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Fame

What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity

Picador, October 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-42993-5, ISBN10: 0-312-42993-2,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 288 pages,
Trade Paperback, $16.00

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See All Categories Classics Classics - All Titles

We may regard celebrities as deities, but that does not mean we worship them with deference. From prehistory to the present, humanity has possessed a primal urge first to exalt the famous but then to cut them down. Why do we treat the ones we love like burnt offerings in a ritual of human sacrifice? Perhaps because that is exactly what they are.

From Greek mythology to the stories of the Christian martyrs and Dr. Faustus, Payne makes the fascinating argument that our relationship to celebrity is perilous, and that we wouldn't have it any other way. He also shows that the people we choose as our heroes and villains throughout the ages says a lot about ourselves—and what it says is often quite frightening. Fame even brings new life to all the literary figures from our high school English classes. In these pages, the most ephemeral reality television stars (those "famous for being famous") find themselves in the same VIP lounge as the characters of The Iliad. With great wit, scholarship, and insight, Tom Payne draws the narratives of the past and the present into one intriguing story.

Fame takes a closer look at the mortals, and the immortals—us and them.

Praise

"The belief that our heavily mediated age is unique in doling out renown to every Tom, Dick and Kardashian? It’s off the mark, Payne points out in Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity. The 14th-century bard Chaucer, he notes, wrote about a couple of slackers who petitioned the monarchy with this elegant, if unconvincing, plea: 'We have done neither that nor this/ but spent our lives in idle play/ Nevertheless, we come to pray /that we should have as good a fame,/ and great renown, and well-known name/ as those who have done noble deeds.' Had these bold strivers been born 700 years later, they might’ve secured a six-episode commitment from VH1. But for our purposes, they serve as evidence that, as three new books remind us, celebrity confounds as often as it entices."—Kevin Canfield, The Daily Beast

"Payne's wonderfully witty and erudite study of modern fame in the light of ancient myths and rituals is markedly kinder and more balanced, and yet also more unsettling."—Sunday Times (UK)

"Payne takes us through all the various similarities between sacrificial rituals and the world of Hello! and Grazia . . . He explains these and other ideas with tremendous gusto, humor, and many flashes of self-knowing irony . . . Fame is a good read."—Mary Beard, The Observer (UK)

"Payne studies a wide variety of celebrated characters—among them Achilles, Julius Caesar, Odysseus, Nero, and that especially intriguing rogue, Faust—and traces their stories, motivations, and actions, illustrating in detail how these figures were venerated and set standards, noble or questionable, for all to emulate. On the other hand, he also reveals how and why onlookers take cruel delight in the misery of a fall from a lofty perch. Payne knows his literature and his modern culture, and he deftly draws some astounding parallels between these classical figures and today's celebrities as well as audiences both past and present who invest their idols with power but can rob them of privacy, dignity, and even fame. This one-of-a-kind book looks at current society's responses to celebrities from a highly literate and astute perspective. It is well written and accessible enough to have appeal beyond academic audiences, and it warrants a second read by those who would like to absorb more fully the finer points of its thesis."—Library Journal

About the Author(s)

Tom Payne

Tom Payne read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. For four years he was deputy literary editor of The Daily Telegraph.

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Excerpt

1
A Certain Sacrifice: What Was Britney
Telling Us When She Cut Her Own Hair?
You do have to sacrifice your freedom when
you’re in this business, but it’s a small price
to pay for all the good.
—BRITNEY AND LYNNE SPEARS
Britney Spears Heart to Heart (2000)And shall my life, my single life,
Obstruct all this?
—IPHIGENIA IN EURIPIDES’
Iphigenia at Aulis

View Entire Excerpt

Fame

Praise

About the Author(s)

Excerpt

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