Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth

In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited excellence—beliefs about descent from gods or heroes—is elaborated and challenged. Rose offers subtle and penetrating new readings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey , Pindar's Tenth Pythian Ode , Aeschylus's Oresteia , Sophokles' Philoktetes , and Plato'