Virgil's Iliad: An Essay on Epic Narrative Book

A book with very good ideas and a very good introduction to the history of crafting (however absurd the notion is) a Western canon, particularly when the idea of literature has no place in the performance-based world of Ancient Greece. Literature, the solitary reader, is a false construct that existed for a select few who had the privilege of working in, say, the Library of Alexandria; furthermore, these Ancient Greek literary traditions, while possibly the foundation of Western literature in retrospect, were merely the performance pieces and cultural landmarks of a civilisation that was interacting with the east'not the west.

'The Greek world of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE was not in any significant sense part of "Europe"; it is more constructive [...] to site it as the north-western corner of a vigorous and dynamic complex of east-Mediterranean and Levantine cultures' (23). These epics shaped a Greek culture, which was then further shaped by the symposium. 'Symposia became a central, definitive part of Greek culture [as] fundamental institutions for education, social definition, testing boundaries of acceptability and instituting cultural norms' (53). Poems were tried out in the symposia that critiqued the symposia, which in turn altered both the gathering of Greeks and the poems they wrote. Theatre followed a similar function. It was in the vibrant democracy of Athens where rich citizens staged contests of theatre: 'the Lenaia (sacred to Dionysus Lenaios), 'the rural Dionysia, and the Great or City Dionysia' (69). Athenians came en masse down from the Acropolis, through the groves, and to the theatre to see not solitary literature but performance looking to the ancient and mythical past of Greece while reflecting the democratic institutions and politics of the present (71). The theatre also reminded the burgeoning and 'bejewelled' Athens that man has a 'limited...dominance over the wild' (78). The Romantics look to Arcadia as an ideal'a pastoral golden age of peace and tranquility. Indeed, even the during the time of Augustus, Virgil's Georgics romanticised the rustic man.

Greek literature, as we read it, is done through the lens of the Romans and (even worse) the subsequent canon-writers who pilfered through the ancient literature of the Greeks to root out the semites (Lucian), the debased writers (anyone from the Middle East or Africa), and those who did not reflect the democracy and perceived 'intellectual superiority' of Athens. In other words: your Greek canon is bullshit. The authors may be great, but check the lens through which you read; you're likely reading through the lens of antisemitic, capitalist, colonialism-loving Germans and Englishmen.

Informative, interesting, and well-structured. Every textbook writer could stand to learn a thing or two from Whitmarsh.