Download Historians and Homer As in other areas of ancient literature, the

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Historians and Homer As in other areas of
ancient literature, the influence of Homer on the
Greek and Roman historians was profound and
abiding. He was important in giving the Greeks their
first sense of a historical past and a geographical
place in the world, as well as in providing for the
historians themselves the subject matter and
methods for creating historical narratives.
Although it is a truism that “the Iliad is not a
history-book,” it is also the case that “Homeric
interest in the human past was all pervasive”
(Hornblower 1994, 9). The poet himself has a
clear sense that the events of his poems belong to
a distant era (see Heroic Age): his heroes are
men of a long-gone generation preeminent in
ability and strength (cf. the frequent remark
that the heroes perform tasks “such as not two
men of today could’: Il. 5.302–304), and even
parts of their physical world have vanished (12.9–
33 on the Achaean Wall; cf. Od. 13.159–183 on
why the Phaeacians no longer transport
strangers). In addition, in the epic world itself, the
heroes are aware of, and influenced by, earlier
generations, as seen in the narratives of
Nestor (Il. 1.254–284) and Phoinix (9.526–598)
(see also Reminiscences), and by the heroes’
recitation of their genealogies (most famously,
Glaukos and Diomedes, 6.119–236: see
Glaukos–Diomedes Episode). And just as the
Homeric poet’s world is inferior to that of his
heroes, so these earlier heroes invoked in the epic
are seen as exemplary and even superior to the
Homeric heroes (Odysseus refuses to compare
himself with Herakles, Od. 8.223–224). The
Homeric poems thus first created for the Greeks a
Vergangenheitsraum (Schadewaldt 1982, 69), and
it is perhaps not surprising that “historical” commentaries were written on the Homeric poems
(e.g., Demetrius of Scepsis on the Trojan
Catalogue, or Apollodorus of Athens on the
Catalogue of Ships) and that Homer’s value as
a historical source was a topic much debated in
antiquity (Strasburger 1972, 18–32).
To this concern with the past, the Odyssey adds
an interest in ethnography and geography. Its
descriptions of other lands (even if some were in
the realm of fantasy) and the enumeration of the
manners and customs of the peoples visited by
Odysseus betoken a growing awareness of, and
The Homer Encyclopedia, edited by Margalit Finkelberg
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
engagement with, the larger Mediterranean world
(see Odysseus’ Wanderings). The Odyssey exerted
a strong influence on early investigators into other
cultures (Montiglio 2005, 118–146), and the figure
of Odysseus himself was important in many
foundation myths of Greek colonies (Malkin 1998).
The other important area of Homeric influence
was on the historians themselves. The developed
genre of historiography took from the Homeric
poems many features of epic: a mimetic, largely
third-person narrative of deeds, interspersed
with the speeches of historical characters in direct
discourse; a concern to articulate the causes of
actions and to pinpoint responsibility; an elevated style appropriate to “great” deeds; and a
concern to immortalize those deeds for posterity
and to draw from them important lessons about life
and human action. The historians were also influenced by Homer in their choice of “suitable” subject
matter: from the Iliad, the story of great deeds and
struggles, especially military campaigns and the
sackings of cities; from the Odyssey, an interest in
foreign lands and places, in the guile and cunning
of leaders, and in the pleasures of narrative itself.
Under the influence of both epics, they favored stories of persistence in the face of great obstacles, and
displayed sympathy for the sufferings of human
beings on the grand as well as the individual scale.
The early historians were particularly influenced
by and engaged with Homer. Herodotus plays the
key role here, and he was recognized already in
antiquity as “most like Homer” (homêrikôtatos
[Long.] Subl. 13.3). Although Herodotus was
indebted to, and much influenced by, the traditions
of Ionian science and enquiry, it was Homer who
offered him an intelligible model for the
presentation of those enquiries: how to construct
a large-scale narrative, with (sometimes expansive)
shifts in time and space; how to subordinate
individual episodes and digressions within a
larger, unified narrative structure; and how to
present the events of the past with immediacy and
clarity. Herodotus unites both epics within his
work, since his thematic conception – a great war
between East and West – is indebted to the Iliad,
while his own travel, enquiry, interest in marvels,
and preoccupation with reversals of fortune owe
much to the Odyssey. His preface makes allusion
to both epics: his desire that the deeds he narrates
not be without their fame (aklea, praef.) is a clear
reference to the klea andrôn celebrated by
Achilles (Il. 9.189; see kleos) and others; and his
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remark that he will go through the “great and
small cities of men alike” (ὁμοίωϚ μικρὰ καὶ
μεγάλα ἄστεα ἀνθρώπων, 1.5.3) borrows from
Odyssey 1.3, πολλω̂ν δʹἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ
νόον ἔγνω (“he saw cities of many men and
learned their minds”).
Yet even while imitating Homer, Herodotus
challenged him. He brought to historiography the
polemic against Homer begun by the Presocratic
philosophers (see Xenophanes), and, like them, he
sought to challenge the authority of Homer by
“correcting” and “improving” him. His displaypiece refutation of Homer’s account of the Trojan
War (2.116–120), based on probability and the evidence of the poems themselves, is meant to devalue
poetry and point out the superiority of Herodotus’
own, new “historical” method. Elsewhere, he challenges the greatness of Homer’s war by explicitly
claiming that the Persian armament against Greece
dwarfed that of the Greeks against Troy (7.20).
This twin legacy – emulation and challenge –
was bequeathed to Thucydides, who maintains the
general epic features imported into historiography
by Herodotus, but whose relationship with Homer
is more complicated. In the “Archaeology”
(1.1–20) he accepts much of the information from
the Homeric poems while simultaneously arguing
that the early events portrayed there were far from
great and vastly inferior to his own war.
Thucydides’ narrative technique follows Homer
more closely than Herodotus, especially in the
suppression of the ubiquitous “I” of Herodotus’
work in favor of a more “unintrusive” Homeric
narrator (Rengakos 2005, 2006). And ancient
critics saw Thucydides too as one who “vied
with Homer” (Marcellinus, Vit. Thuc. 35–37):
Thucydides’ consistent emphasis on the magnitude
of the sufferings in war is thoroughly Homeric
(Woodman 1988, 28–34).
Historians thereafter continued to look to
Homer for inspiration. Xenophon’s Anabasis is a
story of adventure and return that consistently
recalls the Odyssey (Lossau 1990). Alexander
the Great, who claimed descent from Achilles
via Neoptolemos, and kept a copy of the Iliad
beneath his pillow (Plut. Alex. 8.2), saw himself
as the reembodiment of the Homeric hero, and he
inspired (or required) his historians to think in
similarly epic terms, not infrequently to the detriment of any truth value that these histories might
have. Although all of the first-generation
Alexander historians are lost, it is nevertheless
clear that their works made explicit connections
between their subject and the Homeric poems;
Callisthenes especially seems to have placed
Alexander within a recognizably Homeric landscape (Pearson 1960, 41–46). In the Hellenistic
world, Polybius shows great respect for Homer
(cf. his defense of Homeric geography, 34.2.1–3,
4.1–8), and argues at length that Homer even created a figure of the ideal historian: Odysseus, who
united in his person both the practical skill of a
general and leader of men, and the intellectual
interest of the explorer and traveler (12.27.1–28.5;
cf. 9.16.1; cf. similarly Diod. 1.1.1–2).
Ancient historians, Greek and Roman, consistently looked to Homer to infuse their narratives
with an elevated tone and a “heroic” cast.
Battle-scenes in particular were fertile ground
for this influence. Thucydides’ narrative of the
Sicilian Expedition in Books 6–7 is suffused with
Homeric motifs and themes (Allison 1997;
Frangoulidis 1993; Mackie 1996; Rood 1998, §§3,
4.1; Hornblower 2008, 259–745 passim), as is
Livy’s account of the battle of Lake Regillus,
where several incidents are modeled directly
on Homer (Ogilvie 1965, 283–287; cf. also the
Roman tradition on the ten-year siege of Veii,
indebted to Homer’s account of Troy). Likewise,
speeches of generals before battle show a long
tradition of Homeric influence (Keitel 1987).
Although scholars frequently refer to a “contamination” of history by epic, we cannot forget that
the Homeric poems and characters were present
to the ancients in an immediate and profound
way, often serving as exempla, and it is perhaps
just as likely that some, if not many, of the reminiscences of Homer in the Greek and Roman historians reflect the enormous influence that the
Iliad and Odyssey actually had in the real world.
See also Historicity of Homer.
References and Suggested Readings
The fundamental study of Homer and historiography is
Strasburger 1972; for the influence of the Odyssey in
particular, see Marincola 2007. On the historical consciousness of Homer and his heroes, see Grethlein 2006.
Other important discussions include Fornara 1983,
62–63, 76–77; Woodman 1988, 26–38; Murray 1988–9;
Hornblower 1994, 7–10; Malkin 1998; Dougherty 2001;
Hartog 2001. On Homer and Herodotus, see especially
Hüber 1965; Huxley 1989; Boedeker 2002.
john marincola