The Other Greeks
The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Civilization
(amazon)Victor Davis Hanson (View Bio)
Hardcover: The Free Press, 1995; Paperback: The Free Press; University of California Press, 1996.
"Nothing less than a masterpiece.... The truth is that Hanson's grasp of the sources, archaeological and literary, is unexcelled; that his command of the pertinent scholarly literature is impressive in the extreme; and that his argument, as it inexorably unfolds, is not just breathtaking but in nearly all particulars persuasive. No one who teaches ancient Greek history, no one who studies classical civilization, can afford to ignore what Hanson has uncovered. All future work on the polis will take this book as its starting point." — The American Journal of Philology
"I can't imagine a more timely book, or one more relevant to the social forces that are shaping modern American and world society and politics.... Hanson's argument is a careful, scholarly and complex one, honest, sometimes angry, and rarely comfortable.... THE OTHER GREEKS is a book that ought to be read, and repays re-reading." — Jane Smiley, Civilization
"Compelling." — Wilson Quarterly
"A ground-breaking book.... This brilliant and moving re-creation of the ancient farmer's unending struggle against nature is not offered for its own sake; it is part of Mr. Hanson's development of a thesis that he himself qualifies as 'disturbing.' That is, 'Agrarian populism, not intellectual contemplation, farmers not philosophers, other Greeks, not the small cadre of refined minds who have always comprised the stuff of Classics, were responsible for the creation of Western civilization'." — Bernard Knox, The Washington Times
