The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays (2nd ed)

Laura Slatkin's influential and widely admired book, here published in a second edition together with six additional essays, explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad.

Highly charged allusions reverberate through the narrative and establish a constellation of themes that link the poem to other traditions.

Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis's place in the thematic structure of the Iliad.

The six additional essays included in this volume - some of them classics, some never before published - cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic: the workings of genre in Hesiod and Homer; the poetics of exchange; and the nature of enmity and friendship.

The volume also includes a study of the Hesiodic Catalog of Women and reflections on particular heroes, such as Diomedes and Odysseus.