One such collaborator was Sir Arthur Evans, whose imaginative restorations of a palace at Knossos, Beard says, "have only an indirect connection with the second millennium BC." His restoration of an idyllic painting of a young boy picking saffron fit well into his vision of the peaceable, nature-loving Minoans — though it fit less well when it turned out the painting was actually supposed to be of a bright blue monkey.
Similarly, Thucydides' edicts on power and politics are "repeated in international relations courses the world over," but Beard illustrates how many of these maxims are the result of too-liberal translations. She writes, "As a general rule, the catchier the slogans sound, the more likely they are to be largely the product of the translator rather than of Thucydides himself."
In a work of such sprawling ambition, mistakes are inevitable, though they're generally not so much errors as small elisions: Beard, like her ancient colleagues, can be the victim of narrative gaps. In leaping cavalierly from place to place, she occasionally leaps over scholarly debate. On the one hand, this is liberating – on the other, it feels a little irresponsible.
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