Andrea Catanzaro - Politics Through the Iliad and the Odyssey: Hobbes Writes Homer

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Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey

Facing censorship and being confined to the fringes of the political debate of his time, Thomas Hobbes turned his attention to translating Homers Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English. Many have not considered enough the usefulness of these translations. In this book, Andrea Catanzaro analyses the political value of Hobbes translations of Homers works and exposes the existence of a link between the translations and the previous works of the Malmesbury philosopher. In doing so, he asks:

• What new information concerning Hobbes political and philosophical thought can be rendered from mere translation?
• What new offerings can a man in his eighties at the time offer, having widely explained his political ideas in numerous famous essays and treatises?
• What new elements can be deduced in a text that was well-known in England and where there were better versions than the ones produced by Hobbes?

Andrea Catanzaros commentary and theoretical interpretation offers an incentive to study Hobbes lesser known works in the wider development of Western political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Andrea Catanzaro is Assistant Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Genova, Italy. His interests lie in Ancient Political Thought and its reception in the Western Political Literature of Early Modern and Modern Age.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

136 Democracy, Dialogue, Memory

Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus

Edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz

137 Common Sense as a Paradigm of Thought

An Analysis of Social Interaction

Tim Delaney

138 The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

David Ohana

139 Political Fraternity

Democracy beyond Freedom and Equality

Angel Puyol

140 Nationalism, Inequality and Englands Political Predicament

Charles Leddy-Owen

141 Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey

Hobbes writes Homer

Andrea Catanzaro

142 Social Change in a Material World

How Activity and Material Processes Dynamize Practices

Theodore R. Schatzki

143 Hubris and Progress

A Future Born of Presumption

Carlo Bordoni

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey

Hobbes writes Homer

Andrea Catanzaro

First published in English 2019

by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Andrea Catanzaro to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Catanzaro, Andrea, 1976 author.
Title: Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey : Hobbes writes
Homer / Andrea Catanzaro.
Other titles: Hobbes e Omero. English
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 141 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056872 (print) |
LCCN 2019004997 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351205672 (Master) |
ISBN 9781351205665 (Adobe) | ISBN 9781351205658 (ePub3) |
ISBN 9781351205641 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780815383642 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781351205672 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Hobbes, Thomas, 15881679Political and
social views. | Homer. Iliad. | Homer. Odyssey.
Classification: LCC JC153.H659 (ebook) |
LCC JC153.H659 C38413 2019 (print) | DDC 320.01dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056872

ISBN: 978-0-8153-8364-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-20567-2 (ebk)

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S UMMARY This chapter seeks to contextualize the translations and focuses on the relation between Hobbes and the ancient Greek world, from both a linguistic and an ideological perspective. It also analyses the main positions of scholars regarding the value, role and political significance of Hobbes translations of the Homeric poems.

It was in 2008 that Eric Nelson published his critical edition of the Hobbesian translations of the Homeric Poems with Oxford University Press. In his substantial General Introduction, placed right before the main text, he wrote an incisive and precise sentence summarising what was in his opinion the ratio of this work by the Malmesbury philosopher. He wrote: Hobbess Iliads and Odysses of Homer are a continuation of Leviathan by other means. Nelson was considering politics as a means to explore a text seemingly unrelated to this subject, at least at first glance. The choice to frame the Hobbesian work within this particular perspective ascribed it wider value, since it was not usually considered in this way. About ten years earlier, in an article published in Translation and Literature, meaningfully entitled Political Ideology in Translations of the Iliad, 16601715, Jack Lynch had stressed how, in the English context of Hobbess day, it was something of a custom to use translation as a means to achieve political aims. However, he had also underlined how this practice had been put under the magnifying glass by scholars only in recent times. He wrote in the opening lines of this work:

The political upheavals of the fifty years following the Restoration of the Stuarts have for decades figured in critical discussion of English poets from Milton to Pope. Only recently, however, has the same attention been given to political allusions and ideological resonances in the translated verse of this era as to the same features in non-translated texts. Whether the concurrence of one of the richest periods of literary translation is mere chance or something more, the work of these years provides an exceptional opportunity to explore the influence of political ideology on translations, as commentators have recently begun to show.

Furthermore, Lynch also underlined how the use of tales of gods and heroes from the Homeric poems had been customary among factions fighting one another in that same period. They were accustomed to using this means not only in order to support their respective ideological apparatus and their speeches, to boost their claims and demands, but also to discredit the positions, opinions and actions of opposing groups. With reference to one of the most famous episodes of the

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