Edifying reads for the curious

An ongoing annotated bibliography of sorts!

A while back, I had a post where I laid out some of my favorite short pieces on writing. People seemed to like it, and some people commented that they’d discovered some new essays that they really enjoyed. So that’s super nice. Then Deb suggested I compile a list of good books, which seemed like kind of a cool idea. Cool for me, because I get to think about the books that I think are both good and accessible to a more general audience, and (potentially) cool for you, because you get to meet new books. And then cool for both of us, because we can talk about the books, and the stuff we learned!

This will be an ongoing project, so check back in from time to time to see what’s new (I’ll add new stuff at the top of the list). Since other people have the fiction territory covered far better than I could do it, I’m going to largely limit myself to non-fiction, and particularly to academically-inclined non-fiction. Not to spoil any surprises or anything, but it will probably also be mostly Classics and antiquity related, for obvious reasons.

I hope you’ll add your suggestions in the comments!

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Classics-related (in alphabetical order)

Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. (1992) Okay, I totally haven’t read this book. It’s on my shelf, and I’ve been meaning to read it, because it’s important and everybody knows it and acts like they’ve read it, whether or not they really have. Basically Burkert works mostly on history of religion stuff, but this book – as you can guess from the subtitle… – focuses on blood sacrifice, and particularly on how the guilt of hunting, up against the aggression of our nature, shaped our psyche and culture. Or something. There’s a paleoanthropological (!) theory attached to it, but that’s above my pay grade.

Here, trust the opinion of people you’ve never heard of (I lifted this from the Wikipedia page on the book): Robert Parker, in reviewing the book for Times Literary Supplement, observed of Burkert that “boldness of theory and consummate learning are united in him as in few others”.M.L. West, in Journal of Hellenic Studies, remarked that the book was “an exceptional intellectual experience”. See what I mean? I need to read it. Summer read-along, anyone? *crickets*

Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. (1999) This one I have read, and even liked. (It’s French, though – I mean, it’s been translated into English, but the thinking is still very French, so brace yourself for that.) In this book, Detienne traces out the development of the idea of ‘truth’ in antiquity. He argues that, early on, it carried a quasi-religious sense of memory, and was attached to poetry – poets are an oral culture’s memory, and thus their truth-tellers. As philosophy grew up, it was kind of set against poetry in many ways (although not in any obvious ways, really – I can show you the section in my diss, if you want, but you’re probably better off waiting for the movie). Truth became a stable, objective, single thing – and the rational, logical system of thought that has shaped us for the last 2,500 years (here in the West at least) came into being.

Oh, and I guess I’m doing an ‘authority-vouching’ thing, at least when I see one that amuses me, so here, this is what Vernant (who, in the interest of full-disclosure, has done lots of work with Detienne, and they were totally BFFs) says of the book: “Marcel Detienne undertakes a new and daring intellectual project with both rigor and erudition…. A fascinating study which is essential reading for sociologists of religion and historians of philosophy alike.” (I took that from the Amazon page.)

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) Yes, this is very outdated. However, it is also a seminal work in the field, and kind of changed the trajectory of particularly the study of Greek philosophy. So that’s neat. I still recommend it to my students occasionally. Now that I think of it, it would probably be a pretty good lead-up to Detienne’s book (below), since it’s basically the foundation on which the latter was built. Anyway, it traces the development of rationalism in Greece. Pretty much what the title says.

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (1990). It’s surprisingly hard to find a source that talks explicitly about the labyrinth as a concept. This book does it beautifully. Doob is a wonderful, readable writer, and a trustworthy lead through the dangerous maze of metaphors that have been built up around the idea of the labyrinth: the labyrinth as symbol for initiation, for death and rebirth, for personal growth, for morality, for penitence, for dialectic… it’s an incredibly productive symbol in our culture, but hard to tease out because it’s inherently unstable.

(Also, this isn’t strictly speaking a Classics book, I guess, but the first chapter is devoted to Classical sources, and obviously everyone in the Middle Ages couldn’t do anything literary or artistic without consulting Classical authors, so it’s close enough.) (Please don’t tell my Medievalist friends that I said that.)

Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. (1996) Another favorite tome (or set of tomes, technically, since it comes in two volumes). It’s not exactly the kind of book you want to sit down and read through (and I think it does write to a pretty specialized audience – like, it might not translate Greek and Latin, I can’t remember), but it is a fantastic resource if you want to know about iterations of a myth in Greece (he goes into Rome on occasion, but focuses on Greece). Like, you look up Cerberus or whatever and you are presented with literally every mention (in chronological order, mostly) of Cerberus and how they relate to each other, and then presented with a discussion of what Cerberus got up to as a visual motif on vases and such.

David Konstan. Pity Transformed. (2001) Another book I haven’t read yet. This one’s nice and short, at least. The book traces out the concept of pity through Greco-Roman antiquity, and along with it, necessarily, other ideas like compassion and justice. It’s also part of the Classical Inter/Faces series, which is explicitly aiming to interest non-Classicists, which is kind of why I’m including it here (alas, and annoyingly, the series seems to have no internet presence, but B&N lists the series here. I don’t know all the authors, but I know the editor, and the authors I know are fantastic, so I would say you can trust any of the books in this series to be both interesting and reliable.). Alas, no blurbs for this one. You and I will have to read it and write our own.

Kenneth Lapatin. Secrets of the Snake Goddess. (coming soon)

Nanno Marinatos. (coming soon)

Denise McCoskey. (coming soon)

Sarah Pomeroy. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. (1975; updated, and with a new preface by the author, 1995) Another one that’s a bit outdated by now, but, like the Dodds, it’s still read. It’s basically the first book in the field to take the position of women as a serious subject of serious study (in English, at least). (Think about that for a minute: nobody had written a book about women in antiquity until 1975.)  It’s a pretty manageable little book (230 pages), and covers myth-time as well as real history, spanning the archaic age to to established Roman Empire, so some thousand-plus years or so.

Here is what the indomitable Mary Beard has to say on the new edition’s front cover: “The first treatment to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism. … Its position has hardly been challenged.”

Tim Rood. The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten-Thousand in the Modern Imagination. (2004) Okay, first off, let me just say: I have taught this book to several dozen freshmen, and they almost categorically hate it. So if you’re a freshman, this book is probably not for you. I love it, though.

In all seriousness, what I mean by that is that I think it requires a certain level of knowledge about cultural history that 18 year olds simply haven’t lived long enough to acquire. So the deal with ‘The Sea! The Sea!’ (and I can’t remember if we’ve ever talked about it around here, hm) is that that is what Xenophon’s soldiers shouted on finally reaching the Black Sea after the long and dangerous march up-country. (It’s kind of a long story, but a good one – my students liked this one – here’s a good translation.) The phrase wended its way into the cultural consciousness, and has been referenced by all kinds of artists, politicians, thinkers through the years, and Rood’s book traces out… pretty much every last one. Fortunately, I thought he had a lively, narrative style that made reading the book fun.

Robert B. Strassler. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. (1998) (In the course of writing that title, I realized that I really do know how to spell Peloponnesian! I totally deserve my PhD.) Interesting side note here: Strassler is a businessman who took, like, a handful of Classics classes in college, and liked them. Later he went to read Thucydides, and he found it hard to follow because there was no single resource to help you learn everything you need to know for that incredibly complex story to make sense. So he made one. It is phenomenal. He includes maps, things are cross-referenced, he gives historical details in the margins… It’s a solid translation (it’s an edited update of Richard Crawley’s old translation, which I think is in the public domain) and the additional information is stellar, and extremely helpful. I wouldn’t send a first-time Thucydides reader anywhere else.

Oh – he’s since done comparable editions of other historians – Herodotus, Xenophon (not the Anabasis, alas)… more forthcoming, as I found out on the series’ home site. I haven’t read them, but if they’re anything like the Thucydides, I will vouch for them blind.

James Tatum, The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam. (2003). (coming soon)

Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. (1979) I love this book. I bought it on a whim over a decade ago (mainly because the title is awesome), but it’s fantastic. First off, Vermeule is a lovely writer. Not always especially academic in her tone (which is not a bad thing!), and actually quite poetic at times – and, as it turns out, she actually was a published poet as well. But in my opinion, that makes the read easier. And the scholarship is top-notch – the book actually won my field’s highest honor (for a book), the Charles J. Goodman Award of Merit. I’ve talked before about how different Greek ideas of the afterlife and ghosts were; well, some of that has been picked up from this book. It’s a wide-ranging discussion, too: she looks at art and poetry as well as archaeological and historical evidence.

I’ll let Greg Nagy take over for me now: “A book with such universal appeal that even the most entrenched Hellenophobe will find it irresistible. … Beautifully written, it is nothing short of a joy to read.” (lifted from the blurb on the back cover)

Simone Weil. The Iliad, or the poem of force. (1940) As a side note, I had no idea how fascinating Weil was – or that she died during WWII! Her work didn’t really catch on until some decades later. Those of you who read the Iliad with me this winter are all primed for this essay! (Oh, yeah: it’s not really a book, strictly speaking, but whatevs.) One of the things that is most interesting about this essay is that it’s written by a woman who had lived through WWI, and probably knew that WWII was going to be no easier, and who saw patterns of suffering and compulsion in the Iliad that reflected her personal experience of war. It’s a pretty powerful piece.

From the essay’s Wikipedia page: The Atlantic Monthly has written that along with Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, Weil’s essay “remains the twentieth century’s most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world’s greatest and most disturbing poem.”

Also from that page, because it is beautiful, a line from the essay: “Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe [the Iliad]  in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent.”

David Wiles. Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. (2000) I had to read this for a class back in college, and it was useful. It is exactly what it says: an introduction, for non-specialists, to the who-what-why-when-how of Greek theater. (*ahem* theatre) Most scholarship on Greek tragedy, naturally, approaches it from the angle of the plays; Wiles’ book is a useful counter-balance that looks at the practical issues behind how the plays were performed. Also a pretty cool book for anyone interested in the history of theater (theatre) obviously.

This book doesn’t have blurbs on the back, but it has a funny little personal ad for itself, so I’ll share that:

• Specially written for students and enthusiasts
• Accessible and informative
• Explores the cultural world of ancient Greece and the vital role of the theatre

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Non-Classics-related (but I probably thought a lot about how they relate to Classics)

Natalie Angier. Woman: An Intimate Geography. (1999) Angier is a science journalist, and this book shows off the best of both worlds: it’s very readable, but also very thoroughly researched. It’s been some years since I read it, but the fact that it came into my head early on when I was thinking about pulling this page together should tell you something about what an impact it made. She gets into some of the questions about what it is to be “a woman,” of course, and the degree to which it’s innate in our bodies or internalized through society or what. It also has a really fascinating discussion of the question of whether or not to go on hormones when you hit menopause. Before this book I hadn’t even realized there was controversy.

This review from Publisher’s Weekly (lifted from the book’s Amazon page) made me laugh (because it’s kind of terribly written): “Did postmenopausal women invent the human race? Are males more similar to females than females are to males? These are among the many stimulating questions at the core of Angier’s provocative “scientific fantasia of womanhood,” a spirited and thoroughly informed – if admittedly biased – study of how the body is “a map of meaning and freedom.”

Karen Armstrong. A Short History of Myth. (2005) Exactly what it purports to be: it is fairly short, and it traces out myth through history. I almost always enjoy Armstrong’s writing, and this is a decidedly enjoyable book. It’s also related to the Canongate Myths series, whose explicit purpose is to have contemporary authors retell old myths in new ways.

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A note on conventions: I link to professional academic sites or Wikipedia pages for authors whenever possible, and google books pages for books. My second choice for book pages is WolrdCAT, and my third is publisher’s pages – only when that fails me will I go to Amazon. It’s just what I feel good about. My second choice for author pages (and, let’s face it, there aren’t that many living Classicists who have Wikipedia pages…) is the faculty page of the school where they work. If I can’t find a non-commercial site for an author, I won’t link to anything. I just think it’s weird to link to something that might be personal, or at any rate not the professional representation that person might want.