Classics Salon!

[cahn]

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Comments

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

I mean, don't all authors (especially ones from a hundred years ago) have their issues :) And like I said above, I remember really, really liking The King Must Die -- I probably should have read all of Renault then, but for some reason I wasn't in a place I could get any more of her books at the time?? Idk, it was a long time ago :)

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[selenak]

The King Must Die was my first Mary Renault novel as well. Her contemporary novels I didn’t read until about a decade ago when Narath did some great book club readings for both The Charioteer and Return to Night, and that was when I read a biography of Mary Renault as well (and wrote RPF fanfiction starring her and Alfred Hitchcock).

She does have her issues, which get more pronounced in both the historical and the contemporary novels the later in her life it gets (mother figures, female characters in general - her early novels have some good and more dimensional ones, but the later ones…), and (not just some ) elitism - but she writes really compelling, she’s incredibly good at creating characters both main and supporting and bringing them to life, and she is excellent at evoking a genuinely different time (based on the research available to her aat her time).

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

Excellent! I shall get started on her historical novels, then, and maybe the contemporary ones later. Ah, right, yes, I read that fic and enjoyed it very much!