Greek Fire is a profusely illustrated survey of what recent times have made of ancient Greece. Oliver Taplin, Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and prolific writer on the Greek theater, has here expanded his scripts for an English television series (unseen by me) into an autonomous volume.
Making clear that it was only in the eighteenth century that anything like an accurate Hellenic paideia entered the modern bloodstream—the Renaissance having been a recovery of Latin culture—Dr. Taplin is entertaining on the world of Flaxman, Winckelmann, Wedgwood, and Sir William Hamilton (the first great collector of so-called “Etruscan” vases), and on the neo-Hellenic architecture that took Europe from 1790 to 1830 and throve in Washington, D.C., until 1943 (the Jefferson Memorial). Much less is heard, though, of eighteenth-century literature: Pope’s Homer is dismissed as “the last glimmering of the Latinate Homer,” a view ready for demolition; Goethe and Holderlin get a sentence or so. One often, reading this book, looks back lovingly at Gilbert Highet’s calmly compendious, catholically curious Classical Tradition (1949), which now seems a product of another age.
For Dr. Taplin hastens throughout to his contemporary exempla (he proceeds by topic —myth, sex, war, etc). The timely theatrical adaptations of English poet Tony Harrison figure often in the book. Mr. Harrison’s adaptation of a Sophoclean satyr play “combined such incongruities as ancient Greek, ghetto blasters, papyrology, lager swilling, lyre playing and clog dancing”; his Oresteia rang with “native Yorkshire phonemes”; his as-yet-unproduced Lysistratawill