Los Griegos Y Lo Irracional

The Greeks and the Irrational

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Preferred Citation: Dodds, Eric R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1951, 1973 printing 1973. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0x0n99vw/

The Greeks and the Irrational
By E. R. Dodds
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford ©1962 The Regents of the University of California

To GILBERT MURRAY

Preferred Citation: Dodds, Eric R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1951, 1973 printing 1973. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0x0n99vw/
To GILBERT MURRAY

Preface
THIS BOOK is based on a course of lectures which I had the honour of giving at Berkeley in the autumn of 1949. Theyare reproduced here substantially as they were composed, though in a form slightly fuller than that in which they were delivered. Their original audience included many anthropologists and other scholars who had no specialist knowledge of ancient Greece, and it is my hope that in their present shape they may interest a similar audience of readers. I have therefore translated virtually all Greekquotations occurring in the text, and have transliterated the more important of those Greek terms which have no true English equivalent. I have also abstained as far as possible from encumbering the text with controversial arguments on points of detail, which could mean little to readers unfamiliar with the views controverted, and from complicating my main theme by pursuing the numerous side-issueswhich tempt the professional scholar. A selection of such matter will be found in the notes, in which I have tried to indicate briefly, where possible by reference to ancient sources or modern discussions, and where necessary by argument, the grounds for the opinions advanced in the text. To the nonclassical reader I should like to offer a warning against treating the book as if it were a historyof Greek religion, or even of Greek religious ideas or feelings. If he does, he will be gravely misled. It is a study of the successive interpretations which Greek minds placed on one particular type of human experience—a sort of experience in which nineteenth-century rationalism took little interest, but whose cultural significance is now widely recognised. The evidence which is here broughttogether ― iv ― illustrates an important, and relatively unfamiliar, aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece. But an

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The Greeks and the Irrational

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aspect must not be mistaken for the whole. To my fellow-professionals I perhaps owe some defence of the use which I have made in severalplaces of recent anthropological and psychological observations and theories. In a world of specialists, such borrowings from unfamiliar disciplines are, I know, generally received by the learned with apprehension and often with active distaste. I expect to be reminded, in the first place, that "the Greeks were not savages," and secondly, that in these relatively new studies the accepted truths ofto-day are apt to become the discarded errors of to-morrow. Both statements are correct. But in reply to the first it is perhaps sufficient to quote the opinion of Léy-Bruhl, that "dans tout esprit humain, quel qu'en soît le développe-ment intellectuel, subsiste un fond indéracinable de mentalité primitive"; or, if nonclassical anthropologists are suspect, the opinion of Nilsson, that "primitivementality is a fairly good description of the mental behaviour of most people to-day except in their technical or consciously intellectual activities." Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from "primitive" modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation? As to the second point, many of the theories to which I have referred are admittedly...