Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives - Hardcover

Goldhill, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226301176 ISBN 13: 9780226301174

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Synopsis

"If you do not know where you come from, you will always be a child." Cicero wasn't talking about being a child in the sense of enjoying life in a state of ignorant bliss. He was, rather, adamant that those who don't understand their origins are consigned to a life without power or authority, without the ability to act fully in the world. Love, Sex & Tragedy is acclaimed classicist Simon Goldhill's corrective to our state of ignorance. Lifting the veil on our inheritance of classical traditions, Goldhill offers a witty, engrossing survey of the Greek and Roman roots of everything from our overwhelming mania for "hard bodies" to our political systems.

Marx, Clark Gable, George W. Bush, Oscar Wilde, and Freud—Goldhill's range here is enormous, and he takes great delight in tracing both follies and fundamental philosophical questions through the centuries and continents to the birthplace of Western civilization as we know it. Underlying his brisk and learned excursions through history and art is the foundational belief, following Cicero, that learning about the classics makes a critical difference to our self-understanding. Whether we are considering the role of religion in contemporary society, our expectations about the boundaries between public and private life, or even how we spend our free time, recognizing the role of the classics is integral to our comprehension of modern life and our place in it.

When Goldhill asks "Who do you think you are?" he presents us with the rarest of opportunities: the chance to let him lead us, firmly but with a wink, back two thousand years to where we are.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Goldhill, the author or editor of numerous books, is a professor of Greek literature and culture at King's College, Cambridge.

From Publishers Weekly

For Goldhill, the classics are indispensable to an understanding of today’s Western culture. Without a knowledge of basic Greek and Roman texts and ideas, our "buried life" and "ancient grounding," the modern citizen is lost—a child forever. Goldhill, a professor of Greek culture and literature at Cambridge, organizes his thesis around five questions: Who do you think you are? Where do you think you are going? What do you think should happen? What do you want to do? Where do you think you came from? Time and again, Goldhill reminds us, the brightest thinkers through the ages have turned to the classics for inspiration. In the New World, the founding fathers were steeped in the intellectual material of Greece and Rome. George Washington found inspiration in the story of the Roman emperor Cincinnatus—a farmer who was called to service, defeated an enemy, then laid down his arms and returned to the farm. Goldhill views Victorian England as the high-water mark of classical influence; some 80% of school time in 19th-century Britain was devoted to the classics. On the dark side of classicism is National Socialism: there, Goldhill argues, the ideas of Plato’s Republic (with its emphasis on a perfect social order) played out to a calamitous end. With patient authority and a refreshingly light touch, Goldhill brilliantly illuminates the essential timeliness of these ancient ideas.
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226301176
• ISBN 13: 9780226301174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 345