This book does not try to solve the ‘Homeric question’ of who Homer was and when (and how) he/she/they composed, although it does discuss the issues raised. Nor is it a book of literary criticism or a simple analysis of the poems' reception. What Porter offers us instead is a ‘cultural history … of an idea', in which Homer is ‘a peculiar cipher’.
Homer comes out of nowhere and for these poems to exist with no information as to their provenance is partly what makes them so fascinating. In chapter two (Who was Homer?) Porter examines the ‘biofeedback’ of visualisations of Homer both in the ancient world and more recently in the painting L'Apothéose d'Homère (1827) by Ingres. From the earliest times potential biographers were happy to ‘enter into a literary Wild West’ (p.65) as people speculated on his real name, his life story and his character. Ancient biographers had him falling in love with a woman called Penelope, advised by the Delphic oracle, mocked by clever children, and dying after falling in mud. Admirers speculated that his origins were divine, some detractors denied that he existed at all. The one thing they all agreed on was that they could not agree on anything about the source of this remarkable poetry. ‘Homer was treated as both real and fictional at the same time’ (p.71). He was everywhere and nowhere, looming large in Greek culture but disappearing like smoke when anyone tried to grab hold of him (to borrow an image from Iliad 23.100).
In chapter three (Apotheosis or Apostasy?) we see some damning appraisals. Xenophanes accused the poet of blasphemy, Heraclitus was said to recommend that Homer be beaten with a staff, while Plato wanted him thrown out of his republic for showing heroes behaving like emotional beings. Porter makes much of the story (known from the Contest of Homer and Hesiod §18 and even found on a wall painting in Pompeii) about children mocking the elderly Homer, and sees envy behind all the critique: ‘Homer had undeniable cachet. But with cachet comes envy … and even hostility’ (p.91). Homer also provoked competition and emulation: most obviously in Virgil, but also in writers such as Dictys and Dares under the Roman Empire who tried to discredit him with their own accounts of the Trojan War. Other Greek and Roman poets used Homeric tropes, paying him the compliment of assuming that their readers would recognise the references. Was Homer a divinely inspired and godlike figure or else a godless and highly flawed poet? The jury stayed out.
Chapter four (What did Homer see?) shows how Homer made Troy and Troy made Homer. The Trojan War was the ‘ground-zero of recorded human history’ (p.151), the last time when gods and men intermingled. It marked the end of the heroic age and the bridge between myth and history. The archaeology of Troy is neatly summarised (pp.152–4) and illustrated with a diagram, but then has its importance qualified: ‘any or all of these phases before 700 BCE could have contributed to the image or memory of Troy in its former glory and later demise’ (p.155). Troy vanished while the texts lived on, and Troy became a ‘theme-park-cum-museum’ as historians and archaeologists clambered over the sites and struggled to locate the poet's topography on Turkish soil, wanting proof that the poet was somehow an eyewitness.
The final chapter (Why war?) looks at the problematic violence in the Iliad and its ‘PTSD offspring’ the Odyssey. Is Homer condemning or celebrating brutality? The jingoistic reading of Homer as a naive philhellene celebrating the victory of the west over eastern barbarism is neatly smashed (p.180). What Homer loathes is not ‘the east’ but rather war itself. Can we justify the violence with the aesthetic pleasure of the poetry? Porter adduces two examples from the Iliad to illustrate Homer's ‘self-resistant poetics of war’: 3.371-2 where the lovely chinstrap is strangling Paris, and 9.186-9 where Achilles has a lovely lyre which was taken as spoils of brutal warfare. Is value found in ‘deathless fame’ or Vernant's ‘beautiful death’? Sarpedon's death (16.638-44) is hardly beautiful and Achilles himself (9.308-429) takes down the ‘everlasting fame’ point in what Jasper Griffin once called ‘the most splendid speech in Homer'. Porter takes us through several versions of the quest to justify the content from the form: Nietzsche showing the Apollonian gloss on Dionysian darkness, Simone Weil's essay on the centrality of force, and Auerbach's work on similes seeing the poems as unruffled surfaces which exist to divert the eye from the grim reality underneath. The book ends with a refusal to accept more modern ‘reparative’ readings in which the poetry conveys the pathos of vain human effort.
Porter's tone is strident in places and many of his assertions will provoke dispute, not least because many of his arguments need more development to carry conviction: this is especially so in his discussion of the philosophers (ancient and modern). There are also gaping holes in the texture: why does Porter barely mention Greek Tragedy, which made enormous (and challenging) use of Homeric material? Why does he not compare Homer with the many other cases where history becomes literature within a few generations? The book is inexpensive, well produced and proof-read, and has a useful timeline, a guide to further reading, a full bibliography and a general index. Quotations from Homer are given in Lattimore's translation and the style is brisk and energetic. Students (and teachers) will find much here to provoke thought and argument about the literary, cultural and moral issues which find expression and exploration via the pages of this most enigmatic of poets.
Open access
