The Children of Athena

A compelling account of the continuing legacy of Greek writers and thinkers in the age of Rome. In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the heterogeneous traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish in the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the work of thinkers and scholars such as the historian Plutarch, the geographer Ptolemy, the physician Galen, the philosopher Plotinus and the mathematician Hypatia.

Charles Freeman tells the story of a vibrant, constantly evolving tradition of intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years – one that would shape the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages and beyond.