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Explores the moral choices and values Homer offers in his Iliad
Interpretation of ancient Greek literature is often enough distorted by the preconceptions of modern times, especially on ancient morality. This is often equivalent to begging the question. If we think e.g. of aretê, which has different meanings in different contexts, we shall think in English (or in Modern Greek or in French or in German) and shall falsify the phenomena. If we are to understand the Greek concept e.g. of aretê we must study the nature of the situations in which it is applied. For it is an important fact in the study of Greek society that the Greeks used the one word (e.g. aretê) where we use different words. If we are to understand properly the texts, we have to view them in their historical and social context. Ancient Greek thought needs to be studied together with politics, ethics, and economic behaviour. Moreover, the best insights can be found in those who confine themselves to the terms of each ancient author's analysis. From this principle each of the contributions of the volume begins.
The archaic context of vengeance -- Vengeance in the Odyssey: tisis as narrative -- Three narratives of divine vengeance -- Odysseus' terrifying revenge -- The multiple meanings of Odysseus' triumphs -- The end of the Odyssey.
An exercise in cultural sociology, Moral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece seeks to explicate the dynamic currents of classical Hellenic ethics and social philosophy by situating those idea-complexes in their socio-historical and intellectual contexts. Central to this enterprise is a comprehensive historical-sociological analysis of the Polis form of social organization, which charts the evolution of its basic institutions, roles, statuses, and class relations. From the Dark Age period of "genesis" on to the Hellenistic era of "eclipse" by the emergent forces of imperial patrimonialism, Polis society promoted and sustained corresponding normative codes which mobilized and channeled the requisite emotive commitments and cognitive judgments for functional proficiency under existing conditions of life. The aristocratic warrior-ethos canonized in the Homeric epics; the civic ideology of equality and justice espoused by reformist lawgivers and poets; the democratization of status honor and martial virtue that attended the shift to hoplite warfare; the philosophical exaltation of the Polis-citizen bond as found in the architectonic visions of Plato and Aristotle; and the subsequent retreat from civic virtues and the interiorization of value articulated by the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics, new age philosophies in a world remade by Alexander's conquests--these are the key phases in the evolving currents of Hellenic moral discourse, as structurally framed by transformations within the institutional matrix of Polis society.
This volume describes both divine and human behaviour in Homer through exhaustive surveys of relevant terms and episodes. It is a critical response to A.W.H. Adkins' "Merit and Responsibility" and H. Lloyd- Jones' "The Justice of Zeus."
Homer and Hesiod, Myth and Philosophy is a study of the nature and function of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod when their work is considered in historical context as the initial significant developments of poetry as a distinctive voice for truth beyond religion and myth. To understand their innovations properly, this work begins with the presentation of an account of the nature of religion and myth and in particular of the disclosure of truth achieved in myth. Then it takes up the Homeric and Hesiodic innovations which transform the bardic poetry that was heritage from at least Mycenaean times and that make the inspired poet an educative voice for truth. After giving an account of the four major poems in which this transformation is embodied: Illiad and Odyssey, Theogony and Works and Days, the work concludes with a discussion of how these creations shaped the matrix within which philosophy arose. In this way it points to why the distinctive realization of philosophy in Greece (as contrasted with that in China and India) involved what the Platonic Socrates can speak of as "an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy."