A. R. Burns.
The Lyric Age: The Greek World, c. 750 - 510 BC.
London: The Folio Society, 2002.
(Originally published as: The Lyric Age of Greece, Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1960.)

This book considers "archaic" Greece: Greece before we have contemporaneous written histories. The author bases the book on archeological evidence, what few written fragments we have from this period, and a discriminating use of later ancient Greek and Roman historians. There is an account of the peoples who moved into what became the ancient Greek homelands (modern Greece and western Turkey) - the rim of the Aegean Sea - and the culture(s) and language(s) they brought with them. The Greek peninsula has limited amounts of land suitable for agriculture; during this period population pressures led to successful Greek colonization of Sicily, southern Italy, and Black Sea coastal areas. The city of Corinth played a major early role in establishing colonies. The book describes the major provinces of the Greek peninsula and Asia Minor, and the major city-states. During this period the Greeks developed trading networks with their overseas colonies and other states. Some forward-looking cities developed export industries (e.g., Corinth pottery, superceeded by the finer red pottery of Athens, olive oil). City-state governments were dominated by tyrants and aristocratic oligarcharies during this period. Population growth also led to non-city people encroaching on cities, upsetting the political stability of the cities. The book has a separate chapter on the Spartans (lots from Plutarch's biography of Lycurgus/Lykourgos) describing how the Spartan warrior class dominated their slave/serf-like helots; and two chapters on Athens, including discussion of Solon's innovative representative govenment reforms, along with the fall of those reforms and Athens' revsersion to tyranny. There are chapters on Greek mystery religions and literature (strong on Sappho of Lesbos, but nothing on Homer - probably a topic too big for this wide ranging survey). The book ends with several chapters on our most important Greek legacy: the beginnings of the abstract rationalist approach towards understanding the world, due to the pre-Socratic philosophers (e.g., Thales, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Herakleitos).