Klicka på en bild för att gå till Google Book Search.
Laddar... Homer and His Iliadav Robin Lane Fox
Ingen/inga Laddar...
Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken.
This book is the result of a lifetime spent teaching the Iliad. Its first part puts a historian’s focus on how, where, and when the epic was composed, its second on the significance of the poem itself and its view of our human predicament. The approach is scholarly and based on a walker’s deep knowledge of Homer’s landscapes, but also entertainingly idiosyncratic, with much use of the personal voice. As one of few remaining Homerists to have been brought up among one of the last aristocracies, that of England, and a proud scion of its most aristocratic school, as he often tells us, Lane Fox has a better instinct for the ethos of Homer’s heroes than do most moderns. Since my first teenage job was to teach Latin to an Earl aged ten, whose family graciously admitted this plebeian to their Palladian hall through the main portal rather than the tradesman’s entrance, I can myself attest to Sarpedon’s ethos of noblesse oblige.
Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date, and a method for its composition--subjects of ongoing controversy--combining the detailed expertise of a historian with a poetic reader's sensitivity. Lane Fox considers hallmarks of the poem; its values, implicit and explicit; its characters; its women; its gods; and even its horses. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
Pågående diskussionerIngen/ingaPopulära omslag
Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)883.01Literature Greek and other Classical languages Prose and Fiction, Classical Greek Pseudo-CallisthenesKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
Är det här du? |
But what of those poems themselves, specifically the Iliad, which takes its title from Troy’s alternative name, Ilion (itself derived from the Hittite Wilusa)? Since antiquity, scholars have debated but never agreed on how it came to be written. Multi-layered Hisarlik might well serve as a metaphor for their often-contorted arguments. Most accept that the Iliad has its roots in oral poetry performed at gatherings held in the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ and perhaps earlier; some suggest that it is an amalgam, a ‘stitching together’ of shorter works made over many years; others that it is a ‘snowball’ with a core of original material expanded over generations by different hands. While classical authors believed that it was the product of one man, sometimes imagined as a blind poet from Samos, few in modern times have felt compelled to try to track down who that man might have been. Enter Robin Lane Fox. Having used topographic and literary detective work to ‘find’ Hippocrates on the island of Thasos (in his recent and brilliant book, The Invention of Medicine), he now uses his sleuthing skills to try to discover Homer, the man who he believes authored most of the Iliad.
‘Authored’, not ‘wrote’. Homer was, Lane Fox maintains, an oral poet, taught by great masters, part of a long tradition which may have stretched back to the Bronze Age. But whereas previous reciters were content to link together existing free-standing episodes to form a linear narrative, the Iliad is different, its details interlinked throughout the text, which ‘only make sense in the light of the whole’. It is partly this structure which reveals the genius of a single author who dictated his rehearsed, perfected composition to scribes versed in the newly honed Greek alphabet (which may even have been invented for this purpose). Already well known, his oral Iliad (Lane Fox’s ‘preferred guess’ is that Homer ‘first performed a version for troops who were out at war’) was the product of autopsy and experience. Based on the west coast of Asia Minor, somewhere between Ephesus and Miletus, he travelled south to Lycia and north to Troy to garner detail. But according to Lane Fox he was not simply a poet. He may have been a charioteer – ‘I like to believe he drove a racing team himself’ – a hunter, even a ‘putative gardener’. In fact, as he sharpens into focus, this Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox, himself a great horseman, who once declared: ‘On my deathbed I will think of Homer, then gardens, the great women I know, and lastly my best days fox hunting. And then I’ll die.’
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
David Stuttard is the author of Phoenix: A Father, a Son and the Rise of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2021).