Browse all reviews
The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity / Johana Hannink
Review Date: 03 August 2017
At the height of the Greek financial crisis, reports from colleagues based in Athens painted a sorry picture of respectable citizens who had fallen upon hard times desperately rummaging in dustbins to supplement their dwindling larders. The statistics told an even grimmer story – between 2010 and 2011, suicide rates in Greece rose by 40 per cent.
Barbarism and Religion: Volume 6, Barbarism: Triumph in the West / J. G. A. Pocock
Review Date: 26 November 2015
Triumph in the West is the triumphant conclusion of J. G. A. Pocock’s series on Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). Earlier installments sought to situate Gibbon and his text in a series of contexts: European Enlightenment(s), narratives of civil society, the conceptual history of ‘Decline and Fall’, theories concerning ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, ecclesiastical historiography.
Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity / eds. Kristi Upson-Saia, Carly Daniel-Hughes, Alicia J. Batten
Review Date: 09 July 2015
This is a very welcome addition to the study of dress in antiquity. While studies of clothing, bodily adornment and the body language of antiquity are becoming more frequent, a volume that considers the role of religious dress and the religious meanings of dress among Jews and Christians takes this research in new directions.
Exhibition: Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum / Paul Roberts (curator)
Review Date: 12 September 2013
The monumental importance of the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum lies not least in the staggering number of people it has reached. It can safely be called a blockbuster, having attained its visitor goal for the six-month duration of the show – a quarter million visitors – after only three months.
Reuse Value. Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine / eds. Richard Brilliant, Dale Kinney
Review Date: 06 September 2012
One can hardly imagine that several decades ago the concept of spolia did not yet indicate a field of widespread research in the history of architecture, art and archaeology. The title of this volume with 12 essays and a fascinating introduction, points to this change in research focus, since the value of reuse of objects and materials has not always been recognized.
Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity / Simon Goldhill
Review Date: 26 July 2012
Simon Goldhill throws down the gauntlet to the entire field of classical reception studies in his new book Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. This flourishing sub-discipline of Classics has, in the last two decades in particular, explored a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.
The De Re Militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages / Christopher Allmand
Review Date: 26 July 2012
In an age of crisis a late Roman bureaucrat offered a plan for reforming military recruitment and training to an unnamed emperor, who requested the project’s continuation. Later additions on army organization (book 2), tactics and campaign operations (book 3), and siegecraft and naval warfare (book 4) yielded a compendium of ancient military thought, the Epitoma rei militaris of Flavius Vegetius Renatus.
The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy / Michael Squire
Review Date: 26 July 2012
As L. P. Hartley famously remarked in The Go-Between (1953), ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. This was more prescient than he knew, for most of the English-speaking world now seems to view the past not merely as foreign but as totally alien – diverting at times, perhaps, but utterly irrelevant to them and their lives.
The Shock of the Ancient: Literature & History in Early Modern France / Larry Norman
Review Date: 20 July 2012
Playing on the title of Robert Hughes's popular history of modernist art, The Shock of the New (1980), Larry Norman recreates that moment in 17th- and 18th-century France when the classical literary texts that Renaissance humanists had treated as timeless vehicles of cultural value, and so put at the core of European education, came to many to seem shockingly ‘primitive,’ even ‘barbaric’ – superseded, in effect,…
Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America / eds. Peter S. Onuf, Nicholas Cole
Review Date: 12 July 2012
Classical works formed the kernel of Thomas Jefferson's libraries. The third president read both Latin and Greek. He wrote repeatedly of his fondness of classical literature and died, on 4 July 1826, with Seneca's work open on his bedside table. Nonetheless, Jefferson in many ways doubted the classical world was the original mold upon which the American experiment had to be built.