A history of ancient Greece in fifty lives

the long version

The political leaders, writers, artists and philosophers of ancient Greece turned a small group of city states into a pan-Mediterranean civilization, whose legacy can be found everywhere today. But who were these people, what do we know of their lives and how did they interact with one another? In this new history of Greece, David Stuttard takes an original approach, weaving together the lives of the movers and shakers of the Greek world into a continuous narrative, from the early tyrant rulers Peisistratus and Polycrates, through the stirrings of democracy under Cleisthenes to the emergence of Macedon under Philip II and Alexander the Great and the eventual decline of the Greek world with the rise of Rome.