Reading Homer When His Gods Became an Embarrassment

Almost as soon as the poems were fixed, Greeks who took religion seriously found them difficult. Xenophanes objected that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods everything that is shameful among men, theft and adultery and deceiving one another. Plato proposed in the Republic to censor them out of the education of the young for the same reason, while quoting them throughout his own work. The move that rescued the text was allegory: read the gods as elements, or as physical forces, or as faculties of the soul, and the scandal dissolves into physics. Antiquity credited the technique to Theagenes of Rhegium, the Stoics developed it at length, and Neoplatonists were still using it a thousand years later.

Two other habits show what the poems had become. Homer was the schoolbook, so a literate Greek carried long stretches of him in memory and could be argued with in his own words, which is a kind of authority scripture usually has and literature usually does not. And the text was consulted for divination, opened at a random place and read for an answer, a practice that treats the poems as an oracle rather than as a story. Whether one poet composed them, or whether the name covers a tradition of oral singers whose work was written down later, was already an old question in antiquity and is not settled now.