The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures) (Paperback)

by E. R. Dodds (Author) "SOME YEARS ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with..." (more)
Key Phrases: psychic intervention, inherited conglomerate, prophetic madness, Archaic Age, Classical Age, Culte des Muses (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
An event in modern Greek scholarship . . . thoughtful, well- documented, and beautifully written. -- Classical Outlook

An exciting and fundamental subject . . . illuminated by imaginative insight. . . . A book which it would be difficult to overpraise. -- Oxford Magazine

Product Description
In this philosophy classic, which was first published in 1951, E. R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?" Praised by reviewers as "an event in modern Greek scholarship" and "a book which it would be difficult to over-praise," The Greeks and the Irrational was Volume 25 of the Sather Classical Lectures series. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 327 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (December 1, 1962)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520003276
• ISBN-13: 978-0520003279
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #468,611 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Those Crazy Greeks, November 5, 2002

By	Big Dave (Boise, Idaho) - See all my reviews

Dodds introduces his material with an anecdote of a young man he met in the British Museum who confessed his inability to get excited about the Elgin Marbles, because, after all, the Greeks were so "terribly rational." Dodds then poses the question, "[w]ere the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics?" In answering his own question (the answer is, of course, "no"), Dodds writes an interesting book.

Dodds's chapters (originally lectures) are roughly chronological and thematic, starting (as one must) with Homer's use of "ate" and working down through the increasing rationality of classical Greece to the Hellenistic Return to Irrationality. En route, he deals with perceived shamanistic influences, the notion of divine inspiration, the question of whether man has a soul, etc.

_The Greeks and the Irrational_ is great in itself and may have value, as Dodds indicates in his closing chapter, to moderns seeking to understand their own relationship with Irrationality. It is also enlightening background reading for any student of the classics generally, in particular providing useful commentary on Homer, Plato (lots on Plato) and the tragedians. Because each chapter was originally a lecture, Dodds' style is eloquent and also readable. Each chapter is buttressed with an impressive clump of endnotes (about a quarter of the book must be notes) for further research.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dodds - the ideal communicator, April 5, 2000

By	M.I. "migoe" (Newcastle, UK) - See all my reviews

This is a work that can't fail to grip. It's not a work just for the historian or the classicists. It's a book for anyone with an interest in the mind and the civilisation of Europe and America. Our notion of the ancient Greeks as an intensely rational people doesn't begin to do them justice. They too had their deeper, psychic side, on the basis of which their philosophy developed, and which even the modern culture continues to demonstrate. The Greek view of madness (mania),and possession, not necessarily as a curse, is explored from original sources. 'Madness' could be viewed as even a blessing in this ancient culture. So too the 'Sacred Disease' of Hippokrates (i.e. epilepsy). We find his treatment of what may be the first description of an out-of-body experience - in Pindar (c.470 B.C.E.) and the poetic double vision and causation, the Muses' gift. Not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the human mind.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'A SIMPLE PROFESSOR OF GREEK', February 17, 2005

By	DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Eric Dodds was sometime professor of Greek at Oxford. This book created a certain amount of a stir in its day both within and outside the arena of classical studies by either addressing, or being believed to address, up-to-date issues of anthropology and psychology. It consists basically of the Sather Classical Lectures that Dodds was invited to deliver at the University of California in 1950, and as it has been reissued in paperback in 1997 it's fair to assume that the publishers intend it to reach a wider readership than the dwindling band of classical initiates.

I very much hope it does that, but a word or two would probably be in place regarding what to expect and what not to expect to find in the book. The author's preface warns us not to look in the book for a history of Greek religion, and more pertinently recognises that modern scholarship is a world of specialists, and Dodds reiterates right at the end that he is `a simple professor of Greek'. Amateurs, dilettantes and bluffers will find plenty of material to suit them I don't doubt, but Dodds is not one of their number. This work is best read as a standard piece of classical scholarship, not as breaking down any moulds or enclosures. The most casual glance at the daunting catalogue of references in the notes appended to each chapter will show what a vast amount of writing on the topics covered here was in situ before Dodds, and how could it be otherwise? Any commentary on, say, Plato or Empedocles or Greek history by and large had to do its best with issues of religion and trends in thought. There are numerous references to other cultures, and Dodds is certainly better versed in such matters than other classics dons that I knew. By my standards he shows wide reading and deep interest in anthropology and human behaviour. On the other hand my standards in these matters are a thing of shreds and patches, and if I wanted to improve that situation this is not where I would look. The focus here is exclusively on Greeks, and any parallels cited are cited from that point of reference. Another thing to be wary of is trying to read this book as any kind of parable for our times. In my own view it is a powerful parable for our times, but that's my own parable only. In the last chapter Dodds alludes to recent history. His date is 1950, which is nearer to the start of the first world war than to 2005. It seems to me that what he has to say about the recrudescence of irrational religion and what he calls `the pathetic reverence for the written word' is very near the bone indeed in 2005, but even if I'm right Dodds could not have known that in 1950, and modern history is invoked by him to illustrate ancient history, not the other way about.

What one does expect and demand from a professor of Greek is knowledge and elucidation of what Greeks said thought and did. This is where The Greeks and the Irrational comes up trumps. There are eight chapters plus two appendices (on maenadism and the semi-magical theurgy). Dodds begins, very reasonably, at the beginning with Homeric terminology for the divine, seeing a culture in which values were a matter of status rather than of morality in any modern sense. He traces the development of the latter together with an analysis of various kinds of `madness', the significance (for Greeks not for Swedenborg or for Kant or for moderns) of dreams, the phenomenon of shamans in the context of trends in religious belief, the rise of rationalism and the counter-reaction that followed it, and the complex issue of Plato's teachings, which are far from unified or consistent. His final chapter is `The Fear of Freedom', and for my money this rings (or tolls) a loud clear bell in the early years of the third millennium. Genuine freedom of thought, much less of expression, is resented widely as being subversive, it seems to me, not least in a culture that likes to pose as embodying liberty by some kind of definition. In this Dodds seems to me to support my own view, but my own view it remains. Dodds is talking about Greeks.

The presentation of the material improves as the book goes along. The early chapters contain too much Greek that should have been reserved for the notes in what was after all lectures, not the printed word, and will not be fully intelligible without help unless you have Greek. For all that they remain readable, and anyone who can recognise a first-class mind and a first-class scholar will recognise it here. In this respect Dodds has not been as adept as his Cambridge opposite number Denys Page, whose History and the Homeric Iliad followed about a decade later in the Sather series of annual lectures.(Curiously, Page was restricted to six lectures, not the eight he seemed to have been expecting.) Dodds has all eight at his disposal, the book is beautifully written, and I ended wishing there had been more. Still a book for a wide reading-public I should say, wherever intellectual curiosity and a wish to understand human thought-processes thrive.