A compelling and fascinating portrait of the continuing intellectual tradition of Greek writers
and thinkers in the Age of Rome. In 146 BC Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman
Republic sixty years later when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome the
general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato laying waste to the
famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However the traditions of Greek cultural life
would continue to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed in the lives and
work of a distinguished array of philosophers doctors scientists geographers travellers and
theologians. Charles Freeman's accounts of such luminaries as the physician Galen the
geographer Ptolemy and the philosopher Plotinus are interwoven with contextual 'interludes'
that showcase a sequence of unjustly neglected and richly influential lives. Like the author's
The Awakening The Children of Athena is a cultural history on an epic scale: the story of a
rich and vibrant tradition of Greek intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five
hundred years from the second century BC to the start of the fifth century AD.