2013
First Published
3.64
Average Rating
376
Number of Pages
In October 1945, at the age of 19, John Freely passed the southernmost tip of Crete on his way home from the war in China, just as Odysseus did on his homeward voyage from the battle of Troy. He has been mesmerized with Homer and the lands of Homer's epics ever since. Throughout his life spent exploring both these lands and the stories by and connected to Homer, Freely has forged a captivating traveler's guide to Homer's lost world and to his epics—The Iliad and The Odyssey—investigating where such places as the Land of the Lotus Eaters are and what it was about the landscapes of Greece and Turkey that influenced and inspired Homer—arguably the greatest classical epic poet.This will be a traveler's guide to all of those places linked to Homer that can be identified and it will also speculate on where such places as the Land of the Lotus Eaters might be. With a revealing introduction to Homer and his times and an outline of the wanderings of Odysseus, the book follows in his footsteps from Troy to his final return to Ithaca. Finally, Freely illuminates how the Homeric epics took their final form and their subsequent echoes in literature, art, legend and all part of the romance of the wandering hero.
Avg Rating
3.64
Number of Ratings
56
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
14%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
John Freely
Author · 19 books
John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents, and spent half of his early childhood in Ireland. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the U. S. Navy, serving for two years, including combat duty with a commando unit in the Pacific, India, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G. I. Bill and eventually received a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, followed by a year of post-doctoral study at Oxford in the history of science. He worked as a research physicist for nine years, including five years at Princeton University. In 1960 he went to İstanbul to teach physics at the Robert College, now the Boğaziçi University, and taught there until 1976. He then went on to teach and write in Athens (1976-79), Boston (1979-87), London (1987-88), İstanbul (1988-91) and Venice (1991-93). In 1993 he returned to Boğaziçi University, where he taught a course on the history of science. His first book, co-authored by the late Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was Strolling Through İstanbul (1972). Since then he has published more than forty books.
