"An eloquent contribution to the new literature on beauty. Konstan asks a basic question: How well do ancient notions of beauty translate into our modern lexicon? The result is a rich sampling of sources from Homer to the Hebrew Bible to the Byzantine Church Fathers, expertly traced through a series of philological probes. Because ancient beauty was not limited to art or reduced to a focal concept of any kind, looking into the past like this provides a valuable and often surprising reminder of the limits of our own aesthetic intuitions. Konstan's study will be a critical resource for anyone interested in this fascinating set of issues." --James I. Porter, University of California at Irvine"A breathtakingly wide view of beauty as the ancient Greeks conceived it, from Homer to the Septuagint, and from Plato to Derrida and Bourdieu-this is the work of a scholar with an immense command of classical literature and its legacy in our own time. This book should be required reading for anyone working in aesthetics, ancient or modern. Readers will never again be able to imagine beauty shorn completely of its historical ties to passion and desire." --Paul Woodruff, The University of Texas at Austin