The Story Of Civilization - Part 2 - The Life Of Greece

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WILL DURANT A History of Greek

Government, Industry, Manners,

Morals, Religion, Philosophy, Science, Literature and Art

from the

A.

^

Earliest

Times

to the

Roman Conquest

hJ

THE INNER SANCTUM

^

OF SIMON AND SCHUSTER PUBLISHERS



630

FIFTH AVENUE

ROCKEFELLER CENTER NEW YORK CITY

^



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In the course of his dynamic synthesis of world history, Will Durant now attacks the absorbing, perennially fascinating problem of

(^l^sjffs^

Greek

Not

civilization.

since Mahaffy's eight

epochal volumes, almost half a century ago, has a historian grappled so boldly with the whole

comphcated structure of that civilization which has laid its spell on every enlightened generation of thinkers and dreamers.

The Life of Greece is a large, generous book whose amplitude of scope and audacious f^^s^l[s.^

generalizations recall the golden age of historical writing, before specialization

had invaded

the field. Dr. Durant tells the whole story of Hellas, from the days of Crete's vast Aegean empire to the final extirpation of the last remnants of Greek liberty, crushed under the heel of an implacably forward-marching Rome. The dry minutiae of battles and sieges, of tortuous statecraft of tyrant and king, get the minor emphasis in what is pre-eminently a vivid re-creation of Greek culture, brought to the reader

through the medium of a supple and vigorous prose.

(^>^^^ Will Durant Greece, and looks at

it

looks

whole

at

the

— quite

of

life

as

whole,

indeed, as a cultivated fifth-century Athenian,

with

Athens.

constantly

eager,

his

looked

the

at

The

superb

best

method of writing

searching

picture

insight

into

of

mind,

Periclean

following sentence from the section on the of Pericles:

"When

goras, Aspasia,

^1^

Dr. Durant's

history can be found in the

Pericles, Pheidias,

and Socrates attended

Age

Anaxa-

a play

^1

by

Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens

fti

could see visibly the zenith and unity of the life

of Greece: statesmanship,

art, science,

9

phi-

no separate career

as in the

pages of chroniclers,

(Continued on back flap)

I

^

losophy, literature, religion, and morals living

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