Dating Aphrodite by Luke Slattery

Description of Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World by Luke Slattery

'Greece has a profound and permanent message to mankind; it is humane and progressive and affects not only art but the whole of life.' Australian classicist Gilbert Murray

'Dating Aphrodite' is a modern celebration of the classics of ancient Greece and ancient Rome - their wisdom and humour, as well as the insights they offer our contemporary world.

In the best tradition of Alain de Botton and Simon Schama, journalist and traveller Luke Slattery illuminates the classical ideas underpinning so much of modern civilisation - our literature, art and architecture, our democracy, science and even our religion - with a cheeky sense of irony.

A combination of travel book, history book and a meditation on what it means to be living in the media-saturated twenty-first century, 'Dating Aphrodite' takes you to the actual places where the big ideas of Western civilisation were born. Slattery shows you the real landscape and explains how, even today, the spirit of these places and the meanings that can be found there shine through.

'Dating Aphrodite' follows 'the footsteps of the ancients on a journey in search of ourselves'.

Review in Sydney Morning Herald