Homer's my new homie

[All-American]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

Robert Fitzgerald's is the translation of the Aeneid I have read, and it is beloved. But Robert Fagels, whose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be the most famous, just finished a translation of the Aeneid that received high praise. The Aeneid of course was written not by a Greek, but by a Roman, Virgil, in Latin, about 700 years after the earliest date we know the Iliad existed.

It is only one sign of the Iliad's tremendous influence that at the time of Augustus Rome's most famous poet decided that Rome, like Greece, needed a founding epic, and Virgil made his masterpiece a sequal to the Iliad. But though he modeled it on the Ilidad, the tone is very different. One thing I love about the Aeneid is that its tragic character--its Priam/Hector--is a woman. It also has some steamy romance.

In contrast to the Aeneid's status with the Romans, who simply believed it to be a great work of art, however, the Greeks believed the Iliad to be true and divinely inspired as much as your average Evangelical believes such things about the Bible. Moreover, many well known dramatic and literary devices used and loved in our age originated in the Iliad and the Greek tragedies that it begat. As I've noted, Socrates/Plato made repeated allusions to the Iliad, and it was a very old poem by their age.

The Trojan horse appears in many Greek poems and plays, most of them no longer extant, but we know about them from other references. It is a common misconception that it appears in the Iliad. Among existing works it is best portrayed in the Aeneid.

Not surprisingly, what is meant by the Iliad having been orally transmitted is a subject of vigorous debate in acedemia. From recent stuff I've read it seems to me the pendulum has recently swung more strongly toward concensus that Homer recited it much as it was handed down in written form. See, for example, Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles' translation, and I believe the one you read in front of Lombardo's. I read a New Yorker article to that effect recently as well, that focused on an ongoing oral tradition in rural India, where bards recite over many days poems with gripping plots and beautiful imagery word for word that are longer than the Bible. Interestingly, they've found that when the bard begins to learn to read, his awesome powers of memorization fade. I'll see if I can post the article electronically.

This begs the unanswerable question. To what extent was Vergil forging his own founding myth versus writing down an existing one? The Romans definitely believed that they descended from the remnants of Troy. "Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar" may have been Vergil's words, but the idea that Caesar was a descendant of Aeneas, and thus of Venus (and of Trojans), was not his own. Nor is the connection of the name Julius with Iulus and Ilia (and the Iliad) his brainchild. The legend of Romulus and Remus had been around for ages. It seems that what Vergil does in the Aeneid is try to interweave all these myths into one work.

One possible hypothesis, which would be hard to prove, given the lack of information of the Homeric age, is that what Homer did the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey that Vergil did with the Aeneid-- that is, he compiled the legends of the Trojan War that took place 400 years earlier. Wouldn't be the first time it happened-- in fact, this seems to be a real tendency for ancient civilizations. The Enuma Elish, the Rig Veda, or even the Book of Genesis and the Pentateuch-- they all do the same thing.