The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey

by Seth Benardete

Overview

In this exciting interpretation of the Odyssey, the late renowned scholar Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742565975
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/14/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	361 KB

About the Author

Seth Benardete was professor of classics at New York University. He was the author of The Being of the Beautiful, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, Socrates' Second Sailing, and The Tragedy and Comedy of Life.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Notice to the Reader
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3
Chapter I: The Beginnings
Chapter 4 Theodicy
Chapter 5 Politics
Chapter 6 Telemachus
Chapter 7
Chapter II: Pattern and Will
Chapter 8 Nestor
Chapter 9 Helen and Menelaus
Chapter 10
Chapter III: Odysseus' Choice
Chapter 11
Chapter IV: Among the Phaeacians
Chapter 12 Shame
Chapter 13 Paradise
Chapter 14 Pride
Chapter 15
Chapter V: Odysseu' Own Story
Chapter 16 Memory and Mind
Chapter 17 Nature
Chapter 18 Hades
Chapter 19 Destiny
Chapter 20
Chapter VI: Odysseus' Lies
Chapter 21
Chapter VII: Nonfated Things
Chapter 22 Theoclymenus and Eumaeus
Chapter 23 The Slave Girls
Chapter 24 The Name and the Scar
Chapter 25
Chapter VIII: The Suitors and the City
Chapter 26 The Suitors
Chapter 27 The City
Chapter 28
Chapter IX: Recognition
Chapter 29 Penelope
Chapter 30 Hades
Chapter 31 Laertes
Chapter 32 Notes
Chapter 33 Index

Editorial Reviews

Bernardete's procedure frees him to take seriously the problems of the surface on their own terms.

Albert E. Gunn and Staff - Martin Sitte

The Bow and the Lyre is a treasure of startling observations, but it is also much more. His book is a remarkable account of the Odyssey. .. There is really nothing else like it in print.

Michael Davis

Guided by the fundamental problems opened up through his studies of the Platonic dialogues, Seth Benardete unravels the intertwined threads of Homer's Odyssey and finds at its core the choice Odysseus makes to be human—to return home rather than accept Calypso's offer of immortality. This choice reflects the understanding Odysseus has of his fate, on which the Olympian gods have in turn imposed a design of their own, assigning Odysseus a part in their plan of withdrawal. Once home, Odysseus strings his bow and makes it sing, Homer tells us, as easily as a bard his lyre; but whether the apparent fusion of rationality with spiritedness in the soul of Odysseus allows him to share Homer's perspective is the Platonic question that animates Benardete's penetrating and illuminating reading of the Odyssey.

Ronna Burger

The Bow and the Lyre is a work of matchless erudition and insight.

Harvey C. Mansfield