Homer: The Very Idea

JAMES I. PORTER

The fixed point around which the Greek nation crystal-

lized was its language. The fixed point around which its
culture crystallized was Homer. Thus in both cases we
are having to do with works of art.
—NIETZSCHE
And the blindness—
—VICO

T HE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY have been required

reading in Western culture from its first beginnings, despite
the complete mystery surrounding the circumstances of their
date and authorship, and despite their obvious flaws and
blemishes—the inconsistencies, repetitions, irrelevancies, and
so on—which have led to their impeachment as products of a
single mind. All the uncertainties about Homer and his po-
ems notwithstanding, their place in the cultural imagination
in the West has been unrivalled. Indeed, as secular texts with
no pretensions to revealed truth, and yet conferred with
nearly Biblical stature, their status in world literature is al-
most unique.1 How can we account for their standing and
their enduring attraction? Whatever the answer, approaching
the question will involve confronting the monumentality of
the two poems—less their quality as great works of literature
than their role as cultural icons, as signifiers of value, and as
landmarks in the evolving relationship between literature and
culture. To look at Homer in this way is to consider his
place—the very idea of Homer—in the culture wars of antiq-
uity and modernity. A perspective such as this is an invitation
to study the intellectual and cultural history of value, and
that is how I would like the following remarks to be under-

arion 10.2 fall 2002

58 homer: the very idea

stood. Homer will, in a sense, merely be our guide.

Any discussion like this must needs be selective and,
inevitably, reductive. My own treatment will be limited to a
selection of developments within the English- and German-
speaking worlds, starting with a glance back at predecessors
in antiquity where the patterns for Homer’s modern recep-
tion were first set. The discussion will be threaded by three
recurrent themes: first, the persistent classicism of Homer, de-
spite every tug of pressure in the opposite direction; second,
the elements of disavowal that go into the construction and
sustaining of Homer’s ever-imaginary identity; and third,
more implicitly than explicitly, the sheer allure and inaccessi-
bility of Homer and, what proves inseparable from this, the
sheer fascination of watching how the story of Homer’s re-
ception continually engages those who contribute to its mak-
ing. Looking at Homer in this way, as an object of cultural
production, can throw a valuable light on the logic of cul-
ture, quite apart from any canonical virtues his poems may
be felt to have. For leaving aside the nearly self-evident tru-
ism that what is finally at stake in the contests over Homer
are the identities of the various combatants involved, surely
Homer’s greatest attraction has to lie not in his greatness,
however that comes to be defined, but in his utter mystery
and unreachability. Indeed, if there is any value at all to
“Homer,” it lies in the very indeterminateness of his defini-
tion, in his insolubility, which has provoked intense reflection
and so too has served as an instrument of endless debate,
contest, and redefinition. One suspects, in other words, that
with Homer the ancients and moderns have made a rather
telling choice of object for contention, one that ceaselessly
authorizes the imaginative work of culture. Culture is not
just an arena of contestation. It is a deviously calculating and
self-enabling thing.
Before going on, we might pause to consider whether
Homer hasn’t outlived his usefulness to culture. Have we
reached the end of the line? Is it true, as a small but vocal mi-
nority think, that although he was once a burning issue,
 James I. Porter 59

Homer is now “dead” and that it was the study of the clas-
sics that killed him, thanks to the waves of trendy theory,
multiculturalism, and cultural nihilism which have finally
swept over classical studies themselves and turned Homer,
the one-time fountain of value and meaning—of classically-
centered knowledge—into a meaningless bibliographical cita-
tion? It is a bit hard to make out just who Homer is in this
account, because much of the time Homer seems to stand for
nothing less than the sanctity of the Classical Tradition itself.
The assumption seems to be that Homer is prior to the de-
bates about him, and that he somehow persists through the
din of debate to emerge victoriously alive—until recently.
One problem with this complaint is that it imagines, wrongly,
that Homer was ever a stable entity from which a sure base
of culture and learning could flow. (Homerizein, “to Homer-
ize,” after all can mean “to lie.”)2 It also tends to idealize
classical antiquity, and to blind us to the fact that classical
studies seem to be constitutionally in crisis.3 But it ought to
be clear that “Homer,” in the desired sense, cannot have pre-
ceded the debates as to his worth. He was, on the contrary,
the product of those debates, and his survival was predicated
on them. In fact, if we wish to take Homer as an emblem for
classics in the largest sense, then he has to be equivalent to
these debates. He is not the argument that the Homeric po-
ems, and by extension the classical cultures of Greece and
Rome, have an intrinsic worth. Rather, he is the very dispu-
tation of the question (valuable to whom, and for what rea-
sons?)—less what survives the argument than the survival of
the argument itself. In any case, to read Homer in this sym-
bolic way is to extend the very form of argument that gave
rise to him in the first place.
Here we might as well ask, “Has a person been made out
of a concept or a concept out of a person?” This precise ques-
tion was the centerpiece of Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture at
Basel from 1869, “Homer and Classical Philology.” The
problem named by Nietzsche was one that was racking the
nineteenth century, both inside and outside of the academy.
60 homer: the very idea

At issue was not the Homeric Question alone (Who com-

posed the epics, when, and where? Are they by a single au-
thor or the product of a tradition, if not a committee?, and so
on), but rather something deeper that was driving the ques-
tion. What Nietzsche was exploring was the entire attitude of
modernity to the study of “the so-called ‘classical’ antiquity,”
that “buried ideal world” which classics was trying to exca-
vate and to bring to light in the contemporary present.4 The
problem of Homer encapsulated this larger worry. It would
be wrong to take the Homeric problem as an artifact of nine-
teenth-century anxieties and as something that has been ban-
ished to irrelevance today (even if the particular form it
assumed at the time was such an artifact). Quite the contrary,
the problem has flourished from antiquity into the present.
“Homer” has been good to think with. Or at least, some-
thing to think with. Not Homer, but the very idea of Homer.
Nor does this interest show any signs of abating.5
Following in Nietzsche’s wake we can try to give some
content to the concept of Homer, and in this way trace its
history, or rather the history of this particular fascination,
the sheer power of which still needs to be accounted for. For
surely other relics of antiquity are equally mysterious and
unfathomable as Homer has proved to be. So alongside my
overview of Homer’s reception I want to add a further spec-
ulation, namely that Homer is, and probably always was
from his baptismal naming, an idea of something that re-
mains permanently lost to culture—whether this be a Heroic
Age, an ideal of unattainable poetic excellence, or a vague
sense of some irretrievably lost past. It was only natural that
Homer, the narrator of Troy, should become inseparably
linked to the violent destruction of Troy. That destruction
was complete, and its memory was traumatic for the ancient
world—and, in different ways, remained this for the modern
world. So let us first consider briefly how Troy might have
functioned as a trauma for Greece—not in a clinical sense,
but in an imaginary sense, one that works through the
artifices of cultural memory—and then take up Homer’s
 James I. Porter 61

connection to this memory, which (all speculations aside) is

an integral element of Homer’s reception. After that, we can
turn to some of the implications these questions have had for
modernity.

homer in antiquity

Troy had two connotations in antiquity. It was known either

as Homer had described it (as a vital, flourishing civilization,
albeit one that was pitched on the brink of disaster) or as it
appeared in dim memory and on the ground, by reference to
its aphanismos, or obliteration. Troy’s sacking was first
mythologically and then conventionally the start of history,
the ground zero of relative dating within human time (in-
deed, marking the end of the Golden Age, it was tied to the
unrepealable separation of mortal from immortal time), and
so history began, oddly, in an obliteration.6 There is a lesson
to be learned here, and it was frequently drawn. The orator
Lycurgus could invoke the memory of Troy in monitory
tones, reminding the Athenians in 331 of their former dire
peril at the hands of the traitorous Leocrates: “Who has not
heard of Troy? Who does not know that Troy—once the
greatest city of its age, and the queen of Asia—has remained
for all time uninhabited, since once for all it was razed by the
Greeks?”7 Troy for Lucan, centuries later, was a paradoxical
lieu de mémoire: it was a place where “even the ruins have
perished” (etiam periere ruinae).8 In between stretched a long
literary tradition of allusions to the destruction of Troy, but it
was Homer, not other poets, whose name was soldered to the
catastrophic memory of Troy. Together, they became a fixed
point around which Greece’s idea of itself would take form.9
It is ironic, or simply telling, that the Greek sense of identity
formed itself around a possible fiction.
The loss that Homer vividly recalls, being total and quasi-
mythical, is effectively primordial, lying at the root of time.
It was a loss that the Greeks experienced not only in the face
of Troy (or Troy’s absence) but also in the person of Homer.
62 homer: the very idea

What was Homer’s relation to Troy? A survivor? A witness?

Conventionally he was neither. If Homer’s poems stood for
the historical loss they also recalled, Homer the poet could
only embody this loss, not merely in his memory of the past,
but above all in his distance from it. Compare the following
verses from the start of the Catalogue of the Ships, which is
a locus classicus for those keen to demonstrate that Homer
records the past:10 “Tell me now, you Muses . . . / [For] we
have heard only the rumour (klevo~) of it and know nothing. /
Who then of those who were the chief men and the lords of
the Danaans? / I could not tell over the multitude of them
nor name them, / not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths”
(Il. 2.484–88; trans. Lattimore). Although these verses are
standardly taken as a sign of Homer’s deference to the
Muses, the opposite suggests itself: it is the deference that is
feigned, not the ignorance.11 Nor is Homer, eager to make
up for what he doesn’t know, innocent of deliberate
anachronism, a fact that gradually came to the awareness of
the poems’ readers only in the modern age.
Representing a loss that could not be confirmed but only
imagined, the reality of the Trojan war could be doubted, at
least in its details if not as a whole.12 What is more, as if by
attraction and then by identification, Homer was himself felt
as a strange loss, as grand and distant as Troy, and it was in-
evitable that he should assume mythic proportions. One an-
ecdote, probably Hellenistic in origin, relates how Homer’s
poems suffered near-total destruction due to fire, floods, and
earthquakes, as though Homer were not a text but a place.13
No other ancient author—and few places—enjoyed this kind
of catastrophic fame.14 The survival of Homer’s poems, it
was felt, was in ways too good to be true. How real, in fact,
was Homer? The historicity of Troy could be doubted in an-
tiquity, but we have no direct evidence that Homer’s his-
toricity ever was. Still, the ancient view of history was plastic
and accommodating in ways we can barely follow. Though
never conceded to be a fiction, Homer was in fact treated as
both real and fictional at the same time: his historicity was
 James I. Porter 63

etched around the borders with transcendental hues, and

consequently Homer became more than real—he became
surreal. Whether or not we can ascribe their attitudes to
Homer to precritical belief or to shrewd disavowal (which is
fully consistent with the attitude of historicism), slowly the
Greeks began the work of framing a monumental Homer, a
Homer that was at once a museum housing a library of po-
etry, an empty cenotaph, and a workshop of ceaselessly new
cultural attainments. In this enterprise, they were building
on the tendencies to revere, monumentalize, and idealize the
Iliadic past which were the norm in the archaic period even
prior to the creation of the Homeric poems.15 The modern
reception of Homer took its cue from here.
Tempting as it is to connect Homer’s momentous effect on
antiquity to a displaced, buried memory of the past which he
came to embody, as if through a kind of transference of emo-
tion, this can only be a speculation. But there is no specula-
tion in saying that the uncertain question and meaning of
“Homer” was the source of anxieties and debates through-
out the whole of antiquity, which gave rise to a veritable
Homer-industry not much different from our own. One need
only think of Demetrius of Scepsis in the Troad, a provincial
antiquarian contemporary with the Alexandrian scholars at
their zenith, who wrote a monstrous, now lost, work in
thirty volumes devoted, at least in part, to establishing the
true location of Troy. This polemical and proudly local work
was a commentary on a mere sixty-two lines of the Cata-
logue of the Ships (the Trojan portion, Il. 2.816–77). The
fury of Demetrius’ historicism is telling (no doubt of differ-
ent things).16 But it is only one exaggerated instance of a
widespread tendency with roots in ancient legends and lore
and in the earliest rationalizations of Homer.
Troy’s location was widely debated, if not its reality. Simi-
larly, and indeed in parallel, Homer was himself a contro-
versial entity, as much a myth as a person, but always a
legend (the son of a river, of one of the Muses and Apollo, or
of divine poets, he died unable to solve a child’s riddle or
64 homer: the very idea

from the debility of old-age), and ultimately a potent sym-

bol, idea, and a prize.17 From Hesiod and Callinus to the
Second Sophistic, the ancients do seem to have generated a
good deal of their culture around the mere hypothesis of
Homer.18 At the end of the line there is Lucian, who in his
True Stories interviews the ghost of Homer in the Elysian
Fields, pressing him about his origins (which Homer reveals
to be Babylonian) and about the truth of his poems. Lucian
was laughing at the entire Greek tradition’s desire to “really
know” the truth about (an irrecuperably dead) Homer. Nor
was he saying anything new, or anything the tradition didn’t
already know about itself. A clear predecessor is the tongue-
in-cheek Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the product of Alci-
damas in the fourth century, but rooted in earlier speculation
about the lives and deaths of the two premiere poets of
Greece. Moreover, if, as is likely, Homer’s name was added
to his poems as an afterthought, once they became fixed as
texts, it seems equally likely that this is when the contests
over his identity were launched.19 That is, Homer became
uncertain, literally lost to memory, the moment he was
named and found.

the modern idea of homer

The permanent loss of Homer, the loss he came to stand for

and embody, is an abiding element of his reception, but it is
one that was felt more acutely as time went on. The moderns
took their cue from the ancients, following the canonical
lines of reception and research laid down in antiquity,
though it was the particular achievement of modernity to
name Homer finally as the idea that he always had been. Gi-
ambattista Vico first articulated the view, well before Niet-
zsche, that Homer was not a person but an idea (un’ idea)
created by the Greeks (though believed in by them), in his
Scienza Nuova Seconda (1730; §873). The denial of
Homer’s historicity is for Vico tied to a denial of the his-
toricity of the Trojan war as one more fiction from antiquity
 James I. Porter 65

(“it never in the world took place”), but this doesn’t prevent
Homer from being somehow more real than Troy. Troy after
all has vanished, while Homer’s poems have not. But this
can’t be right. After all, the Trojan war is no less “a famous
epoch in history” for its never having happened. And so, in
the last analysis, both Homer and Troy have to be equally
real. Vico here is playing out the logic of disavowal that
would typify Homer’s reception for centuries to come, which
runs: “He was the best poet ever, but he never existed (and
here are the proofs for both claims—his poems).”20 Vico’s
simpler hypothesis, anticipating F. A. Wolf by half a century,
is better known: it is that Homer’s poems were the final
product of a long tradition of oral composition and compi-
lation (§805). But his sinuous, uncertain logic is equally an
anticipation of Wolf and the analytical tendency (see be-
low)—and, I would wager, of most readers of Homer today.
It is the logic of the MacGuffin (an impossible, non-existent
object), which as Hitchcock recognized, governs larger parts
of our lives than we are usually prepared to admit: ideas
may be false and events may not occur, but their effects can
be real, and at times they can even be more compelling than
the truth.21 Thomas De Quincey nicely caught this logic in a
wry moment of his essay “Homer and the Homeridae”
(1841): “Some say, ‘There never was such a person as
Homer.’—‘No such person as Homer! On the contrary,’ say
others, ‘there were scores.’” Incidentally, if you are wonder-
ing how to say MacGuffin in Greek, you need only think of
the eidolon or phantom of Helen that, Stesichorus assures
us, was the object that the Greeks fought over and the Tro-
jans defended at Troy. But then, he wasn’t blind like Homer.

the modern historicity of homer

It is tempting to say that one of the great achievements of

modern thinking about Homer was its discovery, during the
latter half of the eighteenth century, of the historicity of
Homer and his world, but this is only half of the story. For
66 homer: the very idea

once it dawned on modernity that it might be possible to lo-

cate Homer in space and time, and in a way that antiquity
never could, it remained to come to grips with this realiza-
tion. Locating Homer had innumerable implications, nor
was it necessarily a desirable thing. To return to the lan-
guage from which we set out, we might say that the trau-
matic loss that was embodied by Homer in classical
antiquity became the traumatic prospect of Homer’s possible
recovery in the modern world. Formerly a comfortable no-
tion, for instance an icon of naïve genius of the sort that
Goethe and Schiller could romanticize, Homer—the very
idea of him—suddenly became problematic, threatening,
and consequently a source of anxiety. In this anxiety was en-
capsulated the whole of modernity’s relationship to the clas-
sical past, and so too its own historical self-image.
That there were obstacles to making Homer historical is
not hard to see. The inherited idea of “Homer” did not read-
ily lend itself to historicization. How can one confront an
idealization (which Homer plainly was) with reality? Ar-
chaeology eventually held out the promise of a solution, but
this in turn created further dilemmas and no solutions. Rein-
serting the encumbered Homer of tradition into history was
an arduous affair. Much of the progress (if that is the correct
word) was made reluctantly, and often with as much back-
tracking as advances.
Coming face to face with Homer the historical reality was
painful, because it brought with it a “feeling of derealiza-
tion” and “estrangement” (Entfremdungsgefühl) of the sort
that Freud experienced when he stood for the first time
among the ruins of the Acropolis, an object of his fantasies
from early childhood, and said to himself: “So all this really
does exist, just as we learnt at school!” The thought was
puzzling, because Freud could not recall ever doubting the
existence of the Acropolis as a child. Searching for deeper
explanations for his reaction, Freud rejects the most obvious
one, namely that he had, in fact, doubted its existence. The
fantasy of the classical ideal required it of him. Nor was
 James I. Porter 67

Freud’s reaction exceptional. J. P. Mahaffy records his dis-

tinct disappointment upon finally laying eyes on the Acrop-
olis, in his widely popular travel guide, Rambles Through
Greece (1876; 2nd ed. 1900). His self-analysis is brutally
frank: “the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disap-
pointing,” he warns the prospective traveler, because “there
is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden
of such greatness.”22 Equally revealing is how quickly—a
short page later—disappointment is overcome and ideality
restored, albeit in the key now of tender melancholy: “so at
last we tear ourselves from it as from a thing of beauty,
which even now we can never know, and love, and meditate
upon to our heart’s content.”
Homer in the modern age had much the same status as the
Acropolis—as would, eventually, Troy. An idealized object,
Homer bore an uncomfortable relation to historical reality.
His reality was both affirmed and denied by classicism, both
desired and unwanted, as was the case of all classical ideals.
Nevertheless, Homer occupied an uneasy place apart in the
modern classicizing paradigm, and the strains showed. He
came too early to be compared with the fully developed clas-
sicism of Phidias and Sophocles, but given his paradigmatic
role even in the fifth century Homer’s classicism could not be
denied. In some ways prototypically classical, in another
sense Homer could be felt to be both more and less classical
than the classical authors of the fifth century—more authen-
tically and more pristinely classical, if also representing a
simpler, naïver, less developed form of classicism. At one end
of the spectrum, there was a view like Humboldt’s (and, a
century on, Jebb’s), which was that “one should dwell at
length not only on the periods in which the Greeks were
most beautiful and most cultivated,” but also, and “above
all, on the first and earliest periods. For it is here that the
seeds of the true Greek character actually lie; and it is easier
and more interesting to see how in the sequel that character
gradually changes and finally degenerates.”23 Historical con-
tingency is at once admitted and erased in the essence of the
68 homer: the very idea

Greek character, which gives the essence of the human mind,

while Homeric psychology could be left unexplored—in
part, for fear of what might be discovered there.
What they were warding off was the opposed extreme,
which finds in Homer a prehistoric childlikeness that is more
naïve than even children can be. (A caricature of this view
was developed by Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind
[1946; English translation 1953].) These are not really op-
posed views; they are merely two faces of a single coin. Both
derive from the Romantic classicizing paradigm of Homeric
mentality, which gives rise to two mutually incompatible pic-
tures: the view of the Homeric individual as something less or
more than a whole person. As a rule, the ancient Greek, and
prototypically the Homeric Greek, came to be viewed either
as an early and superseded instance of the universal self, an
(as it were) imperfectly formed and undeveloped version of
the self, or as a lost ideal of selfhood that may or (more fre-
quently) may not be reattained in the modern present (the
self that was once, but no longer is). And behind these two
views lies the ambivalent construction of the ancient Greek in
relation to the modern self. The realization of either fantasy
promised to bring with it incalculable terrors. And with the
onset of archaeology, thanks to the energies of Heinrich
Schliemann at Mycenae, Tiryns, and above all at the symbol-
ically laden Troy, that promise finally seemed to be about to
be made good.
But not if others could stop him first. Richard Claverhouse
Jebb, the leading classicist in the English-speaking world and
future editor of Sophocles, was one of Schliemann’s fiercest
opponents. What business did he have getting involved? At
stake in this contest, I believe, was more than a battle be-
tween academic insiders and outsiders. Schliemann’s work
pitted archaeology, the study of material culture and physi-
cal remains, against philology, the study of literary culture
and ideas, although this alone cannot have been decisive
(Jebb was a vocal supporter of the founding of two British
archaeological institutes, one in Athens and the other in
 James I. Porter 69

Rome). Schliemann’s digs presented an additional threat:

they probed into archaic Greece, pushing the envelope of the
modern contact with classical antiquity into the furthest
reaches of Bronze Age, well beyond what anyone gazing at
the Elgin marbles, which were hung in the British Museum
in 1816, could imagine. But above all, it was Schliemann
who, beyond anyone else, presented to the modern world
the specter of a Homer redivivus: now Homer would be
shown not to be a phantom, but to have been a material re-
ality, as solid as the foundations of a rediscovered Troy.
Would he even be recognizably Greek any longer? How
Schliemann imagined Homer to have been is unclear. But
what he unearthed was both excitingly and frighteningly
strange, and Jebb would have none of it. He disputed Schlie-
mann’s methods and challenged his findings. At the formal
center of the dispute was the location of ancient Troy: His-
arlık according to Schliemann, Pınarba£ı according to Jebb
(who sided with Demetrius of Scepsis, while singing his
praises).24 Mahaffy, backing Schliemann, would align Jebb
with “those who are playing Demetrius’ part,” and by the
strangest of inversions the nineteenth century found itself
thrown back into the mid-second century bce.25
But unlike Demetrius, the skeptical Jebb was ultimately
unconcerned with the location of ancient Troy. He wanted
to dispute the location of Homer’s Troy. In particular, what
was in dispute was the reality of the acropolis, not of Athens
now, but of Troy. That is, it was the question whether His-
arlık, lying flat on the plain, could possibly have been
adorned with the “lofty” and “beetling” acropolis of the Il-
iad (Homer’s Pergamus). Schliemann had to give up this pos-
sibility early on in his digs. In May of 1873, he made a first
revision: “what I last year considered to be the ruins of a sec-
ond storey of the Great Tower are only benches made of
stones joined with earth.”26 Against his own will, Schlie-
mann’s Homer was being brought down to ground level, a
veritable humiliation. Two years later, in his book on Troy
he added: “the city had no acropolis, and Pergamus is a pure
70 homer: the very idea

invention of Homer.”27 Jebb comments drily, “For Dr.

Schliemann, who believed in the historical accuracy of the Il-
iad, . . . [an admission like] this must have been somewhat of
a trial.” Troy was not the Acropolis; it could lay no claim on
the classical imagination. But Jebb still wasn’t satisfied.
Homer’s Troy, according to him, was a work of the fancy, a
pure poetic invention by Homer. As he resoundingly put it,
“‘Homer’s Troy,’ in the sense of an actual town described by
a poet recording historical fact, has not been found at
Hissarlik, and will never be found anywhere.”28 Schliemann,
for his part, wouldn’t budge. At most, he would make the re-
markable allowance that “Homer can never have seen Il-
ium’s Great Tower, the surrounding wall of Poseidon and
Apollo, the Scaean Gate or the Palace of King Priam. . . . He
knew of these monuments of immortal fame only from
hearsay.”29 And still Homer was the best source of evidence
for identifying the finds at Troy! In return, Jebb would play
the classicizing card that trumped all others: sublimation, by
claiming that “it is in taking a bird’s-eye view from a height,
not in looking around on the level, that the comprehensive
truth of Homeric topography is most vividly grasped.
Homer is as his own Zeus or his own Poseidon, not as one
of the mortals warring on the lower ground.”30 This move,
conflating Homer with a perspective offered up by his po-
ems—which is to say with their sovereign consciousness—
was a well-rehearsed element of the classical tradition, from
Robert Wood to Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel. The problem
for classicism was not reducing Homer to a notional exis-
tence (to the idea of his poems); it was detaching that con-
cept from the substance of the poems. For that would mean
the materialization of Homer, and his loss of reality—his ex-
posure as an idea(l).
Were there space, one could trace parallel developments in
philology, for which the Homeric texts had begun to appear
as something like an archaeological site, with layers of his-
tory built into them in a palpable stratigraphy: the disparate
effects of multiple compositional layers (some, including
 James I. Porter 71

Jebb, would call these “strata”) and the intrusive hands of ed-
itors could all be felt in the poems. Thanks to classics, starting
with F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer (1795), Homer had
become a scientific object, in the form of a question. Thanks
to Homer, classics had become again what it always had been,
an object of uncertainty and doubt. But what is even more im-
portant, classics would never again be free of historical and
material contingency.
One of the more profound results of this process was the
inevitable detachment of Homer from the stuff of his epics:
Homer was now firmly located centuries away from the sto-
ries he sang. But surely one of the more curious upshots of
this process was that Homer could now be viewed as a com-
plete stranger to the past he retold, or else, insofar as he was
moved to counteract historical loss (for instance, by preserv-
ing archaic details, whether or not he grasped their mean-
ing), as something of a proto-archaeologist in his own
right.31 The past was a foreign country indeed. Homer had
become its alienated witness, and in his alienation he stood
closer to “us.” But just how close do we want to get to
Homer?

on not translating homer:

arnold, newman, and parry

As a final illustration of the dilemmas this kind of proximity

and overproximity of Homer to the present created, I want
to offer a sketch of two oddly connected instances of the
modern approaches to Homer: Matthew Arnold’s Victorian
quarrel over Homeric translation and Milman Parry’s revo-
lutionary discovery of oral composition. What we will find
here are different strategies of keeping Homer at an appro-
priate distance, now mediated through the question of his
translatability.
In late 1860 and early 1861, Matthew Arnold, the Oxford
Professor of Poetry, delivered and then published a series of
lectures called “On Translating Homer.” The lectures had a
72 homer: the very idea

single purpose: to air criticisms of the 1856 translation of the

Iliad by Francis W. Newman, professor of Latin at University
College London (and brother to the future cardinal), and to
propose a new theory of translation as a counter to existing
English renderings, from Chapman, Pope, and Cowper to
Newman and other Victorians. Newman’s position is laid out
in his Preface and is easily summed up. The Greeks, but in
particular Homer, are marked by their “eminently childlike
simplicity” of mind. The style of Homer, being in Newman’s
words “quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low,” and, above all, “an-
tiquated,” matches this mentality perfectly.32 The poetic form
most suited to rendering these qualities is the old English lyri-
cal ballad, with its Saxon sounds and its alternating four and
three beats to a line. The result is the following: “Chestnut
and Spotted! noble pair! / farfamous brood of Spry-foot! // In
other guise now ponder ye / your charioteer to rescue // Back
to the troop of Danaï, / when we have done with battle: //
Nor leave him dead upon the field, / as late yet left Patro-
clus.”33 The end product may be strange, but that is the in-
tended effect. Indeed, Newman’s translation is prefaced by a
two-page “Glossary” of the more antiquated terms, not un-
like a Greek textbook of Homer for beginners.
Arnold’s objection is total: Newman has it all wrong.
Homer is neither quaint nor antiquated in Greek, nor should
he sound like this in English. He is, on the contrary, “noble,”
“simple,” “plain,” “rapid,” “natural,” and “transparent.”
“An appropriate meter” is needed to capture the aesthetic and
ethical qualities of Homer’s language; the meter must be
Greek; it must be authentic; it must, therefore, be the hexam-
eter.34 The result will read something like this (in Arnold’s
sample counter-translation): “Xanthus and Balius both, ye
far-famed seed of Podarga! // See that ye bring your master
home to the host of the Argives // In some other sort than
your last, when the battle is ended; // And not leave him be-
hind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus” (166). Newman
replied in a hundred-page essay in the same year, and Arnold
shot back with a concluding scientific postscript (“Last
 James I. Porter 73

Words”). The debate is fascinating, as much for the ground

that the two critics share as for their unbridgeable differences.
What they share—and I am compressing, for the debate
gains in clarity as it rumbles on—is a fundamental accord
around the single duty of translation: it should faithfully ren-
der, in Arnold’s phrase, “the general effect” and “impres-
sion” that Homer’s verses produce on the ear and mind of its
hearers, without seeking to render the particulars of Homer’s
verses themselves.35 What is to be captured is less the sound
or the meaning than the “moral character” of the sound and
the poetry. For Newman, this means rendering the effect of
the strangeness of Greek relative to English; his translation is
meant to be “a historical one”: it creates, or else recreates,
the effect of a historical alienation.36 Only, what is odd about
his model of estrangement is this: it works by analogy, while
the analogy works by familiarity and identification. (The
form of choice is after all the popular “national ballad me-
tre,” and it is “a likeness of moral genius which is to be
aimed at.”37) Newman’s aim is “to rear a poem that shall af-
fect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have
affected its natural hearers.” The point of reference is Sopho-
cles, and then Robert Burns: for “every sentence of [Homer]
was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no
more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated
character of the poetry than an Englishman can help feeling
the same in reading Burns’ poems.”38 Readers today must
identify with the classical ear in order to appreciate Homer’s
preclassical antiquity. But the relative antiquity of Homer in
the Periclean age, itself already separated by a “chasm” from
Homer,39 has become an “absolute” antiquity for the mod-
ern-day Victorian, and so Homer appears today as a “poet of
a barbarian age” (“odd” and “illogical,” and comparable
only to an “African tribesman of the Gold Coast,” he can be
“disgusting and horrible occasionally”), whence his “inex-
haustibly quaint [and] very eccentric” diction.40 After all,
Newman pleads, “a crag must not be cut like a gem.”41 It
seems odd that Newman’s reader should identify with the be-
74 homer: the very idea

mused Sophocles, both of them joining hands in the face of a

distant Homer, but that is how Newman will have it. New-
man’s Homer is to be filtered through a classicizing lens; but
through that lens he will appear hoarily antique.
Arnold has a different view. He is willing to concede, in a
way that Newman would not, that Homer is forever histor-
ically and aesthetically lost to us (“we cannot possibly tell
how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers,’” not even in the
fifth-century [98, 100]), and so the next best thing is to
strike a compromise and “to try to satisfy scholars” (117):
“they are the only tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are
dead” (99; italics added). For Arnold, too, translation is me-
diated by identification. Only, the target of the identification
for the reader is not the classical Athenian poet, but the
modern classical scholar, whether he be “the Provost of
Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor
Jowett here in Oxford.” What the translator should aim at is
to recreate the “feeling which to read the original gives
them” (99; italics added), which is to say gives informed and
poetically sensitive modern scholars, for “the scholar alone
has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be repro-
duced” (117). Rendering the impression that Homer makes
on the informed modern-day reader, the translation will be a
kind of simulacrum, not of the original songs in their origi-
nal sound, but of the experience of reading Homer’s Greek
today. The verses will scan as hexameters (difficult though it
be to render a quantitative accent in an accentual language
like English),42 so as to remind us that we are dealing with a
Greek original, and to give a sense of the epics’ flow and
movement (104–5). But the English will be as clear and
limpid, and as natural and direct, as Homer’s language is to
the contemporary fluent reader of the original. No glossary
is needed. Readers will get a fully digested Greek in English
form, and so they can enjoy Greek and remain Greekless all
at once.
Arnold’s solution to the Homeric problem of translation is
no accident of theory gone awry. His program is fundamen-
 James I. Porter 75

tally a pedagogical one, and it goes along well with his lib-
eral politics and with the social mission of English criticism
generally. Classics is dying as a field, but literacy is rising, he
notes on the first page. Translation will make the classics
available to everyone. But more to the point, translation can
serve education by offering the make-believe experience of
reading what is increasingly a dead language: the untutored
ear is to be treated to a surrogate experience of the classics.
What it receives (learns to understand, even hears) is no
longer Homer, but rather Homer’s monumentality: Homer
will be read, “not indeed as part of a classical course, but as
the most important poetical monument existing” (97)—even
if ultimately what is rendered is nothing more than a feeling,
or rather the illusion of one: “we feel, or imagine we feel,
even though it be unsupported . . . ” (199). This last remark
is Arnold’s, but he may as well have been speaking for New-
man too, who likewise sought to create the effect of an “il-
lusion.”43 After all, both agree that a gulf of “time, race, and
language” separates us from Homer, “who belong[s] to an-
other world,” even if Arnold, but not Newman, wants to
call this world “classical” (135).
For both critics, Homer stands off in a remote distance
from us today. A case in point has to do with their attitudes
to Homer’s meaning. Both concur that the meanings of
Homer’s individual words are all too frequently opaque
(which is to say, lost and irrecoverable), and that ultimately
what a good translation renders is not meaning but atmos-
phere, feeling, and style. But whereas Newman’s translator
seeks to capture the strangeness of words whose meaning
has vanished, Arnold perceives no obstacles to a translator,
for whom nothing in Homer is so opaque as to lie beyond
capture. For Arnold, a reader’s practiced enjoyment will an-
nul all philological scruples, whether of meaning or of the
Homeric Question (which he declares both insoluble and ir-
relevant [99–100]): “the uncertainty of the scholar about the
true meaning of certain words can never change this general
effect, . . . whatever the scholar’s doubts about the word
76 homer: the very idea

may be. . . . Poetically he feels clearly about the word, al-

though philologically he may not” (182).44 This curious act
of open disavowal, which goes hand in hand with an
affirmation of Homer’s singular personality and a character-
ization of his original “mind” and “voice,”45 reenacts a con-
ventional ambivalence of classical scholarship from Wolf
onward, an ambivalence that was driven by diverging aes-
thetic and philological impulses.46 But that is not the point I
want to emphasize here. Rather, I want us to concentrate on
the opacity—the loss and lack of meaning and sense—that
joins these two impulses before they turn into philological
doubt and distance or into aesthetic pleasure and (illusory)
contact with the past. Another example, this time from the
early twentieth century, will help reinforce the point.
In 1928, a young American graduate student from Berkeley
published two doctoral theses in French. A quick succession
of essays in English followed, until his untimely death in
1935. The work of Milman Parry changed the face of Home-
ric studies even more dramatically than Wolf had. What he
demonstrated, in scientific detail, was the nature of Homeric
composition: it was oral, traditional, the work of generations,
and formular (built around modular noun-epithet combina-
tions that slotted into fixed metrical positions). It is often said
that Parry transcended the stale debates of the nineteenth-cen-
tury Homeric Question, for instance that he made otiose the
endless debates without issue between those who argued the
unity of the extant poems and those who saw only layers of
sedimented accretions.47 Nothing could be further from the
truth. In Parry, the Homeric Question is reduced to its barest
essentials and made achingly relevant again.
Parry, the hard-hitting statistician, gives the sense that
with his work one can get almost an archaeological glimpse
of the oldest and indelible layers of the Homeric tradition,
practically its unconscious memory and poetics. Parry’s the-
ory carries out the logic of Wolf’s reduction of Homer: it se-
verely constrains the role of the poet as an originator of
diction or meaning, let alone of poetic effect; the poet is re-
 James I. Porter 77

duced to a spokesman of the rhapsodic tradition that pre-

ceded him, as its last incarnation, virtually as its effect or
product. But at the same time, this puts the Homeric com-
poser (whom Parry conventionally dubs “Homer”) in an
awkward position vis-à-vis his own tradition: how much of
this tradition is Homer actually aware? As a machine of
memory with limited aesthetic scope, his materials emerging
from the deepest lava flows of epic time, does Homer even
understand what he sings?
Parry stares down this question directly in his first English-
language publication, “The Homeric Gloss: A Study in Word-
Sense,” from 1928. There, he isolates to his satisfaction a
category of words whose meaning is obscure to Homer and
his audience. Oddly, the starting point is made up by those
phrases whose meaning is obscure, if not utterly opaque, to
ourselves.48 In any event, the gloss or sub-category of orna-
mental epithets Parry defines as “adjectives used attributively
without reference to the ideas of the sentences or the passages
where they appear,” and whose meaning leaves us “in the
dark” (241). These are words like ajtrugevtoio (used seventeen
times of the sea and once of the air) or ejntupav~ (“evidently an
adverb”), where the lexica draw a blank and no amount of
guessing will prove a scholar right or wrong. But why should
these words be unknown to Homer and his audience? One
pressing reason is the need to preserve intact the Homeric hy-
pothesis itself. In a word, the datability of Homer is founded
on the absolute undatability of some of his language. Take
away the premise of layers of archaism unto obscurity, and
the entire hypothesis that Homeric composition transpired
over generations collapses on itself.49 Homer has to have
come after the tradition, and he has to be ignorant of some of
what preceded him. He has to become a poet of memory
without access to what he remembers.
This reduction fits hand in glove with the theory of a re-
duced Homeric persona. As Parry asks, anticipating a
reader’s puzzlement, “Did Homer, then, accept blindly, as an
unchangeable part of the traditional style which he inher-
78 homer: the very idea

ited, a large number of words concerning whose meaning he

was completely ignorant?” (248). The answer is, plainly,
Yes. Accordingly, “the meaning of the fixed epithet has thus
a reduced importance: it is used inattentively by the poet,
and heard by the auditor in a like manner” (249); its effect
is one of “rapidity,” of a mere incidence of sound (the term
is originally Arnold’s [428]); it is both familiar, from its re-
peated occurrences, and strange; its uses tend to be “irra-
tional”; it is necessarily “vague” (249), but also associated
by habituation to meaning of another kind, or rather to a
sense of meaning: the auditor (and Homer is and is not his
own auditor for Parry) can “pass rapidly over the ornament
glosses, feeling in them only an element which ennobles the
heroic style,” and that somehow confirms through its great
antiquity the very antiquity and epic distance of the poetry
itself; “he is fully alive to their sense, but scarcely heedful of
their meaning,” and so on (250). Not content to leave Homer
blind, Parry bestows him with the illusion of clairvoyance:
“It may be considered as certain that Homer thought he un-
derstood the ornament glosses” (248). But that is just an-
other form of blindness. So ends the article on the Homeric
gloss. But how generalizable is this isolated anomaly to the
rest of Parry’s theory?
Completely, I want to suggest. And it is here, or already,
that Parry’s theory starts sounding strangely familiar, at once
Arnoldian and Newmanian—not surprisingly, given that
Parry cites Arnold’s essay in a handful of places. A section of
his doctoral thesis from 1928 even asks, “Can the Fixed Ep-
ithet Be Translated?” and the answer is, predictably, No, and
it doesn’t need to be.50 Nor is this all. Ornamental epithets
that take the form of glosses, far from being an aberrant mo-
ment of the epic experience, are in fact symbolic of that ex-
perience as a whole: here the auditor listens with, as it were,
a third ear, feeling more than hearing (let alone comprehend-
ing) what is sung. That is, while ornamental epithets, unlike
glosses, have a fixed and knowable meaning for the original
audience or for ourselves, they share a crucial feature of the
 James I. Porter 79

gloss, which is that their meaning is not their essential char-

acteristic. The gloss is a word whose meaning is unknown
but irrelevant to its effect; the ornamental epithet is a word
whose meaning is known but is nonetheless irrelevant to its
effect (cf. 241). In another essay, from 1933, Parry extends
his readings to the problem of the “traditional metaphor in
Homer” (phrases such as “watery ways,” “winged words,”
“rosy-fingered dawn,” and “silver-footed Thetis”), which
then can be taken to reflect back again, in their “typicality,”
“the diction as a whole” (370). These are metaphors that es-
sentially are behaving like fixed formulas. They recall noth-
ing so much as “the true fixed metaphor [that] has not
existed in English poetry since the days when Anglo-Saxon
was spoken” (367) and that was resurrected in the age of
Dryden. A further subset are fixed metaphors with no clear
meaning: “kavrhna, ‘heads’ for ‘peaks’; a ship ‘running’—
e[qeen; a wave ‘howling’—i[ace; a god, ‘standing over’ a city—
ajmfibevbhka~,” and so on (373). What these words have in
common is that they are not marked as metaphors, and in
lacking this mark of metaphoricity they lapse into the com-
mon parlance of “simply epic words”—they signify nothing
in particular, beyond the fact that they belong to an epic dic-
tion. Obscure though not exactly opaque, they tell us that we
are in an epic world. That is why they are “traditional”: they
show us how oral poetics works—not according to the ro-
mantic rules of poetic genius and novelty, but through the
anonymous byways of inherited patterns. What they convey is
not meaning, but something else: “charm,” “music,” a
“mood,” a sense of epic and heroic “nobility,” the “distant
and wondrous.” In effect, these are words that have ceased to
signify. Their only function is that of connotation, in which
they exhaust themselves, meaninglessly. No longer semantic in
their own right, they have become what they always were—
music: “[Epic] poetry thus approaches music most closely
when the words have rather a mood than a meaning. . . .
Though the meaning be felt rather than understood it is
there. . . . It is an incantation of the heroic” (374–75; italics
80 homer: the very idea

added).
Now, traditional metaphors are not opaque glosses of the
ornamental epithet category, which express no centrally fixed
and identifiable idea. They express an idea, only one that is
lost, or rather irrelevant (the way “the formulaic line which
expresses the idea ‘at dawn’ always brings in the epithet
rJododavktulo~,” which expresses no idea at all).51 In this re-
spect, they are exactly like typical epithet combinations, the
standard building block of Homeric diction. But, looking
back from the metaphor over to the gloss and then back to
the epithet formula where everything began, we can realize
how even the fixed epithet captures what is formulaic about
Homer’s diction: it conjures up the very fixity, the tradition-
ality, of a living oral tradition itself (cf. 249), and ultimately
it isolates nothing more than the inner quality of noble, epic
poetry itself—its “quality of ‘propriety,’” which in time
tended to minimize, if not eliminate altogether, questions of
meaning.52 Parry’s Homer is an oral poet in every sense of the
word. Surrounded by sounds and driven by them, “he is led
by the habitual movement of his voice to these formulas, . . .
guided by his feeling for what there is in common in the
sound of . . . a system” of sounds (324). So understood, oral
poetry, with its habits of audition (listening for the sound)
and its reinforcing of structures of feeling at the expense of
sense, not to mention its ideological attractions (nobility,
heroic ethos), folds back into the conventional ideology of
the classical ideal and all that this entails.53
Parry’s enduring Phidian and Winceklmannian biases are
elsewhere transparent.54 His clinging to the improbable no-
tion of Homer’s singular, authentic voice is a further index of
his aesthetic and ideological affiliations. We’ve already seen
how Parry moves effortlessly from the aberrant to the central,
from the opaque to the heroic and the noble. What he has
designated, through philological reduction, is a zone of aes-
thetic enjoyment that, in contrast to the prohibitions on logic
and meaning, is directly apprehensible to the reader or listener
of Homer. It is a zone that is defined by what could be called
 James I. Porter 81

the materiality of Homer’s voice; what it covers is less a zone

of significance than a zone of signifiance that turns out to be
utterly characteristic of Homeric poetry and of our experience
of it. Parry’s deepest aesthetic insights into Homer are moti-
vated by an attunement to this very feature of epic diction,
which is to say its quality of sound and voice, insofar as these
are evocative of a “heroic” character (“the quality of epic no-
bility”). This feature of epic diction is instrumental in produc-
ing what we might call an “epic-effect.” One of these effects
is Homer himself: the voice of Homer that somehow, despite
all the intervening layers of mediation, can be directly heard
by us today (“one . . . has the overwhelming feeling that, in
some way, he is hearing Homer” [378]).
A questionable Homer, to be sure, but it is what Parry’s
answer to the Homeric Question is ultimately all about. The
poems have a “unity” that can be discovered only once we
have grasped “Homer’s idea of style and poetic form,” that
is, once we correctly adjust our idea of Homer. Oral theory
and poetics are foundational to this understanding (269).
Philology here has sanctioned itself with an appeal to tradi-
tional aesthetic ideology. It has historicized, we might say,
that ideology, by rooting it in an experience that is both our
own and definitionally Greek. Science finally beholds itself
in a mirror, and like Narcissus is content with what it sees.
An ideal scientific object in every sense of the word, Homer
is nothing other than the modern idea of what is ancient
about antiquity—a thought we can feel, or imagine we feel,
but can never really know.

notes

This essay is preliminary to a longer study in progress.

1. The point is well made by Walter Burkert, “The Making of Homer in
the Sixth Century BC: Rhapsodes Versus Stesichorus,” Papers on the Amasis
Painter and his World (Malibu 1987), 43. Vergil enjoyed a similar status in
the Latin Middle Ages; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and
the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton 1953).
2. oJmhrivdden: yeuvdesqai Hsch. Cf. Arist. Po. 1460a18–19: “Homer has
82 homer: the very idea

taught the rest of the poets how to lie.”

3. At least from its modern inception in Wolf and his immediate succes-
sors (see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future [Stanford
2000]), if not also earlier. Compare Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,
Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin 1884), 381–83, lamenting the demise
of classics under the flood of irrelevant discourses that were swamping the
Homeric Question at the time: poetics, Völker-psychology, politics, anthro-
pology, and not least, philology. “Homer is currently not much read as a
poet. . . . How many adults still read him for edification? . . . Homer is a
force, but one that is exhausted.” “But,” he adds, not without a certain pi-
quancy, at least “the Homeric Question is popular.” Then comes a dis-
paraging parallel, comparing his own day with the spiritually and culturally
exhausted era of the Alexandrian scholars.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer und die klassische Philologie” [1869],
Philologische Schriften 1867–1873 [1982], in Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
Werke, ed. Georgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin 1967–),
2.1.247–69.
5. Last year through April 2002, a large itinerant exhibition on Troy and
its history was mounted in Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and then in Bonn, Ger-
many. See the catalogue volume Troia—Traum und Wirklichkeit, Archäolo-
gisches Landesmuseum (Baden-Württemberg 2001) and the archived
web-site: http://www.troia.de/. See also Michael Wood’s BBC production
(1985) and book (In Search of the Trojan War, revised ed. [Berkeley and
Los Angeles 1998]); and finally, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to
Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Readers of U. S. News online (http://-
www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/quiz.htm) can, as of this
writing, take a “Mysteries of History” quiz and try the following question:
“3. Who was the first person to doubt that Homer was the single author of
The Iliad and The Odyssey? Aristotle; F. A. Wolf; Herodotus; Vico?” For
the correct response, see below.
6. See Hes. Op. 90–173e; [Hes.] Ehoeae fr. 204 M-W; Cypria fr. 1 Allen;
Schol. Hom. D Il. 1.5; Eur. El. 1282–3, etc.; Wolfgang Kullmann, “Ein
Vorhomerisches Motiv im Iliasproömium,” Philologus (1955) 99.167–92;
Ruth Scodel, “The Achaean Wall and the Myth of Destruction,” HSCP
(1982) 86.33–50; and below on Arist. fr. 162 Rose. Eratosthenes and Apol-
lodorus began their chronographies with the fall of Troy (1184/3); Dem-
ocritus dated a work of his to “730 years after the capture of Troy” (D. L.
9.41). This symbolic view of history had implications for later poets; see
Denis Feeney, “Mea Tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses,”
Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception.
Cambridge Philological Society, Suppl. 23, eds. Philip Hardie, Alessandro
Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge 1999), 13–30 and Giancarlo
Mazzoli, “Qualie Praeistorie? Catullo, Lucrezio,” L’Antico degli antichi,
eds. Guglielmino Cajani and Diego Lanza (Rome 2001), 133–40.
7. In Leocr. 62, trans. Jebb.
8. Luc. 9.969.
9. One need only glance at the northern Parthenon frieze in Athens, with
 James I. Porter 83

its decorative motifs from the Iliad. For later appropriations, see Froma I.
Zeitlin, “Visions and Revisions of Homer,” Being Greek Under Rome: Cul-
tural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Si-
mon Goldhill (Cambridge 2001), 195–266.
10. E.g., Walter Leaf, Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography (London
1912), 13; Denys Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley 1959).
11. See Kirk, comm. ad loc., subsuming Homer’s ignorance under his
“solemnity.”
12. Examples run from Stesichorus to Thucydides to Dio of Prusa. Cf.
Aristotle’s comment on the Achaean wall at the ships, which he says never
existed, because “the poet who created it [viz., made it up] (plavsa~) de-
stroyed it (hjfavnisen)” (fr. 162 Rose). In this tradition, the wall is plainly
emblematic of—literally, a “metaphor” of (cf. metafevrein bouvletai)—the
traceless obliteration of Troy itself (see Schol. Hom. Il. bT 7.445 and
12.3–35), but also of the event’s susceptibility to fictional manipulation (cf.
the conflation of the two kinds of making, th;n teicomacivan poiei`n with te-
icopoiiva, etc.).
13. Schol. in Dion. Thrac. 29.16–30.17 Hilgard; Cic. De Or. 3.137; Vit.
Hom. 4.13–13.
14. We do occasionally hear of lesser places, some of them mentioned by
Homer, that have vanished, e.g., Strab. 8.8.2 (in the effort to verify Homer’s
references to three former cities), or Paus. 10.33.8 on Parapotamii, another
paradoxical lieu de mémoire.
15. See J. N. Coldstream, “Hero-Cults in the Age of Homer,” JHS (1976)
76:7–17; Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment
(Berkeley 1980); S. C. Humphreys, “Death and Time,” Mortality and Im-
mortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, eds. S. C. Hum-
phreys and H. King (London 1981), 261–83; Carla Antonaccio, “The
Archaeology of Ancestors,” Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Per-
formance, Politics, eds. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (Cambridge
1998), 46–70.
16. One of his motives would undoubtedly have been to resolve the ques-
tion of whether Aeneas’ descendants ruled the Troad after the fall of Troy,
and if so, where (Scepsis was Demetrius’ preference) and for how long (see
Strabo 13.1.52).
17. Cf. Certamen, passim; Athen. 125 D (“risen from the mud”); and A. P.
2.715, an epigram that confesses Homer’s origins to be “unknowable,” while
Homer is a godlike hero beyond earthly location.
18. For the term “hypothesis,” see Nietzsche (note 4), 256.
19. Cf. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Der epische Cyclus, oder die home-
rischen Dichter. 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Bonn 1865), 1.120; M. L. West, “The In-
vention of Homer,” CQ (1999) 49.2.364–82.
20. Cf. §823: “But this does not make Homer any the less the father and
prince of all sublime poets” (Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Gi-
ambattista Vico: Translated from the 3d ed., 1744, eds. and trans., Thomas
G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch [Ithaca 1948], 281).
84 homer: the very idea

21. Hitchcock in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, with the collaboration of

Helen G. Scott (New York 1967), 98–100: the term MacGuffin “might be
a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man
says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other an-
swers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’
‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scot-
tish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish
Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So
you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.” Examples of the MacGuffin in film
would be the Maltese Falcon, or the uranium in Notorious (which could
have been diamonds), the mistaken identity at the beginning of North by
Northwest, or “the little tune of The Lady Vanishes.” According to Hitch-
cock, the MacGuffin can be ignored as soon as it has served its purpose, but
it rarely does this, and instead it tends to become the object of endless fas-
cination, despite its being “empty, nonexistent, and absurd.” See further
Slavoj ˛i≈ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London 1989), 184.
22. J. P. Mahaffy, “The Site and Antiquity of the Hellenic Ilion.” Journal
of Hellenic Studies (1882), 3.69–80, 89. See also page 90: “The traveler . . .
has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached
at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain: and as is wont to
be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not fulfil his de-
sire.” Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”
[1936], Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Lon-
don 1964), 22.239–48. I owe Mary Beard the reference to Mahaffy. See
now Mary Beard, The Parthenon (London 2002).
23. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in fünf Bänden, eds. Andreas Flitner
and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt 1960–81), 2.22; Richard Claverhouse Jebb,
Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, (6th ed., Boston
1902; 1st ed., 1887), 38: “The Homeric Greek exhibits all the essential
characteristics and aptitudes which distinguish his descendant in the histor-
ical age,” which is to say the Homeric Greek is in his essence a classical
Greek, but only potentially so.
24. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, “Homeric and Hellenic Ilium,” Journal of
Hellenic Studies (1881), 2.7–43, 34–35, calling Demetrius’ lost work “one
of the most wonderful monuments of scholarly labour which even the inde-
fatigable erudition of the Alexandrian age produced.”
25. Mahaffy (note 22), 78.
26. Leo Deuel, Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann: A Documentary Por-
trait Drawn from His Autobiographical Writings, Letters, and Excavation
Reports (New York 1977), 204.
27. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, “Homeric Troy,” The Fortnightly Review,
n.s. 35 (1 April 1884) 433–52, 436 (citing Troy and its Remains: A Narra-
tive of Researches and discoveries Made of the Site of Ilium, and in the Tro-
jan Plain. By Dr. Henry Schliemann. Tr. with the author’s sanction [London
1875], 18).
28. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, “The Ruins of Hissarlik,” Journal of Hel-
lenic Studies (1883), 4.147–55, 155. Similarly, Eduard Meyer, Geschichte
 James I. Porter 85

von Troas (Leipzig 1877), e.g., 106: “That this [sc., Homer’s] Ilion never
once stood on earth is proved beyond refutation by Schliemann’s excava-
tions.” The destruction of the vastly scaled-down historical Ilium necessi-
tated its reconstruction and inflation in the poetic fantasy: whatever truth
lay behind the legends, “seeing the ruins in the Homeric age was no longer
possible” (108), let alone necessary—one wonders whether Homer’s blind-
ness isn’t a quiet confession of this fact—and “accordingly, the [ancient]
claims that [Troy] had completely vanished from the face of the earth were
fully justified” (106, n. 1).
29. Deuel (note 26), 210.
30. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, “A Tour in the Troad,” The Fortnightly
Review, n.s. 33 (1 January–1 June 1883), 514–29, 520.
31. Cf. Andrew Lang, Homer and His Age (London 1906), 1–14.
32. Francis W. Newman, The Iliad of Homer, Faithfully Translated into
Unrhymed English Metre (London 1856), iv; cf. also xvii.
33. Francis W. Newman, Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A
Reply to Matthew Arnold, Esq., Professor of Poetry, Oxford (London
1861), 30.
34. Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer” [1861], The Complete
Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor 1960–1977),
1.97–216, 142. References to Arnold will henceforth appear parenthetically
in the main body of the text.
35. Arnold (note 34), 98, 101, 118, 182. The effect, being general, which
is to say a matter of inarticulate feeling, can at the same time have a pecu-
liarity all its own (cf. 105; 128).
36. Arnold (note 34), 98; Newman (note 32), xv–xvi.
37. Newman (note 33), 22; Newman (note 32), xvii; italics added.
38. Newman (note 33), 35–36.
39. Newman (note 33), 35 and 37.
40. Newman (note 32), iv; Newman (note 33), 14, 48, 56, 59, 73; cf. 86,
95, etc.
41. Newman (note 33), 24.
42. Arnold (note 34), 151–53, 193–95; cf. Newman (note 32), xvii. If
you detect a slight circularity here, you are not far from wrong: “The mod-
ern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexa-
meter, as read by us moderns” (198; italics added); cf. Newman (note 33),
6–19; 42.
43. Newman (note 32), xv; Arnold (note 34), 97–98.
44. Following the same logic, a footnote reads: “Our knowledge of
Homer’s Greek is hardly such as to enable us to pronounce quite
confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what is not, any more than
in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to recognise . . .” Arnold (note
34), 155 n. 1.
45. Arnold (note 34), 109, 205; Newman (note 32), iv.
86 homer: the very idea

46. Wolf had killed Homer, for instance, by arguing that the Iliad was the
work of later redactors, but then resurrected him through his philological
sensus, by claiming to be able to detect the genuine and original Homeric
portions of the poem. Unlike Vico or d’Aubignac, Wolf never denied the
historical existence of Homer, a point that Nietzsche was quick to make
against him. See Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795,
trans. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton
1985), 117 n. 84, rejecting d’Aubignac’s conclusion from 1715, and Wolf’s
later review of Vico, “Giambattista Vico über den Homer.” Museum der Al-
terthums-Wissenschaft (1807), 1:555–70; Nietzsche (note 4), 256.
47. Adam Parry in Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The
Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford 1971), li.
Henceforth, references to this volume will be by page only.
48. The starting point is doubly odd, in that Parry has difficulties ren-
dering the meaning of the term “gloss” itself, which he finds in Aristotle but
not in the sense he wants it to have, while Liddell and Scott’s definition of
the term glw`ssa, which refers to Aristotle, is likewise deficient in his view
(241). Just when, we might like to ask, do we know what a word means?
49. “To what great antiquity must we assign Homer, if we would sup-
pose that he naturally understood the ornament glosses . . . ? This antiquity
it is easy and necessary to accept for his language, but difficult to believe in
for himself” (245; cf. 22).
50. Parry (note 47), 171; cf. also, 126–27.
51. “[It] is not being used because of its meaning” (373). It is worth not-
ing that Aristotle would have disagreed: “It makes a difference whether the
dawn is called ‘rosy-fingered’ or ‘purple-fingered’” (Rhet. 3.2, 1405b19–10)—
but then, Aristotle’s ear was already corrupted by a classical sensibility,
Parry would doubtless reply, as he ventures to say elsewhere (cf. esp. 365
and 374).
52. Not surprisingly, this was the gist of Arnold’s view of the epithet too,
whose aesthetic terminology (rapidity, nobility, feeling, and the like) Parry
closely, and no doubt consciously, parallels. (Parry commends Arnold’s ap-
preciation of Homeric style: 428 n. 47; cf. 172, 250, 306, etc.) Interestingly
enough, the debate between Arnold and Newman often seems to gravitate
toward the question of how to understand and render the fixed epithet
(Arnold [note 34], 183; Newman [note 33], 63, 86). More could be said
here, but suffice it to say that Parry’s view of the epithet owes a good deal
to this Victorian quarrel, and on both sides of that debate.
53. See James I. Porter, “Feeling Classical: Classicism and Ancient Liter-
ary Criticism,” forthcoming.
54. xxiv–xxv; 417; 424–25; 427; 431.