Book Review Love, Sex, and Tragedy

"Why study classics?" is such an open-ended question that to get 321 pages that actually stick to the point -- more or less -- is pretty impressive. That Simon Goldhill does that while providing a survey of the classics and its impact on history, laced with many fascinating facts and truly illustrative photos is quite a feat.

Love, Sex, and Tragedy, by Cambridge Classicist Simon Goldhill, answers the question "why study classics?" Instead of simply looking at the obvious historical periods, the Renaissance and the French and American revolutions, Goldhill covers the Reformation and modern history. The answer he gives is that we need to know the classics in order to understand where we come from. Goldhill takes the Oedipus myth and Freud's fascination with it as the perfect example of how important to us is our search for our origin: the myth, about mistaken ideas about our origins, takes us back to the classical Greek tragedian Sophocles and the Dionysian dramatic festival. Goldhill is not afraid to cover controversial areas like the Elgin marbles, the Greco-Roman homosexual practices, the contrast between modern ideas of pronography and ancient acceptance of nudity, the Greco-Roman drunken symposium component of the Jewish Passover Seder, and the problems of democracy. Without overstatement, Goldhill makes us look at our fascination with violent sports or televised warfare to see that we haven't progressed beyond the stimulated fans at gladiatorial events. Some parts of Goldhill's book seem less central to his thesis than others, he doesn't make all his points convincingly enough, and some parts are written with more loving detail, but Love, Sex, and Tragedy covers an immense amount of material in just over 300 pages, and does so in an introductory format.