Ebook: Greek fire

Greek fire was used to destroy enemy ships. It was alleged to stay alight under water, submerged in a contrary element. In this highly stimulating and original book, Oliver Taplin employs the term as a metaphor for astonishing resilience of classical Greece. For more than two millennia its influence has persevered, often submerged in alien cultures. Greek Fire has the capacity to benefit and to harm, can be obvious on the surface or latent below, and as with all half-legendary stuff, the author observes, it is not the 'correct' version that matters so much as what has been productively believed about it. The book explores what has been made out of ancient Greece, and how the modern world has been inspired by, reacted against, imitated, transformed, parodied, recycled, subverted or received Greek culture. It is a brilliant attempt by one of our leading classical scholars to show why a new and fluid view of the Greek ideal - quite different from that of Renaissance painters or Victorian builders - is surfacing in our lives today and what the phenomenon might signify to us as we approach the twenty-first century.