The Classics

Mary Beard and John Henderson link a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur. Rather than focusing on the traditional retelling of the classics, the authors concentrate on one particular artifact-the friezes from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia-as a springboard to explore, define, and debate the relationship between our contemporary world and the ancient one.