Kleos in a Minor Key

Kleos in a Minor Key The Homeric Education of a Little Prince - Hellenic Studies

Paperback (03 Jun 2011)

Save $4.49

  • RRP $26.58
  • $22.09
Add to basket

Includes delivery to the United States

10+ copies available online - Usually dispatched within two working days

Publisher's Synopsis

As scholars have remarked, the word kleos in the Iliad and the Odyssey alike refers to something more substantive and complex than "fame" or "glory." Kleos distinctly supposes an oral narrative-principally an "oral history," a "life story" or ultimately an "oral tradition." When broken down into its twin constituents, "words" and "actions" or "deeds," a hero's kleos serves to define him as a fully gendered social being.

This book is a meditation on this concept as expressed and experienced in the adult society Telemachos find himself in. Kleos is the yardstick by which his psychological change was appreciated by Homer's audiences. As this book shows through philological and interdisciplinary analysis, Prince Telemachos grows up in the course of the Telemachy and arguably even beyond (in book 24): his education, which is conceived largely as an apprenticeship on land and sea, admits him gradually if unevenly to a full-fledged adult kleos-a kleos that nonetheless necessarily remains minor in comparison to that of his father and other elders.

Book information

ISBN: 9780674055926
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: Center for Hellenic Studies
Pub date:
DEWEY: 883.01
DEWEY edition: 22
Language: English
Number of pages: 171
Weight: 306g
Height: 151mm
Width: 228mm
Spine width: 13mm