Download Free The Athenian Empire And The Great Illusion Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Athenian Empire And The Great Illusion and write the review.

This title explores new approaches to the key phenomenon of 5th-century Greek history, the growth and collapse of the Athenian Empire.
An overview of history in ancient Athens, beginning with the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of 413 B.C. and ends with the surrender of Athens to Sparta in 404 B.C.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Pericles, famed general and foremost political leader of Athens during her glory days of the 5th century, brought about the downfall of the Athenian empire almost single-handedly. This truth, obvious to contemporary Greeks, is today not generally understood, and we have Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War to thank for the confusion. That Thucydides, a fierce partisan of Pericles and a soldier exiled for his own military misadventures, should wish to reinvent the history of that famous war to show himself and Pericles in a more favorable light is understandable. But how could one man with a single literary production manage to replace the reality of the war with a myth of his own making, creating in the process an edifice of illusion that would last for millennia, scarcely questioned even by scholars? The answer lies in Thucydides’ ability to engage the reader’s mind and emotions with his psychological motifs. By promising to peel back the superficial layers of contemporary descriptions of the war and reveal the true ‘mysteries’ of history, Thucydides draws in his readers and persuades them to accept his overall thesis of Pericles’ innocence. Author of Illusions examines Thucydides’ techniques and demonstrates just how it was that he was able to reinterpret the history of the Peloponnesian War so successfully for his own and for Pericles’ benefit.