a good single-volume history of ancient greece?

But if you've read the Iliad and Odyssey you obviously aren't averse to reading 'primary sources' anyway, so I'd recommend picking up Herodotus' Histories and then Thucydides' History Of The Peloponesian War and reading them.

Herodotus: dawn of time to some random point in Persian Wars. I think it's meant to have been written a generation after the events described, or earlier.

Oh, you want dates? nyeh.

J.B. Bury, History of Greece
H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks
Jaeger Werner, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture: Archaic Greece and Mind of Athens
Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men (Greeks - Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, Alexander)

Plutarch, [see above] (Romans - Cato Censor, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Antony)
Oxford History of the Classical World (Greece, too!)
Tacitus, Histories and Annals
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (note that there is a "sequel" of sorts)
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (there is an abridged single volume)
H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68

Any thoughts on a good book about Alexander the Great?

Just finished Anabasis by Xenophon, great read.

Can anyone recommend a book that uses Spartan vs Athenian society as a guide to modern and/or historical politics particularly flawed/oppressive "liberal" societies being vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy vs. outright fascist defenses of autocratic principles, slavery, oppression, etc - kind of like a broad view of political history seen either as emerging from political questions raised in Ancient Greece or at the v least just that certain political philosophical conflicts have existed throughout human history and then starting there? I was reading this textbook on the history of Egalitarianism that starts with Ancient Greece and it's quite amazing how so many of these modern discussions are prefigured then but the book only gave the topic like 10 pages and I'd like to read a longer treatment. i'm sure such a thing already exists and maybe many such things?

Read the Realness of Things Past by Greg Anderson before you read anything else making deep analogies between modern politics and classical Athens.

thanks i'll check it out - looks interesting

In regard to Athens vs. Sparta as a context for understanding recurrent issues in history regarding social and political organization, I've never read anything that clarifies those issues better than Thucydides, even with its thorny problems with finding an organizational principle that allows one to follow the course of the war.

For the purpose you intend, the progress of the war itself is generally irrelevant. When Thucydides analyzes the political problems and social institutions of Athens and Sparta, he drives right to the heart of the problems and his analyses are quite clear. Start there, and skim over any battles you don't care to read about.

From eight years ago: Any thoughts on a good book about Alexander the Great?

Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, 356- 323 B.C. is a great distillation of the available sources, along with a tremendous number of credible interpretive insights into the deeper problems and motives that most likely lay behind many of Alexander's decisions as a military and political leader. I came away from it feeling like Green's handling of 'the man behind the myth' was as definitive as any study of Megalexandros could be at this late date.

which translation do i want? is there any value to reading the hobbes one? is there one that's particularly conducive to a brisk reading?

The Rex Warner translation in Penguin Classics is fine. I've read it several times. Since you'd probably be skimming and skipping ahead, your main problem would be distinguishing the more analytical sections and ensuring you have enough context to understand them, since Thucydides tends to cast these sections as speeches he puts into the mouths of major political figures at various turning points of the war. Not always, though, so you can't quite rely on that as the sole clue.

As a warm up, you can probably find Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus somewhere for free on the web. It would give you a (somewhat overly admiring) view of how Sparta mythologized itself, while also giving valuable information on what was a very strange, highly militarized social structure. Wherever helots are mentioned, just imagine the American history of dehumanized chattel slavery and you won't be too far off.

i read a great essay series on sparta recently that i posted a link to in a spara thread somewhere - it does seem like more than just american slavery sparta is an ur-text for a kind of militaristic oppressive hierarchal social structure in a way that philosophically prefigures a lot of authoritarian regimes maybe particularly in the ways it claimed legitimacy? i'm only part way through the anderson book and i'd like to get further before speculating/saying more.

but i'll take a look at the warner translation too, thanks

The Landmark edition of Thucydides is epic and packed to the gills with supplemental materials, maps, etc.

I checked out the first essay in that series, so I know you can def skip over Plutarch. Those essays will have given you a thorough grounding in Sparta's systematic and all-pervasive brutality.

the obvious question while reading anderson's book is why his critiques of athenian democracy should convince us that it's not a democracy like we know it when the history of modern democracies are full of relevant and in some places identical critiques. to his credit he anticipates this objection when he writes "To all of this, one might still respond that our own enlightened, modern lib- eral polities are hardly innocent of such egregious contradictions themselves, as if that would make the Athenian case somehow less remarkable or more excus- able. To be sure, the professed commitment of modern nations like Britain and the United States to securing the rights, freedoms, and equalities of humans as individuals has historically coexisted with aggressively imperialist policies, the exploitation of slave labor, the exclusion of women from the privileges of full cit- izenship, and a tolerance for extreme economic inequalities among citizens." yes indeed! unfortunately his response is not terribly convincing - that bc in western countries there have always been voices of critique pointing out where our democracies fall short (and in many cases that forced course corrections to bring those democracies more in line with egalitarianism) that makes athenian democracy not truly comparable to our own. but it seems to me that even if you are optimistic about western democracy being self-correcting when it comes to slaves, women, and non-citizens (and i'm not sure how optimistic you should truly be but let's allow it) there's a glaring area where western democracy has struggled as much as the athenians to institute egalitarianism and it's an area that anderson critiques greek democracy with - economic inequality! moreover aiui there are greek voices that consistently critique greece on many issues but in particular economic inequality. plato iirc calls for the richest man to be no more than 5 times wealthier than the poorest (and aristotle says 1:4?). that they didn't frame this critique necessarily in the terms of "this is undemocratic" doesn't mean they weren't wrestling with egalitarianism. iow there's an aspect for sure where western audiences imagine athens as more similar to them than strange + foreign but otoh certain issues have truly been on humanity's mind for a long time and i don't think it's westerncentric to note that the greeks were also interested in issues like income inequality even if the way they framed the issue is foreign to us. tbc there's a lot i do like in this book but this does stand out to me as not fully compelling.

have not picked up an edition of the Thucydides yet but it's on my shortlist

I think Anderson is mainly warning against the distorting effects of trying to understand the world of ancient Athens through the normative lens of modernity (specifically by imposing on our concept of the Greek mind the materialism, anthropocentricism, secularism, and individualism that he takes as premises of post-Enlightenment thought). Whatever the Greeks thought about income inequality, they thought in a world ruled by the gods, and they didn't think it using concepts like "the state," "rights," "the economy," "the social contract," etc. That doesn't mean their engagement with such issues is irrelevant to us, but we have to be wary in interpreting how they understood them in their own world.

thanks btw to f. hazel for recommending Anderson's book -- I'm enjoying it a lot, especially now that I've made it through his dogged theoretical justifications to his application of his methods to the case of Athens

fwiw i'm enjoying it too and i think his positive arguments (about new ways of understanding athens acc to its own logic) are great. i'm just a little skeptical of claims of total alienation from our experience - from certain enlightenment constructs no doubt. i'm not sure we're quite as rational + enlightened as the field + scholarship he's critiquing purports to be.

i wonder also if my personal experiences living in a community that venerates ancient era texts and in many ways accepts the logic of divine intervention and religion structuring every aspect of life political, economic, collapses family/community interests, downplays individualism for communalism, etc, predisposes me to find plenty in common with these elements of athens whereas maybe a secular atheist reader w/ enlightenment + ancient world philosophical commitments may be far keener to downplay that whole context.

they didn't think it using concepts like "the state," "rights," "the economy," "the social contract," etc.

It is useful to remember that Athenian governance (and all others of that period) grew organically, simply as a set of responses to the innate problems of survival and growth as a polity. It was only after Athenian democracy had been functioning for more than a century that Greek thinkers began to form theories of political science that tried to isolate in detail the characteristic aspects of monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies and democracies in an effort to discover why some grew and conquered and others were subjugated.

In those early beginnings of political science, their whole motive was to dig out the secret of the "best" form of government so as to copy it. For them "best" meant the form of government that was best able to subjugate others and accrue wealth and power, while avoiding instability and insurrection. iow, a very Machiavellian outlook.

It was the plague that first led to other forms of lawlessness in the city 53
too. People were emboldened to indulge themselves in ways they would
previously have concealed, since they saw the rapid change in fortunes –
both for those who were well off and died suddenly and for those who
originally had nothing but in a moment got possession of the property
of these others. They therefore resolved to exploit these opportunities [2]
for enjoyment quickly, regarding their lives and their property as equally
ephemeral. No one was eager to add to their own hardships for suppos- [3]
edly fine objectives, since they were uncertain whether they would die
before achieving them. Whatever gave immediate pleasure or in any way
facilitated it became the standard of what was good and useful. Neither [4]
fear of the gods nor law of man was any restraint: they judged it made no
difference whether or not they showed them respect, seeing that everyone
died just the same; on the contrary, no one expected to live long enough
to go on trial and pay the penalty, feeling that a far worse sentence had
already been passed and was hanging over their heads, and that it was
only reasonable to get some enjoyment from life before it finally fell on
them

*tick*

awesome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia#/media/File:TR_Pamukkale_Hierapolis_asv2020-02_img29.jpg

No Yanni, no credibility.

xpost actually anatolia but y’know