The Classics
Many of the classics make excellent companion reading for a trip around Greece - especially the historians Thucydides and Herodotus. Reading Homer's Odyssey when you're battling with or resigning yourself to the vagaries of island ferries puts your own plight into perspective. One slightly less well-known source, especially recommended for travels around the Peloponnese, is Pausanias's fourth-century AD Guide to Greece , annotated by Peter Levi in its Penguin edition with notes on modern identifications of sites mentioned. Most of the standard undergraduate staples are part of the Penguin Classics paperback series. Routledge and Duckworth both also have a huge, steadily expanding backlist of Classical Studies, though many titles are expensive and quite specialized. Herodotus The Histories (Penguin), or A.D. Godley, tr (Cambridge UP). Revered as the father of systematic history and anthropology, this fifth-century BC Anatolian writer chronicled both the causes and campaigns of the Persian Wars, as well as the contemporary, assorted tribes and nations inhabiting Asia Minor. Homer The Iliad; The Odyssey . The first concerns itself, semi-factually, with the late Bronze Age war of the Achaeans against Troy in Asia Minor; the second recounts the hero Odysseus's long journey home, via seemingly every corner of the Mediterranean. For a verse rendition, *Richmond Lattimore's translation (University of Chicago, Iliad ; HarperCollins, Odyssey ) has yet to be bettered. For a prose rendition, *Martin Hammond's Iliad (Penguin) and Odyssey (Duckworth, UK) currently edge out second-best choices by the father-and-son team of E.V. Rieu ( Iliad , Penguin) and D.C.H. Rieu ( Odyssey , Penguin). Ovid The Metamorphoses , A.D. Melville, tr (Oxford UP). Though collected by a first-century AD Roman poet, this remains one of the most accessible renditions of the more piquant Greek myths, involving transformations as divine blessing or curse. Pausanias The Guide to Greece (Penguin, 2 vols, Vol. 2 currently o/p). Essentially the first-ever guidebook, intended for Roman pilgrims to the holy sites of the Greek mainland; invaluable for later archeologists in assessing damage or change to temples over the intervening centuries, or (in some cases) locating them at all. Plutarch The Age of Alexander; On Sparta; The Rise and Fall of Athens (Penguin). Another ancient author, writing perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, but with the disadvantage of unreliable sources and much conjecture. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin). Bleak month-by-month account of the conflict, by a cashiered Athenian officer whose affiliation and dim view of human nature didn't usually obscure his objectivity; see George Cawkwell's book for a revisionist view. Xenophon The History of My Times (Penguin). Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War stops in 411 BC; this work continues events until 362 BC.
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