Classical Studies

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Law & Liberty Reviews New Book by Bard Professor James Romm

The latest book by James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics James Romm was reviewed in Law & Liberty. Demosthenes: Democracy’s Defender is about the Greek orator, born in 348 BCE, who convinced the Athenian Assembly to confront the Macedonians. Romm covers Demosthenes’s life in “diminished times” during the conquest of Greece and extrapolates lessons about democracy for the current day. Graham McAleer writes that Romm’s “fast-paced” biography provides a valuable perspective on Demosthenes’s charge to Athenians, in which he stated that “you cannot have been wrong [to] have taken on the danger of fighting for the freedom and safety of all.” Throughout the book, Romm examines the mind of a man who took on the challenge of saving Greek freedom, while also exploring how democracies can be destroyed by internal division and infighting.

The Classical Studies Program at Bard is an interdisciplinary field of study encompassing the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The program seeks to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world, and approaches these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Post Date: 12-02-2025

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James Romm’s Book Plato and the Tyrant Reviewed in the Washington Post

Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, a new book by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, has been reviewed in the Washington Post. The work is “a deft and engaging work of history, philosophy and biography, as well as a meta-commentary on the perils of regarding canonical thinkers as disembodied minds,” writes Becca Rothfield for the Post. In his book, Romm draws on personal letters of Plato―documents that have long been kept in obscurity―to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era, the opulent city of Syracuse, where Plato encountered two authoritarian rulers and tried to steer them toward philosophy all while writing his masterpiece, Republic. “Romm relates this history—and introduces readers to a colorful cast of sycophantic courtiers, eccentric philosophers and defiant poets—with flair. He is an equally admirable guide to the many controversies in which the affair is mired.”

Post Date: 07-01-2025