Edith Hall

An award-winning classicist turns to Greek tragedies for the wisdom to understand the damage caused by suicide and help those who are contemplating suicide themselves   In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant , a messenger arrives to report that Jocasta, queen of Thebes, has killed herself. To prepare listeners for this terrible news, he announces, “The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen for themselves.” Edith Hall, whose own life and psyche have been shaped by such loss—her mother’s grandfather, mother, and first cousin all took their own lives—traces the philosophical arguments on suicide, from Plato and Aristotle to David Hume and Albert Camus.   In this deeply personal story, Hall explores the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, relating it to the ancient Greek idea of a family curse. She draws parallels between characters from Greek tragedy and her own relatives, including her great-grandfather, whose life and death bore similar motivations to Sophocles’ both men were overwhelmed by shame and humiliation.   Hall, haunted by her own periodic suicidal urges, shows how plays by Sophocles and other Greek dramatists helped her work through the loss of her grandmother and namesake Edith and understand her relationship with her own mother. The wisdom and solace found in the ancient tragedies, she argues, can help one choose survival over painful adversity and offer comfort to those who are tragically bereaved.

Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker, perhaps the greatest in history. Yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. His deepest belief was that we can all be happy in a meaningful, sustained way – and he led by example. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons we come to understand more about our own characters and how to make good decisions. We learn how to do well in an interview, how to choose a partner and life-long friends, and how to face death or bereavement. Life deals the same challenges – in Ancient Greece or the modern world. Aristotle’s way is not to apply rules – it’s about engaging with the texture of existence, and striding purposefully towards a life well lived. This is advice that won’t go out of fashion.

Never in a single volume has the full two-thousand-year story of the ancient Greeks been told, from the Bronze Age to the triumph of Christianity. Acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall draws on archaeological discoveries and canonical texts to offer readers an invigorating new tour of the foundations of Western culture. In Hall's view, the Greeks' habit of living by the sea was their secret weapon, the trait that made them the perfect conduit for intellectual and cultural innovations originating throughout the ancient world. Coastal villages and routine seafaring expeditions led the Greeks to cultivate early advances in energy-harnessing technologies including the water mill and the sailing ship. In exploring their curiosity, independence, and suspicion of authority, Hall evokes a startling new portrait of the ancient Greek mind. Surprisingly witty and superbly researched, Introducing the Ancient Greeks will leave readers with new insights into our most important cultural ancestors.