Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition

Preface

PREFACE The Homeric poems provide our earliest direct insights into the religious thought of the Greeks, and, with few interruptions, the presence of Homer in the Greek religious imagination, pagan and Christian, re­ mained continuous until the decline of the Byzantine church in the late Middle Ages. Indeed, when we find Nikolaos Mesarites, a metropolitan of Ephesus early in the thirteenth century, describing a striding image of St. Paul in a mosaic at Constantinople with a phrase borrowed from a description of a Homeric hero (θ έ α µoL ToVToV iiaKpa ^LJB&tvra) and bor­ rowing from the Homeric chimaera the qualities to describe the teach­ ings of the Apostles (TOVTMV ai Sidaxui trveovcn H,BVOaicrTov pu|/eis VTTO Trarpos, ju.eAAoi'Tos TT) fJL7)Tpi TVTTTOfAEVr) dtflVVBlV, KCtl QEOfJL.Otxiot'S OCTa? "O/U.T/pO5 TTSTToi'TJKEl' OV TTCtpaSeKTSov eis Tt)v TTO\W, OVT' sv vTrovoia.ii; TTeTroLrmeva's OVTE avev VTTOVOI&V (Plato Rep. 2_378d). Cf. Konrad Miiller, "Allegorische Dichtererklarung," col. 17. 5. See N. J. Richardson, "Homeric Professors in the Age of the Sophists." 6. See S. G. Kapsomenos, "'O dpix6<; TTcmvpo<; rij? ©eo-o-aAocuojs." An unauthorized text of the papyrus was published in the Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 47 (1982): 1-12 in a new sequence following p. 300. For the most upto -date discussion of the interpretation of the papyrus, see Jeffrey S. Rusten, "Interim Notes on the Papyrus from Derveni." 7. Throughout this study, the name Heraclitus will normally refer, not to the X PREFACE These two works provide a background against which a focused image of Homer emerges, an image articulatedby dogmatic Platonists and Neopythagoreans. This, to a large extent, was the tradition the Latin Middle Ages inherited, independent of the text of Homer, itself clothed in a forgotten language. The image finds its strongest medieval expression in Dante's portrait of Homer as the prince of poets, and the probability seems very great that the Neoplatonic exegesis of Homer and the model of the levels of meaning in literaturefor which Proclus is our primary source in antiquity may have had a profound, if indirect, influence on Dante's conception of his own work and his role in the development of the epic tradition. Dante, moreover, is not the only major poet in whom the influenceof this interpretive tradition may be perceived. The beginnings ofdeliberate and conscious allegoricalpoetry in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries after Christ appear to represent the transfer into the creative realm of the expectations with which allegorizing interpreters approached Homer and other early texts. The tradition of epic poetrywas one of allegory , of masked meanings—or so the dominant tradition of interpretation claimed—and poets such as Prudentius and "Musaeus" seem to have created poems designed to be approached with exactly these expectations. The history of the influence of the mystical-allegorical tradition beyond the Renaissance lies largelyoutside the scope of this study, but it is clear that Renaissance manuals of mythology tap medieval traditions, themselves ultimately reaching back to the Neoplatonists of late antiquity . After Ficino, the rediscovery of Plato, along with the Neoplatonist commentaries, again made availablethe philosophicalbasis ofallegorical interpretation, and allegorizinginterpretivetexts regularlyaccompanied new editions ofHomer down into the eighteenth century.ThomasTaylor, whose influence can be seen in Blake and the EnglishRomantics,directed the attention of yet another generation of poets to the Neoplatonists and their habits of reading and interpretation. As noted, the present study is concerned primarilywith the evidence for the understanding of the meaning of the Homeric poems among the Platonists of late antiquity—the high period of mystical allegory, in which the figure of the visionary Homer and the scope of the allegorical meanings of his poems were fully developed and articulated. Neverthesixth -century Ephesian philosopher, but to the author of a work on Homer that probably belongs to the first century after Christ. PREFACE Xi less, since it is my purpose to portray a neglected and crucially important period of transition within the tradition of epic poetry (and, more generally, of literature), considerable attention is paid to the proximal end of that period and to the impact of the ancient Neoplatonists' reading of Homer on the Middle Ages. The Neoplatonic allegorists refashioned Homer not by any interference with the text itself, but by exerting their influence on the other factor in the equation of reading: the reader. In so doing, they predisposed subsequent readers to expect, and so to discover, a certain scope of meaning in early epics. Had they simply reshaped and reorganized Homeric verses to convey their own teachings explicitly, their general effect would have been no greater than that of the Homeric centones of the Gnostics. As it was, however, the effect of their refashioning of the poems was far subtler and far more pervasive: it generated a reading of the received text of Homer that was to become inseparable from the meaning of that text for later generations. This page intentionally left blank ...