Review: James I. Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea”

“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.'”

Near the shores of Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, the ruins of a city lie buried beneath the sands of time. The fabled city of Troy, so long considered a phantom of the ancient imagination, turns out to be real. At least, sort of real. But the ruins of Troy that have so far been excavated do not show the signs of having been burned to ash by a conquering army. In fact, the excavated city shows signs of still having been inhabited long after the supposed demise of the city by invading hordes of Greek soldiers who sailed to recapture Helen from the lusty hands of an eastern prince.

The cultural imagination we have toward Troy and the Trojan War is bound up with the most famous poet we know virtually nothing about: Homer. Despite this, “Homer and his poems” have an “unrivaled…place in the Western cultural imagination.” For more than two and a half millennia, the imagination of the Western world has been intoxicated by the idea of Homer. Why?

“Homer’s greatest attraction has to lie not in his greatness, however that comes to be defined, but in his utter mystery and unreachability,” writes James I. Porter. This, though, makes sense. Not only do humans love a good story—which Homer provided in his epics—but they also love mystery. The mysterium tremendum et fascinans captivates us. Whether applied to otherworldly forces, spirits, gods, or, in Homer’s case, a mortal man forever lost to the vicissitudes of history, we have a very real fascination with the mysterious other. The “unreachability” of Homer is also good for everyone who has been involved in the Homeric industry, from ancient luminaries like Plato, Aristotle, and Lucian to Renaissance poets like Dante and Petrarch, to moderns like Anne Dacier, Giambattista Vico, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Friedrich Nietzsche, and now James I. Porter.