Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales From Ancient Greece

by François Hartog, Janet Lloyd (Translation)

The conception of the Other has long been a problem for philosophers. Emmanuel Levinas, best known for his attention to precisely that issue, argued that the voyages of Ulysses represent the very nature of Western "His adventure in the world is nothing but a return to his native land, a complacency with the Same, a misrecognition of the Other." In Memories of Odysseus , François Hartog examines the truth of Levinas' assertion and, in the process, uncovers a different picture. Drawing on a remarkable range of authors and texts, ancient and modern, Hartog looks at accounts of actual travelers, as well as the way travel is used as a trope throughout ancient Greek literature, and finds that, instead of misrecognition, the Other is viewed with doubt and awe in the Homeric tradition. In fact, he argues, the Odyssey played a crucial role in shaping this attitude in the Greek mind, serving as inspiration for voyages in which new encounters caused the Greeks to revise their concepts of self and other. Ambitious in scope, this book is a sophisticated exploration of ancient Greece and its sense of identity.

Genres: History

266 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 1996

About the author

François Hartog is a French historian and Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Born in 1946, Hartog attended the 'École normale supérieure. A former student of Jean-Pierre Vernant and assistant to Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog’s early work focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and historiography, while his recent work deals mainly with temporality.

His most recent book to be published in English, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia University Press, 2015, translated by Saskia Brown), engages our “ways of relating to the past, present, and future.” Hartog also tackles the concept of “presentism,” or how we adhere to present-day ideas to attempt to understand the past via interpretations of writing as the “motor of history” and the “contradictory qualities of our contemporary presentist relation to time.”

Hartog’s research frequently attempts to situate the progressions of time and memory against the realities of repetition and methodologies of understanding history from various theoretical reference points.

His other publications include Mémoire d'Ulysse: récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Gallimard, 1996), Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Galaade, 2005), and Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne (La Découverte, 2007), as well as countless articles, lectures, and, more recently, a series of podcasts on ancient and modern history.

Selected Bibliography
-Le Miroir d'Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l'autre, Gallimard, 1980.

-Le XIXe siècle et l'histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges, PUF, 1988.

-Les Usages politiques du passé, avec Jacques Revel, EHESS, 2001,

-Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Le Seuil, 2002 (Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, Columbia University Press, 2015; translated by Saskia Brown)

-Anciens, modernes, sauvages, Galaade, 2005.

-Évidence de l'histoire. Ce que voient les historiens, EHESS, 2005.

-Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne, La Découverte, 2007.

-Croire en l'histoire, Flammarion, 2013.

-Partir pour la Grèce, Flammarion, 2015.