Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors

[Mudhammam]

I'll refrain from further comment on the works I am still reading until I have completed them. This brings me to Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. I'd like to think that my attraction to both of these works is due to the genius of Homer rather than Fagles' award-winning translations, but I haven't read any other versions, and in comparison to other ancient works, I'm still starting to think it is Fagles' renditions that really makes them shine. Then again, Homer was sacred to the ancients and perhaps the responsibility for creating works so timeless, in that they seem contemporary to every age, really does fall upon Homer. The Illiad is one long battle-struggle, such as one you might read in a Tolkien epic, and Homer has this masterly technique of using everyday metaphors in the heat of blood and death---something like, "the arrow flew... like the wind over a harvest crop when the summer day draws to an end and the farmer's tools are cast down... so too was so-and-so cast down, breathing his last, when the arrow pierced his brains, splattering them all over the red earth"---Homer (through Fagles) does it much better though. The Illiad is almost perfect; the one criticism I have is that it at times feels repetitive. Even still, it continually surprised me and kept my attention the entire time.

What The Iliad is to something like The Return of the King, The Odyssey is to The Hobbit. It's an adventure and a metaphor for the ups and downs of life's journey, following Odysseus (who fights at Troy in The Iliad) as he returns home but gets into a few troubles along the way that result in two decades of delay. The story is told from a number of perspectives, but it is all constructed wonderfully to captivate the reader's attention throughout. Also, both epics by Homer have a number of memorable scenes that cut to Zeus' Olympian Halls and depicts the gods arguing over how certain human affairs should play out. It's quite possible that Homer was mocking the way that people viewed the gods but whether or not this is the case, they are often hilarious.

I must recommend everybody read both Homerian epics. As Bernard Knox puts it in the introduction to Fagles' translation, "One ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer's old age, of 'a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun---the size remained, without the force.' He did, however, temper the harshness of that judgment by adding: 'I am speaking of old age---but it is the old age of Homer.'"

The Presocratic Philosophers by G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield is a great selection if you want a work that contains the source documents for all of the major Presocratics and their views on cosmogony, theogony, man, being, mind, etc. It gives a satisfactory overview of all the known philosophers and is in the end a fairly exhaustive study, with one provision: on the one hand, there's not a lot of material on many of these figures that we can trust, so "exhaustive" is somewhat relative, and on the other hand, if you want an in-depth study on a particular character and his influence on later philosophers, this work probably only scratches the surface. Still, I do recommend it if your interest lies principally in thinkers preceding Plato and Xenophon and their accounts of Socrates.

Alicia Stallings' translation of Lucretius' The Nature of Things - I read this last summer. It was a fascinating read as it was my first real taste of ancient poetry outside of the Bible, and a perfect entry for this reason: it's a very modern translation, and feels like you're reading contemporary poetry by an American author. That's also the worst part about it because I think it would have been better to own a translation that conveys the scholarly tone typically given in updates of works from antiquity. I recommend it for anyone that is new to the ancients; but a more seasoned student will probably find her translation frustrating; if I remember correctly, she even changes some of the imagery that Lucretius uses, for example, instead of shooting an arrow she says gun or something to that effect. That annoyed me a bit. In terms of Lucretius himself, this work is a masterpiece and is unique as basically a philosophical treatise (the epicurean school) in the form of poetry, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as I often find epicureanism to be very close to my heart.