Customer Reviews

The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth

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Fairly readable, but unwieldy in terms of size, price, and logic. I got through about 200 pages before I lost interest in wallowing through more of Professor West's alleged cultural links between Hellas and the Near East. I skimmed the rest of the book to confirm that his approach was consistent throughout and that I wasn't missing some dramatic change.

In the preface, the author gives warning that these links are theoretical and may be controversial. But that warning in no way prepared me for his blitz of vague guesses and fanciful speculation. He tries to draw cross-cultural connections to just about every word recorded in the Ancient Greek corpus. This is an academic form of carpet-bombing: footprint the landscape to make sure you don't miss any possibilities...an approach guaranteed to hit a lot of wrong targets.

An example of the author's poor (and poorly-defended) guesswork: The Greeks gave their gods a mountain home, and so did the Semites; therefore, the Greeks must have imported the idea. Ditto the fact that both the Greeks and the Mesopotamians located their Land of the Dead underground; therefore, the Greeks must have borrowed it. Has Professor West never looked up at a mountain and felt religious awe? Or considered that humans bury their dead *in the ground*, making it the obvious locale for the afterlife? But suppose you think my simple, intuitive explanations are simplistic. Consider then the fact that other cultures that could not plausibly have had contact with the Middle East--e.g. American Indians and Polynesians--shared these and other cultural features. To pass muster in academe, shouldn't you consider alternative explanations? Shouldn't you address analogous cases that your premise could not explain?

Another problem: over and over, the author uses phrases like "We must assume..." and "One would have to believe..." to cover gossamer-thin links. I think he needs to review the meanings of Necessary and Sufficient; I can't see how such examples would qualify as either.

The book is better when the author is being purely instinctive, as when he reasons that the Greeks owned plenty of slaves captured from foreign lands, and that these slaves would have shared their folk tales and religious beliefs with their Greek households. I agree.

It's ironic that I went into this book believing the basic premise. I still do, but now I think it's weaker. Instead of this book, I recommend Peter Jones' "An Intelligent Reader's Guide to the Classics", which is shorter, more entertaining, and less speculative. Jones refers favorably to the idea of cultural borrowing championed in "Helicon," and even mentions this book in a footnote, but he doesn't go overboard.

The East Face of Helicon by the consummate Classicist Martin West is a the last word on the influence of Ancient Near Eastern Literature on early Greek poetry, myth, and drama. It supports to a large extent Martin Bernal's Black Athena at least as regards the influence of older Western Semitic literary motifs and archetypes on Greek literature. It does not raise the issue of Egyptian influence which dominates Bernal's work. Martin Bernal's three volume Black Athena is synthetic and much more speculative dealing with a preponderance of evidence, whereas Martin West's approach is focused, analytic, and displays Greek types against Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Uartian, and Hebrew literary archetypes in an organized manner. They do quote each other, however. West displays his evidence for the reader without trying to show or even hypothecate mechanisms of transmission as does Bernal. Martin West's East Face of Helicon is an elegant and persuasive work.
Prof. P.C. Patton, Ph.D.
Ancient Near Eastern Studies