‘Every scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven”, says Jesus in St Matthew, “is like a man put in charge of a household, who brings out of his treasury things new and old.” The late Roberto Calasso may have been train-ed more for the studia humanitatis than for God’s kingdom, but the prodigious Florentine author spent a lifetime procuring marvels new and old from the treasure-house of literature.
His best known work of this kind remains The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988), which blends a lively retelling of Greek myths with an essayistic reflection on their enduring influences on our culture and society. More recently, The Celestial Hunter (2016) similarly treats the intoxicating powers of hunting and religious ritual; here too the material is largely Greek, albeit with excursions into exotic shamanism and Pharaonic Egypt. In The Book of All Books (published in Italian in 2019, but soon out in a new English paperback edition) Calasso brings his literary energies to bear on sacred Scripture.
