Fifty Key Classical Authors

The classical world of Greece and Rome furnished early written works in poetry, philosophy, mathematics, history, plays, and the natural sciences. By explaining the lives of FIFTY KEY CLASSICAL AUTHORS, this book gives the historical setting in which intertextuality had 1,000 years of allusion and the dynamics of appropriation to produce meanings which were not isolated but interactive. I would consider the authors of this book young, as the Notes at the end of the Introduction reveal that a book on Virgil by Otis which was published in 1964 was written "before either of the authors of this book were born." (p. xxi).Back in 1964, I was taking Latin in high school, but my high school only offered two years of Latin, so after tenth and eleventh grades, I gave it up. I avoided reading the great Greek plays studied by the honors students at the University of Michigan in 1965-66 by enrolling in the College of Engineering, which had its own English courses, in which ancient civilizations were not the key to what we were supposed to learn, though writing one paper about something that was supposed to be funny was as challenging as sticking to the factual approach for which technocrats would become famous, in the event they ever escaped being anonymous.Philosophy is much more aware of its origin in the Greek world, and Plato and Aristotle show up in this book, after the early poets, writers of the great tragedies, a historian, the comic Aristophanes, "the best of the writers of Old Comedy," (p. 84), a speechwriter who is called a logographer, and the versatile Xenophon, who even gets credit for writing "Socratic texts." (p. 103). Socrates was not a writer, so he is not discussed as a main character in FIFTY KEY CLASSICAL AUTHORS, but the index reveals that he was mentioned on 16 pages, similar to Suetonius, who is mentioned on 15 pages before having his own section on pages 365-70.The index is mainly names, with more people than places. Many names which appear in the text are not to be found in the index, especially names of two words. Though "the epic poet Silius Italicus" (p. 274) can be found in the index between Sicily and similes on page 420, modern names are listed under the last name, as in Shakespeare, William; Shelley, Mary; and Shelley, Percy. There is an Alphabetical List of Contents on pages viii-ix in which Julius Caesar appears between Aristotle and Callimachus, then Cassius Dio before Catullus. In the index, the first entry starting with a C is Calabria, and Julius Caesar shows up between Julia (daughter of Augustus) and Juno on page 417.There is no listing in the index for mathematics, but plenty for madness, manuscripts, marriage, Megalopolis, metaphor, metre, misogyny, mothers, Muses, and mutiny. Following a single entry for Rabelais, there are multiple pages for readers, reading, realism, reception, recognition, a single entry for recusatio, many for repetition, revenge and reversal of fortune/peripeteia, but only a few for