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Summary: Perfect for teachers
Review: This is a valuable tool for teachers. It really brings Ancient Greece to life.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: This is the best historical documentary on any subject I've ever seen. The narrative and imagery are sophisticated and informative and I'd recommend it to anyone seeking an introduction to Greek history.
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Summary: If you teach Greek history: Use this video
Review: This movie is an incredibly well done and thoughtful look at Greek history. It manages to include all the major events and individuals and do so in way my high school students as well as college students were able to understand. It brings Archaic and Classical Greece into perspective and is an invaluable tool useful not just in the classroom but for general use. Interesting and educational not two words often put together.
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Summary: If you teach Greek history: Use this video
Review: This movie is an incredibly well done and thoughtful look at Greek history. It manages to include all the major events and individuals and do so in way my high school students as well as college students were able to understand. It brings Archaic and Classical Greece into perspective and is an invaluable tool useful not just in the classroom but for general use. Interesting and educational not two words often put together.
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Summary: Wonderfully-Produced Historiography
Review: This series does an impressive job of peaking its viewers' interest by integrating an intriguing mixture of sounds and visuals. A strong artistic approach was taken when developing this series as sounds of paradoxically subtle cacophony of everyday Greek life mixes with appropriately composed music serve as a backdrop to Liam Neeson's narrative and the visuals of Greek shores, waters, lands and people.This series does not cover every aspect of Greek political and social life... nor does it delve into ancient Greek religious beliefs, but what it does do is cover with great clarity the roots of democracy and its influence on Greek society as a whole. It describes how descisions were made when the Persian threat was at its highest, and how the Athenians dealt with the brute military society of the Spartans. To cover Greek history in great detail requires extensive reading of voluminous academic literature... I don't believe any video series can accomplish this without becoming tens of thousands of hours long and impossibly expensive to the consumer... This series (as most historiographical series do) takes some of the key events and personalities of its chosen history and conveys it intriguingly, thus serving to satiate viewers' curiosity and inspire them to learn more. Not in-depth enough for Greek historians, but a great choice for the rest of us!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent! but very biased towards Athens and it's history.
Review: This title is somewhat of a misnomer. In reality, this film focuses mainly on the city state of Athens, and pays little attention to the rest of Greece. This is part of the ongoing Empires series of PBS. In a little less than three hours, this film manages to document the history of Athens from the founding of the city�s democracy to the execution of Socrates and the dawn of the philosophical age of Greece. This film is very well done, and superbly filmed. It also does an excellent job of detailing the events on which it focuses. The only complaint I have is that it is too short, and as such is forced to skip large periods in the history. This creates a number of gaps in the story, which are difficult to fill in if you are not at least modernly familiar with Athens� history. Also, most of the detailed coverage ends with the death of Socrates, with the age of Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers being only briefly summarized. Despite this flaw, this documentary is a good one. Liam Neeson, who narrates the film, is a perfect fit for the part and does a great job. And, though the coverage isn�t thorough and you will not learn everything there is to know about Greece from this film, PBS does as good a job as one can expect in just three short hours.
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Summary: A good, if incomplete, history of Athens
Review: This title is somewhat of a misnomer. In reality, this film focuses mainly on the city state of Athens, and pays little attention to the rest of Greece. This is part of the ongoing Empires series of PBS. In a little less than three hours, this film manages to document the history of Athens from the founding of the city's democracy to the execution of Socrates and the dawn of the philosophical age of Greece. This film is very well done, and superbly filmed. It also does an excellent job of detailing the events on which it focuses. The only complaint I have is that it is too short, and as such is forced to skip large periods in the history. This creates a number of gaps in the story, which are difficult to fill in if you are not at least modernly familiar with Athens' history. Also, most of the detailed coverage ends with the death of Socrates, with the age of Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers being only briefly summarized. Despite this flaw, this documentary is a good one. Liam Neeson, who narrates the film, is a perfect fit for the part and does a great job. And, though the coverage isn't thorough and you will not learn everything there is to know about Greece from this film, PBS does as good a job as one can expect in just three short hours.
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Summary: Worthy effort but leaves a lot to be desired
Review: This two and a half hour documentary is a an impressive effort on the part of PBS to give the viewer a glimpse of the glory that was ancient Greece .It does a good job covering those facets of ancient Greece that it choses to cover : the battles of Marathon , Salamis , the Paleponnesian war and fairly detailed vignettes of the statesmen & generals ( Cleisthenes, Themistocles,Pericles etc) .However the glaring weakness of this documentary lies in WHAT IT LEAVES OUT .After all , the enduring legacy of Athens to the western civilisation lies not in the wars it fought or the wealth it accumulated but in the treasure trove of philosophy,democracy,drama ,poetry and sculpture that it left behind. It is appropriate to have covered the contributions of Pericles and Themistocles to ancient Athens but what we really admire about ancient Greece isn't the military glory (the Tartars and Attila the Hun could have taught them a thing or two !)___rather it is in the dramas of Sophocles & Euripedes ,in the spiralling mysticism of Plato , the iridescent rationalism of Aristotle and the sublime majesty of Phidias's as manifested on the Parthenon frieze. It is in the intellectual and artistic realm that no civilisation ,before or since, can hold a candle to the ancient Greeks and the glaring deficiency of this documentary lies in giving short shrift to this aspect of the ancient Greek civilisation .I would have given it five stars but for this omission .
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Summary: Athens, not Greece!
Review: This video covers about 100 years of Athenian history, Athenian perspective, culture, life etc... I bought this expecting (as the title implies) something broader. The sheer audacity of the title made me strike off 2 stars. Sure, it covers the areas we know most about, but I like to see producers take on a challenge. Don't expect too much from this one!
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Summary: the definitive introduction to ancient greece
Review: This video is an entertaining and edifying look at the culture that started western civilization. Narrated by Liam Neeson, it is a well-researched and absorbing look into why an obscure tribe of Hellenes rose up to found philosophy, democracy, and science, and what their legacy is today. This is THE video for anyone even remotely interested in ancient history, and I personally enjoyed it immensely.
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