Athena's Disguises


Book Description

"For today's world of generational segregation, Susan Ford Wiltshire offers a classical model of the mentor that connects us and provides opportunity for discernment and the exchange of wisdom. The characters of an ancient story lead us to recognize our timeless need to guide and be guided."-Rev. Anne B. Bonnyman, rector, Trinity Episcopal Parish, Wilmington, Delaware




Athena's Disguises


Book Description

In Athena's Disguises, Susan Wiltshire offers a classical model of the mentor that guides us and provides opportunities for understanding and for the exchange of wisdom. This book seeks to show that a mentor is a gift who ultimately gives us ourselves.




Odyssey


Book Description

Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.




Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey


Book Description

Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey reveals the significance of the Odyssey's plot, in particular the many scenes of recognition that make up the hero's homecoming and dramatize the cardinal values of Homeric society, an aristocratic culture organized around recognition in the broader senses of honor, privilege, status, and fame. Odysseus' identity is seen to be rooted in his family relations, geographical origins, control of property, participation in the social institutions of hospitality and marriage, past actions, and ongoing reputation. At the same time, Odysseus' dependence on the acknowledgement of others ensures attention to multiple viewpoints, which makes the Odyssey more than a simple celebration of one man's preeminence and accounts in part for the poem's vigorous afterlife. The theme of disguise, which relies on plausible lies, highlights the nature of belief and the power of falsehood and creates the mixture of realism and fantasy that gives the Odyssey its distinctive texture. The book contains a pioneering analysis of the role of Penelope and the questions of female agency and human limitation raised by the critical debate about when exactly she recognizes that Odysseus has come home.




The Wrath of Athena


Book Description

A complex study that argues that Athena's wrath is essential to both the structure and the theme of the Odyssey shedding light on the central theme of the relations between gods and men and revealing subtleties of narrative and ambiguities of character.




Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad


Book Description

Jonathan L. Ready offers the first comprehensive examination of Homer's similes in the Iliad as arenas of heroic competition. This study concentrates primarily on similes spoken by Homeric characters. The first to offer a sustained exploration of such similes, Ready shows how characters are made to contest through and over simile not only with one another but also with the narrator. Ready investigates the narrator's similes as well. He demonstrates that Homer amplifies the feat of a successful warrior by providing a competitive orientation to sequences of similes used to describe battles. He also offers a new interpretation of Homer's extended similes as a means for the poet to imagine his characters as competitors for his attention. Throughout this study, Ready makes innovative use of approaches from both Homeric studies and narratology that have not yet been applied to the analysis of Homer's similes.




The Odyssey


Book Description

The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English. This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.




Athena the Wise


Book Description

These classic myths from the Greek pantheon are given a modern twist that contemporary tweens can relate to, from dealing with bullies like Medusa to a first crush on an unlikely boy. Goddess Girls follows four goddesses-in-training – Athena, Persephone, Aphrodite, and Artemis – as they navigate the ins and outs of divine social life at Mount Olympus Academy, where the most priviledged gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon hone their mythical skills. In book 5, Principal Zeus asks Athena to help Heracles (aka Hercules in the Roman pantheon) complete his twelve labors. But when Heracles starts borrowing Athena's friends things without asking, will she be able to help him set things straight?




Homer: Odyssey XIII and XIV


Book Description

New edition of the Greek text suitable for upper-level students, with full attention to literary-critical and linguistic matters.




Let's Hear It


Book Description

A collection of 22 stories by Texas women writers that weave a story of their own: the story of women's writing in the Lone Star State, from 1865 to the present. Authors include Berverly Lowry, Carolyn Osborn, Annette Sanford, Denise Chavez, Katherine Anne Porter, Judy Alter and Joyce Gibson Roach.