Lives of the Greek Poets

by Mary R. Lefkowitz

Book by Lefkowitz, Professor Mary R.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30, 1935), American scholar of Classics. She studied at Wellesley College before obtaining a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College in 1961. Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography.
She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.

Reviews

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author’s main argument is that while we don’t have enough primary source material to actually know anything about the lives of the Greek poets, it is interesting to study their biographies anyway. While these biographies are mostly made up, they reveal the myths that Greeks constructed around their poets. I think I would have enjoyed a shorter, essay version with that argument and some example more than I enjoyed an entire book with said made up biographies.