Access Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction To The Iliad And The Odyssey. Presented By Howard W. Clarke Hardcover

work provides insight and understanding for the reader of the Iliad and Odyssey using the perspective of critical critique.
I found value not in the competing schools of scholarship but in using their analysis to better understand the individual books, story lines and characters of the poems, how they connect or fail to throughout the individual poems and between the two poems.
So much of what each camp developed seemed to me extremely subjective, and, in end, whether right or wrong, of marginal value.

Although dated, Homers Readers gives a person interested in the classic poems some new perspectives and will make a rereading of either poem more enjoyable.
It also calls out, mainly through the discussion of inconsistencies, things that are lost when someone undertakes a front to back reading of either.

. Homer's Readers : A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey by Howard W, Clarke
published:
format:page Harcover
acquired: borrowed from library
read: FebMar
rating:stars

Clarke provides a compilation of the history of the intellectual response to Homer.
He tells us up front that there is nothing new or original here, that he is just summarizing other works.
But wow, he is summarizing a huge well of more and less significant and obscure historical information.
It's really brilliant stuff. It's also some work and takes some dedication to get through,

He begins with the era when Homer was lost to Western Europe, but the idea of Homer was present.
It was preserved and apparently loved in the Byzantine Empire, Then an era of the early criticism which struggled to understand these works that were so far from their Renaissance world.
Readers dug deep into the text, interpreting everything as moral allegory sitelinkGeorge Chapman was one culmination of this.
As the allegories lost their attraction, critical views replaced them, some loving and others hating Homer, The works played a central role in the mostly French Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns of the late's and early's.
This was a bitter and public series a written and spoken arguments involving the likes of sitelinkCharles Perrault yes

that Charles Perrault of fairy tale fame, who was a leading critic and hater of Homer.
sitelinkAlexander Pope seems to sum all of this up, closing both these eras, while defining the Neoclassical era of English literature.
Pope's passing kind of marks the end of Homer as a prominent part of popular intellectual debate.
What follows is an era of academic experts who progressed our understanding, but, however brilliant, remained divorced from most readers, and certainly far outside any popular debate.
Homer was broken apart by concepts of multiple authorship, reduced and remolded and rethought, sitelinkHeinrich Schliemann's finding Troy changed things a bit, sitelinkMilman Parry's concepts of oral poetry, which were partially based on his careful study of generally illiterate Slavic singers in's Yogoslavia, reframed how everyone looks at Homer and his creation.
I haven't mentioned the geographic, anthropological or literary analysis, But are you still with me

I just loved the first chapter, on the evolution of the various butchered versions of the Iliad.
They follow such unpredictable and wonderful directions, Clarke covers these in quite some detail and they are absolutely fascinating if you don't mind that depth.
Need a wikipedia binge He covers sitelinkPindar, The Rawlinson Excidium Troie, sitelinkThe seege of Troye, also called sitelinkSeege or Batayle of Troye, sitelinkKonrad von Würzburgs sitelinkDer Trojanische Krieg, sitelinkDictys Cretensis, The Iliad of Dares the Phrygian.
He more or less ends with sitelinkBenoît de SainteMaure's sitelinkLe Roman de Troie cwhose hero is Troilus, a Trojan warrior the other main character his captured love interest, Briseida.
This Briseida, whose name is from Briseis, Achilles prize woman in the real Iliad, becomes Cressida in later related works.
And sitelinkTroilus and Cressida is a title of a Chaucer tale and, later, of a Shakespeare play.


Seeing this all laid out, I couldn't help feeling that the actual Iliad and Odyssey surely were just another variation that by happenstance were the ones that got preserved.
Troilus, the later hero, has one insignificant mention in the Iliad, And Briseis, who had become his Romantic counterpart in the form of Cressida, was a war prize for Achilles in the Iliad.
She couldn't have any more Trojan contacts, as they, along with her family, were wiped out by the Greeks.


But what I should have noticed was the detail,

Clarke is still quite interesting with the allegorists, In "times when no other interpretation would have sustained his prestige as a philosopher and seer.
. . It allegorism encouraged an imaginative ! reading of the poems, responding to the universal sense that there is something more in a story than meets the eye and that that something more is deeper and truer and directly applicable to life.
“

And he as a nice point about allegory today: “Homer is still being allegorized.
The Iliad remains recalcitrant, but the Odyssey continues to deliver messages for our times, contemporary practitioners read the Odyssey as an allegory a word they choose to avoid of man's search for identity or struggle for selfawareness, this theme acquiring for many of Homer's current readers the vogue that moral didacticism had for the Renaissance“

But once he gets to the Quarrell of the Ancients and Moderns, of sitelinkPerrault, sitelinkAnne Dacier and sitelinkAntoine Houdar de La Motte, it got to be too much for me.
By theth century I was reading at aboutminutes a page, enthusiasm waning under detail I can admire only a distance.
After this Clarke summaries theth century with interesting, and at the time uptodate takes on key topics.


I gave this five because I really admire the amount of information that gets boiled down to fit thesepages.
It deserved the rating. But that overstates my enjoyment, I loved the first chapter, but I merely survived the rest, with less and less enjoyment with each chapter.
.