Antiquity Matters

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering Prizes This book is the culmination of more than sixty years of a writing life during which Frederic Raphael has returned again and again to the literature and landscape of the ancient world. In his new book, Raphael deploys his renowned wit and erudition to give us a vivid mosaic of the complexities and contradictions underlying Western civilization and its continuing influence upon contemporary society. Tackling a broad range of topics, from the presumed superiority of democracy to the momentum behind today's gay rights movement, Raphael's often daringly heterodox view of the Greek and Roman world will provoke, surprise, and, at the same time, entertain readers. He shows how the interplay of fiction and reality, rhetorical aspiration and practical cunning, are threaded through modern culture.

Ever since the International Monetary Fund’s first bailout of Greece’s sinking economy in 2010, the phrase “Greek debt” has meant one thing to the country’s creditors. But for millions who claim to prize culture over capital, it means something quite different: the symbolic debt that Western civilization owes to Greece for furnishing its principles of democracy, philosophy, mathematics, and fine art. Where did this other idea of Greek debt come from, Johanna Hanink asks, and why does it remain so compelling today? The Classical Debt investigates our abiding desire to view Greece through the lens of the ancient past. Though classical Athens was in reality a slave-owning imperial power, the city-state of Socrates and Pericles is still widely seen as a utopia of wisdom, justice, and beauty—an idealization that the ancient Athenians themselves assiduously cultivated. Greece’s allure as a travel destination dates back centuries, and Hanink examines many historical accounts that express disappointment with a Greek people who fail to live up to modern fantasies of the ancient past. More than any other movement, the spread of European philhellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carved idealized conceptions of Greece in marble, reinforcing the Western habit of comparing the Greece that is with the Greece that once was. Today, as the European Union teeters and neighboring nations are convulsed by political unrest and civil war, Greece finds itself burdened by economic hardship and an unprecedented refugee crisis. Our idealized image of ancient Greece dangerously shapes how we view these contemporary European problems.

The nature of matter was as intriguing a question for ancient philosophers as it is for contemporary physicists, and Matter, Space, and Motion presents a fresh and illuminating account of the rich legacy of the physical theories of the Greeks from the fifth century B.C. to the late sixth century A.D.

This edited volume includes a compilation of new approaches to the investigation of inscriptions from different cultural contexts. Innovative research questions about "material text cultures" are examined with reference to Classical Athens, late ancient and Byzantine churches and urban spaces, Hellenistic and Roman cities, and medieval buildings.

Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics. Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export. But in Who Owns Antiquity?, one of the world's leading museum directors vigorously challenges this nationalistic position, arguing that it is damaging and often disingenuous. "Antiquities," James Cuno argues, "are the cultural property of all humankind," "evidence of the world's ancient past and not that of a particular modern nation. They comprise antiquity, and antiquity knows no borders." Cuno argues that nationalistic retention and reclamation policies impede common access to this common heritage and encourage a dubious and dangerous politicization of antiquities--and of culture itself. Antiquities need to be protected from looting but also from nationalistic identity politics. To do this, Cuno calls for measures to broaden rather than restrict international access to antiquities. He advocates restoration of the system under which source countries would share newly discovered artifacts in exchange for archaeological help, and he argues that museums should again be allowed reasonable ways to acquire undocumented antiquities. Cuno explains how partage broadened access to our ancient heritage and helped create national museums in Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul. The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? is sure to be as important as it is controversial. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

A fascinating, accessible, and up-to-date history of the Ancient Greeks. Covering the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, and centred around the disunity of the Greeks, their underlying cultural unity, and their eventual political unification.

This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity. While Plotinus stands at the beginning of its philosophical tradition, setting the themes for debate and establishing strategies of argument and interpretation, Proclus falls closer to its end, developing a grand synthesis of late ancient thought. The book discusses many central topics of philosophy and science in Plotinus and Proclus, such as the one and the many, number and being, the individuation and constitution of the soul, imagination and cognition, the constitution of number and geometrical objects, indivisibility and continuity, intelligible and bodily matter, and evil. It shows that late ancient philosophy did not simply embrace and borrow from the major philosophical traditions of earlier antiquity--Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism--by providing marginal comments on widely-known philosophical texts. Rather, Neoplatonism offered a set of highly original and innovative insights into the nature of being and thought, which can be distinguished in much subsequent philosophical thought, up until modernity.

"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt...and his excitement is contagious."—James Wood, The New Yorker Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.