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 This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern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