7 - Virgil versus Homer: Reception, Imitation, Identity in the French Renaissance

Summary

Of all the poets of the ancient world, Virgil is clearly the one who survived most successfully throughout the Middle Ages, despite the competition of perhaps his closest rival, Ovid. Manuscripts of Virgil were frequent in medieval libraries, and his status as a messianic prophet, founded on the fourth Eclogue, clearly did much to enhance his reputation. Moreover, his compositions in a range of poetic genres made him an ideal model for later poets, while the propagandistic elements in his works provided material which could be exploited for patriotic purposes later on by Renaissance writers who were developing a sense of national or local identity. For centuries his position went unchallenged but, with the rediscovery of Homer, humanists developed a greater awareness of Virgil's debt to his Greek predecessor.

The works of Homer were unknown in the West throughout the Middle Ages except by reputation, and it was not until around 1353 that Petrarch finally realized his ambition of obtaining a manuscript of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even then, he was unable to read them, relying eventually on a word-for-word translation into Latin by Leontius Pilatus. It was not until the last decades of the fifteenth century, however, that the Homeric epics became known to a wider audience, thanks in part to the editio princeps of the Greek text in 1488, and also to the various Latin translations of homer that found their way into print.