Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives
by Simon Goodhill
John Murray £18.99, pp368

In the film Working Girl, Melanie Griffith comes home early, walks into the bedroom and discovers her boyfriend with an energetic naked woman astride him. 'It is,' he protests urgently, 'not what it looks like.' We laugh because it is, of course, exactly what it looks like. What else could it be?

Yet the joke unpacks further. It is not what it looks like. These are actors and this is a film. Even having the woman on top - while familiar to sexually active adults - is probably not what most sex consists of most of the time. In films, the woman on top signals that the sex is ardent and consensual and, crucially, it titillates the viewer with maximum exposure of the female body.

The couple aren't really having sex because respectable actors don't do that; 'real' sex is for film pornography. This too has its conventions as a spectacle. Academics looking back over two millennia at the images of our era may come to some curious conclusions as to our sexual practice and low birth-rate.

Simon Goldhill's passionate, witty and broad-ranging exploration of the ancient foundations of our world has to confront this problem from the start: are the images on ancient pottery or in the musings of ancient writers representative of any kind of reality, and does it matter?

Every society since has looked back to classical Athens, and Goldhill follows that journey and its sometimes improbable diversions, right up to the present time, arguing compellingly that in a failure to understand our classical roots we are left adrift in our own culture. On the way he takes in St Thecla, Erasmus, Karl Marx, Cary Grant and the Colorado Legislature, but at the heart of his account is always ancient Greece: an extraordinarily self-conscious society constantly engaged in looking at itself.

Goldhill - professor of Greek at Cambridge - skilfully overturns and amends our existing beliefs and is superb when discussing the origins of democracy, the importance of tragedy and, inevitably, sex.

Homosexuality has long intrigued those looking back to classical Athens. But what was for decades known coyly as 'Greek love' turns out to be not quite what the outraged or the delighted thought. The obsession with the idea of the beautiful boy was certainly pervasive, but sexual conduct was heavily codified. Surviving images show intra-crural sex (sex in which the penis is placed between the partner's thighs) between aroused older partners and unaroused adolescent boys. We can never know if these depict actual sexual behaviour, but they are, more interestingly, a reflection of ancient ideas about sex.

Greece was a society of ideas, and the greatest of these was democracy. Today its virtues are so evident to the West that we wish to impose it willy-nilly, citing its long history as its own mandate, but it would scarcely be recognised by its progenitors. Democracy in ancient Greece excluded women and slaves but at the core of its ideology, and the defining characteristic of citizenship, was active individual participation in the political and judicial process.

Goldhill's introductory claim that we have never been more ignorant of our classical roots is slightly disingenuous. Classics as a school subject has dwindled but films like Gladiator, and now Troy, and the current popularity of documentaries and novels about the ancient world, mean, more accurately, that there is a widening gap between our perceptions and the ancient sources. Goldhill closes that gap with this lively and multi-layered challenge to assumptions embedded in modern life.

For the academic addressing a non-specialist audience there are decisions to be made: how much pre-existing knowledge will a reader have? How should classics be packaged for a commercial market? Goldhill opts for brief endnotes, and his further reading list is excellent. But either he or his publishers have decided to do away with an index. There is no returning to check facts or look up a reference. In an important book with such a breadth of material, this is an incomprehensible omission.

On the cover, in bright colours, are alluring references to sex, love, tragedy, horrors, and the promise of self-improvement. Here is the celebrity endorsement and the delicious multiple messages of a neon heart with cupids advertising a wedding chapel. But on the back the academic has the last word. 'Whom do we love and how?' he asks. Whom? How precise. This is a book that is, like antiquity itself, not always quite what it looks like, but all the better for it.