Greece and Asia Minor proved an irresistible lure to English visitors in the seventeenth century. These lands were criss-crossed by adventurers, merchants, diplomats and men of the cloth. In particular, John Covel (1638-1722) - chaplain to the Levant Company in the 1670s, later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge - was representative of a thoroughly eccentric band of Englishmen who saw Greece and the Ottoman world through the lens of classical history. Using a variety of sources, including Covel's largely unpublished diaries, Lucy Pollard shows that these curious travellers imported, alongside their copies of Pausanias and Strabo, a package of assumptions about the societies they discovered. Disparaging contemporary Greeks as unworthy successors to their classical ancestors allowed Englishmen to view themselves as the true inheritors of classical culture, even as - when opportunity arose - they removed antiquities from the sites they described. At the same time, they often admired the Turks, about whom they had fewer preconceptions. This is a major contribution to reception and post-Restoration ideas about antiquity.

"delightful, readable, and scholarly. The volume is profusely and well illustrated, each art example is clearly labelled and dated, and superb supplementary references for illustrations and supplementary suggestions for further reading are added to complete the study." Choice

The Eleusian mysteries, the Sanctuary of Apollo, the Theatre of Dionysus, the labyrinths of Knossos, the Delphic oracle---the book leads us to such sacred sites in the ancient way of spiritual pilgrimage. "The gods have not totally vacated the holy places," says Richard Geldard. "Any 'vacating' has to do with our own lack of awareness." He brings to life the mythology that shaped the brilliance of Greek architecture and art, integrating rare historical material with the most recent archeological data. The result is a specialty guidebook comprehensive enough to be the only one you pack, with commentary on: Major and lesser sites of the palace and temple cultures; Greek drama, philosophy, art, and sculpture; Sacred geometry and architecture; Gallery collections in three major museums. Whether you're an armchair or actual traveler, Traveler's Key opens access to the fabled wisdom enjoyed by pilgrims of old and to the living mythology that still has power to transform lives.

Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In this volume drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, major scholars take up basic topics in philosophy and science, offering an account of the extraordinary explosion of desire for knowledge in the classical Greek world.

The classical world has for centuries influenced and inspired the west -- its poetry and literature, art, architecture -- but what provoked the move from the west’s love-affair with classical Rome and its manifestation in the Renaissance, to its focus on the Hellenic world? The decisive shift in focus and taste from Rome to Greece in the eighteenth century began in the 17th century, when a succession of travellers -- mainly from France and England -- journeyed to Greece and what is now Turkey and rediscovered the Hellenic world. In the Footsteps of the Gods traces the ways in which the constantly changing ideal image of ancient Greece, its art and culture, inspired those who travelled there. With lively accounts of their adventurous journeys and vivid descriptions of what they saw, discovered, collected and published about the remains of ancient Greece, it reveals the extraordinary effects that these travellers’ account had on the poets and scholars of the west, who in turn were influential in creating the idea and ideal of Greece, which became such a powerful force in the arts and politics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the book is, in the words of Richard Stoneman, "a poet’s vision of Greece."

Twenty-eight illustrations are included."--Jacket.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.