The Oxford History of The Classical World

The Softback Preview / Oxford University Press, 1994. Creased spine, with wear to cover extremities.

A comprehensive overview of the ancient history of Greece and Rome. It covers a period of well over a thousand years, from the poems of Homer to the end of pagan religioun and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Its geographical extension it begins in Greece with small communities emerging from a dark age of conquest and destruction, and with Bronze Age villages on the hills of Rome; it ends with an Empire which unified the Mediterranean world and a great deal besides, from Northumberland to Algeria, from Portugal to Syria, from the Rhine to the Nile. The fall of Rome was further removed in time from Homer than we are from the Norman Conquest; as for political scale, the Roman Empire comprised the whole or part of the territory of what are now around thirty sovereign states, and it was not until 1870 that Italy, for instance, achieved again the unity which Rome had imposed before the birth of Christ.