Athens: A History

Robin Waterfield has written the first complete history of Athens from its earliest days to the forthcoming Olympics. During the long rise and abrupt fall of Imperial Athens in the classical age, he shows what a strange and fractured society built the Parthenon, and destroyed itself in the Peloponnesian Wars; and how the myth of Athens' superiority, which arose out of its pre-eminent cultural role in Greece inspired, after centuries of almost complete extinction of the city during the Byzantine period, to the rebuilding of a new neo-classical Athens in liberated 19th Century Greece. This is a fascinating portrait of a city forging an irresistible myth about itself, which survives over millennia amidst its monumental ruins