Modern Homeric scholarship is distinguished by a dazzling diversity of approaches. That diversity is brilliantly displayed in this volume, in which nine well-known classicists approach the Homeric poems from the various perspectives of archaeology, economic history, philosophy, literary criticism, linguistics, and Byzantine history.

Several essays are primarily concerned with what the Homeric poems teach us about the past. Richard Hope Simpson, for example, reviews the controversy sparked by his and John F. Lazenby's 1970 argument that the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad accurately reflects the geography of Mycenean Greece. Using archaeology as just one of his starting points, Gregory Nagy reflects upon the death and funeral of Sarpedon as described in the Iliad. Our understanding of the word áté is enhanced by E. D. Francis, who closely examines its prehistory.

Norman Austin's elegant and original discussion of tone in the Odyssey's Cyclops tale is animated by both psychoanalytic theory and his work with two practitioners of optometric visual training. Writing of Odysseus, James M. Redfield dubs that hero "the economic man" and links certain tensions in the Odyssey to the actual economic concerns of Greece in the late eighth century BC. Both Ann L. T. Bergren and Mabel L. Lang concern themselves with problems of narrative in the Homeric epics.

Like Hope Simpson, C. J. Rowe updates a controversy—in this instance, the many objections raised to Arthur Adkins' influential 1960 study of moral values in Homer. Gareth Morgan provides a fascinating glimpse of the Homeric scholarship of another day by focusing on the work of the astonishing John Tzetzes in twelfth-century Byzantium.

A leader in world archaeology argues that the archaeological record can and should be used to reconstruct the social structure of past societies, that archaeology ought, in effect, to become social archaeology. Colin Renfrew believes that the goal is to discover how and why cultures change through time and space. In the thirteen essays collected in this volume he examines various approaches to the problem.

Renfrew begins with specific demonstrations of what can be learned about social organization from the archaeological record. He looks for regularities in the spatial organization of societies and shows what they reveal about social dominance and power. He considers trade and exchange in the broadest context as human interaction. He relates chiefdoms and monument building to the mobilization of labor. Renfrew next moves to the dynamic issue of how cultures change. He examines the use of systems thinking in archaeology, proposing it as a way to avoid overly simple explanations, and demonstrates the power of new statistical techniques and computer programs.

In a final provocative section Renfrew suggests that sudden changes in the archaeological record—the "collapse" of civilizations—should not be seen as anomalies to be explained by the action of some outside agent but rather as predictable instances of "systems collapse."