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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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•
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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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