Travelling Heroes - In the Epic Age of Homer

Zusatztext “Multilayered and beautifully written. . . . [Lane Fox’s] great gift is to make this long-ago world a vivid! extraordinary and sometimes frightening place. Like Homer’s yearning traveller! Lane Fox longs to be there! and his longing is contagious.” —Elizabeth Speller! The Sunday Times (London)   “Full of wit and suspense. . . . Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve.” —Mary Beard! Financial Times   “A fascinating quest . . . that illuminates the roots of Greek thought and ideas that have shaped our own world and philosophies. . . . Lane Fox is a lively writer.” —Lois D. Atwood! The Providence Journal   “Exciting. . . . With his usual panache! [Lane Fox] displays encyclopaedic erudition alongside an unusually wide historical and geographical scope. The pleasure and the education offered by this book lie in the stylishly presented detail.” —Edith Hall! The Times Literary Supplement (London)   “As we follow [Lane Fox] through the pages of this learned! original and ceaselessly intriguing book! we find a strange and alien landscape opening up before us! one so remote that it had hitherto seemed lost to utter darkness. . . . This is a wonderful book.” —Tom Holland! The Spectator (London)   “Original! daring! and arguably life-enhancing. . . . Lane Fox [writes] with a sweeping narrative flourish worthy of a cinematographer or screenwriter . . . seasoned and leavened with a wit that only writing can afford.” —Paul Cartledge! The Independent (London)   “Lane Fox has spent his long and distinguished career negotiating a broader intellectual highway! and leading a wide range of readers along it. Travelling Heroes takes us on a dazzling journey throughout the Mediterranean world of the 8th century BC [and] he evokes the period brilliantly.” — The Telegraph (London) Informationen zum Autor Robin Lane Fox Klappentext The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their gods develop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicist Robin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime's knowledge of the ancient world, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuing it through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the Mediterranean, encountering strange new sights-volcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones-and weaving them into the myths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization.Chapter 1 Hera’s Flight In the fifteenth book of Homer’s Iliad, the goddess Hera flies across to Mount Olympus and the poet compares her to a particular movement of the human mind. When a man has travelled far and wide, he tells us, his mind will sometimes leap and he will think, “I wish I was here, or I wish I was there,” as he “longs for many different things.” Hera’s sideways flight is as swift as these inconsistent thoughts as she moves from the peak of one mountain to another. Two thousand seven hundred years later we still know from inner experience what Homer meant. We do not connect such thoughts with the speed of a passing goddess, which we imagine, rather, as the invisible speed of light. Homer’s imagination is so much more precise. When a goddess descends directly to earth he compares her descent to a vertical shower of hailstones. When she flies sideways he refers us inwards to those lateral fancies which express our enduring sense that life does not have to be as it is. Two thousand seven hundred years are a very long gap between Homer and ourselves and at such a distance the psychology of his heroes has been thought by some of his modern readers to be primitive. Homer’s heroes think in their “hearts,” not their brains; like us, they can disow...

Product details

• Authors: Robin Lane Fox, Robin Lane Fox
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.03.2010
• EAN: 9780679763864
• ISBN: 978-0-679-76386-4
• No. of pages: 496
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 27 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Antiquity