Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic

"The basic idea underlying this book is simple, no matter how difficult its application in specific cases. I maintain that ancient (and, indeed, modern) discussions of the figure of Homer can be seen as testimonies to the significance and meaning of the Homeric poems for specific audiences. In recent years, the ancient biographical traditions about the Greek poets have been closely scrutinised with the aim of exposing their unreliability as historical documents. For example, at the beginning of The Lives of the Greek Poets, Mary Lefkowitz describes her aim as that of establishing the fictionality of the ancient biographical traditions and using it as a basis for dismissing them from the study of literature: ‘If this book can establish that these stories can be disregarded as popular fiction, some literary history will need to be re-written, so that it starts not with the poets’ biographies, but with the poems themselves.’ My main contention is that the fictionality and popularity of the ancient material on Homer’s life does not warrant our ‘disregard’. Precisely because they are fictional, early speculations about the author of the Homeric poems must ultimately derive from an encounter between the poems and their ancient audiences. For this reason they constitute evidence concerning the reception of the Homeric poems at a time in which their reputation was still in the making." (from the Introduction)