Books of a Nature not Necessarily Academic but Nice*

Textkit Community Civilization and Culture of the Greeks and Romans
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Ok so this is a damnably bad title and I apologise. It could be about books, or the book trade in antiquity, reading practices, dissemination of texts. Anything! Such is the scope of the title. Its not though, it is literally about books you like. I want a broad book discussion.

It doesn’t have to be about technical literature on language and metrics and grammar, or inscriptional history or Greek toilet habits. It suppose it can be, but I wanted to turn towards the more broader/accessible studies out there. Not necessarily conspiracy theories and the odd popular press books, but stuff like Whitman’s “Heroic Tradition” etc. Stuff which assumes you know, or will know, one or both languages.

Partly because I need a break from the other stuff, partly because these books don’t really get discussed much. What do you like? by whom? on what? why? recommendations?

For me I’m starting with J Griffins’ “Homer on Life and Death”…I kind of love it. Griffin has had an indirect effect on me via teachers and the field itself as well as a slightly more direct one through his book. It’s…it’s so interesting. It manages to discuss parallels and near eastern reflexes (and world literature generally) without getting bogged down with details of transmissions or ideologies, it gives sensible readings and…it’s just so well written. I’ve read it many times and will do so again probably.

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Right now I couldn’t think of anything much to say, except that this is a good idea and I like it!

I think I’ve read Griffin’s book (at least I had it a long time from the library…), but since it was one of the first Homer books I read I don’t remember much, or what I remember has been mixed up with other stuff. I guess I’ll get it again some day, since everybody seems to be praising it.

3

Ok, here I go.

Jonathan Gottschall: The Rape of Troy. I read this book when I was only starting to study Homer, but it made a big impression then. Now I might be more critical in some points. It tries to explain the behaviour of the Homeric heroes through evolutionary biology and anthropology. Said like that, it sounds really bad, reductionist and predictable, but it isn’t. I learned a lot about human violence reading this book, maybe some of it might be commonplace to people who have studied more anthropology than I have, but still. It really makes Homer just a case in point to show some general tendencies in human behaviour, especially violence, but there are many good observations about Homer in particular too. It’s a short book and absolutely worth reading.

Samuel Marks: Homeric Seafaring. Ok, maybe this is goes in the same category with Greek toilet habits. Still, if you interested about 1) Homer, and 2) ships, this book is for you. The title is a bit misleading, it’s about ship construction, navigation is not really treated. The writer is naval archeologist and thinks Homer’s ships use sewn plank contruction, among other things. The parts about geography at least were naive, but I really enjoyed the bits where the author kept in his own trade, i.e. naval archeology.

Ceterum censeo, everything written by M. L. West should be read, read again, read backwards and read once again.

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I liked Homeric Seafaring! I mean like most bits on Homer (and the wider world) by archaeologists, those sections were…trying at times, but we can’t get into that without going beyond the remit of the thread. :laughing: I really enjoyed it overall.

Chadwick’s Mycenaean World:

I did and still adore this book. There have been countless improvements in the field since and several introductory books (not always by Mycenologists or Classicists…) but for me this is still the best overall treatment. First off, its sensible in its theorising and I admire the way he sets out the relationship between Homer and Bronze age, as in stop abusing one in explaining the other. Alas, precious few have listened. It leads on wonderfully to more technical and modern introductions whilst still being inherently readable. Take another modern introduction for example, Castledon’s, basically expensive toilet paper.

Winnington-Ingram’s Sophocles and Interpretation:

Another classic, on one hand I (as I mentioned above) feel uncomfortable with this kind of literary work…Its a completely different modus operandi than my own but it remains an excellent introduction to Sophocles and his plays, my second favourite of the triad (I dislike all but like, two, of Euripides’ plays. He is last. He deserves to be last). The sections are divided by individual plays but everything has a wonderful synergism.

Argh this is harder than I thought. Also Paul please feel free to suggest alternative thread titles. I forgot to mention that above, this title sucks and I’ve still nothing in my petasos.

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Then there’s of course the ground-breaking, pioneering, trend-setting work by Felice Vince, The Baltic Origins of Homer. We talked about this one before, but it’s so important that I thought it worthwhile to mention it again. Little did I know before that I’ve been living most of my life at less than two hours drive from Troy! As with any breakthrough, there are some sceptics and denialists, but luckily they were not the ones who wrote the Wikipedia article.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read this amazing piece of scholarship yet… I think it would be a good idea to buy a couple of those to offer to fellow Homerists, in case one needs to offer them a κειμήλιον, say on the 1st of May…

The author is a nuclear engineer. I hope the facilities he has been working in have been maintained with the same intellectual rigour as the one that gave birth to this wonderful work.

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I agree with Scribo re Griffin and Whitman (I’ve treasured my copy of the Whitman book since high school, and I took a couple of courses with Whitman long ago, as well as a seminar with G.N. on the Iliad before his views became hardened).

I have my reservations about M.L. West, which I’ve expressed in the Homer forum, but I agree with Paul that he is a great scholar who has made many contributions to the study of ancient Greek literature. And, after rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey earlier this year, I’ve become more sympathetic to his view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were somehow composed in or with the aid of writing, and probably later than the 8th century. I felt this more strongly as I read the Odyssey, in which I think the complex anticipations and foreshadowings and patterns of thematic development seem even less amenable to oral “composition in performance” than the Iliad’s. I just don’t like the arbitrary excisions and wholesale tampering with the evidence of the manuscript tradition–our only evidence for the texts–that pervade West’s edition of the Iliad, and I think his views on the origins of the Homeric poems (along with those of nearly everyone else who ventures to address this topic) are expressed far more categorically and confidently than the evidence allows.

Among other things I read as I was reading the Iliad, were (1) Due and Ebbott’s Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush–a stimulating and thought-provoking “hard Parryist,” G.N.-inspired, defense of Iliad 10 as an integral part of the Iliadic tradition (though my inclinations, subject to a generally skeptical outlook, lie in another direction), and (2) Jenny Strauss Clay, Homer’s Trojan Theater, which I think is a big help in understanding the action of the Iliad in spatial terms.

I wholeheartedly agree with with Paul’s assessment of the Felice Vince “book”, even though I haven’t read it. Paul, you must already have paid a visit to the site of the Iliad. “a κειμήλιον, say on the 1st of May…” I think you meant, on the 1st of April, didn’t you? As I recall, there’s another book that locates the Iliad in Scotland, too. Both of these must be right, simultaneously!

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I’ve actually flicked through that book…it…I feel ashamed I can’t make a witty joke of my own about it and join in the fun, damn.

I see what you mean about the Iliad, though I think I’m going to sidestep a discussion of Homer and composition in this thread if you don’t mind. Overall, I’m very Westian in certain aspects but I disagree with a) incisions and problems and b) that writing was necessary. When I was a second year I wrote a defence of the so called logical inconsistencies and problems within the texts btw, it was very facile. Having a more systemised experience of oral performances I’ve built up my ideas and its certainly something I would like to get back too. I’ve only had a few chances to give my ideas on this orally and really want to get something down but…it’s proving difficult.


The Whitman book I only got recently, as of…2011, I’ve yet to actually finish it but it possesses a certain charm and I’m currently on chapter four.

What’s sad, to me, is how few good accessible books there are on Hesiod! Οκ, we have W’s amazing commentaries and some serious scholarly works but…there aren’t really that many general treatments. I don’t know if we can include Strauss-Clay’s book on “Hesiod’s Cosmos” under this rubric. It’s a shame, he is a phenomenal poet. I also find him oddly comforting. I guess he’s grumpy and down like I often am. I wish he had a more central place in reading lists.

On the Roman side of things there’s Fanthams book “Roman Literary Culture”. It is written for american undergraduates so requires no classical languages and is often facile in its assessments but overall its a fantastic book: It has a broad range, pays enough attention to Republic contexts and is clearly informed of current important debates about the nature of Roman literary praxis. I think I’d actually recommend this as an introduction to Roman literature. I recently read it since it has a new edition out with a Christian epilogue.

Anyway for someone like me, who really dislikes the entire Augustan movement (well bar a few) and tends to read either much earlier or later, this is a wonderful book.

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This is a nice thread, keep telling about books you like!

Qimmik, I sort of agree with you about West’s overconfident bracketing in his Iliad, which we’ve discussed so many times before already… But what I wanted to point out is how huge his literary output is, the sheer number of important books. I mean beside his Iliad books, there’s The East Face of Helicon, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, his Works and Days, his Theogony, his new commentary on the Epic Cycle, the one on the Catalogue of Women, these being the books I’ve either read or at least had borrowed from the library ( :slight_smile: ), and then there’s a whole lot more, like his books on Greek music and Greek metre, which I hope I’ll read one day. Not to mention his articles (The most important of which are now being published in a three volume set called Hellenica. The first volume is on Epic.)

As for the 1st of April… That would be a nice day indeed to pass around books by Vinci! But I’d just forgotten that the 1st of May isn’t as important in other countries as in Finland. In Finland it’s a carnaval day (and, especially, a day of public drunkenness).

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Unfortunately not, I’ve never been to either Hissarlik or Toija (Vinci’s Troy - a place totally devoid of archaeological or any other interest. If it wasn’t for Vinci, I wouldn’t know such a place exists).

Speaking of Troy, two books great books about Hissarlik and Troy come to mind

  1. Joachim Latacz: Troy and Homer. I guess this is some kind of reference, though some people think he’s too optimistic. I read him quite a long time ago, I don’t remember very well anymore the exact debate.
  2. Trevor Bryce: Trojans and their neighbours. I think Bryce is generally called the more sober of the two. What he says about Homer tends to be naive though, as is expected from an archaeologist… Anyway, he doesn’t even seem to accept a link between Alexander (=Paris) and Alaksandu (a king of Wilusa, according to Hittite documents). Skepticism is a good thing in general, but I think this one is too good to be a coincidence.
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I like Latacz’s book, but it has its flaws. Misuse of evidence, logical leaps and an oddly selective bibliography. As in it seems to (deliberately?) miss out important studies. See if you can get hold of Joshua Katz’s review which details a lot of problems. Despite all this I’m still positive because, like Katz, I want to believe. I want to believe so much I took a full year of advanced training in the bronze age crap. Even handled and played with tablets and stuff. I want to believe, even as my intellectual integrity tries to stop me. Grr…

I used to think the problem with these sort of books btw is that Archaeologists heavily misuse Homer and the oral tradition and Classicists ignore the most interesting archaeological stuff due to relative obscurity. Moreover most work on the bronze age is now handled completely by Archaeologists with limited training in Greek philology, which is a recipe for disaster. Whereas in previous generations they all a strong basis in Greek linguistics. However I also think, basically, that there is a growing unfamiliarity amongst classicists of how oral traditions and cultural memory work so there is a third missing aspect. You never see the most important studies cited.

Bryce is an excellent study, also Yakubovich has an important book on sociolinguistics and Luwian which do sort of impact this stuff. It’s very stiff reading though.

PS. Found that review on an open access thing: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1426853

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I think West’s Hesiod commentaries (Works and Days, Theogony etc.) are superb. Also his work on Greek music. His book on Greek meter is also the best I’ve seen, though it’s very succinct and dense, almost too much so. East Face of Helicon and Indo-European are very helpful as reference works (even he admits they contain speculative leaps, but they could be useful and suggestive to Hellenists in tracing Near Eastern and Indo-European parallels to archaic Greek literature). I have the first two volumes of Hellenica, and both offer a lot of important articles.

I, too, want to believe (and I do, with all the fervor of an Appalachian snake handler), so I liked the Latacz book. However, I think Trevor Bryce’s book is more sober, as you say, but it’s informed by a specialist knowledge of the Anatolian Bronze Age and, in particular, the Hittites. I’m not sure he actually rejects the identification of Wilusa and Alaksandu so much as remains cautiously agnostic. The book itself is aimed more at a popular than a scholarly audience, and in that context, I think his discussion of Homer is illuminating and helpful. There’s now a small volume on the Trojan War in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, which covers much the same ground.

Another book on Homer: Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer, which traces how the idea of Homer (as opposed to the poems themselves) took shape over the course of Greek history.

Chadwick’s Mycenaean World – I wholeheartedly agree, and his Decipherment of Linear B which I read at 13 in 1959 and it has held me in its thrall forever after.

When I visited Greece last year, I came away with a keychain with the Linear B symbol for olive tree. I acquired this magical talisman at the Olive Museum in Sparti–it sounds like a Sehenswuerdigkeit you could easily skip, but it’s really a wonderful, very modern museum that should be especially fascinating for anyone with an interest in ancient (or modern) Greece. Vaut le detour! If you visit the Byzantine city of Mostras, Sparti is not far away. There’s also a modern statue of Leonidas in Sparti, with the inscription μολὼν λαβέ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe

For those who aren’t aware just how weird and crazy the US is (and by now you should be), read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling

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Wow that really is crazy…haha. I truly know very little of the US, I ought to have gone when I could have.

The problem with believing is, as I say, my mind won’t let my heart. I think there is a generic connection, that some places and some names have came down to us. Beyond that…I see little to no evidence. For me, studying this stuff at a graduate level, was in some ways one of my first slaps in the face: The civilisation really was alien. It was interesting, but alien. I felt a lot of work being done was facile and often specious too. The other major slap in the face, what really disillusioned me with academic praxis, was being asked…seriously asked…at an interview at one of the biggest universities in the world…why I bothered with learning non classical ancient languages and why did I think x ancient culture could tell us anything about the Greeks? who were magical and unique basically. This from a big name. It’s just…sad.

Greece has a few nice museums off the beaten way actually but I’d never heard of that one, I shall add it to my list when I’m back for Christmas. I heartily recommend the Byzantine museum, its well kept, organised and the write ups are infinitely better than what you find elsewhere. The Akropolis museum was nice for the price and the view but overall just…just hilarious.

Graziosi, along with Haubold, has actually put out a decent nexus of work on epic, and have gathered a little coterie of students up there in Durham. When I was there for a conference I was amazed, I’ve never seen so many students in the same room all interested in epic, the near east, oral intertexts etc etc. Phenomenal. Bet we’ll see many awesome books pouring forth from there in the near future!

I also put forward Finley’s book on ancient history, the one with the essay on myth and society.

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“The problem with believing is, as I say, my mind won’t let my heart.”

Yes, I agree with that, too, and of course I’m a cautious skeptic when I read modern books about the historicity of the Trojan War. But that’s no reason not to entertain two mutually inconsistent ideas simultaneously.

And you really can’t experience ancient Greek as fully as possible in our degenerate era without accepting the literal truth of Homer.

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Is that a challenge to carry off the statue, if you’re strong enough…?

About the mind not letting the heart to believe… I’ve known this problem with other things in life, but not with Homer. I’ve never thought the Iliad was a historical document (and I guess nobody in their right minds thinks the Odyssey is one). Even in children’s books I read when I was like 10 there was some kind of skeptical note, “we don’t know if there ever was a Trojan War”. (This is different from say, the Old Testament, which up to a certain age I thought was historically exact and accurate from beginning to end). Sure, there wasn’t probably one great Trojan war. But the Mycenean civilisation did exist, there were Greek-speaking people doing stuff on the Anatolian coast in the 2nd millenium BC, we have places called Wilusa and Truwisa in just the right place according to Hittite sources, with some guy called Aleksandu ruling there as well as people whose names sound not much unlike Priam (this last part doesn’t convince me so much as the other ones). Also, Homer preserves the memory of the importance of places like Mycenae and Pylos, though he has anachronisms too (I think Sparta wasn’t important in Mycenean times for instance). (As a matter of fact Homeric geography and it’s anachronism is a subject I’d like to know more about - any tips?)

For me, it really depends what you expect me to believe. Sure, you can’t extrapolate on archaelogical data using Homer or vice versa. You can’t go assuming that something happened in the Mycenean age because Homer says so. But certainly Homer preserves memories of something, though it’s so distorted that we can’t trust it. Achilles, for instances, looks to be more connected with raids on other islands and cities near Troy than the Trojan war itself. Other heroes too have certainly been imported from other contexts. Sure, the catalogue of ships probably isn’t a Mycenean muster list; but I don’t believe there’s one single place on that list that Homer made up; it means something, though probably not what Homer is saying. It’s all about disentangling all those different threads and finding the historical kernels (and not all of those threads necessarily go back to the Mycenean age, though I believe many of them do). Since I’m not expecting to gaze on the face of Agamemnon, I don’t really see how the truth about all this could disappoint me.

Scribo: By Finley’s book, do you mean The World of Odysseus? Haven’t read - some say he was wrong there about almost everything. What do you think?

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Homer doesn’t remember something. He remembers some things. There is a crucial difference beyond semantics. Those looking for a concrete memory of “something”, as many do, are bound to be upset. That’s not how oral tradition’s work…there are several “layers” and several small reminiscences and its not reacting to a single time event though we might conjecture that the sack of Troy was one such event. Don’t forget you had Aegeans messing about in Miletus (mi-ra-wa-na-da) well before Troy and along Asia minor (and Cyprus) quite a bit later.

Anyway, Geography, the best treatments of Mycenaean geography are by Chadwick, he may have something in the book Qimmik and I recommended but I believe his article in some proceedings or other is more detailed, likewise there have been a few by others but largely secondary. I recall some French stuff.

For Homer’s geography you obviously have the summary in the Cambridge commentary series and Eduard Visser’s (German) commentary on the catalogue of ships. For me, I think the most important context here is one of contemporary concerns. You’ve also got, much more importantly!, the link between myth, cult, colonisation and Homeric “geography”. Essentially we need to stop trying to act as if Homer’s a proto-Strabo or that his audience and, say, listeners in the late 7th and early 6th centuries saw his geography the same way…

But come on guys we’re falling into the same traps here :laughing:

Finley: No I didn’t mean that one. I don’t see why it’s a bad book…I mean…it is, but it’s old…so does it count as “bad”? I think Latacz supersedes it as a more general treatment. I mean his book “The Use and Abuse of History”. Which has some great set pieces. Especially that on myth and history or myth as history. Fascinating.

I’d like to advance Coffey’s “Roman Satire” too. I loved that book, the best Latin poetry is in this genre and its a really solid introduction with some clever readings without the mentality I associate with Latin scholars.

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Of all the commentaries and books on Virgil, the one that we used in 4th-year Latin (1962-1963) is the one that has stuck with me the most: Page. Page, the Victorian or Edwardian schoolmaster, really took Virgil to heart, more than anyone else before or since. I still have my 50-year old dog-eared copy.

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Ahhh, aren’t you going to tell us who that was?

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Ha no that would be…inopportune since, for one thing, this page would then come up with Google searches etc.

Qimmik that’s cool. Actually that’s a funny point…there aren’t really that many introductory commentaries being produced anymore, so for Homer I went straight to the Cambridge series and the BK, occasionally checking particular book by book treatments, I never had a chance to check Willcock.

For Virgil though I’ve used two: Firstly, Pharr’s commentary on 1-6. Wonderful for the neophyte and my copy is so bloody battered it is unbelievable. Other than I went through William’s, particularly for 7-12. A much nicer pace so I had some idea of what was going on before I was given Norden, Horsfall, Austin et al.

I must admit that very little of Virgil “clicks” with me, I like the end of six, all of eight and twelve and I suppose two is interesting enough for me to like it, but otherwise for me Virgil breaks down into episodes I like, e.g “The Italic catalogue”, and then a lot of dead space.

In fact from the entire Augustan era, outside the Aeneid, I think Horace is the only poet I really like. And that’s discounting his odes. I read them all and I enjoyed some of the Latin pryotechnics but generally my face was like: :angry: :cry: :blush: :open_mouth:

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I tried to read the Aeneid in English translation earlier this year (translated by David West). It was so boring, I abandoned after reading a little more than the half. I guess I’ll force myself to read the rest some day. But how can anyone compare that to Homer? It was just blaa blaa blaa to me.

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In the first instance I would appeal to you to try and develop an ear for Vergil’s word music. I don’t think we can say there is any poet who surpasses him in his sensitivity to the poetic power of the spoken word. Try reading (in Latin, not English!) the first few hundred lines of Aeneid II, for example; you may begin to understand what Tennyson meant when he called Vergil “Wielder of the stateliest measure/
Ever moulded by the lips of man.”