A Reader on Reading

This history of conceived authorship is, in some sense, a parallel history of literature. For the Greeks he was the beginning of all things Greek, of Greek civilization and history. For Virgil he was a Roman in all but birth. For the poets of Byzantium, he was a historian whose knowledge of humanity was great but whose knowledge of history was shaky. For Dante, a famous but retired craftsman. Thomas de Quincey, towards 1850, asked whether Homer (a name absent otherwise in Greek literature) might not be a deformation of the Semitic “Omar” and imagined him as a brother of the Arabian Nights’ storytellers. The much-derided Heinrich Schliemann, following the divagations of the historian Karl Blind, suggested that Homer, like his Trojans, was Aryan, blue-eyed, red-haired, martial, musically gifted and philosophical. Alexander Pope likened Homer to an English gentleman. Goethe saw in Homer a self-portrait: perhaps for that reason in 1805 he chose to listen to the famous Homeric lectures of Friedrich August Wolf hidden behind a curtain, embarrassed at the description of a poet whose German reincarnation he felt himself to be. Samuel Butler argued, ironically, that Homer was a woman. For Rudyard Kipling, for Ezra Pound, for James Joyce, for Derek Walcott, and for Jorge Luis Borges, Homer was everyone and no one. The linguists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord twinned Homer with the guzlars, the epic Serbian singers who still chant their verses from village to village. In 2008, the German poet Raoul Schrott argued that Homer was inspired by the archaic songs of Sumer and suggested that he was a transplanted Middle Eastern poet who had learned his craft in Babylon or Ur. This Babylonian influence does not seem incongruous: the Epic of Gilgamesh has indeed an atmosphere not unlike that of the Odyssey, and the adventures of two men, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whom the reader feels as one, are similar to those of a single man who calls himself Nobody and whom the reader sees as many.

A diversity of occupations, a diversity of influences, a diversity of ethnicities mark the long history of the man we call Homer. What no one, neither Aristotle nor Joyce, appeared to have doubted was that the main physical feature of Homer, real or imagined, singular or plural, must have been his blindness. Already the Hymn to Apollo, from about the seventh century B.C., tells the maidens of Delos that when a stranger asks them, “Who is the sweetest man of all the singers who comes here to you,” they should answer, “The blind man who lives in rocky Chios; all his songs will be the best, now and in the time to come.”

But what reason might there be for always depicting our bookkeeper as blind? Homer’s blindness is an unvarying trait in the numerous “Lives” of Homer that were produced from the fifth century B.c. on. The best known of these is a Life of Homer written in the fourth or fifth century B.c. and once attributed to Herodotus, in which it is stated that Homer was not born blind but contracted an eye illness while visiting Ithaca, the city where he also learned the story of Odysseus, which he would one day immortalize in his verse. The citizens of Ithaca were pleased with the synchronicity: the moment and place in which the poet was given his story were also those in which he was given his blindness, as if illumination within required the lack of light without.

But Ithaca’s presumption did not go unchallenged. Where exactly Homer became blind held such obvious importance for his readers that the pseudo-Herodotus (whom we know to have been Ionian) went on to deny Ithaca’s claim and argued instead that it was in Ionian Colophon that blindness had struck him. “All Colophonians agree with me on this,” he added with assurance in his book. Other places could boast of having lent Homer family roots or a deathbed, and seven cities disputed his birthplace, but the site in which blindness overtook him was, in literary terms, of the essence.

Always, according to the pseudo-Herodotus, it was the poet’s blindness that gave him the name by which we know him today. As a child, the future author of the Odyssey was given the name Melesigenes, after the river Meles; he acquired the name Homer much later, in Cimmeris, where the wandering poet had proposed to the local senate that in exchange for bed and board, he might make the town famous with his songs. The senators (in the tradition of most government bodies) refused, arguing that if they set this dangerous precedent, Cimmeris would soon be overrun with blind beggars (homers in Cimmerian) in search of handouts. To shame them, the poet adopted the name Homer.