B. Interpretation, Allegory, and the Critics of Homer

The interpretive tradition that made of Homer a theologian and, beyond that, a sage providing access to privileged information about the fate of souls and the structure of the universe has, in the past, been studied primarily by students of philosophy and of religion. The goal of the present study, however, is to examine that tradition's contribution to the history of literature. It represents, on the one hand, a substantial part of the neglected interpretive, non-formalist aspect of ancient literary criticism. Perhaps more important still, after the text of the Iliad and Odyssey had become inaccessible, this interpretive tradition, as transmitted piecemeal through the philosophers, provided the Latin Middle Ages with an image of the kind of poet Homer was. Its importance for the history of literature is thus both direct and indirect, and it has information to yield concerning ancient habits of reading and interpretation, as well as about medieval attitudes toward the poet, who was revered as the founder of the tradition but no longer read.

In examining the origins of this tradition of reading, we must bear in mind that our concept of a corpus of European literature with its origins in archaic Greece is a modern construct. At least in the period previous to the fourth century B.C. , the problems of reading and interpretation could not be solved in terms of a body of material comparable to what we

[23] See Plutarch Quaest. conv . 9.14.6 145d-e, and Certamen 38.

― 11 ―

are accustomed to call "literature." Each preserved text had an identity of its own and a claim to truth, historicity, or beauty that was unique and hot easily compared with the claims of other texts. Formal criteria provided convenient and seductive categories, of course, and the idea of a competition (essentially a dramatized comparison) of Homer and Hesiod is far older than the third-century papyrus that preserves part of an early Certamen .^[24] Homer, in any case, remained a discrete category of experience to a degree that may be difficult for us to appreciate, and an understanding of Homer—of what as well as how the Iliad and Odyssey communicated—could not easily be compared to the understanding of other literature.

The uniqueness of antiquity's response to Homer may be traced to a number of factors closely bound up with unique qualities of the text itself. It was, first of all, a body of material manifestly conceived with the primary goal of entertainment (if we may use so unpretentious a term for the relationship between the bard and the audience of whose imagination and emotions he took possession). At the same time it was a text that spoke constantly about the gods and that enjoyed the prestige of enormous antiquity. These two qualities of the text demanded a response that was to some extent divided. Homer is clearly innocent of the characteristic scruples expressed by Herodotus with regard to "speaking of divine things,"^[25] and his freedom in this regard must have been disturbing to Greek piety even independently of such philosophical reactions as that of Xenophanes. Again by Herodotus's account, Homer and Hesiod were the very first poets, and that "the most ancient is the most revered"^[26] was a pervasive principle in Greek culture. The Iliad and Odyssey were thus inevitably placed in a position of very great honor and inspired an awe that must sometimes have jarred uncomfortably against the response demanded by such passages as the deception of Zeus and the song of Ares and Aphrodite.^[27] If Homer demanded laughter—even bawdy laughter—tradition demanded that this response somehow be made compatible with the dignity of the divine and the respect due the

[24] See Homer (OCT) vol. 5, P. 225. Rudolph Pfeiffer (History of Classical Scholarship , p. 11) traces the tradition back to the sixth century.

^[25][26]

[27] Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 214) lists a number of "comic" passages—though one is not quite sure he does not simply mean passages in which laughter is mentioned. In any case, he is more sensitive than most ancient commentators to the humor in Homer.

― 12 ―

text itself by virtue of its antiquity. Finally, much of the "theological" material other than the Iliad and Odyssey that the tradition transmitted was indeed deliberately obscure and oblique. The most obvious examples were the hexameter oracles in which the gods expressed themselves with characteristic coyness, constantly saying one thing and meaning something quite different. The impulse to resolve the contradictory responses demanded by text and tradition through the imposition on the poetry of Homer of a structure of meaning analogous to that of the oracles must be far older than the surviving interpretive texts can demonstrate.^[28]

Many of the apparently contradictory elements in the response of ancient "critics" to Homer thus have their roots in the impact of Homer on Greek society in a preliterate or protoliterate phase. There is no doubt that Homer was expounded and read in other ways from that reflected in the tradition of interpretation under examination here, but it is nevertheless true that the attitudes of the mystical allegorists are anticipated in contradictions that belong to a period before the Iliad and Odyssey could comfortably be included in a larger class approximating what we call "literature." The texts we shall examine belong to a period in which such a category did exist, but Homer continued to demand a unique response, which gave him a special status. He had to be read both as "literature" and as something more. It is primarily that nebulous secondary element that will occupy our attention, but we would be mistaken to assume that a more down-to-earth response to the poems could not coexist with mystical allegory and with extraordinary claims for the authority of Homer. Indeed, the juxtaposition of such attitudes as those of the allegorists, who were willing to leap far beyond the text to discover its "true" meaning, with the sort of sensitivity to the text that we demand of a modem critic is a characteristic paradox of the interpretive literature.

Alongside the problems of the identification of "literature" in the Greek tradition, and of the relationship of the Iliad and Odyssey to that category of experience, stands that of the identity and role of the critic in antiquity.^[29] Here again we find no clear one-to-one equivalent, no identi-

[28] The Derveni papyrus (bibliography in Preface, n. 6, above) of the fourth century B.C. contains Orphic texts with allegorical commentary. The Iliad (24.527-28) is quoted to explain (incorrectly) an expression in the Orphic poem, and it is clear that the author feels that Orpheus was sufficiently close to Homer for Homer to be useful in illuminating his language.

^[29]

― 13 ―

fiable role in early Greek society corresponding to that of the critic in our own. With Rudolph Pfeiffer, we should, perhaps, conceive of the poets themselves and the rhapsodes (including such philosopher-poets as Xenophanes) as the first interpreters of poetry, succeeded in the fifth century by the sophists.^[30]

In the Hellenistic age the term

takes on a meaning that may include at least a part of the function of the modern critic, and in Cicero and other Roman authors both grammaticus and literatus can refer to interpretes poëtarurn .^[31] The

, or criticus , likewise engaged in literary scholarship, and these terms seem simply to designate a grammaticus of a higher degree of distinction. It is difficult, however, to determine whether these designations implied interpretive skills in the modern sense, or rather the ability to expound grammatical points. In a valuable sketch of modes of interpretation, Seneca portrays the grammaticus futurus commenting on Virgil's fugit inreparabile tempus (Georg . 3.284) by pointing out other instances of Virgil's use of fugit to talk about the passage of time,^[32] and then shows him commenting on another passage by citing instances of Virgil's characteristic use of the epithet tristis with the noun senectus .^[33] In the same passage, Seneca illustrates the sort of comment that might be offered by a philosophically inclined reader,^[34] and what emerges is a sensitive, serious paraphrase and elaboration of the meaning of the verses, incorporating a rich sense of their human content. In short, the philosopher and not the grammaticus appears here in the role of the modern critic.

It seems to have been generally true in antiquity that exegesis was the province of the educator, and specifically of the philosophical educator.^[35] Only infrequently was such exegesis given an importance that implied a pretense to permanence, and so only infrequently has it entered the preserved literature, beyond the scholia. Methods of reading and interpretation were doubtless varied: the Stoa favored allegorical exegesis and passed that taste on to later Platonism and to-the tradition under examination here, though we have no reason to believe that Stoics or Platonists

[30] Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 8-12, 16-36, and 43-45.

[31] Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship , vol. 1, pp. 7-9.

[32] Sen. Epist . 8.24.

[33] Sen. Epist . 8.28-29.

[34] . . .ille, qui ad philosophiam spectat (Sen. Epist . 8.24-25).

[35] See N. J. Richardson, "Homeric Professors in the Age of the Sophists" for a summary of the evidence for the use of allegorizing commentary on Homer by the sophists of the fifth century.

― 14 ―

invariably approached all myths and texts as allegorical, or that what we can learn of their response to Homer from the surviving bits of ancient exegesis constituted their entire response, or even their normal response, to the poems.^[36]

The available evidence suggests that modes of response to the poems that seem contradictory to us remained complementary in the eyes of the philosophical traditions of late antiquity, and that no clear distinction was made between reading Homer as "literature" and reading him as scripture. The philosphers, moreover, are more likely to offer us insights into methods of reading and interpretation in antiquity than those whose training was specifically grammatical or rhetorical.

In practice, each of the authors under consideration faced the problem of defining a tradition of his own. Philosophical training naturally provided a model. If one studied under a Platonist, one would be exposed to a predictable body of philosophical literature, though its exact contents might vary from teacher to teacher and from school to school. Similarly, all of these writers contemplate the past and its written artifacts in terms of specific traditions. Porphyry and Proclus are, of course, Platonic philosophers, and their attitudes toward the literature of the past are colored by the canon progressively developed by that school. Of all the authors discussed here, Numenius was probably the most radical in terms of his personal and creative redefinition of the tradition on which he drew.^[37] But common to all is the effort to define the field of useful writings from the past and so to create for themselves a context, canon, or tradition. Their criteria are never stylistic: they are interested in literature as a source of truth, and they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in search of what we might call a body of scripture rather than a literature.

Thus, when Ps.-Plutarch makes Homer the founder of the whole sphere of human (i.e., Greek) discourse, he is claiming Homer to be the source of Greek literature broadly defined to include science, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and, rather incidentally, comedy, tragedy, and other poetry. There does exist for him, then, an extremely broad concept of "literature," but it is so general that he needs no word for it, and, inscriptions and fortuitously preserved ephemera aside, it comprises the collective verbal artifacts transmitted in writing from the past.

Perhaps the most important distinction our authors make within this

[36] Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , p. 237.

[37] See ch. 2B below.

― 15 ―

vast field is the one Heinrich Dörrie singled out in Plotinus,^[38] that between works that contain some eternally valid truth and those that do not. The latter category, including the relatively recent poets and dramatists, may be used for decoration or to illustrate a point, but the discussion of the meaning of these authors would be superfluous. For the former category, however, interpretation is essential, and the nature of the verbal artifact and its relationship to the truth it reflects must be defined.

Thus for each of our "critics" there exists a category of literature for which, were they to give it any attention at all, the formalistic criteria often said to constitute the whole of ancient literary criticism might well be the relevant ones. Discussion of the meaning of such texts would, in any case, be of minor importance. In practice, however, they focus their critical talents on the other category, the literature in which they see the possibility of discovering some enduring truth. The elucidation and articulation of such truths constitute the impetus of interpretation.

The need to articulate the truth thought to be contained in the Iliad and Odyssey can be traced to two primary motives: the desire of the interpreters to use the prestige of the Homeric poems to support their own views and the desire to defend Homer against his detractors.

If we conceive the interpretive tradition to have its origins in the sixth century B.C. , whether in Pythagorean circles or elsewhere,^[39] then the desire to tap Homer's prestige probably came earlier than the desire to defend him.^[40] This suggests that Homer was already something of a

in the sixth century (though the word itself may be an anachronism), or at the very least that he was viewed as an authoritative source of information, a possibility that should not be too surprising in the light of Herodotus's testimony.^[41]

Much of the interpretive literature that comes down to us is, however, concerned with the defense of Homer against his detractors. It is this "defensive" tradition that Porphyry traces back to Theagenes of Rhegium, ca. 525 B.C.^[42] Defensive interpretive efforts must then have been first stimulated by such critiques as that of Xenophanes of Colophon, and

[38] See ch. 5D, with n. 59, below.

[39] See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , p. 12, on Pherecydes and the sixth-century sources of allegorism, and ch. 1D below.

[40] The primacy of "positive" over "defensive" allegory was convincingly maintained by J. Tate, "Plato and Allegorical Interpretation," p. 142. See also his "On the History of Allegorism," p. 105.

[41] Herod. Hist . 2.53-54, discussed ch. 1C below.

[42] See ch. 1D below.

― 16 ―

at an early date the philosophical reaction against the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod may have produced defensive interpretations relating to the nature of the poetic utterance and its structure of meaning.^[43]

In the history of the reading of Homer, however, one critique—that of Socrates in Plato's Republic —stands out above all others, both for its devastating condemnation of the poet and for its influence on subsequent readers.^[44] This critique is central to the concerns of Heraclitus (the author of the Homeric Allegories ), who condemns Plato severely and insists on the superiority of Homer, and to those of Proclus, whose extended consideration of Homer was focused on a reconciliation of the poet and the philosopher. The attempt at reconciliation goes back at least to Telephus of Pergamon and Numenius in the second century after Christ, and must have been an issue of some importance to any Platonist who wished to place Homer alongside Plato in the canon of authors who might provide a glimpse of the truth. This tendency to emphasize the spiritual and cosmological authority of Homer (and of the other

) is a growing trend in Platonism under the Roman Empire—in part, no doubt, because of a need to offer an authoritative scripture able to bear comparison with the scriptures of the increasingly threatening Christian tradition.^[45] It is significant that, for his part, Augustine was able wholeheartedly to praise Plato's banishing of the poets.^[46]

Since the Platonic critique was so important to later Platonists, it will be useful to review its major points briefly here. The context in the Republic in which Socrates first comments on Homer is the discussion of the education of the guardians of the state. Admitting the necessity of stories (myths) for the education of the young, Socrates asserts (Rep . 2.377b-c) that they must be carefully controlled by the state and that most of those currently in circulation (i.e., the myths of Homer and Hesiod) must be rejected. They are to be rejected not simply because they are lies—it is explicitly accepted that all myths are lies that contain a kernel of truth (377a)—but because they are ugly lies.^[47] Ugly lies are said to be lies that

[43] Diogenes Laertius (2.46) mentions a critic of Homer antedating Xenophanes and said to be contemporary with the poet himself.

[44] See Stefan Weinstock, "Die platonische Homerkritik und seine Nachwirkung," and Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato , ch. 1.

^[45]

[46] See August. Civ. Dei 2.14.

^[47]

― 17 ―

distort that about which they speak, just as a bad painter distorts his subject (377e). The preeminent example chosen is Hesiod's treatment of Ouranos and Kronos (377e-378a). Each offensive myth mentioned is viewed in terms of its potential educational impact on the guardians. The myth of Ouranos and Kronos will encourage the young to punish their fathers (378b), and stories of the gods fighting with one another and plotting among themselves will encourage them to believe that internal strife in a society is an acceptable state of affairs (378c-e).

The only solution is to abolish all the existing myths and have new ones made up according to certain basic principles

set by the lawmakers (379a-c). The first example of a

is the principle that god is not responsible for evil (379c-380c). Both the jars of Zeus (Il . 24.527-33) and the attribution of responsibility for Pandarus's treachery to Athena and Zeus (Il . 4.30-204) are rejected as violating this

(379d-e). The second

requires that the divine be immutable and, as a corollary, that the gods by nature never deceive men (380d-383a). This entails the rejection of several offending Homeric passages: the assertion by one of the suitors in the Odyssey (17.483-87) that gods travel among men in disguise (381d), the "falsehoods about Proteus and Thetis" (Od . 4.351-592) (381d),^[48] and the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon (Il . 2.1-34) (383a).

At the beginning of book 3 it is emphasized that these

when exemplified in myths should have beneficial effects on the young. Specifically, they should make the young honor the gods and their parents and take their friendships seriously (386a). Now the problem is approached from the opposite direction. We start from a quality we wish to instill, in this case bravery

, and ask what sort of stories will produce it. Clearly, they will be stories that will cause the listeners not to fear death, and on this score all the mumbo jumbo in Homer about the sufferings of ghosts must go (386a-387b).^[49] A Homer who portrays death negatively is unfit for the ears of free men (387b). It is also important that the citizens bear misfortune with a stiff upper lip (387e). To be

[48] Thetis undergoes no transformations in Homer, but (as Jowett and Campbell point out in their edition of the Republic (ad. loc ., vol. 3, p. 105), a fragment of Sophocles' Troilus (fr. 561 Nauck) indicates that she was commonly said by the poets to have performed changes of shape to escape her marriage to Peleus.

[49] The verses specifically rejected are Il . 16.856-57, 20.64-65, 23.103-4, and Od . 10.495, 489-91, and 24.6-9, but it is clear that their exclusion implies the excision of most of the content of the Odyssey nekyias and of much of the moral core of the Iliad .

― 18 ―

excised on this score are Achilles' mourning (Il . 24.9-21), Priam rolling about in the dung of his courtyard (Il . 22.414), Thetis lamenting her fate (Il . 18.54), and even Zeus's moments of sadness (Il . 22.168, 16.433), along with other portrayals of good men or gods overcome by emotion (388a-d)—even by laughter (Il . 1.599) (389a). A few passages in which Homer portrays restraint are praised (389e), but Achilles' insults to Agamemnon (Il . 2.225-32) are rejected, along with praise of feasting in the Odyssey (Od . 9.5-11, 12.342), the entire episode of Hera's deception of Zeus (Il . 14.153-351), and the song of Ares and Aphrodite (Od . 8.266-366) (389e-390c).

The profit motive must be removed from the embassy to Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad , and Achilles may accept neither Agamemnon's nor Priam's gifts (390d-e). Various excesses of Achilles—his threat to Apollo at Il . 22.15, his fighting with the river god and going back on his promise to the Spercheios by giving his shorn hair to Patroclus's pyre, his treatment of the corpse of Hector and the human sacrifice at Patroclus' funeral—are branded "not to be believed

" (391a-b). Further strictures are laid on the moral content of acceptable stories about men (392a-c), but Homer is not directly involved in this discussion. A few pages later, however, the description of the universal poet able to imitate anything, who if he visits Plato's state will be honored profusely and immediately deported (398a), foreshadows the more sinister discussion in book 10.

Plato returns to Homer in book 10 in the context of general observations on mimetic art, of which Homer is said to be the founder (595b). The model of art-as-imitation developed here is familiar and need not be examined in detail. As Proclus and other Platonists realized, however, the blanket rejection of virtually all art forms as mimetic—and, as such, far removed from reality—is inconsistent with the conception of inspired (if irresponsible) poetry articulated in the Phaedrus . Yet, for purposes of this discussion, there seems to be no way out: Homer is to be banished along with the other artists on the grounds that they are merely generators of images "at the third remove from truth"

(599d). He is interrogated and found wanting because he did not (like Pythagoras) found a school, and because there is no further evidence that he had in his own time, or has now, any power to make men better (599d-600e). Stripped of their attractive poetic form, the poems are found to have no usable content (601b). Their appeal is to the emotions and not to reason, and their incitement to indulge in emotion is undesirable (602-607). One listens to them only at the risk of disturbing one's internal balance (608a-b).

― 19 ―

This critique did much to shape the thinking of the later Platonists with regard to Homer. Clearly, the thrust of Socrates' arguments is a moral thrust from beginning to end, and esthetics are at issue only to the extent that they impinge upon moral issues. It is probably no coincidence that the passages singled out for condemnation include several of exceptionally rich and evocative language, such as the deception of Zeus and the song of Ares and Aphrodite. It is an unspoken corollary of the esthetics of book 10 of the Republic that the better a poem is (in terms of its appeal to the imagination and the emotions), the worse it is (in terms of its impact on one's internal order). The passages are rejected most obviously for the reason that they attribute to the gods motives and actions incompatible with Socrates'

, but secondarily and implicitly because they are exceptionally attractive episodes.

The critique, then, invites response that will defend Homer first of all on the moral plane and secondarily on the esthetic plane. A defense on the level of esthetics will have to be compatible with the Platonic model of reality articulated in the Republic , with its absolute and transcendent realm of forms that constitute the "true" reality, situated beyond the material universe. On this score alone, any pre-Platonic approach to Homer (whether Pythagorean or other) will prove inadequate, for the simple reason that this model of reality begins with Plato. In the surviving literature, a complete defense on the esthetic level is to be found only in Proclus, but the central concepts on which that defense is built are anticipated by Numenius and Porphyry.

The passages rejected on moral grounds are most easily defended on those same moral grounds, by reasoning from the text of Homer and reaching conclusions different from those reached by Socrates. Thus the first tools of defensive commentators will be paraphrase and interpretation. The moral issues are in some cases far less obvious than Socrates would have them, and it is not beyond the powers of dialectical reasoning, for instance, to reduce to a minimum the responsibility of Athena for the crime of Pandarus.^[50] In such discussions, one is often reminded of the tendentious and playful sophistic tours de force by which, for instance, Helen was demonstrated to be innocent of causing the Trojan War.^[51] There was, by the time of the Neoplatonists, a long tradition of turning the moral world of Homer upside down, for a variety of reasons, both rhetorical and philosophical.

It is the second alternative open to the defender of Homer that will be

[50] Cf. Proclus In Rep . 1.100-106.

[51] E.g., Gorgias's Encomium on Helen .

― 20 ―

of greatest concern in the present study, the mode of interpretation that we are accustomed to call "allegorical" in the context of antiquity. There is a general failure in antiquity to make a clear distinction between allegorical expression and allegorical interpretation. What we call "allegorical interpretation" in this context normally takes the form of a claim that an author has expressed himself "allegorically" in a given passage. This is summed up in the scholiasts' frequently repeated, compressed observation, "He says allegorically . . ."

, by which they indicate that the passage in question says one thing, viewed superficially, but means another

. There is never any suggestion that the goal of the commentator is anything but the elucidation of the intention or meaning

of the author. Neither does the interpreter normally feel compelled to justify his claim that the text under consideration "says other things" than the obvious. His goal is to find the hidden meanings, the correspondences that carry the thrust of the text beyond the explicit. Once he has asserted their existence, he rarely feels the need to provide a theoretical substructure for his claims. If such a substructure is implied, it is often no more than the idea that a prestigious author is incapable of an incoherent or otherwise unacceptable statement, and that an offensive surface is thus a hint that a secondary meaning lurks beyond.

Thus our modern associations with "allegory" as an element of critical vocabulary are not particularly useful in this context. The ancient usage is broader and more difficult to define. The word has a specific definition in the sphere of rhetoric,^[52] but that definition has little relevance to the phenomenon under consideration here. A model of poetic expression in which multiple levels of meaning are possible exists at least as early as Plato. Ancient "critics" would normally make no distinction of kind between the observation that Homer says "Hera" but means "mist"

—i.e., that Homer is allegorical in the modern sense—and the observation that Homer says that Athena tricked Pandarus into acting in a cowardly manner, but means only that he was a weak and cowardly character from whom such action was to be expected.

"Allegorical interpretation," then, can comprehend virtually the whole of what we call "interpretation," beyond mere parsing. Grube's claim that the Greek critics assumed that works of literature were able to communicate without intermediaries^[53] is thus in a sense justified—there

[52] Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 70) offers a definition linking it to irony and sarcasm.

[53] See Preface, with n. 3, above.

― 21 ―

does seem to be general agreement on the existence of a level of meaning that is obvious and often sufficient. There is also general agreement, however, that texts such as those of Homer "say other things" than the obvious (i.e., that they speak

), and that failure to apprehend one or more of these "other" meanings may often lead to failure to comprehend the author's full intention in the text.

The process of interpretation, thus conceived, clearly engages the reader in an active role. There are limits set by the text itself, and the Neoplatonists do not follow the Stoic lead that would seem explicitly to sanction the idea that the reader, not the text, determines the field of reference, and hence the scope of the meaning.^[54] Ultimately, however, all interpretation will prove unsatisfactory if we accept the model articulated by Socrates in the Protagoras^[55] and give in to his final frustration that we can never directly interrogate the author and thus can have no hope of testing our conclusions about the actual meaning of a text that is conceived of as coextensive with the meaning (that is, the intention) of its author. Other models are, however, possible—increasingly so when a text is no longer considered as a normal human utterance but as a piece of scripture, an utterance of a privileged sort that, whatever the frustrations and inadequacies of the process, must be interrogated for the sake of the important truths it is thought to contain.

It is difficult to say whether there was ever a time when the Iliad and Odyssey were not viewed as possessing this potential to reveal meanings beyond the obvious. What is demonstrable, however, is that the tradition of interpretation cultivated by the Neoplationists generated a model of the meaning of these poems—and of the structure of that meaning—that departed extraordinarily from the most obvious meaning, transforming the poems into revelations concerning the nature of the universe and the fate of souls. Since they never abandoned the idea that the meanings they

^[54]

[55] Plato Prot . 347e, discussed below in the Afterword.

― 22 ―

found in the poems had been placed there deliberately by Homer, the image of the poet himself underwent a corresponding change. It is by a process such as this that the Homer antiquity saw reflected in Demodocus was transformed into the Homer of the title page of Chapman's Odyssey , assimilated to Tiresias.^[56]

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 729