The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome, 150 BC–400 AD, by Charles Freeman (Pegasus): All roads lead to Rome, but it was expansion by sea that turned the fledgling Italian state into a Mediterranean empire. And when it came to the Aegean, the currents of influence ran both ways: “captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror,” as Horace put it, “and brought the arts to rustic Latium.” The proud Greeks tended to look down on Roman arts and letters, but they readily availed themselves of Roman engineering and military protection; the sums dispensed on Greek tutors and philosophers, meanwhile, by hellenizing Roman elites indicate the esteem in which the “savage conqueror” held that more ancient culture. (For their part, many Greek elites didn’t know a lick of Latin.) Greeks under Rome therefore had a foot in two camps: the bygone glories of Homer and Aeschylus, Plato and Aristotle, and the strange, increasingly universal rule of a culture whose highest art, as Virgil said, was “to pacify, to impose the rule of law, to spare the conquered, battle down the proud.” In his lively and encompassing new survey, the historian Charles Freeman details how these “children of Athena” carried the intellectual traditions of old into the age of Rome and beyond. —RE
Connecting Worlds: Artists & Travel, edited by Anita Viola Sganzerla & Stephanie Buck (Paul Holberton Publishing): Given the ease of both physical and “virtual” travel these days, one might lose sight of just what an undertaking it was in centuries past to leave one’s home and set out for fields abroad. And yet the enterprising still managed to get about, as is richly attested by Connecting Worlds: Artists & Travel, the catalogue to an exhibition that closed at Dresden’s Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in October. In this book we find, as might be expected, some of Albrecht Dürer’s Italian sheets, but also Hans Cranach’s sketches of monkeys as well as Peter Paul Rubens’s study of the Farnese Hercules. Pace Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, who maintained that “abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends,” artists have found travel a great boon to their practice, as this book handsomely demonstrates. —BR
The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts, by Christopher de Hamel (Penguin Press): The men and women charged throughout history with preserving medieval manuscripts have contended with more than a thousand years of human folly: countless manuscripts were looted and destroyed by Viking raiders; a millennium later, countless more were ruined by vandals of another kind when French revolutionaries set ablaze their nation’s medieval libraries. Others were lost by less malicious actors, as when a tipsy eleventh-century monk carrying a case of illuminated vellum fell through a hole in the London Bridge. Thus, the few thousand manuscripts extant represent a tiny portion of the total number created—but in retrospect, it’s a miracle any survived. That they did is thanks to the efforts of an eclectic group of saints, forgers, nobles, and collectors examined by Christopher de Hamel in The Manuscripts Club, now out from Penguin. De Hamel gives a detailed look into the erratic history of manuscript preservation, and along the way shows these objects to be indispensable to the West’s patrimony. —LL
Georgian Classical Music of the XX–XXI Centuries, hosted by Eteri Andjaparidze, at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (December 14): When empires recede, they leave strange detritus behind; consider the aqueducts and amphitheaters of Roman Britain and Gaul, or the nuclear assets scattered across the former Soviet Union. When Georgia gained its independence from Russia in 1918, the fledgling democracy inherited a world-class opera house built in a dazzling Moorish revival style. Though the Red Army invasion of 1921 cast a shadow, for several years a native school of classical composition flowered on this stage. The remarkable work of these patriotic yet cosmopolitan-minded composers—including Meliton Balanchivadze, George Balanchine’s father—deserves to be better known in the West. The pianist Eteri Andjaparidze, a virtuoso born in Soviet Georgia who has made her home in New York for the last few decades, will host an ensemble concert this Thursday at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, celebrating that brief window of creative exuberance as well as Georgian composers and performers active in Tbilisi and America today. —IS
By the Editors:
“The Prophet of Imprudence”
James Panero, Russell Kirk Center
Dispatch:
“Seasonal Bach,” by Jay Nordlinger. On the Christmas Oratorio at Carnegie Hall.
From the Archives:
“The Other Mahler,” by Samuel Lipman (November 1983). A review of Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius by Karen Monson.