Audiobook · read by volunteers
À History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Vol I
John Bagnell Bury (1861–1927)
Read by Joshua B. Christensen, Laura Koskinen, Leon Mire, Sibella Denton, Kalynda, Nicholas James Bridgewater, Graham Redman, Lizzie Driver, Alok Karulkar, Justin Brett · 43 chapters · 20 h 51
About the book
Few stories are as large as the one told here: the rise of the Greek world, from its earliest settlements through the centuries in which its culture took shape. In this first volume of his history, John Bagnell Bury moves with a steady, lucid hand through the age of the great city-states, giving politics and war their due while never losing sight of art, poetry and the life of ideas. His field of view is wide. It takes in the mainland, the islands of the Aegean, the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, and the western colonies of Sicily and southern Italy. Bury writes to be understood, and he rewards patient listeners with a clear sense of how one episode leads into the next. Forty-three recordings carry you through the introduction, the prefaces and the long chapters that follow, in about twenty-one hours of calm, informative listening.
Introduction
John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927) was an Irish-born scholar of ancient and later history who held a chair at Cambridge, and his History of Greece, first published in 1900, became one of the standard English-language surveys of the subject. Its reputation rested on a plain virtue: it organises an enormous amount of material so that a general reader can follow it from start to finish, without ever flattering the reader or hiding the difficulty of the evidence.
The whole work runs up to the death of Alexander the Great and is divided here into volumes, the first taking the earlier part of the story. Bury treats Greek history as more than a chronicle of battles. Bury gives space to literature, sculpture and architecture, to the growth of political institutions, and to the scattered Greek communities from the shores of Asia Minor to Sicily and southern Italy. The sweep is broad, but the prose stays measured and readable.
The recording runs to forty-three files, beginning with the introduction and prefaces and then working through the chapters, several of them divided into parts so that each file remains a comfortable length. In all, the book lasts nearly twenty-one hours. It was read by LibriVox volunteers who shared the work between them.
Why listen now? Because the questions this history raises about citizenship, power, freedom and the fragility of small states have not gone away, and because a clear, unhurried narrator of the ancient world is a pleasure for a long walk or a week of commuting.
Public domain
John Bagnell Bury died in 1927: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text