8vo 304 pages. Hardcover with dustjacket. New book. CLASSICAL STUDIES. Wily Odysseus. Bold Achilles. Brave Hektor. Beautiful Helen of Troy. For centuries, people around the world have been fascinated by these figures and their tragic war as recounted in Homer's Iliad, long admired and studied as one of the foremost epic poems of the ancient world. In The Iliad as Politics, Dean Hammer revisits this epic with a new perspective. In this first full-length treatment of the Iliad as a work of political thought, Hammer demonstrates how Homer's epic is also an ancient Greek discussion on political ethics. Hammer redefines political thought as the activity of addressing issues of collective identity and organization. Using this understanding of politics, he discusses how the characters in the Iliad, through their larger-than-life actions and interactions, embody community issues of authority, conflict, judgment, and the interrelationship between personal and collective identity. The characters' many quarrels, laments, reconciliations, and vows of loyalty and friendship all critically model the principles and controversies of underlying Greek political ethics of communal responsibility and relationship. Much of modern Western political thought focuses on classical Greek discussions of political philosophy. Hammer demonstrates that the Iliad constitutes another such ancient Greek political discussion. Dean Hammer is the John W. Wetzel Professor of Classics and Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins and The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. "I applaud Hammer's effort to read the Iliad as, among other things, the first document of political thought in Greek literature and history. No such work exists at present." -Kurt Raaflaub, Professor of Classics and History Brown University "A rare treat: an engagement with Homer as a political thinker by a political theorist thoroughly versed both in the primary texts and the scholarship on epic poetry and in the period when the polis was emerging." -Walter Donlan author of The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece (Key Words: Iliad, Homer, Dean Hammer, Politics, Political Thought, Classical Studies). Volume 28 in Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture.
