Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths [Hardcover]

Professor Mary Lefkowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2003

In "Greek Gods, Human Lives", classicist Mary Lefkowitz reintroduces readers to the literature of ancient Greece. Lefkowitz demonstrates that these stories, although endlessly entertaining, are never frivolous. The Greek myths - as told by Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and many others - offer crucial lessons about human experience. Greek mythology makes vivid the fact that the gods control every aspect of the lives of mortals, but not in ways that modern audiences have properly understood. We can learn much from these myths, Lefkowitz shows, if we understand that they are stories about religious experience - about the meaning of divinity, the nature of justice, and the limitations of human knowledge. These myths spoke to ancient audiences and helped them to comprehend their world. With Mary Lefkowitz as an interpreter, these myths speak to us as well.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Through these accessible and engaging studies of The Iliad, The Odyssey and other ancient works, Lefkowitz demonstrates how myths helped the Greeks "understand...the limitations of the human condition"-and the limitations of the gods themselves. A professor of classics at Wellesley College, Lefkowitz never loses sight of the fact that myths are about religious experience, not about the foibles of ordinary characters. However, she recognizes that myths can still speak to modern readers the way they did to ancient ones. Their combination of fantasy and realism, she says, conveys the unpredictability of life, its fragility, and the need for humans to depend upon one another because they cannot depend on the gods. Humane and deeply sympathetic, this text makes a good choice for readers who enjoyed Thomas Cahill's Sailing the Wine Dark Sea. 53 b&w illus., 2 maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

A great success... Acute and fascinating. -- Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300101457
• ISBN-13: 978-0300101454
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A treasure cove of links, March 22, 2005

By 

Anthony Pierulla (San antonio, texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths (Hardcover)

Shelly said, "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have Greece."
This text illustrates without pretension or obtuse stilted language these powerful sentiments. Loose ends, nunances, questions, and epiphanies are continually addressed in the readers mind. The notions and ideas presented to me over the last half century via formal education, religious indoctrination, and personal experiences take on a new clarity when reading this outstanding review of the Greek dieties and how they formed and influenced our cultural foundations.
This is a work that is not easily read but one that is beautifully construed to creat maximum stimulation of ones thought processes.
Simply a must for any personal libary that is concern with the evolution of personal believes, knowledge and understanding of the world around us.
Thank you Ms. Lefkowitz

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Olympians as Gods, finally, September 9, 2010

By 

Michel Daw "Publisher of The Portable Library" (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths (Paperback)

This book provides a bracing perspective of the Greek Gods, not as the worst of humanity, but as the best of the Cosmos. Prof. Lefkowitz's brief recaps of the ancient tales allow us to quickly see the roles the Gods play in human affairs. This is not a survey of the literature (nor is it intended to be) but rather a focus on the Gods on their own terms. They are more interested in Justice, Piety, and the performance of virtue, than they are about the petty squabbles of the short lived, self-involved and often treacherous beings under their care.

This book is a must for students of ancient Greek religion, as it helps to prevent our anachronistic insertion of Christian characterizations of divinity, and of mis-judging the Gods by applying 21st century expectations of godhood.

65 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars God doesn't love you and it serves you right, January 8, 2004

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths (Hardcover)

So what does world-renowned classics Professor Mary Lefkowitz do when she is not criticizing Martin Bernal? Apparently working on this book on Greek Gods. To our secular and Christian eyes Greek divinities appear frivolous and spiteful. With their promiscuity and their vendettas they appear very human, except that they are immortal and they can kill people with lightning bolts. It has been hard for people to think that the Classical world could have taken them seriously. But in fact over the past few decades historians such as Paul Veyne, Robin Lane Fox and Ramsay MacMullen have argued that "Paganism" was taken very seriously by its adherents. It was not in intellectual decline or crisis when Constantine appeared on the scene, while what we might consider secular or rational thought was only that of a marginal unimportant minority. So far, so good. Lefkowitz seeks to argue that the Greek Gods are not frivolous and are not petty. In much Classical literature they may appear to be slow to recognize the suffering of humanity. But this is illusory. The Gods are not divinised humans, they are clearly superior beings in every respect. The ages and eras of humans are but moments to them, they cannot be expected to have our sense of time. More importantly, the world was not created for humans, who are but minor players on the earthly stage. There is such a thing as divine justice, but it is narcissistic and sentimental to assume that it revolves around right treatment of humans. By their own, inevitably superior, standards the Gods act with justice. Lefkowitz is rather attracted to this ideal, since the absence of what we might consider justice is a realistic way of viewing how the world works. Homer and others provide a grimly truthful theodicy, whereas later ideas from Plato, the Stoics or Ovid unduly and sentimentally subordinate God to man.

Over and over again Lefkowitz tells how in Classical Literature the manipulations of the Gods are the key to the events that happen. Lefkowitz asserts that when correctly viewed all the acts that happen show the seriousness of the Pantheon. It is just and proper that the Trojans are punished, their city destroyed, their population slaughtered and their women raped and sold into slavery because they are all collectively guilty of the abduction of Helen. But it is also just that the Gods extend the Trojan war and inevitably kill many of the Greeks attacking the city so that the Gods can fulfill a promise to Achilles' mother so that Achilles can Achilles can be covered in glory (before meeting his own inevitable death). And it is also just that the Greeks are punished for not rebuking one of their own for raping Cassandra in a temple dedicated to Athena. Such violations of ritual purity are more important than the offence done to Cassandra, who is later murdered without any of the Gods stepping in to intercede. It is proper that the seven sons and the seven daughters of Niobe are killed because Niobe insults the honor of the mother of Artemis and Apollo. It is likewise also proper that Aphrodite drives Phaedra mad with lust for her stepson because he insulted Aphrodite when swearing himself to eternal celibacy. It is proper that Oedipus and Antigone and Agamemnon meet the fates that they do because they have been cursed by the Gods.

What is wrong with this account? Part of the problem is that much of the book consists of summaries of Classical literature. Lefkowitz clearly belongs to the late Allan Bloom school of shallow, tendentious and interminable paraphrase as we read her accounts of Hesiod, the Illiad, The Odyssey, the Aenied, The Orestian Trilogy, the Oedipean trilogy, the story of Jason and the Argonausts and the Golden Ass. Oddly however, we do not examine Prometheus Bound, nor do we really get an idea of why writers changed myths until after the great age of Classical literature. This refusal to consider change makes Classical literature less ambiguous than it actually is. There is also a certain tendentiousness. Lefkowitz dismisses the God/Human matings as marginal and ultimately inconsequential to the divine life. But sex implies an equality between Gods and mortals; otherwise bestiality would be far more common than it is. And Lefkowitz does not really explain why Cupid asked for, and obtained, immortality for Psyche. But the larger problem is with Lefkowitz's concept of justice. By what criterion of justice can the population of Troy be punished while Aphrodite and Eris get off scot free? It was Eris who started the war by throwing the Apple of Discord and Aphrodite who promised Paris what was not hers to give. To argue that because Aphrodite is divine her actions are not frivolous does not convince. What Lefkowitz asserts is not a proper submission to reality, but an undignified abasement to arbitrary power. Far from being realistic it abjures reason and encourages contempt and callous indifference towards a humanity that is treated that way. It is not a coincidence that it was with the rise of Greek democracy that the dramatic view of divine power became more ambiguous, because it was in this period that the population outside a small elite was able to assert some form of dignity. In claiming otherwise, there is something disingenuous about Lefkowitz's comfortable pseudo-stoicism, and her view of tragedy which behind its veneer of toughness resembles academically sanctioned sadism. As Terry Eagleton has written: "By no means all Greek protagonists concede that their suffering is justified, accept their guilt or confess that the calamity follows from their own behaviour. And they are mostly quite right not to do so. It is the theorists of tragedy, not the victims of it, who imagine that they do, or at least that they should."