Jasper Griffin (1937–2019)

In the words of the Roman poet Horace, "Greece though conquered took her fearce conquerer captive, and brought in the arts to the uncivilized Latin peoples."

These words are indicative of this work which is the legacy of the Hellenistic era. The Hellenistic world ranges from architecture, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts, to military strategy and science. The study begins with the eighth century BC, witnessing the emergence of the Greek city states, and extends to the conquest of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Greek monarchy some five centuries later. Chapters dealing with political and social history are interspersed with chapters on philosophy in the arts, including Homer, Greek myth, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as Greek dramatists such as Sophocles and Aristophanes, and the flourishing of the visual and plastic arts.

Chapters include the history of the archaic period, Homer, Greek myth and Hesiod, lyric and elegiac poetry, early Greek philosophy, the history of the classical period, Greek drama, Greek historians, life and society in classical Greece, classical Greek philosophy, Greek religion, Greek art and architecture, the history of the Hellenistic period, Hellenistic culture and literature, Hellenistic philosophy and science, and Hellenistic and Graeco- Roman art.

Shared blood, shared language, shared religion, and shared customs. These, according to Herodotus, were the ingredients of Greekness (p. 144).

This volume is extraordinarily helpful on many aspects of Greece and the Hellenistic world.… (more)

11. Homer (Past Masters) by Jasper Griffin
published: 1980
format: 80 page little hardcover
acquired: borrowed from my library
read: Feb 24-25
rating: 3 stars

In his introduction Griffin quotes [[Matthew Arnold]] as saying Homer is great "in the noble and profound application of ideas to life.". Then he writes that he hopes "to explain and justify" this statement. I wish he hadn't. Actually all I wanted was a version of a very short introduction to Homer. But that's not really what this is. By taking the high ground in a way, he lets us down a bit. He never comes close to providing the explanation and justification promised, and he also never boils these poems down. But he does allow himself to go his own way, and, when he finally gets somewhere, he has some very interesting things to say.

He takes some time to get there. Shortly after telling the reader we should read the poems before we read his book and he goes on to use up many of his 80 pages with a plot summary of the Iliad. Finally - along about page 30 where he writes, "Perhaps even now, despite the long insistence by churches and philosophers that there is one single set of standards, unambiguously moral and the same for everybody, the common man still retains at heart some Homeric values. " - we start getting somewhere.

The rest of the book has really interesting things to say about the Iliad, which he claims is the greater poem, and the Odyssey. He tells us "And Helen is a legendary figure not for her achievements or her virtue but for her guilt and suffering." That is the expression of suffering is her purpose; and it's same for Achilles and Hektor, making the Iliad quite the tragedy. The main mechanism is heroism, and its restrictions and their consequences provide the plays tragedy. To put it another way, characters suffer and die because of choices forced on them in order to maintain their heroic role.

When he writes about the its largely to contrast it, where characters don't exactly abandon the heroic code, but certainly Odysseus stretches its definition.

So, overall I'm pleased I read this, even if I felt the need to beat it up a little bit.

2016
https://www.librarything.com/topic/209547#5489979… (more)