Book completed

[eve_prime]

Political Myths, by Henry Tudor. This auspiciously named author was a lecturer in politics at Durham University. He was essentially writing about meta-narratives, back in 1972 before they'd been named that. The book begins with two chapters on defining "myth" (in the social science sense, not in the folk-sense of something commonly believed but wrong). He then spends an entire chapter on the founding myths of Rome, from the earliest writers to Cicero (who emphasized the Romulus myth and mostly ignored the Aeneas myth) and then Virgil (who, for very different reasons, went with Aeneas). Then he's got a chapter on other familiar meta-narratives: Christian millennialism, etc.; and (not being British myself) I had no idea that the English Civil War in part inspired by the Myth of the Norman Yoke. The last chapter is on myth and ideology, including Marxism.

In general, his perspectives were sound and thoughtful. The language of the book was dated, though, referring to humanity as "men" and to indigenous people in the 19th century as "savages."