Each study guide will have three categories of readings: 'required readings', which will come from the required texts or the course reader; 'recommended readings', which might also come from the required texts, from Burn's History of Greece, or materials I've placed on reserve; and 'suggestions for further study', which are simply meant to provide starting points for those of you with particularly strong interests in the topic, now or in the future.

The class web site also includes a bibliography section (currently under heavy construction) in which you can find fairly thorough bibliography on many aspects of Greek warfare. The bibliography in Sage is also quite useful.

If you are looking for a book that is checked out of the UT libraries, please consult me before recalling it; there's a good chance that I have it checked out, and I'd be happy to loan it to you.

1. Required readings: Sage pp. 1-18; Thuc. 1.1-1.23.

(Note: references to Herodotus and Thucydides are to book and section; i.e. Thuc 1.23 means 'Thucydides book one, section twenty-three').

Thucydides' work chronicles the events of the Peloponesian War, which starts in 431 (note also that all dates in this class, unless otherwise indicated, are B.C.). But in the first part of his work, he sets out a brief outline of the Greek military conflicts up to that day. Keep in mind that he is writing about events that took place (or are alleged to have taken place) many centuries earlier. Think about the kinds of information Thucydides would have had at his disposal for these events.

2. Recommended reading: Burn 21-60.

I strongly suggest that you consult some textbook on Greek history as we progress through the semester - it will help to place the events we're focusing on in a broader context. If you own another history of ancient Greece, feel free to use it rather than Burn; just read the sections relevant to the period we cover in any given week. I ordered Burn because it's relatively concise and inexpensive, and it covers the entire period we're interested in, but there are plenty of other perfectly good texts out there.

The readings for this week are fairly light; they'll get much heavier in a few weeks when we begin reading the narratives of Herodotus and then Thucydides. Feel free to get a head start on either of these two authors before I start assigning them - they aren't the kinds of books you can just breeze through, at least not if you want to follow the narrative. I won't be requiring you to read the full texts of these authors (thought they are certainly worth reading in full, and I encourage you to do so): in particular, we'll skip large portions of Herodotus, so if you do want to get started with him, you could begin at book five. If you purchased the Penguin editions of either, the introductions provided are worth reading.

3. Suggestions for further study:

J. Chadwick, The Mycenean World (Cambridge 1976)

J. Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge 1958)

E. Vermule, Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago 1964)

R. Drews, The Coming of the Greeks (Princeton 1988).

R. Drews, The End of the Bronze Age (Princeton 1993).

M. Wood, In Search of the Trojan War (New York 1985).