Full name: From Democrats to Kings: The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great

Author: Michael Scott Year: 2009 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781848310735 9781590203910 1848310730 1590203917

Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great. Michael Scott, Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge, explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned on its head from Democratic Athens to King Alexander the Great in this superb example of popular history writing. "From Democrats to Kings" also gives us a fresh take on the similar challenges we face today in the 21st century - a world in which many democracies - old and new - fight for survival, in which war-time and peace-time have become indistinguishable and in which the severity of the economic crisis is only matched by a crisis in our own sense of self. Similar books: Ancient Greece by Sarah B. Pomeroy Athens by Christian Meier The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan The Ancient Greeks by M. I. Finley The Classical Greeks by Michael Grant Early Greece by Oswyn Murray The Greek Experience by Maurice Bowra The Rise Of The Greeks by Michael Grant The Greek Achievement by Charles Freeman Thermopylae by Paul Cartledge The Greeks Overseas by John Boardman Introducing the Ancient Greeks by Edith Hall Greece in the Making by Robin Osborne Courtesans and Fishcakes by James Davidson Dead Wake by Erik Larson One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer The History of Jihad by Robert Spencer