Louis A. Ruprecht is the author of "Symposia: Plato. the Erotic and Moral Value" (SUNY 1999); "Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence" (SUNY 1996); "Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve" (Continuum 1994).

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the First century, to Romanticism in the Nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture - we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places - everywhere from the U.S. Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games - and in doing so makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.