The Greek World

In this magnificent volume the continuous attractions of Greece - from Bronze Age Crete to the coming of Alexander - are revealed by Eliot Porter, one of the world's premier color photographers, who began focusing his large-format camera on the remnants of Greek culture in 1967. Working with Mr. Porter, Peter Levi, poet and classical scholar, allows the reader to make connections between Homeric myth and history going back to the third millennium B.C. Eighty-six powerful four-color photographs capture a magical world, with it blend of natural and man-made beauty. Along the way one learns how much our world has inherited from the truths of Greek drama, the bittersweetness of fifth-century Athenian democracy, the glories and horrors of war, the elegant simplicity of the Greek architectural orders, the earnest competition of the games at Olympia, even the intellectual climate that produced Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It is remarkable what a strong sense of that vanished world, a world substantially dissolved into our own history and our own bloodstream, is still to be found in Greece today.