Homer

Homer: The Very Idea by James I. Porter Lilah Grace Canevaro Homer: The Very Idea. By James I. Porter. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2021. Pp. xiv, 277. Homer is infamously reticent to tell us anything about himself in his poems. Hesiod, with whom Homer is frequently paired in his reception, tells us about his father and his brother and his farm and his experience with ships and song contests and ploughs—but of Homer we learn nothing. The immanence of Hesiod's poetic persona and the elusiveness of the Homeric narrator both have as their backdrop a similar set of Homeric/Hesiodic Questions: whether the poets tell us about themselves or not, we still do not really know about the poems' origins. But that has not stopped us from hypothesising, and Homer's relative opacity spurs us on even more. Barbara Graziosi's 2002 book Inventing Homer (Cambridge) is a landmark study of the ancient reception of Homer, and her 2016 book Homer explores the "ubiquitous myth of the author" through reception ancient and modern.1 Porter's Homer: The Very Idea operates in a similar vein, approaching Homer "as an object of cultural production" (3). Yet Porter sets his project apart in that it is not literary criticism or a reception history, but rather "a cultural history of an idea" (5), and as such it can range over a lot of ground. The book is divided into five chapters covering five questions: Why Homer? Who was Homer? Apotheosis or Apostasy? What did Homer see? Why war? It is prefaced with a timeline that takes us from the Late Bronze Age right up to modern excavations at Troy, plotting key literatures, objects, periods, translators, and excavations. The timeline epitomises the broad-ranging, multifaceted book it introduces. Homer is an object of cultural production. What kind of culture? Something that stands out from Porter's discussion is his treatment "from below" (in the vein of E. P. Thompson and other Marxist-inspired proponents of people's history2): the contention that "the idea of Homer is a popular one before it is a learned one" (12). Porter calls this poet of the people "the Other Homer," which recalls Hugo Koning's Hesiod: The Other Poet (Leiden 2010), giving us not only a pairing of Homer and Hesiod in the history of ideas but also a duality within the figure of Homer himself. The Other Homer can be wide-reaching and relatable but also debased and disgraced. It is of particular relevance to the popular perception of classics today and its mobilisation in various political spheres that Homer has been both "a potent symbol of political and cultural authority" and, in the same breath, "the inversion of these forms of authority and a protest against them" (14). What emerges from Porter's analysis is that Homer has been through a lot. At the end of Chapter One Porter asks the question: is Homer dead? He has died multiple deaths over the centuries, only to be resurrected with new waves of interest and interpretation. The list of modern Homeric receptions Porter gives from across the globe shows that Homer is alive and kicking. Ivana Petrovic writes, in her article "On Finding Homer: The Impact of Homeric Scholarship on the Perception of South [End Page 132] Slavic Oral Traditional Poetry,"3 that modern enlightened Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries killed Homer only to immediately resurrect him, and as such he became "the vampire king of European literature." This resonates with Porter's Chapter One, in which he explores the oral-traditional roots of Homeric poetry through the work of Friedrich August Wolf, Milman Parry, and Albert Lord. In Chapter Two Porter offers another haunting perspective: Homer as "the dark matter of the classical tradition" (78), "a ghost in the machine of the tradition" (75), a ghost that Lucian claims to meet in the Elysian fields and a poet who, despite the too many lives attributed to him, only really ever had an afterlife. In Chapter Two Porter turns to visual representations of Homer and in particular Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's

Apotheosis · Art · Art history · Criticism · Epistemology · Genius · Hesiod · Hubris · Literature · Mythology · Nothing · Poetry · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · History · Philosophy