D. M. Lewis - Böcker

The years covered by this volume saw events and developments of major significance in the Mediterranean world. The first section of the book examines the Persian empire, the regions it comprised and its expansion during the reigns of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. In Greece, Sparta was attending maturity as the leader of a military coalition and Athens passed through a period of enlightened tyranny to a moderate democracy of dynamic energy and clear-sighted intelligence. Given the contrast between Greek ideas and Persian absolutism a clash between Greece and Persia became inevitable, and important chapters deal with the revolt of the Ionian Greeks against the Persians, and the two Persian invasions of Greece including the epic battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis. The third part of the volume turns to the Western Mediterranean. Italy now becomes a significant factor in the history of the area and this section covers the Italic peoples and their languages from the Bronze to the Iron age, and examines the Etruscans and their culture. Sicily is the subject of the final chapter. There the Greek city-states under Gelon of Syracuse and Theron ruler of Acragas repelled a Carthaginian onslaught at the battle of Himera. This new edition has been completely replanned and rewritten in order to reflect the advances in scholarship and changes in perspective which have been taking place in the sixty years since the publication of its predecessor.

Volume VI of the new edition of The Cambridge Ancient History begins with Sparta attempting to consolidate its leadership of mainland Greece and ends with the death of Alexander the Great after he had conquered the Persian Empire and marched far into India. It is correspondingly wide-ranging in its treatment of the politics and economy, not only of old Greece, but of the Near East and the western Mediterranean. The century also saw the continued development of Classical Greek art and the moulding of Greek prose as an uniquely flexible means of expression. The formation of the great philosophical schools assured to Athens in her political decline a long future as a cultural centre, and established patterns of thought which dominated western civilization for two thousand years.