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Becoming Achilles - Child-sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the lliad and Beyond (Paperback, New)
Loot Price: R1,268
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Becoming Achilles - Child-sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the lliad and Beyond (Paperback, New)
Series: Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Viewing the Iliad and myth through the lens of modern psychology,
in Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the
Iliad and Beyond, Richard Holway shows how the epic underwrites
individual and communal catharsis and denial. Sacrificial
childrearing generates but also threatens agonistic, glory-seeking
ancient Greek cultures. Not only aggression but knowledge of
sacrificial parenting must be purged. Just as Zeus contrives to
have threats to his regime play out harmlessly (to him) in the
mortal realm, so the Iliad dramatizes threats to Archaic and later
Greek cultures in the safe arena of poetic performance. The epic
represents in displaced form destructive mother-son and
father-daughter liaisons and resulting strife within and between
generations. Holway calls into question the Iliad's (and many
scholars') presentation of Achilles as a hero who speaks truth to
power, learns through suffering, and exemplifies kingly virtues
that Agamemnon lacks. So too the Iliad's cathartic process, whether
conceived as purging innate aggression or arriving at moral
clarity. Instead, Holway argues, Achilles (and Socrates) try to
prove they are not what at bottom they experience themselves to
be-needy, defenseless children, who fear to acknowledge, much less
speak out against, parents' use of them to meet parents' needs.
What emerges from Holway's analysis is not only a new reading of
the Iliad, from its first word to its last, but a revised account
of the family dynamics underlying ancient Greek cultures.
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