The contemporary study of classical antiquity is always hard pressed, both on and off campuses. Smartphones and social media war with literature and history. Continuing stagnant university enrollments, political correctness, a perennially tight job market, and new financial pressures on colleges crowd out and discourage formal study of the ancient world.

Classics needs all the friends it can get.

So it is ostensibly good news that the well-known screenwriter and octogenarian essayist Frederic Raphael offers Antiquity Matters to encourage and excite those uninitiated in the richness of the ancient world:

Antiquity Matters is more a montage than any kind of a textbook. If it serves the readers as a primer, in the sense of both a place to start from and what might cause an explosion of interest (even of exasperation), then it will not have been composed in vain. I should like to think that its value lies not least in all the signposts it offers to go this way or that, preferably both, or more, in search of intelligence and—why not?—entertainment.

Unfortunately for friends of Greece and Rome, Raphael’s “montage” may be a euphemism. The book’s introduction is largely a hagiographic account of Raphael’s own aristocratic education, sprinkled with references to who’s-who friends within transatlantic high culture. It serves as an early warning that what follows might not necessarily ignite “an explosion of interest” in the ancient world.

Raphael’s montage begins in mediis rebus and abruptly ends the same way.

The book