Archaic Greece

Download or read book Archaic Greece written by Anthony M. Snodgrass and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1981-11-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until quite recently, it has been the accepted view that the Archaic period of Greek history was by definition merely a prelude to the Classical period, an era regarded as unsurpassed in its literary, intellectual, artistic, and political achievements. Lately, however, historians and archaeologists have undertaken a major reappraisal of their subject. Professor Snodgrass shows how the supremacy of Classical Greece would have been impossible without the preceding centuries of the Archaic period. It established the economic basis of Greek society; it drew the political map of the Greek world in a form that was to endure for four centuries; it set up the forms of state that were to determine Greek political history; it provided the interests and goals, not merely for Greek but for Western art as a whole, which were to be pursued over the next two and a half millennia; it gave Greece in the Homeric epics an ideal of behavior and a memento of past glory to sustain it; and it provided much of the basis of Greek religion. "Archaic Greece" gives a broad cultural history of the period. -- From publisher's description.