It's All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World
Touring the literature of ancient Greece, Higgins, formerly a Guardian journalist on the arts beat, revels in her mission to introduce Homer, among others. Wryly if candidly describing her treatment as a &#x201C;bluffer&#x2019;s guide,&#x201D; Higgins offers a companionable start on the monumental significance of the Greek classics, so if one can&#x2019;t tell Sappho from Sophocles, this is the place to start. Higgins begins, however, with The Iliad and The Odyssey and shuttles between them throughout the volume as she alights on the topics of the gods, mortality, morality, love, war, politics, science, and women&#x2014;the gamut of inquiry about human nature undertaken by the authors whose names resound through the ages, from Hesiod to Thucydides to Plato. Focused especially on the fifth century BCE, Higgins highlights the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War as the milieu of intellectual ferment in the Hellenic world and, in colloquial language, strives to inspire her audience to experience the pleasures Higgins does when she reads the classics. Populist, enthusiastic, and informed, Higgins can fan an ember of interest into a flame. --Gilbert Taylor