The Place of the Father. The Reception of Homer in the Renaissance Canon

Our perception that Homer was always the cornerstone of the Western canon needs a profound rethinking. Unlike other classical and especially Greek authors, Homer never faded from the West’s collective memory: his name was revered even in the Middle Ages, despite the impossibility of actually reading his poems. Such was the longing to hear his voice that already in the fourteenth century, Petrarch and Boccaccio managed to have his poems translated into Latin. From that moment on, we would have expected Homer to have received a hearty welcome and rapid progress in the literary canon. The reality is that it took more than two centuries for the Iliad and the Odyssey to earn real jurisdiction in the Renaissance cultural discourse. New translations − both into Latin and the vernacular – were fragmentary and tentative, despite the calls from authoritative patrons to replace Leontius Pilatus’ early attempt. Also, the very text that in antiquity had given birth to philology as a discipline, the Iliad, benefited strikingly little from editorial care, precisely at the time when Renaissance editors and printers worked towards ever better editions of classical texts.