Thinking the Greeks

Bruce M. King teaches Classical Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, USA; he is also a member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, USA. Lillian Doherty is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

"An impressive tribute to a path-breaking scholar and inspirational teacher. Taking their bearings from Redfield’s own work, the volume’s diverse, adventurous contributors uncover new connections between epic and tragedy, poetics and thought, literary form and social practice in ancient Greek culture and beyond." - Sheila Murnaghan, The University of Pennsylvania, USA"The variety of themes are held together by the common intellectual-history approach of the authors. All the essays are characterized by the originality of perspective and stylish interdisciplinarity of the Committee on Social Thought. This book will satisfy both the curious general reader interested in ancient Greece and specialists, who will find unusual approaches to their subject-matter." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

• List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Editors’ Introduction: Bruce M. King and Lillian Doherty; Part One: Homer; 1. Laura M. Slatkin "Counterfactuals and the Plot of the Iliad"; 2. Wendy Olmsted "Odysseus at the Boundaries of Pre-Culture"; 3. Sarah Nooter "The Wooden Horse: The Unmaking of the Odyssey"; 4. Froma Zeitlin "Constructing the Aesthetic Body in Homer and Beyond"; 5. Katherine Kretler "Tapping the Wellsprings of Action: Homeric Ring Composition in Aristotle’s Birth of Tragedy"; Part Two: Plato in Conversation with Epic, Tragedy, and Comedy; 6. Glenn Most "Homer, the First of the Tragedians? Remarks on Plato Republic 10"; 7. Kendall Sharp "Plato’s Hippias Minor as Literary Criticism"; 8. Stephanie Nelson "Between Being and Becoming: Comedy, Tragedy, and the Symposium"; 9. Bruce M. King "Contrafactual Education in Sophocles’ Philoktetes and Plato’s Lysis"; 10. Paul Ludwig "Vulgar Eros in the Phaedrus"; 11. James McGlew "Equality and Sortition in Plato’s Laws"; Part Three: Travel and Transmission; 12. Gregory Nagy "A Ritualized Re-thinking of What it Meant to be ‘European’ for Ancient Greeks of the Post-Heroic Age: Evidence from the Heroikos of Philostratus"; 13. Wendy Doniger "Menander, Terence, and the Rape of the Clever Wife"; 14. Philippe Borgeaud "Sarapis and the Emperor of China: Some Thoughts on Comparison"; 15. Claudia Zatta "The Desire to Live: Aristotle’s Animals in Hobbes’ Philosophy of Man"; 16. Ian Desai "The Alchemy of Influence: Socrates, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi"; List of James M. Redfield publications; Index