-Further Reading-Greece
- Greece: The History Of The Archaic Period (By George Forrest)
A. Andrewes, Greek Society (Harmondsworth, 1975) is the best general introduction to Greek history;
O. Murray, Early Greece (London, 1980) is a good modern account of the period. A more detailed
account will be found in the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History; with vol. iii 3 (1982) it
has reached The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries BC. C.W. Fornara, Archaic
Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge, 1983) is a useful collection of sources in
translation.
For dark age Greece see A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (Edinburgh, 1971); V. R. D'A.
Desborough, The Greek Dark Ages (London, 1972); J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (London,
1979). For the historical value of Homer, discussion starts from M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus
(Cambridge, 1954). The hero's tomb at Lefkandi (Euboea) discovered in 1980 is described by M.R.
Popham, E. Touloupa, and L.H. Sackett in Antiquity 56 (1982), 169-74.
For archaic Greece see W.G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy (London, 1966); L.H.
Jeffery, Archaic Greece (London, 1976); A.M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece (London, 1980). Two books
by A.R. Burn offer an excellent longer account: The Lyric Age of Greece (London, 1960); Persia and
the Greeks (London, 1962; 2nd edn., with an appendix by D.M. Lewis, 1984). Important works on
individual topics are J. Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (3rd edn., London, 1980); A. Andrewes, The
Greek Tyrants (London, 1956); CM. Kraay, Archaic and Classical Greek Coins (London, 1976); H.W.
Parke, Greek Oracles (London, 1967); W.G. Forrest, A History of Sparta (2nd edn. London, 1980); P. A.
Cartledge, Sparta and Laconia (London, 1979); J.B. Salmon, Wealthy Corinth (Oxford, 1984); R. A.
Tomlmson, Argos and the Argolid (London, 1972); T.J. Dunbabin, The Western Greeks (Oxford, 1948).
- Homer (By Oliver Taplin)
Translations
The translation of Homer into English, since the first by Chapman, epitomizes the development of
national taste and letters. (It is no chance that Matthew Arnold made it the subject of one of the classics
of literary criticism.) The greatest is surely that of Pope, which has laboured too long under the vacuous
reproof of Richard Bentley-'a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.' William