The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others

Who were the Classical Greeks? This is not an original question, but in this book it is given an original and challenging answer. Paul Cartledge examines the Greeks in terms of their own self-image, mainly as it was presented by the supposedly objective historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenephon. The Greeks were the inventors of history as we understand it, just as they were our cultural ancestors in so many other ways. Yet their historiography remained rooted in myth, and the mental and material context of many of the inventions for which we rightly treasure the Greek achievement--especially democracy, philosophy, and theater, as well as history--was often deeply alien to our own ways of thinking and acting. The aim of The Greeks is to explore that achievement. The book looks in depth at how the dominant Greeks--adult, male, citizen--sought, with limited success, to define themselves unambiguously in polar opposition to a whole series of "others"--non-Greeks, women, non-citizens, slaves, and gods.