With such controversy surrounding the figure of Homer, about whom, if he ever existed, there is no certain information, the Iliad and Odyssey themselves must take center stage when we consider the topic of Homer’s post-classical legacy. To be comprehensive, we should also consider the many other works attributed to Homer in antiquity, including all of the epic traditions encompassed by the Epic Cycle (such as the Cypria and the Aethiopis; see Chapter 24, by Burgess), the Homeric Hymns (see Chapter 28, by Garner), and even a comic poem entitled the Margites and a parody of the Iliad known as the Battle of Frogs and Mice. These works are all included in scholarly modern editions of Homeric poetry, such as the Oxford Classical Text edited by Monro and Allen, even though conventionally when we refer to ‘‘Homer,’’ we usually mean the Iliad and Odyssey. In the earliest documented phases of the ancient Greek reception of Homer it was believed that Homer was a historical person, and that he invented and composed all of Greek heroic epic and the Homeric Hymns. (The didactic hexameter poetry of Hesiod was never attributed to Homer; two additional hexameter poets, often cited in antiquity in conjunction with Homer and Hesiod, are Orpheus and Musaeus; see Chapter 23, by Nelson.) At some point, however, the question arose whether one person could have composed all of the epics in existence, and the poems began to be separated into those thought to be composed by Homer - the Iliad and Odyssey - and those that were not. The fifth century BCE historian Herodotus, for example, tells us that Homer lived roughly 400 years before his own time, which would be about 825 bce (Hdt. 2.53). At one point in his history he mentions the lost epic poem called the Cypria and notes that he does not think that it was composed by Homer (Hdt. 2.117).
Such debates did nothing to detract from Homer’s status as the first and greatest of all poets: in antiquity Homer was often referred to as simply ‘‘the poet,’’ without further qualification or specification, the inspiration of all subsequent poets (see Chapter 11, by Lamberton; also Harmon 1923). The performance of Homeric poetry was a central feature of one of the most important religious festivals of the ancient world, the Panathe-naia in honor of Athena in Athens. The interpretation of Homeric poetry became one of the principal occupations of scholars and philosophers. At the great centers of learning in the Hellenistic world, Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt and Pergamum in Asia Minor, scholars and poets and philosophers such as Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus, and Crates of Mallos devoted their lives to textual and literary criticism and composed scholarly commentaries on countless literary works. As Robert Browning has noted: ‘‘the impressive textual, grammatical, metrical, and lexigraphic studies of the great Alexandrian scholars laid the foundation on which all European literary and philological studies have been built’’ (1992: 134).
Homeric poetry was known to the ancient world primarily in performance. Most scholars would agree that in their earliest incarnations the poems that came to be our Iliad and Odyssey were composed orally and in the context of performance (see Chapter 13, by J. Foley and Chapter 4, by Jensen). Even after this tradition died out, the primary access to the poems for most people would have been in the performances of professional rhapsodes. How the poems came to be fixed in the form that we now have them and written down is still a matter of great controversy. But at some point the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey did become fixed, recorded, copied, and copied again and again for centuries (see Chapter 10, by Haslam). With the exception of a few ancient quotations that survive in other texts, Homeric papyri are the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer. These papyrus documents are ah fragmentary, and range in date from as early as the third century bce to the seventh century ce. The vast majority of the fragments were discovered in Egypt, and now reside in collections located ah over the world. The earliest quotations and papyrus fragments of Homeric poetry reveal that the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey were still somewhat fluid in antiquity. It is only in about 150 bce that the texts became fixed in the form that we find in the medieval period. It is thought that the work of the Alexandrian scholars that was taking place at this time played an important role in establishing the relatively standardized text of Homer that is found in the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey.
After papyrus ceased to be used, the Iliad and Odyssey were copied onto parchment codices, which resemble modern books in their shape and construction (see Chapter 10, by Haslam). These manuscripts often contained not only the texts of the poems but also excerpts from the scholarly commentaries of antiquity, which were copied into their margins. These writings in the margins, known as ‘‘scholia,’’ contain notes on the text that explain points of grammar, usage, the meaning of words, interpretation, and disputes about the authenticity of verses. The earliest extant and complete medieval manuscript of Homer, hand copied and assembled by Byzantine Greek scholars, is the tenth century ce manuscript of the Iliad known as the Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus 454, now located in Venice), and it is the one on which modern texts are primarily based. When Jean Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison first published the Venetus A codex in 1788, the wealth of ancient scholarship contained in the scholia sparked a revolution in Homeric studies, about which I will have more to say below. (For images of medieval manuscripts of Homer and more information about the Venetus A, ancient scholarship, and Homeric papyri, visit the Center for Hellenic Studies Multitext of Homer web site at www. stoa. org./chs.)
The first printed edition of the Greek text of the Iliad and Odyssey was made in Milan in 1488. Over the course of this more than 2000-year period of transmission, the figure of Homer and the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey were constantly reinterpreted. Already in the classical period many aspects of Homeric poetry needed explanation or could be found objectionable. The language of the poems is an artificial poetic dialect that spans centuries of time and immense geographical distances. Similarly the myths that the poems narrate are an accumulation of traditions from a vast array of times and places (see chapter 3, by Edmunds). The representation of heroes and gods in Homeric epic troubled some thinkers and seemed at odds with contemporary values at various points in antiquity (see Chapter 7, by Louden). The figure of Socrates in the dialogues of the philosopher Plato, for example, attacks poetry and even bans it from his ideal state in Plato’s Republic. The later Neoplatonic philosophers, however, embraced poetry and invoked Homer as a voice of authority from the past, a revealer of wisdom and truth (Lamberton 1992). One of the ways that this could be done was by reading Homer allegorically, a practice that can be documented as far back as the sixth century bce and that would continue into the Middle Ages. In an allegorical reading, heroes and their adventures, gods, monsters, natural phenomena, and physical objects - in short, anything at all - can be read as symbols of deeper truths, available to those with the skills to interpret them. For Neopla-tonists such as Porphyry, for example, the Odyssey came to be an allegory for the fate of souls and the struggle of one soul in particular through the realm of matter (Lamberton 1992: 127). Christian scholars were able to interpret the Odyssey along similar lines. In the notes to his 1615 translation, George Chapman captures both Neoplatonic and the Christian interpretations in his own articulation of what he saw to be the central allegory of the Odyssey:
Deciphering the intangling of the wisest in his affections and the torments that breed in every pious mind; to be thereby hindered to arrive; so directly as he desires, at the proper and only true natural country of every worthy man, whose haven is heaven and the next life, to which this life is but a sea in continual aesture and vexation. (Underwood 1998: 23).
World History
