BACKING INTO THE FUTURE

Essays, articles, and reviews from the past few years by scholar and classicist Knox (The Oldest Dead White European Males, 1993, etc.). The ancients, Knox remarks, thought of themselves as looking into the past, which was visible, and as standing with their backs to the future, which was invisible for not yet existing. How this intriguing idea (people seem to have turned around sometime in the Middle Ages) manifests itself in the present volume may not be fully clear, although it's true that one does come away with an awakened sense of the past, if not always a highly excited one. Essays on Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Catullus, and Ovid—often the reviews of books on these figures—have less lift for the nonspecialist than they might have had at their first publication (in Grand Street, for example, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books). A speech made on the subject of democracy's first origins, however (``The Athenian Century''), is full both of fact and fascination, as is a review of I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates; but a long review, on the other hand, of an academic book on Plato and Aristotle (``How Should We Live'') is unremittingly demanding, and a long essay on Sophocles is touched by Lethe. These pieces, though, have different characters just as they had different origins, and an essay on T.E. Lawrence's Odyssey is filled with interest, as are essays on the present status of philology (constituting a grand call to arms for humanities teaching), on historical American views of Rome, and a lyrically celebratory review, from a classicist commanding the entire long tradition, of Derek Walcott's Omeros. Not all things to all readers, but a varied pasture for literate browsers.