Ancient Greece by Hourly History – Book Review

Greece is fascinating – it is nearly impossible to completely avoid Greek influence in various things you read, watch or do – if you are a sports enthusiast, there is the Olympic Games influenced by Greek tradition, mathematics is full of Greek symbols owing to the early discoveries by Greeks in the subject, literature has a lot of ancient Greek influences, among various other things as the list goes on. This is a short compilation of some of the important aspects of Ancient Greece by Hourly history.

The first thing that the book started with was describing the various characters of the Greek mythology and their importance to the locals. The next the book tried and established was that Greece back then was no a homogenous unit as it is today, and the city states (Athens, Sparta, etc.) were often hostile to each other and united only in case of facing a common enemy – Darius and Xerxes of Persia. Followed by that, there were elaborate descriptions of the two most famous cities, being Athens and Sparta, followed by Literature, philosophy, art and architecture and science, in Ancient Greece.

I liked how the book was structured, that it had a short five page focus on all the major aspects. It also established how ancient Greece was run and the various types of Governments that were present throughout – some with tyrants and some being democracies (a word whose etymology has Greek origins). I am also glad that the focus was not entirely on mythology, for that has been highly popularised by Hollywood and in my case, by games (Age of Mythology was my first encounter with Ancient Greece). The book touches upon most of the famous aspects of ancient Greece, being the Colossus of Rhodes, Archimedes, the war against Persia, etc and thus, they chose the right topics.

I don’t have any major flaws to pick, with this book, maybe they could have made a passing mention of Alexander of Macedonia, perhaps the most famous emperor of Ancient Greece but then, that would probably be a biography of its own from Hourly History.

I would award the book a rating of eight on ten.

Rating – 8/10

Have a nice day,
Andy