Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books. Glenn W. Most is Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Salvatore Settis is Professor Emeritus of the History of Classical Art and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and a former Director of the Getty Museum.
Over a thousand pages in length, with some five hundred articles
surveying the survival, transmission, and reception of the cultures
of Greek and Roman antiquity, The Classical Tradition is a low-cost
Wunderkammer, a vast cabinet of curiosities… The Classical
Tradition should rightly evoke…gratitude. This is a book whose
long, learned, and witty essay on Rome could stand alone as a
surprisingly comprehensive guide to that city’s ancient relics, but
that also has time for entries on Armenian Hellenism, Hunayn
ibn-Ishaāq, and Gandhara; carpe diem, deus ex machina, and the
translatio imperii; the Society of Dilettanti, the Grand Tour, and
Fascism. It is possible to get pleasantly lost in these pages, as
in the internal courtyards of Pompeii, and not emerge for
hours.
*New York Review of Books*
A heady, hefty new single-volume reference… This is a browser’s
paradise… While Greece and Rome are no longer the foundation of
education, classical scholarship has never been richer.
*New York Times Book Review*
Entries of commendable clarity and range include those on Homer, on
pastoral, on Catullus, and on the Argonauts. This is a valuable
reference work, especially for those new to the classical
world.
*Times Literary Supplement*
The Classical Tradition is a guidebook of great erudition that is
notably well written and unexpectedly compelling. It definitely is
not another of those solemn introductions to ‘the glory that was
Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.’ Instead it is a lively
compendium of the manifold ways in which the enduring creations of
the classical tradition, and the Greek and Latin classics, have
been imitated, adulated, denounced and misunderstood—or understood
all too well—over the past two millennia… Each article brings some
unexpected insight or little known fact into the discussion, to
illuminating effect… The scholarship is impeccable, but there is a
donnish drollery in many of the articles… [A] marvelous guide.
*Wall Street Journal*
Now here is a fabulous book—and a bargain to boot. Harvard has
produced this gigantic volume, packed with color plates and essays
by some of the greatest scholars alive, for the price of a couple
of hardback thrillers. Better still, while The Classical Tradition
may look like a work of reference, it’s actually one of the best
bedside books you could ask for. I know because I’ve been browsing
around in it with immense pleasure… Certainly anyone even mildly
interested in the Western cultural heritage will find The Classical
Tradition a necessary purchase… [It] shows us how deeply the
stories, iconic figures and ideas of antiquity succor our
imaginations and still suffuse the world we live in.
*Washington Post*
[The Classical Tradition’s] catalogue of contributors is a who’s
who of classical scholarship and includes some of the best known
scholars writing for an educated non-specialist public, such as
Ingrid Rowland, Simon Goldhill, Mary Beard and Glen Bowersock… [The
editors] have sourced not so much anodyne entries on set-piece
subjects—the staple of any encyclopedia—as stories brightly told
that move through time to relate, for example, the achievements of
the Roman poet Horace as they were seen in the ancient world,
followed by an assessment of his immediate influence on Latin
poetry, and his considerable impact on subsequent poets from
Petrarch to Joseph Brodsky, with a slight pause over the case of
Byron, who loathed Horace after their encounters in school… The
publication of this Harvard guide not so much to the classical past
as to the uses we have made of it—its various metamorphoses—is in
itself a cultural event. Consider it one among many markers of a
contemporary re-attachment to the classical past.
*Australian Literary Review*
If, as some classicists say, our minds, bodies, government, law,
medicine, arts, and fill-in-the-blank are unintelligible without an
understanding of the Greco-Roman heritage, then do not waste
another minute in ignorance and read this massive work, or at least
selections of it, with urgency. A team of distinguished
scholars—rivaling the number of warriors in the Battle of
Thermopylae—dispenses knowledge and opinions on every imaginable
topic under the Classical sun, connecting us to our ancient
bloodline.
*First Things*
Eclectic rather than exhaustive, the compendium is less an
encyclopedia than a buffet, in alphabetical order, of topics and
glosses. There is, fortunately, no ideological consistency or
purpose. The harvesting academics bring home a bumper crop to
remind and instruct the reader of how the Classics are still
central to the civilized intelligence; food for thought and primers
of the imagination.
*Literary Review*
Anthony Grafton’s entry on Historiography is as elegant and learned
as everything he does. So elegant and learned, in fact, that I
wanted to read each and every essay he had written in The Classical
Tradition… Being lost in this book can be invigorating.
*New Criterion*
Make no mistake, The Classical Tradition is exceedingly delightful…
An esoteric tool for the scholar on the face of it, The Classical
Tradition turns out to be a guide for living here, now, in the 21st
century as we find it.
*The Smart Set*
A stunningly wonderful compilation… Massive in length and
unimpeachable in scholarship, it nonetheless manages to be
endlessly absorbing, and often quietly entertaining into the
bargain… I’ve pored over this book like a madman ever since setting
hands on it and I’ve devoured enough to be certain that it’s a
masterpiece of concision, knowledge, judgment and dedication. It’s
clearly going to be a companion for life, and all the better for
being well-nigh inexhaustible.
*Taipei Times*
This absorbing and endlessly browsable compendium, edited by
Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, explores the
richness of our classical legacy through scores of essays,
alphabetically arranged by subject, that illuminate our past, our
present, and probably our future as well.
*Barnes and Noble Review*
This magnificent compendium explicates the outsized influence Greek
and Roman society, literature and myth has had on the medieval and
modern European ages that followed, and in turn on the imperial
culture exported around the world. The Greek gods and their
attributes—from wise Athena and fierce Ares to bibulous
Dionysus—are key elements in a worldview we still look back on, at
once alien and familiar. A wonder of research and writing that
connects both casual browser and scholar to centuries of
learning.
*Barnes and Noble Review*
Whether priced by the pound or the page, this hefty compendium is
quite a bargain. Lead editor Grafton…is perhaps the perfect captain
for an ambitious work that attempts to capture, as the preface
indicates, the ‘reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its
dimensions in later cultures.’… More than 150 color images only add
to the browsing pleasure.
*Choice*
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