Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture - Hardcover

Green, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 050025107X ISBN 13: 9780500251072

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 1989

Synopsis

In this collection of sixteen literary and historical essays, Peter Green informs, entertains, and stimulates. He covers a wide range of subjects, from Greek attitudes toward death to the mysteries of the Delphic Oracle, from Tutankhamun and the gold of Egypt to sex in ancient literature, from the island of Lesbos (where he once lived) to the challenges of translating Ovid's wit and elegant eroticism into present-day English verse, from Victorian pederastic aesthetics to Marxism's losing battle with ancient history. This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern academic criticism.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Texas, Austin, and currently Visiting Professor of History at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. His other books available from California include a translation of The Argonautika: The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece (1997), Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990), Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (1991), The Laughter of Aphrodite: A Novel about Sappho of Lesbos (1993), and The Greco-Persian Wars (1996).

Review:

"The sixteen beautifully written essays sensitively assess the state of contemporary classical scholarship on Greek society and mores, Hellenistic history, and Latin poetry. A particularly attractive feature of these studies is the author's ability to establish connections between antiquity and the present."--"Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 050025107X
• ISBN 13: 9780500251072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328