Spanning more than two centuries, the Greek and Persian wars forged a new world order, sparking developments in battle strategy, naval technology, world exploration, and art and culture that impact the world even today. Now is your opportunity to survey this globe-spanning conflict, as well as its enduring impact on the world at large. From the ancient battlefields of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Gaugamela, to the imperial halls of Persepolis, to the bustling marketplace of Athens, The Greek and Persian Wars presents the clash of the Greeks and the Persians over the course of 24 fascinating lectures.
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We call it the Golden Age: the time during the 5th century B.C. when the Greek city-state of Athens experienced a cultural flowering of extraordinary power and importance for Western culture. In the generation that followed Pericles’s appearance on the public stage after the Persian wars, Athens transformed the allied Greek states into a true Aegean empire, dominated by the Athenians and their mighty navy.
View the ancient world through the eyes of its first historian. This course addresses the most remarkable achievement of Herodotus—his narrative account of the great Persian Wars and their causes. It considers the ways his work retains a mythical world-view and discusses his influence on later Greek historians.
What do we really know about the ancient Persians? Explore the secrets of one of the greatest empires in the ancient world from a fresh perspective: its own. Over the span of 24 lectures, Professor John W. I. Lee examines Persian sources to reveal what we known about this grand civilization. Tapping into the latest scholarship, The Persian Empire is sure to fill in some critical gaps in your understanding and appreciation of the sweep of ancient history and its undeniable effect on later civilizations.
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides called it "a war like no other"—arguably the greatest in the history of the world up to that time. The Peloponnesian War pitted Athens and her allies against a league of city-states headed by Sparta. Thucydides's eyewitness account of the war has been a classic for 24 centuries and is still studied for its profound truths about the nature of human strife. In The Peloponnesian War, Professor Kenneth Harl draws on this masterpiece and other ancient sources to give you a full picture of the Greek world in uneasy peace and then all-out war in the late 5th century B.C.
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