The portrait of Homer that forms the frontispiece of this volume hangs in the Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice. It is generally thought to be an early work of Mattia Preti (1613-1699), from a period when the influence of Caravaggio on him was strong. As a rendering of the bard, considered retrospectively from the twenty-first century, it offers much to ponder. The general appearance - closed, useless eyes upon a gaunt and bearded face - follows the ancient type. The upward turn of the head, however, evokes ancient portraits of Alexander of Macedon, that great dreamer, and the painting’s dark and brooding atmosphere, like many other portraits of the seicento, seems already to evoke the spirit of Romanticism. Proto-Romantic too is the stress on the inspiration of the lonely genius. The principal light in the picture streams from heaven, abode of the Muses, the source of this inspiration. It falls full on the unseeing eyes, underscoring the paradox that the blind poet sees more than the sighted. Yet the poet is no mere passive receptacle. Above his eyes, Homer’s deep brows are obscured by Apollo’s laurels; this is a learned poet, like the docti poetae of Hellenistic Alexandria or Catullan Rome. The doctor’s robes reinforce the point: medieval, of course. The wreath too more probably springs from medieval conceptions of the poet’s garb or from the famous close of the third book of Horace’s Odes - sume superbiam | quaesitam meritis, et mihi Delphica | lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam - than from close knowledge of Greek cultic practice.

On 12 April 1989 in the Main House of the Düsseldorf Theatre a staged version of Homer’s Iliad had its première. Die Ilias des Homer was a co-production between the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and the Schauspiel Essen. It was presented in two parts, each lasting two and a half hours, directed by Hansgöunther Heyme and Hanns-Dietrich Schmidt, based on the translation into German by the Homer scholar Wolfgang Schadewaldt (1900-74) who had completed work on the project shortly before his death. A proposal to make the version into a television production to be shown in the early evening in order to attract a young audience to Homer had foundered for financial reasons.

Alongside his research, Schadewaldt also worked extensively on translations, many of which were published in the later stages of his career and some of which were staged. In 1958 he had published a prose translation of the Odyssey so the Iliad translation both completed his translation of Homer and linked to his staged translations of Greek drama. Schadewaldt also published works on the history of German culture, especially on the relationship between classicism and Romanticism, including Goethe-Studien: Natur und Altertum (1963). T

Latinists are accustomed to measuring Homer’s presence in Rome by his impact on Roman poetry. Epic looms largest in this regard, but most poetic genres can be regarded to some extent as derivatives of Homer. And even outside of poetry, Homer’s impact on Latin letters is not small. But the reception of Homer by Roman culture is a very widespread phenomenon that is hardly confined to literature. Homerising literature in Latin needs to be understood as part of a much broader and more pervasive Homeric presence in material culture and social practice. Abundant evidence from the material and social spheres shows that elite Romans lived in a world pervaded by Homer, and would have done whether Roman poets had interested themselves in Homer or not. That the poets did so should be regarded as an outgrowth of material and social considerations rather than as their source. This is not to challenge traditional ideas about the importance of literary-historical engagements with Homer by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Virgil and others. Such ideas have been voiced many times, and each of these important authors is in his own way justified to claim the title of 'the Roman Homer'. But habitual celebration of poetic achievement without due attention to the broader cultural milieu in which the poets worked has produced a very partial picture of Homer’s presence throughout Roman culture. Accordingly, in part one of this essay I will survey the nonliterary presence of Homer in Rome and elsewhere in Italy as a context for understanding Homeric elements in the realm of Roman literature. In the second half of the essay, I will proceed to literary evidence, but will focus on those aspects that look to the circulation of Homer in Roman social life, again as a context for more belletristic performances of Homer. In following this procedure, I do not mean to give short shrift to such monuments of Homeric culture as Ennius' Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid. Rather, I hope to redress an imbalance between the use of literary and nonliterary evidence in assessing Homer’s impact at Rome.

Father Homer

In antiquity the relationship between Homer and subsequent Greek literature was figured through a series of (often overlapping) images: Homer was the 'source' from which all subsequent writers were irrigated, the fountainhead of both subject and style, and also the 'father' of all later literature (cf. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 25.265). On a famous late Hellenistic relief by Archelaos of Priene (Plate 1) the enthroned poet is acclaimed by (among others) History, Poetry, Tragedy and Comedy, and crowned by Time and 'Oikoumene' (the inhabited world) as being, in Thucydides' hopeful words about his own work, not only 'a possession for all time', but also one for everyone; no one 'owns' Homer.

Where the Iliad deals with one short phase of the Trojan War, the Odyssey tells the drawn-out story of the Achaean hero Odysseus after the sack of Troy: his enforced wanderings, his return to his homeland Ithaca, his struggle to regain his kingdom and Penelope, his queen, who has spent the best part of twenty years resisting the advances of the local princes.

The Odyssey has long been regarded as a poem like, but not like, the Iliad. For 'Longinus', in the first century ad, the poem is 'an epilogue' to the Trojan epic, and in support of this proposition the critic cites old Nestor’s recollections of the Trojan battlefield, as told to Odysseus' son Telemachus in Book iii:

The Iliad celebrates a ritualised way of living and dying and, complementary to it, practises a ritualised way of describing that living and dying – which is the aesthetic rationale of its formulaic alternations and repetitions. It celebrates also a human striving for heroism and an agreed, if elusive, harmony of human striving and divine facilitation. The Odyssey is different. Though its formulaic idiom, its ritualism and its heroic ideal are similar, the Odyssean universe, by comparison, seems restless and less assured of any ultimate correspondence than concerned to achieve one. Even before the action of the poem is under way, the Odyssey foregrounds the issue of disharmony of the spheres.