Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture / Edition 1

by Peter Green

Overview

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 This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520208117
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/25/1998
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

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).

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 
Abbreviations 
I Precedent, Survival, Metamorphosis: Classical Influences in the Modern World 
II Victorian Hellas 
III Lesbos and the Genius Loci 
IV On the Thanatos Trail 
V The Treasures of Egypt
VI Delphic Responses 
VII Strepsiades, Socrates, and the Abuses of lntellectualism 
VIII Downtreading the Demos 
IX Sex and Classical Literature 
X The Macedonian Connection 
XI After Alexander: Some Historiographical Approaches to the Hellenistic Age 
XII Caesar and Alexander: aemulatio, imitatio, comparatio 
XIII Carmen et Error: The Enigma of Ovid's Exile 
XIV Wit, Sex and Topicality: The Problems Confronting a Translator of Ovid's Love Poetry 
XV Juvenal Revisited 
XVI Medium and Message Reconsidered: The Changing Functions of Classical Translation 
Notes and References 
Index