The World of Odysseus

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the Thirties Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley's best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus. »

Bernard Knox is director emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. »

By M.I. Finley
Introduction by Bernard Knox

The World of Odysseus is a concise and penetrating account of the society that gave birth to the Iliad and the Odyssey—a book that provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values. Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes in his introduction to this new edition, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"—a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

A scintillating work of literary and historical sociology, this book, originally published in 1954 and last revised in 1977, is back in print.... His book and E. R. Dodd's The Greeks and the Irrational remain the smartest and most dazzling works on ancient Greece that are accessible to the layman.
— The Atlantic Monthly

Readers of Homer have been rendered a service by Mr. Finley which can best be praised for the modesty and restraint of its rendering. . .There are certain things about Homer's world, Homer's special world, which he thinks we are entitled to know. . . And he tells these things with the greatest clarity and good sense.
— Mark van Doren

A book of remarkable intellectual power and social insight.
— C. P. Snow, Sunday Times (London)

Also see:

The Bog People
By P.V. Glob
Introduction by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
and Paul T. Barber
Translated from the Danish by Rupert Bruce-Mitford

Conceived as a kind of a detective story, this classic of archaeological history—out of print for over thirty years—is a fascinating account of the religion, culture, and daily life of the Iron Age in Europe.

Grief Lessons
A new translation by Anne Carson

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief." Celebrated contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson presents new translations of four plays by Euripides.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)

Sep 30, 2002
232 pages
ISBN: 1590170172
9781590170175
NYRB Classics
History

Find us on Facebook