Greek to me: Met opens “Pergamon,” unprecedented Hellenistic show

April 13, 2016

“So,” a publicist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art asked teasingly, “are there enough Alexanders for you?”

She knows me only too well. Lover of the ancient Greeks that I am, there can never be for me enough images of Alexander the Great – the Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. ushered in 300 years of Hellenism (Greek culture) in Asia, reversing the course of cultural influence from East-West to West-East, and underscoring a tension between East and West that is still with us.

And yet, there I was in the first gallery of “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” (April 18 through July 17), surrounded by Alexanders. ...

Gods among us: Male beauty and ‘Dieux du Stade’

February 17, 2016

What would Abigail Solomon-Godeau make of “Dieux du Stade,” the new book by photographer Fred Goudon, inspired by the “Dieux du Stade” calendars featuring members of the Stade Français Paris rugby club and athletes from other disciplines?

In her 1997 book “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation” (Thames and Hudson), the feminist art historian suggests that the nude male has been the primary sex symbol throughout art history, reaching an apotheosis in Neoclassical (turn-of-the-19th-century) Paris in the work of such artists as David, Ingres and especially Girodet, who often portrayed their subjects in the languid pose of women offered up for the male gaze. ...

A classical Christmas

December 24, 2015

At Christmastide, I like to share one of my traditions, which is a reading of a selection from John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” As a classical Christian – I know, an oxymoron – I’m always struck by how the advent of Christianity sounded a death knell for Greco-Roman culture. But then, someone’s sunrise is always someone else’s sunset.

Yet Greco-Roman culture – with its sensual tales of gods and heroes, its dramas on the terrible wonder of the human condition, its emphasis on the body in all its brutal beauty – never died. (It’s a theme of Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel “Julian,” about the post-Christian Roman emperor who attempted to reinstall the Greco-Roman pantheon.) The Greeks would instead resurface in the Renaissance and at the turn of the 19th century. ...

The Greek debt crisis: WWATGD? (What would Alexander the Great do?)

July 13, 2015

In my debut novel “Water Music” – the story of the rivalries and loves among four gay athletes – Spyros Vyranos is a successful shipping executive in a country whose glory days seem momentarily long behind it.

“The money’s all in Russia and China these days,” Spyros complains bitterly to his son, Alexandros. That the continuing Greek fiscal crisis may be in large part of the Greeks own making is not lost on Alex, who has a strong sense of history and irony ...

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