Peter J. Ahrensdorf’s ‘Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue’

In Defense of Homer

BY: Kate Havard

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 andOdyssey —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.

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