Homer
– Polymath & Renaissance Man
A
polymath has been defined as a person whose knowledge and expertise extends
over a rather significant span of subjects and who is able to draw upon his or
her complex body of varied knowledge to solve specific problems. Polymaths have
the ability to connect the dots from this broad and comprehensive grasp of
widely different fields of study. When we examine the knowledge base of a polymath,
we find that it is both deep and wide across many disciplines and that it is
comprised of more than just a superficial understanding of the various subject
matters. This interdisciplinary thinking is used by the polymath in an
integrated way to solve problems or to generate new ideas. Key elements of
knowledge in one discipline can be applied by the polymath to a problem posed in
a related or even non-related discipline. There is a difference between being a
true generalist in a superficial way, and in having an in-depth grasp of the
specifics of many disciplines. The latter more closely defines the polymath.
Examples of polymaths from history include Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin
Franklin, and I would argue Homer, the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Similarly,
a Renaissance man is seen as a person with expertise in multiple fields and
these often include art, literature, science, philosophy and nature. A
Renaissance man is well-rounded and accomplished and the term is generally
applied to those who exhibited the characteristics described here and who lived
during the period of the Renaissance from the 14th to the 17th
centuries. The Renaissance man exhibits intellectual curiosity and creativity
and is dedicated to mastering a wide variety of skills and areas of knowledge.
Like the polymath, the Renaissance man is adaptable and is able to apply
knowledge from one discipline or field of study to solve problems in another.
Homer displays such talents and in view of the fact that he lived in the time
of a Renaissance, when Greece was emerging from its Dark Ages, we can
confidently apply the term Renaissance man to the epic bard.
In
order to be considered a polymath or a Renaissance man, we must be convinced
that Homer knew much about many things. There are those who contend that Homer
was merely a poet, albeit a great one, who knew very little about very few
things and that he was, in the main, a re-teller of tales already told. The
premise here is that Homer was the transcriber of stories from the oral
tradition and that he simply wrote down what other subject matter experts had
said, without personally having knowledge of the subjects themselves. The
argument is that a person could listen to a great chef describe how to prepare
a rack of lamb and then to re-tell the story himself, without even knowing how
to boil water or to make a cup of tea or to fix a cheese sandwich. This
argument would fall flat in Homer’s case, because he would not only accurately
repeat how to prepare the rack of lamb, but would do so in such a way that the
listener would actually hear the meat sizzling on the fire and smell the fat as
it hit the blazing coals, and have the saliva of anticipation running down his
chin as he waited to be served.
Just
think of the talent that was Homer’s. First of all he was a poet
extraordinaire. I have written several volumes of poetry, but still I find it
tough enough to write three lines of haiku with a total of seventeen syllables,
let alone 48 books of dactylic hexameter totaling 27,802 lines. The Iliad has
become the foundational work of Western literature and is still widely read
today, despite the fact that it was written in the 8th century BCE.
The Odyssey is also one of the oldest surviving works of literature and is
still providing inspiration to story-tellers and movie makers alike.
Christopher Nolan`s new movie The Odyssey,
starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, is scheduled for release in the Summer
of 2026. The poet Homer continues to inspire.
Homer’s
knowledge, as displayed in his two epics, was extensive. He knew much about the
war between the sexes, relationships, motherhood and fatherhood, the art of
hospitality, sports, food preparation, hunting and animal husbandry, medicine,
astronomy, military strategy and deceit, geography, sailing, meteorology,
ornithology, the natural world and human society as well as the actions of the
gods and the role played by the divine in human endeavours. The list goes on
and on and in every case, we are not talking about a superficial understanding
of the subject matter. Homer’s knowledge base is wide and deep and we can truly
refer to him as a polymath or Renaissance man. We could explore examples of his
encyclopedic knowledge more deeply here, but I refer you instead to the series
of articles in Footnotes & Fancy Free which cover many of these same topics
in detail.
Homer
was considered so important that to many he was viewed as divine. The
Apotheosis of Homer is a common scene in classical art and depicts Homer’s
elevation to divine status. One example is a marble relief created by Archelaus
of Priene in the 3rd century BCE that is housed in the British
Museum. It is hung immediately to the left of the famous bust of the blind poet
and I was happy to see both during a recent trip to London where I attended the
Summer School in Homer at University College London. The Apotheosis of Homer is
also the subject of an 1827 painting by the same name by the French
Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres that hangs in the Louvre in
Paris.
Let
us focus on the impact that Homer had on the Western world and in particular
the legacy that he left in its literature. As we previously said, in Western literature
the Iliad and the Odyssey have become foundational works and enduring
influences. Although there were epic poems which predated Homer, for example The Epic of Gilgamesh which dates from
approximately 2100 BCE in Mesopotamia, Homer set the standard for what epic
poetry was to become. Vergil’s Aeneid,
John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante
Alighieri’s Divine Comedy were
created using the template that Homer established.
William
Shakespeare drew heavily on Homer’s account of the Trojan War with his play Troilus and Cressida. The play dates
from 1609 and the cast of characters included Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon,
Hector, Helen, Paris and Priam. The same story was told by Geoffrey Chaucer in
the mid 1380’s with the title Troilus and
Criseyde. James Joyce’s Ulysses
was published in Paris in 1922 and features the same-day experiences of three
Dubliners with parallels to Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus. To this list of
authors can be added the names Dryden, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and many more.
Plato
stated that Homer was the one who had taught Greece and in Dante’s work, Vergil
refers to him as ‘poet sovereign’. In his preface to his translation of the
Iliad, Alexander Pope calls him ‘the greatest poet’. The study of Homer’s epics
was considered the foundation of a solid education for refined people from
ancient times to modern. Alexander the Great is said to have been enamored by
Achilles and carried a copy of the Iliad with him wherever he went, after first
being introduced to the text by his tutor Aristotle. Homer’s Odyssey provided
inspiration for the movie O Brother,
Where Art Thou? set in 1937 and telling the story of three desperate escaped
convicts, as well as 2001: A Space
Odyssey and Nolan’s The Odyssey
coming in 2026.
A
mere re-teller of tales already told could not possibly have created the influence
and the impact that Homer has. He knew so much about so many subjects and could
apply this knowledge widely. His influence lives on forever and we can surely
add his name to the list of Renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Albert Schweitzer and Benjamin Franklin. He can
also take his place among other notable polymaths like Rene Descartes,
Aristotle, Galilei, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Marie Curie and Thomas Jefferson.
Writing
in The New Criterion in February
2024, Joshua T. Katz says in his article The
Importance of Homer,
Homer
is often called the—or at least a—“father of Western civilization.” This is not
a new idea. To take a prominent example, already before the end of the first
century A.D.,
the Roman rhetorician Quintilian had these laudatory words for Homer in Book 10
of his Institutes
of Oratory (trans. Donald A. Russell, very lightly
revised):
Like his own conception of Ocean, which he says is the source of every river and spring, Homer provides the model and the origin of every department of eloquence. No one surely has surpassed him in sublimity in great themes, or in propriety in small. He is at once luxuriant and concise, charming and grave, marvelous in his fullness and in his brevity, supreme not only in poetic but in oratorical excellence.
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