The Homeric Question

FRANK M. TURNER THE HOMERIC QUESTION Homer and Homeric composition have been discussed, probed, and criticized since ancient times. I The Homeric Question, however, is a distinctly nineteenth-century invention, created by the philological enterprise, the romantic concepts of composition, and the historicism of the age. Research and argumentation over the Question were pursued within distinctly nineteenth-century intellectual institutions. The Question was, however, in fact a series of questions about the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Those included: Did the two epics have a single author? Under what conditions were the epics composed? Was there an original core to the Iliad or to the Odyssey upon which a later longer poem had been composed? What was the relationship of the Iliad to the Odyssey? These became issues of genuinely European scope, because unlike works of later literature, the Aeneid being the only exception, the Homeric epics were read and admired across the continent, provid ing humanistic scholars with a body of material that could be debated transnationally. But it was the emergence of philology as a core dis cipline in German universities that made the questions surrounding Homer problematic for a significant group of scholars. The Homeric Question became a vehicle whereby philologists worked to assert their cultural authority in European and more particularly German intel lectual life. Homeric criticism constituted an arena in which aca demic philological virtuosos could display their skills in transforming two of the monumental works of Western literature into objects of academic analysis. Philologists wrested Homer from the world of poets and literature and placed him at the mercy of modern scientific criti cism, just as they wrested the Christian scriptures from the realm of sacred reverence. I J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (New York, 1967; first published 1903-1908), Vol. 3; U. von Wilamovitz-Moellendorf, History of Classical Scholarship, trs. A. Harris (London, 1982; first German edition, 1921); Davison (1962b); Turner (1981) 135-186. 124 FRANK M. TURNER The eighteenth century had seen much debate over the character of Homeric poetic genius, and the first modern exploration of the physical landscape described in the poems.2 This debate went on within the arena now denoted by cultural historians as the Republic of Letters. Eighteenth-century commentators as different as Richard Bentley, Giambattista Vico, and Jean Jacques Rousseau raised ques tions about the nature of Homeric authorship and composition that directly foreshadowed and laid much of the groundwork for the Homeric Question that dominated so much nineteenth-century clas sical scholarship.3 Alexander Pope's translation of Homer for a time ensconced the poetry into the confines of neoclassicism, but the epics would not long be so contained. The eighteenth-century debate over the character of poetic genius, as seen in Thomas Blackwell's An Enquiry into the Life and Writings if Homer (1735; German translation, 1766), along with the new emphasis that emerged in the second half of the century on poetic originality, brought Homer to the fore of taste over the long-standing respect accorded to Virgil. 4 Homeric poetry stood not in the glacial confines of neoclassical marble but as one of many manifestations of an ancient and less polished or civi lized Mediterranean life and culture. To grasp Homer in all his full ness required that the imagination escape to a different time and place. Blackwell, for example, had argued that readers must set them selves into the audience of ancient warriors who understood all of the customs that Homer's verse described and recounted. Not un importantly, while Blackwell's book worked its way through English and European intellectual circles, biblical critics like Archdeacon' Robert Lowth were bringing the narratives of the Hebrew Bible into a similar world of historical analysis and -empathy. There was a strong intellectual and spiritual sense that the critical fate of Homer and the fate of the scriptures stood closely linked. In addition to the growing awareness of history, the late eighteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for the topographical accuracy 2 Simonsuuri (1979). 3 Bentley had written, 'Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment; the Iliad he made for the men, the Odysseis for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected together into the form of an epic poem until 500 years after.' Richard Bentley, 'Discourse of Freethinking, by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,' (1713) quoted by Grote, (1869) 1:151 fn. 4 F. M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authoriry: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Lift (Cam bridge, 1993) 284-321. .

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