http://tinyurl.com/2z42bv (washingtonpost.com)
"In recent years, the periods just before and after the Athenian miracle have grown increasingly attractive to modern readers and scholars. The surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets -- Heraclitus, Archilochus, Sappho -- now seem to capture more feelingly the relentless mutability of life, whether the ups and downs of the suffering human heart or the ceaseless shocks of an inherently unstable world. This sense of familiarity is even more pronounced in the three war-torn centuries bracketed between the Asian conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) and the naval battle at Actium (31 B.C.), which hastened the downfall of Ptolemaic Egypt and assured the triumph of imperial Rome."
"In recent years, the periods just before and after the Athenian miracle have grown increasingly attractive to modern readers and scholars. The surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets -- Heraclitus, Archilochus, Sappho -- now seem to capture more feelingly the relentless mutability of life, whether the ups and downs of the suffering human heart or the ceaseless shocks of an inherently unstable world. This sense of familiarity is even more pronounced in the three war-torn centuries bracketed between the Asian conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) and the naval battle at Actium (31 B.C.), which hastened the downfall of Ptolemaic Egypt and assured the triumph of imperial Rome."
Review by Michael Dirda.
The Hellenistic Age - A Short History. By Peter Green. Modern Library. 199 pp.
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