Essays Ancient and Modern
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Overview
Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's remarkable life, the twenty-five chapters of "Essays Ancient and Modern" cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, Knox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Italy finds a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse-- and opens it to read Virgil's denunciation of war. An illiterate Greek bard composes a garbled Homeric song to celebrate the recent heroism of local partisans. A traveler heading north from modern Athens must choose between the Sacred Way-- or the NATO Road.Whether the subject is the role of women in ancient Athens or the novelists of modern Italy, the wit and erudition of Bernard Knox never fail to instruct and delight. Now in paperback, "Essays Ancient and Modern" takes it place alongside the distinguished essays of Knox's "Word and Action", a book whose title brings together, in the words of Anthony Hecht, "the double strand of his admirable career".
Synopsis
Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's remarkable life, the twenty-five chapters of this book cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War.
Library Journal
Knox is a noted classics scholar whose essays on Greek literature keep a nice balance between the claims of history and of art, between the discipline of research and the rights of interpretation. Most of his other subjects here come either from literary England or from the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The tragic destinies of nations, warriors, and kings run through this book in a dark undercurrent. Though many of the essays are lengthy book reviews, often full of scholarly dispute, the book as a whole reaches for a wider public of history lovers who will find rich resources here.-- Donald Ray, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Editorials
New York Review of Books
This collection of essays is the work of a man whom one would like to have as a friend. It deserves to have a great success.— Jasper Griffin