Backing into the future

Bernard Knox, "the foremost classicist of our time" (Maynard Mack), presents a collection of illuminating essays on diverse topics, united by their common defense of the classics, by their common concern that renewal and innovation go hand in hand with tradition, and by Knox's wit, humanity, and elegant prose. Backing into the Future opens with a group of essays on individual "Poets and Heroes" of antiquity (exploring such topics as Homer's masterly psychological insight into the character of Achilles, the playful and startlingly obscene poetry of Catullus, and Ovid's poetry of exile). The…