Barbara Graziosi - Homer

In 1354, Petrarch received a manuscript of the Iliad from a Byzantine correspondent, and wrote to him in acknowledgement:

Your Homer is mute to me. Or rather, I am deaf to him. Still, I rejoice even to look at him and often, as I embrace him, I say, sighing, O Great Man, how ardently would I listen to you!

With this paradoxical love for an author he could not read, Petrarch set in motion an intellectual movement of vast proportions: the recovery of ancient Greek literature shaped the Renaissance, or rebirth of antiquity, and this early declaration of love for Homer was one of its symbolic beginnings.

Petrarch did not content himself with hugging his incomprehensible Homeric manuscript, but looked for a scholar who could translate it, and teach him Greek along the way. He also helped to persuade the City Fathers of Florence to establish the first chair of Greek in Western Europe. Unfortunately, the man chosen for the position, Leontius Pilate, proved to be unsuitable. Petrarchs letters reveal something of the impression he made: stubborn, vain, volatile, badly dressed. As disastrous academic appointments go, that of Leontius Pilate must rank among the worst in historyand yet the slow uptake of Greek in Western Europe was not just a result of his poor manners or dress sense. Petrarch shared with his Italian contemporaries an attitude of suspicion and superiority towards Byzantine culture, which was not conducive to language acquisition. He was more interested in making contact, directly, with Homer, than in learning the intricacies of Greek grammar.

Today, Homers poems are easily accessible. A list of translations, published in 2003, runs to hundreds of pages, and includes all major modern languages, as well as Esperanto and several dialects and forms of patois. There are also countless grammars, commentaries, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, monographs, articles, and digital resources which greatly facilitate access to the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original Greek. Last but not least, there are many excellent teachers. And yet people today often find themselves in a position which resembles that of Petrarch: they assume that Homer is a great poet, but have not read any of the poetry attributed to him. Homeric epic still reaches us primarily through echoes and refractions in other poems, novels, plays, and works of artas well as through the ubiquitous myth of the author, since everybody knows that there is a question about the identity, and even existence, of Homer himself.

Given the situation, this book has two main aims. The first is to facilitate an understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey, by providing a succinct and up-to-date guide to the main literary, historical, cultural, and archaeological issues at the heart of Homeric studies. The second is to show, by way of concrete example, how readers of Homer join a vast and diverse community of other readers and, indeed, non-readers (like Petrarch).