From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer's epic poems – the Iliad, theOdyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him – served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era's intellectual, political, and theological struggles. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe's transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

Although the influence of Homer on Western literature has long commanded critical attention, little has been written on how various generations of readers have found menaing in his texts. These seven essays explore the ways in which the Illiad and the Odyssey have been read from the time of Homer through the Renaissance. By asking what questions early readers expected the texts to answer and looking at how these expectations changed over time, the authors clarify the position of the Illiad and the Odyssey in the intellectual world of antiqueity while offering historical insight into the nature of reading. The collection surveys the entire field of preserved ancient interpretations of Homer, beginning with the fictional audiences portrayed within the poems themselves, proceedings to readings by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Aristarchus and Crates, and culminating in the spritiualized allegorical reading current among Platonists of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The influence of these ancient interpretations is then examined in Byzantium and in the Latin West during the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Robert Browning, Anthony Grafton, Robert Lamberton, A.A. Long, James Porter, Nicholas Richardson, and Charles Segal. Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics and John J. Keaney is Professor of Classics, both at Princeton University. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

They packed up their Bibles and left behind them a life that had been filled with turmoil, peril and oppression. The horizon ahead of them to the west, that new Promised Land of Stephen F. Austin called Texas, was their destination. T.H. Farenbach summed it up best in his book

Frustrated with the continuing educational crisis of our time, concerned parents, teachers, and students sense that true reform requires more than innovative classroom technology, standardized tests, or skills training. An older tradition—the Great Tradition—of education in the West is waiting to be heard. Since antiquity, the Great Tradition has defined education first and foremost as the hard work of rightly ordering the human soul, helping it to love what it ought to love, and helping it to know itself and its maker. In the classical and Christian tradition, the formation of the soul in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence took precedence over all else, including instrumental training aimed at the inculcation of "useful" knowledge. Edited by historian Richard Gamble, this anthology reconstructs a centuries-long conversation about the goals, conditions, and ultimate value of true education. Spanning more than two millennia, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary writers, it includes substantial excerpts from more than sixty seminal writings on education. Represented here are the wisdom and insight of such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Eric Voegelin. In an unbroken chain of giving and receiving, The Great Tradition embraced the accumulated wisdom of the past and understood education as the initiation of students into a body of truth. This unique collection is designed to help parents, students, and teachers reconnect with this noble legacy, to articulate a coherent defense of the liberal arts tradition, and to do battle with the modern utilitarians and vocationalists who dominate educational theory and practice.