Reviews for Pope's Iliad

The average rating for Pope's Iliad based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-06 00:00:00 Judy Yost This is not a perfect book, but it is an utterly essential one for appreciating The Iliad. Long regarded as a kind of anthropological study of the text, that kind of thumbnail sketch seems bound to lose rather than gain the work readers. What Redfield does, in simplest terms, is a kind of contextual study. He works through what particular words and concepts would have meant in the culture for which this work was originally produced, and then applies that etymological, sociological understanding to the narrative arc of The Iliad. It seems, to this reader at least, the most natural and persuasive way of proceeding in the world, and yet, when the book first appeared, there was significant resistance both to how the argument worked and what conclusions it reached. The first half of the text is a bit of a slog, though for some readers it might offer greater appeal. In it, Redfield lays the philosophical and philological groundwork for his text, by thinking through questions of narrative and tragedy, especially as articulated by Aristotle. These arguments are augmented by references to Greek drama and Homeric epic, and are far the driest portion of the narrative. Once this conceptual ground is cleared, however, Redfield feels free to begin to build his reading of The Iliad and it is here where the book becomes essential. In Redfield's persuasive reading, the real tragedy of the poem stems from the narrative around Hector. To unpack this idea, Redfield explains the sense of various terms and concepts as they would have meant to an earlier audience. This move allows the reader to replace anachronistic readings of the poem. What they are replaced with are nuanced and, frankly, exciting readings of particular moments in the poem that far surpass the shibboleths of the past. To take just one example, Redfield unpacks the difference between ritual and ceremony in the chapter called "Purification." Contemporary understanding of these terms sees them often as rough equivalents. Redfield however, distinguishes them. Ceremony is an action that marks a passage of time or an evolution of status, that renders that change acceptable. Ritual, by contrast, intervenes in the human order and itself creates a change. Ceremony is about manners, ritual about magic. As Redfield would have it, a presidential inauguration, where someone is sworn in, is the essence of ceremony. However, to the degree the one being sworn in makes a private promise to his or her God, the event partakes of ritual. This distinction allows Redfield to go to town on the final books of The Iliad. The funeral games for Patroclus are a ceremony. They are one of the mechanisms by which this culture marks the absence of the warrior and how he ceases to be a member of the community. Redfield elucidates a host of gestures linked to Patroclus' funeral games that perform precisely this function. And ceremony is simply not enough to return Achilles to the human community, given the grief and separation he has experienced earlier in the poem. Only ceremony when it rises to the level of art can do that. And this allows Redfield to turn to what amounts to a magisterial reading of the final book of the poem, where Priam meets Achilles to ransom the body of his dead son. What makes Redfield's reading so persuasive and impressive is how thoroughly it accounts for the majesty of the poem's final moments. It is a reading that in fact enhances modern appreciation of the unfathomable gesture of a father asking for the body of his son from the man who murdered his son. This reading makes all the philosophical throat-clearing in the book's first portion utterly worth the candle. But it is only one of a host of cultural insights that render moment after moment in the poem less opaque and more meaningful to a modern audience. Essential.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-09 00:00:00 George S. Rennie,lll Takes us out of our modern context and deepens the scope of what can be understood and admired in Homer. For me, Achilles is the essential, fundamental Other -- maybe because he's so complete. We envy Achilles his completeness because, I think, we don't recognize that its price is sorrow, and since we can't imagine a valid justification for divine rage, we find it hard to admire him. Hector, human in his incompleteness, can easily inspire our admiration -- but not our envy.