San Antonio College Library

"The earliest and greatest works of Greek literature - the Iliad and the Odyssey - have been attributed since antiquity to the poet Homer. This concise book is an ideal introduction to the poet and his two great epics. Assuming no prior knowledge of Greek, the author supplies all the background information necessary to understand the poems." "The book presents an overview of the "Homeric question," considering the authorship, composition, and transmission...

A vivid and comprehensive account of the background and development of the Homeric poems and their quality as literature.

"This new study challenges traditional ways of reading Plato by showing that his philosophy and political theory cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the literary or aesthetic features of his writing. More specifically, it shows how Plato's well-known cosmological dialogues -- the Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias -- are structured using several books of the Odyssey as their shared source text. While there has recently been much scholarly...

In this penetrating and compelling reinterpretation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Kevin Crotty explores the connection between the "poetic" nature of supplication on the one hand, and, on the other, the importance of supplication in the structure and poetics of the two epics. The suppliant's attempt to rouse pity by calling to mind a vivid sense of grief, he says, is important for an understanding of the poems, which invite their audience to contemplate...

Many have forgotten that the subject of the "Illiad" was war--not merely the poetical romance of the war at Troy, but war, in all its enduring devastation. This groundbreaking reading of Homer's epic poem restores the poet's vision of the tragedy of war, addressing many of the central questions that define the war experience of every age.

Ever since antiquity the two Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have been considered to be masterpieces, and their influence on subsequent Greek and Western literature has been immense. In this volume an international team of scholars discusses the poems, their background and composition and, most originally, their subsequent reception down to the present day. Each chapter communicates the best of contemporary scholarship and offers new critical...

Essays discuss Homer's epic poem, examines its motifs, setting, and characters, and offers an assessment of its place in literature.