| THE STORY of the discovery and development of philosophy in ancient Greece is one of the greatest epics of intellectual adventure there has ever been. In my Introduction, I will discuss the bearing of these Greek ideas on our world of today, and my reasons for telling the story in the way I have done. There remains, by way of preface, my thanks for help which has made the book in its present form possible, by contributing to the means, motive, and opportunity involved in its writing. |
| The opportunity for leisure to write was provided by fellowships from Yale University and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The writing was one of the enterprises I was able to carry out during a year in Athens and on the Aegean islands in 196364. |
| My conviction that this material was relevant, interesting, and important, and that I understood it well enough to write about it, reflects my indebtedness over many years to teachers, students, and colleagues, an indebtedness to so many persons, over such a long time, that it cannot be acknowledged in detail. |
| For permission to reproduce illustrative material and to discuss interpretation, some detailed thanks are in order. The American School of Classical Studies has given me permission to reproduce the photographs of Athenian jury ballots, the lottery-machine, the ostracism tiles, the cooking bell with its caption, and the reconstruction of the ivory copy of Apollo of the Lyceum, from publications writing up their Athenian Agora Excavations. The two photographs of pages of thirteenth-century Greek manuscript are reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Yale Libraries and the Beinecke Rare Book Library; the coastlines in my reconstruction of Anaximander's map follow W. H. Heidel's in his Frame of Ancient Greek Maps, by permission |
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