Description
Book SynopsisThe story of our ongoing fascination with Homer, the man and the myth.
Trade Review"Porter is an exceptional scholar. Clear, intelligent, and filled with fascinating examples, this book is contemporary while reaching beyond the fashionable, and it will arouse a good deal of discussion."--Simon Goldhill, author of Preposterous Poetics "This book is a reckoning with who or what we understand Homer to be and how we have reinvented him for our own ends. Porter makes clear the impossibility of Homer both as a concept and as a person, revealing him as the illusion of a perfectly formed whole that has been kept alive for millennia, a ghost in the machine, a phantom both alive and dead. As a leading scholar in dismantling assumptions about the classical past, Porter has written an original, compelling, and eye-opening book that will generate excitement and admiration."--Alex C. Purves, author of Homer and the Poetics of Gesture
Table of ContentsNote on Translations and Abbreviations List of Illustrations Timeline 1. Why Homer? 2. Who Was Homer? 3. Apotheosis or Apostasy? 4. What Did Homer See? 5. Why War? Acknowledgments Notes Further Reading Works Cited Index
