Refuting Homer in the Heroikos of Philostratus* Francesca Mestre €E dpxiis nad" “Oynpov énei nepadrxam mavres “Since all at first have learnt according to Homer —Xenophanes frg. 10, DK* (trans. Burnet) Thave chosen to start with this fragment from Xenophanes because, -with the eloquence of all fragmentary texts, it bears witness to the longstanding dependence of the Greeks on Homer. This depend- ence isat two levels, which are often complementary. The first is the level of exemplarity: the Homeric poems present models of all behavior and knowledge (“all . . . have learnt”), The second is the level of historical authenticity: the poems’ “historical” account of the events of the past, that is, the “reality” acknowledged by all the Greeks (“at first”). It goes without saying that the Homeric poems ‘were acommon point of reference throughout the history of Greek culture. At times it was the historical value of the poems that was foregrounded; at other times it was their exemplary value. In either case, they enjoyed absolute prestige in both areas, even though, also practically from the beginning, the literal authenticity of the account is often brought into question. Homer is the first historian: he recounts the distant past of the Greeks, their common past. Once his poems were established, the history they narrate became the official history, transmitted from city to city: the epic poet tells the story of who the Greeks are—all the Greeks—who their forefathers were—all their forefathers. The epic poet also tells of where they originated as well, obviously, who they were not. Homer establishes for the first time the first signs of Greek identity, in opposition to the other. As the different types of discourse of the Greek world—historical, political, and scientific * I would like to thank my colleague Pilar Gomez for her invaluable comments on an earlier draft of the essay and Michael Maudsley for help with the English ver-128 PHILOSTRATUS'S HEROIKOS discourses—began to acquire a specificity of their own, Homer was always the first point of reference. As for the exemplarity of what the poems narrate, a very differ- ent picture emerges. From the times of Xenophanes onward, through the pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras or Heraclitus, criti- cism of Homer wes as constant a feature of Greek culture as was its fidelity to him. In the sixth century 8.C.£. the discussion of the reli~ ability of Homer's accounts began; the question was whether the poems should be taken literally or understood as allegories requir- ing correct interpretation (as Theagenés of Rhegium proposed).' Later, concerned with the education of the citizen in his ideal city, Plato paid less attention to the historical value of the Homeric Poems than to their potentially harmful educational influence. Indeed, in the fourth century, the problem of the exemplary nature of the Homeric texts was discussed: if Homer is the source of all knowledge and all culture, and if what he describes is exemplary and serves as the basis for an educational program, how do we account for the truculent desire for vengeance, the cruelty of fathers to sons, the harsh conduct of the gods, and the atrocities that the poems describe? How could this be explained to an increasingly sophisticated society which would no longer accept visceral reac- tions and was acquiring moral and ethical norms of conduct according to which the primitive actions of the remote past were incomprehensible or unjustifiable? ‘The implausibility of some of the historical events recounted could be attributed to the fact they were just that—history—and that so long had passed, but the fact that many of the actions were far from exemplary could not be explained away so easily. Under the empire, however, the situation was very different. Greek society or, more precisely, the culturally dominant Greek elites seeking to affirm their identity by demonstrating the traits that almost exclusively defined them, were in urgent need of Homer's support. Homer now represented the glorious past, the past that united and defined Greek identity. The Greeks under the empire needed common models that would admit those qualified to form part of the elite, models common enough to hide their inter- nal divisions and distinetive enough to protect them from outside influences that might represent a threat or an interference—the new Roman customs, for example, or the emergence of the Christians, ‘treated with contempt at that time, However, rather than being " Theagenés of Rhegium frg, 2, DK. MESTRE: REFUTING HOMER 129 political of religious opposition it was fundamentally cultural, with a very important meaning. Inside the idea of culture, or even lan- guage,’ there were many other questions of a moral, ethical, and political nature. The Greek elites, who wrote in Attic Greek, were the direct heirs of the Greek past, of the grandeur of the heroes and their feats. They wished to be acknowledged as the guardians of those heroic values, which many knew and practiced, but only belonged to those who formed part of the group—without this oppo- sition ever amounting to any form of resistance. In this regard as well, Homer was the ideal source of moral and political authority. But for this very reason Homer had to be corrected. If Homer described the past, the past must be as historically authentic as pos- sible. There was no place for symbols or allegory; the account must appear plausible to the contemporary reader. It must be revised, especially its paradigmatic aspects. The question was not merely one of hermeneutics.* Corrections of Homer in the works of the writers of the impe- rial era are commonplace.’ Some authors refuted Homer's work in its entirety: in his famous Troikos (Or. 11), Dio Chrysostom stated that Paris was one of Helen's suitors, along with Menelaus, and since Paris was chosen, the marriage was legitimate. On this account, the Trojan War was not waged to avenge a deceived hus- band. For the Achaeans, and in particular for Agamemnon, the significance of the marriage was that Paris was claiming something that belonged to Greece; this was the reason for the campaign against Paris and against Troy (Troikos 61-64). So, according to Dio, Homer is lying. Indeed, for the mentality of the beginning of the second century C.E. it would have been far easier to accept that the Achaeans went to Troy to protect their interests and to conquer + C& Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World 4.0. 50259 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 46-5 * Swain, Helleniom and Empire, 112: “... the past setting of the ancient Greek novel appealed to the Greek elite because of the role of the past in their ideology ‘of power. They enjoyed the past in the novel for exactly the same reason they ‘enjoyed it in the world of declamation oratory and civic life.” * Nori the Aleandrian editors! elimination of verses that were incompai ble with the Homeric “temperament”: The case of Menelaus isa clear example; ef Bryan Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary. Books 9-12 (vol. 3 of The Hiad: A Commentary, ed. G. 8. Kirk; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 175-76. . * According to Glen W. Bowersock (Fiction as History: Nevo to Julian (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1994), 21), Homeric revisionism is one of the subjects of the production of fiction.130 PHILOSTRATUS'S HEROIKOS new wealth rather than merely to save someone's honor; equally, it ‘was perfectly plausible that Homer was obliged to write the story he did to content his public, since this was how he made his living (Troikos 15). And above all, it was plausible in the context of this speech, because Dio was doing exac:ly the same thing: the Troikos was in all likelihood composed to be delivered in Troy. This was the time of the empire, and according to the official Roman tradition, Troy was the ancestor of Rome, just as the Achaeans were the ancestors of the Greeks. So one could hypothesize that the Trojans were in fact the victors. ‘There are other refutations of points of detail, both in the poems and as regards the figure of Homer himself. Most of them, in my view, refer to the jifos of the characters, including Homer, although they are points of detail, they are highly significant in each ‘The works of Philostratus, in particular the Hervikos, are among the most valuable examples of these revisionist practices during the imperial era. For some scholars, in fact, this revisionism is the work's sole objective; that is, the rest of the themes in the Heroikos, its narrative structure and the contents, are only there to authorize this correction of Homer, to stress the veracity of a series of events vvia the presentation of a “correct” version. ‘The Greek elites of the imperial era coexisted with the Romans, ‘The Greeks were not alone in seeking to preserve their cultural ‘manifestations; the imperial court was also keen that Greek culture should survive, in order to appropriate a certain amount of history and civilization for themselves. The source of authority that the Past represented for the Greeks was also of great interest to the Romans, and so cultural manifestations were resurrected. These manifestations all had a certain religious element; though their Fecovery was artificial from a religious perspective, there is no denying their cultural vitality. This resurrection was extremely * Ct, for example the treatment of Penlope inthe Bubs (0 , enclope inthe Bubutos (Or. 2) by Dio Chrysostom, or the ret rejection of the hero onion that Lars Doty Of the Dead vepresentson this, sce Francesca Mestre "Pot ue mens Honey (Ca isin hittin sobre os poemanhomeox en Soca peri eAetor ot X Conese apa de etd aso: ss de eptanire he sogp Cd aaa Crespo and Maria Jose Barrios Casto; 3 voles Madd: aicones Clase, sooo “40 Cf. Graham Anderson, Philostratus: Biography and c » Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D. (London: Croom Helm, :986), 253: "[It] becomes too clear that the cule and powers of Protesilaos offer only a preliminary excursus before the ‘main subject—the correction of Homer.” MESTRE! REFUTING HOMER Bt important because it was supported by the emperors themselves: just as Nero traveled to Greece and visited Olympia in an attempt to revive the Games,* in the time of Philostratus (in 214-215 C.e) Caracalla traveled to Asia Minor, visiting the Trojan Plain and paying homage to the tombs of the heroes buried there (cf. Dio Cassius Roman History 78.16.8; Herodian History 4.8.3). There are two possible interpretations of this gesture: either it was in support of a sentiment that was already alive among the Greeks under the empire, or it gave impetus to a way of recovering the past, which ‘was to be capitalized on immediately by the cultural leaders of the moment ‘The first explanation would represent an attempt to create a type of pagan arctalogy to challenge the Christian aretalo- gies, such as the lives of saints, that had already gained a certain importance in the second and third centuries C.r. The second would suggest a desire to use the heroes of the tradition to heighten the sentiment of identification: after appropriate processing by the sophists, they were to become a fundamental reference point for the definition of Greek existence. It goes without saying that Philostratus’s Heroikos ties in neatly with this idea of the revival of the cult of the heroes."" What is more, even conceding that this cult had or may have had a substan- tial religious component (indeed, Philostratus’s re-creation clearly evokes a religious scenario in which the hero Protesilaos arises from his tomb to succor his human friends and to teach them in all senses of the term), the reference to the epic heroes is a form of meta- history. Again, the éros, Homer, is the historical reference point used to speak of the past, the past re-created by those Greeks of the empire. To an extent this past was re-created to suit their own ends, but it supported Homer nonetheless. Philostratus is a man of his times, more exactly, a member of the Greek elites under the Roman Empire. For him, the past—the past that emanates above all from Homer, but from other sources in the tradition as well—was a question of identity, in the sense that it * Dio Chrysostom's Olympic Discourse (Or. 12) is an echo of ths visit © Opinion is divided as to the interpretation of this imperial gesture: ef ‘Teresa Mantero, Ricerche sll’ Herojkos di Filostrato (Genos: University of Genoa, Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medioevale, 1966), 21-47, and Anderson, Philostra- tus, 241-37, above all. °* On the religious value of certain features under the Severans ("un engoue~ ment croissant pour les formes les plus irationnelles de la ferveur religieuse”) and. the place of Philostratus's Hevoikor among them, cl. Alain Billault, L'univers de Philostrate (Collection Latomus 252; Brussels: Latormus, 2000), 38-40.