It is 1922 when Jonas Knight, a seventy-year-old self-made millionaire begins an expedition to find a mysterious cave that he feels holds the secret to what he has been seeking his entire life eternal youth. Known for his energy and vitality, Knight is aware his time on earth is running out as he embarks on a relentless search for a way to cheat death. After uncovering the history of two rival kings one of whom supposedly discovered a fountain of youth Knight heads to a Greek island where he hopes to find the fountain, which was reported to have been lost forever. After he accidentally slips and plunges into an ancient cave, he is exposed to a plant that can reverse the aging process. Suddenly, his team of scientists learns both the benefits and the problems that accompany the ability to live multiple life cycles. Decades later, Mike Andros is a renowned investigative report and author who is on a fast track to self-destruction. Events beyond his control create a new destiny that leads him straight to the same Greek island, where he soon makes a discovery that has the potential to change the future of mankind.

This book challenges the current view of the Homeric epics, according to which they reflect only the institutions and ideas of their own time, telling us nothing about the Mycenaean Age preceding it. Using a comparative analysis of evidence from the Near East and the Homeric corpus, Peter Karavites comes to the bold conclusion that the epics actually contain much that harks back to the Mycenaean Age, and that the two eras may not be completely discontinuous after all. Most contemporary scholars maintain that the mighty Mycenaean period was almost completely separated from the Dark Ages and that virtually no evidence of the former remains, with the exception of the archeological finds and the meager testimony of the Linear B tablets. However, the Near Eastern evidence about treaties and other forms of promising suggests that the Iliad and Odyssey may indeed provide historical pictures of the Mycenaean times featured in their narratives.

This book challenges the current view of the Homeric epics that they reflect only the institutions and ideas of the Dark Ages, during which they were composed, telling us nothing about the Mycenaean Age preceding it. Comparing evidence from the Near East with the Homeric corpus, Peter Karavites argues that the epics actually contain much that harks back to the Mycenaean Age, and that the two eras may not be completely discontinuous after all. Most contemporary scholars maintain that the mighty Mycenaean period was almost completely separated from the Dark Ages and that virtually no evidence of the former remains, with the exception of the archeological finds and the meager testimony of the Linear B tablets. However, the Near Eastern evidence about treaties and other forms of promising suggests that the Iliad and Odyssey may indeed provide historical pictures of the Mycenaean times featured in their narratives.

This examination of the heroic journey in world mythology casts the protagonist as a personification of nature--a "botanical hero" one might say--who begins the quest in a metaphorical seed-like state, then sprouts into a period of verdant strength. But the hero must face a mythic underworld where he or she contends with mortality and sacrifice--embracing death as a part of life. For centuries, humans have sought superiority over nature, yet the botanical hero finds nothing is lost by recognizing that one is merely a part of nature. Instead, a cyclical promise of continuous life is realized, in which no element fully disappears, and the hero's message is not to dwell on death.

Praise for Silvia Montiglio "[A] brilliant and important book. . . . " ---Journal of Religion, on Silence in the Land of Logos "[A]n invigorating reevaluation of both the ancient symbolic landscape and our preconceptions of it." ---American Journal of Philology, on Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture Best known for his adventures during his homeward journey as narrated in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus remained a major figure and a source of inspiration in later literature, from Greek tragedy to Dante's Inferno to Joyce's Ulysses. Less commonly known, but equally interesting, are Odysseus' "wanderings" in ancient philosophy: Odysseus becomes a model of wisdom for Socrates and his followers, Cynics and Stoics, as well as for later Platonic thinkers. From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought follows these wanderings in the world of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, retracing the steps that led the cunning hero of Homeric epic and the villain of Attic tragedy to become a paradigm of the wise man. From Villain to Hero explores the reception of Odysseus in philosophy, a subject that so far has been treated only in tangential or limited ways. Diverging from previous studies, Montiglio outlines the philosophers' Odysseus across the spectrum, from the Socratics to the Middle Platonists. By the early centuries CE, Odysseus' credentials as a wise man are firmly established, and the start of Odysseus' rehabilitation by philosophers challenges current perceptions of him as a villain. More than merely a study in ancient philosophy, From Villain to Hero seeks to understand the articulations between philosophical readings of Odysseus and nonphilosophical ones, with an eye to the larger cultural contexts of both. While this book is the work of a classicist, it will also be of interest to students of philosophy, comparative literature, and reception studies.

What is the relationship between waiting and time? Is there an ethics of waiting, or even an art of waiting? Do the internet, online shopping and text messaging mean that waiting has come to an end? On Waiting explores such and similar questions in compelling fashion. Drawing on some fascinating examples, from the philosopher Henri Bergson's musings on a lump of sugar to Kate Croy waiting in Wings of the Dove to the writings of Rilke, Bishop, and Carver, it examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon from diverse angles in fascinating style.

This is the first substantial commentary on Lucian's Verae Historiae ("True Histories"), a fantastic journey narrative considered the earliest surviving example of Science Fiction in the Western tradition. The Introduction situates the work in the context of Lucian's oeuvre, especially his preoccupation with distinguishing truth from fiction and exposing the lies of philosophers. In their commentary, the editors trace the sources and the meaning of the numerous intertextual allusions and parodies of philosophers, poets, historians and paradoxographers. The Verae Historiae emerges from this scrutiny as a remarkably complex text with some very "modern" concerns: it problematizes the act of reading, allegorical interpretation, authorial reliability, and the validity of cultural norms and literary genres.

What started out, a half century ago, to be a chase down historys trail to discover the origin of a silver sculpture of a man and his dog plasticized around a copper armature turned out to be a chase of the history of mankind itself. The writer has brought to light of day, a reasoned documented analysis of the unbroken chain of seemingly isolated facts, obscure data and wove them into a tapestry or painted a word picture of where man has been. The quest for the man, the sculptor, and his culture became a time traveled beyond the normal bounds of inquiry.

Stranded in an unknown island, Elijah quickly discovers that the choices he has to make will not only help him survive the loneliness in the island and the presence of armed terrorists but will also lead him to change his life.

What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."