2000/11/01 by G.H.R. Horsley, G. H. R. Horsley
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Byzantine Studies and History #Classical Antiquity Studies #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
paper · doi:10.1017/s0066477400001179
openalex publication_date 2000/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In the pantheon of poets of all cultures and ages, Homer (however we respond to the ‘Homeric Question’) has a unique place. His primacy is due to the fact that his two epic poems encapsulated Hellenic culture, both for the Greeks themselves, and for others steeped in the ‘European tradition’ whether in antiquity or in subsequent ages. So much is this the case that the very name ‘Homer’ became an abstraction, summing up what it was to be Hellenic. All literature written by Greeks, in the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial periods, and much that was produced by others (including in Latin), looks back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, takes its rise from them, finds its locus in them. A canonicity was conferred on these poems such as on no other Greek text in equal degree. If Shakespeare was representative of an entire age in one culture, Homer summed up a culture itself.