The Greeks and Greek civilization

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) is perhaps the preeminent historian of classical and Renaissance art, architecture, and culture.

Burckhardt completed significant " cultural history," which he only described in his famous Reflections on History and in a celebrated series of lectures delivered in Basel in 1872. Burckhardt dramatically renounced these speeches during his own lifetime, fearing a hostile reception by a world body of scholars and critics who remained wedded to a romanticized view of the ancient Greek world.

It is only now, for the first time, that the core of these lectures is available in book form to the English-language reader. Rejecting the notion that a perfect democracy had in fact existed, Burckhardt portrayed ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world based on ruthless competition for honor, which led, in turn, to a tyrannous state with minimal freedoms.