Since the publication of Eliza May Butler's Tyranny of Greece over Germany in 1935, the obsession of the German educated elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted, if severely underanalyzed, cliché. In Down from Olympus, Suzanne Marchand attempts to come to grips with German Graecophilia, not as a private passion but as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. The book argues that nineteenth-century philhellenes inherited both an elitist, normative aesthetics and an ascetic, scholarly ethos from their Romantic predecessors; German "neohumanists" promised to reconcile these intellectual commitments, and by so doing, to revitalize education and the arts. Focusing on the history of classical archaeology, Marchand shows how the injunction to imitate Greek art was made the basis for new, state-funded cultural institutions. Tracing interactions between scholars and policymakers that made possible grand-scale cultural feats like the acquisition of the Pergamum Altar, she underscores both the gains in specialized knowledge and the failures in social responsibility that were the distinctive products of German neohumanism. This book discusses intellectual and institutional aspects of archaeology and philhellenism, giving extensive treatment to the history of prehistorical archaeology and German "orientalism." Marchand traces the history of the study, excavation, and exhibition of Greek art as a means to confront the social, cultural, and political consequences of the specialization of scholarship in the last two centuries.

An obscure medical researcher develops the “miracle enzyme” Bevvinase, thus enabling the direct conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen within mammalian organisms, a major aid in the opening of Mars’ hostile environment to permanent human residence. Decades later, a pair of deported, convicted felons, ex-intelligence officer and alpinist Jesperson, and his assigned work-partner, Barnes, are among several hundred carbon dioxide-breathing “Marsrats” dwelling in Burroughs Enclave, an enclosed, pressurized crater housing the denizens in the long shadow of the immense Olympus Mons shield volcano and its vast aqueduct system, the only available source of quintessential water on frigid, arid Mars. The enclave teeters on the brink of becoming a “lost colony” due to a major quake that causes unknown damage to the aqueduct system, and water flow stoppage. With time to avoid doomsday and uncontaminated water running out at a semi-equivalent rate, and home world help unavailable due to insufficient months for effecting a remote rescue, Jesperson and Barnes struggle against opposition from the residents’ council and a derisive expert who believes climbing the volcano a total impossibility, and favors searching for deeply buried water ice. Jesperson and Barnes lead a last-resort, semi-suicidal trek up the six-kilometer-high escarpment, and onward to the rugged lower middle slopes of by far the largest volcano in the Solar System to effect repairs and assure the survival of Burroughs Enclave’s denizens.