An Intelligent Person's Guide to Classics (Intelligent Person's Guide Series)

Peter Jones argues in this book that it is the power, scope and intrinsic fascination of their ideas that makes the Greeks and Romans so important and influential. For over 2,000 years these ideas, many formulated by them (as far as we can tell) for the first time, have gripped western imagination and been instrumental in the way we think about the world. The book gives a succinct account of what is meant by the term 'Classics' and how knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans has been transmitted to us today, before launching out onto a wide-ranging selection of topics spanning the millennia which give some indication of the astonishing intellectual, political and literary achievements of the classical world. The book ends with a brief scream at those responsible for the education of our young today.