The writer Callimachus, who flourished in Alexandria in the third century Bc, was famed for his aphorisms of which one, mega biblion, mega kakon, ‘big book, big mistake’, haunts me as I begin this preface. It may have been a dig at his literary rival Apollonius Rhodius for his large epic on Jason and the Argonauts but Callimachus, an elitist and refined writer in the later tradition of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is right in suggesting that things can get out of hand. My defence is that the history of the ancient Mediterranean is a large subject and I feel that it needs to be taken gently if its values are to be appreciated.
Luckily, I have got away with it so far and I am delighted that Oxford University Press has commissioned a third edition of Egypt, Greece and Rome. I have even been allowed an extra fifty pages which means that I have been able to restore the ‘legacy’ chapter at the end that was squeezed out in the second edition as well as add in other important developments in scholarship and archaeology since the last edition.
The ten years since the appearance of the last edition have been ones in which I have been able to travel more widely in the Mediterranean (children leave home eventually!) and run study tours to Italy and classical Greece and Turkey. I was also delighted to be asked in 2005 to be Historical Consultant to the revived Blue Guides, thirty-five years after I had written a letter to my parents from Delphi saying that it was taking me a long time to get round the site because I had been lent a Blue Guide that seemed to have something to say about every stone! This was the celebrated Stuart Rossiter edition and I was moved to be asked to contribute to the seventh edition (2008). My experiences with the Blue Guides have made me think more deeply as to how to present the ancient world to travellers and resulted in my Sites of Antiquity: Fifty Sites that Explain the Classical World (Taunton, UK, 2009), which might be seen as a companion to this book.
Egypt, Greece, and Rome remains what it has always been, an introductory but comprehensive text for the general reader and those students who need a foundation before going further. No one can be unaware of the enormous interest in ancient history at a popular level but increasing specialization and the rise of ‘companion’ volumes of essays means that it is increasingly difficult to find a full overview in one place. I hope that by keeping these three major civilizations together in one volume, together with other important but lesser-known ones, I have created a book that can not only be read as a whole but used to fill in gaps and relate events and periods to each other. I have put in new material, rewritten several chapters completely, broken up one or two chapters, and added one or two extra ‘interludes’. General further reading recommendations are now grouped at the back with more specific recommendations linked in to the text. I have also taken the opportunity to completely revise the illustrations. I hope that this will sustain the work for a further ten years.
World History
