Homer in the Renaissance:

The Troy Stories

José Ángel García Landa
Brown University, 1988
Web edition 2004

I. The medieval heritage

During the Middle Ages, Homer is lost for the Western World. Instead of Homeric
epic, we have Troy Stories. These stories are not just corruptions and derivations of
the Homeric epic: they derive to a great extent from an alternative source, the Epic
Cycle, which belonged to the traditional Greek literary canon just like the Homeric
epics. The poems of the Epic Cycle, such as the Cypriad and the Little Iliad, are
already defined by Aristotle in comparison to the Homeric epic: they do not
concentrate on a particular event of the Troy story. They want to give the whole story,
and they are a loose narration of facts without any principle of unity. All this they pack
into a narrative much shorter than the Homeric poems, so it is not surprising that their
style is much worse than Homer's. Nevertheless, they were enormously popular in the
Antiquity, just as their offspring would be in the Middle Age and even the
PDFmyURL.com
Renaissance. They satisfied the curiosity of the reader of digests, who must be the
average reader of all times. It is these stories, and not Homer, that were used by
Shakespeare. Their popularity may account for the less than enthusiastic welcome
which Homer received when he came back to the West in the Renaissance. It is in the
narratives of the epic cycle that we find the preliminaries of the war and its outcome,
the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse and the destruction of Troy. The heritage of
the Epic Cycle was to be combined not with Homer himself, but with Latin translations
and digests of Homer.
One of the earliest is the Ilias Latina by one "Silius Italicus" (1st c. AD), which was very
popular in the early Middle Ages, although its influence in the making of the Troy
Story has been questioned. Already in this digest we find the key to later versions of
Homer: the story is slightly romaticized: love, and not honour, is the main motive for
the actions of Achilles. Also, Italicus is uneasy about some inconsistencies in Homer
(the attitude of the Trojans towards Helen, for instance) and does his best to
humanize and add logic to the story. Indeed, we might say that these changes are
already evident in the Aeneid, which will be the model for later epic.
Excidium Trojae (4th-6th c.) played an important part in the making of the Troy Story. It
tells the whole, from the golden apple to the founding of Rome, as it includes an
abstract of the Aeneid. We also find many details which add to the main story, such
as the love story of Achilles and Priam's daughter Polyxena, or the report that Paris
wasn't able to tell which goddess was the most beautiful until Venus took off her
clothes. From it derive such free translations as the Middle English anonymous poem
PDFmyURL.com
on The Seege or Batayle of Troye and Konrad von Würzburg's Trojanische Krieg.
There are other similar works from the late Antiquity. Such works seem to
demonstrate that there is an unbroken tradition of Troy stories since the Antiquity,
from the Epic Cycle to our times. The Compendium historiae Trojanae-Romanae is
very similar to Excidium Trojae.
A somewhat different story is found in two influential narratives: Ephemeris Belli
Troiani, by one "Dictys the Cretan" and De Excidio Troiae Historia, by "Dares the
Phrygian." They are probably 4th to 6th-c. Latin translations of 1st-c. Greek originals.
But the authors tell another story: Dictys says that he was a soldier of the Greek
forces at the siege of Troy; back in Greece, the prologue tells us, he wrote this story
and had it buried with him in a tin box, until an earthquake uncovered the tomb in 66
A.D. Dares the Phrygian was of course a Trojan defending the city. These claims
passed for true history until the 18th century. Both narratives owe their success to the
fact that they are "eyewitness accounts", instead of a blind man's fictions. The public
was curious to know "the real thing" about Troy, without the apparels of the poets. So,
both stories are successful because of their spareness, their matter-of-course
narrative and their lack of poetic imagination and elaboration. They both do away with
all the Homeric stories about the gods, and reduce the war to an earthly conflict. They
improve on Homer's logic, they add circumstantial events, and follow a chronological
order, instead of Homer's fanciful flash-backs. The pestilence the Greeks suffer is
due to an irritation of the Gods "or some other cause"; the war is full of periods of
truce and negotiation, and the Greeks grow crops in the winter to sustain their army.
PDFmyURL.com
The characters have also undergone a transformation: Odysseus is a contemptible
schemer and Achilles is a distraught lover. The medieval Romance of Troy will issue
directly from these sources. Even if Homer had been available during the Middle
Ages, the readers would have preferred these digests. They turn Homer's epic into
history on the one hand and romance on the other, and in this way they afford a kind
of critique of Homeric epic.

12th century

Joseph of Exeter dedicates to the Archbishop of Canterbury his Iliad of Dares

Phrygius (1180s), 3673 lines of a Latin which is extravagantly rhetorical, improving
upon Dares' style mainly with set pieces of rhetoric on conventional moral themes.
Joseph provides a sermon on the instability of Fortune, the falsity of appearances,
the dangers of the appetites and the vanity of women whenever the subject affords a
chance to paste them in. It is from him that we get a description of Helen. It includes a
view of her liver, which apparently was itchy and was therefore the cause of her lust
and of the Trojan War.
Benoît de Sainte-Maure went far beyond Joseph of Exeter, but he used the same
formula, Dares + style. His Roman de Troie (c. 1160) consists of 30,000 rhymed
couplets in French, evidently adding extraneous matter to Dares' account. Sainte-
Maure gives prominence to unhappy love affairs, starting with Jason and Medea. He
PDFmyURL.com
Maure gives prominence to unhappy love affairs, starting with Jason and Medea. He
also elaborates on the story of Achilles and Polyxena and invents the story of Troilus
and Cressida (Briseida). Briseida happens to be the daughter of Bishop Calchas, and
this gives us some insight into Sainte-Maure's peculiar brand of Classical Antiquity.
His Greeks and Trojans are medieval warriors on horseback, who fight on horseback
with axes or shoot each other with crossbows. In the intervals they play backgammon
and worship in Gothic churches; they also seem to have read the Bible. Some of
Priam's many sons retain their Greek names, but the rest are christened with French
names, including one "Ne D'Amors." Sainte-Maure is lavish in the use of gold an
jewelry, and unloads wagonfuls of this on the interminable descriptions of the dresses
of the ladies or of such irresistible scenes as Hector's funeral, which is given an
absurd elaboration, from the embalming to his final setting in a funeral throne which
is a complete mineralogical catalogue, surrounded with allegorical statues and with
an elaborate system of gold pipes which keep pouring embalming liquids on his
corpse. But the best thing for Sainte-Maure is Priam's Chamber of Beauty, worth
more than one hundred thousand pounds, and which gets 300 lines of description. It
has several channels of music and robots which sprinkle perfume on the visitor or do
tricks. Contrasting with such refinements, the battle scenes are of a cartoon-like
violence, and full of that anatomical description of wounds which is dear to French
medieval epic.

PDFmyURL.com
13th century
Sainte-Maure's book enjoyed a well-deserved popularity, but due to its volume and its
language its most popular circulation was in the form of a latin translation and digest.
Guido delle Colone wrote Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), an abridgement in 35
books to about one third of the original. Of course, he does not acknowledge that it is
a translation, he does not even mention Sainte-Maure. Guido is of a sterner cast. He
is a misogynist, not an apostle of courtly love like Sainte-Maure. He also reads a
moral in the story: Fortune topples the mighty, and prudence is necessary. Guido's
version of the Troy story will become almost canonical in the later Middle Ages. He
cites Dares as his source for the truth of the matter, and attacks the poets such as
Homer, who distorted it with their fictions. There are four medieval translations of
Guido's Destructionis into English; the most important ones are by Lydgate and
Caxton.

14th century
The story lingers on; the main English representative, and arguably the best, is
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

PDFmyURL.com
15th century
John Lydgate's Troy Book is written in English. It was begun on Monday, 31 oct. 1412
at four o'clock in the afternoon, and finished eight years later. As Lydgate
acknowledges, he was "prolyx in werkyng & not compendious." It consists of 30,000
lines of decasyllabic couplets, mainly padding, and the atmosphere is Sainte-Maure
all over, only updated: Lydgate's Trojan War is fought with cannons. Lydgate defends
women from Guido's attacks—he finds them so gentle and sweet. But the main
interest of Lydgate's book is that it is a dynastic epic. Lydgate wants to write a "book
of Princes", and dedicates it to the future Henry V. Accordingly, he traces the ancestry
of the British people to Brutus, a great-grandson of Aeneas who adventured farther
to the northwest. There is also a Christian message in Lydgate: this life is only a
pilgrimage and a place of uncertainty, and we must care only for the other life, which
is more substantial.
Caxton's Recueyll of the Historyes de Troye (1475) is Guido through yet another work,
Raoul Lefèvre's Le recueil des Histoires de Troie (1464). Caxton's translation is awful,
full of gallicisms and bad syntax. Still, it is the first book to be printed in English. And it
was a safe editorial investment: there were 12 editions of Lefèvre's work before 1544,
and Caxton's had 15 printings, the last in 1738. The story is by now familiar: a
romantic and bloody plot, and Classical names for a thoroughly medieval setting.
However, Caxton's tone in presenting the story is no longer Guido's or Lydgate's: he
PDFmyURL.com
offers it not in a spirit of admonition, but in one of emulation, and as a way of learning
high virtues. It is the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The Troy stories will have other Renaissance offspring, such as Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida , which is of course inspired in the tradition of Benoît de Sainte-
Maure and not in Homer's. During the Renaissance it is these stories and not Homer
which provided the standard version of the story of Troy. Homer had failed as a
historian, because he did not exploit the sensational possibilities of his source, and
had relied too much on his imagination. Homer's doings with the gods, which had
been criticized by Plato and many classical scholars, have been wiped out, and
Homer will have a popular reputation, insofar as he has one, of being a liar, and a
heathen liar. He had also failed as a romancer: there was no romantic interest in his
epics, and the medieval poets will have to provide that. The stories themselves no
doubt had caught the imagination of the audience. During the Middle Ages they had
been refashioned to the taste of the age; the echoes from the Crusades no doubt
were an important element in this popularity. Also, the Troy stories follow the pattern
of the Iliad in that they provide an illustrious classical ancestry for the emerging
Western nations, supposedly founded by the Trojans scattered throughout Europe.

PDFmyURL.com
II. Homer

14th century

Petrarch chanced upon a Greek text of Homer in 1354 (Clarke 10). It was sold to him
by Nicholas Sigerus, a Greek who visited Italy to discuss the differences between the
Eastern and Western churches. But then Petrarch didn't know any Greek. He had a
poor translation into Latin made by one Leonzio Pilato, an ignorant and bad-tempered
person whom Boccaccio had to lodge during his work. So, Petrarch and Boccaccio
were about the only persons in the Western world acquainted with Homer in the
fourteenth century.

15th century

New Greek texts were discovered in the first half of the 15th century, for instance by
Giacomo d'Angelo da Scarparia, who also brought to public attention other texts by
Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, etc. (Bingham 128).
PDFmyURL.com
Homeric Opera were printed in Greek for the first time at Florence in 1488 / 1489; the
Iliad had been printed in Brescia in 1474, and would appear in a different edition in
1497 (Bingham 3-4). The commonest Greek editions of the Renaissance were
bilingual texts, set side by side with a Latin translation. The role of these translations
was auxiliary, and they were fairly literal. This was in one sense an advantage for
Homer, because in this way the Latin translations were kept free of the elegant neo-
Latin rhetoric fashionable at the time, which was definitely un-Homeric. The
translation by Andrea Divo was praised by Pound, and used in his Cantos (Braden
88).

16th century

It is during this century that translations of Homer appear for the first time in Italian,
Spanish, French, German and English.
New relevant Greek texts come into Western Europe, this time by allegorical
commentators of Homer: Heraclitus (1505, lat. trans. 1544), Porphiry (1518, lat. trans.
1542), Eustathius (1542, lat. trans. 1551). The Stoics, the Neoplatonists, and even
some Christian Fathers of the Church, had used Homeric epic as an allegory of Stoic,
Neoplatonic or Christian doctrine. Homer's modern readers will follow this tradition. In
PDFmyURL.com
Eastern Europe there may have been an uninterrupted tratition of allegory. Johannes
Tezetzer, a Byzantine of the 12th century, worote versified allegorical commentaries
to the epics. In the West, it was Boccaccio who began the allegorizing interpretations
of Homer in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (1364). Homeric epics will be frequently
allegorized during the Renaissance. They seem to be an easy prey for allegorists,
since their main themes (a battle and a journey) can easily be taken as allegories of
human life as a whole. Also, there are concrete elements in the poems which lend
themselves to allegorization, such as the interventions of the gods (Athenea
restraining Achilles), the names of the characters, the frequent parables in their
speech, etc. Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is completely
allegorizing, and it will become the standard Renaissance handbook for mythology
and a guide for allegorical interpretation. The interpretation of Homer will be affected
by this Renaissance bias. In 1573 Lodovico Dolce published an abridged Latin
translation of the Odyssey in which he prefaced each book with an allegorical
interpretation. Allegorical messages will also be read into Homer by the Swiss
humanist Conrad Gesner.
The allegorists read whatever they like to read in Homer, usually the tritest
commonplaces of morality and worldly wisdom. For instance, the Scylla and Charibdis
passage is usually transformed in the Aristotelian advice to avoid extremes and steer
a safe middle course. What the Homeric text says, in fact, is that it is better for
Odysseus to pass in front of Scylla and lose some of his sailors than risk the loss of
the whole ship to Charibdis by trying to avoid Scylla. Usually, however, "In the
PDFmyURL.com
Odyssey the allegorists belaboured the obvious, in the Iliad they ignored it" (Clarke
107).

17th century

In 1611 George Chapman publishes an English translation of the Iliad. The Odyssey
was to follow in 1614. It was the first time that the two epics appeared in a modern
language as the work of a single translator. Chapman defends the use of long verse
(fourteener) in his translation. The very fact of his defense is telling: this long verse is
a problematic rhytmical unit. In order to maintain its identity, it tends to be read
quickly and produces an efect of undignified monotony. Chapman does his best to
fight this tendency with enjambement and caesura (Braden 22). He introduced into
English curious compounds, stimulated by the Homeric epithets (Braden 216).
Keats felt like Balboa looking on the Pacific when he opened Chapman's translation,
but other readers tend to describe it as "gnarled Elizabethan rhetoric" (Clarke).
Chapman endorsed the tradition of Homer the Philosopher, who hides wisdom under
his fables. In his preface, Chapman compares the story of the poem to man's body,
and the allegorical meaning to man's soul. Homer's message is startingly original: the
loveliness of virtue and the ugliness of vice. In order to make this clearer, Chapman
often uses "needful periphrasis" to expand on the original and make his point. He
tries to make a stoic hero out of Homer's angry Achilles; Odysseus he transforms into
PDFmyURL.com
tries to make a stoic hero out of Homer's angry Achilles; Odysseus he transforms into
a wise and prudent man, and the Odyssey becomes a kind of Christian
Bildungsroman (Clarke). The results do not seem to be completely convincing. The
Iliad has always been a difficult prey for allegorists, because its concerns are social
(cf. the names); the Odyssey is a private adventure and it can be made to boil down
to a kind of primitive Pilgrim's Progress. "Allegory thrives on the clash of opposites,
and the Iliad is a poem of clashes but not of opposites" (Clarke 71). Some thinkers will
oppose the whole idea of allegorization, such as Montaigne and Fontenelle in the
17th century.
In 1561, Julius Caesar Scaliger had attacked Homer in his Poetices Libri Septem, as
being inferior to Virgil: less refined, more primitive and ignorant of the makings of a
good epic. In fact, Luis Vives had made much the same charge in 1531, in his De
tradendis disciplinis. Again, this is not new; Homer had been accused of neglecting
both logic and morals since Plato and the Alexandrine commentators. Now, however,
he has to stand an unfavourable comparison with Virgil's epic. They had already been
compared in Roman criticism, but the Romans would not have thought of using one
against the other. Now Virgil is used to disparage Homer. Homer is inventive, but he
lacks judgement. Virgil is patriotic, his hero is virtuous, the parts of his poem are well
proportioned, his epithets are not childish, illogical and repetitive, like Homer's.
Aeneas kills seven deer and brings them back to his sad companions conforting them
with a patriotic speech; in the corresponding passage in the Odyssey, Odysseus
manages to kill just one deer, and says to his comrades, "don't worry, let's eat." Homer
is found to be irrelevant. Scaliger complains that Homer should call Achilles swift-
PDFmyURL.com
footed when he describes his sleep. Homer's comparison of the Greeks to flies
around a piece of meat will be found to be disgusting. The translators usually add
variety to his epithets or substitute wasps, hornets and bees for his flies.
In the last decades of the century there is an increasing disparagement of Homer
following Scaliger's reasoning, this time coming from France, during the Quarrel of
the Ancients and the Moderns, which will soon reach England. Vida, Perrault,
Boileau, Le Bossu... many prefer Virgil. La Motte will write La Nouvelle Iliade in 1714,
improved and adapted to the refined taste of the new age. However, it is noteworthy
that Dryden and Pope prefer Homer, in spite of their qualifications.

18th century

The Troy stories disappear at last, but now Homer finds a new competitor: Ossian,
who (not surprisingly) was more appealing to that "age of passion." In the nineteenth
century it is with the conventions of the realist novel that he will have to compete. The
eighteenth century sees not only the translations of Pope, an unlikely combination of
talents, but the opening of the Homeric question at about the same age with Vico's
New Science. In it Vico not only opposed the current allegorical interpretations of the
epics: he asserted their primitive and mythical nature, and denied that they were the
PDFmyURL.com
work of a single author. This matter will be pursued farther with Wolff's Prolegomena
in Homerum in the second half of the century, which is usually considered to
inaugurate modern Homeric scholarship.

—oOo—

Bibliography

Adam, A.: "Dryden's Indebtedness to Chapman in his translation of Homer's Iliad." Epistemonike
Epeteris tes filosofikes Scoles tou Panepistemiou Athenon XXVII (1979-1980) 131 - 138.
Bleicher, Thomas: Homer in der deutschen Literatur (1450-1740): Zur Rezeption der Antike und
zur Poetologie der Neuzeit. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1972.
Bolgar, R. R.: The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1954.
Braden, Gordon: The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies. New Haven
: Yale UP, 1978.
Bruggeman, Ludwig Wilhelm: A View of the English Editions, Translations, and Illustrations of the
PDFmyURL.com
Ancient Greek and Latin Authors, with Remarks. Stettin: J. S. Leich, 1797.
Bush, Douglas: Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature. Cambridge (Mass.) : Harvard UP,
1952.
Chamoux, A. L.: "Homère en France au XVIIe siecle." International Homeric Symposium (1970) 30
-31.
Clarke, Howard W.: Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Newark : University of Delaware Press, 1981.
Cytowska, M.: "Erasme de Rotterdam, traducteur d'Homère." Eos LXIII (1975) 341 - 343.
Drerup, Engelbert: Das Homerproblem in der Gegenwart : Prinzipien und Methoden der
Homererklärung. Würzburg, C.J. Becker, Universitäts- Drückerei, 1921.
Eade, C (ed.) : "Some English Iliads." Arion VI (1967) 336 - 345. (Annotated selections from the
translations by Chapman, Dryden and Hobbes).
Fay, H. C.: "George Chapman's Translation of Homer's Iliad." Greece and Rome XXI (1952)104 -
111.
Finsley, Georg August: Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante bis Goethe: Italien, Frankreich, England,
Deutschland . Leipzig ; Berlin : B.G. Teubner, 1912.
Ford, P.: "Conrad Gesner et le fabuleux manteau." Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance
XLVII (1985) 305 - 320. (The Swiss humanist Gesner wrote allegorical commentaries to Homer's
epics in the 16th century).
Gross, N. P.: "Zeus and Adam : Pagan Rhetoric in the Garden of Eden." The Classical Bulletin LII
PDFmyURL.com
(1975) 29 - 31. (On a possible Homeric source for a passage in Paradise Lost).
Harrison, J. E.: Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature . London, 1882.
Hepp, Noemi: Homere en France au XVIIe siecle. Paris : Klincksieck, 1968.
Lord, George de Forest: Homeric Renaissance: The Odyssey of George Chapman. New Haven :
Yale UP, 1956.
Mueller, M.: "Paradise Lost and the Iliad." Comparative Literature Studies VI (1969) 292 - 316.
Nicoll, Allardyce (ed.): Chapman's Homer : The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica .
Edited, with introduction, textual notes, commentaries, and glossaries, by Allardyce Nicoll.
Newald, R.: "Die deutschen Homerübersetzungen des 16. Jahrhunderts." Humanistisches
Gymnasium (1932) 47 - 52.
_____. "Die erste deutsche Iliasübersetzung in Prosa des J.B. Rexius (1584)." Zt. dt. Phil. (1929)
339 - 354.
Palli Bonet, J.: Homero en España. Barcelona: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad
de Barcelona, 1953.
Pellegrin, C. : "Leonce Pilate et les premieres traductions latines d'Homere." Scriptorium XXI
(1967) 321 - 326.
Pertusi, A. : "Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio. Le sue versione omeriche negli autografi
de Venezia e la cultura greca del primo umanesimo." Civilta Veneziana : Studi XVI (1964) xxiv &
600.
Ramirez-Araujo, A.: "Luis Vives y Homero." Symposium VI (1957) 240 - 251.
PDFmyURL.com
Riddhough, G.B.: "Thomas Hobbes' Translations of Homer." Phoenix XII (1958) 58 - 62.
Rivers, Isabel : Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry : A Student's Guide.
London ; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979.
Robert, Marthe: L'ancient et le nouveau; de Don Quichotte a Franz Kafka. Paris: Grasset, 1963.
Rummel, Erika: Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics. Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto
Press, 1985.
Scott, J. A.: Homer and His Influence. London: Harrap, 1926.
Shankman, S. I.: "From Chapman's Iliad to Pope's: Some Problems in Homeric Translation and
Interpretation." Diss. Stanford Univ. Palo Alto (Cal.), 1977. Summary in Dissertation Abstracts
XXXVIII (1978) 5449 A.
Shepard, S. : "Scaliger on Homer and Virgil." Emerita XXIX (1961) 313 - 340.
Smith, Eric: A Dictionary of Classical Reference in English Poetry. Totowa (N.J.): Barnes & Noble
Books ; London: Boydell & Brewer, 1984.
Stillwell, Margaret Bingham: Essays on the Heritage of the Renaissance : From Homer to
Gutenberg : The Growth of Knowledge and Its Transmission through the First Printed Books.
Providence : Brown UP, 1982.
Suehnel, R. : Homer und die Englische Humanität. Chapmans und Popes Uebersetzunkunst im
Rahmen der humanistischen Tradition. Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1958.
Thomson, J.A.K.: The Classical Background of English Literature. London : Allen & Unwin, 1948.

PDFmyURL.com
_____. Classical Influences on English Poetry. London : Allen & Unwin, 1951.
_____. Classical Influences on English Prose. London : Allen & Unwin, 1956.

—oOo—

PDFmyURL.com