Just a bunch of quotes from this book, tracing the influence of Homer through Western thought.

"Every great work of literature is either the Iliad or the Odyssey. - Raymond Queneau

"Though Homer might have been 'best and most divine' for Socrates (or rather for Plato, who made Socrates pronounce this encomium), he also presented a philosophical dilemma... those who make images of images have no place in a well-regulated world, since they produce nothing that is true... Even Homer (and here begins Plato's battle with the poet he most admires) cannot be allowed in the ideal republic because, not only does he put forward images that are untrue, he presents men and women with whose faults we sympathize, gods and goddesses whom we must judge as fallible. Literature, Plato says, feeds that part in our soul that relishes 'contemplating the woes of others', praising and pitying someone who, though 'claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief.' This 'is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight' and, to avoid it, we should 'disdain the poem altogether', otherwise, 'after feeding fat the emotion of pity there, it is not easy to restrain it in our own suffering.'"

"Virgil's Aeneid, perhaps the greatest Roman literary achievement, is explicitly modeled on Homer's poems, and if Virgil owes an immense debt to Homer, the reverse is also true, because after Virgil, Homer acquired a new identity, that of Rome's earliest myth-maker. During the first Roman centuries, three legendary figures competed for the position of founder of the city: Romulus who, with his twin brother Remus, was supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf, Ulysses the traveller, and Aeneas, the survivor of Troy. It was Marcus Terentius Varro, 'the most learned of Romans' according to the rhetorician Quintilian, who, in the first century BC, established Aeneas as the winner... but it was Virgil who transformed the legend into something resembling history, lending the defeated Trojans a posthumous victory over their enemy. Thanks to Virgil, the works of Homer, which had seemed until that point to be merely stories (albeit masterly) of battling and travel, were read after Virgil as inspired premonitions of the world to come: first of Rome and its imperial power, and later of the advent of Christianity and beyond."

"For the great scholars and readers of the early Church, the apparent conflict between the old pagan literature and the dogma of the new faith presented a difficult intellectual problem. One of the most learned of these Christian scholars, St. Jerome, attempted throughout his long life to reconcile the two. Jerome realized that he could never honestly disclaim Homer as his own beginning, nor could he ignore the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure Homer's books had given him. Instead, he could create a hierarchy, a gradus ad Parnassum of which Homer and the ancients were the necessary grounding, and the Bible the highest peak."

"By the end of the fourth century, the division between the Greek east and the Latin west half of the Empire became more evident. In the east, Church and state lent its citizens the sense of living in a divinely appointed Christian realm, while in the west, service to the emperor and service to the Christian authorities were seen as two separate duties. Intellectually, the east held as essential the traditional study of the classics, both Greek and Latin; in the west, classical scholarship was judged part and parcel of pagan beliefs. Therefore, while Homer continued to be edited, studied and read in Constantinople, in Rome he all but faded from the memory of readers... While in the east, Bishop Athanasius told holy virgins 'to have books in their hands at dawn', in the west, Christians quoted Augustine who had written approvingly of holy men who lived through 'faith, hope and charity - without books.'"

"Towards the end of the Middle Ages, scholars and poets returned, once again, to the questions that had preoccupied Jerome and Augustine regarding the relationship between Homer's stories and the stories of the Bible... a search for correspondences between what the ancients had told and what the Church had revealed, establishing a sequence of parallel readings that honoured one without dishonouring the other.. for example, Achilles in the Iliad and David in the Old Testament, or between the stages of Ulysses' return and the troubled exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. In the early fourteenth century, Albertino Mussato, the most celebrated of the members of the cenacolo padovano or Paduan Circle of Latin poets, argued that the pagan writers had expressed the same ideas as those found in Scripture, but in the form of enigmas or riddles in which they had secretly announced the coming of the True Messiah."

"Dante acquired his Homer through Virgil... in this sense, Virgil was not only Dante's guide through Hell, he was also his source and inspiration, and through him Dante was able to enjoy the experience of Homer's work... Even though the complex architecture of the afterlife realm is, to a large degree, Dante's own, the foundation-stone is Homer's."

"Michel de Montaigne, writing in the last decades of the sixteenth century, chose Homer as one of the three 'most excellent of men' of all time... 'Nothing lives on the lips of men,' wrote Montaigne, 'like his name and his work: nothing is as known or accepted as Troy, Helen and his wars - that may never have taken place on real ground. Who does not know of Hector and Achilles? Not only individual lineages but most nations seek their origins in Homer's inventions. Mehemet II, Emperor of the Turks, wrote thus to our Pope Pius II: "I am amazed that the Italians should band against me, since we both have a common Trojan origin and, like the Italians, I have an interest in avenging the blood of Hector on the Greeks whom they however favour against me."'

"But Homer could be understood as a counter-argument to the Enlightenment's view of a world driven by rationality alone, a view put forward, for instance, in Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream of 1769. The book, intelligent and humorous, consists of a series of philosophical dialogues in which Diderot proposes a revised materialist account of human history and animal life, suggesting that emotions, ideas and thoughts could be explained through biological evidence, without recourse to theology or spirituality, and dismissing all uncritical reverence for the past... For Diderot, Homer belonged to a primitive, superstitious age."

"For Shelley too, Greece was Homer. Homer's poems, he wrote in A Defence of Poetry in 1821, 'were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations.'"

"If Homer had created the model both of craft and theme, then, Byron believed, it was the modern poet's task to translate both elements into a contemporary idiom. The subjects of war and travel in the Iliad and the Odyssey were recast into Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-24), in which both heroes have something of Ulysses in their makeup and become the privileged witnesses of less than heroic Troys."

"Shortly before his death in 1832, Goethe finished the last section of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. In it, he hails his century as one fortunate enough to have witnessed the rebirth of Homer. 'Happy is that literary age,' he wrote, 'when great works of art of the past rise to the surface again and become part of our daily dealings, for it is then that they produce a new effect. For us, Homer's sun rose again, and according to the requirements of our age... No longer did we see in those poems a violent and inflated heroic world, but rather the mirrored truth of an essential present, and we tried to make him as much ours as possible.'"

"Homer was for Nietzche a creative Apollonian force that wrote his poems 'in order to persuade us to continue to live.' Homer's gods justify human life by sharing it with us mortals; for his heroes, the greatest pain is therefore to leave this life, especially when one is young... Freud did, however, follow Nietzche in noting that the value we place on life after death was a development of post-Homeric times and, like Nietzche, quoted in support of his theory the answer Achilles gave to Ulysses in the Underworld."

"William Butler Yeats, in an essay written in 1905, which Joyce had with him in Trieste, had suggested that the time was ripe for a new writer to revisit the ancient world of the Odyssey. 'I think that we will learn again,' he said with visionary wisdom, 'how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slowly gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all these so different things... become... the signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination.' In Yeats' rallying call, and in Vico, Joyce found confirmation of his intuition. Philological synchronicities bolstered his confidence. The Odyssey begins with Ulysses on Calypso's island, Ogygia. Joyce discovered that Ogygia was the name that Plutarch had long ago given to Ireland. Although Joyce had told Vladimir Nabokov in 1937 that basing his Ulysses on Homer's poem was 'a whim' and that his collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in preparing a Homeric correspondence to Ulysses was 'a terrible mistake' (Joyce deleted the Homeric titles of his chapters before Ulysses was published in book form), Homer's presence is very obviously noticeable throughout the novel. Nabokov suggested that a mysterious character who keeps appearing in Ulysses, described only as 'the man in the brown macintosh' and never clearly identified, might be Joyce himself lurking in his own pages. It might just as well be Homer, come to supervise the renovation of his works."

"In the process of association, however, they all become Joycean, as in the beautiful use of Homeric epithets in Joyce's description of the Citizen Cyclops:

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero."

"Joyce's Ulysses is not an interpretation of Homer, neither is it a retelling, even less a pastiche. Dr. Johnson, writing in 1765, argued that 'The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new-name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments. The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.'

Joyce did other than acknowledge Homer's position: he re-imagined the story of the primordial journey undertaken by every man in every age. His coupling was less between Ulysses and Bloom than between Homer and Joyce himself, less between the creations than between the creators. Other writers made Homer theirs through translation, transposition, projection. Joyce did it by starting again." ( )

A nice, compact cultural history of different ways of reading the founding epics of Greek culture, from the ancient Greeks themselves right through to Margaret Atwood and Derek Walcott. As erudite and wide-ranging as you would expect from Manguel, but lively and accessible at the same time. Some predictable stuff — Keats and Chapman's Homer — but also plenty of less obvious insights, like the odd ways stories taken from Homer came into the north European folktale repertoire via Arabic literature. Or the Counter-Reformation prejudice against Greek culture that left Homer largely unread in Catholic Europe in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, to the extent that Miguel de Unamuno could be appointed professor of Greek in Salamanca in 1891 despite having no knowledge of that language. (Manguel points out that Racine made Greek socially acceptable again in France.)

Inevitably, in such a short book, there isn't space to explore everything — Henry Fielding only gets a brief mention, for instance, and Christa Wolf is missed out altogether. But, true to his origins, Manguel does give us a short discussion of the Argentinian epic Martin Fierro, whilst the closing chapter is mostly taken up by a discussion of a story by his own mentor, Borges.

This probably isn't a book that will make you read Homer if you never saw the need to before, but it is helpful in giving a bit of perspective on the sort of role the Iliad and Odyssey have played in Western culture over the past three millennia. And it's a great pleasure to read for its own sake. ( )

This book takes the reader through the history of the two great epics and of later perspectives on Homer. In the process we not only learn a huge amount on how later writers reacted to Homer but also we get to see an interesting angle on the thought of those later writers. ( )

The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are considered to be among the most influential works of literature ever written, second only to the "Bible" in the scope and depth of their influence. Thus, a book that focuses on Homer's historic works was an obvious choice for the "Books that Changed the World" series. The goal of this work is to explore how the Homeric works have influenced writers over the past 2800 years. The adjective "Homeric" is useful, as it acknowledges that there most likely was no single author of either of these two works, which instead are the only written versions we have of orally- transmitted epic poems that predate the invention of Greek writing.

Alberto Manguel, the author of this work, is erudite and eloquent, with an encyclopedic grasp of great literature. Then what's not to like? Frankly, while the author's knowledge of western literature is impressive, I found this work a bit frustrating to read; it wanders from topic to topic, inserting a few lines of poetry here, discussing a tangential point there, and ultimately leaving the reader (or this one at least) with very little that was tangible and even less that was memorable. If 10 competent historians of science were asked to describe the ways that Darwin's "Origin of Species" changed scientific history, their responses would likely be very similar, since the facts are indisputable and easy to state clearly. Why must an essay on the influence of Homer's works be any less clear? -- unless (as I suspect) clarity and focus were sacrificed for the sake of rhetorical flourishes and philosophical musings. Overall, while this book mentions various cases in which later writers have drawn on Homeric themes, whether and how they changed human history warrants a more concrete and less esoteric account. ( )

El legado de Homero a lo largo de la historia. ( )