Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to this short Episode 6 of Epic Greek History, Homer: Immortal Rock Star of the Ancient World. I’m Scott Emmons

If you were asked to name a book that was foundational to your nation’s literature and culture, what would it be? For the moment, let’s leave out religious texts like the Bible or the Koran. Obviously, they play a central role in many people’s lives, but what if you were asked to identify a work that both defined and continued to influence the culture you live in? Of course, it would vary from place to place. In Italy, most people would probably say Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Japan, The Tale of Genji would probably take top honors. Here in the U.S., Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is often held up as the wellspring of American literature, embodying individualism, independence and other American values. The same might be said of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or Thoreau’s Walden. But even if we can identify one book or one body of work — for the sake of argument, let’s say Huckleberry Finn — how present is it really in American life? How many times has the average American read it or even seen a movie of it? How much real estate does it take up in our consciousness on a day-to-day basis? I would venture to say not much. We have works that we consider classics, that we value as part of our heritage, but few of us interact with them regularly. Even if they influence our thinking and our values, it’s usually not at a conscious level.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. If you could time travel back to the 5th century BCE and ask that question in Athens or Corinth or just about anywhere in the Greek world, the answer would be obvious — Homer is the king, no question about it. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not just classics to be revered. They were that, but they were also very much alive. People heard them recited regularly at public performances. The Homeric epics were cultural common ground that helped give Greeks a sense of their shared identity — even while they were fiercely loyal to their own city-states. Homer provided inspiration for later authors, like the Athenian playwrights who often drew on Homeric stories and themes. The tragedian Aeschylus was quoted as saying tragedies were “nothing but scraps from Homer’s great banquet.” Homer was so central the culture, it’s worth one episode to explore how pervasive his influence was through all of Greek and Roman antiquity.

Now, we can’t say that Homer invented the Greek epic. We don’t even know if he was a real person, but if he was, he was working in a long tradition with its roots in orally composed poetry. What we can say is that by the time the Homeric epics were written down the standard form for a Greek epic poem was set. In the last episode, I talked about the dactylic hexameter, that distinctive, six-measure rhythm that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed in. I sampled the first two lines of the Iliad there, so this time I’ll illustrate by quoting the opening of the Odyssey in Greek, where Homer says — as translated by Robert Fagles:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns,
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered 
the hallowed heights of Troy.

It’s a good translation, but the English can’t convey the original rhythm, so here it is in Greek:

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν·

Even if you don’t know a word of Greek, you can hear that the rhythm is distinctive. You can also tell that this form has long lines, which makes it a good fit for narrative. Now, the hexameter wasn’t used only for epic. Hesiod used it in his didactic poetry, for example. But from Homer’s time on, if you were going to write a Greek epic, it had to be in dactylic hexameter. Even through all kinds of changes in literary fashion. In the third century BCE, over 400 years after Homer, a poet named Apollonius of Rhodes wrote the Argonautica, an epic poem telling the story of Jason and the Argonauts. This was the period known as the Hellenistic era, and the literary trend was far removed from the direct, simple narrative you get in Homer. What was in style was highly literary poetry with lots of allusions and obscure references to show off the erudition of the writer and the readers who were sophisticated enough to catch them. The Argonautica was a product of its time. Apollonius wove in esoteric versions of legends and other Hellenistic elements, but there was still no question that it had to be in the dactylic hexameter, the standard epic form. 

To get back to the Homeric poems themselves, it would be hard to overestimate the part they played in Greek life. We know they were part of basic education. Greek authors talk about it, and there’s some evidence on vase paintings too. I thought when I first went to record this that I’d seen at least one depiction of a schoolroom scene with a teacher holding a scroll with a quote from one of the Homeric epics. But then I made the mistake of fact-checking, and I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. Maybe that image exists somewhere, but I suspect it was a false memory. Still, there is a famous Athenian cup showing a schoolroom where a teacher holds a scroll with writing in an epic-style hexameter. It’s not an exact quote from Homer, but it’s at least Homer-adjacent. Vase paintings aside, it’s clear that the Iliad and the Odyssey would be part of any school curriculum. 

But they were much more than just school texts; they were popular entertainment. Festivals often included contests between performers called rhapsodes, who specialized in reciting the Homeric epics for audiences. We meet one of those performers in a dialogue of Plato called Ion. The title character is a professional rhapsode who goes from town to town competing at those festivals. He tells Socrates that he’s just come from a festival at Epidaurus, where he took the first prize, and he’ll be competing at the Panathenaea in Athens. In the course of the dialogue, we hear quite a bit how a rhapsode performed. He’d be dressed up in festive clothes, and according to Plato he might wear a gold wreath on his head. We know from other sources that a rhapsode typically held a long staff while reciting. So he’d cut a striking figure. Ion also describes how he produces an emotional response in the audience by feeling the emotions himself. As translated by Lane Cooper, quote: “I will tell you frankly that whenever I recite a tale of pity, my eyes are filled with tears, and when it is one of horror or dismay, my hair stands up on end with fear, and my heart goes leaping.” Unquote. He sounds a lot like a modern actor talking about their dramatic technique. So it’s clear that people went to these performances of centuries-old poetry to be entertained.

But entertaining as they might be, the Homeric epics were also revered. Homer has sometimes been described as the “ancient Greek Bible.” Which isn’t totally off base. It’s a rough analogy, because the Iliad and Odyssey weren’t religious texts, even though the gods played major roles in the narrative. This gets a little complicated, because the epics did shape popular conceptions of the gods. The historian Herodotus remarks at one point that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods — in other words, they established the gods’ genealogies, their appearance, and so on. But the epics weren’t used as religious texts in rituals. If you attended a sacrifice to Athena, for example, the priestess wouldn’t be chanting lines from the Iliad or the Odyssey. 

But even if they didn’t have that kind of religious significance, they did carry tremendous authority. There are instances in Greek history of city-states appealing to Homer to settle disputes. The classic example is an argument between Athens and its neighbor city Megara over which one should have control of the island of Salamis just off the coast. According to one account, they agreed to have Sparta arbitrate, and the Athenian statesman Solon cited a passage in the Iliad that said the hero Aias had brought his ships from Salamis and stationed them next to the Athenian ships. So that supposedly proved that Salamis had belonged to Athens from time immemorial. Advantage Athens.

Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and Homer is inspiring no less a figure than Alexander the Great. As the greatest conqueror of his time, he seems to have thought of himself as a kind of latter-day Achilles. The biographer Plutarch tells us that as soon as Alexander got to Asia, he went to Troy, where he honored the heroes of the Trojan War, and in particular he anointed the column that supposedly marked the grave of Achilles, ran a foot race by it with his companions, and laid a wreath on it. In another passage, Plutarch says, as translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, quote:

He regarded the Iliad as a handbook of the art of war and took with him on his campaigns a text annotated by Aristotle… which he always kept under his pillow together with his dagger.
Unquote

That passage puzzles me on a couple of levels. For one thing, Alexander used the Macedonian phalanx, which was a much more complex and organized war machine than anything Homer describes. There’s no way the Iliad could literally be a “handbook” for military tactics. Secondly, I suppose I could put a paperback of the Iliad under my pillow and sleep fairly comfortably, but a book in those days was a bulky papyrus scroll, and the Iliad contained 24 books! I don’t know what’s going on there, but that’s the story Plutarch tells, and he doesn’t seem to question the logistics.

So Homer always had enormous prestige throughout the Greek world. And in the third and second centuries BCE, as Rome was expanding and becoming more familiar with Greek culture, elite Romans started saying, “Hey, these Greeks have been doing some really cool things for centuries now, we ought to do some of this stuff too.” So Romans started learning Greek, studying Greek literature, and producing their own versions of Greek literary forms. That, of course, included epic, and a poet by the name of Ennius wrote a historical epic of Rome in Latin, adapting the time-honored dactylic hexameter of Homer. His epic, called the Annals, is now lost. But according to some sources it started with the poet saying he’d had a dream where Homer came to him and told him that his spirit had been reincarnated in Ennius.

Well, Roman imitation and adaptation of Homer reached its peak in one of the seminal works of European literature, the Aeneid of Vergil. Now, this requires a little back story. Vergil wrote under the patronage of Augustus Caesar, the first real Roman emperor, who was working hard to consolidate his power. Propaganda was a very important part of that effort. And one means of effective propaganda was to cultivate authors who would glorify and legitimize his rule. Vergil had already established himself as a major literary talent, so he was a likely candidate to become the new Homer for imperial Rome. 

And the Trojan story was perfect for his purposes. Roman legends had adopted the idea that Rome’s founders were descended from a Trojan — the hero Aeneas, who escaped the destruction of Troy and made his way to Italy. Aeneas brought his son with him, whose name was Ascanius, but he was also known by the name Iulus. One of the noble families in Rome, the Julian clan, claimed Iulus as an ancestor. And of course, one member of the Julian clan was a guy you may have heard of, Julius Caesar. Augustus was his nephew and adopted son. To make things even better for the Julians, that Trojan hero Aeneas was the son of the goddess Venus. So that meant Augustus could claim to be a direct descendant of a deity. Needless to say, Vergil had a lot of great raw material to work with.

Now, I’ll confess that, just as a matter of personal taste, it’s more exciting for me to read Homer than Vergil. But I’m still blown away by Vergil’s talent and skill in taking the essence of Homer and reworking it into the quintessential Roman epic. The first three words of the Aeneid essentially proclaim, “I’m the new Homer.” They do that by closely echoing the opening of both Homeric epics in a very ingenious way. Both Latin and Greek allow for a lot more freedom in word order than we have in English. So if you want to emphasize a word, you can put it in a prominent position. The Iliad is about the wrath of Achilles, and the very first word is “Wrath.” It’s the direct object —he's calling on the muse to sing the wrath — but it has that emphatic position as the first word in the epic, which is mostly concerned with war and fighting. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is about a man, Odysseus. And Homer does the same thing by putting the word “man,” “andra,” at the very start. Vergil begins the Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano.” “Arms and the man I sing.” I’m singing of arms, because my work is an Iliad. 

And I’m singing of a man, because my work is an Odyssey. And the whole structure of the Aeneid bears that out. The first half parallels the Odyssey, with the hero’s wandering and struggles to reach Italy. The second half parallels the Iliad, featuring war with local tribes once he gets there. Even though I’m Team Homer for sure, my hat’s off to Vergil for what he accomplished.

And that brings us to what really blows my mind about all of this — the sheer staying power of Homer’s influence in the Greco-Roman world. It doesn’t end with Vergil. Over the next centuries, poets like Lucan, Statius, and others continued to write Latin epics in hexameters, on the Homeric model. Greek authors in the Roman empire kept imitating Homer in new epics, sticking to the hexameter and even the peculiar epic dialect of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And it’s not like literary and artistic tastes weren’t changing all the time. Even looking back to classical Athens, what was fashionable in tragedy changed significantly between the earlier playwright Aeschylus and the later Euripides. And yet, through centuries of change and evolution in literary tastes, Homer never went out of style. 

For example… In the third or fourth century CE — that’s A.D., if you prefer that notation — a poet named Quintus Smyrnaeus wrote a Greek epic called Posthomerica, which picked up where the Iliad left off and told the story of the fall of Troy. In the fifth century CE, Nonnus of Panopolis, a Greek city in Egypt, wrote the longest known ancient Greek epic, about the life of the god Dionysus. Now, in the fifth century, we’re in late antiquity — a time when the Roman Empire, at least in the west, is in deep decline. But here’s this author still imitating the form and style of Homer, who lived 1200 years in the past! That strikes me as extraordinary. If we look back at English literature from 1200 years ago, we’re in Beowulf territory. Is anyone out there writing narrative poems in Old English using Beowulf as a template? The language alone has changed so much, it would be impossible. To me, this is one of those aspects of ancient life that show how different it was from life today. Try to imagine a world where a thousand-year-old poem would still be relevant and even current.

Well, today, the Homeric epics are still being translated and published. They’re still accessible, not just to academics, but to a general audience. But most of us treat them in the same way we treat most classics. As Mark Twain put it, “something that everybody wants to have read but no one wants to read.” In the ancient Greek and Roman world, people did read them. And those who couldn’t read heard them performed. Homer transcended passing literary trends and maintained his position at the top of the poetic pantheon. Herodotus said Homer gave the Greeks their gods. In a sense, he might have said he gave the Greeks their culture.

That’s it for Episode 6. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please make sure you follow and tell your friends. If you’d like to help defray the cost of producing Epic Greek History, you can do so for as little as three dollars a month by clicking the “Support” button at epicgreekhistory.com. If you have comments, corrections, or anything else to communicate, shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.