Volume 43, Number 19 · November 28, 1996
Bringing Homer Home
By Jasper Griffin
The Odyssey of Homer
translated by Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox
Viking, 541 pp., $35.00
It is a cliché that Western literature begins with the poems of Homer. The well-informed know that the truth is rather more complex: the Iliad and Odyssey have indeed been at the root of the literature and the culture of Europe and the West, but their roots are in what we call Asia. The first great work of European literature is also the crowning achievement of the art of the Near East, and recent scholarship delights to trace the parallels with the epic of Gilgamesh, with Mesopotamia, and with the poems and hymns of the Canaanite people of Ugarit. The action of the Iliad is set at Troy, in modern Turkey; the hero of the odyssey wanders right off the map of Greece and meets exotic people, sometimes friendly and sometimes murderous, as far afield as the Hellespont in the east, Egypt in the south, and a fantastic version of Sicily in the west. The Muse of Homer was no stay-at-home.
Review, 4245 words
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