Product Description

Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds argues that the Greeks were subject to the same 'primitive' modes of thought to be found in any society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148925 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 335 pages

Customer Reviews

A Classic Study of a fascinating subject
This book, based on a series of lectures, first appeared in the early 1950s, but it remains a standard reference for anyone looking to discover more about the "irrational" beliefs of the ancient world. Curiously, its subject becomes ever more relevant, as New Age beliefs gain ground in the supposedly rational West -- our modern society seems to be turning the clock back to a time when magic and superstition still ruled people's hearts and minds. But that's one of Dodds' central contentions: that such beliefs never actually disappeared, despite the intellectual enlightenment of Plato, Aristotle and the other great thinkers of the ancient world. The same is true today it seems.

One caveat for the general reader: there is a profusion of learned notes and untranslated Greek terms which can be off-putting. But the text itself is clear and not over-stuffed with jargon, as is too often the case with more modern academic writing.

I would also recommend Georg Luck's "Arcana Mundi" (Amazon ASIN: 0801825482), which collects many relevant texts on these subjects in new English translations.

E.R. Dodds, the master communicator
This is a book that can't fail to grip. Specialist or non-specialist, or just interested in our culture, Dodds' course of lectures will haunt you. We do our cultural ancestors, the Ancient Greeks, a disservice by thinking of them as the last word in rational thought at all times. They too had their psychic side, upon which their philosophy and art developed. For them, madness or possession (mania)could be positive as well as negative - a god-sent gift to the favoured. There is a thoughtful, attention-gripping, examination of the treatise of Hippokrates on the Sacred Disease (epilepsy). Here too, possibly the first description of an 'out-of-body experience' - to be found in Pindar, c.460 BCE.

When you've read this book, you can't forget it - for the Irrational of the Greeks is with us still, not so very far below the surface.

'A SIMPLE PROFESSOR OF GREEK'
Eric Dodds was sometime professor of Greek at Oxford. This book created a certain amount of a stir in its time both within and outside the arena of classical studies by either addressing, or being believed to address, up-to-date-issues of anthropology and psychology. It consists basically of the Sather Classical Lectures that Dodds was invited to deliver at the University of California in 1950, and as it has been reissued in paperback in 1997 it's fair to assume that the publishers intend it to reach a wider readership than the dwindling band of classical initiates.

I very much hope it does that, but a word or two would probably be in place regarding what to expect and what not to expect to find in the book. The author's preface warns us not to look in the book for a history of Greek religion, and more pertinently recognises that modern scholarship is a worlds of specialists, and Dodds reiterates right at the end that he is 'a simple professor of Greek'. Amateurs, dilettantes and bluffers will find plenty of material to suit them I don't doubt, but Dodds is not one of their number. This work is best read as a standard piece of classical scholarship, not as breaking down any moulds or enclosures. The most casual glance at the daunting catalogue of references in the notes appended to each chapter will show what a vast amount of writing on the topics covered here was in situ before Dodds, and how could it be otherwise? Any commentary on, say, Plato or Empedocles or Greek history by and large had to do its best with issues of religion and trends in thought. There are numerous references to other cultures, and Dodds is certainly better versed in such matters than other classics dons that I knew. By my standards he shows wide reading and deep interest in anthropology and human behaviour. On the other hand my standards in these matters are a thing of shreds and patches, and if I wanted to improve that situation this is not where I would look. The focus here is exclusively on Greeks, and any parallels cited are cited from that point of reference. Another thing to be wary of is trying to read this book as any kind of parable for our times. In my own view it is a powerful parable for our times, but that's my own parable only. In the last chapter Dodds alludes to recent history. His date is 1950, which is nearer to the start of the first world war than to 2005. It seems to me that what he has to say about the recrudescence of irrational religion and what he calls 'the pathetic reverence for the written word' is very near the bone indeed in 2005, but even if I'm right Dodds could not have known that in 1950, and modern history is invoked by him to illustrate ancient history, not the other way about.

What one does expect and demand from a professor of Greek is knowledge and elucidation of what Greeks said thought and did. This is where The Greeks and the Irrational comes up trumps. There are eight chapters plus two appendices (on maenadism and the semi-magical theurgy). Dodds begins, very reasonably, at the beginning with Homeric terminology for the divine, seeing a culture in which values were a matter of status rather than of morality in any modern sense. He traces the development of the latter together with an analysis of various kinds of 'madness', the significance (for Greeks not for Swedenborg or for Kant or for moderns) of dreams, the phenomenon of shamans in the context of trends in religious belief, the rise of rationalism and the counter-reaction that followed it, and the complex issue of Plato's teachings, which are far from unified or consistent. His final chapter is 'The Fear of Freedom', and for my money this rings (or tolls) a loud clear bell in the early years of the third millennium. Genuine freedom of thought, much less of expression, is resented widely as being subversive, it seems to me, not least in a culture that likes to pose as embodying liberty by some kind of definition. In this Dodds seems to me to support my own view, but my own view it remains. Dodds is talking about Greeks.

The presentation of the material improves as the book goes along. The early chapters contain too much Greek that should have been reserved for the notes in what was after all lectures, not the printed word, and will not be fully intelligible without help unless you have Greek. For all that they remain readable, and anyone who can recognise a first-class mind and a first-class scholar will recognise it here. In this respect Dodds has not been as adept as his Cambridge opposite number Denys Page, whose History and the Homeric Iliad followed about a decade later in the Sather series of annual lectures.(Curiously, Page was restricted to six lectures, not the eight he seemed to have been expecting.) Dodds has all eight at his disposal, the book is beautifully written, and I ended wishing there had been more. Still a book for a wide reading-public I should say, wherever intellectual curiosity and a wish to understand human thought-processes thrive.