From the Hellenistic period, rhetoric became a branch of knowledge which addressed all forms of literary discourse, prose and poetry alike, and thus the only branch of knowledge specializing in the exegesis of poetry. For a number of reasons, Aristotle’s theory of mimetic fiction exerted no significant influence on the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine literary culture, and it is not before the High Renaissance that poetics re-emerged as a self-contained discipline approaching literature on its own terms. This supremacy of rhetoric or, as Pierre Chiron puts it in this volume, ‘l’impérialisme de la rhétorique’ (161) is the conceptual rationale behind the present collection of essays. The volume’s focus on Homer is also amply justified. Homer was not only the initiator of the Graeco-Roman poetic tradition and the perpetual reference point for any form of literary discourse from the Classical period to the end of antiquity. He was also regarded as the founding father of rhetoric, and his comparison of the speaking styles of Menelaus and Odysseus in Iliad 3 became a locus classicus which, alongside the ‘honey-sweet’ manner of speaking characterizing his Nestor, laid the foundation for the universally accepted classification of the styles of oratory (cf. Quint. Inst. 12.10.64–65).
The editors of the volume under review are well aware of all this. What interests them, however, are not mere tokens of Homer’s presence in the Graeco-Roman rhetorical tradition but, rather, a comprehensive engagement with the theme ‘Homer and ancient rhetoric’. As stated in the introduction (14), the two main axes around which the 14 essays of this volume arranged are (a) the rhetorical reception of the oratory of Homeric speakers (the case studies include Hermes and Calypso in Odyssey 5 and the Embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9, both discussed in the scholia, as well as Telemachus’ development as a speaker throughout the Odyssey as traced by Eustathius); and (b) Homer’s rhetorical apparatus, that is, the rhetorical figures of speech employed in his poems as identified and analysed by ancient theorists. These correspond to Part One and Part Two, respectively; but there is also Part Three, which addresses references to Homer in rhetorical literature of different historical periods, from Quintilian in the first century AD (Pascale Paré-Rey) to Julius Caesar Scaliger in the 16th century (Christiane Deloince-Louette). The material discussed includes both such ancient texts that are exclusively dedicated to Homer, namely, Homeric scholia (Christodoulos Zekas, Anne-Marie Favreau-Linder, Sylvie Perceau, Françoise Létoublon), Pseudo-Plutarch’s On Homer (Hélène Fuzier), Eustathius’ Commentary on the Homeric poems (Jean-Luc Vix, Corinne Jouanno, Perceau, Pierre-Yves Testenoire) and compositions of a more general character: Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime (Sophie Conte), the On Figures by Alexander Numenius (Chiron), Aelius Aristides (Vix, Martin Steinrück, Johann Goeken) and more.
Although the material discussed mainly belongs to the Imperial period, it is reasonable to suppose that much of it originated in earlier times and that the majority of sources at our disposal represent a common rhetorical tradition rather than original contributions of individual authors (Chiron, 152). Nevertheless, not a few new syntheses emerge. Thus, Favreau-Linder convincingly argues that the approach to Homer adopted in the bT scholia is predominantly rhetorical and that the professional terminology the scholiasts employ corresponds to the one used between the end of the Hellenistic period and the first centuries of the Imperial era (60). Steinrück draws attention to the nonconformity of Aelius Aristides who, rather than routinely evoking the Menelaus-Odysseus comparison in Iliad 3, turns to a comparison of the rhetorical styles of Nestor and Menelaus as represented in books 3 and 4 of the Odyssey (95). Diverging from the scholia on which he normally heavily depends, Eustathius enthusiastically embraces parechesis (the repetition of the same sound), a rhetorical figure identified by Hermogenes in the second century AD, which is absent from the Homeric scholia; furthermore, he develops a full-scale theory of parechesis which is based on diachronic developments in Greek phonology (Testenoire, 163–76). It is a pity that there is nothing on Dio of Prusa, whose deconstruction of Homer’s narrative in the Trojan Oration signalled a crisis in Homer’s reputation as (to quote the subtitle of Paré-Rey’s chapter on Quintilian) summus et primus auctor.
A tension between Homer and Vergil, already discernible in Quintilian (Paré-Rey, 202–04), culminates in the middle of the 16th century, in Scaliger’s dismantlement of Homer’s supremacy and his opposing of Homer’s ‘rude’ style to the stylistic perfection of Vergil (Deloince-Louette, 229, 233–36). Scaliger’s stance on Homer was highly influential in the subsequent centuries. Yet the middle of the 16th century was also when the revival of interest in Aristotle’s Poetics stimulated the birth of literary criticism as an independent discipline rather than a branch of rhetoric. This new development, however, lies beyond the scope of the present collection, which admirably fulfils its purpose to add a new chapter to the history of Homeric reception.
