learning Ancient Greek History-where to start?

Besides my WWII/WWIII fetishes, I'm very interested in Greek culture. Yet, I've never took the time to sit down and study its history. I been obsessed with writing an alternate history Peloponnesian War, yet know virtually nothing about it.

Where should I began when studying Greek history? The reason I'm refraining from studying Roman as for alt hist sake its been done a ton of times, yet it is no doubt interesting. Any links/books you can point me to? Should I read everything-myths, ancient and modern authors on the subject, culture, economy? etc?

How long should the research span? A year? two years? life? Any good alternate history Greek novels(IF those exist)/and or forum threads?
 

MrP

Banned
Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War is good. Thucydides, Xenophon and others are obvious. Aristophanes isn't my cup of tea, insofar as I don't find him funny, but he is essential reading to get into the mindset of an Athenian of the period. There is some historical fiction, but it doesn't deal with allohistorical events, not really. Margaret Doody's the author. I don't really know where one would begin with Greek mythology. Hesiod? My parents are Classicists, so I first heard many of these as childhood tales. I think the length of time you spend depends how quickly you go through things. There is enough material to consume a lifetime, but whether one needs that much time to compose a good TL about the period, I rather doubt.
 
Reading The Iliad and The Odyssey will be well worth it, even though both are obviously legends and not history. Given their importance in Greco-Roman culture and the frequency with which they're mentioned in later Greek literature, it's a good place to start. In addition, they're great stories and wonderful works of literature in their own right.

I would also recommend reading Herodotus's Histories and Thucydides's History of the Pelopennesian War.
 

MrP

Banned
hypothetically speaking, lets say I wanted to write a novel about an alternate historical Peloponnesian War. What would you recommend then?

All the above, Strangeland's suggestions, too, and something on society in the period. Then some more specific things, depending who your protagonists are. I see Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, on my bookshelf, but I don't recall anything of it. I must have read it, but in the last decade or so, I've quite forgotten it. Anyway, something like that if you have a slave as a main character. You'd want something on the Athenian household if you had women turning up - it was physically divided into male and female sections, if one was wealthy enough, that is. I realise I'm waffling a bit, but, as I say, my memory isn't what it was. I can't really recommend something from every field you'd like. But I know we have people here who can. :)
 
Just a random question, as I am ignorant if you have not already guessed. How did ancient people talk back then? Was it like now? Do we even know?
 
Just a random question, as I am ignorant if you have not already guessed. How did ancient people talk back then? Was it like now? Do we even know?

Presumably, they moved their tongues and lips and words came out :p:D


Kidding aside, we know quite a bit about the Ancient Greek language, mainly because they left behind so much literature. For instance, there were several dialects of Ancient Greek: Attic, Ionian, Doric, Cypriot, and probably also minor ones which vanished without a trace. We don't know exactly how the language actually sounded, but we can make educated guesses based on orthography.
 

MrP

Banned
Just a random question, as I am ignorant if you have not already guessed. How did ancient people talk back then? Was it like now? Do we even know?

strangeland's answered one interpretation of this, so I'll have a stab at another. We have law court speeches, historical accounts, philosophical dialogues, various kinds of plays and poetry* and more sources, which all give us some idea of how people spoke. I assume you're asking whether a sentence would run something like "Hey, buddy, what are you doing with my car?" or "May I borrow a thousand dollars? I'll repay you eleven hundred in a week!" to which the answer is yes. We know how sentences were formed and what rules governed them. For instance, neuter plural nouns take singular verbs.

Special Note

Note carefully the last sentence on pg. 26 of Black:

Neuter plural nouns regularly take singular verbs

[but not always]

"Perhaps no syntactical peculiarity of Greek is more striking to us than the use of the singular verb with a neuter plural subject...The rule appears to have been most strictly followed in Attic...Homer and Koine are less consistent, while the plural is used exclusively in MGr [Modern Greek]. In the NT (as in the LXX and pap...) there is marked diversity, and often in individual instances the MSS [manuscripts] diverge...
(1) The plural is used especially with neuters designating persons...
(2) The singular, on the contrary, preponderates with words having non-personal meaning...
(3) and even more so with abstracts and pronouns..."

BDF, pg. 73.

* The caveat here is that plays and poetry are written with a certain artificial metrical rhythm, so word order is sometimes odd, word choice can be unusual, and so on.
 
Read the Iliad, the Odyssey and Scbwab's compilation of classical myths (if it's avaible in English, you might prefer the shorter single volumed version instead of the one with three. Then do something about actual history. Mogen Herman Hansen's "The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes" (1991), although perhaps a little too specific. It is, although not up to primary sources, an excellent overview of the Athenian mindset.
 
First Herodotus' Histories to have a general idea on how they perceived the world.
Then Thucidides' Peloponnesian War and Xenophon Helleincas (often you find them as the same book) to see the history itself.
Finally, a bit of Aristophanes (expecially Clouds): it is fun, it gives you an idea of what "common people" thought, and it accurately describes what sort of scoundrel Socrates really was.
Only after that begin reading modern historian works
 
hypothetically speaking, lets say I wanted to write a novel about an alternate historical Peloponnesian War. What would you recommend then?

Plutarch on Sparta, if you want to get a grips for the Spartans (though it's very idealised).

A good overall starting point for a newcomer to Greek history who doesn't want to plunge into the ancient tomes immediately might be From Democrats to Kings by Michael Short, which basically explains starting from the Peloponnesian war to the death of Alexander why Athens failed politically, despite succeeding economically and culturally. Despite being full of pop culture references and the occasional mistake that will annoy veterans (he refers to "Sparta's walls" :rolleyes:) it should be a good starting point
 
Besides my WWII/WWIII fetishes, I'm very interested in Greek culture. Yet, I've never took the time to sit down and study its history. I been obsessed with writing an alternate history Peloponnesian War, yet know virtually nothing about it.

Where should I began when studying Greek history? The reason I'm refraining from studying Roman as for alt hist sake its been done a ton of times, yet it is no doubt interesting. Any links/books you can point me to? Should I read everything-myths, ancient and modern authors on the subject, culture, economy? etc?

You'd probably enjoy, if you can get a copy, "The Life of Greece" by Will Durant (Volume 2 of his "The Story of Civilization"). My hardback cover is 671 pages but it's written in short chapters dealing with a myriad of subjects. Some titles: "Sparta's Golden Age", "The Greeks in Africa", "Work and Wealth in Athens", "Alexander: the Soul of a Conqueror", "Hellenism and the Orient", "Socialism under the Ptolemies", "The Morals and Manners of the Athenians". There is a lot in the book about the Peloponnesian War as well.
 
You'd probably enjoy, if you can get a copy, "The Life of Greece" by Will Durant (Volume 2 of his "The Story of Civilization"). My hardback cover is 671 pages but it's written in short chapters dealing with a myriad of subjects. Some titles: "Sparta's Golden Age", "The Greeks in Africa", "Work and Wealth in Athens", "Alexander: the Soul of a Conqueror", "Hellenism and the Orient", "Socialism under the Ptolemies", "The Morals and Manners of the Athenians". There is a lot in the book about the Peloponnesian War as well.

Ah yes, a tiny bit dated, but an excellent read nonetheless. The nearest university library should have a copy.
 
I recommend starting with "The Peloponnesian War," by Thucydides, a historian of the time. That was my start, and I've grown deeply fond of it. There're many translations, including one longstanding ;classicish' one online, if you're into reading long online things. The one with the most maps and help and appendices (and hence pretty expensive), is The Landmark Thucydides, edited by Robert Strassler.

There's also a great, recentlyish out alternative I like, titled Lords of The Sea, by John Hale. It's about Athenian naval supremacy over a longer period, from the Persian Wars, to the Peloponnesian War, to Phil II and Al the Great of Macedon. I'm rereading it while working on a new Athenian TL. Sometimes I'm tempted to think of it as trireme porn, though.

I'd be cautious about trusting Don Kagan or, especially, Victor Hanson. Both have, to my mind, shown insufficient respect for facts in their work and too put too much reliance on which tribal side they're on in culture war.

EDIT: Both Kagan and Hanson, BTW, supported the Iraq War, and showed no interest in understanding the zillions of things wrong with how that and how the Afghan War were planned, especially the sad consequences to civilians of not being bothered to protect them after their police and army had been dismantled, as is normally done.
 
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Just so you guys know, as some of you seem to assume I'm a college student, I'm not. I'm a High School Student(ya, I like Greek shit)

I've made it my goal to write an alternate history novel one of these days. I'd do WWII, but its been overdone to death. Roman AH has been overdone. Civil War AH has been overdone.

I think Greek history is largely ignored, yet there is so much AH you could do for it.
 
I am intrigued. :cool:

Google search yields nothing, please elaborate.

That section is about 5 pages longer, much like all the other topics, which makes Durant's book so readable. Here is the opening paragraph of "Socialism under the Ptolemies"

"By far the most interesting aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt is its extensive experiment in state socialism. Royal ownership of the land had long been a sacred custom in Egypt; the Pharaoh, as king and god, had full right to the soil and all that it produced. The fellah was not a slave, but he could not leave his place without the permission of the government, and he was required to turn over the larger part of his crops to the state. The Ptolemies accepted this system, and extended it by appropriating the great tracts which, under previous dynasties, had belonged to the Egyptian nobles or priests. A great bureaucracy of governmental overseers, supported by armed guards, managed all Egypt as a vast state farm. Nearly every peasant in Egypt was told by these officials what soil to till and what crops to grow; his labor and his animals could at any time be requisitioned by the state for mining, building, hunting, and the making of canals or roads; his harvest was gauged by state measurers, registered by the scribes, threshed on the royal threshing floor, and conveyed by a living chain of fellahs into the granary of the king. There were exceptions to the system: the Ptolemies allowed the farmer to own his own home and garden; they resigned the cities to private property; and they gave a right of leasehold to soldiers whose services were rewarded with land. But this leasehold was usually confined to areas which the owner agreed to devote to vineyards, orchards, or olive groves; it excluded the power of bequest, and might at any time be canceled by the king. As Greek energy and skill improved these cleruchic (shareholders') lands, a demand arose for the right to transmit the property from father to son. In the second century before Christ it was recognized by law, and the usual evolution from common property to private property was complete.

Doubtless this system of socialism had been evolved because the conditions of tillage in Egypt required more cooperation, more unison of action in time and space, than individual ownership could be expected to provide. The amount and character of the crops to be sown depended upon the extent of the annual inundation, and the efficiency of irrigation and drainage; these matters naturally made for central control. Greek engineers in the employ of the government improved the ancient processes, and applied a more scientific and intensive agriculture to the land."
 
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