But for Beard, while the classics have always been a dialogue with the dead, “the dead do not include only those who went to their graves two thousand years ago.” Rather, “the study of the Classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves.” It’s the back-and-forth sparring between betweeded Oxford dons, it’s Picasso and Shakespeare, it’s Ben-Hur and Gladiator-it’s anything that engages in or, as the wonderful title suggests, confronts that gilded and gargantuan Greco-Roman world. Offering up 30 years of pointed insights and inquisitions, Cambridge classics professor Beard (The Fires of Vesuvius) returns with a collection of primarily reprinted reviews of her classicist peers’ work that somehow manages to touch on nearly every notable person, place, and event associated with the Ancient world.
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