The World of Odysseus

First published in 1954, this historical essay reconstructs the society implied by the Iliad and the Odyssey rather than retelling those poems. Finley reads Homeric households, gift-exchange, guest-friendship, assemblies, and the limited power of kings as evidence for a real world of Dark Age and early archaic Greece, distinct from the Mycenaean palaces archaeology had begun to uncover. He treats warriors, dependents, and women inside the oikos, and he argues about whether the epics remember a particular century. The book is social history built from epic, not a translation of Homer and not a Bronze Age romance.

Bound in red-brown cloth printed with a black and white design. Brown slipcase.