Reviews for From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition

The average rating for From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-03 00:00:00 Chandy Clarke The W.H. Auden is the portion of this book likely to be of greatest general interest. The rest of Bowersock's volume is frequently too specialized and, viewed as a whole, disjointed. Dating from 1978 into 2007 and ranging from the popular''The New Republic''to the scholarly''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society', these seventeen pieces represent more the broad range of their author's interests than any particular, unifying theme beyond, perhaps, his belief that the classics and ancient history retain some enduring relevance. Two topics predominate: Gibbon and Cavafy. Indeed, the collection being divided into three sections by century, eighteenth through twentieth, Edward Gibbon alone runs virtually throughout. Bowersock argues and attempts to demonstrate that 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', despite its author's lack of German, poor Greek, limited sources, internal inconsistencies, plagiarisms, aristocratic bias, moralizing, presumptuousness and avoidance of original research or fact checking remains recognized as an unsurpassedly brilliant work of historical "imagination." Constantine Cavafy, the diasporic Greek poet and neo-pagan Christian, is more confined to three of the twentieth century essays. He serves as a bridge to "Auden and the Fall of Rome", which includes the poet's twice-rejected (written in 1966 at the request of 'Life Magazine', then rejected by both it and 'The Atlantic Monthly') "The Fall of Rome" and a lyric of the same name. Like Cavafy, a poet spiritually drawn more to the old world than the new, sexually drawn more to young men than women, Auden's essay represents an existential confrontation of the classical celebration of homoeroticism with the Christian aversion to corporeality. Both writers had felt such tension in their souls. Both saw the popular fusion of paganism and Christianity in late antiquity as constituting a home large enough to accommodate the breadth of their beings. This kind of questionable, yet provocatively plausible, argument runs throughout Auden's essay. He makes claims about Irenaeus and Augustine which are almost certainly false, but his very tendency to make large, controversial judgments makes his piece interesting in a manner that Bowersock's attention to demonstrable fact cannot. Auden's, like Gibbon's, may be a derivative and inferior history, but it also, at least in parts, is brilliant.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-29 00:00:00 David Thompson Bowersock has a lovely width of mind and a facility across fields, such that if you're a fan of Cavafy's historical poems, set in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world, you won't want to miss this historian's appreciation of them: he documents how scrupulous in scholarship Cavafy was, and understands them as poetry too. The other highlight for me was 'Gibbon's Historical Imagination', recommended for admirers of the Decline and Fall.