Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.

Slattery invokes Knox more than once in his own ‘modern adventures in the ancient world’, and he also has some of Hecht’s double attunement to the beautiful and the terrible. His book may best be seen as an essay on the durability and the utility of Classical art and insight, in particular the Greek version of these things. As he writes at the beginning, ‘A plea for classical literacy unfolds in the following pages, a piece of advocacy on behalf of the ancients’; and the book’s last sentence runs: ‘Twenty-five centuries after the climax of the pagan world, it is revealing itself anew.’ I hope that this last claim is true with some generality: it is certainly true for Slattery.