Fourth-century Athens has a special claim on our attention, writes the author,
apart from the great men it produced, for it is the prelude to the end of Greece.... The kind of
events that took place in the great free government of the ancient world may, by reason of
unchanging human nature, be repeated in the modern world. The course that Athens followed
can be to us not only a record of old unhappy far-off things but a blueprint of what may happen
again.

With the clarity and grace for which she is admired, Edith Hamilton writes of Plato and Aristotle,
of Demosthenes and Alexander the Great, of the much-loved playwright Menander, of the Stoics,
and finally of Plutarch. She brings these figures vividly to life, not only placing them in relation to
their own times but also conveying very poignantly their meaning for our world today.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.