The focus of this book -- its new perspective -- is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Twelve contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry to the end of the Roman empires in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. From the heights of Athens to the hellenistic Greek diaspora,...

Examines how the educations of America's first four presidents, and in particular their scholarly devotion to ancient Greek and Roman classics, informed the beliefs and ideals that shaped the nation's constitution and government.

"This collection of twenty-four essays exemplifies Daniel Mendelsohns wide-ranging critical interests in the Greek inheritance, film, literature, television, and the personal essay. As always his writing on these subjects is filtered through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity, in ways that are both surprising and illuminating. Some of the essays examine how we continue to look to the Greek past to understand even the most contemporary...