Where does the name Britain come from and who gave it? The astronomer Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille) exploring the North Atlantic in the 320s B.C. discovered, measured, circumnavigated and named Britain 265 years before the Romans. He took measurements at five points on his journey, which have been verified. He corrected the position of the North Pole and developed the theory that the earth was a sphere. Marseille (Massalia) in France was founded by Greeks in 600 B.C. en route to get silver from Spain. Due to the Persian invasion in 546 B.C. Greek refugees from Ionia swelled their western colonies and settlements. Marseille now led and founded several cities of its own in France, Spain, Monaco and Corsica still existing today as Nice, Monaco, Antibes, Le Brusc, Agde, Roses, Sant Marti d'Empuries and Aleria. Marseille saved Rome from extinction when besieged by the Celts in 390 B.C. and played a crucial part in stopping supplies from Spain reaching Hannibal fighting the Romans in Italy. Hannibal and his elephants went over the Alps to avoid a well-fortified Marseille blocking the fabled coastal road used by mythical Hercules. Aristotle, Strabo and Cicero praised Marseille's government as the 'best ordered' of all the aristocracies. Marseille (Massalia) the city founded by merchants could be described, given another definition of an empire, as 'an extensive enterprise under a unified authority'. Marseille lasted as an independent Greek city-state over 700 years: continuing as a Greek city under the Romans: and for a period under the Franks from the sixth century A.D. After a long siege Marseille suffered its first defeat by Julius Caesar in the civil war with Pompey losing most of its empire. With Caesar dead attempts to regain its lost territories were blocked by Mark Antony while the city itself was allowed to stay independent. Marseille continued as a Greek university city of famous schools where 'notable' Romans and the consul Agricola, Governor of Britain, were educated. Quotes from primary sources give you the words of the time together with archaeological evidence on a remarkable and little known part of our history.

An important new study that seeks to establish what Victorian writers said about Greek culture and how their interpretations both molded and reflected the attitudes and values of the Victorian age. "Turner's readable, intelligent, thorough, witty, and magisterial book discovers and narrates a fundamental strain in British intellectual life from the late eighteenth century until the beginning of World War I. It is THE book on its subject. . . . Turner's study has changed, changed utterly, the Victorian landscape."-Richard Tobias, Victorian Poetry

Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen who built this empire, analysing the testimony of over 100 such military personnel sent to Alexandria, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and the towns and islands between them, as they voyaged, made camp, and explored and patrolled the city streets. Whereas histories examining soldiers' experiences in the First World War have almost exclusively focused on their lives at the frontlines, this study provides a much needed in-depth history of soldiers' experience and impact on the urban hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean, where urban planning, nightlife and entertainment, policing, and security were transformed by the presence of so many men at arms and the imperialist interventions that accompanied them.

For many, “Greece” is synonymous with “ancient Greece,” the civilization that gave us much that defines Western culture today. But, how did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place and then define an identity for itself that is at once Greek and modern? This book reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last three hundred years, of building a modern nation on the ruins of a vanished civilization—sometimes literally so. This is the story of the Greek nation-state but also, and more fundamentally, of the collective identity that goes with it. It is not only a history of events and high politics; it is also a history of culture, of the arts, of people, and of ideas. Opening with the birth of the Greek nation-state, which emerged from encounters between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Roderick Beaton carries his story into the present moment and Greece’s contentious post-recession relationship with the rest of the European Union. Through close examination of how Greeks have understood their shared identity, Beaton reveals a centuries-old tension over the Greek sense of self. How does Greece illuminate the difference between a geographically bounded state and the shared history and culture that make up a nation? A magisterial look at the development of a national identity through history, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation is singular in its approach. By treating modern Greece as a biographical subject, a living entity in its own right, Beaton encourages us to take a fresh look at a people and culture long celebrated for their past, even as they strive to build a future as part of the modern West.

"Wonderful…a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours." —Natalie Haynes, Independent The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history to show how the ancient Greeks were the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. Hall portrays a uniquely rebellious, inquisitive, individualistic people whose ideas and creations continue to enthrall thinkers centuries after the Greek world was conquered by Rome. These are the Greeks as you’ve never seen them before.