Ancients in Action
2 total works
Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire, and in his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance with profound meditations on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual and the State. From short pastoral poems he progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, recognized as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature and an incalculable influence on Dante, Milton, Berlioz, Tennyson, and T.S. Eliot. In this concise introduction to the poetic achievement of Virgil, Griffin explores the thought of this great poet, placing him in his historical and literary context.
The Iliad and the Odyssey stand at the very beginning of Greek literature. Much has been written about their origins and authorship, but Jasper Griffin, although he touches briefly on those questions, is here concerned with the ideas of the poems, which have had such an incalculable influence on the ideas of the West. He shows that each of the two epics has its own coherent and suggestive view of the world and of man's place in it.