Books by Philip Matyszak - Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day

Welcome to Ancient Athens!

  This witty guide - a companion to the same author's bestselling Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day - provides all the information a tourist needs for a journey to ancient Athens in the 5th century BC.
  Travel via Thermopylae, the Oracle at Delphi and the site of the recent epic battle of Marathon to the city of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Learn what to see and where to go, what to eat and what to avoid in the city of Perikles.
  Meet Socrates, Thucydides and Phidias, and others among the greatest philosophers, writers and artists who ever lived. Encounter ordinary Athenians in the marketplace, in the assembly and on their country farms, and learn the true character of one of the most extraordinary cities of any age.
  Ancient Athens was not all art, intellect and politics. This well-researched yet irreverently unacademic handbook also plunges into the fun side of Athenian life, with wine-sodden symposiums, brothels and brawls, advising the reader to avoid inns where the beds are infested with bugs (and prostitutes) and warning that torches and an escort are needed to avoid muggers after an evening on the town.

'Clever, worldly and instructive....His unorthodox approach also sharpens our sense that the present, too, will soon be history.'

The New York Times

'an invaluable encounter with the Athenians'

The Telegraph

'bright and breezy with a good sense of fun'

Times Higher Education Supplement

'vividly imagined, well-informed descriptions of the city's daily life'

The Guardian

'Ancient Athens achieves that elusive balance of being both well researched and extremely funny.'

The Sunday Times

I knew I'd be writing this book over a year before the contract arrived. It was evident from the word 'go' that if 'Rome for 5 Denarii a Day' was successful then there was a series of such books to be written. Athens was an obvious choice, and as the person who had dreamed up the original idea, I was allowed to earmark that one for myself as a future project.

As it turned out the Rome book was (and is) very successful. So much so that some other publishers immediately began preparing their own guides to ancient cities. Because I'd already done the research, I was still ahead of the opposition when the request came for this book as a companion to Rome. I was also interested to note that some buyers had acquired the foreign rights even before the first word had been written.

Because I wanted to give the Athens book its own character, my approach was slightly different. With Rome the focus was on the city and its monuments. With Athens I chose the city of Perikles, and the focus was on the truly remarkable generation which lived in the city at this time. This was period of incredible intellectual achievement, in art, architecture, philosophy, theatre and politics, and I wanted to capture the excitement and wide-eyed wonder of the era.

Much of what I learned while writing the book has been turned to a more academic approach in the course 'Athens and the fifth century intellectual revolution' which I will be teaching for Cambridge as an eLearning course in 2009, but I'm glad I did the book first - I was truly astounded by what I learned about Athens while researching the book, and I hope that sense of freshness and surprise comes across in the text.