Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age
Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age
Four-time prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) was also a prolific author and enthusiastic scholar of the classics. Gladstone had spent almost two decades in politics prior to his writing the three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. This work and the preceding 'On the place of Homer in classical education and in historical inquiry' (1857), reflect Gladstone's interest in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he read with increasing frequency from the 1830s onward and which he viewed as particularly relevant to modern society. As he relates, he has two objects in the Studies: 'to promote and extend' the study of Homer's 'immortal poems' and 'to vindicate for them … their just degree both of absolute and, more especially, of relative critical value'. Volume 1 establishes Homer's contemporary relevance and provides an extensive 'ethnography of Greek races' related to Homer's works.
Product details
June 2010Paperback
9781108012041
604 pages
216 × 140 × 34 mm
0.76kg
2 maps
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. Prolegomena:
- 1. On the state of the Homeric question
- 2. The place of Homer in classical education
- 3. On the historic aims of Homer
- 4. On the probable date of Homer
- 5. The probable trustworthiness of the text of Homer
- 6. Place and authority of Homer in historical inquiry
- Part II. Achaeis. Ethnology of the Greek Races:
- 1. Scope of the inquiry
- 2. On the Pelasgians, and cognate races
- 3. The Pelasgians, and certain states naturalized of akin to Greece
- 4. On the Phoenicians and the outer geography of the Odyssey
- 5. On the Catalogue
- 6. On the Hellenes of Homer
- 7. On the respective contributions of the Pelasgian and Hellenic factors to the compound of the Greek nation
- 8. On the three greater Homeric appellatives
- 9. On the Homeric title of αναξ ανδρων
- 10. On the connection of the Hellenes and Achaeans with the east
- Addenda.
