A. The Paths of Transmission

Up to this point, with the exception of a brief discussion of Prudentius, this study has been concerned exclusively with Greek literature and thought. In fact, much of what has been discussed has been of Italian origin, from the archaic Pythagoreanism of southern Italy to the teachings of Plotinus and Porphyry in Rome. Virtually all the material examined, however, has been Greek in language and tradition. Traces of the Platonized Homer can be found in Latin authors as early as Apuleius,^[1] a contemporary of Numenius, but there is no single work in Latin that explores at length the conception of Homer we have been tracing.

The history of the mystical allegorical interpretation of Homer from Proclus to Eustathius, as well as of its place in Byzantine tradition, would require a special study of its own. Up to the present, little work has been done in this area.^[2] The Iliad and Odyssey were found by the Byzantines to be Christian allegories, or at least to communicate allegorically truths compatible with Christian doctrine,^[3] much as Virgil had been mustered

[1] Cf. Apuleius Met . 9.13, where Homer is referred to as priscae poeticae divinus auctor , and the discussion of Odysseus and Athena (the latter taken as a representation of prudentia ) at the end of De deo Socratis (24). Augustine mentions Apuleius as an interpreter of myth (Civ. Dei 9.7).

^[2]

[3] Browning, "Homer in Byzantium," pp. 25-29.

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to the Christian cause since the time of Constantine.^[4] It is a premise of the present study, however, that the mystical allegorical interpretation of Homer has importance for the development not only of Byzantine culture but also, and from our perspective more significantly, for the development of Western European literature. Thus the Byzantine tradition of Christianizing Homeric allegory will interest us only in its earliest phases, those susceptible of transmission to the Latin West.

Traces of awareness of the mystical allegorical interpretation of Homer can be found in Western European literature from Dante to Blake. This study has proposed a model for the early development of allegorical literature in late antiquity that, if sound, extends the influence of this interpretive tradition far beyond those who had any knowledge of the ancient interpretive texts themselves.^[5] Those influenced would include the writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance who worked in a mode that owed its origin to the demands upon literature generated by the interpretive tradition. This, however, is a distant influence and difficult to trace.

Scholars have demonstrated links between the tradition of allegorical interpretation and the understanding of the Homeric poems in the English Renaissance under the influence of Chapman's Odyssey .^[6] That influence was discontinuous, and one finds little trace of it during the eighteenth century,^[7] but by the end of that century Thomas Taylor's translations were making available to the poets and intellectuals who were creating the Romantic movement in England not only the whole of Plato—translated into English for the first time—but a vast amount of Neoplatonic commentary, including Porphyry's essay on the cave of the

[4] A Christian interpretation of Eclogue 4 appears in an oration of Constantine appended to Eusebius's Life of Constantine , along with a Greek translation of the eclogue.

[5] See Preface and ch. 4 above.

[6] See Lord, Homeric Renaissance . Lord describes the allegorical interpretation of Homer in Renaissance England as part of an "unbroken tradition extending 2,000 years back to classical times," (p. 35) and emphasizes Chapman's "'almost religious attitude'" (p. 39—the words are Donald Smalley's) toward Homer and his belief that "his highest duty as a translator [was] the revelation of Homer's concealed mysteries" (p. 40).

[7] Even eighteenth-century critics "were intrigued by the fact that the tradition of antiquity, which was theirs as well, had seen Homer as a divinely inspired, omniscient poet" (K. Simonsuuri, Homer's Original Genius , p. 152). Nevertheless, after (and in spite of) Joshua Barnes's edition of 1711, the major eighteenth-century critics seem to have taken the sort of anti-allegorical, Enlightenment stance one might have expected with regard to the meaning of the text.

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nymphs and part of Proclus's defense of Homer. The fact that Blake painted a representation of the Ithacan cave, based manifestly on Porphyry rather than Homer, suggests that the lesson was not ignored. One would like to know a great deal more about the relationship between the claims for Homer made in Porphyry's essay and Blake's conception of his own epic poetry.^[8]

Such works as Georg Finsler's comprehensive history of the literary fortunes of Homer from Dante to Goethe (Homer in der Neuzeit ) do little to trace this development, and it is clear that the Odyssey as read, for example, by Chapman, by Pope, by Blake, and by Joyce constitutes four quite different works of art.

It is far beyond the scope of the present study to examine all of the authors who have made use of Homer since the late Middle Ages to try to assess the level of influence of the mystical allegorical interpretive tradition upon them. In most of the cases mentioned—Chapman and Blake are the ones in point—the availability of at least some of the ancient interpretive texts we have examined can be demonstrated. The problem with regard to Dante is a far more difficult one. Dante lived in a culture ignorant of the Iliad and Odyssey . He did not know Greek, and no translation was available to him (Convivio 1.7). At the same time, however, he expressed his awe of Homer and elaborated on Homeric themes in the Divina Commedia . One source for this attitude can no doubt be found in the Latin literature available to Dante, and especially in Virgil. It is clear that though he had no direct knowledge of Homer's poetry, Dante had certain ideas about the nature of that poetry and of the goals and structure of meaning of epic poetry in general, which point to the influence of the tradition discussed in this study.

It is impossible to prove that Dante or his contemporaries supposed Homer to be the sort of poet Porphyry or Proclus thought him to be. It will be the purpose of this final chapter to indicate, however, that the conception of Homer articulated by Greek Neoplatonism was transmitted through influential authors who were read in the West at a time when Homer was not. It is generally accepted by scholars that the Plato known to the Middle Ages was a creation of the Middle Platonists and the Neo-

[8] See Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition , esp. vol. 1, pp. 69-98. Raine's explanation of the iconography of the "Arlington Court Painting" served as a basis for tracing many elements of Blake's imagery back to Porphyry. Her explanation of the painting has not been universally accepted (see Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake [text], pp. 549-50, contra), but both her discussion of the iconography and her demonstration of links between Thomas Taylor and Blake seem quite convincing.

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platonists, and that the "essential" Plato of the dialogues had to be rediscovered, beyond the Neoplatonists' intrusions, by the eighteenth century.^[9] Very much the same thing may be said to have happened to Homer. The traditional master poet, no longer read, followed the path of the traditional sage and was submerged by his earlier readers and commentators. The evidence is meager but not without substance. If anything, the absence of a text of Homer would have aided the Latin Middle Ages to take with complete seriousness the testimony of Calcidius or Macrobius on the kind of meaning to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey . Our task, in any case, will be limited to an examination of that evidence and to the presentation of a model for the transmission of the Neoplatonists' understanding of the Iliad and Odyssey to the Latin West. Even to accomplish this will require excursions into bodies of literature far from the major expertise of the author, and therefore greater dependence on existing scholarship. Nevertheless, whatever gaps it contains, this survey represents an attempt to document a survival that remains marginal to the concerns of most intellectual and literary histories—the survival not of a text but of a reading.

The most important of the lines of transmission through which the ideas we have been discussing reached the West was the Latin tradition that extended directly from the influential authors of late antiquity to the major thinkers of the Middle Ages. But this was not the only path; two others command our attention as well. The model of transmission we shall follow is that formulated by Raymond Klibansky in his outline of the projected corpus platonicum medii aevi .^[10] His "three main currents," the Arabic tradition, the Byzantine tradition, and the Latin tradition all contribute, if unequally, to the transmission of the "divine Homer"—a figure who, by late antiquity, had become part of the general baggage, not simply of Platonism (since Platonism no longer had any serious rivals), but of philosophy as a whole.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 639