Preface

My first debt is to the series editors, John Ferrari and Catherine Osborne, for inviting me to write this book. My second, and most important, is to the students on my course ‘Should We Ban Homer?’ in 2009/10: without their engaged and intelligent contributions, developing the material would have been much harder, and much less enjoyable. An anonymous reader for Cambridge University Press provided insightful commentary on the initial outline proposal. Without that stimulus, Chapter 4 would have had even less to say about the Epicureans than it does, and I might have persisted (with however bad a conscience) in my pretexts for not engaging with Plotinus: the resulting change of plan has had beneficial consequences, direct and indirect, throughout Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 5 also benefited from Timothy Costelloe’s timely invitation to contribute to an edited collection on the history of the sublime (Heath 2012). Some of the ideas in Chapter 2 were refined in the light of discussion of Republic 2–3 and 10 at two meetings of the Yorkshire Ancient Philosophy Network in 2010/11. The editors put me further in their debt by making extremely helpful comments on a draft, as did my colleague Regine May.

Chapter 3 draws in part on work undertaken for an ongoing project on Aristotle and the anthropology of poetry (Heath 2008; 2009c; 2009d; 2011); the approach outlined here will in due course be worked out in more detail in a monograph, provisionally entitled Poetical Animals. I am grateful to the Arts Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support for this project.