[.ca] Aspects Of Greek History 750-323 BC: A Source-Based Approach (ISBN 0415099587)

Unfair Review:
I think that the review posted for this book is exceedingly unfair. What Buckley tries to do is clear away some of the hypocrisy that has surrounded modern writing about ancient history. For generations books have been written by regurgitating the narratives of a few primary sources: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, et al. Buckley puts this process in the foreground and allows teachers to amplify and to correct by appealing to inscriptions, coins, less "privileged" narratives and so forth. This is a dynamic text, which is really alone in a sea of pompous writers who aspire to the true account of what "actually happened" and don't want to let students in on the process. I fully intend to use this text in a course surveying Greek history. Everyone gets some details wrong, but I admire the basic honesty of this text.

An example of an uncritical and sloppy approach:
To support the title, I'll take as an example only one chapter of Mr Buckley's book:The age of Greek Tyranny:c.650-510(page 47). First, the term "Age of Tyranny" as above is at least unfortunate.The author astounds everyone by such an unfounded allegation, since it is well known that tyrannies exist from their inception throughout Greek history. Second, at page 47 he defines a tyrant 'as someone who had seiged power unconstitutionally', thus implying that the cities where tyrants took over had pre-existing constitutions, which is untrue. Third, in his section "Feidon of Argos" at page 55 he alleges that "the Chalcidians were the best in pre-hoplite fighting", whereas it is well known that Chalkis' strength lay on its horsemen, as it is reported in the expedition of 508 BC in the topic of Cleisthenes and the war of the Athenians against the Spartan alliance. I only chose these three points to illustrate and state further that I would never have recommended this book to my A-level Ancient History students.