QUANDOQUE BONUS DORMITAT HOMERUS

(The Homeric title above is supplied courtesy of Horace.)

As the reader will see, this entry is not at all about our good old Homer, but more about those annoying nitpickers who question the fact that he ever lived. Being an unabashed and unapologetic monumental historian, I am convinced that Homer the person has long rotten in his undiscovered grave, and in this sense he certainly is no longer relevant as a historical person. But Homer the immortal author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, yes, Homer the priceless cultural entity within our Western Civilization, is very much an indisputable fact of life, and not of death, and even his physical features are equally indisputable, familiar to us from a Roman copy of the long-lost ancient Greek bust, reproduced in thousands of books, which Roman copy I had the good fortune to see “in person” in the British Museum.

Thus, in a sense, this entry is a “sonnet” around Homer, rather than any kind of literary or cultural essay about his immortal works.

This is by no means the only Homer entry in this book. He occupies a prominent place in PreSocratica, and he is of course a subject of particular interest for Nietzsche, which makes him especially interesting to us in this respect. As a proper introduction to the present entry, here is an unpleasant excerpt from the Homer entry in Webster’s Biographical Dictionary (the respectable 1963 edition, which I own):

“A school of modern criticism maintains that the Iliad and the Odyssey are not the work of any one poet, but composite products of many poets who contributed over many generations of history to the growth of these epics to their final form. The so-called Homeric Hymns, once attributed to Homer, are probably the work of rhapsodists. Various dates have been assigned to the traditional Homer, from 850 BC (by Herodotus), to as early as 1200 BC.”

So, here is yet another towering symbol of the glory of our Western Civilization, which has occasionally been threatened with “disembodiment,” but has somehow managed to withstand the assault of critical historians, although emerging out of it not completely unscathed.

This could well have been a rather large entry on the cultural significance of Homer. But, as I said before, I already have a fair-sized entry on Homer in PreSocratica. For this reason, I shall only concentrate on one particular quote here, from Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture on Homer at the University of Basel, of which the following is an abbreviated excerpt.---

“The important problem is the question of the personality of Homer.

“…In Homer, the modern world I will not say has learnt, but has examined a great historical point of view. The zenith of the historical-literary studies of the Greeks and hence also of their point of great importance that is the Homeric question was reached in the age of the Alexandrian grammarians. They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer. To explain the different general impression of the two books, on the assumption that one poet composed them both, they sought assistance by referring to the seasons of Homer’s life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eyes of the critics were on the lookout for discrepancies in the language and the thoughts of these two poems, but at this time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. It was believed that Homer’s poem was passed from one generation to another viva voce, and faults attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards.
“If we descend backwards, step by step, we find a guide to the understanding of the Homeric problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was, for him, a flawless and untiring artist, who knew his end, and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle, i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion, which considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase. More and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as Homeric. In this backward examination, we instinctively feel that, beyond Herodotus, there lies a period in which an immense flood of great epics has been identified with the name of Homer.”

…What makes the subject of Nietzsche’s lecture especially interesting is a clear parallel that can be found here, with the similar discussion on the authorship and the personality of Shakespeare, not to mention quite a few other historical notables. It is under this angle that I intended to focus this entry, which virtually coincides with the discussion of the person of Aesop in my next entry Genius In Fabulis. Having no intention of repeating myself twice in the space of a single page-length, I am ending the present entry right now, continuing the conversation in the one which dutifully follows.