Homer the Hidden Philosopher
When Homer returned to Western Europe in the Renaissance, he arrived already cloaked in reverence. Humanists, steeped in allegory, saw him as the archetypal wise poet. His tales of gods and heroes were read as veils over hidden truths, echoing ancient Stoic and allegorical readings.
In this atmosphere, Homer was less a war-singer than a cryptic sage, his epics mined for moral and philosophical insight.
The First Major Backlash
Not everyone was impressed. In 1664, François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, launched a ferocious attack. He denounced the poems as incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and stylistically poor. Going further, he argued that Homer never existed, and that the epics were clumsily cobbled together from unrelated songs by inept editors.
About fifty years later, Richard Bentley offered a different skepticism. Homer, he thought, did exist—but as a minor, prehistoric oral singer whose original songs bore little resemblance to the grand epics preserved. In Bentley’s reconstruction, “the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex,” only later gathered into unified epics centuries after his time.
Homer as an Idea, Not a Man
Giambattista Vico pushed this further in The New Science (1744). For him, Homer was not a person at all but a symbol: an “idea” or heroic expression of an entire people, the collective voice of Greek men who sang their history.
Seeds of Modern Scholarship
These debates cracked Homer’s pedestal, preparing the ground for Wolf and the Analyst school, and ultimately for the Homeric Question itself. Admiration never disappeared—Homer remained “the greatest of poets” to many—but it had become entangled with suspicion.
By challenging Homer’s unity, wisdom, and even existence, early modern critics forced later generations to ask not just what the epics mean, but how they came to be.