Why Homer Still Matters

Before Dante grappled with his “Inferno” and Aristotle coached the Greeks on persuasion, a blind Aegean dazzled the ancient world with his riveting storytelling and rhetoric.

Somewhere close to 750 B.C., Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey launched the ancient Hellenes on the voyage-battle that became the Greek miracle. Like no other literature apart from the Bible, his epics continue to form culture and transform souls.

We don’t know much about Homer. We believe he was Greek, suspect he was blind, and know he (if he was “he”) lived centuries before Jesus Christ. Most of what scholars and everyday readers have learned about Homer is derived from his works. 

Homer presented his heroes as examples of real people writ large — men prone to vice straining for virtue and glory. And yes, fearing death, but dreading shame more. Homer offered characters who lead us on the path to virtue, especially through courageous speech and wise battling. After all, what human activity can be mastered, and what virtue can be gained, without courage and wisdom?

Homer conceived paideia, what we call education, as the cultivation of the complete man of arete (virtue). The Iliad is a war story, yet his heroes were as ready to speak before an assembly as they were to fight on battlefields. When they prevailed in either contest, they did so through courage, temperance, and wisdom with an eye to justice.

Yet his writings contain a warning for the Greeks: You’re going to have to speak to achieve community and its benefits, but you can’t be naïve. While you can build wonders through speech, you can also destroy yourselves if you speak without wisdom and virtue.

No doubt, Homer understood oratory and could have listed a set of principles had he judged it prudent. Instead, he wove them into his Iliad with such skill and subtlety that we don’t just learn the rules, we feel them.

If the Iliad could be reduced to a guidebook on rhetoric, the Odyssey could be similarly reduced to a guidebook on story-telling, or poetics (poiesis — Greek for “creating”). It is from Homer above all that the West — through the Greeks — learned to tell stories.

Whether Homer was one, two, or many people, his epics are best read as a unified artifact, comparable to a medieval “diptych.” In a diptych, viewers can give attention to each picture as complete in itself. But when they compare the two, they discover that they interpret each other with ever-new light: The Iliad interprets The Odyssey and The Odyssey interprets The Iliad; Achilleus interprets Odysseus and Odysseus interprets Achilleus; rhetoric interprets poetics and poetics interprets rhetoric.

The result of this interaction between poetics and rhetoric is dialectics: the back-and-forth of discussion, thought, and reflection. By creating the diptych, Homers moves the audience toward awareness of their own thoughts and motives. Homer’s epics provide space for audience members, both then and now, to wrestle with what is good, meaningful, and beautiful in the varying circumstances of life. Consequently, centuries later, the rules of dialectics, poetics, and oratory were codified as the three arts that underlay all Greek thought: logic, grammar, and rhetoric.  

Scholars generally recognize that much of Plato’s work was a response to Homer’s epics. And while Homer’s direct influence on Aristotle is less widely recognized, recent scholarship (such as Rachel Knudsen’s “Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric”) is correcting this oversight. Aristotle’s “On Rhetoric” includes little that could not be found in narrative form in Homer. Homer truly is what Plato confessed him to be: the educator of the Greeks.

Homer’s influence didn’t stop with the Greeks, however. Roughly two and a half millennia later, careful viewers can recognize Homeric plots in popular movies. The Coen brother's award-winning film “O Brother, Where Art Thou” adapts the Odyssey to their vision of the 20th-century American South. Moreover, the 1994 comedy “Dumb and Dumber” plays out like an intentional inversion of The Odyssey — one wise man striving to return home to his wife becomes two idiots who leave home to seek another man’s wife, and, along the way, kill a cyclopes character with his own poison. Other literary examples like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” wear their debt to Homer on their sleeves.

The Homeric narrative is so hyper-present in our culture that it slips past our consciousness. (One wonders if American rhetoric, that is, public discourse and deliberation, might not be cured if we marinated longer in the Iliad.)

The classical renewal spreading through America and many other countries has introduced Homer to tens of thousands of young men and women seeking wisdom as they search for a home, demand justice, and bear the grief and loss that fill every life.

“Tell me, Muse, of the polytropic man, he who traveled many places after he sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. He saw many cities of men and learned of their minds, and he suffered many things in his soul on the sea, with great care striving to save his own soul and those of his companions.” Homer opens his Odyssey by invoking the muse, the goddess of inspiration, and introducing a complex man who embodies the yearnings and burdens of all of us who want to return home and bring our friends with us.

The muse heard him. Thousands of years later, the weight and glory of Homer’s song reach beyond what even he could have imagined traveling on that wine-dark sea.