Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox

Homer and His Iliad

By Robin Lane Fox

Basic Books 2023

Classicist Robin Lane Fox open his new book Homer and His Iliad on a curiously appealing personal note, talking about his own appreciation of Homer’s Iliad, which he calls the world’s greatest poem. “Whenever I read it, it reduces me to tears,” he writes. “When I leave it and return to everyday life, it changes the way in which I look at the world.” 

This isn’t typical scholarly language, although people familiar with the Iliad tend to talk this way about it. Fox’s book is as fiercely intelligent and scholarly as everything else he’s ever written, but Homer and His Iliad feels different, charged with more personal passion even than his terrific biography of St. Augustine. This is a marvelous grappling with a poem and his masterpiece.

One of the central points of the book is the singular of that “poet.” Fox here pursues his contention that the Iliad has the thematic and rhetorical cohesion that can only result from the creativity of a single author, not the workshop that’s often been put forward as the genesis of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Fox’s construction, the poet, a veteran of countless elaborate oral recitations of segments of the work, decides at some point to recite the whole thing very carefully to the scribes who’ll write it down for wider dissemination. Fox recounts some of the tedium and irritation that’s arisen from this kind of process in living memory, when oral skalds became irked with the recording process, but he imagines Homer having the patience to match his genius:

Homer was not dictating to suit an outsider’s wishes: the decision, I believe, was his own. He was doing it with great authority, to scribes who wanted to catch their maestro’s every word. They revered him. He had no reason to become disengaged from the process as it was one, with good reason, he had inflicted on himself. 

Ironically, the main point to make to readers who might be skeptical of this hypothesis is that the hypothesis itself ends up being the least intrusive aspect of the book. Watching an expert of Fox’s caliber theorize about a work as beloved as the Iliad is undeniably fascinating (his Notes and References section is a trove of information), but the book’s far more prominent feature is connected with that opening personal note: throughout the book, the reader finds Fox simply reading the poem — skillfully and insightfully, in ways that will send even experienced readers back to their favorite translation to do some rereading:

Unlike sarcasm, irony does not have to be harsh. Gentle irony is very rare in the Iliad, but it occurs in the poem’s final book, in the scene between Hermes in disguise and elderly Priam on his way by night to Achilles. We know, and Hermes knows, what Priam does not, that he is entertaining divinity unawares. The irony here is not ruthless: it relates to disguise and a consequent absence of recognition. The Odyssey will be rich in this kind of irony, exploiting it while Odysseus goes in disguise among members of his own household.

Homer and His Iliad puts forward a cluster of arguments, and they’re all deeply interesting (readers who’ve been thinking about the difference, say, between the written and the dictated Henry James novels will find the heart of Fox’s theory endlessly thought-provoking). But this is also very much one lifelong Homer-reader’s attempt to account for the poem, for the pull and magic of the thing. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News