Mr. Jean Michel Ropars will come to the gallery on Thursday, September 14th at 6:30 p.m. to sign his new book "Ulysses in the World of Hermes." He will give a 30-minute presentation on the story of Ulysses and Hermes through a new mythological approach.
"The connection has long been made between the character of Ulysses and the god Hermes, who is very close to humans: the originality of the book is to try to go further than this simple observation, by showing how the bards modeled Ulysses in the image of the god, according to the requirements of the epic. By making him "descend" into the world of men, they made the god who did not fight (Hermes) a "warrior" (Ulysses), very poor in reality. They endowed him with a "biography" by establishing him as sovereign of an improbable kingdom since it was located in the misty and almost infernal confines of the archaic Hellenic West; a contradictory polymorph, they made him a perpetual and suffering wanderer, in the image of Hermes: for the book establishes for the first time the sufferings of the god in the various manifestations of his cult (Homeric Hymn, statues, rituals). These sufferings are explained as the necessary accompaniment of a cycle of disappearances followed by returns through perpetual metamorphoses. A key to reading the subterranean architecture of the Odyssey is then proposed, based on a very learned lunar allegory: the cycle of the moon underlies the adventures of Ulysses, his final journey back as well as the twelve preliminary stages he recounts in Alcinous.