The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their gods develop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicist Robin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of the ancient world, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuing it through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the Mediterranean, encountering strange new sights—volcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones—and weaving them into the myths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization.
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Oxford classicist Fox explores the 700s BCE, the century to which he imputes the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Explaining that this was an era of cultural contact between Greeks—specifically, those from the island Euboea—and residents of the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, he delves deeply into the nature of that exchange. Aiming to evoke the Euboeans’ mind-set, he springs from the archaeological traces of their settlements to the gods and heroes of the Near East they adapted into their own myths. While there is considerable textual explication of Homer and Hesiod involved in Fox’s procedure, he pulls the mythical characters from the pages and places them in the physical landscapes with which the Euboeans not only associated them but believed they actively inhabited. So doing lends the appealing impetus of travel writing to Fox’s account that aids readers in absorbing the world of pagan belief. Detailed but recurrently on point, Fox will connect with readers drawn to the Homeric age. --Gilbert Taylor
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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Review
“Multilayered and beautifully written. . . . [Lane Fox’s] great gift is to make this long-ago world a vivid, extraordinary and sometimes frightening place. Like Homer’s yearning traveller, Lane Fox longs to be there, and his longing is contagious.”
—Elizabeth Speller, The Sunday Times (London)
“Full of wit and suspense. . . . Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve.”
—Mary Beard, Financial Times
“A fascinating quest . . . that illuminates the roots of Greek thought and ideas that have shaped our own world and philosophies. . . . Lane Fox is a lively writer.”
—Lois D. Atwood, The Providence Journal
“Exciting. . . . With his usual panache, [Lane Fox] displays encyclopaedic erudition alongside an unusually wide historical and geographical scope. The pleasure and the education offered by this book lie in the stylishly presented detail.”
—Edith Hall, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“As we follow [Lane Fox] through the pages of this learned, original and ceaselessly intriguing book, we find a strange and alien landscape opening up before us, one so remote that it had hitherto seemed lost to utter darkness. . . . This is a wonderful book.”
—Tom Holland, The Spectator (London)
“Original, daring, and arguably life-enhancing. . . . Lane Fox [writes] with a sweeping narrative flourish worthy of a cinematographer or screenwriter . . . seasoned and leavened with a wit that only writing can afford.”
—Paul Cartledge, The Independent (London)
“Lane Fox has spent his long and distinguished career negotiating a broader intellectual highway, and leading a wide range of readers along it. Travelling Heroes takes us on a dazzling journey throughout the Mediterranean world of the 8th century BC [and] he evokes the period brilliantly.”
—The Telegraph (London)
—Elizabeth Speller, The Sunday Times (London)
“Full of wit and suspense. . . . Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve.”
—Mary Beard, Financial Times
“A fascinating quest . . . that illuminates the roots of Greek thought and ideas that have shaped our own world and philosophies. . . . Lane Fox is a lively writer.”
—Lois D. Atwood, The Providence Journal
“Exciting. . . . With his usual panache, [Lane Fox] displays encyclopaedic erudition alongside an unusually wide historical and geographical scope. The pleasure and the education offered by this book lie in the stylishly presented detail.”
—Edith Hall, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“As we follow [Lane Fox] through the pages of this learned, original and ceaselessly intriguing book, we find a strange and alien landscape opening up before us, one so remote that it had hitherto seemed lost to utter darkness. . . . This is a wonderful book.”
—Tom Holland, The Spectator (London)
“Original, daring, and arguably life-enhancing. . . . Lane Fox [writes] with a sweeping narrative flourish worthy of a cinematographer or screenwriter . . . seasoned and leavened with a wit that only writing can afford.”
—Paul Cartledge, The Independent (London)
“Lane Fox has spent his long and distinguished career negotiating a broader intellectual highway, and leading a wide range of readers along it. Travelling Heroes takes us on a dazzling journey throughout the Mediterranean world of the 8th century BC [and] he evokes the period brilliantly.”
—The Telegraph (London)
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Challenging, Illuminating Book,
By Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer (Hardcover)
Robin Lane Fox's "Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer" is a challenging, illuminating work. After a short introduction, the author presents a highly detailed examination of the archaeological evidence for the spread of Greeks - especially Greeks from the island of Euboea - through the Mediterranean in the 8th century BC, an examination so detailed that seemingly every piece and fragment of Euboean ceramics ever found outside of Greece is discussed.
After the archaeological exposition, Fox launches into his main subject: the creation and evolution of Greek myth and poetry as it was influenced by what these 8th century Euboean travelers saw and experienced. Fox contends that for the most part Greek myths were indigenous, not fundamentally borrowings from other peoples, but that the indigenous mythic elements were modified and shaped by the new worlds into which the Greeks were moving: not lands empty of other people, but lands where other people were already living and telling their own mythic tales. This long central portion of "Travelling Heroes" demands careful attention by the reader, as the evidence and arguments presented are complex and subtle. Of necessity, the foundations for the author's conclusions are less solid than the archaeological evidence presented earlier in the book; frequently, the evidence is linguistic or threaded through literary sources dating centuries later. The final section of the book examines the direct effects of the 8th century Euboean experience upon the poems of Homer and Hesiod (Fox concludes that Homer most likely worked on Chios in the middle of the 8th century, while Hesiod came a few decades later). Undoubtedly, Robin Lane Fox's conclusions will not find universal acceptance, but at a minimum this book provides a fascinating view of the foundations of much of Western culture.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glad this wasn't exiled to academic purgatory,
This review is from: Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer (Hardcover)
The Post reviewer criticizes this book for being too academic for the general public, but I found it to be fascinating. There are those of us who are students of history even though we aren't academics--we like to be challenged intellectually, too--we don't need to read another generalized history of the Greek world. This is a very well-written, exhaustively researched book and I highly recommend it.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic in Every Sense of the Word,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer (Hardcover)
This Robin Lane Foxes take on the "Greece v. the Near East" debate, i.e. to what extent classical Greek culture was inspired by the older, more well established of the near east, specifically the neo-hittite indo european speakers. Fox approaches the question by taking heavily from recent archaeological studies in the Mediterranean world and methodically discussing the "world" of 8th century Greek/Euboean adventurers. The writing style and scholarship are first rate, I literally gobbled this book up. Foxes conclusion is basically that the Greek/Euboeans were aware of Near Eastern religious practices largely through individual experiences both trading and settling in places like Crete. Fox outlines different points of contact and also does an excellent job charting western expansion in the 8th century.
Although I'm not a specialist in the field, I found his placement of Homer in the 8th century as convincing. I think Fox, while obviously conversant with some of the advances in "indo european" studies, is largely dismissive of that discipline, but of course it's impossible to ignore the relationship between Hittite culture and Greek myth.
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