From Publishers Weekly
How did Homer's marvelous epics, the great Greek tragedies and early Greek philosophy introduce the birth of consciousness and record its development? Through tiresome and pedestrian readings of the
Iliad and the
Odyssey, the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, Danish literary critic Zeruneith attempts to answer these questions. He concludes rather simplistically that Homer's account of Odysseus' use of the wooden horse to win the Trojan War demonstrates the use of strategic reason, rather than brute physical force, and the development of a focus on the inner life rather than the body. Later Greek writers develop Homer's insights about Odysseus' mind through poetry (Sappho) and tragedy (Sophocles and others). According to Zeruneith, the turn inward develops most fully in the philosophy of Empedocles, Pythagoras and the Pre-Socratics, culminating in Socrates' singular focus on reason as the definitive virtue. On balance, Zeruneith offers tired insights about Greek literature, and his thinly spun argument loses its way in his torturous retellings of the stories.
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Review
"A sweeping, accessible inquiry into what the makers of classical Greek literature were thinking about... Unlike many others, Zeruneith reads the original Greek sources and can make sense of etymologies; like them, though, he works from the anthropologically problematic assumption that it is possible to `read' another culture across not just space but time. The premise may be faulty--or it may not be--but the author's view that the Greeks had the same concerns as ours and that their literature was made up of `concrete interpretations of experience' has the virtue of making, say, Euripides' worries about reason's slide into `the chaos of the unleashed instinctual world' more comprehensible, the tale of Prometheus as a peacemaker punished for breaking the cycle of violence that much more affecting. Zeruneith pays attention to the smaller concerns of classical scholarship: the meaning of dolos, mtis and at; the structure of tragedy as trilogy; the parallel crises (in the Greek sense) that drive The Iliad. But he also works larger themes, such as the development of Greek thought from the Ionian epic to the comparatively modern works of Aristophanes and Plato--in the second of which we, to follow Zeruneith, must wonder just what those voices Socrates heard in his head were. A readable, vigorous survey--if a touch overlong--of a piece with modern works of classical scholarship such as Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993) and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet (1986)." --
Kirkus Reviews"Odysseus is the central figure in the bold story that Keld Zeruneith tells about Greek poetry and the development of Greek thought, tracing he growth of a new `structure of consciousness,' still meaningful for modern society. This is an extraordinary book: intense, imaginative, highly idiosyncratic, and written with great warmth and energy. --
P. E. Easterling, Regius Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge"Ranging from Greek myth and religion to Greek poetry, drama, and philosophy, The Wooden Horse reminds one, in its breadth of scholarship, of the groundbreaking work of Hellenists such as Bruno Snell and E. R. Dodds and, in its deft deployment of Jungian insights, of the writings of Erich Neumann and James Hillman. Like an archaeologist of the mind, Keld Zeruneith has unearthed significant fragments of archaic and classical Greek culture and then reassembled them to form an image of the primal structures of Western consciousness." --
Christopher Collins, Professor, New York University"The Wooden Horse is a most inventive and profound exploration of ancient Greek mythmaking. I admire all the learning and creativity that went into this ambitious book." --
Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
