Our Iliad and Odyssey begin as acts of translation. The background to the Iliad is that of possibly archaic orality. The transfer into writing implies translation in both the generic and the more technical sense. The world of the rhapsode and the bard, of the singer of ancient tales, many-layered, open to personal and local variations, is not that of the writer. The relation of text to audience - literally to the listener - is altogether different from that of writer to reader. Perforce, we have no knowledge of the epic of Troy, of the heroic and clan-sagas which went into its assemblage, prior to 'Homer'. What is manifest, however, is the process of linguistic adjustment and semantic stylisation. The idiom of the Iliad as we know it is a composite artifice in which vestiges of archaic forms and dialects still surface. The redactor has translated, not always with absolute confidence or understanding, from diverse lexical-grammatical materials.

Responses to Homer during the 'Romantic' age (roughly, 1770-1830) were largely positive yet the emphases were often subtly different from those of the previous period and sometimes registered challenge or difficulty as well as easy acceptance. Many writers were prepared to acknowledge that Homer, or 'Homer', was endowed with a special authority which, like that of Shakespeare, gained in force from the absence of biographical detail. Homer was an originator, an original genius, the great poetic father (according, among others, to Godwin, Coleridge and Lamb). The worlds of the Iliad, the Odyssey (and, for some readers, the Hymns) were vividly realised yet almost 'unimaginably different' from those which had developed in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Homer’s achievement was often unquestioned but it could be daunting and untouchable. This complex of reactions was given expression by Robert Southey in July 1797 when he wrote: 'With Homer and Milton no future, indeed no other, poems can be compared. The age of the one and the subject of the other preclude it, independant of their unequalled and perhaps unequalable merit.' Phrases such as 'old Homer' (used, for example, by Keats and Hazlitt) signalled that the Greek poet, who was still conveniently compressed into one individual by most readers, was endowed with the wisdom and insight achieved by experience: in artistic representations he is never youthful, unlike Apollo, the god with special jurisdiction over poetic affairs.

Narrative method has long been a central issue in Homeric scholarship, since Analysts relied on narrative difficulties to identify earlier levels, while Unitarians responded by claiming that an understanding of Homer’s narrative rules would explain inconsistencies. More recently, oral poetry and structuralist narratology have contributed to more understanding of Homer’s narrative techniques. Yet even while scholars have treated Homeric narrative as problematic, readers have been moved by the poems.

To the Greeks of the eighth century, epic presented a remote, splendid, shared past. Heroic stories were a valuable cultural resource; they provided entertainment, historical continuity and a method of ethical thought. Epic performance was an especially important vehicle for transmitting these tales: at a successful performance, everyone shared in excitement, sorrow and admiration, making the occasion a source of social cohesion. The familiarity of the main characters and stories, reinforced by epic’s conservative language and style, offered stability in a changing world, while the flexibility of performance meant that the stories could be adapted to their immediate contexts.

We are never outside what the anthropologist Gayle Rubin has taught us to call a 'sex

gender system': it is the task of cultural critics - anthropologists, literary scholars, classicists, archaeologists - to specify the components and dynamics of such systems as they take cultural form, whether in societies or in artefacts like poems. Sex, sexuality, gender, reproduction, production and ideas about all of these are structurally linked in any society; consider, for example, Lévi-Strauss’s meditation on exogamy - the exchange or 'traffic in women' between social groups, fundamental to human communities thus far - as the foundational requirement for any human traffic, for society itself. Over the last thirty years scholars and activists have greatly refined our understanding about sex, sexuality and gender: a sex-gender system is not simply about men and women, nor even about 'masculinity' vs. 'femininity', or 'homosexuality' vs. 'heterosexuality'. Each of these categories has a history and a cultural specificity; it is a truism worth repeating that sexuality, gender and ideas thereof are culturally variable. Yet just as the linguist Émile Benveniste observed that nowhere do we find a human society without language, so we might also say that nowhere do we find a human society without a sex-gender system (however debated, brittle or fragile) - some way of organising sexual dimorphism, reproduction and child-rearing.

The portrait of Homer that forms the frontispiece of this volume hangs in the Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice. It is generally thought to be an early work of Mattia Preti (1613-1699), from a period when the influence of Caravaggio on him was strong. As a rendering of the bard, considered retrospectively from the twenty-first century, it offers much to ponder. The general appearance - closed, useless eyes upon a gaunt and bearded face - follows the ancient type. The upward turn of the head, however, evokes ancient portraits of Alexander of Macedon, that great dreamer, and the painting’s dark and brooding atmosphere, like many other portraits of the seicento, seems already to evoke the spirit of Romanticism. Proto-Romantic too is the stress on the inspiration of the lonely genius. The principal light in the picture streams from heaven, abode of the Muses, the source of this inspiration. It falls full on the unseeing eyes, underscoring the paradox that the blind poet sees more than the sighted. Yet the poet is no mere passive receptacle. Above his eyes, Homer’s deep brows are obscured by Apollo’s laurels; this is a learned poet, like the docti poetae of Hellenistic Alexandria or Catullan Rome. The doctor’s robes reinforce the point: medieval, of course. The wreath too more probably springs from medieval conceptions of the poet’s garb or from the famous close of the third book of Horace’s Odes - sume superbiam | quaesitam meritis, et mihi Delphica | lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam - than from close knowledge of Greek cultic practice.

On 12 April 1989 in the Main House of the Düsseldorf Theatre a staged version of Homer’s Iliad had its première. Die Ilias des Homer was a co-production between the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and the Schauspiel Essen. It was presented in two parts, each lasting two and a half hours, directed by Hansgöunther Heyme and Hanns-Dietrich Schmidt, based on the translation into German by the Homer scholar Wolfgang Schadewaldt (1900-74) who had completed work on the project shortly before his death. A proposal to make the version into a television production to be shown in the early evening in order to attract a young audience to Homer had foundered for financial reasons.

Alongside his research, Schadewaldt also worked extensively on translations, many of which were published in the later stages of his career and some of which were staged. In 1958 he had published a prose translation of the Odyssey so the Iliad translation both completed his translation of Homer and linked to his staged translations of Greek drama. Schadewaldt also published works on the history of German culture, especially on the relationship between classicism and Romanticism, including Goethe-Studien: Natur und Altertum (1963). T

Latinists are accustomed to measuring Homer’s presence in Rome by his impact on Roman poetry. Epic looms largest in this regard, but most poetic genres can be regarded to some extent as derivatives of Homer. And even outside of poetry, Homer’s impact on Latin letters is not small. But the reception of Homer by Roman culture is a very widespread phenomenon that is hardly confined to literature. Homerising literature in Latin needs to be understood as part of a much broader and more pervasive Homeric presence in material culture and social practice. Abundant evidence from the material and social spheres shows that elite Romans lived in a world pervaded by Homer, and would have done whether Roman poets had interested themselves in Homer or not. That the poets did so should be regarded as an outgrowth of material and social considerations rather than as their source. This is not to challenge traditional ideas about the importance of literary-historical engagements with Homer by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Virgil and others. Such ideas have been voiced many times, and each of these important authors is in his own way justified to claim the title of 'the Roman Homer'. But habitual celebration of poetic achievement without due attention to the broader cultural milieu in which the poets worked has produced a very partial picture of Homer’s presence throughout Roman culture. Accordingly, in part one of this essay I will survey the nonliterary presence of Homer in Rome and elsewhere in Italy as a context for understanding Homeric elements in the realm of Roman literature. In the second half of the essay, I will proceed to literary evidence, but will focus on those aspects that look to the circulation of Homer in Roman social life, again as a context for more belletristic performances of Homer. In following this procedure, I do not mean to give short shrift to such monuments of Homeric culture as Ennius' Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid. Rather, I hope to redress an imbalance between the use of literary and nonliterary evidence in assessing Homer’s impact at Rome.

Father Homer

In antiquity the relationship between Homer and subsequent Greek literature was figured through a series of (often overlapping) images: Homer was the 'source' from which all subsequent writers were irrigated, the fountainhead of both subject and style, and also the 'father' of all later literature (cf. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 25.265). On a famous late Hellenistic relief by Archelaos of Priene (Plate 1) the enthroned poet is acclaimed by (among others) History, Poetry, Tragedy and Comedy, and crowned by Time and 'Oikoumene' (the inhabited world) as being, in Thucydides' hopeful words about his own work, not only 'a possession for all time', but also one for everyone; no one 'owns' Homer.

Where the Iliad deals with one short phase of the Trojan War, the Odyssey tells the drawn-out story of the Achaean hero Odysseus after the sack of Troy: his enforced wanderings, his return to his homeland Ithaca, his struggle to regain his kingdom and Penelope, his queen, who has spent the best part of twenty years resisting the advances of the local princes.

The Odyssey has long been regarded as a poem like, but not like, the Iliad. For 'Longinus', in the first century ad, the poem is 'an epilogue' to the Trojan epic, and in support of this proposition the critic cites old Nestor’s recollections of the Trojan battlefield, as told to Odysseus' son Telemachus in Book iii:

The Iliad celebrates a ritualised way of living and dying and, complementary to it, practises a ritualised way of describing that living and dying – which is the aesthetic rationale of its formulaic alternations and repetitions. It celebrates also a human striving for heroism and an agreed, if elusive, harmony of human striving and divine facilitation. The Odyssey is different. Though its formulaic idiom, its ritualism and its heroic ideal are similar, the Odyssean universe, by comparison, seems restless and less assured of any ultimate correspondence than concerned to achieve one. Even before the action of the poem is under way, the Odyssey foregrounds the issue of disharmony of the spheres.

In the last thirty years a great deal of sophisticated work has been done on the notion of metaphor: linguisticians, philosophers, scientists and archaeologists, amongst others, have all joined in the debate. At the centre of the discussion has been the 'location' of metaphor: is it a distortion of ordinary (= 'degree zero') language, or is it, on the contrary, at the very centre of linguistic usage? Far less attention, however, has been devoted to the closely related linguistic-rhetorical figure of the simile. In the recently published Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, for instance, the entry on 'simile' receives 30 lines, as against 258 for 'metaphor'. Yet there are certain forms of literature in which similes forge well ahead of metaphors as regards the insistence of their claims upon readers' attention. A prime example of such a form is Homeric epic.

Before approaching Homer directly, however, I want to ask a preliminary and very basic question. Is there anything to be gained, in spite of all the theoretical elaborations in recent criticism,3 by retaining an elementary, formal, linguistically based distinction between metaphor and simile, according to which a metaphor is a comparison which does not contain a word signifying ‘like’ or ‘as’, whereas a simile is a comparison which – however short or long – does contain such a term? To describe the ocean as ‘like an unfingered harp’ will be, on that formal definition, to use a simile; whereas to observe, with Stephen Spender, that ‘afternoon burns upon the wires of the sea’, will be to employ a metaphor

More than half of the Homeric epics consists of speech by characters, not narrative by the narrator. That is a very high proportion, and the speeches, with their scope, variety, and vividness, are a striking feature of the poems. That was to have momentous consequences. Homer is, as Plato says, the first and greatest of the tragic poets; and without the example of Homer, showing the heroes and heroines of myth conversing in dialogue in a high style, Attic tragedy would never have come into existence in the form that it did. That would have had grave implications for the plays of Seneca, and consequently for all European verse drama, including Shakespeare. It was the Homeric epics which showed how it was possible to present great figures, participants in elevated and significant action, conversing in a manner which was at once dignified and true to convincing human psychology. From Homer the line runs to Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. By contrast Virgil, who took so much from Homer, does not excel at dialogue and never has extended conversations. Dialogue in the Aeneid is normally just statement and reply, and a famous scene with Dido is broken off with Aeneas 'still having much to say'.

Can the oldest text of European literature be the greatest ever composed? An epic of killing, unprecedented and sui generis in myriad ways, was perhaps completed before ink and stylus were (re-)introduced to a savage European continent, long after the crash or whimpers of the Bronze Age, citadel dominated civilisation that in some way the poem celebrates. This narrative of and meditation on death, loss and individual decisiveness became and remains fundamental for Mediterranean, European and even transatlantic literature. In the third, computerised millennium, when many still endorse Christian ethics of 'turn the other cheek' but otherwise rigorously forget former canons of honour, beauty and truth, conscientious readers anxiously confront this complex, inexplicable colossus, the Iliad. A provoked but fiercely introspective and precisely responsive young man becomes angry, and this anger trumps his community’s desperate need for help. The consequences of Akhilleus' decisions for himself, his friends and his enemies constitute the Iliad, a uniquely long and uniquely coherent poem by some one or many called 'Homer'. This synoptic consideration of its plot hopes to orient new readers to the story and provoke returning ones to consider afresh the terrifying subject, the various nature of the narrative with its inimitable pacing and episodic units, the characters, and their social and personal values nigh incomprehensible today.