Beaton Roderick. The Greeks: A Global History. Basic Books,2021. — 608 p.. 2021

For more than two and a half millennia, Greek names of people and places have been written in the Greek alphabet, described in Chapter 2. Various conventions have been used at different times to represent these names in the Latin, or roman, alphabet that we use in English. Because pronunciation has changed over the centuries, the sounds represented by several letters of the Greek alphabet are not the same today as they were in ancient times. There is therefore no fully consistent way to write Greek names in English. The problem is compounded because there is a long-established practice of representing ancient Greek names in the Latin forms adopted by the ancient Romans. These are usually far more recognisable in English today than a more rigorous transliteration direct from Greek: ‘Thucydides’, for example, is the Latin transcription for the name of the historian whose name was more accurately Thoukydides. Particularly well-known names, of both places and people, have long since acquired English equivalents: ‘Athens’, not ‘Athenai’ (ancient) or ‘Athina’ (modern); ‘Plutarch’, not ‘Ploutarchos’.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS AND CREDITS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PREFACE

1 OF LEDGERS AND LEGENDS 1500 BCE–c. 1180 BCE

2 ‘HOMER’S WORLD, NOT OURS’ c. 1180 BCE–c. 720 BCE

3 INVENTING POLITICS, DISCOVERING THE COSMOS c. 720 BCE–494 BCE

4 THE FIRST WORLD WARS AND THE ‘CLASSICAL’ AGE 494 BCE–404 BCE

5 CULTURAL CAPITAL 404 BCE–322 BCE

6 ‘BECOMING GREEK’ 322 BCE–27 BCE