HERO AND LEANDER THROUGH THE AGES - (B.) Murdoch The Reception of the Legend of Hero and Leander. (Brill's Companions to Classical Reception 19.) Pp. xii + 409. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. Cased, €149, US$179. ISBN: 978-90-04-40093-1.

Abstract

Hadot allows those who accompany him to participate in this performance, to be animated by the music's rhythm and to be reborn in the process. He enjoins us to embrace the paradox of philosophical life, namely, that 'at the heart of everyday life, it is a more or less profound rupture with everyday life itself' (p. 50). Sharpe and Testa are to be thanked for making this collection available. Their able translation has produced a work that cultivates and contributes to what Hadot described as a 'poetic' or philosophical attitude, a way of contemplating nature and living harmoniously with it (p. 166). Aided throughout by the translators' notes, the essays richly reward careful study. For readers willing to dialogue with Hadot and to practise philosophy under his tutelage, they may find themselves implicated in a 'process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of the self which realizes its greatness of soul' (p. 230). Certainly informative and potentially transformative, I echo the words that called Augustine to a conversion of life: take up, then, and read.