CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Sustained Beauty and Splendor: Aristotle and Homer

Aristotle with a bust of Homer by Rembrandt, 1653. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

I have a deep respect and affection for Homer. I do indeed think of him as the teacher of the Greeks. My understanding of Homer is no different than that of ancient Greeks.

In a metaphorical way, I am ancient Greek, too. In Greek, ancient is αρχαῖος / archaios, which means more than very old. Its core meaning is beginning and the rule of law.

Homer: sparked Greek civilization

The ancient Greeks started what we call civilization. And Homer was the spark for that Promethean transformation of the Greeks. Plato would not disagree. He thought Homer was “the best poet and the most divine” (Ion 530c). He also reports that during the Panathenaea, Athens’ quadrennial religious and athletic festival honoring the birthdate of goddess Athena, bards would sing extensively from the poetry of Homer. Such public performances of the Homeric epics took place in the theater of Dionysos in front of about 20,000 Athenians who, along with the bards, wept while listening to the story-songs of Homer (Ion 530c; 535d-e).

Aristotle had no doubt that Homer was “the poet of poets” (Poetics 48b 30-35). He was the first scholar-philosopher who decoded the wisdom of Homer. He realized that Homer’s epics revealed a secret and lost knowledge of Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece. He understood the importance of that knowledge. No wonder Aristotle treated Homer as an equal. He often mentioned him in his philosophical, scientific and political works.

Homer was a polymath. His poetry is full of gems of wisdom and insights about the Greeks, the Trojans, war, peace, agriculture, geography, traditions, science, technology (robots, very advanced technology), the natural world, the Cosmos, and the gods. Aristotle was also a polymath. Reading the epics of Homer was like going through an encyclopedia of tremendous wisdom and knowledge of great antiquity.

To Aristotle, Homer was like a fountain of knowledge and lighthouse of wisdom. His epics were like a time machine, allowing Aristotle to see the Cosmos and Greek society about 900 years before his age, the fourth century BCE. Homer gave Aristotle satisfaction, pleasure, and probable confirmation of his own........

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