The book Ancient Greeks: The Portrait of a People

The book Ancient Greeks: The Portrait of a People by Dr Ivan Jordović has recently been released as a joint edition of the Zavod za udžbenike and the Institute for Balkans Studies. Until this book appeared, the Serbian readers interested in ancient Greece depended on the small number of translated books by selected foreign authors or on the relevant literature in foreign languages. With the exception of Konstantin Bojić and his History of the Greek People published in Serbian in 1843, there was no book by a Serbian author taking a comprehensive look at the history of this tremendously important ancient civilization. Ancient Greeks: The Portrait of a People has filled up this gap. The newly-published study not only uses the latest scholarly work in the field, but also pays special attention to a number of issues the understanding of which has profoundly changed over the past twenty years or so (tribal society in the Homeric and Archaic periods, early Sparta, the advent of democracy etc). Moreover, it discusses some issues and phenomena which have seldom been dealt with in more detail in the studies of this kind worldwide (the democratic ideology in Athens, the form of government and military organization of Macedonia etc). In that way, the book offers a comprehensive historical account and analysis of the subject from the earliest times to Alexander the Great