I suppose the most important question to answer here is: Why another book on the ancient Greeks? After all, people have been studying the ancient Greeks since, well, the days of ancient Greece itself, and the average bookshop and library have no lack of texts on this rich and fascinating society.
What I hoped to accomplish here was to write what I would call a more balanced and complete book on the ancient Greeks, presenting as much of their history and culture as possible as a continuous whole. Thus this book goes from Minoan Crete up through the reign of Cleopatra VII, the last of the Hellenistic monarchs, including information on the so-called Dark Age that separated the Bronze Age from the historic periods. I hope that my presentation of the information in this way will allow the reader to appreciate the long continuity of ancient Greek society and to understand that the glory days of Classical Greece did not spring up out of nowhere, but were the result of several centuries of growth, experimentation, and development.
Likewise, I wanted to correct a somewhat standard practice in the study of ancient Greece, whereby the city of Athens is presented as a microcosm of Classical Greece itself. Granted, we do have more texts from ancient Athens than from all other Greek cities, and the archaeological data for that city are quite extensive. However, one must remember that Athens was also rather weird by ancient Greek standards, the "wild, liberal left" of ancient Greece, and what held true for Athens was not necessarily the case, or even representative of, the other cities. Nevertheless, many books on ancient Greece focus primarily on Athens, with most specialized books focusing exclusively on Athens (Athenian law, Athenian democracy, Athenian religion, etc.). Although there is quite a bit of information on Athens in this book, too, I tried to expand the repertoire to focus on the other important regions of Greece, such as Sparta and Thebes.
Finally, I wanted to present a gender-balanced view of ancient Greek society. Only since the 1970s, with the rise of feminism and feminist theory in academia, has there been much focus on women in ancient societies, Greece included. When women, and then gender, became objects of study, the discipline was somewhat ghettoized, so that a general book on ancient Greece might have a subsection dealing with women, while most studies of ancient Greek women were present in books specifically dedicated to the topic. Here, I tried to present Greek history and society as a combination of men and women (which, let's face it, it was).
World History
