The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.

In its examination of two of Plato's key works, Soul, World, and Idea: An Interpretation of Plato's Republic and Phaedo reveals the key role that images and our capacity for image-making play in the relationship among soul, world, and Idea. This bookbegins and ends with a reading of the Republic. Daniel Sherman turns midway to the Phaedo to further analyze the nature of the soul and its relation to the nature of the Ideas, then returns to apply the conclusions to the rest of the Republic. Sherman's focus is on the ontological and epistemological argument, including attention to the dramatic detail. He argues that the ontology of the Ideas in the Republic and the Phaedo is inseparable from the ontology of human being, that is, from the structure and life of the soul. On this interpretation, the Ideas are seen as indeed objective but as in a sense also a product of a permanent dialectical relationship. The Ideas, though something more than concepts, do not have any real independent existence outside of this human dialectical triad of world, soul and Idea. The stability of the Ideas need not be grounded in a static otherworldliness, and the condition of meaning is not temporally prior to human existence in general. The result is a new interpretation concerning the realm of the Ideas, the immortality of the soul, and the lived in world of their interaction in the production of interpretive images. Sherman argues that the platonic soul is immortaland the Ideas eternal wholly and solely in human (dialogical) activity--the rest is muthologia--and that the world of our experience is a product of an ongoing act of interpretation or dianoetic dialegesthai. This reinterpretation of the platonic Ideas will be especially interesting to students and scholars of classics, ancient philosophy, and continental philosophy.

What can transcendence mean for us? We live in a world in which there are many conceptions of transcendence. Some philosophers say that they all point, in their way, to a transcendent realm, without which death and life's sorrows have the last word, while their opponents argue that since this realm is an illusion, we must use our own resources to meet life's trials. Others argue that moral and religious concepts of transcendence are obscured by philosophical notions of transcendence, and must be rescued from them. These conflicting views on a central issue in our culture are brought into sharp relief in the present collection.

Two important theologians of early Christianity were Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo. Both were intellectually formed by philosophers, such as Cicero, who taught that virtue was the way to greatness. Yet they saw contradictions between Roman and Christian ethical ideals. Could these competing visions of greatness be reconciled?

For Lampert, Strauss's essay is equally important for understanding Strauss himself. Lampert's Strauss is a sympathetic admirer of Nietzsche and his teachings, who ultimately situates him in the company of Plato and elevates understanding the contest between Plato and Nietzsche into the highest task facing contemporary or postmodern philosophy. Why, then, should Strauss have kept this admiration hidden while permitting such a distorted public view of his thought? And why should he have discouraged others from appreciating the teachings that had proved so important to his own philosophical liberation and training? According to Lampert, the answers lie in Strauss's own esoteric writing, full of subtexts, implications, and consequences. Strauss conceived of philosophy as a furtive undertaking, and believed Nietzsche had rejected the necessity of this role for philosophy in favor of a daring candor.

Female Characters play various roles in the Odyssey: patron goddess (Athena), seductress (Kirke, the Sirens, Nausikaa), carnivorous monster (Skylla), maid servant (Eurykleia), and faithful wife (Penelope). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study examines these different female representations and their significance within the context of the poem and Greek culture. A central theme of the book is the visualization of the Odyssey's female characters by ancient artists, and several essays discuss the visual and iconographic implications of Odysseus' female encounters as depicted in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art. The distinguished contributors--from the fields of classical studies, comparative literature, art history, and archaeology--are A.J. Graham, Seth L. Schein, Diana Buitron-Oliver, Beth Cohen, Sheila Murnaghan, Lillian Eileen Doherty, Helene P. Foley, Froma I. Zeitlin, H.A. Shapiro, Richard Brilliant, Jenifer Neils, and Christine Mitchell Havelock. Feminine in orientation, but not narrowly feminist in approach, this first interdisciplinary work on the Odyssey's female characters will have a broad audience amongst scholars and students working in classical studies, iconography and art history, women's studies, mythology, and ancient history.

Perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translations of the Greek tragedies and Herodotus's History, as well as his edition of Hobbes's Thucydides, David Grene has also had a major impact as a teacher and interpreter of texts both ancient and modern. In this book, distinguished colleagues and former students explore the imaginative force of literature and history in articulating and illuminating the human condition. Ranging as widely as Grene's own interests in Greek and Roman antiquity, in drama, poetry, and the novel, in the art of translation, and in English history, these essays include discussions of the Odyssey and Ulysses, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, Mallarmé's English and T. S. Eliot's religion, and the mutually antipathetic minds of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. The introduction by Todd Breyfogle sketches for the first time the contours of Grene's own thought. Classicists, political theorists, intellectual historians, philosophers, and students of literature will all find much of value in the individual essays here and in the juxtaposition of their themes. Contributors: Saul Bellow, Seth Benardete, Todd Breyfogle, Amirthanayagam P. David, Wendy Doniger, Mary Douglas, Joseph N. Frank, Victor Gourevitch, Nicholas Grene, W. R. Johnson, Brendan Kennelly, Edwin McClellan, Françoise Meltzer, Stephanie Nelson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Ostwald, Robert B. Pippin, James Redfield, Sandra F. Siegel, Norma Thompson, and David Tracy

Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists (3rd-5th century CE). She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.