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Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard
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A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, this is “the perfect introduction to classical studies, and deserves to become something of a standard work” (Observer).
Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people—the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as gospel—not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world is still very much alive.
- Sales Rank: #117808 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-09-09
- Released on: 2013-09-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
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. 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. So, the chapter about King Minos's legendary palace is much more concerned with how and why Arthur Evans decided to elaborately, and disastrously, restore the site in the early 20th century. The discussion of Cleopatra turns around history's ever-changing, mostly guessing portrait, and ends with Beard finally advising that we just stick with the Augustan myth and Horace's ÿdemented queen.' And then there's her fascinating, gentle dig at the obsessive, retiring Victorian academic Charles Frazer. All in all, a smart, adventuresome read. Illus. & photos. (Sept.)
From Booklist
Why should twenty-first-century readers care about Caligula or Commodus, Sappho or Sophocles? In this thought-provoking collection of essays and book reviews, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard explores the reasons that ancient Greece and Rome still matter. Finding surprising substance even in Astérix cartoons, Beard convincingly establishes the Roman Forum and the Greek Agora as settings for clarifying issues still vexing the modern world. In the ancient debate over how Cicero invoked emergency powers to quash the Catilinarian conspiracy, for instance, readers find the same issues now perplexing lawmakers debating whether national security justifies abridgment of constitutional rights. Elsewhere—in the gender issues swirling around Livia’s crimes, the public-relations tactics transforming fierce Octavian into dignified Augustus, the hermeneutical problems surrounding Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War—readers repeatedly discover that visiting classical antiquity means seeing modernity more fully. Though far from seamless, Beard’s organization of her essays and reviews into four thematic sections unifies and focuses her wide-ranging forays. Lively and engaging, Beard’s scholarship brings Pericles, Antony, Nero—and other ancient titans—back to life. --Bryce Christensen
Review
“Starred review. Beard's clear way of explaining times and people we may or may not have heard of makes learning not only fun, but satisfying, and her prose style is easy without being annoyingly breezy…. A top-notch introduction to some fairly arcane material, accessible but not patronizing.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Beard is the best…communicator of Classics we have.” (Independent Sunday (UK))
“Witty, erudite collection…To Beard, the classical past is alive and kicking―and she has the great gift of being able to show just why classics is still a subject worth arguing about.” (Sunday Times (UK))
“These reviews are ideal for providing a basic understanding of classical studies, as they not only pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the books she reviews but also elucidate the sometimes tricky nuances of current approaches in the field…. Not to be missed by fans of Beard, this will also appeal to readers generally interested in classical studies.” (Library Journal)
“Highly engaging.” (Sunday Telegraph (UK))
“With such a champion as Beard to debunk and popularise, the future of the study of classics is assured.” (Daily Telegraph (UK))
“Engaging…impressive… Through her lively discussion of modern scholarship, Ms. Beard succeeds in her goal of proving that study of the Classics is “still a ‘work in progress’ not ‘done and dusted’."” (The Economist)
“Essayists are like dinner guests: The best are amusing and erudite, the worst think they are. If Cambridge professor Mary Beard's conversation is anything like her wise and elegant book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, 31 of which are collected in Confronting the Classics, she must be very popular indeed…. Throughout, readers will learn something new or look at familiar topics afresh, alternately nodding and grinning.” (M. Carter - The Wall Street Journal)
“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.…. All in all, a smart, adventuresome read.” (Publishers Weekly)
“In this thought-provoking collection of essays and book reviews, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard explores the reasons that ancient Greece and Rome still matter…. Lively and engaging, Beard’s scholarship brings Pericles, Antony, Nero―and other ancient titans―back to life.” (Booklist)
“Many of us studied classics not only to read what was written in Latin, but also because poets, writers, and thinkers had blazed a brilliant trail. Beard conveys in her survey of the subject and the people who study it the excitement and romance of that tradition. For someone who has argued vehemently against the need to be glamorous, she makes the study of classics irresistibly attractive.” (A.E. Stallings - American Scholar)
“Beard’s essays in this volume range from humor in ancient Greece to the reputation of the emperor Caligula to the restoration of Roman sculpture. She writes with grace and wit on a vast array of subjects, and she has a novelist’s gift for selecting odd and revealing details.” (Nick Romeo - The Daily Beast)
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
nothing if not critical
By Stanley Crowe
I enjoyed this book very much, but anyone tempted to buy it should understand what it is: a collection of review essays on classical figures and topics, sensibly organized both chronologically and thematically -- but it is emphatically NOT itself a history of the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome. Those "confronting the classics" are the authors of the books that Beard is reviewing, and throughout Beard reviews them with an eye to their adequacy or otherwise as historians. So the book isn't history -- it's ABOUT history and what it is to try to do history well. That means that it's about how people handle evidence, especially the very fragmentary evidence that we have from so long ago. There are documents, there are artifacts, and there are the results of archeological activity. How do we, in the 21st century, put such stuff together to tell a convincing (aspiring to "true") story about Octavius or Alexander or Boadicea? It's tempting to say that the ancient world had its historians too -- Tacitus, Suetonius, Thucydides et. al. -- but they wrote decades or even centuries after the events they relate, so they have to be looked at with pretty cool scrutiny. So -- to sum up, a general reader who is interested in history and in the problems of writing history will find this book accessible and enjoyable. And you learn things! It's something to know that we know quite a bit about Augustus's life before he took care of Antony and Cleopatra but very little about the four decades of his rule as emperor. Beard speculates interestingly on why that is so. In general, we get a sense of the fragments of knowledge that seem beyond dispute and then are brought face to face with the obvious difficulties of "connecting the dots," as we would now say. Beard also has quite a bit to say about modern representations of historical figures in popular culture ("Cleopatra," "I, Claudius," etc.) and she ties in her discussions of these with the critiques of the usually more serious scholarship represented by the books under review in each chapter. Her style is direct and engaging -- she doesn't assume a lot of prior knowledge on her readers' parts -- and she usually finds the places in the books she reviews where the writer makes plausible connections and claims, but most importantly she has a great eye for the implausible, and she is very clear about when and why we should find this or that claim about Nero, Caligula, Julius Caesar, Cicero and others questionable. And she doesn't seem to have an agenda -- she's not pushing her view of the "truth" about Alexander or Cleopatra or whomever; she's talking about how fascinatingly elusive these figures and their cultures remain. Recommended for the critical reader!
55 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
A collection of book reviews
By Michael Gunther
"Confronting the Classics" is misdescribed in the publisher's blurb, so to set the record straight - it is mostly a collection of Mary Beard's book reviews from the Times Literary Supplement. Obviously, as someone who is reviewing a book on Amazon, I don't have any objection to book reviews as such! But on the other hand, I don't think that many people would find this book-length collection to be compelling reading. The nature of the book-review format prevents Beard from including much detail about her chosen topics, especially because she often reviews more than one book in the same essay. The result too often appeared, to this reader at least, like a throwaway collection of opinions ("Ancient Athens did not invent democracy") and nit-picking.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best books I've read in several years -- briding gaps between readers and scholars and the ancients and today.
By R. B. Bernstein
This is one of the best books I've read this year, and for several years.
Mary Beard is one of the finest classicists ever, but just as important she is one of the all-time best practitioners of book viewing. This fine book is the kind of book that introduces you to an entire field, a scholarly culture, the craft of reviewing, and the challenge of building bridges between a scholarly community and the general reading public and between the ancients and today -- all at once. Beard's lucid, elegant, and quietly funny prose; her clear concern both for those whom she writes about (historical subjects and authors of reviewed books alike) and for those who will read her; and her gift for explanation all shine from these pages. This book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.
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