Homer in Wittenberg: Rhetoric, Scholarship, Prayer by William P. Weaver. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 256 pp. Hardback. £82.
In the early 1520s, Philip Melanchthon wrote a poem about poetic inspiration, with reference to Homer in particular:
That good poets are moved by God is a tale that is told true.
For it is God who stirs song in their virtuous hearts.
They proclaim virtue’s commands, just as God, the first author, has passed them
On to the poets to teach–God’s vatic bards here on earth.
That isn’t all: since eloquence comes in its richness from heaven,
God has given in turn answering power of speech.
Thus it’s a duty divine that we give recognition to Homer,
Since he bestows the good gifts brought from celestial realms.[1]
In this brief text, the Christian reader meets with a number of perhaps surprising elements. The chief of these is that it is God himself—the Christian God—who gives impetus to song in the hearts of pagan poets, such that they teach their readers about both true virtue and true eloquence; and of these poets, Homer is the best. His virtuosity (in the sense of both excellence and uprightness) demands a response of gratitude from his readers; Melanchthon calls this a “duty divine.” The Latin word he uses for this duty is pietas, which straddles the border between paganism—it is the leading characteristic of Vergil’s Aeneas—and Christianity, where it can serve as a summation of what the Ten Commandments require.
For the contemporary Christian reader, the most salutary effect of such a way of speaking may well be its ability to shock him out of inherited and unexamined habits of thought. Not the least of these habits is the reflexive maneuver by which we cordon off the “sacred” from the “secular—in education, in art, in politics, and in other realms, too. A poem such as Melanchthon’s compels the reader to entertain the possibility that pagan thought, and not just Christian thought, takes place within a divine economy subject to God’s providential plan for the education of the human race.
This poem is not the only place Melanchthon speaks of Homer and of poetry in the way just described. A few years before, in 1518, he had done much the same thing in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg, an oration that was published under the title De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis, “On Correcting the College Program of Study.”
In that address, Melanchthon laments that the loss of Greek learning in the West had led to the ruin of both secular study and sacred piety. He further expresses regret over all the time that had been wasted on trivialities in his own academic formation. But all of that, he indicates, is about to change, through a great reformation of studies re-envisioned along humanistic lines.
And at the forefront of Melanchthon’s proposed curricular renascence is the poet Homer, who is not just Homer, but “our Homer” (Homerus noster). For “Homer is the source of all the disciplines for the Greeks, as are Vergil and Horace for the Romans.” Thus in his first year of teaching, Melanchthon sets himself a twofold task for the classroom: the poetry of Homer and Paul’s letter to Titus.
Homer as “source” (fons), and his easy conjunction with sacred literature, is the subject of William P. Weaver’s recent book Homer in Wittenberg: Rhetoric, Scholarship, Prayer. In six chapters, not including the Introduction and Epilogue, Weaver takes the reader through various texts in which Melanchthon discusses Homer from the very beginnings of his professional career in Tübingen through the early 1550s, the last decade of his life. The works examined are of a wide variety: textbooks of grammar and rhetoric; orations such as the aforementioned De corrigendis; student notes from Melanchthon’s lectures; and scholia that likely derive in large part from Melanchthon’s own notes on Homer, which Weaver calls the “Wittenberg scholia.”
With regard to the last, readers who, like me, might have hoped for fully developed commentary on the poem will be disappointed, as the notes are skeletal, often consisting of brief labels and references to Vergil (on whom more below). This is no fault of Weaver’s, and can serve as a beneficial historicizing reminder that what readers in other eras were interested in will often diverge from what we find most significant. And those differences in interest and emphasis often stem from differences in priorities and what one might call the telos or end of reading.
As Weaver repeatedly stresses and demonstrates, for Melanchthon that telos consists of a combination of prudence and eloquence. At times, Weaver allies them too closely in my view. For example, writing of Melanchthon’s 1523 Encomium eloquentiae (“Praise of Eloquence”), Weaver claims that “Melanchthon develops the language philosophy of Valla and the language instruction of Erasmus to assert a new priority: eloquence is the substance of philosophical prudence, which follows logically and practically from eloquence” (81-82, emphasis mine). This seems confused: it is not at all clear to me what it would mean for eloquence to be the “substance” of prudence—the content? the nature?
His proof is an admittedly provocative statement of Melanchthon’s, viz., that “one’s shadow does not follow (adsectatur) his body more closely than prudence accompanies (comitatur) eloquence.” The translation is my own. Weaver’s (“prudence follows eloquence no less nearly than a shadow follows a body”) slightly obscures the fact that Melanchthon uses two different verbs. That may not be significant; what is significant, it seems to me, is that one not press the “substantial” aspect of the body/shadow simile too hard, instead giving weight to the idea of conjunction, which is where Melanchthon places the focus of the analogy. One could even call this a substantial conjunction, which is not quite the same thing as calling one the substance of the other. It is a small point verbally; but it is not a quibble.
By reframing the image as I suggest, Weaver could strengthen the second part of his assertion regarding the way in which prudence follows from eloquence. This is evident if we look at the quotation in context:
To this [i.e., what I have just said] is added the profit—not to be scorned—that comes from the study of eloquence: that fact that, by practice in the arts in which eloquence is contained, our natures are roused and formed to discern all human matters more prudently; nor does one’s shadow follow his body more closely than prudence accompanies eloquence….Our forebears saw that these two things—the knowledge of speaking well and the judgment of the mind—clung to each other by nature. For that reason, some of them also said, not ineptly, that speech was the unfolding of the reason of the mind.
Speech and wisdom are two different things, but things so closely linked that they cannot be separated from one another.
If speech and eloquence form a kind of unity, it mirrors the unity that Weaver sees in Melanchthon’s reading of Homeric poetry. That is to say, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not one poem in plot, but, in Weaver’s telling, they are one and seamless in their unparalleled rhetorical capacity to form men with “verbal competency in the world of affairs, and the ability to discriminate when controversies or conflicts arise” (78). As a way into this unity, Weaver relies on a curious habit of speech in Melanchthon’s 1538 Praefatio in Homerum (“Preface to Homer”). I wish to complicate Weaver’s account, as a prelude to endorsing it.
The curious habit of speech to which I refer is Melanchthon’s penchant in the “Preface” to refer to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a single poema or “poem.” That is, Melanchthon refers to “the Homeric poem” (poema Homeri/Homericum) rather than to “Homeric poetry” (poiesis Homeri/Homerica). Indeed, this was the impetus for the book (5) and, according to Weaver, is unique to Melanchthon’s treatment of Homer (2, 115).
But the claim to uniqueness can be challenged in at least two ways.
First, the singular appellation “poem” to the collected works (as it were) of a poet is not unique to Homer in Melanchthon’s literary idiom. (Weaver does not say that it is, but, on the other hand, he does not give other examples showing that it is not.) Melanchthon refers to the comedies of Terence in just this way (in hoc poemate, “in this poem”) in a letter to Paul Geraeander that was used as the preface to a 1516 edition of Terence’s plays. He also does so with reference to the poetry of the Greek poet’s Tyrtaeus, using the singular poema interchangeably with the plural carmina (“poems” or “songs”).
Second, Melanchthon is not the first to refer to Homer’s (plural) poems as a single poema. If the reader will forgive a brief digression, I think that the topic merits further exposition.
The earliest instance of such a locution I am aware of is found in Pomponius Porphyrio, the early third century commentator on Horace. Commenting on Epistles 1.2, which opens with a reference to the profitable results that accrue to the reader of Homer, Porphyrio glosses Horace’s Troiani belli scriptorem (“writer of the Trojan War”) with the remark that the author had been “reading the Homeric poem” (lecto…poemate Homeri). Lest this appear to be a reference to the Iliad alone, what follows, both in Horace’s poem and in Porphyrio’s comments, makes it clear that it refers to the Odyssey as well. And we know that Epistles 1.2 was important to Melanchthon, because he cites it in the “Preface to Homer,” as well as in “On Correcting the College Program of Study” and the “Praise of Eloquence,” all of which are considered in Homer in Wittenberg.
We then find a handful of references in the sixth century. Boethius uses it in his Latin translation of Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, where Homeri poema (“the poem of Homer”) serves as a Latin equivalent for Aristotle’s ἡ Ὁμήρου ποίησις [hē Homērou poiēsis, “the poetry of Homer”]. Likewise, in the Latin version of Josephus’s Against Apion, overseen by Cassidorus, poema[te] Homeri (“the poem of Homer”) represents the τῆς Ὁμήρου ποιήσεως [tēs Homērou poiēseōs, “the poetry of Homer”] of the original. Again, the Tripartite History, a Latin work of church history compiled from the Greek church historians Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, and Theodoret by Cassiodorus and Epiphanius Scholasticus, uses Homeri poemate (“the poem of Homer”) for Sozomen’s τῆς Ὁμήρου ποιήσεως [tēs Homērou poiēseōs, “the poetry of Homer”] in a discussion of Apollinaris the Elder’s (sadly lost) epic version of some of the Old Testament.
One can reasonably conclude from this data that poema Homeri was a not uncommon way of referring to Homer’s poetry as a whole in sixth century Italy. After the sixth century, in contrast, it seems only to occur in logical texts in discussion of the passage in Boethius-Aristotle. (We find one exception in the twelfth century in Book 8 of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, where he narrates the episode about Apollinaris the Elder, presumably following the account in the Tripartite History).
What if we fast forward nearer to Melanchthon’s own day? One of Melanchthon’s heroes, Desiderius Erasmus, uses the phrase Homeri poema exactly once (in the Adages; elsewhere, he uses poesis as well)), where it turns up in the introduction to a misattributed and misunderstood (the first is at least partially the fault of the edition he was using) quotation from Heraclitus’s Allegories or Homeric Problems. Interestingly, in this instance Erasmus is not translating the phrase from his Greek source, where an equivalent does not appear, but seems to add it as his own summary way of labeling Homer’s poetry.
But the passage in Erasmus is the only instance I have found for this expression that is contemporary with Melanchthon.[2] And in all of Erasmus’s voluminous writings, it does not recur. Melanchthon, on the other hand, uses it repeatedly. (Curiously, though, he only seems to do so in one work: the aforementioned “Preface to Homer.” There, it appears in the first sentence, before it or its equivalent reappears, by my count, another 17 times in the remainder of the oration.)
Thus, even if the earlier attestations of the phrase undercut Weaver’s claim to Melanchthon’s uniqueness in one respect, it might still be the case that they strengthen and enrich his account in other ways. That is to say, it could still be true that with this phrase Melanchthon is doing something different and, if not unique, at least remarkable. So: Is he? Let us see.
A good test-case to measure Melanchthon’s uniqueness is where he places the locus of unity vis-à-vis other writers. That is, if the Iliad and the Odyssey form, in some sense, one work, in what does their unity consist? It does not consist in plot or theme: The plot of the Iliad is tragic and its theme is wrath, whereas the plot of the Odyssey is comedic and its theme is the man of many turnings, Odysseus.
For Weaver, the unity of the Homeric poem seems to obtain in its rhetorical-ethical center. The “Homeric poem” uses speech to form the virtue of prudence in the reader, teaching him how to speak and how to live. Such a view of poetry might be classed under what Kenneth Burke calls “literature as equipment for living.” That interpretation is the same as the view expressed in the poem with which this essay began. It has much to commend it, and I will return to it momentarily.
But first, there are a couple of other possibilities that also might account for how one could refer to Homer’s (one) poema. In a passage about predication in his Dialectica, Peter Abelard treats the proposition Homeri poema est poeta, “The poem of Homer is the poet.” Whatever else is going on in Abelard’s technical discussion, we are reminded here of the way in which the distinction between a work and the work’s author is often elided, such that we can say either “We read in the Homer’s poetry that…” or “We read in Homer that…” interchangeably. That is one possibility.
The second is found farther back in time. I refer to Vergil’s Aeneid and the way in which Vergil uses the Iliad and the Odyssey together to make one new epic about both arms (Iliad) and a man (Odyssey), a feat that relies implicitly on the hypothesis that the two poems are, or at least can be made to be, episodes in one grand story that is recapitulated in reverse (wanderings, then war) by the Trojan hero Aeneas, who himself becomes the point of integration of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the Aeneid.[3]
What connects the proposition in Abelard to Vergil’s use of Homer in his own epic and the conception of each about the unity of Homer? We might suggest that they share a view of poetic unity that exists somehow in the mind of the maker rather than, or at least before, it exists in the texts themselves.
It seems doubtful to me that Melanchthon was thinking of Peter Abelard in conjunction with Homer. But it is certain that he was thinking about Vergil. As Weaver notes, “the authority most often cited” in the Wittenberg scholia, “accounting for approximately fifty-seven percent of identified citations, is the poet Vergil” (144-45). Every book of the Aeneid is cited in these notes (155). Thus Weaver can justly say that “[p]erhaps more decisively than any theorist, critic, or exegete, it was a poet that influenced Melanchthon’s conception of a single Homeric poem” (126). It is plausible, then, that this principle of Homeric unity has made its way to Melanchthon via Vergil.
But that does not mean that there is nothing new or unique in Melanchthon’s approach to Homeric unity and the poema Homeri; and this is where I think that Weaver is right. For Melanchthon does not evince a great concern with unity in the mind of the maker, even if he can use the phrase poema Homeri as a stand-in for “Homer.” As Weaver shows, Melanchthon’s interests lie elsewhere—in, as noted above, his connection between rhetorical-ethical instruction (paralleled in other explicators of ancient epic) and the link between this instruction and the question of poetic unity. That combination does indeed, I believe, make Melanchthon’s usage of poema Homeri “idiosyncratic” (116). The property of the text that Melanchthon cares most about is its capacity for the rhetorical and ethical formation of the reader to equip him to handle affairs in “real life.” To put it more succinctly: The locus of Homeric unity for Melanchthon exists on the level of a literary pragmatics ordered toward civic catechesis. This function of the text is in turn brought out by the competent teacher and communicated to the student. Exploration of that facet of Melanchthon’s literary pedagogy would require another essay, and so I simply note here that Weaver devotes a great deal of attention to it in the book.
Perhaps most significantly for readers of this review, Weaver connects Melanchthon’s search for a unity or “a standard of literary completeness that is not defined by theme, plot, or character” (138) but rather by types of speech in Homer with Protestant approaches to Scripture through the “speech genres” of law and gospel (138). Discussion of this, too, would require another essay. In lieu of that, I will add a brief gloss and conclude. By connecting the reading of Homer and the reading of the Bible, Weaver gives us a valuable reminder that Melanchthon’s thinking about the text of the Bible is in some respects a subset or specification of his thinking about texts in general. Attention to this link foregrounds the fact that, in that sense, the boundary between classical and sacred literature is, for him, permeable.[4] For that reason (and, I hasten to add, for many others, too), Homer in Wittenberg repays close reading.
E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics and Chairman of the Collegiate Scholars Program at Hillsdale College.
The translation is my own. ↑
There could, however, be other instances that have escaped my investigation. I am no Holmes; I am not even a Watson. ↑
In the “Preface to Homer,” Melanchthon describes “the theme of the Homeric poem” (poematis Homerici argumentum) as “twofold” (duplex): the Iliad has to do with “physical strength” (robur corporis) and “war in defense of conjugal modesty” (bellum…pro defensione pudicitiae coniugalis), while the Odyssey has to do with the “powers of character” (vires ingenii) of the “wise and political man” seen “under the image” of Odysseus in his exploits after the conclusion of the Trojan War (errores Ulyssis, sub cuius imagine virum sapientem ac politicum…describere voluit). ↑
There are, of course, other senses in which the boundary is not permeable. ↑