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.

The later twentieth century saw a trend in the study of classical authors from a historical ('diachronic') approach to one that focused more on the author’s own times (a 'synchronic' approach) and on the text itself. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Homer, where the identification of Homer as an oral poet turned critics inward on his text and its special character. This Homer newly created, or 're-created', each instance of epic for each performance and his work was accordingly part of a largely irrecoverable performance tradition, rather than one in a history of interacting texts.

Nevertheless, we cannot really understand Homer, or the emergence of Greek literature, if we have no idea of the tradition that preceded him and of the different uses made of that tradition by poets of his time. And we should not exaggerate the fluidity of these poems: our Iliad and Odyssey were relatively fixed texts, which could be badged 'Homer', as far back as the sixth century BC and probably a good deal earlier. It is credible that the poems of his contemporaries were fixed to a similar extent, making after all a family of 'texts', with a recognisable intertextuality. Depending on our views of what was fixed and what was improvised, we may differ on the nature of this intertextuality: perhaps it will be easier to accept the recognition of the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon as a typical motif, 'argument between heroes', than to see in the sudden appearance of Thetis to lead the lament over Achilles (23.14), the footprint of a specific epic that depicted Thetis mourning the dead Achilles.

The subject of this chapter - in keeping with its chronological place in this section - is the importance of Homer for English epic up to the end of the eighteenth century. Its rationale, however, is not solely diachronic: the starting point is rather a widely accepted premise that between what goes before and what comes after there is a fault-line in the nature of the availability of Homer to English literary consciousness. A critical event can be readily identified, in the publication of F. A.Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer of 1795. This work itself is the product of a period of change and questioning: the eighteenth century saw a steady growth in historical, topographical and antiquarian interest in the ancient world. In relation to Homer, Robert Wood had provided one of the most influential landmarks in his investigation, based on travels undertaken in the early 1750s, of Homer’s own time and culture, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1769). Wolf, however, is definitive:

Why Homer?

The 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 repetitions, inconsistencies and irregularities which have led to their impeachment as products of a single mind. All of the uncertainties about Homer and his poems 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 unique. How can we account for their standing, and especially for 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 antiquity and modernity. But it is also to do more, for a perspective such as this is an invitation to study the intellectual and cultural history of value. And given his idealised role in our culture, Homer is an ideal place to begin such an inquiry.

By almost all accounts, The Marble Faun is the most obscure of Hawthorne's four full-length romances. Not only does it break stride with the other long romances and most of the short fiction by being set outside the United States ( “Rappaccini's Daughter,” the notable exception, is also set in Italy), but it seems even to violate Hawthorne's own carefully specified definition of romance fiction. This is the definition put forth in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, in which Hawthorne establishes the basic features of what becomes an influential, perhaps definitive American genre:

Describing the forest scene in The Scarlet Letter in which Hester and Dimmesdale “recognize that, in spite of all their open and secret misery, they are still lovers, and capable of claiming for the very body of their sin a species of justification,” novelist William Dean Howells writes, “There is greatness in this scene unmatched, I think, in the book, and I was almost ready to say, out of it.”The emotional climax in a book of many memorable scenes, Hester's and Dimmesdale's reunion in the forest has captured readers' imaginations for generations. Despite the importance of the love story of which that scene is a part, however, some of the best recent political readings of the novel have diverted our attention from or downplayed its significance.

For instance, in “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter” Jonathan Arac argues that the novel’s famous ambiguity needs to be understood in relation to the politics of inaction on the issue of slavery as expressed in Hawthorne’s campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce. As groundbreaking as this essay was, its major mention of the love story comes when Arac notes that “ ‘adulterer’ (or ‘adultery’?) is nowhere spelled out in Hawthorne’s text, just as ‘slavery’ is nowhere present in the Declaration or the Constitution.” Similarly, Sacvan Bercovitch asserts that the love scene Howells praises “is a lovers’ reunion, a pledge of mutual dependence, and no doubt readers have sometimes responded in these terms, if only by association with other texts. But in this text the focus of our response is the individual, not the couple (or the family).”