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The Greeks and Romans are good company. For many of us, however, getting to know them well involves reading with a dictionary at hand and having access, physical or virtual, to various types of primary and secondary sources. But what if you’re going to the beach? Is it possible to spend time with the Greeks and Romans there? Manuscripts can’t leave the library, there’s no room in a tote bag for the Oxford Latin Dictionary, and sand is bad for hard-drives. A paperback translation or a few articles might serve your interests. But perhaps you have lighter fare in mind; after all, if you’re at the beach, you must be on vacation.
The books on this list are inspired by what we know, or wish we knew, about the Greeks and Romans. Most are works of imagination: historical fiction set in the ancient world, ancient myths retold, and contemporary stories that owe something to how the ancients saw their world and their place in it (or that reveal our obsession with that world). Many of the books bridge the temporal and cultural gap between “us and them” in compelling and surprising ways, sometimes filling in historical and literary gaps. For example, Ursula Le Guin lets Lavinia speak where Vergil didn’t, Zachary Mason has brought us “the lost books” of the Odyssey, and Jane Allison envisions the exile of Ovid, the “love artist,” as the story behind the composition and disappearance of his tragedy Medea.
The list includes many mystery series, a genre that has no end of practitioners and devoted readers, as well as several versions of the Trojan War myth. There are old favorites (Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian) and guilty pleasures (Donna Tartt’s The Secret History), a smattering of science fiction (Dan Simmons’s Olympos) and graphic novels (Frank Miller’s 300). Books by travel writers, historians, and biographers round out the list, among them Patricia Storace’s Dinner with Persephone, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus, and Neal Ascherson’s The Black Sea. This last book begins with words from Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography that capture the spirit in which the list is compiled: “I must admit, I can be perfectly happy reading…and equally happy pouring the sands through my fingers.”
Please note:
The description above is based on “Summer Beach Reading for Classicists,” which was originally published in Amphora 10.1, Summer 2012 by the Society for Classical Studies.
The list itself began as an in-house resource for the classics community at the University of Michigan. It was not intended for broad circulation. The material that it contains has been gathered and presented in an improvised and informal way, much like seasonal lists of recommended reading published by newspapers and magazines. There is no attempt here to be scholarly, exhaustive, or objective.