CREATORS, CONQUERORS, AND CITIZENS

A HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE

ROBIN WATERFIELD OUP, 528pp, £25, Oldie price £14.05 inc p&p

Writing a history of the Ancient Greeks must be a bit like trying to reassemble an Attic vase, several shards of which are missing. For although the Greeks had language, custom and religion in common, they were not one nation but a thousand different communities in an area that stretched from the western Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And those communities were for ever squabbling. As Daisy Dunn noted in the Sunday Times: ‘they were far too competitive for their own good’. Hence their failure to unite against Philip of Macedon, the upstart barbarian chieftain who succeeded where Persian emperors had failed. Kirkus Review described Creators,

Conquerors and Citizens as ‘a superlative textbook …. the scholarship is thorough, deep and well explained, but the text does not sing’. Steve Donoghue in Open Letters

Review was more appreciative of Robin Waterfield’s style, describing it as ‘smoothly readable’ and ‘scholarly but never pedantic’. He praised Waterfield as ‘a true enthusiast with a gift for clarifying’.

Daisy Dunn thought Waterfield’s book was ‘enlivened by its detail’, which included the lowdown on symposia – suspiciously like a lads’ night out – and the revelation that ‘the average height of a classical Greek male was 170cm, taller than a Roman 500 years later’. No wonder the Lady’s reviewer concluded that ‘this engaging narrative history’ was ‘all you ever needed to know about the Greeks’.