Classics: A Very Short Introduction

The timeline at the end of this book gives a clue to the authors' approach. It starts at c800-500 BCE ("Early Greece"), ends at 1995 with the publication of this book, and includes entries like "1959 Ben Hur film starring Charlton Heston". It is about Classics as a subject, about how the Classical world has been viewed and interpreted over the years, and how it continues to impact today's world. In other words, it is more about the nature and significance of Classics as a discipline than about specific Classical topics. That makes it an excellent introduction for someone embarking on such a study. The Further Reading section at the end is something of a letdown, being just an unhelpful list of titles. See Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, by Helen Morales, for an example of how a Further Reading section should be done. In fact, the Morales book should be seen as a companion volume to the present one. But this is a well written and entertaining exploration of a fascinating subject, full of valuable insights. Read this first and then the Morales book. [PeterReeve]

It has been more than forty years since I took any courses in Greek or Latin or the history of Greece or Rome. With a son graduating next week with a B.A. in the Classics, I thought I should honor him and brush up on my own now very patchy, superficial understanding of the Classics. So I read this installment in Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series. I thought it would be an introductory survey of the highpoints of Ancient Greek and Roman culture -- such as Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and the Parthenon; and Virgil, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and the Pantheon. It is quite different, in a thoughtful and provocative -- although not altogether satisfying -- way. Authors Mary Beard and John Henderson are both professors of Classics at Cambridge, so they know their subject. CLASSICS, their book, is not donnish, however. It is a "big picture" book. It touches on a wide variety of disciplines and activities involved in expanding and refining knowledge of the classical world. As opposed to the landmarks of architecture, sculpture, poetry, and theater, the book is inclined towards matters of economics, sociology, and historiography. A sense of the wide-angle lens through which the authors view their subject is conveyed in these sentences from early in the book: "'Classics' is a subject that exists in [the] gap between us and the world of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by 'Classics' are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and by its familiarity to us. * * * The aim of 'Classics' is not only to 'discover' or 'uncover' the ancient world * * *. Its aim is also to define and debate 'our' relationship to that world. " CLASSICS does not operate exclusively on a macro-level, however. The authors often supply interesting examples of their larger points or themes. For instance, slavery. They write that "there can be no explanation for anything in the classical world, from mining to philosophy, from building to poetry, that does not take account of the presence of slaves." And in the next paragraph they refer to a legal rule that was of particular interest to me, as a retired trial lawyer: many societies have barred slaves or others who were not "full citizens" from giving evidence in court; in Rome, slaves could not give evidence unless they did so under torture; in other words, their testimony was admissible ONLY if it were elicited under torture. In many ways, CLASSICS will be beneath all who have even a modicum of knowledge about the subject. (Such as my son, although for him the book might offer some welcome reassurance as to the continued relevance of his major.) But for those who know very little about the Classics and tend to think of it as an arcane, intimidating subject, the book is worth reading.

Great but be warned you don't need this well written little book if you already have or intend getting Mare Beard's "Confronting the Classics" as it seems to be condensed from that excellent book. That being said it is a lovely, well wri tten member of a great series of " Introductions.

This short book discusses the important but changing role played by Classics in our civilization over the past 2000 years. The temple at Bassae, unknown to me until I read this book, serves as a recurring example of how perceptions and interpretations evolved. In conclusion, the work deals relatively lengthily with Arcadia, an actual region of Greece. The result is extremely interesting and of high intellectual level. By no means, however, does it qualify as an introduction to the topic. On the contrary, the reader is expected to be familiar with Greek and Roman authors and their works as well as with classical architecture. Though the book is really not expensive, one would expect illustrations to be of a much higher quality. Photos are tiny and black and white, sketches, as of the frieze in the Bassae temple, are minimalist and maps are not of professional quality. (What is Washington, D.C., doing on a map of the classical world?). Overall this brief book is recommended to those interested very specifically in its topic, the varying significance of Classics.

Wow! I sure wish I could remember more of the high school Latin from decades ago! We did read Julius Caesars letters and the Aeneid, but mostly I remember the teacher told us several times a day that repetition is the mother of learning. I'm looking forward to reading more.

A novel take on 'the Classics' in a volume that avoids the usual emphasis on history and the arts. Instead, it focuses on such intangibles as identity in the ancient world. The authors take the Greek writer Pausanias as a starting point. Although he was was writing his 'Guidebook to Greece' more than two centuries after Greece had become a Roman colony, he chooses to write about Greek civilisation, architecture and history as though it were still independent of Roman influence. His silence on matters Roman speaks volumes and reminds us that reading between the lines is sometimes more revealing than reading the lines themselves. Beard and Henderson suggest that Classics is not the study of a dead culture but a live, interactive process informed by the 'vast community of readers across the millennia'. Their book dwells on the friezes from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae - initially, at what seems too great a length, but actually for very good reason. The temple friezes, now on exhibit at the British Museum, are independent blocks of marble that can be reassembled in many different ways. Bassae is therefore a metaphor for discovery and re-evaluation. Furthermore, the temple is set in Arcadia - a region of huge importance for literature, religion and philosophy, giving it yet more symbolic significance. As the authors suggest, the notion of Arcadia - sometimes paradise, sometimes brutish wilderness - is itself capable of multiple interpretation, like so many aspects of the ancient world. Each new generation's interpretations and insights shed extra light on, and themselves become part of, the classical heritage. The book's unexpected emphasis on the historic reception of classics constitutes, perhaps, its major strength. It is an emphasis reflected in the concluding Timeline, two pages of which record events from 800 BCE to the Renaissance and the other two and a half pages to events such as the election of Dr Johnson to a Professorship at the RA (1770) and the publication of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980). Probably not everyone's idea of a classical initiation, but this is a fresh and stimulating introduction to what can still seem a dauntingly élitist and exclusive area of study.

This short book discusses the important but changing role played by Classics in our civilization over the past 2000 years. The temple at Bassae, unknown to me until I read this book, serves as a recurring example of how perceptions and interpretations evolved. In conclusion, the work deals relatively lengthily with Arcadia, an actual region of Greece. The result is extremely interesting and of high intellectual level. By no means, however, does it qualify as an introduction to the topic. On the contrary, the reader is expected to be familiar with Greek and Roman authors and their works as well as with classical architecture. Though the book is really not expensive, one would expect illustrations to be of a much higher quality. Photos are tiny and black and white, sketches, as of the frieze in the Bassae temple, are minimalist and maps are not of professional quality. (What is Washington, D.C., doing on a map of the classical world?). Overall this brief book is recommended to those interested very specifically in its topic, the varying significance of Classics.

I think my dissatisfaction with this book may have been due to a misunderstanding of its purpose. I note that there is another book in this series entitled 'Classical Literature: A Very Short Introduction', and I think that was what i was expecting from this book. Instead, I got a seemingly interminable discussion of an obscure Greek temple in Arcadia, the figures on a decorative freeze, its architecture and so on. What I was hoping for was an overview of Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Aeschylus, Ovid and the rest. If that's what you're looking for, try Robert Cahill's 'Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter' (which does, however, only cover the Greek half of classical literature), or the other book in this series that focuses on literature.

This is the first in the "Very Short Introduction" series and perhaps a very good place to start. Is the book very short? Yes, it is something you can accomplish in a few hours of uninterrupted reading (or two days of mildly interrupted reading in my case). And does it introduce the subject matter? Yes, through one useful example. The book lost its way to detail around the 61% mark (accuracy attributed to my kindle) and I felt I would need to start taking notes but eventually the book regained its macro approach in a way that is appropriate for an introductory text. I'm always explaining to people that economics (my degree at university) is the study of choice and not just about money and markets. In the same way, Classics has been explained to me to be not just about temples and friezes. If you scratch the surface of the scientific method both disciplines are sociological and anthropological. Whilst classics incorporates Greek and Roman products (art, language, philosophy, archaeology, etc.) it is explained that Greece is to be seen through Roman eyes; and so begins the transition of culture down the ages. This is a study just not of the static state of such products just mentioned but of their constant state of flux. The subjectivity of the interpretation develops our understanding of the past whilst also revealing nuances about the present context from which our opinions have come from. Historical inquiry is in a jostle between technological advancement that may reveal and 'Chinese Whispers' that may reconstruct. Eventually the subject boils down to philosophy, that, without providing an answer that is concrete (or maybe I should say marble), provides a journey that is informative and enjoyable in itself. To know where you are going, it helps to know where you are coming from.

This book is really well written, entertaining and extremely thought provoking. It provides a whistlestop tour through the classical world in terms of how we study it, not the classical world itself. If you want lists and dates and what is taught at school as 'history', this is not the book for you. The premise of the OUP Very Short Introduction To books is to take an expert who has something really interesting to say on a particular subject, whether it be bananas or the classical world and then get them to talk about their interest in the subject in an easy to digest 150 short pages. This is not clearly explained, and these books are often picked up by total novices expecting something like 'a dummies guide to'. Well, there are already 'dummies guides to' which do their job very well. These, in my opinion can be much more rewarding and thought provoking. In this book, Beard and Henderson use the example of a classical temple site in Greek Arcadia and what we know about it to explore how we approach the study of classics. It roams through archaeology, sociology, religion, politics, study of language, poetry and literature and makes a compelling case for why classics are still relevant today and what they mean to us in modern times.