Customer Reviews

The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Did you ever wonder what college professors of Ancient Western Culture did to keep their Chairs at the universities when the students in the 70`s and subsequent generations exhibited their disdain for studying all things which had to do with western culture by boycotting their classes? Well, they adapted, willingly or not. As such, you may want to consider this book to be a compilation of all of the important lectures they subsequently presented in order to keep students attending their classes.

First of all, what this book is not. It is not a reference book on ancient western classical thought or history per se. It is a reference book on the derivative impact and relevancy of Ancient Classical Western (principally Greek and Roman) culture on subsequent (including current) world culture.

For example, You will find no account of the Peloponnesian War here. When you search in the index for it, you will be referred to (for some strange reason) "Achilles" where you will find in the discussion of the "idea" of Achilles the notion of a disillusionment with the concept of Achilles because of the "general decay of values during the Peloponnesian War." (p.4)

What about Athens? The information on Athens begins, "Various cities and regions of the ancient world became symbols of self actualization in the collective consciousness of modern Western civilization...In this sense Athens competes for prominence with Egypt, Jerusalem, and especially Rome." (p. 97) Further on it states that, "Athens has achieved a unique status in what is generally called culture,...as a singular term of value, in terms of high or low culture." And again, "Athens` role as an icon of the classical per se begins not in the Middle Ages or modernity but in antiquity."

What about Alexander The Great? Surely some accounting of his exploits would be included. However, under his name, believe it or not, in the second sentence there is a discussion of Oliver Stone's "epic film, "Alexander." It notes that the movie "may have bombed with the American critics and failed at domestic box offices, but it went on to recoup around the world even more than the staggering $155 million it had cost to produce." (p. 25)

By this inherent widely-focused design it is not systematically organized into neat chunks of information. I dare you to compile the following under a large section: pornography, meteorology, Jesuits, sexuality, suicide, tragedy, music, glass, Deus ex Machina, comedy and the comic, etc.

In essence it takes the form of a potpourri of knowledge compiled by classical scholars in a single, finely bound, and affordable volume of theirs and other contributors lectures on how the Classical tradition influenced subsequent human activity. The list of contributors takes up a whopping seven and a half pages, single space list. If you wish to broaden your understanding of the influence of classical history or classical thought, this may make for a very handy compilation of useful information.

Finally, it is not designed to be read from beginning to end. Weighing in at over five pounds, it is organized alphabetically and comes with a handy index in the back. Given its heft I doubt that it would be pragmatic as a bedside reader or for (heaven forbid) "john reading."

Fills admirably the tremendous gap on the impact of classical events and personalities down to the present time. Was most recently useful to me while finishing up a talk on the American painter Benjamin West. Helpful articles,for example, on history painting, neo-classicism, Winckelmann, the Apollo Belvedere and on West too. Good and useful mentions also of West-contemporaries such as Cardinal Allessandro Albani, nephew of Martin XI, art dealer and the Curia' s curator/ art authority.

Grafton's great work is not only a detailed source, say, on the last generations, such as West's, to live and breathe Classical literature, history and art, but on the Renaissance humanists as well.

I would take serious issue with one of the foregoing critics who complained that he could not find "Greece" in the index. I think he misses the point: "The Classical Tradition" is not about Greece, but about it's impact. He should have persevered and read the entries under "Greek, Ancient; Greek, Modern; Greek Anthology; and Greek Revival."

However, as one detractor justly complained, this is a heavy book. I wish it had been published in two volumes! FIVE STARS!!!

Anyone interested in Western classical history would like this book. 1000 pages of entries from Aesthetics to Zeno's Paradoxes. No need to read from cover to cover, just open it up and be enlightened and entertained. It's no small thing these days to find a book beautiful presented, with a good binding and attractive pages. Something would be lost if it were an "e book". A nice gift for a history buff.

This is a fascinating book. I love how the authors discuss not only the classical concepts, authors, literature, artifacts, etc. but also discuss how they have been incorporated into various cultures over time. They include references to great scholars who interpreted the classical tradition for their own times. The Oxford Dictionary of Classics is a fantastic resource if you want only the information about the classics themselves. If you want to know more about how the classics were used, transformed and reviewed over time, this is your book.

If you are the kind of person who likes to read random articles in the encyclopedia or random pages in the dictionary, this is for you. We pick up the book and read a few articles at random, just for the fun of it. Always enlightening.

If you are researching classical influences in a given period of history, let's say, the influences of the classical period on aesthetics over time, this is for you.

The cover art is perfect, showing many aspects of the classical tradition - all in one painting. Well done.

I'm not expert enough to be critical of all the entries but I can say this is a very thorough and extremely readable encyclopedia of everything to do with the classical tradition. I loved the entry on "Irony" (can you define irony?) and the entry on the use of classicism by the Fascists. I keep this around to flip through and always find something new which I feel fills out my education and entertains at the same time. High recommendation!

Have you seen me lately?

Everything that always has been and is now will come crashing down as soon as rock and roll learns how to surf a purple ocean.

The Classical Tradition (2010) edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis is a large scholarly collection of interactions between our knowledge of the ancient world and some significant figures in the history of western civilization. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is called a scientist, who was sensitive to the nature of "speculative arguments". (p. 383). His problem with the institutional church as an organization which thought it was supposed to be speaking of things that always were, are, and always will be continue for modern thinkers who suppose that Christianity and alcohol are the European poisons used to destroy other peoples, as Nietzsche once wrote. The jump in infinity during the centuries in which Galileo lived made our knowledge merely the inklings of an inner artificer, and an example of a typical argument in this book reveals:

Thus, Galileo would eventually
compare the typical Peripatetic
thinker, busily ransacking the
Aristotelian corpus for the
appropriate response to every
query in natural philosophy, to
those who so brazenly borrowed
from and tampered with Virgil's
works. (p. 384).

Nietzsche mined antiquity:

From these sources he developed
his doctrine of eternal return, thus
winning for himself an argument,
legitimated in antiquity, against the
doctrine of salvation and eschatology. (p. 640).

Famous cycles are covered in a topic called

Progress and Decline. (pp. 782-785).

Gibbon did not expect a fall of modern civilization because it could never be invaded by barbarians from beyond its borders as Rome had at the end of the classical empire.

Cyclical theories of the rise and decline
began to be reasserted, notably in Oswald
Spengler's study of the decline of the West (p. 784).

Spengler did not get an entry on his own thinking. It might have been a big let down if it was placed alphabetically after the entries on

Socrates

Sophocles

Sparta

Spartacus.

The Third Servile War "paralyzed southern Italy 73-70 BCE." (p. 901). Spartacus "came from Thrace, served in the Roman army, and deserted. Captured and enslaved, he joined the ranks of the gladiators at a famous gladiator school in Capua." After an escape, "So many runaway slaves and disaffected people sought him out that Spartacus found himself in charge of an army," like young people going to Woodstock to listen to rock and roll.

At the outset, one should note what this book is not: it is not a primary reference work on the classical world of Greece and Rome. For that one needs to turn to the Oxford Classical Dictionary or the various editions (in German) of Pauly-Wissowa. The present volume attempts something different, and very worthwhile.

"The Classical Tradition" offers a series of stimulating and learned essays on what is nowadays termed the "reception" of classical persons, themes, and motifs. That is to say, it treats what used to be called the heritage of classical antiquity. For example, the article on "Ovid" tells you little about the Roman poet himself, but offers a great deal of fascinating information about the uses of Ovid from the later Middle Ages, through Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and down to Ezra Pound.

The basic viewpoint stems from the Warburg Institute, one of the jewels of the University of London. Founded by Aby Warburg in Hamburg in the 1920s, the Institute and its library address the classical legacy in all of its manifestations.

Apart from this affinity, the principles observed by the Editors are not altogether transparent. It is evident, though, that they are somewhat conservative. There is little effort to incorporate the insights (perhaps somewhat sparse) of Structuralism and Post-Modernism. The articles on Freud and Marx are disappointingly brief, as if the editors are glad to discuss that sort of thing quickly and be done with it. Martin Bernal's iconoclastic views about the contribution of Egypt do not even rate a mention. There is also a certain prudery with regard to sexual matters: the articles on "Homosexuality" and "Pederasty" are short and inadequate; Prostitution does not appear at all. However, the entry on "Pornography" by Bette Talvacchia is outstanding.

The greatest exclusion is feminism. In fact there is not even an article on Women. One need not fully endorse contemporary views of the misogyny of the ancient Greeks and Romans to lament the exclusion of this scholarship.

There is a more fundamental issue. A hundred years ago proficiency in the classical languages of Greece and Rome ranked as the indispensable attribute on an educate person. Needless to say, that is no longer true. Over the last century the prestige of the Classical Model has come to be much battered, and the effects of this occultation will be hard to repair--a point rarely acknowledged by the authors of this book.

There are several major sources of this erosion in status. Here are the most prominent ones.

1) The advocates of the comparative-civilization approach (Danilevsky, Spengler, Toynbee--to some degree Frazer and Harrison) perceive classical civilization as but one of several major cultural configurations, a totality that includes Islam, India, East Asia, and the European Middle Ages.

2) Marxists emphasize material culture, class conflict, and slavery, thereby undermining the status of Greece and Rome as the summit of the normative ideals of truth and beauty. This critique is powerful because Marxism has produced some serious historians--e.g. Finley and Sainte-Croix. By treating classical antiquity as simply one stage in the overall development of civilization, the Marxist approach blends with the previous one.

3) Doctrinaire modernists disdain any interest in earlier stages of human culture, and may even (as in the case of the Futurist F. T. Marinetti) call for its destruction.

4) "Progressive" educators of the John Dewey type have called for replacing the study of Greek and Latin with Social Studies and the like.

5) Feminists and indeed many women scholars point out that the subordination of women in classical times is scarcely admirable.

6) Enthusiasm for ancient Egypt, a major rival, was already evident at the time of the discovery of the Tut tomb in 1922. Martin Bernal and his followers have ridden this wave.

7) The views of some black nationalists are dismissive, witness Al Sharpton at Kean College in 1994: "White folks was [sic] in caves while we was building empires.... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it." While Sharpton later disavowed the homophobic aspect of these remarks, it is not clear whether he ever renounced his Afrocentrism.

All these solvents have worked together to diminish the once-unchallenged hegemony of the classical model. It shows something of the inherent strengths of the classical tradition that many of us, myself included, are still strongly attached to it. Yet this attachment can no longer be taken for granted, but must be justified. For all their individual and collective learning, the authors of the articles in this book have, by and large, not attempted this necessary defense.

All that being said, this well-produced book is excellent value for the money. It provides many hours of useful instruction about the subjects it covers. Forthrightly ecommended.

This is a very disappointing book. There were over 400 contributors and three editors. The writing is pedantic. There is no sign of style or humor. The personalities of the contributors are absent: all articles sound the same. I imagine this was done purposely, but the book would have been better if writers were allowed some freedom. There are illustrations, but they are collected together in bunches, not printed with the text; and there are surely not enough of them.

A good index is a sign of a scholarly work. This index is dreadful. Many subjects are discussed, but hardly any of them appear in the index. For example, you won't find Beauty, or Art, or Greece, or Delphi, or Literature in the index, though all are covered in the book. One suspects that a complete index would reveal much duplication.

The book is too large. Good editing would have organized the material better, and made it elegant.

To see a wonderful book with a similar enormous subject-matter, compare the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, by David Crystal. No committee here; just one creative man writing with intelligence and grace.

This is really a encyclopaedia covering the influence of Greece and Rome on subsequent western culture, even though the authors like to call it a guide. Most of us no longer study greek or latin, but the classical tradition is off course still with up. Just to start on A, think about Achilles heel. Look it up in this book and you will understand who Achilles was and, more importantly, how Achilles have influenced western thought. I do like the approach of putting emphasis on the later influence of Achilles.

I don't really know who the target audience of this book is. Many potential buyers are probably going to be non-classically educated people that would like to learn more. Being a encyclopaedia it provides very episodic knowledge. If you just want to learn a little bit here and there, when you have time, the format might actually be a strength. Otherwise, the format is probably a weakness. Another problem with the format is that it has to compete with wikipedia. Sadly, the book doesn't have many illustrations compared to wikipedia. The entries in the book are more detailed (scholarly and dry) than ditto entries in wikipedia. In fact, many entries are so detailed so they are clearly aimed at specialists in the field. I suppose the authors have really written the book for their peers. Thus my confusion regarding the target audience.

Despite the somewhat unclear target audience, I can recommend the book to the educated general reader who is interested in the subject matter, but doesn't know much. The dry style and lack of pictures will put some people off. However, the lateral style (i.e. jumping between different eras) will also fascinate. I will give the book 3.5 stars.

What a deal! Top-notch up-to-date scholarship on dozens of classical topics interleaved with lush illustrations chosen with an eye for the kooky and illuminating juxtaposition. A beautiful object as well as a great work of scholarship. I feel like I got a great book for a reasonably modest price.