The ancient hero's quest for glory offers metaphors for our own struggles to reach personal integrity and wholeness. In this compelling book, Van Nortwick traces the heroic journeys in three seminal works of ancient epic poetry, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad, and Virgil's Aeneid. In particular, he focuses on the relationship of the hero to one or more second selves, or alter egos, showing how the poems address central truths about the cost of heroic self-assertion: that the pursuit of glory can lead to alienation from one's own deepest self, and that...
The ancient hero's quest for glory offers metaphors for our own struggles to reach personal integrity and wholeness. In this compelling book, Van Nort...
Compromising Traditions is the first collection of theoretically informed autobiographical writing in the field of classical studies which aims to create a more expansive and authoritative form of classical scholarship.
Compromising Traditions is the first collection of theoretically informed autobiographical writing in the field of classical studies which aims to cre...
Exploring models for masculinity as they appear in major works of Greek literature, this book combines literary, historical, and psychological insights to examine how the ancient Greeks understood the meaning of a man's life. The thoughts and actions of Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and other enduring characters from Greek literature reflect the imperatives that the ancient Greeks saw as governing a man's life as he moved from childhood to adult maturity to old age. Because the Greeks believed that men (as opposed to women) were by nature the proper agents of human civilization within the...
Exploring models for masculinity as they appear in major works of Greek literature, this book combines literary, historical, and psychological insi...
Only a few plays by Sophocles--one of the great tragic playwrights from Classical Athens--have survived, and each of them dramatizes events from the rich store of myths that framed literature and art. Sophocles' treatment evokes issues that were vividly contemporary for Athenian audiences of the Periclean age: How could the Athenians incorporate older, aristocratic ideas about human excellence into their new democratic society? Could citizens learn to be morally excellent, or were these qualities only inherited? What did it mean to be a creature who knows that he or she must die? Late...
Only a few plays by Sophocles--one of the great tragic playwrights from Classical Athens--have survived, and each of them dramatizes events from the r...
