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The Bad Boy of Athens
‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.’ Sebastian Barry
Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ‘our most irresistible literary critic’ (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn – a classicist by training – uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates.
There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer’s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ‘bad boy of Athens’) about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho’s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil’s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author’s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer.
In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today’s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2020
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262 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Mendelsohn
46 books432 followersDaniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, and, most recently, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 28, 2020
The Greekling
Daniel Mendelsohn is an outstanding critic, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He is a trained classicist and is obsessed with all things Greek, including Greek love, if you follow. He is inevitably fascinated by gay characters, writers, performers, etc and these feature strongly in this wonderful collection of critical pieces. Mendelsohn is a pleasure to read; he wears his obvious erudition lightly and has no problem tying the past to the present, from Euripides to Sansa Stark. His essays are always playful, insightful and incisive. I learned a great deal just reading these pieces (some familiar from NYRB) and I urge you to do so.
He saves his most revealing for last - American Boy - which is an autobiographical account of his pen pal relationship with Mary Renault, a writer of gay historical fiction (a lesbian herself), with her Alexander the Great trilogy and other works. These made Mendelsohn a writer and lead to his self recognition as a gay man at a pretty tender age. Mendelsohn is an outstanding critic, kind, precise, and forensic. I plan to read his just published book of further essays.
I listened to this on British Audible - it was great, except the narrator spoke in a peculiar accent and mispronounced many common words. His performance was good but slightly unsettling as a result.
Daniel Mendelsohn is an outstanding critic, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He is a trained classicist and is obsessed with all things Greek, including Greek love, if you follow. He is inevitably fascinated by gay characters, writers, performers, etc and these feature strongly in this wonderful collection of critical pieces. Mendelsohn is a pleasure to read; he wears his obvious erudition lightly and has no problem tying the past to the present, from Euripides to Sansa Stark. His essays are always playful, insightful and incisive. I learned a great deal just reading these pieces (some familiar from NYRB) and I urge you to do so.
He saves his most revealing for last - American Boy - which is an autobiographical account of his pen pal relationship with Mary Renault, a writer of gay historical fiction (a lesbian herself), with her Alexander the Great trilogy and other works. These made Mendelsohn a writer and lead to his self recognition as a gay man at a pretty tender age. Mendelsohn is an outstanding critic, kind, precise, and forensic. I plan to read his just published book of further essays.
I listened to this on British Audible - it was great, except the narrator spoke in a peculiar accent and mispronounced many common words. His performance was good but slightly unsettling as a result.
March 29, 2021
A fascinating series of reviews that are more critical analysis than simply reviews, with wide-ranging, academic input into ancient and modern classics and popular culture, all very engagingly written without any pretentious jargon. I particularly liked the chapters on Medea, the Aeneid, Game of Thrones (though I wonder how he would feel about its latest series), A Streetcar Named Desire (which I don't know as a play but the article was so interesting even so) and Patrick Leigh Fermor, whom I am now reading myself. The final chapter about Mendelsohn's own relationship to Mary Renault I found very moving. I highly recommend this book.
April 27, 2020
I read the book after attending the book tour in UK, which I greatly enjoyed, and the book too was a good, satisfying read. I was not at all surprised by the tone of his written word -- it very organically continued the themes and thoughts and manner of expression we heard at the lecture: fondness for classics through a personal lens of queerness (Sappho! Wilde! Renault! Queer interest and camaraderie in our year of our lord uhh. umpteen BC :P)
I had my reservations about the works of classics (and let’s be real, the cult movies) he would reference, and my own ability to enjoy his gushing about the rhyme and meter in Latin verse, but Mendehlson knew how to handle it, with enough detail to feel like you’ve gotten to know more about the original work, and in a relatable, approachable way that makes you connect if not to them, but at least to why people care about them.
The most touching and personal story was also the last one. He mentioned his correspondence as a young boy with Mary Renault in the lecture, and briefly, in an opening essay. Put at the very end of the book, after many essays lovingly talking about classics, the story about his friendship with Mary Renault comes again and in full, and resonates a lot. I can only imagine how it must have been, to actually write and hear back from an author whose books you admire so much, but it resonates anyway, because to me, the core behind tectonic, life-changing encounters with writers is through their words anyway. Being myself, I am easily emotional on the subject. If you are too, well, you might enjoy the book as well.
I had my reservations about the works of classics (and let’s be real, the cult movies) he would reference, and my own ability to enjoy his gushing about the rhyme and meter in Latin verse, but Mendehlson knew how to handle it, with enough detail to feel like you’ve gotten to know more about the original work, and in a relatable, approachable way that makes you connect if not to them, but at least to why people care about them.
The most touching and personal story was also the last one. He mentioned his correspondence as a young boy with Mary Renault in the lecture, and briefly, in an opening essay. Put at the very end of the book, after many essays lovingly talking about classics, the story about his friendship with Mary Renault comes again and in full, and resonates a lot. I can only imagine how it must have been, to actually write and hear back from an author whose books you admire so much, but it resonates anyway, because to me, the core behind tectonic, life-changing encounters with writers is through their words anyway. Being myself, I am easily emotional on the subject. If you are too, well, you might enjoy the book as well.
June 12, 2020
this book made me smart
January 11, 2021
As we have seen with the last anthology I plodded through (I don't know why I did this to myself not once but twice in a row), mismatched collections often give me trouble. That's not always true: there are anthologies and collections which have blown me away but they are few and far between. Thankfully this effort from Mendelsohn is stronger than the one from Naffis-Sahely; it was shaping up to be a tough January.
Mendelsohn's book doesn't live up to the way it sells itself. There is relatively little about the classics, and even less erudite dot-connecting to surface the ways in which modern media is built on classical bones, which the title rather suggests is the point of the collection. Instead we get a series of long (and highly intelligent) meditations on the reading of various works, particularly the way that different characters have been and can be interpreted into film and theatre.
Those essays, although they make up the bulk of the book, are not Mendelsohn's strongest work. Here and there he diverges from both classics and self-conscious criticism into reflections on, I suppose, modern media civilisation. Positioned as he is: a highly intelligent and thoughtful gay man, now conversant with twenty-first century media technology but born and raised in an era when homosexuality was a quite different proposition, Mendelsohn is a superb pair of eyes through which to regard the modernity of Big Tech and the Age of Attention. His best essays mostly appear in the later part of the book, and reflect on precisely those concerns: a memorable line considers Karl Ove Knausgaard's comically overwrought and self-interested My Struggle:
Later, and once again in an aside from the relatively dry central thrust of his book, Mendelsohn concisely diagnoses a malaise in modern discourse: "in a culture where victimhood has become a claim to status..." and expertly exposes the heart of that discourse as "whether the thing that sets you apart ought to define you."
These are diamonds in the rough. Mendelsohn's collection is largely dry, and no doubt of great interest to avid readers of literary-theatre criticism. It is less interesting, regrettably, to those expecting some explication of the strands of intertextual conversation binding modern storytelling to the tales of our much-touted ancestor civilisation. Despite Mendelsohn's subtitle the Greek roots of Game of Thrones still elude me.
Mendelsohn's book doesn't live up to the way it sells itself. There is relatively little about the classics, and even less erudite dot-connecting to surface the ways in which modern media is built on classical bones, which the title rather suggests is the point of the collection. Instead we get a series of long (and highly intelligent) meditations on the reading of various works, particularly the way that different characters have been and can be interpreted into film and theatre.
Those essays, although they make up the bulk of the book, are not Mendelsohn's strongest work. Here and there he diverges from both classics and self-conscious criticism into reflections on, I suppose, modern media civilisation. Positioned as he is: a highly intelligent and thoughtful gay man, now conversant with twenty-first century media technology but born and raised in an era when homosexuality was a quite different proposition, Mendelsohn is a superb pair of eyes through which to regard the modernity of Big Tech and the Age of Attention. His best essays mostly appear in the later part of the book, and reflect on precisely those concerns: a memorable line considers Karl Ove Knausgaard's comically overwrought and self-interested My Struggle:
Knausgaard's creation, for all its vastness... reduces the entire world to the size of the author. This is happening everywhere now... the internet and social media, by forcing us endlessly to perform our own lives, threaten to trivialise the very notion of selfhood... What work more deserves to become the new great classic of the age of the blog?
Later, and once again in an aside from the relatively dry central thrust of his book, Mendelsohn concisely diagnoses a malaise in modern discourse: "in a culture where victimhood has become a claim to status..." and expertly exposes the heart of that discourse as "whether the thing that sets you apart ought to define you."
These are diamonds in the rough. Mendelsohn's collection is largely dry, and no doubt of great interest to avid readers of literary-theatre criticism. It is less interesting, regrettably, to those expecting some explication of the strands of intertextual conversation binding modern storytelling to the tales of our much-touted ancestor civilisation. Despite Mendelsohn's subtitle the Greek roots of Game of Thrones still elude me.
August 19, 2024
I've reading this brilliant collection of essays over several months, dipping in for half an hour or so of intellectual delight. I think I could read Mendelsohn on any topic (except perhaps his personal life) and be fully engaged by it.
He's a classical scholar and also actively engaged in contemporary culture - many of these pieces first appeared as book, theatre or film reviews in The New York Review of books and the New Yorker. Who else could put Ted Hughes, Alcestis and the ghost of Sylvia Plath together and make it witty and illuminating? Or begin a 2018 review of Knausgard's 6 volume My Struggle: Book 1 with
'Which would prevail - Scandinavian high literature or Meghan Markle?
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of My Struggle: Book 1 and all of Suits'. I couldn't help feeling that he found Suits more entertaining.
One of my favourite essays is the title piece, The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The Bad Boy is Euripides and the stimulus for the essay is two recent productions of Medea, both of which he reviews from his deep knowledge base of the ancient Greek language and the play itself, and finds them both wanting in their interpretations.
As he writes about Medea, he teases out what it was that made her so horrifying to her (male) Greek audiences, and that leads him into what was expected of women in that society. Women don't feature as actors in Greek myth, the heroes are men who pursue and are waited on by them.
Medea was, and is, so disturbing, Mendelsohn writes, because she is strong, wilful, energetic, seeks revenge and kills. Like a man.
His last piece is autobiographical, revolving around his teenage realisation that he was gay and his relationship by correspondence with Mary Renault, whose novels set in Ancient Greece triggered both his love of the classics and his discovery that he wasn't the only boy who was attracted to other boys.
All in all, it's a fascinating collection, one I'll come back to.
He's a classical scholar and also actively engaged in contemporary culture - many of these pieces first appeared as book, theatre or film reviews in The New York Review of books and the New Yorker. Who else could put Ted Hughes, Alcestis and the ghost of Sylvia Plath together and make it witty and illuminating? Or begin a 2018 review of Knausgard's 6 volume My Struggle: Book 1 with
'Which would prevail - Scandinavian high literature or Meghan Markle?
This is the question that dogged me between May and August of this year, during which I devoted myself to two cultural undertakings: reading all of My Struggle: Book 1 and all of Suits'. I couldn't help feeling that he found Suits more entertaining.
One of my favourite essays is the title piece, The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The Bad Boy is Euripides and the stimulus for the essay is two recent productions of Medea, both of which he reviews from his deep knowledge base of the ancient Greek language and the play itself, and finds them both wanting in their interpretations.
As he writes about Medea, he teases out what it was that made her so horrifying to her (male) Greek audiences, and that leads him into what was expected of women in that society. Women don't feature as actors in Greek myth, the heroes are men who pursue and are waited on by them.
Medea was, and is, so disturbing, Mendelsohn writes, because she is strong, wilful, energetic, seeks revenge and kills. Like a man.
His last piece is autobiographical, revolving around his teenage realisation that he was gay and his relationship by correspondence with Mary Renault, whose novels set in Ancient Greece triggered both his love of the classics and his discovery that he wasn't the only boy who was attracted to other boys.
All in all, it's a fascinating collection, one I'll come back to.
April 22, 2025
I enjoyed most of the essays in this book, even those I had read before--in one case, especially because I had read it before. Had that essay, "An American Boy", been placed in the middle and replaced at the end with one from the handful that really didn't strike a chord with me, my rating might be different.
That concluding essay, "An American Boy" really hit home for me, perhaps because of the difference of our experience and he similarities of our temperaments (Daniel Mendelsohn and myself) and our passions. In his adolescence, he had written to a writer whose work had moved him. And Mary Renault wrote back, their correspondence, helping him come out as a gay man and find his path as a writer.
J.R.R. Tolkien was not around to write back when I first discovered Lord of the Rings. (No other writer of fantasy--or any genre for that matter--moved me as Tolkien had.) it is that difference between the one Daniel and the other that made that last essay so compelling to this Daniel the reader. How he related a tale of the kind of correspondence I used to dream about.
The essay moved me in so many ways, particularly the second time reading it, knowing what was coming, knowing the origin of the title.
As I read, part of me wondered what might have been had I had such a correspondence. Another part delighted in the smooth and clear writing, the care Daniel the essayist, critic, and teacher took to tell of his relationship with the celebrated writer of historical fiction. How the books struck him in his adolescence, a teen knowing what he was, but not knowing how to express. How he struck up a correspondence with her. How he treasured what she gave him. It was a gift. And his daring to share his anxieties about how she read his missives.
Their correspondence gained greater meaning when one of Renault's friends reached out to him in the first decade of this century, allowing him to see the impression he had made on the writer. He traveled to South Africa to meet that friend and the survivors of Mary Renault's circle. He become philosophic about the experience, his reflections infused with an undercurrent of gratitude.
It is that sense that made the reading of that essay so meaningful to someone with a temperament so similar to the writer's, but with experiences so different.
That essay reminded me what we read. And why we write.
And should I find it in another anthology of Mendelsohn's prose, I will read it again with alacrity.
That's just one essay in this collection. There are so many other good ones, but the anthology concluded with that American boy. And that is where my mind is right now.
Just read the book, particularly if you love stories of the classical world. It is well worth your time.
That concluding essay, "An American Boy" really hit home for me, perhaps because of the difference of our experience and he similarities of our temperaments (Daniel Mendelsohn and myself) and our passions. In his adolescence, he had written to a writer whose work had moved him. And Mary Renault wrote back, their correspondence, helping him come out as a gay man and find his path as a writer.
J.R.R. Tolkien was not around to write back when I first discovered Lord of the Rings. (No other writer of fantasy--or any genre for that matter--moved me as Tolkien had.) it is that difference between the one Daniel and the other that made that last essay so compelling to this Daniel the reader. How he related a tale of the kind of correspondence I used to dream about.
The essay moved me in so many ways, particularly the second time reading it, knowing what was coming, knowing the origin of the title.
As I read, part of me wondered what might have been had I had such a correspondence. Another part delighted in the smooth and clear writing, the care Daniel the essayist, critic, and teacher took to tell of his relationship with the celebrated writer of historical fiction. How the books struck him in his adolescence, a teen knowing what he was, but not knowing how to express. How he struck up a correspondence with her. How he treasured what she gave him. It was a gift. And his daring to share his anxieties about how she read his missives.
Their correspondence gained greater meaning when one of Renault's friends reached out to him in the first decade of this century, allowing him to see the impression he had made on the writer. He traveled to South Africa to meet that friend and the survivors of Mary Renault's circle. He become philosophic about the experience, his reflections infused with an undercurrent of gratitude.
It is that sense that made the reading of that essay so meaningful to someone with a temperament so similar to the writer's, but with experiences so different.
That essay reminded me what we read. And why we write.
And should I find it in another anthology of Mendelsohn's prose, I will read it again with alacrity.
That's just one essay in this collection. There are so many other good ones, but the anthology concluded with that American boy. And that is where my mind is right now.
Just read the book, particularly if you love stories of the classical world. It is well worth your time.
August 30, 2025
A collection of essays, most originally written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, that draw connections between classical antiquity and contemporary culture. Mendelsohn moves fluidly between Greek tragedy, modern literature, and film, showing how ancient themes continue to shape the way we tell stories and understand ourselves.
I picked up the book mainly for the essay “Not an Ideal Husband: Ted Hughes’ Alcestis and the Ghost of Sylvia Plath,” which explores Hughes’ translation of Alcestis through the lens of his relationship with Plath. But the collection as a whole offers a wide-ranging and insightful meditation on how the classics still resonate today, whether in unexpected corners of popular culture or in the lives of modern writers
I picked up the book mainly for the essay “Not an Ideal Husband: Ted Hughes’ Alcestis and the Ghost of Sylvia Plath,” which explores Hughes’ translation of Alcestis through the lens of his relationship with Plath. But the collection as a whole offers a wide-ranging and insightful meditation on how the classics still resonate today, whether in unexpected corners of popular culture or in the lives of modern writers
October 2, 2021
At first I'm convinced Mendelsohn writes crisply and brilliantly on a range of themes, and I'm in awe of his mental dexterity! For me, however, the subject themes are often too far removed from my own field of knowledge to give me a meaningful experience. It's first when Susan Sontag and Karl Ove Knausgård appears that I can throw my own opinions and feelings into the mix. Interestingly this is also when Mendelsohns writing and interpretations seem to be at their weakest.
I suspect I confuse my lack of knowledge with his brilliance in some cases, but I was certainly inspired to seek out and learn more about many themes discussed in this book.
I suspect I confuse my lack of knowledge with his brilliance in some cases, but I was certainly inspired to seek out and learn more about many themes discussed in this book.
November 13, 2024
Daniel Mendelsohn’s mind is a wonderland, and I really enjoyed how the articles build pathways between modernity and antiquity and all the petty drummings, the sighs and signals of being human. I loved how delightfully acerbic the review of A Little Life was, as I share his befuddlement at the adulation that book has received. The collection has a fantastic way of twining the microscopic and the grandiose. To control and modulate scope so artfully is truly the greatest accomplishment of the volume.
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August 31, 2021Great variety of articles and points of cultural interest.
December 29, 2021
witty nendelsohn strikes back
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July 31, 20258 out of 10
January 18, 2020
A book specially for all lovers of the Classics. Abounding with literary references, it is a treat for all those who were once students of the various books and authors that are discussed in this collection of essays.
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June 21, 2022Really insightful and fascinating, stuck with me a long time afterwards. Touching towards the end.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews