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D. The Latin Tradition 3 page

Eustathius's performance goes on at great length, proceeding first to explore the Aeneid from beginning to end for borrowed passages, then to look for passages in which Virgil outdid his model, those where they are equal, and those where Homer was beyond him. Eustathius's true allegiance comes out at this point in his assertion that Virgil wanted to imitate Homer in everything, "but with his human forces he was unable everywhere to match that divinity."[142] This should not be taken much more seriously than the references by other speakers to Virgil the "high priest."[143] It does, however, testify to an attitude that saw in Homer the theologian the predecessor and master of Virgil, in an age when the latter had eclipsed the former in the West.

There is little more in the Saturnalia that evokes the Homer of late Platonic tradition. The contribution of Servius to the discussion is limited to the explanation of uniquely Virgilian figures and vocabulary (e.g., Sat . 6.6-9). The allegorical portion of Servius's own surviving commentary on Virgil, dating from the early fifth century, has been examined by J. W. Jones, who emphasizes that the substantial element of allegorical exegesis in the Servian commentary differs from that found in some of the medieval commentators in its lack of "a single system or plan."[144] In other

[141] See Flamant, Macrobe , p. 140.

[142] nec tamen humanis viribus illam divinitatem ubique poterat aequare (Sat . 5.13.33).

[143] Aside from the instance already cited, cf. divinus ille vates at Sat . 7.10.2, where the context is quite trivial and the epithet casual.

[144] J. W. Jones, "Allegorical Interpretation in Servius," p. 224. This element is indeed small enough that Emile Thomas (Essai sur Servius et son commentaire sur Virgile , p. 245) was able to ignore it and to paint Servius as the defender of "les droits de la raison et du bon sens" against the allegorists, but his opinion merely reflects an understandable and widespread prejudice against the mode of interpretation under consideration here.

― 270 ―

words, it is allegory of the piecemeal, eclectic type we have been examining, dealing not with the global meaning of the work, but more often with specific elements within that work, and characterized by methodological diversity. The universe of book 6 of the Aeneid predictably requires cosmological explanation,[145] and various moral allegories are expounded, some of them explicitly Pythagorean. Again, this tells us little about the fate of the understanding of Homer, but the fortunes of the two poets were to a considerable degree intertwined. Like the Saturnalia , Servius's commentary on Virgil enjoyed a large public in the Middle Ages.[146] Not surprisingly, Homer is evoked or quoted very frequently, and these references serve to perpetuate his image as Virgil's antecedent and master,[147] the greater sage behind the magus that Virgil was to become for the Middle Ages.[148]



The importance of Macrobius for the transmission of the conception of Homer under discussion is far more obvious in the Commentary on Scipio's Dream than in the Saturnalia .[149] Here, piecemeal allegory abounds. Macrobius's version of the Numenian cave allegory, already mentioned,[150] constitutes the most significant evidence of Macrobius as the vehicle of a "Pythagorean" reading of Homer. It is through him that this allegory reached, among others, Albertus Magnus, the master of Aquinas.[151] Other references to Homer include the association of Menelaus's imprecation to the Greeks, "May you all become earth and water," with the doctrine of the

that the line of demarcation between earth and water

[145] Jones, "Allegorical Interpretation in Servius," pp. 220-21.

[146] Cf. Thomas, Essai sur Servius , pp. 303-50 for the medieval manuscript tradition.

[147] For references, see J. F. Mountfort and J. T. Schultz, Index Rerum et Nominum in Scholiis Servii et Aelii Donati Tractatorum , pp. 79-80.

[148] The basic source on this development remains Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo (1870).

[149] The basic modern study of the commentary is Karl Mras, Macrobius' Kommentar zu Ciceros Somnium . He emphasizes Macrobius's use of Porphyry and his acceptance of the concept that the teachings of Homer and Plato are identical (P. 55). The commentary itself uses the dream of Scipio at the end of the De re publica of Cicero (in the position of the myth of Er in Plato's Republic ) as a pretext for the elaboration of Neoplatonic ideas.

[150] See above, pp. 71-72.

[151] Aquinas Sum. theol . 2.12. q. 72. m. 4, art. 3. See Stahl's annotated translation of the commentary, p. 133, n. 18, and p. 134, n. 3.

― 271 ―

is called necessitas (In somn. Scip . 1.6.37) and a reference to Homer as an authority on the credibility of dreams (In somn. Scip . 1.3.14). Macrobius defends Zeus's conduct in sending the deceitful dream to Agamemnon using exactly the same arguments put forward by Proclus in the same context. Perhaps the common source used by Macrobius and Proclus on this point,[152] Porphyry is explicitly the source of a passage commenting on the gates of horn and ivory (Od . 19.562-67), which cannot itself be described as allegorical but is built upon the commonplace that "all truth lies concealed" (latet . . . omne verum ).[153] The interpretation of Thetis's description of Zeus's journey to feast with the Ethiopians is repeated from the Saturnalia and attributed simply to physici and not specifically to the Stoics. The allegorical understanding of the Homeric lines is attributed to the physici along with the associated conception of the relationship of fire and water. In this context Homer is described as "the fount and origin of all inventions concerning the divine" (divinarum omnium inventionum fons et origo ) and said to have "delivered this truth to the understanding of the wise beneath a cloud of poetic fiction" (sub poetici nube figmenti verum sapientibus intellegi dedit ) (In somn. Scip . 2.10.11).

Many of these interpretations from the commentary are physical and moral rather than mystical allegories, but aside from the association of Homer with Pythagorean doctrines on the fate of souls, this work is also an important source for the specifically Neoplatonic allegory of the golden chain of Zeus (Il . 8.19). This passage has a rich tradition among the interpreters, which has been meticulously examined and analyzed.[154] The Neoplatonic branch, which probably goes back to Porphyry, saw in Homer's image a description of the chain of spiritual powers extending from the highest god to the material universe.[155] Macrobius's formulation depends on the triad of hypostases of Plotinian Neoplatonism and incorporates an image from Plotinus:

Thus, since mind emanates from the highest god and soul from mind, and soul both shapes and fills with life all that follows and that single blaze illuminates everything and appears in all things, as a single face reflected in a series of mirrors, and since all things follow on one another in a continuous succession, degenerating progressively as they descend, he who looks closely will find a continuous bond, com-

[152] See Stahl's annotated translation of Macrobius's commentary, p. 119, n. 3, where he summarizes the positions of earlier scholars on the problem of Macrobius's source here.

[153] Macrob. In somn. Scip . 1.3.17-18.

[154] See Pierre Lévêque, Aurea Catena Homeri .

[155] Lévêque, Aurea Catena Homeri , p. 56.

― 272 ―

posed of interlocking links and never broken, extending all the way from the highest god to the last dregs of the material universe. This, moreover, is Homer's golden chain, which he says god ordered to be hung from heaven to earth.[156]

The image enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages and beyond, though the Homeric source is seldom explicit.[157] The fact that Macrobius was aware of its Homeric origin and mentions it is, however, a guarantee that this was also known to some of the medieval authors to whom he transmitted it. The golden chain appears without mention of Homer in Bernard Silvestris, who may in turn have influenced Dante.[158]

In view of the probability that Macrobius's extensive citations from Homer are all at second hand, and that his direct knowledge of Homer was minimal,[159] we have here striking evidence of the pervasive influence of the interpretive tradition in isolation from the text. As early as the beginning of the fifth century in the Latin West, we must consider a certain conception of the kind of poet Homer was to be replacing the direct experience of the poems.

It is a peculiar coincidence that we have another commentary on Scipio's dream, perhaps two decades older than that of Macrobius.[160] It likewise uses the passage from Cicero's De re publica as a pretext for the elaboration of Neoplatonic ideas, and its author, Favonius Eulogius, was a Carthaginian rhetor and a student of Augustine's.[161] Karl Praechter

[156] Secundum haec ergo cum ex summo deo mens, ex mente anima fit, anima vero et condat et vita compleat omnia quae sequuntur, cunctaque hic unus fulgor illuminet et in universis appareat, ut in multis speculis per ordinem positis vultus unus, cumque omnia continuis successionibus se sequantur degenerantia per ordinem ad imum meandi: invenietur pressius intuenti a summo deo usque ad ultimam rerum faecem una mutuis se vinculis religans et nusquam interrupta connexio. et haec est Homeri catena aurea, quam pendere de caelo in tetras deum iussisse commemorat (In somn. Scip . 1.14.15). See Lévêque, Aurea Catena Homeri , pp. 46-47, and cf. Plotinus's comparable use of the image of the string of mirrors at Enn . 1.1.8.

[157] The literature is summarized by Lévêque, Aurea Catena Homeri , pp. 57-60.

[158] Bernard Silvestris, De mundi universitate libri duo 2.7.1, cited by Lévêque, Aurea Catena Homeri , p. 57, n. 3. For the possible connection between Bernard Silvestris and Dante, see David Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys , p. 28. See also ch. 6E, with n. 212, below.

[159] See Flamant, Macrobe , pp. 300-304.

[160] On the date of Favonius's commentary see Van Weddington in his edition of Favonius, p. 7.

[161] The evidence is from the De cura pro mortuis gerenda of Augustine, cited and discussed by Van Weddington in his edition of Favonius, p. 5 and n. 2.

― 273 ―

listed him among the significant Latin Neoplatonists,[162] but the brief commentary that is his only surviving work throws little light on our problem. His sources are primarily Latin rather than Greek (as one might expect from a student of Augustine's), and his interests are numerological and musical. Without mentioning Homer, however, he does explain the "first marriage" as described by "the poets" using the same Pythagoreanizing Neoplatonic numerology applied by Proclus to the intercourse of Zeus and Hera in the episode of the deception of Zeus (In Rep. 1.133-35). Juno is identified with the dyad and Jupiter with the monad.[163]

The famous De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, approximately contemporary with Macrobius, constitutes a unique document in the late history of Latin Platonism. Its trappings of myth and personification allegory make it clear that it is esthetically close to Prudentius, but as we have seen, personification allegory is only distantly related to the interpretive tradition, and the genuinely Neoplatonic contents of Martianus's book are minimal.[164]

Martianus undertook to create a digest of classical rhetoric and learning, clothing it in an allegory representing the apotheosis of Philologia and her marriage to Mercury, the god presiding over eloquentia . Despite his knowledge of Greek, his references to Homer and to specifically Homeric myth are extremely sparse. Homer is cited only once,[165] when the line,

A fierce man—he'd be likely to cast blame even on an innocent person,


(Il . 11.654)

is used to describe the proverbially incorruptible and severe statesman Gaius Fabricius Luscinius, who appears with Cicero among the foremost orators. It is revealing that glosses on Martianus Capella indicate that by the ninth century this isolated line of Greek had been totally garbled and could not be understood.[166]

[162] Praechter, Philosophie des Altertums , p. 652.

[163] Primumque conubium poetae fabulosae dixerunt sororis et coniugis, quod videlicet unius generis numero coeunte copuletur; et Iunonem vocant, uni scilicet Iovi accessione alterius inhaerentem (Favonius Disp . 6 [17.27-19.1]).

[164] So Praechter, Philosophie des Altertums , p. 652.

[165] Mart. De nupt . bk. 5 (213.11). References are to page and line of Dick's Teubner edition.

[166] Dunchad Gloss. in Mart . p. 40 and n. 91.

― 274 ―

The single presentation of Homer in the De nuptiis that casts light on the tradition under examination is his appearance in book 2, where a chorus of Muses greets Philologia and, after she has encountered the gods and demigods, she enters a clearly Pythagoreanizing paradise of intellectuals: "You saw Linus, Homer and the Mantuan seer, redeemed and singing—Orpheus and Aristoxenus resounding their beliefs—Plato and Archimedes rolling down golden spheres."[167] The situation seems to be precisely the one we encounter later in Dante. Homer's fame and his association with visionaries and philosophers had outlived any clear knowledge of the text. Significantly, the ninth-century commentator already mentioned misreads the passage and takes Linus and Homer to be the same poet.[168]

Beyond this triumphant epiphany, the references to Homeric material are few. In the classification of speeches the type an Aiacem Ulixes occiderit occurs (De nupt ., bk. 5 [236.3]), and there are linguistic and morphological comments on the names of Ajax and Agamemnon.[169] Finally, in the geographical excursus of book 6, two locations are associated with Homer, four with Ulixes, and one each with Circe, Aeolus, and Achilles. These references, slight as they are, are nevertheless indicative of important survival patterns for Homeric material. Martianus clearly has geographical sources that use the Odyssey and trace Odysseus's wanderings. In isolation from the text, this stratum of Homeric lore would seem to have taken refuge in the geographers and in the oral tradition in the form of founding myths.

The last link in our chain is Boethius. This ambitious scholar had planned to translate the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin but earned the displeasure of Theodoric the Ostrogoth and was tortured and put to death in 524 or 525. Although his translation project remained far from complete (and there was not to be a complete Latin Plato before Ficino), Boethius remains, as Praechter put it, "der Vermittler

zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter."[170] That he was a Christian is shown by five theological treatises that survive under his name, but the famous

[167] Linum, Homerum, Mantuanumque vatem redimitos canentesque conspiceres, Orpheum atque Aristoxenum fidibus personantes, Platonem Archimedenque sphaeras aureas devolventes (Mart. De nupt . bk. 2 [p. 78.10-13]).

[168] Or perhaps he took linum as an adjective modifying Homerum . See Dunchad, Gloss. in Mart . p. 12 (on 78. 10) and n. 41.

[169] Mart. De nupt . bk. 2 (88.4, 21; 92.10) and bk. 3 (P. 122.5).

[170] Praechter, Philosophie des Altertums , pp. 652-55.

― 275 ―

Consolation of Philosophy and the translations and commentaries[171] show no trace of explicit Christian content.

The position of Homer in the works on logic is negligible, as might be expected. The Consolation , infused as it is with classical culture viewed from the perspective of an eclectic Platonism, repeatedly associates Homer with the philosophical tradition and specifically with Neoplatonic doctrines.

The Consolation is a complex mixture of philosophical dialogue, Menippean satire, and personification allegory. The author, imprisoned and depressed, looks up from the self-indulgent lyrics in which he is expressing his misery and sees the figure of Philosophy before him. She drives away his Muses (comparing them to Sirens, Cons . 1.1 [prose] 40-41), replaces them with her own, and proceeds to offer him exhortations and consolations with the goal of reconciling him to the true nature of things.

There can be little question that Boethius had both a solid command of Greek and direct experience of the Homeric poems. There is no reason, however, to believe that this experience extended to the entire Iliad and Odyssey . When Philosophia, making the banal point that no life contains unmixed blessings, asks, "Did you not learn as a little boy that 'two jars, the one of evils, the other of good things' lie on Zeus's threshold?"[172] she throws light on Boethius's relationship to Homer. We have no reason to believe that he studied Homer beyond the excerpts that would have been the inevitable introduction to his Greek education or that he returned to Homer as an adult with more developed philosophical interests.

Boethius is clearly aware of a variety of uses of Homer. He employs him both decoratively and rhetorically to enhance the vividness of his dialogue and appeals to him as a higher authority. These appeals often involve some implicit effort of interpretation. Of all the authors considered thus far, Plotinus is perhaps the closest to Boethius in his use of Homer, in that explicit efforts at exegesis are relatively insignificant, though Homer remains constantly available as a source of citations and images charged with spiritualized meaning. These meanings may be de-

[171][172]

― 276 ―

veloped in the immediate context or they may depend on the tradition of interpretation implied in their use. Here, Homer is by no means replaced by the interpretive tradition, but Boethius's use of the Iliad and Odyssey is deeply affected by that tradition.

Aside from the references to the Muses, just mentioned, the opening tableau exploits several unacknowledged but unquestionably Homeric images and details. When Philosophy tears Boethius's attention from his poetic lamentations and stands before him oculis ardentibus ,[173] the mind of a reader versed in Homer would be directed to the familiar description of Athena when she appeared to Achilles, and "her eyes blazed terribly" (

, Il . 1.200). The description of her size depends on the Homeric description of

,[174] and as she wipes away Boethius's tears, the reference to Athena removing the mist from Diomedes' eyes is unavoidable. Philosophy wants to make Boethius capable of recognizing her (just as Athena had wanted to make it possible for Diomedes to perceive gods on the battlefield and distinguish them from men), and she says, "So that he may be able to do this, let us clear his eyes for a while from the mist of mortal things that clouds them."[175]

Two of these details have possible significance in that they borrow descriptions of Athena from the Iliad to describe Boethius's Philosophia, an obvious correspondence. This sort of use of Homer, however, whatever it might imply about the spiritual message of Homer to an audience that knew Homer by heart, could mean little or nothing to most of Boethius's readers, even in his own time. Of more interest in the present context are those passages where Homer is quoted directly or mentioned by name.

It is significant, first of all, that it is always Philosophia and not Boethius who quotes or alludes to Homer. Passages from Homer are employed as educational touchstones and, as in the passage on the jars al-

[173] Cons . 1.1 (prose)4.

[174] Cons . 1.5 (prose) 8-11 echoes Il . 4.442-43.

Philosophia speaks: Athena speaks:
Quod ut possit, paulisper lumina eius mortalium rerum nube caligantia tergamus
Cons . 1.2 (prose) 15-16.  
  Il . 5.127-28.
Note also the use of this Iliad passage with the force of an incantation in Proclus (see ch. 5C, with notes 55 and 56, above).

― 277 ―

ready cited, Philosophy uses Homer primarily to help Boethius return from his present despair to the sound principles of philosophy imparted during his first education, which his emotion has now blocked from his mind. She makes explicit reference to Homer four times in the prose passages and once in verse and at several other points alludes to specifically Homeric myth.[176]

The first instance is very close in spirit to the non-explicit borrowings in the opening tableau, but with the important difference that Homer is cited directly in Greek. Philosophia and Boethius now take on the pose of Thetis and Achilles in the scene where the hero reluctantly and poutingly shares his grief with his mother (Il . 1.348-427). After the quoted line, "Tell it out; don't hide it in your mind" (

, Il . 1.363), Boethius responds exactly as Achilles had, by asking Philosophia if her demand is really a necessary one. Here again, however, the allusion is merely decorative, and the echoed Homeric scene soon fades from consciousness without providing more than an imaginatively charged epic backdrop for the symbolic encounter.

In the following chapter, however, when Philosophia cites (with slight modification) the Homeric phrase "let there be one shepherd of the people, one king" (

, Il . 2.204-5), the context makes it clear that Homer is being evoked in a manner reminiscent of the Plotinian interpretive allusions. Philosophia has just called upon Boethius to remember his true homeland,[177] and the Homeric phrase constitutes an attempt to characterize that realm, in contrast to the political chaos of which Boethius is presently the victim. The "native land" evoked here is not necessarily that to which Plotinus enjoins the soul to return, but it is at the very least the focused and unified realm of mind and reason, and it is to this sort of reality that the Homeric passage is made to refer.

Considerably later in the dialogue, Philosophia cites a Homeric line in the rather surprising context of asserting the impossibility of explaining ultimate reality in human speech or of comprehending it with human

[176] Philosophy quotes Homer with acknowledgement in the prose sections of Boeth. Cons . 1.4; 1.5; 2.2; and 4.6, as well as in the verse section of 5.2. She also alludes to Circe in the poem of 4.2 and to Agamemnon and Odysseus in that of 4.7. The infernal landscape of the Orpheus and Eurydice poem (3.12) is peopled from the nekyia of the Odyssey . A reference to Tiresias at 5.3 is not relevant here because Boethius's source is a Horatian parody of oracular utterance (Hor. Sat . 2.5.59) and the story in question is not Homeric.

[177] Cf. Plot. Enn . 5.1.1.

― 278 ―

reason. She has attempted to reconcile "chance" and "providence": "But it is a hard thing for me to tell all this like a god [

,
Il . 12.176] for it is not allowed for a man either to comprehend all the devices of the workings of god within his mind or to explain them with his speech."[178] Homer thus becomes the unwilling spokesman of the negative theology. In its original context the line had referred simply to the pressures placed upon the singer by a complex battle narrative, but here it has absorbed the Plotinian understanding of the difficulty of making meaningful statements about the divine through the vehicle of articulate human speech.

In one of the most impressive of the verse passages, Philosophia quotes Homer in Greek and then mentions him by name in order to correct him and bring his statement into line with the truth. The procedure is again Plotinian:

Honey-voiced Homer sings
that Phoebus shining with pure light
"sees and hears all things"
but he cannot break through
to the deep center of earth or sea
with his feeble shimmer.
The maker of this great universe
is not so weak: no mass of earth,
no black clouds of night
block his view from above.
He grasps in a single impulse of mind
what is and was and is to be
and you might call him the true sun
since he alone sees all things.[179]

[178] Neque enim fas est homini cunctas divinae operae machinas vel ingenio comprehendere vel explicare sermone (Cons . 4.6 [prose] 196-99).

[179]

― 279 ―

The Homeric material, of course, goes beyond the line quoted in Greek, and the eleventh verse is a translation of


(Il . 1.70). The attributes of the highest god here are derived almost exclusively from Homeric sources, and the only correction, finally, is the clarification that the god in question is the sun only in the sense that the material sun might be taken as a representation of that higher, noetic reality. Related conceptions have come up in Plotinus, Julian, and Macrobius.

Although these are the only references and citations in the Consolation leading us directly to the text of Homer, Philosophia also draws upon Homeric exempla to make moral points. Circe's victims are evoked, along with Odysseus's narrow escape (Cons . 4.3 [poem]). The moral tag attached to the decorative fable is, however, a paradox. Circe's potions are dismissed as negligible, in that they only transform the body, but leave the mind intact. The poisons most to be feared, according to Philosophia, are those that do the opposite, attacking the mind rather than the body. This adaptation of the Odyssey material, though apparently original, is inseparable from the previously existing tradition that imposed moral allegory on the passage. Odysseus and Agamemnon are similarly introduced in the poem of section 4.7, and their function is again a moral one. Their heroism against a backdrop of despair is to inspire Boethius to a similar victory, and the more appropriate Heracles rapidly takes over as the dominant mythological figure of the fable.

Perhaps the most important point to be retained from Boethius's use of Homer is the persistent association of Homer with Philosophia. Just as for Macrobius (drawing upon Numenius and Porphyry) Homer was a philosopher whose doctrines were compatible with those of Plato, so for Boethius Homeric language and myth, properly understood, yield truths about the nature of man and the universe compatible with Platonism.


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