In the last few generations, however, any reference to the classics has tended to be accompanied by self-deprecating concessions that the subject is academic, specialised, or élitist, or feeble attempts to claim that it remains ‘relevant’. Hence perhaps the rather unfortunate jacket of Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics, with a classical bust in oddly retro sunglasses. Even the title implies that only an aggressive stance will justify venturing into this dusty realm, while the endorsement suggests it will be ‘provocative’.

Paradoxically, it is the classics themselves that remain forever confronting and provocative in the deepest sense. In a consumer world of disposable sensations, the uncompromising tragic vision of Homer, the subtle moral discriminations of Sophocles, the intellectual lucidity of Plato, the political realism of Thucydides, even the razor irony of Lucian – to mention only a handful of the Greeks – are more startling than ever. Amid the pitiful charades of mass entertainment, no works are more profoundly counter-cultural.

The message suggested by the jacket and the title, however – for which we must presumably thank the publishers and their marketing people – fortunately turns out to have little in common with the content of the book. Beard is neither apologetic about her subject nor aggressive, but humane and insightful; she takes it for granted that discussions about classical literature, history, and culture are of interest beyond the confines of the academic world. The book, indeed, is a collection of reviews of scholarly works that appeared in literary publications, rather than in academic journals.

Beard’s introduction is also, in her own words, a manifesto of the spirit in which we should approach the classics. Reflecting on the perennial complaint that the study of classics is in decline in schools and elsewhere, she reminds us that earlier generations have feared the same thing, and that even the Renaissance was a desperate attempt to salvage classical culture from centuries of decline and corruption. ‘There has been no generation’ – a sobering thought – ‘since at least the second century AD that has imagined that it was fostering the classical tradition better than its predecessors.’

It is, indeed, ‘the sense of imminent loss’ and the fear of losing touch with the tradition that gives the subject its distinctive ‘energy and edginess’. This excitement and pathos extend to the moderns, from the Renaissance onwards, who have engaged with that tradition, and their successive readings and interpretations inevitably inflect the way we understand the classics themselves: Racine adds something to our reading of Euripides, just as Virgil’s Eclogues affect our understanding of the Idylls of Theocritus.

Beard is arguing, rightly it seems, for a fuller integration of reception into the study of classics – in effect demonstrating the living reality of the classical tradition. The study of classics, she insists, ‘is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture of the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with those who have gone before us who were themselves in dialogue with the classical world.’

It is this longitudinal or vertical sense of the subject that frees it from the academic vortex of ever-increasing specialisation, especially with a positivistic focus on what are held to be objective facts. The critique of a positivistic approach is raised in the chapter on Thucydides, where she argues that there are literary and structural questions about the text that are as important as that of determining its factual accuracy. The argument is memorably and wittily pursued in the chapter on Hadrian’s Villa, where she explains how ancient historians expand on scanty and lacunose data ‘by a combination of scholarship, conjecture and fiction’ and shows the perverse way in which the latter are lent a specious credibility: ‘the wilder the speculation, the greater the panoply of scholarship.’

The trouble with such speculations is not just that they are unfounded, but that, in their determination to pursue or even invent facts, scholars may fail to take a broader view of the significance of events: that Hadrian’s reign, for example, could be seen as a ‘velvet revolution’, representing a comprehensive reassessment of the relations of Greek and Roman cultures. In Beard’s chapter on Sappho, she deplores the vain attempts to establish whether another woman poet, Korinna, was or was not actually the contemporary of Pindar; the more important issue is the significance of the tradition – true or false – that she won victories over this greatest of lyric poets. We should consider not only ‘the literal truth’, but also ‘the much more important symbolic truth’.

It is this openness to a longitudinal and symbolic perspective that informs the chapter on the modern reception of Pompeii from its rediscovery in the eighteenth century, as well as the fascinating discussion of English guidebooks on Greece since independence: the early ones advise taking a tent; we are counselled against bringing English servants, because they don’t like foreign places or strange food and are not as good at putting up with physical discomfort as their masters; and we are constantly promised that we will find echoes of the Homeric world in the lives of the simple peasants, a conceit partly designed to counter any doubts about the ancestry of the modern population.

Beard’s concern for the tradition extends to the question of the restoration of ancient sculpture: almost everything found in the Renaissance was broken or fragmentary, and almost everything was completed by contemporary sculptors, who supplied missing noses, hands, and even whole limbs. One of the few exceptions was the Belvedere Torso; otherwise all important finds were restored, up to the Aegina pediments, completed by Thorvaldsen, and Canova’s refusal to do the same to the Elgin marbles was a turning point. A few years later, no one seriously considered restoring the Venus de Milo.

The passion, indeed, for un-restoring sculptures and buildings in pursuit of authenticity reached its height in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thorvaldsen’s additions to the Aegina marbles were removed when the Glyptothek was rebuilt after World War II, and then the Laocoon, in a slightly different case, had its right arm changed after the discovery of what is not quite certain to be its authentic elbow. Since then, though, there has been another turning point, and ‘art historians and museum curators have generally come to see the interventions of Bernini and his like as an important part in the ongoing, creative history of classical sculpture’. It was, after all, Bernini’s inspired addition of the mattress that made the Hellenistic Hermaphrodite into the ambiguously erotic image it has been from Velázquez’s version in the Rokeby Venus to the titterings of the modern tourist.