by Philip Hooker
Once again, I have surveyed the
Bookseller’s Buyers Guide to find some forthcoming books on classical themes
which publishers believe will be of interest to the general reader – and have also
called in some more from elsewhere.
I start with works from leading
classical scholars. Judith M Barringer’s
Olympia: A Cultural History is a splendid survey of the games, the
monuments, the oracle, from 600 BC all the way to the late Roman Empire. Anthony Barrett’s Rome is Burning:
Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty examines Nero’s role in the great
fire of 64 AD; he reckons that he took sensible steps to prevent the fire from
spreading, but 15-20% of the city was razed to the ground including many noble
houses; when their owners were hard hit by tax increases for the rebuilding,
they spun stories about Nero’s iniquity, what might today be called fake news. This
is complemented by Thorsten Opper’s Nero
which accompanies a new British Museum exhibition with 200 objects, due from May
to October. Michael Fulford’s Silchester
Revealed presents a full description of the Iron Age and Roman town of
Calleva, based on decades of archaeological research.
We have two major feats of
reception study. Simon Goldhill’s Preposterous
Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity asks how
does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? This
is, one reviewer opined, “a playful book”. Meanwhile, Edmund Richardson offers Alexandria: The Quest for a Lost City
– a wild journey through 19th century India and Afghanistan,
featuring Charles Masson, a spy extraordinaire and master of a hundred
disguises, who discovered a city in Afghanistan in 1833. This is a follow-up to
his Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of
Antiquity, published in 2013.
We also have several works from
professional writers. David Stuttard
has Phoenix: A Father, A Son, and the Rise of Athens, a novelistic
history of Athens by way of the lives of Miltiades and Cimon. Jeffrey
Smith has Themistocles: The Powerbroker of Athens. Philip Matyszak offers A Year in the
Life of Ancient Greece: The Real Lives of the People who Lived There –
248BC, an Olympic Year as seen by assorted characters in the Hellenistic World.
Alberto Angela, an Italian
journalist and TV host, has his 2018 Cleopatra: The Queen who Challenged
Rome and Conquered Eternity now in translation; he has, more recently,
published the first part of a trilogy on Nero and the fire of Rome. In lighter
vein, Philip Womack has How to
Teach Classics to Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction to the Ancient Greeks and
Romans. “You’d be barking to miss it” declares Michael Scott.
On the fiction front Lindsey Davis’ A Comedy of Terrors
is the ninth Flavia Alba story featuring the Saturnalia, a possible Nut War and
threats to Domitian; we also have the latest works from Conn Iggulden (with an Athenian series) and Simon Turney (Rise of Emperors series, with Gordon Doherty). Slightly Foxed Books are reprinting all of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Roman Britain
series for younger readers, starting with The Eagle of the Ninth.
Notable translations include Vergil’s Aeneid, a revision by Susanna
Braund of Sarah Ruden’s 2008 version (line by line in iambic pentameters), an
Oxford World Classics edition of Epigrams from the Greek Anthology by
Gideon Nesbit and two more of the Princeton series with jolly titles – Cicero’s How to Tell A Joke (based on
the Ideal Orator, with additional material from Quintilian) by Michael Fontaine
and Sextus Empiricus’ How to Keep an Open Mind by Richard
Bett. Kae Tempest’s version of Sophocles’
Philoctetes, which is still a planned National Theatre production with Lesley
Manville in the lead role and a large all-female cast, should have its text
published. The latest Cambridge Green and Yellow is Cicero’s Pro Milone by Thomas J Keeline; the latest Loebs are Petronius’ Satyricon by Gareth
Schmeling, Galen’s On Temperaments
by Ian Johnston and Livy volume 7
(Books 26-27) by J C Yardley. Douglas Olson has a new Aristophanes commentary – the Clouds, the first major one since
Dover.
And then. on March 31st,
so Amazon tells us, we should see the long-awaited Cambridge Greek Lexicon, edited by James Diggle and others, rebased
on first principles with a study of original texts, in two volumes, part-funded
by The Classical Association, one of the great scholarly achievements of our
time.
Philip Hooker is the Hon. Treasurer of the Classical Association, and writes regularly for the CA Blog on Classics in the Media
