Myth and Thought among the Greeks

TLDR

Vernant’s 1965 book *Thought among the Greeks* revolutionized ancient Greek scholarship by redefining myth and thought, positioning him as a master storyteller who reshapes narratives of civilizations and human identities. The book seeks to answer how individual Greeks were inseparable from their social and cultural environment, being both creators and products. Vernant presents eighteen essays—translated into English—organized into seven themes that liberate Greek studies from philological constraints and reinterpret myth and logos across religion, art, philosophy, science, institutions, and psychology.

Abstract

When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays--three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first time--Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its philological chains and reread the questions of muthos and logos within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts--of religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic institutions, and historical psychology. A major contribution to both the humanities and the social sciences, and Thought among the Greeks aims to come to terms with a single, essential question: How were individual persons in ancient Greece inseparable from a social and cultural environment of which they were simultaneously the creators and products? Seven themes organize this stellar work--from Myth Structures and Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time to The Organization of Space, Work and Technological Thought, and Personal Identity and Religion. A master storyteller, an innovative, precise, and original thinker, Vernant continues to change the narratives we tell about the histories of civilizations and the histories of human beings in their individual and collective identities.