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DODDS, E.R., The Ancient Concept of Progress and other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973. VI,218p. Original blue cloth with dust wrps. Signature on free endpaper. Dust wrps to spine as well as small part of the back bit discoloured. Still a nice copy. This collection brings together ten essays all originally delivered as lectures at various points in a period of over forty years. (...) Scholars will be glad to have so many notable articles in a single volume, especially the two surveys of 'concepts which have shifted their ground and their meaning': the 1969 Frazer Lecture on 'The Ancient Concept of Progress' and 'Supernormal Phenomena in Classical antiquity', a long account of the evidence handled with masterly objectivity. (...) Perhaps the most striking feature of all is not the quality of the author's scholarship, which one has learnt to take for granted, nor his dry wit, but his continuing awareness (...) of contemporary trends and their effect on the study of antiquity. (...) The old Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times!' (says Dodds in 'The Prometheus Vinctus and the the Progress of Scholarship'-ND) has descended on us with a vengeance', is Dodds's wry comment in that first post-war year (1946). 'It is inevitable that we should ask ourselves what future there is for those studies of Classical Antiquity. (...) Ought they indeed to have any future? Can we afford it? Typically, he attempts no direct answer; but he has two things to say which sum up the beliefs on which all his great contributions to the study of the past have been founded. First, we can not afford it to lose contact with the ancient world and so let slip the tradition which is our common cultural inheritance. Secondly, 'a cultural tradition cannot be transmitted passively. Unless new minds are always at work on it, so that it is continuously reinterpreted and revalued by and for the new generations, it becomes a dead thing, an encumbrance, a pedant's burden... The condition of life is growth; a study which has ceased to progress ceases to attract enterprising minds, and therefore ceases to live.' (H.C. BALDRY in The Classical Review (New Series), 1976, pp.55-56). € 45.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780198143703