Plato criticizes Homer’s effort to promote religious skepticism through his portrayal of the gods for overestimating the power of human reason and underestimating the power of human passions, and he criticizes Homer’s education concerning human excellence for inadvertently glamorizing the passionate and tragic hero Achilles and all too effectively hiding his own example as a philosophic thinker behind the mask of the divinely inspired singer. Plato therefore replaces the Homeric education with a new, poetic, Platonic education that presents Socrates – the fearless, dispassionate, self-sufficient, apolitical philosopher who promulgates the pious, edifying, and reassuring doctrines of the separate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul – as an explicit object of admiration and model for imitation.

A study of Homer in conjunction with Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche confirms that Homer was a philosophic thinker and that he plays an illuminating role in the thought of each of the three political philosophers. This study also shows that there are many ways of living a philosophic life; that philosophers may present themselves in different guises depending on the political, religious, and intellectual circumstances they may find themselves in; that their most fundamental choice is whether or not to present themselves explicitly as philosophers; and that therefore we must broaden our understanding of who a philosopher is beyond those who explicitly present themselves as philosophers and consider the possibility that a number of poets, statesmen, historians, and even theologians of the past may also be philosophers in their own right.

Homer plays an important but overlooked role in the history of political philosophy. Plato criticizes the philosophic tradition founded by Homer and establishes a new one in its place; Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two leading philosophic critics of Plato, invoke Homer in their arguments against Plato and his legacy.