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Every now and then a book is published which offers new insights into a period of the past through applying fresh ways of viewing men, their activities, and their societies in the present. European scholarship has treated in this way the world it has studied most intensively, that of ancient Greece and Rome. The pleasure of realizing new things, particularly about Greek society and history, is equalled only by the delight in proving the power of new tools of thought by assuring ourselves that they do help us find new meanings in well-worn themes.
In 1951 Professor E. R. Dodds, then Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and successor to Gilbert Murray, published The Greeks and the Irrational, based on his 1949 lectures at Berkeley, California, as Jane K. Sather visiting Professor in Classical Literature. Last year, in 1971, Professor H. Lloyd-Jones, his successor both at Oxford and at Berkeley, published his Sather lectures (of 1969), here reviewed. The two sets of lectures, the two books, are intimately connected, not so much as thesis and antithesis (there is a danger that they may be so seen), but rather as the first two statements in an open discussion by classical scholars of world stature, who are prepared to apply or allow for the findings of modern anthropology and psychology (especially those of psychoanalysis) in reinterpreting their own subject, the ancient Greek