The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics

Should the ancient Greeks - "the oldest dead white European males" - and their legacy have any relevance to the way we live now? So much of what the ancients were and did may now appear positively racist and sexist in this era of multiculturalism. Yet for all their flaws, the Greeks gave us Homer Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and Thucydides, to name a few. They invented much of what we now take for granted: the idea of the humanities, philosophy, the theatre, competitive athletics, political theory, rhetoric and oratory, biology, zoology and atomic theory. In this book, Bernard Knox raises questions that are of fundamental importance for our age.