Who Were the Greeks?

Who Were the Greeks? by John L. Myres, first delivered as the 1927 Sather Lectures, confronts a deceptively simple question: how can we define the Greeks as a people and a civilization? Myres rejects both timeless ethnic myths and romanticized self-descriptions, proposing instead a multi-disciplinary reconstruction that tests Greek traditions against modern evidence. Drawing on comparative philology, physical anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, religion, and folk memory, he offers both a...