Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age

Analysing in detail ancient Greek culture and society, Gladstone achieves his aim 'to promote and extend' the study of Homer.

William Ewart Gladstone (Author)

9781108012065, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 June 2010

648 pages, 1 map
21.6 x 3.6 x 14 cm, 0.81 kg

Four-time prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) was also a prolific author and enthusiastic scholar of the classics. Gladstone had spent almost two decades in politics prior to his writing the three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. This work and the preceding 'On the place of Homer in classical education and in historical inquiry' (1857), reflect Gladstone's interest in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he read with increasing frequency from the 1830s onward and which he viewed as particularly relevant to modern society. As he relates, he has two objects in the Studies: 'to promote and extend' the study of Homer's 'immortal poems' and 'to vindicate for them … their just degree both of absolute and, more especially, of relative critical value'. Volume 3 examines Greek polities of this period before returning to the poems themselves, their plots, characters and the beauty of their language.

Part I. Agore, or the Polities of the Homeric Age
Part II. Ilios, the Trojans Compared and Contrasted with the Greeks
Part III. Thalassa, the Outer Geography of the Odyssey
Part IV. Aoidos: 1. On the plot of the Iliad
2. The sense of beauty in Homer
3. Homer's perception and use of number
4. Homer's perception and use of colour
5. Homer and some of his successors in epic poetry
6. Some principal Homeric characters in Troy
7. The declension of the great Homeric characters in the later tradition.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]