The Voice of the People

About this book

Stylianos V. Spyridakis was born in Crete and educated in Greece, Germany, and the United States, where he earned a doctorate in ancient history at UCLA. He began teaching at the University of California, Davis, in 1967. In 1979, he was invited by the Greek ministry of education to organize and head the history department at the newly established University of Crete. He returned to University of California, Davis, but continued to serve the University of Crete as a member of its board of electors responsible for academic appointments. A recipient of the academic senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award, he has taught literally tens of thousands of students, written six books and numerous scholarly articles in Greek, French, German, Italian, and American scholarly journals. Since 1988, Prof. Spyridakis has served as a trustee of the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism and as a member of its academic committee and editorial board. The Center has sponsored and organized several international conferences at UCLA, University of California, Davis, Greece, and Australia, and has published thirty volumes of scholarly books on Hellenism through the millennia. Prof. Spyridakis and his wife, Dr. Klea Bertakis, have two sons, Vasilios and Demetrios, and spend summers in their ancestral island of Crete. Professor Spyridakis’ selected publications include: Ancient Greece: Documentary Perspectives (1997), Mantinades: Selected Love Distichs of Crete (1997), Ancient Rome: Documentary Perspectives (1995), Cretica: Studies on Ancient Crete (1992), Ptolemaic Itanos and Hellenistic Crete (1970).