The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey

The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey

Role: Author
Benardete’s research was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich. He received an honorary degree from Adelphi University.

In this interpretation of the Odyssey, Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings.