Homer Atomized: Francis Bacon and the Matter of Tradition

Scharfsinnig habt ihr, wie ihr seid,Von aller Verehrung uns befreit,Und wir bekannten überfrei,Daß Ilias nur ein Flickwerk sei.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Homer wieder Homer"

In his introduction to The Making of Homeric Verse (1975), a collection of the writings of Milman Parry, Adam Parry diagnosed the problem with nineteenth-century critics who attempted to classify different strata or layers of the Homeric tradition by dialect:

Their work has been judged a failure . . . because the dialect-mixture of Homeric poetry goes too deep: it is pervasive in the poems, and like Anaxagoras's elements, it seems to be found in the smallest units of them. An attempt to find chronological layers in this way would lead to atomization.¹

In other words, Homer's poetry was the product of so many singers-so many levels of gradual encrustation and accretion-that to separate them out was to misunderstand the very nature of his poems or, worse, to destroy them. I have begun with this passage to introduce a larger question of what it means to mix the discourses of invisible bodies and literary history-a question that was deeply entrenched in the very idea of Homer long before Milman Parry described the dynamics of an oral tradition.² In what follows in this essay, I explore how the poetry of Homer became entangled again with the language of physics at a moment when the material of texts-and of printed texts in particular-was understood by some Renaissance readers as not so different in nature of behavior from the matter of the universe.

The story centers on the seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, who appears unexpectedly as a crucial if forgotten figure in a long history of Homeric readers-a forebear even to the great critical legacies of Giambattista Vico, F. A. Wolf, and Milman Parry. In bringing the grandfather of modern science to bear on a question of literary history, I want to begin to consider how the world of ancient materialism came to contaminate ideas about authorship and textual integrity in the Renaissance, and to examine how a problem of defining literary history and its origins shaped the work of the natural philosopher. As a voracious consumer of texts himself, Bacon knew a great deal about the ancient and Renaissance traditions of Homeric scholarship he had inherited and used them to transform a familiar and increasingly problematic notion of the poet's textual stability into an image of structural change that was integral to his philosophy.

The concept of the matter of tradition emerges for Bacon in a number of places at once: in the scattered fragments of pre-Socratic philosophers he collected and assembled, in the shadow of moveable type, and in dialogue with his own thinking on the nature of atoms and void. It also emerges in an extraordinary encounter with two figures who loomed large in the philosopher's imagination: Lucretius, the Epicurean whose poem about the physics of the universe had been subject to near-oblivion until its Renaissance revival, and Michel de Montaigne, the essayist whose influence Bacon absorbed and bent with a perversity to rival perhaps only the Frenchman himself. Reading Montaigne reading (and mangling) the poetry of Lucretius, Bacon would discover a vision of Homer scattered and combined infinitely like the letters in a printer's shop-a dynamic vision of atomic bodies conjured from the depths of textual history to counter a skeptic's fear of the void.

In reconstructing the form of the analogy between matter and knowledge (and the footprints of Lucretius and Montaigne), I will show how the recovery of materialism transformed not only the principles of modern science in the Renaissance, but the idea of tradition itself. At the same time, I will consider how an understanding of the ontology of texts influenced Bacon's own material practices as a philosopher rethinking the nature of intellectual debt, the technologies of transmission, and the unity and conservation of knowledge. As we will see, the way this analogy comes together in and across texts and disciplines is itself inextricably linked to...