“Where your own intelligence fails, a god will inspire you. For I think the gods have blessed both your birth and your progress to manhood.” – The Odyssey, Book 3 (Rieu et. al. 96)
It was a good site for a new city. The young king, fresh from his latest conquests, felt certain of that – he had, after all, been told to seek it out in a dream. In this dream, an old man with a noble bearing had appeared to him, eyes milk-white with blindness, and had recited two lines of poetry to him:
“An Island lies, where loud the billows roar
Pharos they call it, on the Egyptian shore”
These were two lines from book four of The Odyssey by Homer. The young king was convinced that the old man in his dream was Homer himself. He immediately commanded his architects and engineers to travel to the place: a broad, flat island at mouth of the Nile River, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The architects and engineers soon confirmed its suitability as the site of a future harbor. The augurs confirmed its suitability as the capital of his newest province.
The young king had ideas about how the city should be laid out – ideas also taken from his close study of Homer. The Greek biographer Plutarch, writing several centuries later, described the king’s decision like this:
“[H]e said he saw now that Homer was not only admirable in other ways, but also a very wise architect, and ordered the plan of the city to be drawn in conformity with this site. There was no chalk at hand, so they took barley-meal and marked out with it on the dark soil a rounded area . . .” (Plutarch 301)
No sooner were the lines sketched out, however, when apparent disaster ensued. Again, Plutarch:
“Suddenly birds from the river and the lagoon, infinite in number and of every sort and size, settled down upon the place like clouds and devoured every particle of the barley-meal, so that even [the king] was greatly disturbed at the omen.” (Plutarch 303)
It seemed like an omen worthy of Homer: the birds descended to make a mockery of his designs. Or did they? The young king’s priests assured him that no, this was actually a fortunate sign:
“The seers exhorted him to be of good cheer, since the city here founded by him would have most abundant and helpful resources and be a nursing mother for men of every nation, and so he ordered those in charge of the work to proceed with it.” (Plutarch 303)
The king was Alexander III of Macedonia – Alexander the Great. The city would become Alexandria, home to the wondrous lighthouse and to the even more wondrous library, where scholars would, among other things, work to produce authoritative editions of both The Iliad and The Odyssey during the third century BCE. And it all began because this Homer fanboy felt his literary hero was speaking to him through his dreams.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 12: The Odyssey, Part 2: Unto a Savage Race. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
Alexander the Great was introduced to Homer’s works as a teenager by his tutor, Aristotle – you know, Aristotle – and developed a reverence for the poems that bordered on obsession. For Aristotle, the goal of introducing this young prince (as he then was) to Homer’s works was more about a moral education than a literary one.
According to a 2021 article by Thomas R. Martin for the Center for Hellenistic Studies at Harvard University, Aristotle likely wanted to develop Alexander’s sense of nobility – not of being well-born, which was an accident of fate, but of understanding his nature and living up to it even in the face of great peril. Characters like Diomedes, from The Iliad, provided good examples of this – and there was something to be said for giving the young man an idea of the nature of war. It was, after all, a warlike age.
Clearly, Alexander felt his nature was also warlike, and if living up to that nature was a noble act, well: Alexander was possibly the most noble man who ever lived. Ascending to the throne of Macedonia aged just 20, by the time he died at the age of 32, he had conquered and reshaped much of the Mediterranean and Near East. According to Plutarch, when Alexander campaigned, he slept with two things under his pillow: his dagger, and his copy of The Iliad, which Aristotle had helpfully marked up for him.
When the Persians surrendered to Alexander early in his career, he obtained a horde of treasure, which included a beautiful, bejeweled casket. That doesn’t refer to a coffin for a person, this casket was more like a large jewelry box. Advisors asked Alexander what treasure he meant to keep inside it. Gold? Jewels? The teeth of his defeated foes? No. Alexander placed his tattered copy of The Iliad inside the casket, because to him, it was the greatest treasure in the world. Must have made quite a lump under his pillow, though.
Alexander the Great was probably the most famous early student of Homer. But he wasn’t the first, and he certainly wasn’t the last – if you listened to episode 10, you’ll recall that another national leader, William Gladstone, the prime minister of Great Britain, was also a Homer stan from an early age. What I want to try to do in this episode is to trace the history of Homer as a tool for teaching. As this show has developed, I’ve been stunned by the number of times I’ve read a biography of a scholar or linguist and learned that they read Homer “in the original” as part of their formal education, often at a shockingly tender age.
The violence, gore, and sex that abounds in Homer would send any busybody PTA mom in the US into fits of rage – maybe even more so than a children’s picture book about two male penguins raising a chick, or a biography of Rosa Parks. This episode tries to understand how reading Homer become such a central part of what it meant to be educated for so long. It also looks at how one man decided to liberate Homer from the elites and place him back into the hands of ordinary readers, in the process creating a publishing sensation that endures to this day.
It’s probably no surprise to you to learn that the Greeks quickly adopted Homer as a kind of set text for pupils. Or at least it seems to have been – the scholar T.J. Morgan’s 1999 paper “Literate Education in Classical Athens” notes, through fairly gritted teeth, that,
“The study of [the history of] education is . . . hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways, and so partial in others.” (Morgan 47)
Morgan explains that a lot of what we “know” about education at this early date – about 600 – 500 BCE or so – comes from how it’s described in fiction by writers like Plato and Aristophanes. There’s also a limited amount of material evidence – things like vases that show people reading or learning to write, for example. From what we can tell, education in Classical Athens was limited to male citizens and it combined music, gymnastics, mathematics, rhetoric (the art of persuasive public speaking), and reading and analyzing poetry. This almost certainly included Homer, given how prevalent references to him were in other works from the time. As Morgan discusses, what we can tell about the form of education in these early years is that it was loosely constructed and limited to elites: if you had the money, you could hire a tutor for your boy or stick him in a fee-paying school.
One theme of Morgan’s paper that struck me most was that, at first, being able to read and write was not central to the process of becoming educated – Morgan describes how Plato, for example, downplayed the importance of literacy. For him, having a strict teacher mattered more. (Morgan 58) But literacy had its uses for administrative purposes, and it soon began to spread, catching on among the nouveau riche of Athens – people who were rising socially through trade, for example. Literacy only gradually became the foundation of all learning over the course of a few centuries.
One thing that does seem to begin early on is the idea of Homer as a kind of all-purpose sage. Just as Gladstone would later argue, Greek commentators in antiquity claimed that Homer was not merely the spinner of entertaining yarns, or an interesting stylist: he was a kind of key to understanding life. Aristotle, for instance, claimed that Homer could teach you about the gods and religious practices, battle strategy, the historical leaders of the various early Greek states, and about important virtues, such as courage, persistence, and accepting one’s fate. (Pache et. al. 425)
Homer’s next incarnation as a teaching tool came after Alexander conquered the near east – what’s known as the Hellenistic period, when Macedonian Greek culture dominated places like Syria, Egypt, and the Levant. This period lasted from about 300 – 150 BCE, and it’s when the earliest surviving papyrus copies of Homer were created (again, likely at the library of Alexandria). Becoming familiar with Homer was part of how people successfully assimilated into this society, so Homer would be taught from young ages. In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, the chapter titled “Homer in Antiquity” tells us that Homer was the foundational text pupils studied at the various private schools which were popping up at this time:
“In the diverse, expansive Hellenistic world, where Greek identity was less a matter of ethnicity than ‘culture,’ Homer, whom every ‘Greek’’ had read in school, becomes a universal and unifying figure – the greatest, oldest, but also most familiar representative of Greek paideia, a veritable symbol of Hellenism itself.” (Pache et. al. 427)
It was also during this period that visiting scholars from other cultures began to come to Alexandria to find new texts and copy or translate them to take home – for example, Roman scholars came to Alexandria to create Latin translations of Homer. (Pache et. al. 429)
The Romans began their conquest of Alexander’s former empire in 168 BCE, when they seized Macedonia, and only completed the job in 31 BCE, when Caesar conquered Alexandria, Egypt, and Cleopatra all at once. (You may remember that Cleopatra was culturally, and likely ethnically, Greek as well as Egyptian.) But even before Julius Caesar unrolled Cleopatra from that carpet, Homer had become a subject for scholarly analysis, poetic imitation, and, yes, instruction.
During the Roman Republic, the orator Cicero casually referred to Homer in letters to friends. The scholar Carolyn Higbe, in a 2011 paper called “Cicero the Homerist”, explains that “early in their schooling, little boys would have been given passages of Homer to rework or paraphrase; at every stage in their education, they would have read the epics.” (Higbe 380) Higbe also mentions that the surviving papyri from Roman schoolrooms suggests that young children only read selected highlights of Homer – this partially addresses my question about how teacher in the past prevented their little charges from having nightmares about, say, intestines spilling onto the ground.
Seeding Homer’s work early in the life of the Roman citizen (and then later into the life of the Roman imperial subject) resulted in a flowering of Homeric knowledge among all educated members of the growing Roman sphere of influence. According to the Cambridge Guide to Homer, by the time the Roman empire was at its height, The Iliad and The Odyssey were set texts not just for little boys, but also for young men who needed to hone their public speaking skills – or just show off their smarts.
“Writers and speakers,” explains the Cambridge Guide to Homer, “drew from the Homeric well for all sorts of rhetorical purposes: to show off their erudition, adorn their discourse, provide a recognizable example, invoke Homer’s authority, or even contest his alleged knowledge.” (Peche et. al. 431) I’m trying to think of a modern body of work that has this kind of multi-purpose applicability, and the only thing that springs to mind are the first 10 seasons of The Simpsons, which I guess brings us neatly from Homer to Homer.
The Roman empire (spoilers) didn’t last forever. As it slid into decline during the early centuries AD, so did its standards and practices for educating young people. From the early Middle Ages onward, the flow of Homeric knowledge from Eastern Europe and Asia Minor to Western Europe all but dried up. In fact, so did knowledge of Greek – for most of the medieval period, in fact, Western scholars barely knew any Greek. They had to depend on ancient Latin and more recent Arabic translations of Greek works to gain any familiarity with Greek cultural knowledge, whether it was Homer or Aristotle. (Scott)
Homer’s flame was kept alive in the Byzantine Empire, however, where Greek was still spoken. It wasn’t until 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, that Homer re-emerged in the west. He was carried there by Greek-speaking refugees from Byzantium and then broadcast far and wide by the printing press. Homer in Print, a website created for a 2014 exhibition by the University of Chicago Library, states that the first printed editions of Homer designed for use as schoolbooks appeared in 1520. This fed into one of the major reform movements that emerged out of the Renaissance, which was spreading across Western Europe at the time: the Humanist movement.
The Humanists gave us the concept of what we now call “the humanities” in education: the idea that the study of art, history, literature, and philosophy can reveal something about our essential nature as human beings. They also began to define the structure of what we now call a “classical education” – one focused on studying Greek and Roman authors across a variety of subjects.
One famous product of a humanistic education? Elizabeth I of England. She was educated by scholars who taught her to read and write in numerous languages, including French, Italian, and Welsh (she was a member of the House of Tudor, after all, and they were Welsh in origin) along with Latin and Greek. I could not find direct evidence that Elizabeth studied Homer while I was researching this episode but given her education would have started about 15 years after those first schoolbooks were printed, I can’t imagine she wouldn’t have encountered him at some point. I imagine that she, as the daughter of a man who executed her mother, would have seen parallels between the drama of her own early life and those of the Greek gods. (Taylor)
So the Renaissance gave way to the early modern period, and the Humanists’ idea of a “classical education” crystallized throughout Western Europe. As new empires rose – British, French, German, and (later) American – they began to appropriate and center literature from old empires, to lend themselves legitimacy as great powers. As Peter E. Pormann explains in his 2009 paper, “Classics and Islam: From Homer to Al-Qaida”: “The Greek and Roman past played a powerful role in the ideologies of the great empires of the time . . . the West construed a European identity with reference to a Greek past – from Plato to NATO.” (Pormann 202)
An excellent illustration of this is in Great Britain. The British Empire was at its height for the century from 1815 to 1914, and this was also the height of the standardized classical education. A 1999 article by Victoria Larson called “Classics and the Acquisition and Validation of Power in Britain’s Imperial Century” lays out how and why classical education informed by Greek and Roman writers came to dominate in Britain. Part of this is because it was considered “unworldly and apolitical” (Larson 188) by the people in charge at the time.
Larson quotes Edward Coplestone, a provost of Oriel College, Oxford, as saying that “the object of Classical education is not to fit [a student] for any specific employment, or to increase his fortune.” Instead, Classical education should develop a student’s “high sense of honor, a disdain of death in a good cause, a passionate devotion to the welfare of one’s country, a love of enterprise, and a love of glory.” (Larson 189)
Yup, sounds totally apolitical to me! I’m sure the people pushing Homer under the noses of young boys who could be packed off to occupy India or fight in a trench somewhere in France, depending on which end of the century they were born just wanted them to be willing to fight like Diomedes, hold out for loot like Achilles, and trick the enemy like Odysseus for unworldly reasons. Not, you know, any obvious worldly ones.
Larson calls this out more elegantly than I did, saying that “classical studies were closely affiliated with both the acquisition and validation of worldly privilege and power.” (Larson 189) She explains that classical studies were almost exclusively reserved for the upper classes from boyhood straight through to university. Being able to read Homer (or Cicero, or Aristotle) “in the original” didn’t mean you were necessarily intellectually fit for a certain role in life. It meant you were a gentleman, or could plausibly pass as one. (Larson 190-191)
You may recall from episode 6 of this show that our old pal E.A. Wallis Budge, the illegitimate son of a Cornish housemaid, nearly failed to complete his Cambridge degree because he hadn’t studied Greek and Latin during his primary education. These were subjects not typically taught to poor boys like him.
Beginning in the latter half of the 19th Century, as the new middle classes emerged, they began to clamor for less time reading Homer and more time on practical applied subjects needed for their jobs. (Larson 192) By 1868, a government report on secondary education stated that:
“Those who want classical education can no longer find it, as they could in the last century, close to their doors, all over the country. They are compelled to seek it in boarding schools, and generally in boarding schools of a very expensive kind.” (Larson 192)
As the 20th century dawned, there were fewer and fewer Champollions or Budges coming up in the world: the classical education these young men of modest means were able to pursue had retreated behind the ivy-covered walls of the wealthiest, most exclusive schools. And those students may not really have appreciated their luck all that much: Naomi Kanakia, writing in the LA Review of Books in 2021 about “The Myth of the Classically Educated Elite” notes that:
“Historically, education was more a byproduct of social position than a cause of it. There were times and places in which education in the Classics could improve one’s standing and be put to good use in the world, but those times were a relative rarity. Generally speaking, the more powerful a member of the political elite tended to be, the less cultured he would be . . . The English squires who ran the country were not the ones writing and reading the books.”
That may be so, but for a large part of history, they were the ones hoarding the books.
It’s probably appropriate that Homer’s big breakthrough in the mass market came out of a war. War and its aftermath are, after all, Homer’s major themes. One wonders what he would have made of the Blitz. The Blitz, if you’re not up on your history of the Second World War in Europe, was the aerial bombing of Britain by the Nazis during 1940 and 1941.
Over a period of eight months, the Luftwaffe attacked many British cities: ports like Cardiff and Bristol; manufacturing centers like Birmingham and Sheffield. (Aside: To this day, construction crews in the UK sometimes have to stop work because they’ve stumbled across unexploded bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe, and they have to wait for someone to come defuse them or conduct a controlled explosion.) However, nowhere was Blitzed quite like London was Blitzed. While many people evacuated to the country, many people stayed. Among those who did was a publishing executive named Emile Victor Rieu – E.V. Rieu, as he was professionally known.
Rieu had been born in London in 1887. He was the son of Swiss immigrants. He’d taken a first-class degree in Classics at Oxford in 1908 and then began a steadily rising but not particularly earth-shaking publishing career, first with the Oxford University Press, and then with Methuen. In 1937, he joined Penguin Books.
Penguin was a new company, recently founded by a fellow named Allen Lane, that produced inexpensive paperbacks. Paperback books weren’t anything new at that time – they’d sprung up in the 1850s alongside mass railway travel. Cheap paperbacks were, and remain, popular with people who commute by rail. (Sen 445) What was different about Penguin was its focus on high-quality contemporary fiction.
In a 2022 episode of the Omnibus podcast about Penguin Classics, Ken Jennings (yes, the guy who won all those episodes of the American quiz show Jeopardy! and who now hosts it) gives the origin story like this: Allen Lane was traveling back to London by train, and was dismayed by the terrible reading material on offer in the station shop: trashy pulp novels, magazines, and newspapers. “There’s nothing that a person of quality,” said Jennings, “not just a gentleman, but even a middle-class sort with a briefcase on the train would want to pass his eyes over.”
Lane set out to build a better kind of paperback. His initial 10-title list for Penguin – a name chosen because it was cheerful and cute, and because another publisher was already using his first choice, dolphins – included works by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. (Sen 446) Penguin Books were priced at six pence, the same as a pack of 10 cigarettes. They soon began appearing in stations, bookshops, and the new mass marketers like Woolworth’s. More importantly, they soon began disappearing from there, too.
By the time the war broke out in September 1939, Penguin had expanded its fiction list and branched out into non-fiction (Pelican Books) and “Penguin Specials” – short topical books about pressing issues of the day. Even with their staff conscripted and paper rationing in effect, Penguin continued to grow throughout the war. This was partly because they’d landed a contract with the government to produce books for soldiers at the front (Sen 449) and partly because the people at home turned to books to pass the time.
Which brings us back to E.V. Rieu, and how he passed the time during those perilous months of the Blitz. As the bombs fell on London, he would gather his wife and daughters and read The Odyssey to them. Well, he didn’t just read it – he was translating from the Greek on the fly. To keep his daughters amused and engaged, he couched his translation in plain, clear, and even idiomatic English. His family’s enthusiastic reception of his Odyssey gave Rieu an idea: what if Penguin produced accessible English translations of great classic works?
Allen Lane was interested in the idea. Other staff members at Penguin were not: weren’t there enough English editions of Homer in the world already? There were five of them in paperback alone at the time. Plus, while Rieu had a classics degree, he wasn’t a capital-C Classicist or renowned scholar. (Sen 449)
Lane gave Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey the go-ahead anyway. It went on to sell more than a million copies in its first decade. Penguin Classics had been born. Now, as Ken Jennings put it, “your kids [can] grow up around the very same books that the wastrel scions of these aristocratic families would have, except the price point is just insanely low.” (Omnibus 431)
Rieu’s Odyssey is not without its critics. It’s been called a little too prosy, a little too cute in places. But as he himself said in his intro to the 1946 edition, “Too faithful a rendering defeats its own purpose. If we put Homer straight into English words, neither meaning nor manner survives.” (Rieu 60) In other words, he’s a painter, not a photographer.
So E.V. Rieu helped to liberate Homer from upper-class schoolrooms. The Iliad and Odyssey are in the hands of readers like you and me who can experience the stories as strange and thrilling tales, not as a linguistic exercise or as part of our assimilation into a conquering culture or an elite social class. He is a poet – an extraordinary one, but a poet – singing to us down the ages about what the Muses told him. We can take him as we are.
I’ve looked into some of the contemporary efforts to revive classical education at the primary and secondary levels. Most of them seem reactionary or exclusionary in nature. Either they’re trying to use Homer and other classics to instill some sort of quote-unquote traditional, manly virtues in their children, or they’re trying to produce a kind of intellectually elite child.
This latter aim seems to treat classical education like a more effortful version of that brief craze for Baby Mozart, where people would play CDs of sonatas at their newborn, or even clamp headphones over a pregnant abdomen, in the hopes that Wolfgang’s tunes would somehow spot the kid a few extra IQ points.
I don’t think either of those things are what Homer is for, really – I don’t even think that’s really what reading is for. While the purpose of reading will be different for everyone, the writer James Baldwin came closest to describing what it does for me:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [Reading] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
But, like, don’t get me wrong: it’s fun to read about sea monsters, too.
That’s it for this episode. We’ll encounter Homer again, at second hand, when we read the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid sometime next year. For now, we’re moving on from Greece to the Levant; from polytheism to monotheism. Our next episode takes us into what will be very familiar ground for many of us: Genesis and Exodus, the first two books of the Torah, if you’re Jewish, or the Pentateuch, if you’re Christian. Join me on Thursday, August 15 for Episode 13, “Genesis and Exodus, Part One – The Gold of That Land Was Good.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Spaceman Lonnie’s Electric Hate Machine, formerly known as Twitter. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Griffiths, Frederick T., and Stanley J. Rabinowitz. “Tolstoy and Homer.” Academic Studies Press, 2011, pp. 144–175, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxshz3.8. Accessed 29 July 2024.
Higbe, Carolyn. “Cicero the Homerist.” Oral Tradition Journal, Oct. 2011, journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/26ii/08_26.2.pdf.
Jennings, Ken, and John Roderick. “Penguin Classics (Entry 915.EC1212).” Omnibus, episode 431. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/omnibus/id1318335827?i=1000548927216
Martin, Thomas R. “The Nature of the ‘Noble Man’(Γενναῖος Ἀνήρ) for Alexander the Great, the ‘Man Who Loved Homer’ (Φιλόμηρος).” The Center for Hellenic Studies, 19 Mar. 2021, chs.harvard.edu/martin-the-nature-of-the-noble-man%CE%B3%CE%B5%CE%BD%CE%BD%CE%B1%E1%BF%96%CE%BF%CF%82-%E1%BC%80%CE%BD%CE%AE%CF%81-for-alexander-the-great-the-man-who-loved-homer-%CF%86/.
Morgan, T. J. “Literate Education in Classical Athens.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 1999, pp. 46–61, http://www.jstor.org/stable/639488.
Pache, Corinne Ondine, et al. The Cambridge Guide to Homer. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Perrottet, Tony. “The Ancient Roman Reading Craze.” Believer Magazine, 27 June 2018, http://www.thebeliever.net/the-ancient-roman-reading-craze/.
Plutarch. “The Life of Alexander.” The Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/alexandr.html. Accessed 15 July 2024.
Pormann, Peter E. “Classics and Islam: From Homer to al-Qaida.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–233, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40388894.
Scott, Joe. “Homer Before Print.” Homer in Print – The University of Chicago Library, 16 Mar. 2014, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/homer-print-transmission-and-reception-homers-works/homer-print/.
Sen, Mandira. “The Paperback Revolution.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4, 1983, pp. 443–465, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001386.
Taylor, Barry. “Elizabeth I and Languages – European Studies Blog.” The British Library, 17 Nov. 2021, blogs.bl.uk/european/2021/11/elizabeth-i-and-languages.html.
Books Of All Time 
Leave a comment