Essays Ancient and Modern

by Bernard Knox

Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's re arkable life, the chapters of Essays Ancient and Modern cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, KNox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Itlay find a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse―and opens it to read Virgil's denunciation of war. AN illiterate Greek bard composes a garbled Homeric song to celebrate the recent heroism of local partisans. A traveler heading north from modern Athens must choose between the Sacred way―or the NATO Road. Whether the subject is the role of women in ancient Athens of the novelists of modern Italy, the wit and erudition of Bernard Knox never fail to instruct and delight. Now in paperback, Essays Ancient and Modern takes its place alongside the distinguished essay's of Knox's Word and Action , a book whose title brings together, in the words of Anthony Hecht, "the double strand of his admirable career."

Genres: Essays

352 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1990

About the author

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox (Ph.D., Classics, Yale University; M.A. Harvard University; B.A., St. Johns College Cambridge, 1936) was a classicist, author, and critic. He taught at Yale until 1961, when he moved on to become the first director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. He was the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In 1939 he married American novelist Betty Baur, who wrote under the name Bianca van Orden. He served in the United States Army during World War II, making his way from private to captain between 1942 and 1945 in the European Theatre, and was awarded a Croix de Guerre a l'Ordre de l'Armée for parachuting behind Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces. Knox additional was the recipient of the 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (1990), and the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1990).