1 - Homer, Ossian and Modernity

Summary

THE HOMERIC QUESTION

The Homeric question was set in train by the English traveller Robert Wood, whose 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer initiated over two centuries of debate about the poet. Wood, among other things, asserted that the poet was probably illiterate; this was taken up by the German scholar Friedrich Wolf at the end of the eighteenth century and made the basis of the contention that he was not one single poet at all. At its most obvious level, then, this was a controversy about whether ‘Homer’ was one poet or many – both whether the same poet composed the Iliad and the Odyssey and whether, more radically, either poem was composed by a single author at all: ought they rather to be thought of as compositions made out of multiple original shorter poems or lays? But to put the matter in this way is to lose sight of what was at stake in the controversy. The effort to dissolve the Homeric epics into constituent lays was only the most visible aspect of a line of argument which, in a manner broadly typical of a phase of the Enlightenment, as we have seen, sought to historicize them; in the words of Wood, reproducing one phase of that interpretative circle in which the poems came to be understood, ‘it is principally from him [Homer] that we have formed our ideas of that sameness in the pursuits and occupations of mankind in the Heroic ages, which is the genuine character of an early stage of Society’.