Reviews for Traditions of heroic and epic poetry

The average rating for Traditions of heroic and epic poetry based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-17 00:00:00 David Holton Lamberton's study is not concerned with religious thought as such, but rather a single phase of the history of the interaction of the Homeric poems with Greek ideas concerning the nature of reality and the divine: the reading of Homer by thinkers of the Platonic tradition from the 2nd to 5th century after Christ. Therein was a double impulse toward a redefinition of the meaning of Homeric poems and the attribution of Homeric status to their own ideology. The two divergent works of Heraclitus and Ps-Plutarch provide a background against which a focused image of Homer emerges, an image articulated by dogmatic Platonists and Neo Pythagoreans. These Neoplatonic Allegorists refashioned Homer not by any interference with the text itself, but by exerting their influence on the other factor in the equation of reading: the reader. "In so doing, they predisposed subsequent readers to expect, and so to discover, a certain scope of meaning in early epics" (XI). To aid in this end, Lamberton traces how the Divine Homer provides the background for Homer's use in Neoplatonic Allegory, its development in Middle Platonism (Lamberton does not see that Philo is very original), in Plotinus and Porphyry and Julian, and then how Deliberative Allegory also interacts with the thought of Proclus. Lamberton concludes tha Allegorical interpretation has a bad reputation in our time: we imagine the Allegorists to have been guilty of willful deception in distorting the meaning of texts and imposing foreign ideas on them, compounding their crimes by appealing to the texts as authority but then foisting other ideas on them. But if we can not take seriously the claims we find in Porphyry and Proclus regarding the meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey we are left with a curious and unsatisfying model of the cultural process in questions. After all, "garbage in" did not create "garbage out" but Dante. A must-read for those interested in the phenomenon of allegorical interpretation, the pagan exegesis of Homer, or the influence of Homeric exegesis on Christian exegesis of the Bible.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-05-05 00:00:00 LOUIS PALACIOS The 20th century political origins of "race war." The effectiveness of imperial Japanese propaganda on black Americans. And how the diplomatic needs of WW2 affected the civil rights movement.