This work will be the definitive Vernant textbook for students and scholars alike in the English-speaking world... Froma Zeitlin is in my view America's foremost expert on the work of Vernant... -- Gregory Nagy, Harvard University

Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest--death, the body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination; the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness itself, or "alterity."