Memories of Odysseus: Tales from the Ancient Greek Frontier

Product Description
This work centres on identity, questioning how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mond, to show what these reveal at key points in Greek history. It first follows the journeying of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory, and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. The analysis then moves to Egypt, Persia, the Near East, old Greece, the new Greek world, and Asia Minor, from the creation of Homer's work around 700BC to the high Roman imperial period some 800 years later. The author looks in particular at the importance of the barbarian and the other, first in the theoretical process of describing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation - themes with a later resonance.
About the Author
Francois Hartog is Directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) and is also the Director of the Centre Louis Gernet de recherches comparees sur les societes anciennes (which unites researchers from the EHESS, the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques and the University of Paris). His books include Le Miroir de'Herodote: Essai sur la representation de l'autre (Gallimard 1980; revised edn 1991).