THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS

by Hermann--Ed Bengtson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1968

The title of this volume, the fifth in the series ""Delacorte World History,"" is misleading. It is not so much a study of the interaction of Greeks and Persians at a time when their overlapping ambitions brought them into conflict as it is a history of Greece at the time of its cultural and political apogee (520 to 323 B.C.), with a few good, but somewhat irrelevant, chapters on the Persian Empire thrown in. If a book must be judged in terms of the author's intentions, The Greeks and the Persians must be viewed as a failure. The extreme brevity of treatment of Persia (understandable historically, but not editorially, because of the paucity of source material), the topical fragmentation of the material on Greece, the author's textbookish idiom combined with his Germanic propensity for polemics, and the inappropriately high price of the book make The Greeks and the Persians a superfluous work in a field which abounds with volumes of superior scholarship and style. The reader and the student will be well advised to stick with Rostovtzeff for a general treatment of the period, with Ghirshman and Olmstead for Persia, and with Beloch, Bury, et al. for Greece.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION