Anthony Snodgrass – författare

This is a book about Homer, myth and art. The Iliad and Odyssey so dominate our view of ancient Greece that our natural reaction on viewing certain works of early Greek art is to identify them as 'scenes from Homer'. However, Anthony Snodgrass argues that, so far from 'illustrating' the Homeric poems, these works very rarely show signs of acquaintance with the Iliad or Odyssey, seldom even choosing their subject-matter from them. When the subjects do overlap, the artists occasionally give positive signs of preferring a non-Homeric version of the episode. He then attempts to explain why this should be so: despite Homer's unique standing in antiquity, the artists inhabited an independent world, where their own inspirations and concerns dominated their production. It is only the traditional dominance of the literary study of antiquity which has hidden this from us.

To be the first full and convincing historian of obscure centuries and the interpreter of a difficult and unpromising material culture is more than falls to most scholars in the course of a lifetime. So wrote the anonymous TLS reviewer in 1972. The Dark Age of Greece is now reissued with an extensive foreword in which the author considers what effect three decades of research and scholarship have had on his original findings and arguments. Professor Snodgrass constructs a narrative of four centuries of Greek history from an exhaustive synthesis of literary and archaeological evidence - pottery, burial-practices, architecture and metalwork, and what can be discovered of religion, commerce, and language. He argues that this was in truth a dark age, from the perspective both of scholarship and, more importantly, of the people who lived through it in poor, isolated communities, conscious of lost skills and departed glories. The recession was caused, he shows, not by external factors but by processes of internal collapse. And yet, although the book reveals material discontinuity, its ultimate conclusion is that at the most fundamental level of culture, human population, a continuity can be discerned, between the greatness of Mycenae and the rebirth of urban civilization, the dawning of the Classical age. The Dark Age of Greece remains the most comprehensive and coherent account of this period in the history of ancient Greece. It is a vital source of ideas and evidence for students, as full of interest as ever for the general reader.

Classical archaeology has changed beyond recognition in the past generation, in its aims, its choice of subject-matter and the methods it uses. This book brings together twenty-five papers by A. M. Snodgrass, some of them previously published only in rather inaccessible places, which have contributed to this change. They cover four decades of work on pre-Classical and Classical Greece and some adjacent fields of scholarship, beginning in the 1960s when Classical archaeology was not widely seen as a free-standing subject. They chart the progress of a movement for the intellectual independence of Greek archaeology and art, from history and textual studies and for recognition among other branches of archaeology. The key theme of the papers is the importance of the Iron Age as the formative period in the making of Classical Greece and the author varies this with comment on literature, history, anthropology, Aegean and European prehistory and Roman provincial archaeology. This book will be an important one for all archaeology and ancient history collections.This collection of essays*represents innovative work in Classical archaeology*challenges accepted boundaries and inhibitions*is wide in scope covering history, prehistory, art, literary interpretation, field archaeology