The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones
‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told. ’ Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ‘our most irresistible literary critic’ (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn – a classicist by training – uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer’s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ‘bad boy of Athens’) about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho’s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil’s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author’s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today’s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Daniel Mendelsohn 2019
Cover image © Shutterstock, wings by Jo Walker
Daniel Mendelsohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007545155
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007545162
Version: 2019-05-09
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Contents
6 Preface
7 The Robots Are Winning!
8 Girl, Interrupted
9 Not an Ideal Husband
10 The Bad Boy of Athens
11 Alexander, the Movie!
12 The Strange Music of Horace
13 Epic Fail?
14 The Women and the Thrones
15 Unsinkable
16 Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf
17 White or Grey?
18 The Two Oscar Wildes
19 The Tale of Two Housmans
20 Bitter-Sweet
21 The Collector
22 The End of the Road
23 I, Knausgaard
24 A Lot of Pain
25 The American Boy
26 Acknowledgements
27 Also by Daniel Mendelsohn
28 About the Author
29 About the Publisher
LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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In the autumn of 1990, when I was thirty years old and halfway through my doctoral thesis on Greek tragedy, I started submitting book and film reviews to various magazines and newspapers, had a few accepted, and within a year had decided to leave academia and try my hand at being a full-time writer.
On hearing of my plans, my father, a taciturn mathematician who, I knew, had abandoned his own PhD thesis many years earlier, urged me with uncommon heat to finish my degree. ‘Just in case the writing thing doesn’t work out!’ he grumbled. Mostly to placate him and my mother – I’d already stretched my parents’ patience, after all, to say nothing of their resources, by studying Greek as an undergraduate and then pursuing the graduate degree – I said yes. I finished the thesis (about the role of women in two obscure and rather lumpy plays by Euripides) in 1994, took my degree, and within a week of the graduation ceremony I’d moved to a one-room apartment in New York City and started freelancing full-time.
This bit of autobiography is meant to explain the contents and, to some extent, the title of the present collection of essays that I’ve published over the past two decades. When I was first settling into my new life, I was eager to leave my academic past behind and write about genres that I’d been passionate about since my teens (opera, film, theatre, music videos, and television) and subjects that exercised a particular fascination for me (not only the ancient past but family history; sexuality, too). This I began to do, as a perusal of the Table of Contents here will show. But fairly early on in my freelancing career, I found myself being asked by editors who knew I’d done a degree in Classics to review, say, a new translation of the Iliad, or a big-budget TV adaptation of the
