Elizabeth Vandiver

Elizabeth Vandiver (Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin) is the Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics, Emerita, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her most recent book is Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2010). She has also recorded several popular courses for The Great Courses on Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, and classical mythology.

You have written a lot about Herodotus. What episode from his writings is the most popular among later artists?

Oddly enough, later artists don’t seem to have drawn on Herodotus to any great extent; there are nowhere near the number of paintings illustrating episodes from his work as there are illustrating stories from Ovid, for instance. It’s perhaps somewhat disturbing that the episode that does seem to have received the most artistic attention is that of the Massagetaean queen Tamyris being presented with the head of the Persian king Cyrus and/or plunging the head into a wineskin of blood (the story is at Herodotus Book I, chapters 205-214). Renaissance artists were intrigued with women from ancient literature (such as Judith from the Hebrew Bible) who triumphed over men, often in bloody ways, and Tomyris was one of that set. The most famous painting of her is probably this, by Rubens, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

I'm interested in the sculpture on the cover of your book about British poetry and the classics. Is it supposed to be a modern representation of Achilles? 

The sculpture on the jacket of my book is the memorial for First World War soldiers in Cambridge, England. It isn’t intended to represent Achilles, but the idealization of the young man’s face did remind me of the idealized faces of the horsemen on the Parthenon frieze (now in the British Museum): 

And here’s the face on the Cambridge statue:

In the years immediately following the First World War, most towns in the UK put up memorials to their dead soldiers (as did towns in France and Germany, and probably in other countries as well). Even the smallest villages usually have a war memorial. Classical or classically-influenced figures were very common elements of these memorials, which often also included the inscribed names of the young men from that town who had died in the war. When my book was about to be published, Oxford University Press asked me to find an image to use on the dustjacket. I wanted an image that would epitomize the subject of the book — that is, one that would visually represent both the young men who fought in the First World War and the importance of classics for the poetry some of those young men wrote. This image (which my husband found for me!) seemed perfect to me, not just because of the very classical idealization of the young soldier’s face but also because of the laurel wreath on his rifle, which works as a visual reference to the ancient world and to poetry. The sculptor was Robert Tait Mackenzie and the statue is formally titled “The Homecoming.”

You can see the laurel wreath very clearly in this photograph:

If you could decree that all students of the classics read one book or article, what would it be?

Well, first I’d have to ask you if you mean a modern book, or an ancient one! You probably mean a modern one, and in that case answering is fiercely difficult. There are so many magnificent books about classics, and so many different aspects to the classical world (literature, history, archaeology, art, and more) that it’s just about impossible to pick ONE book that everyone should read. However, one strong candidate as a starting-point for non-specialists who are interested in classical authors and their continuing influence would be Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke, Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome: Ancient Ideas for Modern Times (Oxford University Press, 2014). It contains essays on 12 different authors, starting with Homer and ending with Lucian, and it is fascinating, informative, and very readable.

If you were thinking of an ancient book, then that becomes a variant of the "desert island" question ("If you could have only one book on a desert island, what would it be?"), and for that, my answer has always been "The Odyssey, in Greek."