Mary Beard

The classical world is a place you can't just enter when you feel like it, but it's open to all.

Once you enter, you'll find that nothing dramatic has happened or has anything changed since Homer's epics, Iliad and Odyssey.

The story's the same: a human being is either not equal to either the inside of the self or to the outside circumstances, and the tensions that arise from either of these inequalities creates the story.

It's another experience altogether to read a contemporary writer, partly by assessing how he or she presents the present--or whatever period the writer is writing about--and partly by projecting 2,000 years into the future and seeing if the writer satisfys a new reader eager to enter that writer's world.

Then there is a writer like Pausanias (c. AD 110--AD 180) who wrote "Description of Greece," a 10-volume work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observation. Classified as indispensible to those hoping to enter the classical world, Pausanias is also classified as a careful, pedestrian writer by a classicist no less than Mary Beard.