Summary of Mary Beard's Confronting the Classics

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The paintings and sculptures at the Knossos museum were largely recreations of the early twentieth century AD. It was easy for Waugh, visiting soon after the restoration, to spot how little of the art was actually Minoan.
#2 Evans, the son of a wellknown antiquarian, was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in 1884. He developed the collection into a research resource for European archaeology, and oversaw its move in 1894 into large new premises behind the University Galleries in Beaumont Street.
#3 The Palace of Minos was a recreation of the Minoan palace, and it was extremely popular with tourists. It was controversial, however, and many people had doubts about how it was being restored.
#4 The paradox of Evans is that, while it is easy to ridicule the romantic version of Minoan culture he invented in concrete and paint, the excavations on site were hardheaded and extremely careful.

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Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669374701
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Mary Beard's Confronting the Classics
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The paintings and sculptures at the Knossos museum were largely recreations of the early twentieth century AD. It was easy for Waugh, visiting soon after the restoration, to spot how little of the art was actually Minoan.

#2

Evans, the son of a well-known antiquarian, was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in 1884. He developed the collection into a research resource for European archaeology, and oversaw its move in 1894 into large new premises behind the University Galleries in Beaumont Street.

#3

The Palace of Minos was a recreation of the Minoan palace, and it was extremely popular with tourists. It was controversial, however, and many people had doubts about how it was being restored.

#4

The paradox of Evans is that, while it is easy to ridicule the romantic version of Minoan culture he invented in concrete and paint, the excavations on site were hard-headed and extremely careful.

#5

The high quality of the work can be attributed to Evans, but he was not the only one who contributed to it. The problems he raised still set the agenda for discussion: what was the function of the palace at Knossos, and the others like it.

#6

Evans’s biography, which is centered on the work at Knossos, does not trade in any such subtleties or paradoxes. However, it is full of snide put-downs and innuendo.

#7

Evans was a half-brother of Arthur Evans, and he was convicted of committing an act in violation of public decency in 1924. He donated the site of Knossos to the British School at Athens, but his most conspicuous act of generosity was intended to cover up this conviction.

#8

The excavators of the past have a powerful hold over the future of the subject. The material they excavated has been destroyed, so we must rely on the probity of the archaeologists.

#9

The poems of Sappho, a Greek poet, were often interpreted as evidence of her unblemished character. But in reality, they were just another example of the conservative classical scholars’ anxiety about Sappho’s apparent sexual preference for young women.

#10

The dominant ideology of the ancient world offered women no place in public discourse. The exclusion of women from politics and power was simply one side of that much greater disability: their lack of any right to be heard.

#11

Snyder points out that Sappho’s poetry is full of female language, such as her fondness for the natural world and her tendency to introspection. However, she misses the poet’s radical subversion of the male literary tradition.

#12

The ancient ideology of female silence was challenged in other ways as well. Women found a voice not just in writing, but also in religious ritual, prophecy, and oracular utterance.

#13

The author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, was a revolutionary who attempted to explain the history of his own times without referring to religious modes of explanation. His writing is often difficult to understand, and translation of his work gives a very poor idea of the original Greek.

#14

The famous slogan about the strong and the weak comes from the Athenian side of the argument, and its popularity owes much to the nice balance between the powerful doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must. But Thucydides wrote that the weak comply with what the powerful demand.

#15

Thucydides’s history is full of examples of how the words we use change their meaning over time. For example, acts that were previously considered bad were seen as good in the context of the Corcyra civil war, between a pro-Athenian democratic faction and a pro-Spartan oligarchic faction.

#16

The Peloponnesian War was not as disastrous for Athens as is commonly believed. The problem lay with the military personnel, who might have replaced the elderly Nicias as commanding officer.

#17

The question of authenticity is a major sticking point with regard to Thucydides’ speeches. Some see them as non-fictional, while others see them as integral to the historical accuracy of the book.

#18

Thucydides was a huge fan of Pericles, the leader of the Athenian war strategy, but he compared the two leaders’ strategies favorably. Cleon, the leader after Pericles, had many aggressive policies that were criticized by Thucydides. But it was Cleon’s policies that nearly won the war for Athens.

#19

The history of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War has been debated and researched for many years, and this book is rooted in the work of the 1960s and 1970s. It is not concerned with questions of history, but rather with how Thucydides constructed an image of historical objectivity within a late fifth-century setting.

#20

The author’s interpretation of the war is not a Thucydides for tomorrow. It goes back to many of the key Thucydidean issues of the last century, but it is not a Thucydides for tomorrow.

#21

The Romans were constantly dreaming of becoming Alexander the Great, and many actually did. Cicero, for example, was military governor of Cilicia in southern Turkey, and he scored a minor victory against some local insurgents.

#22

The ambivalence of Alexander’s Roman image is nicely captured in the well-known Alexander Mosaic, a masterpiece composed of literally millions of tiny tesserae that once decorated a floor in the House of the Faun, Pompeii’s grandest house. It has always been taken to be a Roman mosaic copy of an earlier Greek painting.

#23

The Battle of Issus was a much more complicated composition than it might seem. Alexander was charging in on horseback from the left, and had just impaled a Persian on his long spear. Meanwhile, Darius was facing across from the right, and was just about to flee the scene.

#24

The debate about Alexander’s Greek or Slavic identity has continued through the centuries. The Alexander Sarcophagus, which was found in Lebanon in the 1880s, depicts scenes from Alexander’s life and was made closer in date to his lifetime than any other detailed image of him.

#25

The debates about Alexander have not changed much over the past two millennia. He has remained a positive example of a great general, heroically leading his army to victory in increasingly distant terrain.

#26

The traditional questions about Alexander’s career are: what he was attempting to do, and how far we can admire his methods. The answers to these questions depend on whether we feel uneasy about his methods, or his aims.