The book I read to research this post was Ancient Greece A Very Short Introduction by Paul Catledge which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is part of a series which consists of around 300 books where they take complex subjects and get an expert to write a book of around 150 pages as a kind of an introduction. The earliest record of the ancient greek language which used a simplified alphabet was found at Cnossos in Crete and it is thought a wave of people speaking this language came in from the North and invaded Crete & Greece. This brought the relatively peace loving Minoan civilization to an end. It also sets us up nicely for what the Ancient Greek community would become. It was a nation made up of 1,000 self governing cities and the world has never seen anything like it. Many of these had a few hundred to several thousand citizens. Athens would grow to 250,000 and become the biggest city in the world at this time. Sparta made every male citizen a member of the army so could command an army of around 8-9,000 where as most cities were lucky to have an army of 1,000. In the first Peloppenesion War which Sparta won 4 city states including Athens took on the might of this great city. Sparta was sponsored by the great Persian Empire. These cities would have many more slaves than citizens and the cities were generally in lowlands for protection with agriculture carried in the surrounding land and some of the higher land. Something that would figure in the wars between Athens and Sparta was Athens had a larger navy but Sparta had a superior army. I must admit I really enjoyed this book and even though I have read quite a lot of books on Ancient Greece there was plenty of new information on this subject. This series of books is always really interesting even on subjects I have never heard of let alone know anything about.
