Prolegomena to Homer

"This is Friedrich Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer or Prolegomena ad Homerum in the original, as it was published in Latin. This book marks a really important transition in philology. If you look at ancient philology, its rebirth in the Renaissance, and its development in early modern scholars like Joseph Scaliger, it is historical, in a sense. All philologers believe that if you want to understand a text written in, say, late Republican Rome, you’ve got to know a lot of history. You’ve got to know about Roman law, Roman courts, Roman family life, Roman politics and Roman diet so that you know what these words mean in their context. What is not evident in those philologists — and is certainly evident in our understanding of languages and texts today — is a sense of history as showing the development of important cultural and civilizational differences over time. There was no sense that the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, or the ancient Israelite world, were culturally very different. Wolf is important symbolically because his is one of the first important works of philology that has the strong sense of the ancient Greek world as being really, really different. People thought in different ways, people held worldviews that were, in many ways, incommensurable with our own. When you enter that ancient culture, you are really entering a different world. The task of philology shifts from trying to understand correctly the meaning of ancient texts to trying to understand the civilizations that produced those texts. So what you begin to see — first in classical philology and then very quickly and almost simultaneously in Biblical philology — is a new way of understanding the ancient world (and the intermediate stages between us and the ancient world, like the Middle Ages) as being as strange to us, as the culture of, say, American Indian tribes. That’s a very important shift in the way in which history was understood and it’s a shift we still live with. It’s very crucial to the humanities disciplines today. He wants to show that Homer was not an actual person, but rather the name given to a series of narrative songs that were the characteristic way in which people talked about the past — in this case the Trojan War and its aftermath — in this ancient, different world. Later, someone stitches together these different songs and they eventually take the form of the Iliad and the Odyssey as known to us. But that they emerge in a world in which our conception of individual authorship and even individual authors didn’t exist yet. It’s still controversial — that’s probably the best way to put it. Most classical scholars certainly think there is an element of truth to what he’s saying. There probably wasn’t someone named Homer who wrote down all of these things out of his own head, in the way we think of an author as composing a work. Whether or not there was a real person called Homer, that’s controversial, when the Iliad and the Odyssey came together as complete works in more or less the form known to us now, that’s controversial, and the exact relationship between these ancient songs and the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey , that’s controversial."