It's a very exciting week for me: my latest book, It's All Greek To Me, is published tomorrow, and today the Guardian has printed an extract.

The book is a product of a long love affair with the literature of ancient Greece. Writing it was one of the most joyous and enriching projects I have ever had the good fortune to undertake.

What underpins the book is my profound belief that the great writers of Greece – such as Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Sappho – are not worthy-but-dull, forbidding authors of dusty, unreadable tomes. These authors have left us vivid, exciting, provocative, often devastating, often hilarious reads. They should be as widely enjoyed as Jane Austen or Charles Dickens – and it saddens me that they are not.

The storytelling of Homer – whose humanity, whose deep understanding of love and loss is utterly unmistakable – is unmatched, for my money, in later literature. Plato's Republic (more often discussed than read cover-to-cover) is one of the most terrifying, challenging and bold thought experiments ever to have been dreamed up – and you certainly don't need to be a professional philosopher to be gripped by it. The dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides still lay down a ridiculously high standard for playwrights today – which is why directors and actors keep returning to them. Oedipus the King opens at the National Theatre in a couple of weeks – aside from being an almost perfect play in terms of the relentless logic of its structure, it is also the world's first detective story, one in which the detective and the perpetrator, horrifyingly, turn out to be the same person.

I was just now reading our Books site's excellent poem of the week, and I was thinking about which poem of Sappho I would put in that slot, and why. Well, I'll finish this post with another little chunk of the book: a few words about Sappho's fragment two.

"... Of her wonderful poems of love and longing, many are unambiguously homoerotic; some are wedding songs. Part of their appeal is their very fragmentary quality: these beautiful lines and half-lines are like finely decorated potsherds, separated for ever from their fellows – they act as a poignant metaphor, perhaps, of the study of the ancient world itself, the way we try to make a world from beautiful scraps and bits. In fact there is a (part) poem of hers which was actually discovered written on a potsherd; fragment two, as it is known:

down from the mountain top
and out of Crete,
come to me here
in your sacred precinct, to your grove
of apple trees,
and your altars
smoking with incense,

where cold water flows babbling
through the branches,
the whole place
shadowed with roses,
sleep adrift down
from silvery leaves
an enchantment

horses grazing in a meadow
abloom with spring flowers
and where the breezes blow sweetly,

here, Cypris,
delicately in golden cups
pour nectar
mixed for our festivities.

[Translation: Stanley Lombardo]

It is an invocation, a summoning of the goddess Aphrodite, named here for Cyprus, the island off which she was born from the foam of the sea. It's astonishingly powerful, this evocation of place, this apple grove in which the love-goddess's sanctuary lies. It's synaesthesic, almost, every sense is stimulated: there's the heady scent of the incense; the sight of the stream (in the background) with the shading apple trees in front; the icy coldness to the touch of the water; the drowsy sound of the breeze through the leaves; beyond, the glimpse of the horses grazing in the flower-filled meadows. To read this poem is to be there, lying in the deep grass of the grove, gently heading for sleep ..."