I don't usually include things from magazines which require an online subscription, but the tease for this one is good enough ... here's the incipit of a piece by G.W. Bowersock in the most recent edition of the New Republic:

The stupendous achievements of the Greeks of classical antiquity have long dazzled those who succeeded them. In philosophy, sculpture, architecture, drama, and oratory, later peoples could only aspire to the level of Plato, Praxiteles, Ictinus, Sophocles, or Demosthenes. Thucydides famously ascribed to Pericles a vision of Hellenism that instructed and encompassed the civilized world, and Athens appeared to be the first democracy on earth. Never mind that it was a democracy that depended upon slavery and excluded women. Never mind that the Greeks wrote their language in an alphabet that they borrowed from the Phoenicians. Their achievement was so irresistible that their culture overwhelmed even their conquerors, the Romans. As Horace put it succinctly in the time of Augustus, "Captured Greece took its victor captive." Generations of Western Europeans and their colonists everywhere have grown up with the idea that they are, in some profound way, the heirs of the Greeks....

... might be worth tracking down. As long as you're looking for that, you might also want to track down Mental Floss, which, as Blogographos pointed out, has a piece entitled 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend to Understand. We finally got a Starbucks within reasonable driving distance (yes, there are such places still) ... hopefully a Chapters or Indigo (or some other bookstore with a decent newsstand) will follow soon. [parenthetical rant ... I've got to drive almost half an hour to reach the first available bookstore ... it's a Smithbooks, of course, of the sort which defines 'history' as anything which has happened since 1939, unless it involves freemasons and conspiracies]