Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue. Creating the Foundations of Classical Civilization.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1968, cm.15x23, pp.212, 8 tavole bianco e nero fuori testo, legatura editoriale, sopraccoperta figurata. Testo in inglese. The Age of Gold was one of the so-called 'commonplaces' inherited by the Renaissance from classical antiquity, a myth (taking many different forms) telling of an era of human happiness without war or want. Most writers used it as a convenient device, predicting its return as an age of peace and plenty upon the accession of a ruler or the signing of a treaty: others moralized it as a reformed or spiritually regenerated society. Elizabeth Armstrong's search for an answer to this question has entailed a study of a wide range of possible influences, classical, medieval and contemporary, and an examination of neglected areas of Ronsard's own vast literary output. Most of all an explanation is sought in his temperament and tastes, which made the theme of the Age of Gold at one period in his life a welcome vehicle for poetry expressing his love of freedom and his sensibility to untouched nature.

University of California Press 1994, cm.15x23, pp.254, brossura con copertina figurata a colori. We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.