Quick tour (book talk delivered at several venues)

As its title suggests, my book Becoming Achilles explores what is involved in making a certain kind of hero—a human being who manifests godlike excellence, superiority to ordinary mortals. It also explains an improbable conjunction: the archetypal Greek hero, Achilles, a paragon of violent hyper-masculinity, is a precursor of Socrates. Achilles is a plain speaker,…

Review in Polis

Richard Holway, Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond (Lanham MD; Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012), xiv + 255 pp., $29.95, ISBN 9780739146910 (pbk). Richard Holway’s Becoming Achilles fits into a rich vein of scholarship on the ancient world in which the concepts of psychology or psychoanalysis are used to interrogate classical…

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Richard Holway, Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches.Lanham, MD; Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp. xiv, 255. ISBN 9780739146910. $29.95 (pb).Reviewed by Sonya Nevin, University of Roehampton (sonya.nevin@roehampton.ac.uk) There exists a view that in order to be truly great you must sacrifice domestic happiness, perhaps even…

Review in Choice

Holway, Richard.  Becoming Achilles: child-sacrifice, war, and misrule in the Iliad and beyond.  Lexington Books, 2012.  255p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780739146910 pbk, $25.95. Reviewed in 2012jul CHOICE. Holway’s evaluation of the Iliad in light of attachment theory and Freudian interpretations of family dynamics represents a valuable contribution to a series of interdisciplinary Greek studies…

PsycCRITIQUES Review–Critiqued

PsycCRITIQUES February 6, 2013, Vol. 58, No. 6, Article 7 A Hero’s Aesthetics A Review of Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond by Richard Holway Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 255 pp. ISBN 978-0-7391-4691-0 (paperback) $29.95. Reviewed by Spyros D. Orfanos Why are we moved to tears by a fictional…