The World of Odysseus (Penguin history) - Softcover

Finley, M.

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9780140136869: The World of Odysseus (Penguin history)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014013686X ISBN 13: 9780140136869

Publisher: Penguin, 1991

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Are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" just charming poetic fantasies? Or do they give a more or less accurate picture of the Mycenaean period, the early Dark Age of Homer's own era? Do archaeological discoveries like Schliemann's excavations at Troy bear out Homer's account of the Trojan war? The author offers an analysis of Homer's depiction of kinship and community, Helen and Hector, morals and values, Paris, Priam and the gods.

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Book Description:

A comprehensive and fascinating introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably the most famous works in world literature. 'A classic in its field, as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader. ' New York Review of Books.

About the Author:

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the thirties, Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley's best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.

Bernard Knox (1914-2010) was an English classicist. He was the first director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

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