Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture [Hardcover]

Peter Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1990

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 This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A scholarly history of evolutionary ethics that should be read by anyone undertaking a study of ethics of any kind." -- Skeptic

"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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). --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson; 1st Ed. edition (January 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 050025107X
• ISBN-13: 978-0500251072
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,604,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A book you'll have to work at, but the effort is worth it, December 22, 2011

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (Paperback)

Green, now well into his eighties, has been a noted classicist nearly all his life, having been educated in the old classics tradition at Charterhouse and then taking a Double First at Trinity, Cambridge, followed by a professorial career in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. He became a recognized expert on Hellenistic Greece and on Juvenal and Catullus. And while he never became a pop historian, he nevertheless became known to the better-read sector of the public through his essays and extended book reviews in various venues, and a number of those are collected in this second volume of his miscellaneous work. Of course, some of these sixteen pieces interested me considerably more than others. "Victorian Hellas" considers the 19th-century upper-class Briton's near-worship of the Greek and Roman world -- a tradition in which he himself was raised, though at a later date. "On the Thanatos Trail" is a very enlightening investigation of the Greek attitudes toward death. "The Treasures of Egypt" was written on the occasion of the traveling Tutankhamen exhibition in the U.S. in the 1970s (I still have my exhibition guide) and has some very pointed things to say about the many modern misinterpretations of ancient Egypt. "Delphic Responses," a critical book review, talks at length about the practical place oracular pronouncements had in forming public policy in classical Greece. A fascinating chapter. "After Alexander," on the other hand, considers the historiography of Hellenistic Greece and requires you to pay close attention, but it's worth the effort. On the third hand, "Juvenal Revisited" is a very funny memoir about Green's introduction to the great satirist as an adolescent student as he and his classmates perhaps learned more Latin while trying to chase down all the carefully obfuscated dirty parts than they ever acquired in the classroom. Green's style is not deliberately dense, but he assumes you're familiar with the history and literature of the ancient world. If not, you will frequently be wading through deep water. but if you have the background, there's a great deal here worth reading.