Memories of Odysseus

This work centres on identity, questioning how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mond, to show what these reveal at key points in Greek history. It first follows the journeying of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory, and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. The analysis then moves to Egypt, Persia, the Near East, old Greece, the new Greek world, and Asia Minor, from the creation of Homer's work around 700BC to the high Roman imperial period some 800 years later. The author looks in particular at the importance of the barbarian and the "other", first in the theoretical process of describing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation - themes with a later resonance.