New Releases by Michael Grant

The Herod of popular tradition is the tyrannical King of Judaea who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents and died a terrible death in 4 BC as the judgment of God. But this biography paints a much more complex picture of this contemporary of Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and the Emperor Augustus. Herod devoted his life to the task of keeping the Jews prosperous and racially intact. To judge by the two disastrous Jewish rebellions that occurred within a hundred and fifty years of his death -- those the Jews called the First and Second Roman Wars -- he was not, in the long run, completely successful. For forty years Herod walked the most precarious of political tightropes. For he had to be enough of a Jew to retain control of his Jewish subjects, and enough of a pro-Roman to preserve the confidence of Rome, within whose territory his kingdom fell. For more than a quarter of a century he was one of the chief bulwarks of Augustus'' empire in the east. He made Judaea a large and prosperous country. He founded cities and built public works on a scale never seen before: of these, recently excavated Masada is a spectacular example. And he did all this in spite of a continuous undercurrent of protest and underground resistance. The numerous illustrations presents portraits and coins, buildings and articles of everyday use, landscapes and fortresses, and subsequent generations'' interpretations of the more famous events, actual and mythical, of Herod''s career.

If Greece and Rome are held to be the cradles of Western civilization, this is in large part due to the fact that they are the cradles of written history. Between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. men such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus virtually invented the discipline of history as we understand it. To these supreme craftsmen history was a dual art: the art of recording the truth as accurately as was humanly possible, and the art of writing as lucidly as the great men of letters. Michael Grant offers a stimulating examination of the primary historians of the ancient world. Beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and their very different approaches to historical narration, The Ancient Historians discusses the works and methods of the founders of the historical discipline, as well as the political and social contexts in which their works were composed. Despite varied backgrounds, these men held a common assumption no longer shared by most modern historians - that history is essentially a moral discipline that bears meaningfully not only on past but on future human conduct. Following Herodotus and Thucydides the two great historians of Greece''s military destiny, Dr. Grant discusses the important later Greek historians, Xenophon and Polybius. He then moves on to the Roman masters of the form. First, he surveys the historians of the Republic, Cato, Sallust, and Julius Caesar himself, whose Gallic Wars presents its author as both historian and hero. Then, he provides two divergent views of the violent first-century Empire as reflected in the writings of Livy and Hosephys. Ample space is also given to the works of Tacitus, who wrote at the beginning of the second century A.D. and whose scope, therefore, broadened with the Empire itself. In addition to these giants of general history, Dr. Grant includes two masters of biographical history, Plutarch and Suetonius. The book concludes with chapters on two historians with a much-altered view of the Roman Empire: Eusebius, who wrote his groundbreaking history of the Christian Church early in the fourth century A.D.; and A,,ianus, who lived to record the division of the Empire into two parts, and the chronicle the barbarian incursions in the middle of that same century. The Ancient Historians records the thousand year struggle to create a durable record of human affairs, seperate from fragments that had once been a mixture of myth, hearsay, and personal bias. It is also first-rate history in its own right.

In this 1968 study, Michael Grant examines the varied ways in which Rome used currency to inform direct or deceive public opinion and also considers results of this exploitation. Cunning historians can read in the coins matters of art politics, religion, economics - even personalities not to be found in surviving books: or if found, can set what the books say against what the coins say. Professor Grant astutely masters his difficult and complex subject matter, producing a brief exposition of it in words which the general reader and specialist alike can understand and profit from. Complemented by a series of half-tone plates, Professor Grant''s book is an excellent introduction for students of history to the value of coins as evidence for their subject.

Surveys the historical panorama of European art and culture from the Minoans of Crete to the twentieth century.