The Life of Greece (The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2)
Language: English
Pages: 754
ISBN: 1567310133
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
[MP3-CD audiobook format in Vinyl case. NOTE: The MP3-CD format requires a compatible audio CD player.]
[Read by Stefan Rudnicki]
[The Life of Greece is Volume 2 -- of the eleven volume 'The Story of Civilization' Series]
The second volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume 2 chronicles the history of ancient Greek civilization.
Here Durant tells the whole story of Greece, from the days of Crete's vast Aegean empire to the final extirpation of the last remnants of Greek liberty, crushed under the heel of an implacably forward-marching Rome. The dry minutiae of battles and sieges, of tortuous statecraft of tyrant and king, get the minor emphasis in what is preeminently a vivid recreation of Greek culture, brought to the reader through the medium of supple, vigorous prose.
In this masterful work, readers will learn about:
*the siege of Troy
*the great city-states of Athens and Sparta
*the heroes of Homer's epics
*the gods and lesser deities of Mount Olympus
*the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
*the death of Alexander the Great
Attic vase. Sculpture is a minor art in Crete, and except in bas-relief and the story of Daedalus, seldom graduates from the statuette. Many of these little figures are stereotyped crudities seemingly produced by rote; one is a delightful snapshot in ivory of an athlete plunging through the air; another is a handsome head that has lost its body on the way down the centuries. The best of them excels in anatomical precision and in vividness of action anything that we know from Greece before Myron's
Apollo's priest, Chryses. The King restores Chryseis to her father, but, to console himself and point a tale, he compels Briseis to leave Achilles and take Chryseis' place in the royal tent. Achilles convokes a general assembly, and denounces Agamemnon with a wrath that provides the first word and the recurring theme of the Iliad. He vows that neither he nor his soldiers will any longer stir a hand to help the Greeks. (II) We pass in review the ships and tribes of the assembled force, and (III)
on the west. In that seismic valley lay Homer's "hollow Lacedaemon," a plain so guarded by mountains that Sparta, its capital, needed no walls. At its zenith Sparta ("The Scattered") was a union of five villages, totaling some seventy thousand population. Today it is a hamlet of four thousand souls; and hardly anything remains, even in the modest museum, of the city that once ruled and ruined Greece. 1. The Expansion of Sparta From that natural citadel the Dorians dominated and enslaved the
a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus would be born, and the historian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient temples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Museum. Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the
boundless mass possessing no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied realities of the universe. *02084 This animate and eternal but impersonal and unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander's system; it is the unvarying and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School- that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born new worlds