Archaic Greece : The Age of Experiment

by: Snodgrass, A.

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.

Structural revolution: the human factor
Structural revolution: the material evidence
The just city?
Economic realities
The rise of the individual
The end of archaism

Archaic Greece : The Age of Experiment

by: Snodgrass, A.

• ISBN-13: 9780520043732 / 978-0-520-04373-2
• ISBN-03: 0520043731 / 0-520-04373-1
• University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980