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GREEK THOUGHT: A Guide to Classical Knowledge edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R Lloyd is an English translation of the original French reference work. It is a masterful reference work designed for the general reader covering the most recent scholarship on the scope, methods, and impact of Greek thought--the genesis and epicenter of Western Civilization.

Broadly conceived, GREEK THOUGHT: A Guide to Classical Knowledge places philosophy within the framework of Greek science and learning as simply one branch among others. "Greek knowledge" here represents all the sciences, liberal and otherwise, in a new and unique way. This volume does not attempt to give a complete account of Greek civilization, but an analysis of how the Greeks saw themselves, and what they thought they knew. While focussed on the fundamentals-philosophy, politics, and science-the authors go further by relating politics to physics and math, as well as to mythology and religion. In taking stock of what the Greeks knew or what they thought they knew, they also provide portraits of the significant scientists such as Archimedes and Ptolomy, philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, along side the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius.

The editors have amassed a stellar and international cast of expert contributors to this thoroughly researched work, making GREEK THOUGHT: A Guide to Classical Knowledge--with its focus on ancient philosophy, politics, science, scientific traditions, technology, mathematics, and the philosophers, politicians, and scientists themselves-a volume that is sure to have interdisciplinary appeal.

 Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civ­ilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume ex­plores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought--­investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the condi­tions and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this book reminds us of what our own re­flections owe to theirs.

In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pur­suit of knowledge, major figures, and currents of thought, this work shows us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and philosophical ideas, such as those on "Utopia and the Critique of Politics," "Observation and Research," and "Ethics"; others on specific fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea; studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek civilization-and that Aristotle con­sidered a natural and universal trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations, this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek intellectual adventure.

GREEK THOUGHT: A Guide to Classical Knowledge is a reference concentrates on attempting to bring out the inside of Greek Thinking, as they thought of themselves. Hence it offers a new reader in classical Greek thought a sort of insider view of the rationale of the culture. The essays also integrate current critical thinking about the central themes of ancient Greek culture. As an introduction and reference to reading the classics this is a keen and useful work that will attract attention of general readers and scholars alike.

About the Editors: Jacques Brunschwig is Professor Emeritus, Universite de Paris-I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd is Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science, University of Cambridge

 Excerpt:

If the work we are presenting under the title GREEK THOUGHT: A Guide to Classical Knowledge has one cen­tral ambition, it is to call attention to this fundamental reflexivity that seems to us characteristic of Greek thought, and which gives it even today a forma­tive value and a capacity to challenge. In this book we do not address "Greek science," or "Greek philosophy," or "Greek civilization." Excellent works, both introductory and comprehensive, exist on these subjects, works with which we do not propose to compete. We have not sought to explicate, or even to summarize, the whole of what the Greeks knew, or thought they knew; nor do we tally up what they did not know, the gaps in their knowledge. Similarly, we have not wanted either to repeat or to summarize histories of Greek phi­losophy; and nothing will be found here that touches directly on Greek art, Greek literature, or Greek religion. Instead we have sought to step back from the products to the processes that gave rise to them, from works to actions, from objects to methods. Of foremost interest to us is the typically Hellenic aptitude for raising questions that are at once "second order"-since they oc­cupy a secondary position in relation to questions that bear immediately on the world, the beings that populate it, the events that take place in it, the ac­tivities that transform it-and "first order" or "primary," because they must logically be raised first, and solved in one way or another. The term "Socratic fallacy" has sometimes been used to designate the idea that one could not say whether a given individual was courageous or not, so long as one was unable to say universally what courage is. Fallacy or not, Greek thought finds in this quest for lucidity its most radical task. Classical knowledge, in the sense in which we are using the term, is not the knowledge indicated by expressions like "knowing that Socrates was condemned to death" or "knowing that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side." It represents, rather, the knowledge denoted in expressions such as "knowing what one is saying," "knowing what one is doing," "knowing what one wants."

This dimension of Greek thought, which takes as its objects not only first-­order knowledge, but also life, language, production, and action, strikes us as essential and characteristic, and it is to this dimension that we draw the reader's attention. We look at the Greeks looking at themselves. We evoke not history as they made it and experienced it, but the stories they told them­selves about it; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their music, but their harmonics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. We present their theories about the origin, meaning, and functions of religion. We say nothing about their language itself, but we do offer some of their reflections on the origin, elements, and forms of language. Their political institutions are mentioned, of course, but in the framework of the ideas and theories used to conceptualize and justify those institutions. We recall the principal doctrines of individual philosophers and scientists, or of philosophic and scientific schools, to show what philosophical activity, the development of a theory, the public presenta­tion of a doctrine, meant to those individuals and groups.

 This book is subdivided into five parts. The first might seem to grant too important a place to philosophy, to the detriment of science: in accordance with contemporary parlance, people we call scientists know things, whereas one must no doubt be a philosopher, and even a sort of philosopher that may be on the verge of extinction, to think that philosophy is a form of knowing. But this division between science and philosophy does not correspond at all to the conceptual frameworks of antiquity; at most it puts in an appearance, with many qualifications, in the Hellenistic era, when specialized knowledge begins to acquire a certain autonomy, though philosophy still claims the right to provide the specialists with their principles and to pass judgment on their methods. Plato clearly subordinates mathematics to dialectics; but the vocabulary in which he expresses that subordination, far from leaving mathematics in its customary category as a science, instead contests that categorization. As for Aristotle, although he was more inclined to see the individual sciences as models according to which the criteria of scientific thought could be elaborated, he grants physics only the status of a "second philosophy." The emergence of philosophy as we have described it is also the emergence of knowledge, and of thought in general. Several articles in this first group ("Images of the World," "Myth and Knowledge") describe the popular and mythic background against which the figure of the philosopher stands out, different in so many ways from his modern counterparts. Other articles ("The Question of Being," "Epistemology," "Ethics") offer a first broad staking out of the principal fields in which philosophy emerged. Thus right at the start, the critical approach of the work as a whole is sketched out: trying to avoid both the traps of historicism and those of philosophia perennis, we seek to put our object in a perspective that inevitably refers to a modern point of observation. In this enterprise we are concerned with measuring the legacy that Greek thought has bequeathed to its posterity, the use that posterity has made of it, and the continuities and discontinuities that this complex relation has engendered between inheritance and heirs-and it is not the least of the paradoxes that, in the inheritance itself, the heirs have found, among other things, the possibility of becoming themselves untrammeled producers of knowledge.

The second part is devoted in particular to politics: does not the "invention" of politics, along with that of philosophy and mathematics, belong most indisputably to ancient Greece? Here again, invention is not parthenogenesis. Although the Egyptians and the Babylonians had mathematics, Greek mathematics is characterized by a specific way of proceeding by articulated definitions and proofs. Similarly, institutions and practices of power, as well as reflections on forms of government, on the relations between governors and the governed, and on the nature of the political order, existed outside Greece; but Greece is distinguished by the formation and organization of the city-state, the practice of public debate, the procedures of collective decision-­making, the writing and publication of laws, and, in political analysis, a style of justification and argument that resembles (whatever causal sequence we might wish to privilege) the discourse that emerged in the fields of philosophy and sci­ence. From this invention of politics, we examine not so much the historical birth of the city-states and the development of their institutions as rather the reflection on those events and the theoretical and practical justification of those institutions; the definition of the various roles among which politi­cal action and thought were distributed; the confrontation, sometimes quite openly conflictual (Simone Weil said that the Greeks did not possess the self-­satisfied hypocrisy of the Romans) but sometimes harmonious, between the practices of civic life and the ideology in which they are cloaked ("Inventing Politics," "Utopia and the Critique of Politics"); and the debates between re­flection and participation in public affairs, which pose the perennial question of the sage's commitment to or detachment from his own city-state ("The Sage and Politics").

The third part, "The Pursuit of Knowledge," starts out by offering over­views of the institutional and conceptual frameworks for the extraordinary explosion of desire for knowledge, a desire that Aristotle views as naturally implanted in the heart of all people. Then follows a series of articles on the various branches of knowledge (including some that look to us like pseudo-­science today). We have organized them alphabetically rather than adopting the classification-or rather one of the various classifications-that prevailed among Greek thinkers themselves: the theoreticians' agenda, that is to say the ordered set of questions to which any respectable doctrine was obliged to offer answers, from the formation of the world to the origin of humanity, hu­man culture, and institutions, was fixed in its broad outlines at a very early date, and for several centuries manifested an astonishing degree of stability. Yet that agenda was enriched, diversified, and modified in multiple ways, and the classifications proposed rarely failed to become controversial. Certain dis­ciplines, such as logic, did not come into their own until well after the early period of Greek thought; others, like medicine or harmonics, were quickly pervaded by debates on the extent to which they should be attached to or cut off from the common trunk of general philosophical and scientific theories. All things considered, we judged it preferable to fall back on the naive secu­rity of alphabetical order.

In the final parts readers will find a series of articles on the major Greek philosophers and scholars, as well as on the principal schools and lasting cur­rents of thought. Among so many glorious and singular individuals, the choice was necessarily a difficult one. Our selection is certainly more re­strained than that of Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Opinions of Illustri­ous Philosophers; but it goes further forward in time, and it makes room for scientists and historians as well as for philosophers. Anticipating our own sec­ond thoughts, some may find that we have been unjust toward certain figures such as Xenophanes, Sophists other than Protagoras, the Cyrenaics or the Megarians, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Theophrastus, or Philo of Alexandria. Still, we had to make choices, and any selection reflects judgments that can always be contested. Most of the thinkers or scholars to whom it was not possible to de­vote a separate section are mentioned, along with their works, within one ar­ticle or another, and can be traced through the index. The bibliographies and cross-references also help make up for the inevitable disadvantages of choice and dispersal.

Finally, a word about the choice of contributors. As general editors respon­sible for the overall project and its implementation, the two of us who sign this Introduction are pleased and proud that our association can modestly symbolize the alliance between two major centers of research on the history of ancient thought, Cambridge and Paris; we are even more pleased and proud to have worked all our professional lives, each in our own way, in the convic­tion that the differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin worlds in tradi­tions, methods, and instruments of analysis and research in no way prevent contact, exchange, productive discussion, and the production of a common work. This book bears witness to that shared conviction.

The authors to whom we turned, British or American, Italian or French, have all contributed to the considerable progress that has been made, over the last several decades, in the knowledge and understanding of the intellectual world of ancient Greece. They all have their own personalities, which we have not asked them to suppress; their freedom of opinion and judgment has been intentionally respected. As we have said, the gaze of the moderns looking upon the Greeks looking upon themselves remains obviously, and deliber­ately, our own gaze, and it measures distances, proximities, gaps, and debts from this standpoint. But this gaze of ours can never be entirely unified: con­temporary scholars, sometimes because of the particular fields in which they work, sometimes because of the diversity of their overall approaches, do not all necessarily interpret or appreciate our relation to Greek thought in the same way. No one is in a position to dictate that all these scholars subscribe to the latest trend, or conform to the next-to-latest fashion; if we somehow had such power, we would surely have refrained from using it.

We thank our collaborators for agreeing to write their articles in a style that is not always the one they are accustomed to. We know how wrenching it is, for academics conscious of their scholarly responsibilities, to give up foot­notes and erudite references. But we deliberately chose to call upon authors for whom that renunciation would be painful, rather than those whose habits would not have been particularly disturbed.

 

The standard factual reference The Oxford Classical Dictionary (CD-ROM edition) that embraces Greek, Roman and Hellenistic worlds has a more historical cast with orientation more to fact than the inner ethos of the culture. Praised by playwright Arthur Miller as "a delight for anyone with any curiosity about the roots of our Western culture" and by Booklist as "the single most heavily used book on classical studies," The Oxford Classical Dictionary is without doubt the definitive one-volume resource on ancient Greece and Rome.

Here are over six thousand A to Z entries, ranging from long articles to biographies to brief identifications. Readers can find information on virtually any aspect of the classical world--athletics, bee-keeping, botany, magic, Roman law, philosophy, religious rites, postal service, slavery, navigation, and the reckoning of time.

Both the thousand-page volume and the CD-ROM are available as a package, with the CD included in a sleeve in the inside back cover of the book. Together they make an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Greece or Rome.

The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization has been unrivaled in scope and scholarship, an indispensable guide to the richly textured history of ancient Greece and Rome.

The meticulously detailed entries contained within this volume breathe life into the people, places, and events that shaped the development of classical civilization. Readers will learn that Alexander the Great's grand army consisted of 48,500 soldiers and was the largest ever to leave Greek soil, that the white facades of refined Ionic structures in Greece were once washed with vibrant reds and blues, and that the Theodosian Code, a collection of Roman law published in AD 438, still survives today. Here are examinations of the lives and works of great philosophers and literary figures, such as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Seneca, Aeschylus and the poets Ovid and Sappho. Mythology and religion were integral parts of classical civilization, and from Aphrodite and Hermes to funerary rites and sacrifice, they are integral parts of this volume as well. Filled with both essay length articles and short quick reference entries, this extraordinarily thorough yet accessibly written book is a treasury of information on classical civilization.

Arranged alphabetically, fully cross-referenced, and graced with a beautiful selection of full color plates, The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization will certainly become an essential resource for anyone interested in learning more about the cradle of western civilization.

 

Athens, the City Beneath the City: Antiquities from the Metropolitan Railway Excavations edited by Liana Parlama and Nicholas Stampolidis (Abrams) In this exciting account of a recently completed salvage archaeological excavation, the capital of the classical world comes to life once again. Full-color photographs present the underground framework of this city that has existed for millennia, along with the foundations of age-old houses, market­places, and temples. The wealth of artifacts featured in Athens, the City Beneath the City, untouched for thousands of years, resonate with new information about the dynamic culture of ancient Greece.

Uncovered during the construction of the Athens Metropolitan Railway, these finds clarify for the first time the topography of ancient Athens in and around the fortification walls, including the Kerameikos cemetery and the area beneath modern-day Syntagma Square, and they can now be seen in an extraordinary exhibition at the city's Museum of Cycladic Art. Archaeologists worked just steps ahead of the Athens Metro construction to excavate and preserve the vestiges of the ancient city. Plans, drawings, photographs, and charts show where the objects were discovered, and their use in antiquity is explained.

Covering the entire span of life in Athens from the Mycenaean to the Byzantine period (17th century BCE through 8th century CE), the 500 objects are organized into three sections: public and private life, religion, and burial customs. Among them are marble statues, bronze vessels, painted clay pottery, glassware, ivory tools, gold jewelry, and the tomb of a dog, complete with its glass offerings and dog collar. Among the unusual items is a large stone slab listing the dead from three battles of the Peloponnesian War, which was mentioned by Thucydides.

Beautifully illustrated in full color, Athens, the City Beneath the City offers an unparalleled look at these newly discovered parts of the ancient metropolis, now preserved for posterity while the modern city continues to grow.