Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer - Hardcover

This remarkable and daringly original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal. Its central point is the Jebel Aqra, the great mountain on the north Syrian coast which Robin Lane Fox dubs 'the southern Olympus', and around which much of the action of the book turns.

Robin Lane Fox rejects the fashionable view of Homer and his near-contemporary Hesiod as poets who owed a direct debt to texts and poems from the near East, and by following the trail of the Greek travellers shows that they were, rather, in debt to their own countrymen. With characteristic flair he reveals how these travellers, progenitors of tales which have inspired writers and historians for thousands of years, understood the world before the beginnings of philosophy and western thought.

This remarkable book throws new light on the history and travels of the Greeks in the eighth century BC, the formative age of the great epics of Homer. Drawing on a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history, many recent archaeological discoveries and the author's own travels to its main sites around the Mediterranean, it shows how similar travels shaped the Greeks' myths about their gods and heroes, and relates them to particular places and stories in the east and west. It credits particular Greeks for the first time with a trail of discoveries about their gods and battles which seemed to stretch from one end of their world to the other.

Robin Lane Fox uses this new approach to reject a fashionable view of Homer and his near-contemporary Hesiod as writers who owed a direct debt to the texts and poems in the near East during their lifetime. He traces different patterns of contact within the Greek world, setting eighth-century Greeks among Phoenicians, Assyrians and the peoples of Cyprus, north Syria and their neighbours, but emphasising how Greeks viewed them in their own Greek terms. With characteristic flair he shows that they understood the world around them in a way shared by others in the near East, including the authors of Hebrew scriptures. They are travelling heroes whose discoveries belong to a time before the beginnings of philosophy and whose tales have inspired artists and writers for thousands of years.