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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Virgil and Homer: who was more influential?

All Acting Regiment

15:47 / 06.12.05

This is something that's interested me for a while now. Two important classical authors. Which do you think has influenced proceedings more (if indeed one has been more influential, or if either of them have been at all- this could all be a false dichotomy)?

22:32 / 06.12.05

My first instinct is to say Homer because he's still amazingly influential on writers today. For example, Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos use the Iliad to very great effect. There's something incredibly universal about Homer's works. While I can't sit down and understand what it would be like to siege Troy for ten years, I can immediately get a sense of the emotions of sacking the city, the sense of Achilles, torn between historical longevity and longevity in life, the sense of Hector, ambivalent to war but drawn to it. These emotions are to epic and it's dealt with in an epic manner.

As much as I like Vergil, I think he's playing with Homer's styles more than creating his own work. Not that he isn't creating his own work, but the Aeneid follows Homer's pattern, first the Odyssey and the Iliad second. I don't think using someone else's pattern is a negative thing, I just think it means that Homer is more influential.

(It is also nice to know that Vergil was a person. I'm not sure what the consensus on Homer is, but I was taught in uni that Homer was a retroactively assigned name to a collective of poets and singers over hundreds of years. I'm happy to be proved wrong.)

22:34 / 06.12.05

Virgil was influenced by Homer. Does that answer your question?

22:52 / 06.12.05

I don't think you can say that Homer was more influential simply because Virgil imitated his structure. The Aeneid is an interrogation of Homer's epics; they were the big poems that any poet with epic ambitions had to compete against, so of course Virgil incorporates them into his work. But its much MUCH more than simple imitation, and once you get into them they are all pretty different poems.

I'd say it was definetely a false dichotomy, if only because these things are so hard to quantify. It might be easier to talk about the influence of each in particular genres or periods.

*

05:52 / 07.12.05

Well, I have to wonder what Virgil's work would have been like if Homer hadn't existed, considering that his "assignment" for the Aeneid was to create a foundation myth for Rome like the Illiad was a sort of foundation myth for Greece, based on the Trojan War stories which were mainly transmitted through Homer and his derivitives.

In modern terms, as well, I know of more works based on the Illiad and the Odyssey than the Aeneid. However, the Divine Comedy is clearly extremely influential in western lit, and it's based on the Aeneid.

Seems like it's poets all the way down...

06:07 / 07.12.05

In what sense would you say the Iliad is a foundation myth?

As well as Virgil's overall influence as a poet, you can't forget the influence of particular episodes, like Dido and Aeneas in Book IV, or Nisus and Euryalus. But I can also think of more works directly based on the works of Homer, although that's not necessarily the best indicator of influence.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:41 / 07.12.05

Ah, but Dido and Aeneas was based on a section of the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius, so ultimately Ap. Rhod. wins.

I can immediately get a sense of the emotions of sacking the city

Given that this does not happen in the Iliad, but does happen in the Aeneid, we can probably see some of the difficulties inherent in this whole question. Mind you, the question itself is pretty much unanswerable. More later - in the meantime we have scrappy threads on the Iliad here and the Aeneid here.

08:39 / 07.12.05

Ah, but Dido and Aeneas was based on a section of the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius, so ultimately Ap. Rhod. wins.

Exactly the problem. You can trace things back to who did it first, but that's hardly an indicator of which version is the more influential.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:06 / 07.12.05

I _said_, Apollonius of Rhodes wins. Why do you hate freedom?

23:39 / 07.12.05

none of the fabulous thunderbirds is called 'homer', is he??

08:09 / 08.12.05

Do remember that Virgil was also writing propaganda for Rome's then-emperor. There's a lot of guff that detracts from the epic itself - to me, most memorably, the whole tour-of-the-future-Rome in Book 8. It's fine saying to Aeneas "look, here's the great city that your descendents will found!", but actually touring every bloody location and detailing its future history... is a bit boring, if you're Aeneas. It's not necessary for the narrative, but it does please Augustus (iirc).

Virgil has many of his own merits, but he's not nearly as essential to the development of the form as Homer, imvho.

09:14 / 08.12.05

Book VIII is one of my favourites. Its really not very clear, throughout the whole poem, the degree to which Virgil is trying to please Augustus, or trying to subvert the whole thing. Its partly that ambiguity that makes it such a great poem.

12:55 / 08.12.05

There's a lot of guff that detracts from the epic itself

Gah. To me, that's like saying that the science-fiction bits of Star Trek: TNG 'detract from' the realistic soap-opera about the diverse crew of the ship. The epic is about the relationship between history and empire. If you take out all the stuff about the Roman Empire, you have, well, Homer. And Apollonius of Rhodes, I suppose.

*

19:52 / 11.12.05

In what sense would you say the Iliad is a foundation myth?

Obviously the Iliad wasn't composed as one, as was the Aeneid, but I think later it served the purpose of one in Greek literature and the narrative of Greek history, which to me explains why the majority of Greek literature returns to it as a foundation. I don't have this well-formulated yet, but I'll return to it when I've the time, if people are actually interested.

15:27 / 12.12.05

Deva: you see, you've hit the nail on the head. The Aeneid is an epic about the relationship between history and empire, but I prefer the epics of Homer, for not being weighed down with this necessity. It's a personal complaint, not a general one. I always felt, reading it, that the poetry sometimes lacked in a few of the "contractual obligation" sequences - by which I mean the explicit scenes dealing with history/empire, not those where that relationship is implicit to beautiful, epic metaphor.

All Acting Regiment

00:03 / 04.01.06

Does anyone know where we might find quotations by medieval authors describing what they think of Homer or Virgil's texts?

20:01 / 10.01.06

I completely agree with Deva here. Milton transfers this dialectic between history and myth when he shows Adam the new Jerusalem and his spiritual inheritance in 'Paradise Lost'. For what it's worth I still find Homer more appealing since his is a landmark work collating so many various figures of Greek mythology whereas I feel that Virgil merely takes his template in a great way and runs with it...although he does get a very long way.

17:45 / 22.08.08

I think Virgil might be more influential, in the long run...mostly because Homer's poems were lost to the West for around a thousand years (along with his form of Greek), whereas Virgil's Aeneid was read throughout the Dark Ages. Many even used it as an "I Ching" of sorts, opening the book at random and taking some sort of "divine communication" from the first line their eyes fell upon. So Virgil in a way kept the classical world alive throughout the long miserable haul of the Dark Ages...a feat even Homer couldn't achieve.

18:44 / 22.08.08

Homer inspired Alexander, who wanted to be like Achilles. Alexander changed the face of the world. Alexander inspired Ceasar, who changed the world again, and also inspired Napoleon, who changed Europe.
I'd say Homer, by trickle-down.
If he actually existed, that is...

20:46 / 22.08.08

Aristotle apparently edited a special version of the Iliad for Alexander. It's known as the "casket copy," because Alexander was buried with it (and according to tradition he slept with it beneath his pillow in life). Of course it's lost (along with Alexander's crypt...which contained, Lenin-like, his corpse on full display), but scholars have long wondered what ammendations and edits Aristotle might have made to it.

Don't get me wrong, I think Homer is superior. I'm mostly just referring to that thousand year gap where his work was lost to the West. But his return engendered the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.

21:09 / 22.08.08

Also, my Virgil-swaying has a lot to do with this recent translation I'm currently reading:

Frederick Ahl's Translation of the Aeneid

Published in late 2007 by Oxford. I like it a lot. Ahl is a lifelong lover of the poem, and wanted to bring in the stuff most translators usually leave out: namely, Virgil's love of anagrams, puns, and wordplay. Some of it comes off as a bit too "trying-to-be-poetic," but the guy spent longer working on it than Virgil spent on the original (the translation took Ahl 14 years or so, apparently). I'm up to Book 6 (Underworld bound!) and I'm really enjoying it.