Sue’s Reviews > Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome: Ancient Ideas for Modern Times > Status Update

A fundamental paradox confronts readers of Tacitus. He writes from the heart of Rome's monarchic system of government yet analyses, from the perspective of a republican and a senator, that system's corruption. (loc 2217)

re: Horace: "Although the poet gradually moved from the periphery to the centre of the Roman state (becoming ultimately a kind of poet laureate for the new order), he never achieved high social standing nor complete economic and political autonomy." In fact, Horace's father had once been a slave and Horace himself backed Brutus and Cassius against Antony and Octavian. At least he lived!

"It is not Cicero's political ineptitude, flaws and failings, then that still catch our imagination and encourage political action. Rather it is this inspirational ethical lesson on how to be the best citizen delivered by a man who died trying to become one. Cicero's life..works.. death have..taken on a powerful..symbolic significance..He lives and dies for the principle of 'the rule of law against the rule of force'

Now becoming more acquainted with Cicero. Continuing to learn..

Now into Julius Caesar. Actually quite interesting. It seems I know a little about each of these writers, some more than others, but not a lot about any. Caesar is probably the one I know the best...thanks to Shakespeare and high school Latin.

finished Herodotus, on to Thucydides

Re Sappho: "...more likely it was simply her poems, and the sensuality they evoked, that came to belong in those parties, with men happy to sing them lustily, even if many of them had been written initially for performance in all-female gatherings." "Her same-sex desire is not just an alternative counterpart of the heterosexual love of the time: there is less thought of dominance, the parties are more equal..."

"texts of the ancient world can still speak, not just to us, but with us, and in a range..ways. They still matter, and what they talk about can still be fresh (whether empire, masculinity, nature, urbanity, madness, rationality, religious commitment and disbelief, family and friendship, desire, or death). The voices of ancient Greece and Rome can profoundly affect the individual lives of..those who converse with them