L' homme antique et la structure du monde intérieur

"Epic - Theology - Lyricism and Morality - Philosophy - History - Tragedy-Comedy - From Chaos to the Cosmos - The Alternative - Choice - The Dimensions and Exemplary Steps of Consciousness"

"So many books have been written about ancient Greece in Europe and America that a sense of discouragement immediately seizes the reader when faced with such a title. And yet it will soon be forgotten when reading the dense and enlightening pages that Mr. Schaerer devotes to almost all the great writers up to Socrates. In this book, no bibliography. One would think that the author hasn't read any modern literature on ancient Greece. In truth, it is essentially based on texts. They are the point of support for his analyses and if sometimes they meet the conclusions of philologists, they never look for it. It seems that philologists have never approached ancient literature from this angle. The author, a philosopher by profession, basically proposes to grasp the fundamental ethical conceptions that underlie the universe created by the great Greek authors; he speaks to us of "the moral universe conceived by Thucydides" (p. 309), and this is the fundamental aim of his work: to describe the moral universe in which Homer and Hesiod lived, the lyrical and the tragic, the historians and the pre-Socrats. The subject is of paramount importance and had never been attempted as a whole. It was worth undertaking it to see the essential lines of the spiritual world in which the best of the Greeks evolved." François Daumas, Revue de l'histoire des religions, 1961.