Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness - Softcover

Padel, Ruth

3.89

28 ratings by Goodreads

9780691025889: Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691025886 ISBN 13: 9780691025889

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1995

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Madness is central to Western tragedy in all epochs, but we find the origins of this centrality in early Greece: in Homeric insight into the "damage a damaged mind can do." Greece, and especially tragedy, gave the West its permanent perception of madness as violent and damaging. Drawing on her deep knowledge of anthropology, psychoanalysis, Shakespeare, and the history of madness, as well as of Greek language and literature, Ruth Padel probes the Greek language of madness, which is fundamental to tragedy: translating, making it reader-friendly to nonspecialists, and showing how Greek images continued through medieval and Renaissance societies into a "rough tragic grammar" of madness in the modern period.

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About the Author:

Ruth Padel, recently Visiting Professor in the Modern Greek Program at Princeton University, is a freelance writer and prize-winning poet. She is the author of three books of poems and of In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton).

Review:

"To re-create the contexts in which the Greeks viewed madness, Padel ranges widely, drawing on the medical literature, Homer, Pindar and their scholiasts, epigraphic material, magic and religion, regional and cultural differences. Linguistic details validate her main thesis, ... [and] her re-creation of Greek linguistic categories and cultural norms gives Whom Gods Destroy a sound historical base. A well-informed and helpful book."---Brian Vickers, The Times Literary Supplement

"The sound of clay-footed idols crashing into the abyss resonates throughout Ruth Padel's thrillingly learned, poetically vibrant and eclectically visionary monograph. . . . [A] fascinating new book." (Financial Times)

"A lively and provocative book. An attraction of Whom Gods Destroy is its breadth of reference, expanding beyond the Greeks to more recent times."---Richard Jenkyns, The [London] Times

"Thrillingly learned, vibrant, and visionary. . . . [Padel] shows brilliantly how the Greek playwrights revised and re-shaped their linguistic and intellectual inheritance to fit the context of an inchoate scientific revolution . . . ."---Paul Cartledge, The Financial Times

"A various, wide-ranging book. . . . The ideas are suggestive and tantalizing."---Jasper Griffin, The Spectator

"Suggestive, exhilarating, and wide-ranging."---Peter Jones, The Telegraph

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