Love, Sex and Tragedy
How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, by Simon Goldhill
This book addresses what makes each of us, and western societies collectively, what they are. Many modern cultural foundations are based on Greek and Roman philosophy.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2004
ISBN: 9780226301174
Goldhill's Book Divided into Five Sections
Simon Goldhill, author of Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, is a professor of Greek literature and culture at Cambridge University who draws the reader along in this voyage through ancient history by posing five questions:
1. Who do you think you are?
2. Where do you think you are going?
3. What do you think should happen?
4. What do you want to do? and
5. Where do you think you come from?
Though Goldhill certainly has the qualifications necessary to make this book a weighty, intimidating tome, on the contrary, he has a light and even humorous touch in this broad-brush picture of ancient times and how they inform the 21st century in the western hemisphere.
In simplest terms, Goldhill's thesis is that what went on in ancient Greece and Rome, and what survives from that time in artifacts, art, and literature heavily influences our lives today. Citing a statistic that in Victorian times, formal education heavily emphasized Greek and Latin, he makes the case for how the classics furnished the Victorian culture and therefore continues to influence British and American culture today.
Though his is a lighthearted approach to the subject, it is never silly, and it makes a nice complement to other modern writers who work with Greek literature, like Irish playwright Seamus Heaney, whose translations of ancient Greek drama elucidate and analyze the failures of modern society. Taking his cue from Cicero, Goldhill builds his case that learning something about Greek and Roman philosophy helps us define ourselves, and our places in modern society.
Western Society rests on Ancient Greek and Roman History and Philosophy
Love, Sex and Tragedy is just over 300 pages long, and covers an immense amount of material within those pages. Rather than only focusing on the influence of the classics upon the Renaissance and the American Revolution, he also shows the connection between Greek and Roman culture and Freudian psychology, modern sporting events, and the ancient influence on current standards of male attractiveness, while acknowledging the wide swings in standards of beauty for females over the centuries.
Though Goldhill has been accused of having a slightly misogynistic tilt in this book, it certainly does not appear deliberate, but more likely the result of the limitations of a male author empathizing with the female point of view.
Goldhill conclues that, though Ancient Greek and Roman principles are highly relevant today, it isn't the whole cloth out of which modern western society is cut, but "one essential strand of what has made the West what it is."
Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at King's College Cambridge (UK), where he also is Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics.
