This is a review from the Sydney Morning Herald of Luke Slattery's Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World which is more interesting for the 'meta' comments than the few paragraphs which are actually review:

Some time ago, the son of a friend of mine had reached a stage of life where he liked nothing more than to unsettle his father. Nearing the end of year 12, he thought he had at last found the means to put the old man well and truly off his cornflakes. He announced that he intended to go to university to study classics.

Classic is a word that has been so stripped of value that it has long been used to describe a style of jeans, soft-drink bottle or car. But the young man meant he wanted to spend time in the arcane and yet strangely familiar world of Greek and Latin language and literature. The classics are the attic of our culture. In them, you can find all kinds of fascinating and useful things, as well as important reminders of our family history, which have been allowed to gather dust. As a community we don't go up to the attic much. We have forgotten where we've put the key.

Yet there is a growing curiosity about what's up there. You catch glimpses of it occasionally. A large Sydney bookshop, for example, recently had in stock not just a couple of copies but a pile of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, a Latin translation of the first Harry Potter book. It wasn't a spoof. Maybe the intended buyers were high school Latin students. But rest assured, there are sane folk who take pleasure and comfort in the reassuring shape of Latin sentences. Some of them are seeking refuge from the traumatic stress disorder suffered by the English language. Others are young people who are bored to sobs by Big Brother.

Luke Slattery is part of this cultural resistance. His account of classic (mainly Greek) culture, Dating Aphrodite, is part of a growing trend in non-fiction writing, one that answers a profound need. The problem for those wanting to find their way up to the attic is not shortage of material. It is the opposite. Enter the name of Homer, the blind Greek bard who sang The Iliad and The Odyssey, into Google and within seconds you will get 21,000,000 hits. Admittedly, a good number of these are for Homer Simpson. But the point is obvious. The culture we inhabit is changing from one based on memory, a human art, to one based on retention. If you take $20 out of an ATM, that factoid will be retained in a computer for all eternity. But the smell of the flowers you bought with the $20 can only be remembered. Telstra may retain an account of every phone number you ever dialled. But the tenderness of a conversation over the phone can't be retained, only remembered.

Retention creates data. Memory leads to story-telling. Dating Aphrodite is an important act of cultural memory. This book and others that take readers by the hand and make them welcome in a particular intellectual passion of the author are a counterweight to the search engine. They are more like rescue engines.

Slattery's enthusiasm for the classics is longstanding. He remembers his childhood encounters with Homer: "My imagination had been set alight." He remarks that once he had discovered Achilles, Hector and Ajax, as well as the Greek gods, "the New Testament never had a chance". This comment is a clue to perhaps the one shortcoming of Slattery's tour of classical storytelling, myth-making and truth-finding. He lets us rub shoulders briefly with St Paul, but doesn't really have much interest in how Christianity helped shape the late classic world and was shaped by it. Given that Slattery's persuasive argument for a new classical literacy is based on an understanding that "the classical world is contemporary", it wouldn't hurt to recall that Christianity is also still around.

Dating Aphrodite is a hospitable book. It touches on the resonances between Gallipoli and Troy, it goes to Ithaca, it retells superbly the story of Alexander the Great, it undertakes a small odyssey in search of the writer Paddy Leigh Fermor, it investigates the tensions between Apollo and Dionysius, it explores the figure of Pan, it seeks to rescue love from the claws of cliche. Slattery's fresh insight is born of rational passion. Yet he is wary of romanticising the classical world, making of it an ideal substitute for our own clouded reality. He advocates a broadband classicism, one that doesn't escape to the classical world but brings classical wisdom on line for modern living. This is evident in one of the strongest chapters of Dating Aphrodite, dealing with Stoicism, Epicureans and philosophical therapy as a means to the good life.

It's worth bearing in mind that the word "attic" originates in Greece: Attica was the area around Athens, which gave its name to a type of elegant architecture, which gave its name to a type of column, which gave its name to a raised room. Sequences like this are the songlines of Western culture.

And what about the young man who wanted to annoy his father by studying classics? His dad was secretly pleased because he thought the boy might learn something. But he couldn't let the boy know that in case he changed his plans. So the boy went to the careers adviser at his school.

"I want to do Latin," he said.

"Tango or rumba?" the adviser replied.