Over the last sixty years scholars have increasingly become aware of links connecting early Greek poetry with the literatures of the ancient Near East. Martin West's new book far surpasses previous studies in comprehensiveness, demonstrating these links with massive and detailed documentation and showing they are much more fundamental and pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. His survey embraces Hesiod, the Homeric epics, the lyric poets, and Aeschylus, and concludes with an illuminating discussion of possible avenues of transmission between the orient and Greece.

The Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 B.C.--greats such as Sappho, Anacreon, and Simonides--produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity. Their poetry was perfect in form, spontaneous in expression, and reflected all the joys and anxieties of their personal lives and of the societies in which they lived. This new poetic translation by a leading expert captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry as never before. Not merely a selection, it covers all the surviving poems and intelligible fragments (apart from the works of...

The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient,...