E-Books →The Children of Athena Greek Writers and Thinkers in the Age of Rome, 150 BC–AD 400

However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish - across the eastern Mediterranean world and beyond - during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, rhetoricians, historians, doctors, scientists, geographers and theologians.
Charles Freeman's accounts of such luminaries as the polymathic physician Galen, the soldier-botanist Dioscorides, the Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy and the Neoplatonic philosopher Descriptioninus are interwoven with 'interludes' that counterpoint and contextualise a sequence of unjustly neglected and richly influential lives.
This is the story of a vibrant, constantly evolving tradition of intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years, from the second century BC to the start of the fifth century ad - one that would help shape the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages and long after. The Children of Athena is a cultural history on an epic scale.