Travelling Heroes - In The Epic Age Of Homer

In the manner of a scholarly detective storydrawing upon archaeology, ancient texts, and new discoveries, many of them firsthandTravelling Heroes takes us deep into the past to explore mysteries that have remained unsolved for millennia: from the origins of the Greek gods to the spread of classical culture in the Mediterranean world. Central to the book is Robin Lane Fox’s striking thesis: migrants from Greece in the eighth century b.c. settled in certain places in both the Near East and Italy,and what they found there helped shape some of their most distinctive myths. Lane Fox explores the trail left by these travelling heroes in fascinating detail. Beginning with a rich picture of the Mediterranean world as it existed nearly three thousand years ago, he takes us on an intoxicating intellectual journey into the origins of Greek myths and poetry. Bringing this hitherto dark era brilliantly to life, he exposes the roots that would give rise to Greek thought and ideas in the centuries to come. With the same lively originality he showed in writing about the Bible in The Unauthorized Version, about the triumph of Christianity in Pagans and Christians, and in his groundbreaking biography of Alexander the Great, Lane Fox here challenges received ideas and transforms previously dry scholarship into fascinating and enlightening reading.