The Ascent Of Olympus

Excerpt from The Ascent of Olympus His volume contains four lectures which were delivered in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, during the years l9 5 and 1916, and which appeared at intervals in the Library Bulletins. They are reproduced as nearly as possible in their original form, with a few.necessary corrections and expansions and justifications. It would have been easy to spread them over a much larger area but perhaps they may suffice for the presentation of ideas which are to some extent novel, and, almost as certainly, to some persons distasteful. On the one hand, I have to meet the criticism of my wise friend, and inspiring leader, who is priest of the mythological Nemi and guardian of its Golden Bough, until someone catches him unawares and dispossesses him. He tells me that he despairs of the solution of the riddle of the Greek Mythology, he who does not despair (and with better right than Haeclrel) of the solution of the riddle of the Universe 1 On the other hand, there are those who, having unfortunately been familiar with the Greek gods from their earliest years, and never really detached from traditional faith in them, cannot avoid contemplat ing the author of these lectures as an lconoclast, and put upon him the task, under which Socrates as well as the early Christians alike laboured, of proving to a suspicious bench of magistrates that they were really not atheists. So far from this being the case, it may be hoped that when one succeeds, if one does succeed, in evolving Artemis out of a wayside weed, or Aphrodite out of a cabbage, and, in general, all things lovely out of things that are not at first sight beautiful, one may claim to belong to the brotherhood, whatever its name may be, that has the vision of That far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Gregory Nagy here provides a far-reaching assessment of the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society. Nagy illuminates in particular the forces of interaction and change that transformed the Indo-European linguistic and cultural heritage into distinctly Greek social institutions between the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C. Included in the volume are thirteen of Nagy's major essays—all extensively revised for book publication—on various aspects of the Hellenization of Indo-European poetics, myth and ritual, and social ideology. The primary aim of this book is to examine the Greek language as a reflection of society, with special attention to its function as a vehicle for transmitting mythology and poetics. Nagy's emphasis on the language of the Greeks, and on its comparison with the testimony of related Indo-European languages such as Latin, Indic, and Hittite, reflects his long-standing interest in Indo-European linguistics. The individual chapters examine the development of Hellenic poetics in the traditions of Homer and Hesiod; the Hellenization of Indo-European myths and rituals, including myths of the afterlife, rituals of fire, and symbols in the Greek lyric; and the Hellenization of Indo-European social ideology, with reference to such cultural institutions as the concept of the city-state. A path-breaking application of the principles of social anthropology, comparative mythology, historical linguistics, and oral poetry theory to the study of classics, Greek Mythology and Poetics will be an invaluable resource for classicists and other scholars of linguistics and literary theory.