Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
Ancient Hearts on Fire
By Jasper Griffin
In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self
by Ruth Padel
Princeton University Press, 210 pp., $29.95
Classical and Modern Interactions: Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturism, Decline, and other Issues
by Karl Galinsky
University of Texas Press, 190 pp., $35.00
What do the classics still have to tell us? Classical literature has been on the syllabus of schools and colleges for more than two thousand years; intelligent and learned minds have put it through every imaginable process of interpretation and exegesis, of polemics and apologetics. What, to come closer to home, do professors of classics still have to tell us? Ruth Padel is not the holder of a full-time academic position, but she has taught at the universities of Oxford and London, and she has the expertise of a professional, and she is also a poet. She has written a subtle and haunting book about the mind and emotions as they appear in the plays of the Greek tragedians. Karl Galinsky is a pro, professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written a set of provocative and entertaining essays on the interplay of ancient and modern and the ways in which postmodern architecture, multiculturalism, the Aeneid of Virgil, and the fall of the Roman Empire can illuminate one another and the state of the modern world and of contemporary America. The bucket will go to the well a good many times yet before the ancient waters shall run dry.
Review, 4777 words
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