Bernard Knox, director emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, is editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and coeditor of the landmark Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. His books include: Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time; The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy; Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater; and Essays Ancient and Modern, which received the first ever PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the art of the literary essay. In 1992 Knox was named Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Should the ancient Greeks - "the oldest dead white European males" - and their legacy have any relevance to the way we live now? So much of what the ancients were and did may now appear positively racist and sexist in this era of multiculturalism. Yet for all their flaws, the Greeks gave us Homer Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and Thucydides, to name a few. They invented much of what we now take for granted: the idea of the humanities, philosophy, the theatre, competitive athletics, political theory, rhetoric and oratory, biology, zoology and atomic theory. In this book, Bernard Knox raises questions that are of fundamental importance for our age.