Can anyone explain the book the greeks and the irrational? a short brief summary plzzz?

or:Can anyone explain the book the greeks and the irrational? a short brief summary plzzz?or:This is one of the books that made me decide that Classi

or:Can anyone explain the book the greeks and the irrational? a short brief summary plzzz?

or:This is one of the books that made me decide that Classics was worth spending a lifetime on. It starts with this extraordinary anecdote which is very meaningful for many readers. Dodds was at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and he got talking to a schoolboy. The boy told him: \u201cI know it\u2019s a terrible thing to say, but I don\u2019t really like this stuff \u2013 it\u2019s all so rational.\u201d Well, that got Dodds thinking about this common idea that the Ancient Greeks were all very cerebral, gliding about in white gowns. But was Greek culture so fantastically rational? So Dodds wrote the book to explore that idea.But why should it matter to us if it is rational or not?It mattered to me because in order to understand about us, we have to understand what was at stake in the past. What is interesting is that you can take one of the most formative intellectual cultures and show that just underneath that sparkling surface is a seething heart of irrationality that results in madness and murder. Dodds wrote this book just after the Second World War and I think one of the questions in his mind was, not just that nice encounter in the British Museum, but how could European Society have gone so mad that it did what it did. I wouldn\u2019t say there are direct links between Hitler\u2019s Germany and Ancient Greece but there are indirect links about where the non-rational elements are in any culture, and how they work, how you can understand them and what difference that makes.

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