|9780822983811| The power of legend is that it is never simply an old tale retold. Though the legend may be old, its meaning and influence is new in each retelling and for each new group of listeners. Young provides here a “biography” of the greatest of the classical legends, the story of the fall of Troy. As he states in his book, the greatness of the legend does not depend on its relation to historical reality, but “lies rather in the beauty and variety it has called out of the creative imaginations of artists, from Homer down to modern times,…

|9780822983781| Classical mythology came west from Greece, bearing the thoughts, feelings, and distilled experiences of ancient peoples that have, in turn, been formed by the skilled hands of artists into tangible creations of beauty and significance. Before there were records to preserve significant events, these stories were passed down in tales and songs. Adapted and embellished by successive generations, they were later written down and used to create art from many different materials in different mediums. Within these stories and the creations they inspired was an impulse either to recover the secrets of something that had been lost or to…

|9780822950769| The theme of Echoes of Two Cultures is the transmission of two cultures through legend, how the ideals and moralities of ancient Greece and Rome have inspired and informed successive civilizations to the present day. The legends of Cyrus the Great, from the early Greek world, and Lucretia, of early Rome, recount stories of transgression of rights; the first against a people, the second against an individual. The Greeks of the time of Cyrus, in the 5th century BC, believed that history taught them about an inexorable and divinely ordained law of ethics meant to punish the overweening transgressor….