The Iliad

Description

No Western text boasts a life as long as the "Iliad", and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry. Professor Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the "Iliad" as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. In this second edition the text has been revised in many places, and a new chapter on Homeric repetitions has been added.

Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of greek Tragedy, 1500-1800". Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he edited The Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer).

For those of us introduced to the Iliad by the first edition of this book, the second is welcome, and not least for making its material readily available once more. Despite the plethora of recent (and imminent) general introductions and companions to Homer, this book should enjoy something of the popularity obtained by its predecessor, not least because it is written in a lucid and jargon-free style that should serve as a model for anyone producing a work of this sort. -- Adrian Kelly, Balliol College, Oxford, UK * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *