Customer Reviews

A Companion to Ancient Epic (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World)

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For any scholar of epic literature-- or even those who are curious and may need some extra critical thinking help-- this compilation is unparalleled in comprehensiveness. After laboriously searching for reference resources for epic poetry, I hit the jackpot with this book. I HIGHLY recommend it to students, professors, and enthusiasts alike.

This is a very, very useful book; the essay on "The Epic Hero" by Greg Nagy is worth the price of the volume. Having wasted a lot of money over the past 10 years on overly specific studies of this or that topic, I have now turned to volumes like this--which give you an excellent, basic run-down of topics, and then provide a sometimes extensive bibliography at the end of each essay guiding readers who want to go to the next level.

This collections contains wonderful pieces on important (but under-explored) topics such as: defining "epic," the relationship between "epic" and "myth," and ancient Near Eastern epic. The summaries of the Iliad, Odyssey, Roman epic, and Israelite epic are as good as you'll find for one-stop-shopping. One criticism is that I wish they would have had a longer, single essay on the Mahabharata and other ancient Indic traditions--and it would have been nice if there would have been a bit more uniformity (regarding structure, contents, rigor of treatment, etc.) between the individual essays.

But overall: Highly recommended--actually, required--for all students of ancient epic.