Greece Books

I read this book to my six-year-olds and they were spellbound. By the end of the story I was bawling, but the author did such a wonderful job describing the hero and his courage that they understood why and felt the emotion, too.

I love the story of Phidippides and through this book, my boys now love it. The illustrations are a bit cartoonish, but it holds their attention and doesn't detract from the story. They have asked for it to be read many times and when we go to the gym they 'run a marathon'.

I'm so glad there's a book which makes the courage, bravery and nobility of Phidippides accessible to children. Most teens and adults would enjoy this book as well as it easily explains the story without dumbing it down.

Read it. And then go running!

I am a professional botanist so my standards are high. I checked Huxley and Taylor's book out of the University library and carried it in my backpack for a month. The only thing is you really need a backpack with an easily accessible pocket if you aren't going to just keep this book in your hands.

Barrie Kerper says she has been keeping travel files in cardboard cartons for many years: cuttings, clippings, articles, leaflets. Here she selects from what she has on Greece and the result is dynamite but instead of exploding, it delights and impresses. The book includes material on Athens, the island of the Aegean, and the Poeloponnese. Some selections were written by experienced veterans in the art of travel writing (Robert Kaplan, Patricia Storace)and others by less important but still excellent writers. My own favorite section is the one about the Islands, which includes articles on Patmos, Rhodes, Chios and others. Kerper accompanies each selction with a brief piece about its author and the genesis of the article. The book also contains several carefully annotated bibliographies, presumably prepared by also by Kerper. A fine book.

I first read this book about twenty five years ago. I am a`specialist only in so far as my research focuses on the history of the early modern Greek societies in which Greek folk poetry was created and diffused. Parts or arguments of the book have remained with me after all these years and in my view this alone is a mark of substance.

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This book is based on the 1945 Sather Lectures delivered by Professor Carpenter at the University of California at Berkeley. "They have been printed as composed," wrote Carpenter on their first publication in 1946, "although not quite as they were orally presented since not all their content could be fitted into the straitened hour of the academic tradition."

Rhys Carpenter (1889-1980) was a scholar of the old school, an impressively learned man and a lucid writer. He did his undergraduate and doctoral work at Columbia, with a brief break between to earn an M.A. from Oxford's Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar. He would probably have described himself as an art historian, but he was also a published poet, archeologist and far-ranging classicist. He held a number of academic posts in his long career but he is most firmly associated with Bryn Mawr (1915-1955), where he established the Department of Classical Archeology.

This book consists of seven lectures:
I. Literature without Letters
II. Saga and Fiction
III. Trouble over Troy
IV. Folk Tale and Fiction in the Iliad
V. The Setting of the Odyssey
VI. The Cult of the Sleeping Bear
VII. The Folk Tale of the Bear's Son
VIII. Fact, Fable and Fiction: The Final Verdict

In the course of these lectures, Professor Carpenter ranges from hard-eyed skeptic to wild-eyed enthusiast.

In his second lecture he draws a distinction between saga and fiction. He holds the first to be basically historical in nature but inevitably worn away from mouth to mouth and generation to generation until it is no longer fully remembered or understood by succeeding story tellers. Fiction he takes as created stories arising out of the everyday facts of the current story teller's daily life. Carpenter makes the interesting observation that the most convincing parts of an epic narrative are likely to be the most fictionalized.

Carpenter is at his most skeptical when it comes to Troy. He is distinctly not a fan of Heinrich Schliemann. First, he pours his coldest water on the notion that the city excavated by Schliemann was the Ilios envisaged by Homer (or whoever). That done, he refers back to the surviving bits of the Cypria for some odd doubling of actions by the Greek Expeditionary Force which suggest that the tale of what we now call the Trojan War was once set in some place entirely different from the Troad in Northwestern Anatolia. Finally, referring to the lack of material gains from the war, the small number of returnees, and the close-following collapse of the Mycenean palaces, he changes tack again to suggest that the ultimate origin of the Troy story was actually the catastrophic raid of the Sea Peoples on Egypt in the Thirteenth Century BC.

In Lectures IV and V, he starts hammering away on the idea that fiction arises out of the familiiar daily details and observations of the story teller's life. This leads him to the dubious proposition, to me anyway, that Odysseus's tall tales about his travels in the Far Western Mediterranean could only have been conceived after Ionian sailors had begun fearfully to venture into the area, some time after 650 B.C. He believes the whopper told by Odysseus about his invasion of Egypt must have followed the opening up of that land to Greek mercenaries and merchants around 650-625 B.C. Oddly enough, though, he completely forgets that the Odyssean buccaneering expedition fits quite happily at home with saga memories of the Sea Peoples' raid

In the last three lectures he sets up a straw man only to strike it down. The straw man is a supposed agreement by scholars that the wonderful discovery of the Minoan world indicates that Greek literature as much as Greek art and material culture came from the Southern Mediterranean. He swats that rather unlikely idea away by pointing out that the true origin of Greek literature is to be found in the north where the same, original fund of incidents and motifs serve equally well for Germanic sagas, epics and fairy tales. Proceding down that path by a chain of argument he reaches the conclusion that Achilles and Odysseus are folk lore figures who have become blended with the saga of the Trojan expedition.

He takes one particular folk story archetype, The Bear's Son, and posits that it is the underlying basis of not one but of two great epics, Beowulf and the Odyssey. The set of congruencies he draws between the Anglo-Saxon epic and the Greek is astonishing and almost convincing. Almost.

This is an excellent book, written just before the decipherment of Linear B and the wealth of knowledge gleaned from bureaucratic records at the very close of Mycenean times. Some things discovered about Myceneans, such as personal names being in familiar Homeric form (and quite unlike classical Greek names), including a man on the Greek mainland surprisingly named Hektor, and of Mycenean forms of military equipage might have led Carpenter to change some of his conclusions. Or maybe not.

If you have any interest in the field of Homeric scholarship, this is a necessary book, if for no better reason than it will force you to organize your thoughts to refute it.

Five stars.

This book takes the reader to Greece in the year 1964, along with Emily Kimbrough and three of her travelling companions. It has several chapters with titles which are stories that illustrate the Greek culture. The rest of the book is simply a delightful travelogue in Emily Kimbrough's usual style. Although the book must be considered a period piece in that the trip described took place nearly 40 years ago, it is nevertheless educational and inspiring. "Forever Old, Forever New" is a pleasant companion book, and a great escape!

Caroline Dale Snedeker's delightful novel for young adults is set in and close to Republican Rome of the 2nd century BC, less than a hundred years prior to the rise of Julius Caesar. The forgotten daughter of the title is young Chloe, offspring of an upper class Roman and a Greek slave. Raised as a slave on an estate far from the city, she knows cruelty and want, despite the nurturing presence of Melissa, her deceased mother's closest friend and fellow slave. Another major character in the narrative is the aristocratic young Roman Aulus, whose support of controversial land reforms by the (historical) politican Gaius Gracchus leads to his exile from Rome. While living in seclusion at his family's country home, Aulus meets the spritely Chloe, now grown to lovely young womanhood. He is drawn to her sensitivity and artistic spirit--thanks to Melissa's education, she can even quote from Sappho and the Greek playwrights--and they become friends. Their comradeship and budding romance are charmingly described, as are the misunderstandings between them, and the eventual acknowledgement of Chloe by her long-absent father.

The author artfully combines historical fact with fiction in a lyrical prose that is expressive and moving without being cloying. Note: Young readers of today may be confused by the term "lesbian, " here meant to refer to Greeks from the island of Lesbos.

I found all 4 plays in this book easy to read & easy to get into...this book was awesome & has made me a fan of Euripides.

An enthralling story, it tells of the crossing of the Hellespont by Xerxes' army and the battles fought against the invaders by the courageous Greeks; Pheidippides marathon run from Athens to Sparta and the heroic stand at Thermopylae by a handful of Spartans. The rich, detailed background of vengeful gods and venerable seers gives this brilliant version of the ancient myth a living realism.

The before and after pictures are an excellent resource when trying to visualize the ancient culture as it might have been!

I recently went on vacation to Italy and Greece and focused my souveneir shopping on these books. I had little problem in Italy but in Greece they tended to be overpriced. I was happy to find my theory true, that I would almost certainly find it on Amazon, and saved myself almost $10. The exact same book was arround 25 depending on your bargaining skills!