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Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture

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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.