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A sweeping history of the Greeks, from the Bronze Age to today More than two thousand years ago, the Greek city-states, led by Athens and Sparta, laid the foundation for much of modern science, the arts, politics, and law. But the influence of the Greeks did not end with the rise and fall of this classical civilization. As historian Roderick Beaton illustrates, over three millennia Greek speakers produced a series of civilizations that were rooted in southeastern Europe but again and again ranged widely across the globe. In The Greeks, Beaton traces this history from the Bronze Age Mycenaeans who built powerful fortresses at home and strong trade routes abroad, to the dramatic Eurasian conquests of Alexander the Great, to the pious Byzantines who sought to export Christianity worldwide, to today’s Greek diaspora, which flourishes on five continents. The product of decades of research, this is the story of the Greeks and their global impact told as never before.
First published by CUP in 1989, The Medieval Greek Romance provides basic information for the non-specialist about Greek fiction during the period 1071-1453, as well as proposing new solutions to problems that have vexed previous generations of scholars. Roderick Beaton applies sophisticated methods of literary analysis to the material, and the bridges of the artificial gap which has separated `Byzantine'literature, in a form of ancient Greek as both homogenous and of a high level of literary sophistication. Throughout, consideration is given to relations and interconnections with similar literature in western Europe. As most of the texts discussed are not available in English translation, the argument is illustrated by lucid plot summaries and extensive quotation (accompanied by literal English renderings). For this edition, The Medieval Greek Romance has been revised throughout and expanded with the addition of an `Afterword' which assesses and responds to recent work on the subject.
Biografie van de Griekse dichter (1900-1971).
A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and songs from the end of the Byzantine Empire to the present.
An Englishman sets out for an ancient Greek palace in Crete to clear his family's name. The man's father and grandfather excavated it and they have been accused by the archeological community of fabricating artifacts. A first novel.
When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks, waves of sympathy spread across Western Europe and the United States. More than a thousand volunteers set out to fight for the cause. The Philhellenes, whether they set out to recreate the Athens of Pericles, start a new crusade, or make money out of a war, all felt that Greece had unique claim on the sympathy of the world. As Byron wrote, 'I dreamed that Greece might Still be Free'; and he died at Missolonghi trying to translate that dream into reality. William St Clair's meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences was hailed as definitive when it was first published. Long out of print, it remains the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for any students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron, and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern ethnic and religious conflicts is becoming increasingly appreciated by scholars worldwide. This new and revised edition includes a new Introduction by Roderick Beaton, an updated Bibliography and many new illustrations.
It has been called the age of revolution. The white heat of it came in the decades either side of the year 1800. But it lasted a full century: from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the great national unifications of Germany and Italy during the 1860s. Right in the middle of this long age of revolution and, as it turns out, the pivotal point within it, comes the Greek Revolution that broke out in the spring of 1821. Historians have been slow to recognise the key role of the Greek uprising in 1821, and the international recognition of Greece as a sovereign, independent state nine years later, in 1830, in this process that did so much to shape the geopolitics of the European continent, and indeed of much of the world. This little book sets out to explain what happened during these nine years to bring about such far-reaching (and surely unanticipated) consequences, and why the full significance of these events is only now coming to be appreciated, two hundred years later.
Called variously the ’Byzantine epic’, the ’epic of Modern Greece’, an ’epic-romance’ and ’romance’, the poem of Digenes Akrites has, since its rediscovery towards the end of the nineteenth century, exerted a tenacious hold on the imagination of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and from many countries of the world, as well as of writers and public figures in Greece. There are many reasons for this, not least among them the prestige accorded to ’national epics’ in the nineteenth century and for some time afterwards. Another reason must surely be the work’s uniqueness: there is nothing quite like Digenes Akrites in either Byzantine or Modern Greek literature. How...
The book highlights those writers and works which have enjoyed critical or popular acclaim, and emphasizes the relationships which link one work with another and with its historical context. It moves from the varying responses to European Romanticism which defined Greek literature in the nineteenth century, culminating in the work of Palamas and Cavafy in the first decades of this century, to the Modernist influenced work of the years from the 1920s to 1945.
Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Michael Llewellyn-Smith traces his early years, political apprenticeship in Crete, and energetic role in that island’s emancipation from both Ottoman rule and the arbitrary rule of Prince George of Greece. Summoned to Athens in 1910 by a cabal of officers, Venizelos mastered the Greek political scene, sent the military back to barracks, and led the country through a glorious period of constitutional and political reform, ending in a Balkan alliance waging successful war against Ottoman rule in Europe. By 1914, Greece had doubled in territory and population, and was about to f...