The rise and fall of classical Greece

Περιγραφή

We seldom realize that the western world had to wait until the 19th century to return to the economic performance of Greek antiquity. Equally striking is the fact that in classical Greece wealth was not concentrated in an elite around a palace, but on the contrary was distributed among the broadest strata of the population. How can this completely unusual and extremely prolonged economic boom be explained? And how does it relate to the intellectual and political achievements we usually associate with classical antiquity: art, science, philosophy, democracy?

In this book, Josiah Ober, a professor of classical studies and political science at Stanford University, attempts to provide an answer. Relying on a vast amount of historical, archaeological and philological material, and drawing on the fields of political philosophy, institutional economics, game theory, but also ecology and evolutionary biology, Ober builds a theoretical scheme that highlights the completely new approach of the Greeks to politics – an approach based on the concept of the citizen, as opposed to that of the citizen – and the role it played in the economic prosperity of ancient Greece.

Based on this figure, Ober retells the history of classical antiquity, from its beginnings to the end of the world of Greek city-states, illuminating aspects neglected or completely unknown and presenting known facts, through a completely original prism.

The PRINCETON HISTORY of the ANCIENT WORLD
“Magnificent”
The New York Times
“The final history of classical Greece for the 21st century”
Ian Morris, Stanford University
“If you want to know why all this mess is happening around ancient Greece, you have to start from this book”
John Ma, University of Oxford