Description
Book SynopsisFifty years before its golden age, Athens was just another city-state in Sparta’s shadow. David Stuttard tells the story of the father and son who lifted Athens. Miltiades defeated the Persians at Marathon; Cimon drove them from Greece, revitalized the war-torn city, and moderated its foreign policy, creating the conditions for Athenian greatness.
Trade ReviewCovers Athenian history before the rise of Pericles and its fifth-century BC dominance…Stuttard writes with commendably comprehensible fluency. -- Andrew Roberts * Times Literary Supplement *
[A] powerful and substantial account of the Greek city states in their relationships and encounters with each other…[Stuttard] has a penchant for eye-catching images…and he draws the readers in so that they almost experience the excitement, the emotion, the apprehension, even sometimes the fear, of battle scenes. -- Ray Morris * Classics for All *
A fascinating interpretation with compelling support…Given that we are in another period when democracy itself is under siege,
Phoenix has an eerie relevance more broadly to democracy itself. -- Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Cimon, son of Miltiades of Marathon fame, has left virtually no autobiographical trace in the historical record of fifth-century BC Athens and Greece. With masterly intuitiveness and scrupulous scholarship adeptly combined, this always engaging life-and-times biography at last does justice to the achievements of both father and son, achievements that set the tone and the stage for the extraordinary political and cultural flowering that has left its mark on modernity no less than antiquity. -- Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge
Stuttard writes with such passion and verve of these vibrant years in Athens’s history. Such is the power of his storytelling that Miltiades and Cimon—both so often overlooked—soar as triumphantly as any phoenix from the ashes of antiquity. -- Daisy Dunn, author of
The Shadow of VesuviusIn his new book, David Stuttard takes a fresh look at an important but ill-documented period of Athenian history—its rise to greatness in the years following the Persian destruction of the city in 480 and 479. The linchpin of the book is the charismatic leader Cimon. Stuttard sheds light on Cimon with his and Athens’s backstory, as well as with the details of his life and career, especially his opposition to democracy, his vision for a more united Greece, his resistance to further encroachment by the Persians, and his determination to maintain Athenian hegemony in the Aegean basin. Eminently readable, this is a book that scholars and lay readers alike will find enjoyable. -- Robin Waterfield, author of
Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient GreeceStuttard offers a captivating and at times sparkling narrative underpinned with copious research. By bringing Cimon to life, he makes a persuasive case for assigning him a pivotal role in the realignment of fifth-century Athenian politics. -- Robert Garland, author of
How to Survive in Ancient Greece
