"Five hundred years before Christ," this book begins, "in a little town on the far western border of the settled and civilized world, a strange new power was at work" on the gestation of civilization as we know it. In a sense it was a miracle and remains a miracle; the anthropologists and archeologists have been unable to explain how the passion for truth, beauty, simplicity and freedom developed in a rocky little seaport in the midst of barbarian superstition, despotism and splendor.  There a light was lit that can never go out, that has, indeed, never been matched in the centuries since. For in those brief centuries, which reached their summit in the few years of the Great Age of Pericles, literature, science, philosophy, art, democracy, religion—the main achievements of the modern world—developed almost overnight, full-blown in many cases and as perfect as they could ever be.  Edith Hamilton has illumined it for us with a spirit similar to its own, a complete sympathy and identification, and in a style that is an echo of the Greek grace, clarity, simplicity and warmth.