Grèce

The ancient Greek thinker refutes skepticism, demonstrates God's existence, compares metaphysics to the other sciences, elucidates the nature of the infinite, and explores other major philosophical issues.

How the modern world has understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter todayThe study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it shows the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage. It ends by offering suggestions for the future of the study of the Greeks in the context of world history.

The olive is a tree of the sea breeze. It is not to be found among the hyperboreans, and does not exist in the torrid zone. On the shores of the seas of the temperate zone, or where the winds are channelled to the hinterland through deep gorges or along the banks of rivers, colonies of olive groves coexist with the rugged landscape.

 

The Olive Tree of Civilisation has a rich and varied history. The gnarled tree and its fruits has been extolled by bards from Ovid and Homer to Kipling, Tennyson and Nerua. What other fruit provides light, is a fundamental ingredient in perfume and adds joy and flavour at the table? The ancients knew these virtues and olive oil became a key to their religious and political ceremonies, from the temples of Ra in Egypt where lamps burned olive oil, to the temple of Soloman, where kings were anointed with oil based ointments. Christ was offered a sip of oil on the cross; Hanukah is, at its origin, a festival to celebrate olive oil; the tree and its oil are found in the Koran. Today the oil is worshipped by chefs for its flavours and its colours. For decades, cooks and anthropologists have divided Europe along an olive oil/butter boundary; that line is vanishing as olive oil spreads around the globe. This book explores and brings to life the olives's glorious past, with chapters on the fruit's role in

'A brilliant and luminous writer' MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCETheirs was a love that defied the gods...GLOWING READER REVIEWS'A beautiful story about the power of autonomy' ????? 'Heart-wrenching, hard-hitting, beautifully written, sumptuous, poetic, romantic, and (because Eros is the goddess of desire) utterly scorching in places' ????? 'A gorgeous retelling, and one I will no doubt read again! ????? 'Overall, stunning prose, incredible chemistry, gorgeous characters, just a beauty of a retelling!' ????? 'I cannot tell you how much I loved this, there will never be enough words to describe how much I enjoyed the experience of reading this (and believe me there were many tears involved)' ????? Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eye of every suitor with her beauty - but also, unfortunately, the jealous gaze of the goddess Aphrodite. As punishment, Psyche is tied to a rock to be sacrificed to a 'monstrous husband'. And yet, no monster arrives: instead, she is spirited away by Aphrodite's daughter Eros.Eros, goddess of desire, can change gender at will.

And in her hidden palace, she visits her bride under the cloak of darkness: Psyche is forbidden to gaze upon the face of her lover. But as they explore each other's bodies and discover new pleasures, Psyche is tempted to break her vow... even if it brings down the wrath of the gods.A gloriously anarchic and seductive retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros, groundbreaking, gender-fluid and hugely enjoyable, this is a masterpiece from Caro De Robertis, a writer described by Madeline Miller as 'brilliant and luminous'.

The ruined silhouette of the Parthenon on its hill above Athens is one of the world's most famous images. Its 'looted' Elgin Marbles are a global cause celebre. But what actually are they? In a revised and updated edition, Mary Beard, award winning writer, reviewer and leading Cambridge classicist, tells the history and explains the significance of the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess Athena, the divine patroness of ancient Athens.

Since I too have agonized over trying to decipher the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, I believe that I am allowed to repeat something that I supported some time ago: that the reexamination of a subject so labyrinthine and bibliographically lumbered has to be dealt with as an intellectual debt, the satisfaction of which will justify all future corrective approaches. However, the anticipated reevaluations of perhaps the most important artistic creation of Periclean times will be fruitful and forward-looking only to the degree that they will draw cognitive powers from a fundamental text by Luigi Beschi. With the republication of that text, in a free-standing format, I am sure that all the new interpretative attempts by modern scholars will be inspired by the intellectual stimuli and values of an unrepeatable scientific ethos. Angelos Delivorrias

Over the past decades there has been something of a revolution in the way we view classical drama generally and Euripides in particular. This book, updated in a second edition, reflects that revolution and aims to show how Euripides was continually reinventing himself. A truly Protean figure, he seems to set out on a new journey in each of his surviving 19 plays. Between general introduction and final summary, Morwood's chapters identify the themes that underlie the plays and concentrate, above all, on demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of this great dramatist. New to this edition, which is updated throughout, are further details on the individual plays and extra suggestions for background reading. The volume is a companion to The Plays of Sophocles and The Plays of Aeschylus (both by Alex Garvie) also available in second editions from Bloomsbury. A further essential guide to the themes and context of ancient Greek tragedy may be found in Laura Swift's new introductory volume, Greek Tragedy.

Travellers, poets, artists, even scholars, still go to Greece in search of something they feel that no other land quite offers them. Partly no doubt this is a by-product of the enormous prestige the world of ancient Greece acquired subsequent to the Renaissance; partly, too, it is due to the sheer physical beauty with which Greece presents one at practically every step. Even though the stereotype of classical Greece has now worn thin, and island after island, seashore village after seashore village, are overrun by the life-starved fugitives from the industrial wildernesses of northern Europe, loosed upon them week-in week-out by the seemingly endless succession of package-tours and charter-flights, the spell and the compulsion survive. For Philip Sherrard the enigma of Greece was a lifelong preoccupation. In this anthology, one of his earlier publications, he explores its various aspects through the writings of those who over the centuries have found in Greece not simply an object of study or a romantic haven, but a challenge, an incitement and a reciprocity that has stirred the wellsprings of both heart and imagination. To give an inner coherence to this exploration the passages chosen are presented in the form of an itinerary that includes all the major areas of Greece, the Aegean Islands and Crete. The remarkably evocative photographs by Dimitri complement this itinerary, providing the visual component of an image which cannot but enrich the experience of all who, for whatever reasons, have set out on this journey of self-discovery that Greece offers them. 'Balance — that is a difficult quality in speaking of a country one cares about, and I don't mean the old tag about nothing too much; for Greece everything is not enough. I mean the balance in accepting the extremes . . . And balance, the whole Greece, is what Mr Sherrard is after in this splendid anthology. Seferis and Sikelianos; Kevin Andrews' description of climbing Olympus; Patrick Leigh Fermor's passage on light; Flaubert fording the Alpheus; Robert Curzon enjoying an Athonite hermit's hospitality; poets, historians, travellers ironic, travellers intoxicated by their own emotions: a hundred scenes, a hundred reactions. . . . I am sometimes asked to recommend books about Greece. I should advise, then, reading The Pursuit of Greece not before but after a first visit — or during a second, when the noble or the lively writing will, as it were, bring out the scent of the country.' Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times. The Pursuit of Greece is a reprint of the 1964 London (John Murray) edition.