From Gibbon to Auden: essays on the classical tradition

Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo 8" - 9" tall. A fine and accessible reader in stellar scholarship for several decades; G.W. Bowersock has been one of our leading historians of the classical world, of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Here are collected 17 of his essays, each illustrating how the classical past and the classical tradition have been reflected in leading figures in Modern day, in art, literature, history and politics. Fine-looking, structurally sound hardcover, little discernible wear, bright interior, unmarked. Bright and shiny dust jacket, illustrated, little worn. From the personal library of the noted English historian of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, Professor Peter Morris Green, now of Iowa City, Iowa, 99 years old, nearly blind, but still working, in this case on a new translation and with annotations, of Herodotus, his favorite historian. From the publisher blurb, "The essays here range across three centuries, the eighteenth to the twentieth, and are divided chronologically. The great Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon is in large part the unifying force of this collection as he appears prominently in the first four essays, beginning with Bowersock's engaging introduction to the methods and genius behind The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's profound influence is revealed in subsequent essays on Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century scholar famous for his history of the Italian Renaissance but whose work on late antiquity is only now being fully appreciated; the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose annotations on Gibbon's Decline and Fall tell us much about his own historical poems; and finally W. H. Auden, whose poem and little-known essay "The Fall of Rome" were, in quirky ways, tributes to Gibbon." Volume contains scholarly apparatus in the form of, e.g., notes, index, and bibliography. ix [5], 4-240 pp.Member, I.O.B.A., C.B.A., and adherent to the highest ethical standards. Additional postage may be required for oversize or especially heavy volumes, and for sets.