Athens – City of Wisdom
Athens – City of Wisdom
Abstract: Author, Journalist and Lecturer, Bruce Clark discusses his latest book with Prof. Bettany Hughes (Historian, Author and Broadcaster) and Dr John Kittmer (Former British Ambassador to Greece).
In the words of the publisher, “[Athens: City of Wisdom is] a sweeping history of Athens, telling the three-thousand-year story of the birthplace of Western civilization, from Runciman Award winner Bruce Clark. Each of the book’s twenty-one chapters focuses on a critical ‘moment’ in the city’s long history, from the reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first-century Athens, as a rapidly expanding city struggles with the legacy of a global economic crisis. Bruce Clark has a rich and revealing sequence of stories to tell – not only of the familiar golden age of Classical Athens, of the removal from the Acropolis of the Parthenon marbles by agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin in the early nineteenth century, or of the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896; but also of the less fêted later years of antiquity, when St Paul preached on the Areopagus and neo Platonists refounded the Academy that Sulla’s legions had desecrated. He also delves into Athens’ forgotten medieval centuries, unearthing jewels gleaming in the Byzantine twilight, and tales of Christian fortitude and erratic Turkish governance from the four centuries of Ottoman rule that followed.”
