Product Description

This remarkable and daringly original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal. Its central point is the Jebel Aqra, the great mountain on the north Syrian coast which Robin Lane Fox dubs 'the southern Olympus', and around which much of the action of the book turns. Robin Lane Fox rejects the fashionable view of Homer and his near-contemporary Hesiod as poets who owed a direct debt to texts and poems from the near East, and by following the trail of the Greek travellers shows that they were, rather, in debt to their own countrymen. With characteristic flair he reveals how these travellers, progenitors of tales which have inspired writers and historians for thousands of years, understood the world before the beginnings of philosophy and western thought.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #132492 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Review
'reads as grippingly as any thriller ... ultimate proof of Lane Fox's inimitable remarkable powers of resurrectionism' --Tom Holland, Spectator

Review
'a dazzling journey through the Mediterranean world of the 8th century BC'

Review
'It is, literally, a wonderful story'

Customer Reviews

Comments by Michael Calum Jacques, author of '1st Century Radical'.
Robin Lane Fox, as the reader may or may not know, is an accomplished historian and, quite remarkably, actually underpinning this book is an academic dissertation which is based upon the exposition of four different (8th century)texts. Students of Homer will find this work especially interesting as the author also addresses and largely rationalises the vexed and complex questions relating to the authorship of the Homeric corpus. Actually, Lane Fox asserts the singularity of the author and anchors his life-setting as having been on the island of Chios, in the Aegean. Interestingly the author also refuses to accept that the 'myths' of the Ancient Greeks were simply the literary or oral heirs of eastern mythology. This reviewer has a specialist's interest in both forms of transmission and appreciated Lane Fox's deft summarising of the evidence and his conclusions reached.

In short, the author considers that the Greek's myths were, indeed, indigenous and were later transmitted to and expanded by the Euboeans, during what was effectively a period of colonisation of the Mediterranean 'basin' through Greek trade and culture. This reviewer agrees that all this makes sense ... it adds up; some 850-900 years after Homer, the New Testament was copied down and transmitted in Koine (common) Greek; when Paul wrote to the Romans (c60AD), he wrote in Greek, not Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin. The swelling mounds of archaeological evidence - numerous around Mediterranean societies - which themselves support the author's basic standpoint, also constitute well attested evidence which speaks for itself.

In effect, the book's narrative is something of an adventure tale: 8th-century BC seafarers (from Euboea) voyage abroad - east and west - undertaking expeditions to initiate develop trading opportunities, and, quite literally, to find the new world(s). The whole saga abounds with classical imagery, allusion and even metaphor. The work is beautifully crafted and this reviewer cannot conceive that any reader could fail to appreciate the quality of the prose and the imagery contained within the gushing narrative, as this Homeric quest for a new age, dawn and cosmos is conveyed to the reader with vivid alacrity.


Lane Fox's academic bedrock underlying all this rests largely on archaeological and textual evidence which he administers very skilfully and persuasively. He goes on to reinforce his main contentions by alluding to, and by quoting, other, later classical writers. This reviewer would tend to recommend this especially to the classical historian (no knowledge of Greek is required, by the way!) in the first instance, but can commend it as a meritorious work of literature in its own right.

Michael Calum Jacques (author of 1st Century Radical: the shadowy origins of the man who became known as Jesus christ)

Cannot see the wood for the trees?
I have just finished this long book, and it was not until a few pages from the end that I began to grasp the destination towards which the enormously detailed text was travelling. I think that Robin Lane Fox is saying that the different myths mentioned in the works of (a) Homer and (b) Hesiod are accounted for by the influence or not of different groups of itinerant Greeks, and middle eastern traders, crucially contact (or not) with eighth century BC travelling Euboeans.He also wishes to refute the views of some scholars who in his opinion have overemphasised the influence of middle eastern narratives on Homer, and for this he makes an apparently convincing case.

The first half of the book covers the archaeological evidence for Euboean journeys in two parts of the Mediterranean world,in the east around the Asian coast near Cyprus, and in the west, towards the Italian coast and in particular the islands of Sicily and Ischia. The next major section deals with myth, and I personally found this extremely interesting in itself, though it was rather like starting another book entirely, despite some references to the first section. Finally, Lane Fox discusses Homer and Hesiod's use of myth, ending with a very interesting postscript about the dating of Homer.

The book contains over 130 pages of notes and bibliography, put together from a wide range of international scholarship published in many languages, such as befits a highly academic work. However, as I read the Penguin popular edition, I would have valued the addition of a shorter bibliography of readily available works in English.

It is not long since I re-read the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I have to confess to never having read more than extracts from Hesiod. To remedy this is now a task towards which I must turn, together with further reading about the Hittites, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and planning a visit to Evia, to see the sites mentioned in this book.

If I were advising the publisher about a further edition, I would suggest that Lane Fox be asked to make his overall thesis more explicit, particularly at the beginning, and then revisit it in each chapter, in order to guide his readers more directly through the massive volume of evidence that he puts before them. This would enable them to gain more from this remarkable book.

mindboggling
this is a tour de force - it covers an expanse of time and space quite remarkably.