Reference

of Greek Philology Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen [ 120 ] biographical memoirs I met Walter Burkert in 1985 when he had already written his most important works and was a famous scholar. I had received my master’s degree at Genoa in Italy and spent some years as a high school teacher in the Italian part of Switzerland without ever stopping my research into early Greek “philosophy.” When I stepped into the old-style building of the former Seminar für Klassische Philologie at the University of Zurich, I was feeling anxious at the prospect of meeting such a famous scholar.

Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, translated by Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert (Harvard University Press, 1992), ix + 225 pages, $29.95 p A ROFESSOR BURKERT'S book was originally pub ... vide no information about their ostensible subjects. Like Burkert I do not

The splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, pointing toward a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic East—from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers