THE WORLD OF CLASSICAL GREECE

An illustrated commentary a la Glubok, but, in spite of being intended for an older audience, lacking both the selectivity and subtlety of her Art of Ancient Greece. Whittle falls into some of the most common pitfalls of extreme condensation -- listing the Spartans use of helots and serfs as one factor that made them different from all other Greeks without mentioning until many pages later that Athenians also owned slaves; making possibly misleading generalizations (""The Greeks were the first people to experiment with government""); and, in contrasting the fifth century Apollo of Piombino with a fourth century brasswork, commenting only that ""the features and details are clearer"" in the latter (the point of his century-by-century gallery of sculpture seems to be that it showed progressive improvement as it approached Hellenistic realism). In addition, several pictures from later periods are included without being specifically identified as non-Greek; one painting, probably 19th century, is captioned only ""an imaginary scene at a sanctuary of Aphrodite."" It's hard to dismiss the pictorial materials entirely, but enough questions can be raised about the manner of presentation to shed doubt on its reliability.