SOURCE: Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Breaking Out.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 5 (29 March 2001): 38-40.

In the following essay, Mendelsohn traces Schnackenberg's artistic progress and credits her for bringing fresh ideas to classical material.

1.

In a devastating 1920 attack on Gilbert Murray's translation of the Medea. T. S. Eliot bemoaned the fact that “the Classics have … lost their place as a pillar of the social and political system.”¹ The complaint, of course, is an old one; writers have been grumbling about the decline of the classics since Aristophanes' Frogs, in which the theater god Dionysus, dismayed by the sorry state of the Athenian theater, descends to the Underworld to fetch back Aeschylus and Euripides from the dead.

Still, times do change; it's hard not to think that the deterioration of the classics' influence between Eliot's time and our own is even more marked than that between Aristophanes' and Eliot's. You suspect...