The Platonic Odeyssey

This book is a detailed study of how Plato constructs his seminal philosophical dialogue, the Phaedo, as a unique tragedy, a poetic masterpiece whose structure is organic and symmetrical. Plato's mental Odyssey leads to the internal drama of the Phaedo plot. The analysis examines how Plato's literary art overcomes the philosophical problem of the separation of Ideas from sensible things. And it traces literary and philosophical offspring of the mental Odyssey, including Joyce and Proust.

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.

This book is a detailed study of how Plato constructs his seminal philosophical dialogue, the Phaedo, as a unique tragedy, a poetic masterpiece whose structure is organic and symmetrical. Plato's mental Odyssey leads to the internal drama of the Phaedo plot. The analysis examines how Plato's literary art overcomes the philosophical problem of the separation of Ideas from sensible things. And it traces literary and philosophical offspring of the mental Odyssey, including Joyce and Proust.

Odysseus as a model of wisdom in Greek and Roman philosophy

Draws on Plato to argue that Homer elevated private life as the locus of true friendship and the catalyst of the highest human excellence. Offering a new, Plato-inspired reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey, this book traces the divergent consequences of love of honor and love of one’s own private life for human excellence, justice, and politics. Analyzing Homer’s intricate character portraits, Michelle M. Kundmeuller concludes that the poet shows that the excellence or virtue to which humans incline depends on what they love most. Ajax’s character demonstrates that human beings who seek honor strive, perhaps above all, to display their courage in battle, while Agamemnon’s shows that the love of honor ultimately undermines the potential for moderation, destabilizing political order. In contrast to these portraits, the excellence that Homer links to the love of one’s own, such as by Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, fosters moderation and employs speech to resolve conflict. It is Odysseus, rather than Achilles, who is the pinnacle of heroic excellence. Homer’s portrait of humanity reveals the value of love of one’s own as the better, albeit still incomplete, precursor to a just political order. Kundmueller brings her reading of Homer to bear on contemporary tensions between private life and the pursuit of public honor, arguing that individual desires continue to shape human excellence and our prospects for justice. “A beautiful account of the Homeric hero, in all his complexity.” — Mary P. Nichols, author of Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom

This study focuses on the apocryphal "Acts of Andrew" (200 AD), which purport to tell the story of the travels, miracles and martyrdom of the apostle Andrew. Breaking with tradition that concludes the Acts came from scripture, the author investigates classical literature to find the sources.

This study focuses on the apocryphal Acts of Andrew (c. 200 CE), which purports to tell the story of the travels, miracles, and martyrdom of the apostle Andrew. Traditional scholarship has looked for the background of such writings in Jewish and Christian scriptures. MacDonald, however, breaks with that model and looks to classic literature for the sources of this story. Specifically, he argues that the Acts represent an attempt to transform Greco-Roman myth into Christian narrative categories by telling the story of Andrew in terms of Homeric epic, in particular the Odyssey. MacDonald presents a point-by-point comparison of the two works, finding the resemblances so strong, numerous, and tendentious that they virtually compel the reader to consider the Acts a transformative "rewriting" of the epic. This discovery not only sheds valuable light on the uses of Homer in the early church but also significantly contributes to our understanding of the reception of Homer in the empire as a whole.

These essays examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own philosophical dialogues can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The text argues that no character should be read as Plato's mouthpiece.