The Bow and the Lyre

by Benardete, Seth

• ISBN13: 9780847683673
• ISBN10: 0847683672
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-01-01
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc

Summary

In this exciting interpretation of the Odyssey, the late renowned scholar Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

Table of Contents

Notice to the Reader	ix	(2)
Preface	xi
1 The Beginnings	1	(16)
Theodicy	1	(5)
Politics	6	(5)
Telemachus	11	(6)
2 Pattern and Will	17	(16)
Nestor	17	(7)
Helen and Menelaus	24	(9)
3 Odysseus's Choice	33	(12)
4 Among the Phaeacians	45	(18)
Shame	45	(4)
Paradise	49	(3)
Pride	52	(11)
5 Odysseus's Own Story	63	(40)
Memory and Mind	63	(17)
Nature	80	(10)
Hades	90	(8)
Destiny	98	(5)
6 Odysseus's Lies	103	(14)
7 Nonfated Things	117	(14)
Theoclymenus and Eumaeus	117	(7)
The Slave Girls	124	(4)
The Name and the Scar	128	(3)
8 The Suitors and the City	131	(12)
The Suitors	131	(6)
The City	137	(6)
9 Recognitions	143	(10)
Penelope	143	(3)
Hades	146	(4)
Laertes	150	(3)
Notes	153	(20)
Index	173	(6)
About the Author	179