The Ancient Greek hero in 24 hours

Nagy, Gregory2020

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Summary

In this book based on the Harvard University course he has taught and refined since the late 1970s, Gregory Nagy argues that the ancient Greeks' concept of "the hero" was very different from what we understand by the term today--and it is only through analysing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and Herakles. In Greek tradition, a hero was a human, male or female, of the remote past, who was endowed with superhuman abilities by virtue of being descended from an immortal god. Despite their mortality, heroes, like the gods, were objects of cult worship. Nagy examines this distinctively religious notion of the hero in its many dimensions, in texts spanning the eighth to fourth centuries BCE: the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Eruipides; songs of Sappho and Pindar; and the dialogues of Plato. All works are presented in English translation, with attention to the subtleties of the original Greek. This is a revised paperback edition of the hardcover published in 2013.