Gore Vidal

[Epictetus]

The Economist has an obituary that emphasises how classicism inspired him.

He was an ancient both in thought and predilection, inspired by classicism even more acutely than the founding fathers he revered. Plato was his companion, and “the Agora” his word for the braying marketplace of public taste. Suetonius’s “Twelve Caesars”, he said, persuaded him to be an essayist. His closest avatar was probably the emperor Julian in his novel of 1964, the noble lonely pagan against the Galileans, for whom he fashioned “one last wreath of Apollonian laurel to place upon the brow of philosophy”, before the barbarians smashed the gates. Indeed there was, in his gilded youth, the air of an “archaic Apollo” about him, as one admirer sighed to another in his memoir “Palimpsest”.