Being Greek

Henry Day: Up Country with Xenophon, 2 November 2006

The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Yale, 351 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 300 10403 0
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The Expedition of Cyrus 
by Xenophon, translated by Robin Waterfield.
Oxford, 231 pp., £8.99, September 2005, 0 19 282430 9
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Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age 
by Robin Waterfield.
Faber, 248 pp., £17.99, November 2006, 0 571 22383 4
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The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination 
by Tim Rood.
Duckworth, 272 pp., £12.99, August 2006, 0 7156 3571 9
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... third-person narration inevitably invite comparison with that other great classical war reporter, Julius Caesar. By the mid-19th century, this clarity had entrenched both Caesar and Xenophon as standard school texts. The Anabasis didn’t always endear itself to its readers, however. W.W. Tarn applied to Xenophon one ...

Did Harold really get it in the eye?

Patrick Wormald: The Normans, 3 June 2004

The Battle of Hastings, 1066 
by M.K. Lawson.
Tempus, 288 pp., £16.99, October 2003, 0 7524 1998 6
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The Normans: The History of a Dynasty 
by David Crouch.
Hambledon, 345 pp., £25, July 2002, 1 85285 387 5
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Domesday Book: A Complete Translation 
edited by Ann Williams and G.H. Martin.
Penguin, 1436 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 14 143994 7
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... scholar for whom it was a point of dogma that medieval armies rarely approached the totals led by Caesar or Moltke, his critics reduced the English line by rejigging the contours. The right flank that was exposed if the ridge was only partly defended was bent back at an angle to the main front, so as to exploit a gully. Closer examination of the site than ...

I am an irregular verb

Margaret Anne Doody: Laetitia Pilkington, 22 January 1998

Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington 
edited by A.C. Elias.
Georgia, 348497 pp., £84.95, May 1997, 0 8203 1719 5
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... a woman learns to put up with: For no sooner did the Doctor perceive that I knew Mark Antony from Julius Caesar, and Brutus from both, but he related a great Part of the Roman history to me, even from the first Punic War to the Death of Julius.    My Readers may venture to believe it was not new to me ... I have ...

How do I know?

M.F. Burnyeat, 4 November 1993

Testimony: A Philosophical Study 
by C.A.J. Coady.
Oxford, 315 pp., £40, April 1993, 0 19 824786 9
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... the senses’ extends the doubt to everything he has been taught or told by other people. That Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, for example, is not an opinion Descartes acquired by observing the event with his own senses; he got it by seeing or hearing the words of other people. The remarkable thing is that this preliminary statement about the ...

Ancient Greek Romances

Peter Parsons, 20 August 1981

... in 1534. Translations followed: French 1547, German and Spanish 1554, Italian 1556, English 1569. Julius Caesar Scaliger recommended the Ethiopian Story, alongside the Aeneid, as a model of epic construction; Tasso drew on its heroine for his Clorinda. Rabelais made Pan-tagruel drowse over Heliodorus. Cervantes ‘dared to compete’ with Heliodorus in ...

Hawkesbiz

Frank Kermode, 11 February 1993

Meaning by Shakespeare 
by Terence Hawkes.
Routledge, 173 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 415 07450 9
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Shakespeare’s Professional Career 
by Peter Thomson.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £24.95, September 1992, 0 521 35128 6
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Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales 
by Leah Scragg.
Longman, 201 pp., £24, October 1992, 0 582 07071 6
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Reading Shakespeare’s Characters 
by Christy Desmet.
Massachusetts, 215 pp., £22.50, December 1992, 0 87023 807 8
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Bit Parts in Shakespeare’s Plays 
by Molly Mahood.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £35, January 1993, 0 521 41612 4
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... The body of the book is devoted to studies of the bit parts in particular plays – Richard III, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra (45 small speaking parts) and The Tempest (six). All this is done with gusto, and offers perceptions any director might benefit by. Mahood tells the joke about the small-part actor who, when ...

Fake it till you make it

Anthony Grafton: Indexing, 23 September 2021

Index, A History of the 
by Dennis Duncan.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 37423 8
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... book designed to be filled in by users under Foxe’s various headings. One such user, Sir Julius Caesar, crammed his copy so full of notes and excerpts that the British Library classifies it as a manuscript. In his preface to the first edition, Foxe made clear that he knew he was riding a wave. He worked for Johannes Oporinus, the Basel printer ...

Father-Daughter Problems

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Bad Daughters, 8 May 2008

The Lodger: Shakespeare in Silver Street 
by Charles Nicholl.
Allen Lane, 378 pp., £20, November 2007, 978 0 7139 9890 0
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... in the histories, and all those worryingly ghostly patriarchs looming over the tragedies – Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet, Banquo – you never get very far from paternity in the Shakespeare canon. Nor is fatherhood presented solely as a matter between father and son, in the manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near ...

New Model Criticism

Colin Burrow: Writing Under Cromwell, 19 June 2008

Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham 
by Blair Worden.
Oxford, 458 pp., December 2007, 978 0 19 923081 5
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... out the pesky Irish or the even peskier Presbyterians? Or would he turn out to be Britain’s Julius Caesar, the republican destroyer of the republic? Milton and Marvell also shared some of Nedham’s vocabulary, as Worden illustrates by citing dozens of parallels, ranging from the convincing, through the plausible, to some which look like the ...

Into Thin Air

Marina Warner: Science at the Séances, 3 October 2002

The Invention of Telepathy 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Oxford, 334 pp., £35, June 2002, 0 19 924962 8
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... Freud, dreams were in the main proleptic, prophetic; they also, as we know from Homer and from Julius Caesar, contained secret knowledge of what had transpired but was still hidden from view: they were not fantastic, nor were they subjective. Classical and medieval ghosts enflesh – so to speak – concealed knowledge; it is easy to see why ghosts ...

Germans don’t get toothache

Ange Mlinko: Krasznahorkai’s Antimatter, 20 March 2025

Herscht 07769 
by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet.
Tuskar Rock, 406 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80081 505 6
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... missing. Could these events be related?Among the dark omens that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, it’s said, was wolves running amok through the Forum. A group that campaigns for the conservation of wolves comes to lecture the townspeople but encounters some resistance: ‘The fear of wolves is as old as humanity itself.’ Menacing ...

The Age of Detesting Trump

David Bromwich, 13 July 2017

... in the likeness of Trump. Until 18 June the Public Theater in New York was performing a version of Julius Caesar in which Caesar was made to look and gesticulate like Trump. Of course it trashed the play, since you render the hesitation of Brutus unintelligible if Caesar becomes the ...

What the Romans did

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 5 February 1987

English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman 
by C.O. Brink.
James Clark, 243 pp., £11.95, February 1986, 0 227 67872 9
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Latin Poets and Roman Life 
by Jasper Griffin.
Duckworth, 226 pp., £24, January 1986, 0 7156 1970 5
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The Mirror of Myth: Classical Themes and Variations 
by Jasper Griffin.
Faber, 144 pp., £15, February 1986, 0 571 13805 5
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... pursuit of pleasure, after the manner of the Hellenistic princes such as Demetrius Poliorcetes. Julius Caesar himself was a notable example of the type, which survived into the Imperial period in the guise of men like Otho and Petronius. Even Augustus, at least during the early part of his career, seems not to have been without a taste for some of the ...

Stage Emperor

James Davidson, 28 April 1994

Reflections of Nero: Culture, History and Representation 
edited by Jás Elsner and Jamie Masters.
Duckworth, 239 pp., £35, January 1994, 0 7156 2479 2
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... that contained a profound truth about the new regime. For after witnessing the assassination of Julius Caesar, Augustus had been very careful to avoid creating the institutions of a monarchy, cobbling together for himself a set of quasi-republican titles and extraordinary prerogatives, while leaving the core of the office entirely hollow and pretending ...

Transparent Criticism

Anne Barton, 21 June 1984

A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Methuen, 209 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 416 31780 4
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... obscure, Nuttall relies almost entirely upon Shakespeare, and then upon only a handful of plays: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Henry IV. This Shakespeare criticism, moreover, is concentrated in the third of the book’s four chapters: ‘Shakespeare’s Imitation of the World’. Even there, it seems to exist less for ...