Greeks, Greeks, and More Greeks.

Waterfield, Robin.  Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece.  New York:
          Oxford University Press, 2018.  ISBN: 978-0-19-023430-0

Ancient Greece is a perennial topic that crops up in history, literature, and science.  Ancient Greece was the lynch pin of interactions from the East and the West. toward each other.  However, most readers do not grasp the role ancient Greece played in the formation of modern society.  In Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens, Robin Waterfield seeks to remedy that lack of context.

Robin Waterfield opens with a discussion of Archaic Greece - in other words, the Greece before Homer where the megalithic tombs that earlier archeologists thought belonged to Agamemnon and Odysseus and their ilk.  He covers the founding of Athens and Sparta and the growth of the aristocracy. Then there are chapters on the Persian Wars.  The next major period of Greek history  is the Classical Time with the Peloponnesian War, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle along with the Western Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily.  The Classical Period ends with the conquest of Greece by Phillip and Alexander of Macedon which ushers in the Hellenistic Period.  This is the time of Greek expansion across the former Persian empire all the way to India and south into Egypt.  The time of the Successors is a specialty of Waterfield who really shines in highlighting how this period really set the stage for Greek thought and culture flooding the world. 

In Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens, Waterfield presents a very readable political history of ancient Greece while also providing chapters on Greek religion, art, literature and social constructs in context.  It is appreciated that the Hellenistic period got equal treatment to the Archaic and Classical periods.