Wonderful Stories of Young Greeks
What is it like to look at history through the eyes of young people?
What do we mean when we talk about the ‘’young’’? For the ancient Greeks, belonging to a certain age group was at least as important as name, gender, family or geographical origin. And if in Athens ‘youth’ ended at the age of thirty, the truth is that when the Greeks spoke of ‘youth’, they were not necessarily referring to an age: because youth is above all an attitude, a state of mind. Reckless, crazy, unmeasured, dedicated to hybris and excess. The young are too much: at best containers of utopian dreams, at worst a threat to tradition and order, bringers of chaos. Yet the Greece that we have come to know and love from literature, epic, and tragedy is full of extraordinary young men and women. The name of Achilles already resounds in the first verse of the poem that marks the birth of western culture... This book is about the young. Boys and girls who lived in ancient Greece and who deserve to be freed from the narrow meshes of a storytelling written and handed down by the adult world - which consigned them to history mostly in the role of antagonists. Between myth and history, this book weaves the the exploits, desires, disillusions, and passions of boys and girls of ancient Greece to whom we should all be in debt for questioning tradition and daring the new.