ATHENS

Of sophistry, slaughter, slavery, and, here and there, the smog that a visitor to Athens chews today while enjoying “the taste of ouzo with the sunlight filtering through a shady vine.”

Later this year, Athens will serve as the site for the Olympic Games, whose ancient origins lie in the western Peloponnesus and whose modern version was born in the city in the mid-19th century. Waterfield, a translator of ancient Greek literature, gives credit for the latter revival to the Athenian plutocrat and nationalist Evangelos Zappas, long overshadowed by Baron de Coubertin as the architect of the modern games. He then turns quickly to the city’s classical age, and there he mostly remains, giving a lucid account of the deeds of some of its more illustrious citizens, among which are, of course, the likes of Pericles, Socrates, and Alcibiades. The emphasis on personalities has good authority behind it, for, as Waterfield rightly notes, “an ancient Greek polis was its citizens; the name ‘Athens’ referred only to the physical city with its buildings and open spaces; as a political unit, the name was ‘the Athenians.’ ” Waterfield’s account of postclassical Athens is cursory, though, even with many equally illustrious (or at least picturesque) characters with which to populate his pages, and he devotes only three dozen pages to the city under the many centuries of Byzantine and Ottoman rule. He reasonably observes that the literary and historical attestations for ancient Athens are richer than those of its succeeding iterations, but this quick treatment leaves little room for a discussion of how the modern city—and modern Greece—came to be. In the end, Waterfield’s study is serviceable, but listless; one longs for what Jan Morris might have done with the same material. Even on the matter of the ancient polis alone, it is less impressive than Christian Meier’s Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age (1998).

In a strong field of competitors, this one carries few championship qualities.