Description

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Pencil annotation on endpaper, otherwise very good and clean. / Bleistiftanmerkung auf Vorsatzblatt, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Contents: Foreword by Gregory Nagy -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Citations and Names -- Introduction -- Part I. Some �Minor� Characters in the Odyssey -- 1. Relations of Dependency: Some Themes and Issues -- 2. The View from Above: The Representation of Slaves in the Odyssey -- Part II. Oikos and Community: The Contest of the Bow Introduction to Part II: Competitive Performances -- 3. Household, Honor, and the Violence of Competition -- 4. The Contest at the Hearth: Family Values with a Vengeance -- Part III. Paradigms and Audiences. Introduction to Part III: Appropriating Paradigms -- 5. The Dark Age and Hierarchy -- 6. The Odyssey as Social Process -- Bibliography -- Index. - The Odyssey, William G. Thalmann asserts, does not describe an actual historical society at any period but gives a selective, idiosyncratic, and contradictory picture to serve ideological ends, representing rather than reproducing social reality. The Swineherd and the Bow is an ambitious attempt to apply literary and social science theory to reveal Homeric epic as a form of class discourse within the context of early Greek social and political development. Drawing on recent scholarship in archaeology and cultural anthropology, Thalmann considers the evolution of Greek culture up to the formation of the polis in the late eighth century b.c. He demonstrates that Greek society was already stratified well before that date and that the distinction between an elite and other classes was well developed. Thalmann concentrates on the representation of slaves and on the dynamics of competition and family structure in the contest of the bow to interpret the Odyssey�and, implicitly, epic poetry generally�as an intervention in the conflicts that surrounded the birth of the polis. In the interests of the aristocracy, the poem appropriates a traditional cultural paradigm, enshrined in the story of the Hero�s return. The distortions of dark age reality, Thalmann maintains, should form the basis of a historicizing reading of the poem. - William G. Thalmann is Professor of Classics, University of Southern California. He is the author of three books, most recently The Odyssey: An Epic of Return. ISBN 9780801434792