"The Byzantine Reception of Homer and His Export to Other Cultures.” The Cambridge Guide to Homer, ed. C. Pache in association with Casey Dué, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 444-472. (original) (raw)

2020, The Cambridge Guide to Homer, ed. C. Pache in association with Casey Dué, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton

The article traces the literary genres through which knowledge of Homer (formal elements such as vocabulary and meter, or broader acquaintance with his plots and cast of characters) were communicated throughout the Byzantine period. Centos (a genre of poetry resulting from adapting and stitching together verses from the Homeric epics in order to tell Christian stories, mostly cultivated around the fifth century) were a vehicle through which the taste for Homerizing diction and versification were diffused among Greek-reading schoolchildren and other educated audiences during later centuries (certainly from the tenth century into the Ottoman period). Although neither Homer’s verses nor centos are known to have been translated in other languages during the Middle Ages, texts in languages that closely engaged with the grammar and rhetorical structure of Greek (Syriac, Georgian) indicate acquaintance with those verses of Homer that were frequently used in Greek as grammatical and rhetorical examples. In addition, knowledge of Homeric and other Greek mythology was diffused in oriental Christian literatures through a few widely translated orations by the fourth-century Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus. A number of medieval literatures also show acquaintance with Homer’s status in Byzantine literary culture as a source of proverbial wisdom, although many of the wise sayings circulating under his name in languages other than Greek are misattributed to him. Varying degrees of acquaintance with Homeric plots and heroes are evident in several medieval literatures (Latin and various Western European vernaculars, but also Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic), where they entered through other venues. The most diffused are known translations of world chronicles, in which Homer’s royal figures regularly appear as part of a universal history of kingship. Chronicles and belletristic writing (e.g. romances of chivalry from the later Middle Ages) outlined genealogies of nations or aristocratic houses going back to Homeric figures (most famously, the Trojan Aeneas who fled the sack of Troy by the Greeks counts as the progenitor of the Romans and a number of medieval peoples and royal clans claiming the imperial heritage of ancient Rome). As is well known, genealogies going back to an ancient past serve as narratives of identity that articulate or help negotiate political and social realities in the present. Accordingly, it is possible to interpret the retelling of Homeric plots in Byzantine and other medieval literatures as part of an international dialogue through which Byzantium and its neighbors debated their individual political and cultural claims. In addition, allegorical readings of Homeric plots (equating Homeric figures with cosmic elements or qualities of the human soul) were widely diffused in philosophy and the natural sciences. The naturalization of such texts in Arabic through Greek-to-Arabic translation in the ninth and tenth centuries clearly created a venue for the importation of Homeric elements in the literatures of the Islamic world. The significance of allegory within Byzantine literary culture (it was an omnipresent mode of interpreting Homeric literature throughout the Byzantine millenium) appears to have played a role in the development of allegory in the Islamic context. Allegory continued to be important in early modern European philosophy and the natural sciences until the seventeenth century because of the extent to which ancient Greek technical literature was embraced for these purposes. Early modern Europe read this literature not simply in Byzantine manuscripts, but with the help of Byzantine educational tools and therefore through the lens of a Byzantine interpretative framework.