Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
Anxieties of Influence
By Jasper Griffin
Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
by Mary R. Lefkowitz
New Republic Books/BasicBooks, 222 pp., $24.00
Black Athena Revisited
edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz, edited by Guy MacLean Rogers
University of North Carolina Press, 522 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Western Greeks
edited by Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli. Catalog of the exhibition. an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, through December 8.
Milan: Bompiani, 799 pp., L. 85,000
The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity
a Bollingen Series XXXV by John Boardman
Princeton University Press, 352 pp., $49.50
Among the junk mail that arrives through our doors we find letters, sometimes impressively produced, promising to trace our name and ancestry back through the generations. We, too, can be entitled, for a fee, to claim kin with eminent or at least socially presentable ancestors; to have a pedigree drawn up and illuminated, on quality paper or indeed (why not?) on parchment, complete with the coat of arms of some long-dead person of the same name: some armigerous Griffin of yesteryear, who may impress our friends and put a snap in our walk and a sneer on our lip as we mingle in a world where, in these democratic times, we have to live on terms of apparent equality with poor fellows who have no ancestors at all. At the individual level, such attempts to gain status raise a smile. But it is a sad truth that groups, and nations, behave without shame in ways that would make their individual members blush; and the age we live in is one in which groups make such claims with great tenacity and great seriousness.
Review, 6996 words
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