It would be nearly impossible to overstate the importance of the Odyssey to Greek literature and culture—and by extension Western literature and culture in general. The Iliad and Odyssey both served a fundamental role in shaping their political and cultural lives. The framers of Greece’s famous governmental systems (the foundation of our modern democracy) used Homer’s epics as precedent and support in much the same way a lawyer today would appeal to Supreme Court rulings in trying to argue a case. The events and language of the poems permeate subsequent ancient Greek literature, from the dialogs of Socrates to the plays of Euripides, and continue to echo strongly in today’s literature.
Ancient Rome gradually seized control of Greece between the second and first centuries BCE, and in the process appropriated much of what they found valuable about Greek culture. The great poems of Homer were considered chief among Greece’s cultural gems. In writing his own national epic for Rome, the poet Virgil plainly admitted he was attempting to recreate the glory Homer’s work. As Rome’s military and political dominance spread north across Europe all the way to England, Greek culture (in Roman “packaging”) spread, too, and the Iliad and the Odyssey won more admirers. Countless artists, writers, philosophers, and politicians of the past two thousand years of Western history have acknowledged their debt to Homer, including such famous figures as the Italian artist Michelangelo, English poet John Milton, American politician Thomas Jefferson, American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and English writer James Joyce. Eminent eighteenth-century Irish author Samuel Johnson summed up the influence of Homer’s work thus: “Nation after nation, century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose Homer’s incidents, new-name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.”
World History
