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The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press Reference Library) Hardcover – October 25, 2010
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“A vast cabinet of curiosities.”―Stephen Greenblatt
“Eclectic rather than exhaustive, less an encyclopedia than a buffet.”―Frederic Raphael, Literary Review
How do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus’s sirens to those of an ambulance? The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome is all around us, imitated, resisted, reworked, and misunderstood. In this beautifully illustrated and encyclopedic compendium, a team of leading scholars investigates the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.
From Academy to Zoology, Aristotle and the Argonauts to Pegasus and Persia, The Classical Tradition looks at facts and adages, people, places, and ideas to reveal how the Classical tradition has shaped human endeavors from government to medicine, drama to urban planning, legal theory to popular culture. At once authoritative and accessible, learned and entertaining, it illuminates the vitality of these enduring influences.
- Print length1088 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBelknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
- Publication dateOctober 25, 2010
- Dimensions8.5 x 2.75 x 10.5 inches
- ISBN-100674035720
- ISBN-13978-0674035720
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Review
“A heady, hefty new single-volume reference… This is a browser’s paradise… While Greece and Rome are no longer the foundation of education, classical scholarship has never been richer.”―Steve Coates, New York Times Book Review
“Entries of commendable clarity and range include those on Homer, on pastoral, on Catullus, and on the Argonauts. This is a valuable reference work, especially for those new to the classical world.”―Victoria Moul, Times Literary Supplement
“The Classical Tradition is a guidebook of great erudition that is notably well written and unexpectedly compelling. It definitely is not another of those solemn introductions to ‘the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.’ Instead it is a lively compendium of the manifold ways in which the enduring creations of the classical tradition, and the Greek and Latin classics, have been imitated, adulated, denounced and misunderstood―or understood all too well―over the past two millennia… Each article brings some unexpected insight or little known fact into the discussion, to illuminating effect… The scholarship is impeccable, but there is a donnish drollery in many of the articles… [A] marvelous guide.”―Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal
“Now here is a fabulous book―and a bargain to boot. Harvard has produced this gigantic volume, packed with color plates and essays by some of the greatest scholars alive, for the price of a couple of hardback thrillers. Better still, while The Classical Tradition may look like a work of reference, it’s actually one of the best bedside books you could ask for. I know because I’ve been browsing around in it with immense pleasure… Certainly anyone even mildly interested in the Western cultural heritage will find The Classical Tradition a necessary purchase… [It] shows us how deeply the stories, iconic figures and ideas of antiquity succor our imaginations and still suffuse the world we live in.”―Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“[The Classical Tradition’s] catalogue of contributors is a who’s who of classical scholarship and includes some of the best known scholars writing for an educated non-specialist public, such as Ingrid Rowland, Simon Goldhill, Mary Beard and Glen Bowersock… [The editors] have sourced not so much anodyne entries on set-piece subjects―the staple of any encyclopedia―as stories brightly told that move through time to relate, for example, the achievements of the Roman poet Horace as they were seen in the ancient world, followed by an assessment of his immediate influence on Latin poetry, and his considerable impact on subsequent poets from Petrarch to Joseph Brodsky, with a slight pause over the case of Byron, who loathed Horace after their encounters in school… The publication of this Harvard guide not so much to the classical past as to the uses we have made of it―its various metamorphoses―is in itself a cultural event. Consider it one among many markers of a contemporary re-attachment to the classical past.”―Luke Slattery, Australian Literary Review
“If, as some classicists say, our minds, bodies, government, law, medicine, arts, and fill-in-the-blank are unintelligible without an understanding of the Greco-Roman heritage, then do not waste another minute in ignorance and read this massive work, or at least selections of it, with urgency. A team of distinguished scholars―rivaling the number of warriors in the Battle of Thermopylae―dispenses knowledge and opinions on every imaginable topic under the Classical sun, connecting us to our ancient bloodline.”―Christopher Benson, First Things
“Eclectic rather than exhaustive, the compendium is less an encyclopedia than a buffet, in alphabetical order, of topics and glosses. There is, fortunately, no ideological consistency or purpose. The harvesting academics bring home a bumper crop to remind and instruct the reader of how the Classics are still central to the civilized intelligence; food for thought and primers of the imagination.”―Frederic Raphael, Literary Review
“Anthony Grafton’s entry on Historiography is as elegant and learned as everything he does. So elegant and learned, in fact, that I wanted to read each and every essay he had written in The Classical Tradition… Being lost in this book can be invigorating.”―Brendan Boyle, New Criterion
“Make no mistake, The Classical Tradition is exceedingly delightful… An esoteric tool for the scholar on the face of it, The Classical Tradition turns out to be a guide for living here, now, in the 21st century as we find it.”―Morgan Meis, The Smart Set
“A stunningly wonderful compilation… Massive in length and unimpeachable in scholarship, it nonetheless manages to be endlessly absorbing, and often quietly entertaining into the bargain… I’ve pored over this book like a madman ever since setting hands on it and I’ve devoured enough to be certain that it’s a masterpiece of concision, knowledge, judgment and dedication. It’s clearly going to be a companion for life, and all the better for being well-nigh inexhaustible.”―Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times
“This absorbing and endlessly browsable compendium, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, explores the richness of our classical legacy through scores of essays, alphabetically arranged by subject, that illuminate our past, our present, and probably our future as well.”―Barnes and Noble Review
“This magnificent compendium explicates the outsized influence Greek and Roman society, literature and myth has had on the medieval and modern European ages that followed, and in turn on the imperial culture exported around the world. The Greek gods and their attributes―from wise Athena and fierce Ares to bibulous Dionysus―are key elements in a worldview we still look back on, at once alien and familiar. A wonder of research and writing that connects both casual browser and scholar to centuries of learning.”―Barnes and Noble Review
“Whether priced by the pound or the page, this hefty compendium is quite a bargain. Lead editor Grafton…is perhaps the perfect captain for an ambitious work that attempts to capture, as the preface indicates, the ‘reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures.’… More than 150 color images only add to the browsing pleasure.”―B. Juhl, Choice
About the Author
Glenn W. Most is Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Salvatore Settis is Professor Emeritus of the History of Classical Art and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and a former Director of the Getty Museum.
Product details
- Publisher : Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; First Edition (October 25, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 1088 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674035720
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674035720
- Item Weight : 5.94 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.5 x 2.75 x 10.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,040,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #702 in Ancient & Classical Literature
- #3,540 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #23,025 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Francesca Dell’Acqua is Associate Professor in History of Medieval and Byzantine Art at the Università di Salerno. She held fellowships at prestigious research centres including the Bibliotheca Hertziana/Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome, the American Academy in Rome, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies–Harvard University in Washington DC, and the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham.
She is interested in the interaction between texts, objects, and beliefs in the early medieval Mediterranean. Her first monograph Illuminando colorat (CISAM, Spoleto, 2003) earned her the Hanno and Ilse Hahn Prize from the Bibliotheca Hertziana/Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome. In the past few years, she has co-edited the multi-authored collection Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, C.500–900 (Palgrave, 2020) and published a new monograph, Iconophilia. Politics, Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c.680–880 (Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2020).
The project "At the Crossroads of Empire: The Longobard Church of Sant'Ambrogio at Montecorvino Rovella (Salerno, Italy)", that she conceived and directs with two colleagues, received a Special Mention in the Category Research in the European Heritage Awards of Europa Nostra in May 2020.
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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.
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!!!
"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.
Items in the book are listed alphabetically, making it user-friendly. I suggest using it as an introductory guide to whatever ancient texts you may be reading. For an example, reading Plutarch's Lives, I would find Plutarch, then, the listing covering the personality I was to read about. The book places events in perspective and in relation to other events occuring at the same time.
If you are an historian, or just love history, this is definitely your book!
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It's a fascinating journey through time, demonstrating how ancient ideas continue to shape our culture today. Each essay is a testament to the editors' expertise and the contributors' insights.
Intriguing, informative, and impeccably crafted, I am happy to add this to my library, and I think it is a delightful read for anyone curious about the enduring power of classical ideas.