In Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue, Peter J. Ahrensdorf investigates Homer’s teachings on the nature of human excellence. Unconventionally, Ahrensdorf argues that Homer is one of the West’s principal philosophic thinkers, and deserves to be studied in similar manner to Plato and Aristotle.
Such a position would not have been controversial in classical Athens, where Homer was regarded as the teacher of the ancients. In the Republic, Socrates says that Homer is the one who knows "all the human things that have to do with virtue and vice and also the divine things." As late as the 16th century, Montaigne could say that Homer "laid the foundations equally for all schools of philosophy."
But Homer’s reputation has faded. Now, his two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are thought of as a collection of common folktales, eventually gathered and edited by numerous ancient scribes whose names have been lost to time. "Homer" is himself a myth, says the contemporary academic consensus, which further holds that the edited collection of folktales transmitted under his name merely give voice to the primitive and conventional views of their era.
Homeric scholars justify this claim not on empirical or archeological grounds, but on philosophic ones. As Ahrensdorf shows, Homer’s most influential critic was the man Isaiah Berlin called "the true father of historicism," the political philosopher Giambattista Vico.
Vico advanced the idea that human thought is fundamentally defined by the prejudices of the prevailing culture. This theory, historicism, is now the dominant method of interpretation in the modern university.
Vico seems to have made Homer his test case, and assesses that he cannot be considered a philosopher—or even, possibly, an actual single human who once lived and wrote the Iliad and Odyssey —on the back of a strangely circular moral argument. In his 1725 work The New Science, Vico argues that Homer is not wise because he has bad morals—the barbarous morals of his age. His "heroes" are beastly and unvirtuous, especially the wrathful Achilles. Homer’s gods (the philandering Zeus, the manipulative Athena, the jealous Hera) are even worse than the humans.
We should value Homer because his works are "two great repositories of the customs of early Greece," Vico says. Yet these customs are the "crude, boorish, fierce, cruel, volatile, unreasonable and…foolish morals of early peoples." Therefore (because Homer’s morals are different from those of Vico’s) if he existed he "knew nothing of philosophy." More likely these poems are a "confused aggregation" of shared myths.
By introducing the idea that Homer was not a man at all but the repository for a cultural tradition, Vico makes Homer the first and most complete victim of historicism.
Ahrensdorf’s book seeks to redeem Homer’s reputation, restoring our sense of him not only as an individual artist, but also as one of the most formidable thinkers in Western philosophy. He does this by examining Homer’s understanding of the divine and his teachings on human virtue.
According to Ahrensdorf, Homer’s gods are presented as "whimsical and improvident" not because Homer is merely a conduit for the barbarism of his age, but because he is making a serious (and somewhat impious) point about the nature of the universe and the relative value of human versus divine wisdom.
"By highlighting not only the deception but also the ineptitude of the gods, and specifically their lack of understanding of how to rule human beings, Homer challenges the conventional, trusting, pious belief in the wise providence of the gods," Ahrensdorf says.
Instead, Homer focuses on the excellence and virtue of human beings. The "human beings of the Iliad naturally engage our interest more than the gods," Ahrensdorf says, because "the humans in the poems suffer terrible things but the gods do not, and cannot."
Specifically, no god faces the kind of choice Achilles faces, the choice between "a short but glorious life of war with comrades that need your courage and a long and sweet life of peace with a family that needs your love." Since the gods possess both infinite time and endless life, there is nothing at stake in any choice or action they take. Nothing is permanent.
"Homer suggests...it is precisely because the gods are…immortal beings that they are not and cannot be noble or profound beings," Ahrensdorf says. They lack "our capacity for courage, for love, and even for wisdom." They do not share in the "the drama, the dignity, and the possible nobility that our human lives possess by virtue of our mortality."
We may not agree with Homer, but his argument does not at all appear to be the product of a conventional or primitive mind. Rather, this subversive teaching "made possible the liberation from religious awe and the proud, unabashed glorification of human excellence that were to become the hallmarks of classical civilization." This emphasis on human excellence, Ahrensdorf says, makes itself known in the Greek celebration of the human body, and also in Greek philosophy, with its elevation of human reason and its questioning posture towards the divine.
Homer’s theology teaches us to look to human beings for excellence and virtue—but his views of human excellence are complicated. Achilles, for example, "comes to sight in the Iliad as an unheroic hero, a shockingly disloyal and self-interested warrior." Still, Ahrensdorf argues that Achilles comes the closest to sharing in Homer’s wisdom. After withdrawing from combat following a dispute with King Agamemnon, Achilles receives an embassy of Agamemnon’s representatives, who beg him to return to the war.
They find Achilles in his tent "delighting his mind with his lyre," "singing the glories of men." For the first time we see him content. The ambassadors promise him riches, honor, and even deification. He turns them down, arguing with them about the nature of honor and virtue. He asks them: Why should he sacrifice himself in a war to rescue a foolish man’s wife? What use is it to be honored, even as a god, by inferior men? What use is honor to the dead? They push back against his claims, but he sends them away.
Later, when his friend Patroclus is killed, he returns to battle and to a life of active excellence that ends with his early death. But briefly, in the lyre scene, Achilles nearly abandons that excellent life and its grim end altogether. Therefore, Ahrensdorf says, it is Achilles who grapples most successfully with the deepest philosophical questions in the Iliad, and comes closest to living the best life—which is, to Ahrensdorf, a life that looks like Homer’s life.
Ahrensdorf shows the complexity and seriousness of Homer’s moral universe. Especially strong is his examination of the virtue of Achilles’ rage, the rage that begins the Iliad. Far from being what Vico calls a "beastly" rage, Achilles’ wrath is deeply connected to a passion for justice, and not merely personal glory.
Ahrensdorf suggests that Achilles would be better off if he had become fully disillusioned with the life of glory and virtue, but is unclear that Homer believes Achilles should have spent his life at the lyre and not in battle. Were it not for men like Achilles, who pursue the life of virtue, Homer would not have had anything to sing about—or anyone to protect him. A world without the depth and splendor of Achilles’ spirited wrath would be less terrible, but also less awe-inspiring—and less concerned with justice.
The spectacular humanity exemplified in Achilles, in his suffering and in his overcoming of suffering, is the work of an artist and a philosopher: an individual with a distinctive and unconventional vision that shaped the perimeters of western thought.
Kate Havard is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis.