The present translation is based on the second edition of Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Claassen und Goverts, Hamburg, 1948), with the addition of the essay which here appears as Ch. 7: Human Knowledge and Divine Knowledge.
In this immensely erudite book, German classicist Bruno Snell traces the establishment of a rational view of the nature of man as evidenced in the literature of the Greeks - in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, and in the drama. Here are the crucial stages in the intellectual evolution of the Greek world: the Homeric world view, the rise of the individual in the early Greek lyric, myth and reality in Greek tragedy, Greek ethics, the origin of scientific thought, and Arcadia.