In American Arcadia, Peter Holliday offers readers a sumptuous and fascinating account of ‘California and the Classical Tradition’. Beautifully presented and illustrated, this book is not only a thought-provoking and pleasurable read but also a valuable addition to the body of scholarship that has explored classical receptions in the United States at some length in recent years. Much of that scholarship has focused on now familiar terrain, from the fixation on antiquity in Hollywood and popular culture more broadly, to the grandiose evocations of classical architecture in eastern cities such as Washington, DC, and New York. California, by contrast, for all its prominence on the world stage and in the cultural imagination, might not spring so readily to mind as a rich locus of classical receptions, but Holliday convincingly demonstrates ‘how Californians used classical antiquity as a metaphor for fashioning the Golden State and their own lives in it’ (355). Although well-known buildings such as the Getty Villa, Hearst Castle, and Caesar's Palace rightly receive lengthy discussion, there are a wealth of examples which are likely to be new to many readers, from the nineteenth-century Hungarian refugee building a Pompeian villa in a self-consciously Arcadian landscape, to the 1960s development of the CalArts campus, whose Modernist architects yet proclaimed their debt to Athens and Rome. Nor is the book solely concerned with architecture. Although the built environment is at its core, the full range of Californian identification with, and appropriation of, classical imagery and ideology is explored. The final chapter, for example, shows how pursuers of the quintessentially Californian healthy lifestyle and body beautiful knowingly looked to classical paradigms on multiple occasions. Resisting the temptation to frame all of this in a conventional ‘classical tradition’ approach, Holliday takes pains to show the full extent of the interaction and innovation that characterizes Californian classicism, and the resulting study is highly recommended.
Anton J. L. Van Hooff, From autothanasia to suicide: self-killing in classical antiquity, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, pp. xv, 306, £35.00 (0-415-04055-8).