As a former philosophy student and as a current philosophy and classics enthusiast, the very title of this book brought to mind Plato’s Cave from Book VII of his Republic, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and Saint Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate. For the philosophy enthusiast, the title alone calls to mind the notion of transcendentals in medieval Scholasticism. Hugo Shakeshaft explores how the Greeks in the Archaic Period saw their experience of the divine and the experience of beauty as intrinsically intertwined. In this work, Shakeshaft explores this connection of beauty and the divine through exploring architecture, art, philosophy, poetry, music, dance, ritual, and nature.

Shakeshaft introduces this monumental exploration of the connection between beauty and the divine in ancient Greece by wading right into the middle of the philosophical debate about aesthetics. In the introduction, the author addresses the prevailing notion in aesthetics, dating back to Immanuel Kant, that beauty is something to be contemplated in a pure, disinterested form. Instead, Shakeshaft’s approach presupposes ‘beauty’s inextricability from practical, social, political, and religious interests’. The focus of this book is how ideas of beauty impacted the relationships that ancient Greeks had with the gods and how those ideas of beauty could be revelatory of the ideas that the ancient Greeks had about the divine. Through his exploration of the connection between beauty and the practical, lived experience of the relationship with the gods, the ancient Greeks can place the notion of beauty back in the realm of the pragmatic and can elevate the world of the mundane. When encountering the divine, Shakeshaft writes, ‘beauty is often what mortals see and wonder is what they feel’. This engaging synthesis of philosophy, aesthetics, archaeology, poetic analysis, and history proves to be an essential read for any enthusiast of the ancient Mediterranean world who would like to explore the central place that beauty and wonder had in ancient Greece, and by extension, ought to have in our modern lives.