athenian democracy itself was always vulnerable, but athenian culture-- its philosophy, literature, dramaas much as its architecture, sculpture, and painting-- maintained a hold over the greek and the western imagination. fifth-century athens created a classical ideal against which all subsequent art could be measured. here the sculptor has refocused the youthful ideal of the kouros and the parthenon frieze and the getty bronze behind me onto the person of one man-- alexander the great. what he's doing here is to appropriate the ideals of periclean athens and to show alexander as the logical successor of those young men who fought in the peloponnesian war for athens' greater glory and who tried to establish her empire further and wider. no individual had ever achieved so much in the history of mankind, at least as far as the greeks remembered it. no individual had incorporated within himself qualities which were so conspicuously heroic. so we have here an image that derives its authority from the past-- the human, the heroic, the divine-- but at the same time, looks very definitely toward

materials from the roman dominions flowed into campania's harbors -marble from athenian quarries forstatues, reliefs and vases... nubian gold and emeralds from egypt for jewelry. livia, wife of augustus, is carved in egyptian basanite, a stone once reserved for sculptures of deities -- a subtle reference to roman imperial triumph. wealthy residents of the towns beneath vesuvius shared the taste for luxury found in the more affluent villas on the bay. silver mirrors... and cups... bronze statuettes ... and glassware found in pompeii suggest the same desire for elegance in daily life. the city's fever for art was playfully alluded to in the house of the vettii's wall paintings, where busy cupids assist a hard-pressed goldsmith. the painting may also refer to the industriousness of the owners -brothers who bought their way out of slavery and worked their way into the upper reaches of society. but the streets outside were a different matter. pompeii was congested and dirty -raw sewage flowed between the street's cobbled stepping stones. the city's houses were cheek by jowl with taverns,

i heard people discussing the merits of direct democracy, which the athenians had, vs. representative democracy, which we have. and i suddenly realized here is a whole world that i don't know anything about. and so one of the great joys of what i do is that i am able to spend a lot of time immersing myself in this world. now i don't write philosophical cogitations, and so while i'm very interested in these ideas, i try to find real-world conflicts, like the race debate and the debate over the new economy and, in a sense, use those as a means to raise philosophical issues. and so my book is trying to bridge the divide always between ideas and current issues. c-span: but name me some folks that you like a lot. >> guest: i am--i greatly admire the--milton's "paradise lost." i love "the federalist papers." there is a book by harry jaffe called "crisis of the house divided: a study of the lincoln-douglas debates," which i think is a very profound reflection on america. i love the philosopher charles taylor, his book, "sources of the self," is an exploration of how we went fr