Pj Rhodes: 4 books

Thucydides was labelled the 'greatest historian that ever lived' by Macauley and no study of Classical Greece is complete without encountering his history of the Peloponnesian War, the greatest war of Greeks against Greeks in the late fifth century BCE, which ended in the fall of Athens. This...

Classical Greece and its legacy have long inspired a powerful and passionate fascination. The civilization that bequeathed to later ages drama and democracy, Homer and heroism, myth and Mycenae and the Delphic Oracle and the Olympic Games has, perhaps more than any other, helped shape the intellectual...

In the second and third quarters of the fifth century BC, when Athens became both politically and culturally dominant in the Greek world, Pericles was the leading figure in the city's public life. At this time Athens developed an empire of a kind which no Greek city had had before, and its politics...

Solon (c 658-558 BC) is famous as both statesman and poet but also, and above all, as the paramount lawmaker of ancient Athens. Though his works survive only in fragments, we know from the writings of Herodotus and Plutarch that his constitutional reforms against the venality, greed and political...