Description: Some 500 articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of the rich legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science. Accompanied by an extensive selection of illustrations, this guide illuminates the vitality of the Classical tradition that still exists.
Brief description: Salvatore Settis is Professor Emeritus of the History of Classical Art and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and a former Director of the Getty Museum.
Review Quotes: Over a thousand pages in length, with some five hundred articles surveying the survival, transmission, and reception of the cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity, The Classical Tradition is a low-cost Wunderkammer, a vast cabinet of curiosities... The Classical Tradition should rightly evoke...gratitude. This is a book whose long, learned, and witty essay on Rome could stand alone as a surprisingly comprehensive guide to that city's ancient relics, but that also has time for entries on Armenian Hellenism, Hunayn ibn-Ishaāq, and Gandhara; carpe diem, deus ex machina, and the translatio imperii; the Society of Dilettanti, the Grand Tour, and Fascism. It is possible to get pleasantly lost in these pages, as in the internal courtyards of Pompeii, and not emerge for hours.--Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Leo Koerner "New York Review of Books" (2/21/2013 12:00:00 AM)