Recent close reading and teaching and Homer, along with some long standing interests leads me to reflect on the Homeric epics as a beginning in literature and a beginning in philosophy, which appears in later beginnings. It requires no argument to suggest that The Iliad and The Odyssey are foundational texts in the history of European or western literature, even making all allowances for the impossibility of any pure beginning and the ways that Homeric poetry emerges from a broad east Mediterranean world including northern Africa and southwestern Asia, as well as Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. Even the most radical sceptic of the centrality of ancient Greece in antiquity would surely concede anyway that the Homeric epics are at the beginning of Greek literature.
This also makes a strong case for Homer as the beginning of Greek philosophy, and possibly therefore at the beginning of western philosophy, again making allowances for all the problems around notions of a pure beginning and a self-contained self-identical west. Homer did not seem to the ancient Greeks to be simply the author of imaginative literature in distinction from any form of knowledge. These epics helped define Greek religion, gave some substance to the loose sense of community between different Greek states, and were sources of knowledge.
The process in which Homeric poetry became separated from knowledge began quite early though, in Plato’s claims about the nature or morality and knowledge, along with his idea of the poet as inspired rather than knowledgeable. Still Plato’s targeting of Homer can only confirm that Homer matters philosophically. What was Plato attacking if not bad philosophical claims, failures to establish knowledge while claiming to have knowledge?
There is a familiar story of philosophy beginning with Thales and this may make some sense in terms of identifying the first texts which apparently distinguished themselves a having a kind of knowledge distinct from observation, poetry, myth, and mathematics. Nevertheless the road from the fragments of what Thales wrote, which is all we know of his thought, to the Platonic and Aristotelian treatises of lengthy philosophical reasoning is not the most straight of roads, and the Homeric ways of organising knowledge may lead just as much, if not more so, to the thought world of Athenian philosophy.
A notable current upturn in interest in philosophy as part of pre-urban and pre-literate culture, if from a rather small base, including the ways that ancient historians engaged in a kind of anthropology of the philosophies of ‘barbarians’, should lead us to think all the more of Homer’s place in philosophy, since the Homeric epics themselves contain oral tradition and traces of very early forms of social organisation alongside what comes from the Greek world of the eighth century BCE.
There is much more to say about Homer’s place in beginnings through repetition. Virgil produced a foundational myth and poetry for the early Roman Empire in his sequel to The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, which claims a Trojan origin to Rome, a claim followed up by medieval and early modern states, which somehow claimed to be inheritors of Roman sovereignty. The Renaissance (in the sense of the movement of the cultural movement associated with the end of the Middle Ages, leaving aside Renaissances that took place in the Middle Ages) has its earliest beginning in thirteenth century Florence, and as part of which Dante brings Ullysses/Odysseus into The Divine Comedy, if not at great length.
The Renaissance in its narrower sense, was connected with the fifteenth century printing of Homer, which drew on the eastern Roman (Byzantine) tradition of copying Homer. One of the major literary works in early sixteenth century England is George Chapman’s translation of Homer, which stands alongside Shakespeare and the King James Bible at the beginning of modern English literature, and even of modern English language in general.
The Enlightenment had one of its earliest masterpieces in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, which put Homer at the centre of the early stages of human history, which for Vico were repeated in the Middle Ages. Vlco is something of an overlooked Enlightenment figure, but much of what is in later Enlightenment discussions of civil history, jurisprudence, poetics, and social development is in Vico, who proposed that the Homeric use of imaginative universals was necessary to the development of abstract universals in Athenian philosophy, and further proposed that the poems show the beginning of the transition from societies based on force to societies based on law. In the critique, or radical extension, of Enlightenment, Nietzsche puts Homer at the centre of a definition of the morality of good and bad, its tension with the morality of good and evil
The Viconian interest in Homer at the beginning of human knowledge, repeated in the Middle Ages, informs the epics of James Joyce in the twentieth century: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. These are themselves definitive works of literary modernism transforming expectations of literature informing philosophical understanding of literature, as in Derrida’s essays on Joyce. Returning to the issue of a relatively direct encounter with Homer, the episode of the Sirens in The Odyssey plays an important role in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Sirens episode has also been a frequent reference in discussions of economic rationality, so making it fundamental to questions of what economic behaviour is, or any utility maximising and strategic form of behaviour. So Homeric epic gives us the poetry of barbarian violence and the early formation of economic humanity, a memory of philosophy in the world before the cities and the earliest calculations of economic behaviour.
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