Introduction

This book is about translation, reception and repetition. It is far less about the original. It is not about the ‘classics’ or the ‘classical moment’ and is certainly not a history of events 3000 years ago that a multitude of texts have described, transmuted and reworked. That multitude of texts is a production of 3000 years. Whatever moment or history it attempted to describe at the beginning has long disappeared. No ‘history’ can be written of the Trojan War, no ‘biography’ of Achilles. Of course traces of those moments can be found embedded in texts, embodied in statues, buried in the rock of Mycenae. This search for the ‘world of Odysseus’ is an uncovering of our obsessions and compulsions rather than a search for ‘ancestors’ or the very moment that Atreus dragged the sons of Thyestes into the sacred grove. Indeed the search for that grove of oak and ilex in the heart of the dead city will retrieve nothing.