Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002

Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Simon Goldhill. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]45.00 (US$65.00). 326 pages. ISBN 0-521-81228-3. The author, Reader in Greek Literature and Culture in Cambridge, is here concerned with 'critical moments when cultural identity has become inextricably linked with an idea of Greek and Greek becomes a bitterly contested area of social and intellectual activity'.

His concern is not just with the Greek language but with Greek culture, especially with the view that the Greeks' vanished civilisation was in some sense superior or ideal. He begins with the Renaissance and with the resistance to the renewed interest in Greek, with Erasmus and his favourite Greek writer, the satirist, Lucian, who wrote in the second century AD. The book then moves on to Strauss' opera, Elektra, because it showed the 'rupture between the nineteenth-century ideological appropriations of classical Greece' and the modernist assault as seen in the opera. The next cha pter then looks back at the role of Greek in the nineteenth century and its influence on English and American literature and learning. In the final chapter the author looks at Plutarch and what he tells us about 'Greekness'. The concern here is with the conflicts inherent in European and British civilisations which learning Greek produced. Rather unfortunately he has adopted the somewhat ludicrous American use of 'CE' for AD without enhancing his scholarship. (T.B.)