Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Writing of historical interpretation the great German classical scholar U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff once compared it with the Homeric picture of ghosts revived by the blood of the living -- warning that in the very process of revival the ghosts inevitably absorb an alien element. In this wide-ranging collection Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones looks at the influence of the Greeks on creative thinkers and scholars since the close of the eighteenth century, when for the first time, largely as a result of German scholarship, the Greeks began to be studied directly, rather than through Roman eyes. The men discussed range from Coleridge, Leopardi, Gladstone, Wagner and Nietzsche to scholars of our own day such as Edouard Fraenkel, Rudolf Pfeiffer and E. R. Dodds.