The Parthenon, Mary Beard
The Parthenon, Mary Beard
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

The Parthenon

Author: Mary Beard

Narrator: Joan Walker

Unabridged: 5 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/24/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

Oscar Wilde compared it to a white goddess, Evelyn Waugh to Stilton cheese. In observers from Lord Byron to Sigmund Freud to Virginia Woolf it met with astonishment, rapture, poetry, even tears—and, always, recognition. Twenty-five hundred years after it first rose above Athens, the Parthenon remains one of the wonders of the world, its beginnings and strange turns of fortune over millennia a perpetual source of curiosity, controversy, and intrigue.

At once an entrancing cultural history and a congenial guide for tourists, armchair travelers, and amateur archaeologists alike, this book conducts listeners through the storied past and towering presence of the most famous building in the world. The classicist and historian Mary Beard takes us back to the fifth century BC to consider the Parthenon in its original guise—as the flagship temple of imperial Athens, housing an enormous gold and ivory statue of the city's patron goddess attended by an enigmatic assembly of sculptures. Just as fascinating is the monument's far longer life as cathedral church of Our Lady of Athens, as "the finest mosque in the world," and, finally, as an inspirational ruin and icon.

About Mary Beard

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge University and the author of the bestselling SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Women & Power: A Manifesto, and the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Confronting the Classics. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roy

This is a splendid book of tourism: short, easy to read, and full of interesting tidbits. I now understand how Beard, a classical scholar, has topped best-selling lists: her style is pleasant and snappy, and she is skilled at finding new takes on very old things. It seems difficult to find anything......more

Goodreads review by Steve

Mary Beard is a wonderful writer, who has written extensively on the Classical World. So, the subject of the Parthenon would seem at natural one for her. For the first 100 pages or so, that is the case as Beard tells the history (as much as we know at least) of the famous 5th Century Athens temple.......more

Goodreads review by Nikola

Ne mogu da oprostim hrišćanima iz 5. veka, koji su se sa dletom u rukama sistematski okomili na skulpture na Akropolju. Lice po lice, glava po glava, uklanjamo paganske ikone. Ne mogu da oprostim Mlečanima, koji su bombardovali Partenon 1687. Oko 800 topovskih đuladi je završilo na njemu. (Da li je......more

Goodreads review by Nicky

I enjoyed Mary Beard’s book on Pompeii, so when I spotted The Parthenon in a deal, I figured it’d be an interesting one. I actually expected it to be a bit more about the Greek context of the Parthenon, rather than going into the afterlife of the building — the use as a church and a mosque, the arch......more