Introduction

Note: This volume is based, with some additions, on the panel "The Plato-Homer Question in Antiquity: Philosophers and Scholars" held in Athens (online) at the 2021 conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, and co-organised by Christina-Panagiota Manolea and François Renaud, who were kindly joined by Harold Tarrant in the preparation of the volume. Dylan Vaughan has provided valuable help in the revision of the last version of the manuscript.

Plato's famous, and indeed infamous, criticism of Homer constitutes the climax of a long series of attacks by those we call philosophers on the first and greatest Greek poet Homer, for instance the attacks of Xenophanes and of Heraclitus. It triggers in turn an even longer series of responses attempting either to justify further "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (Pl. Resp. 607b?-?c), or, in most cases, to reconcile the two great authors. The so-called Plato-Homer problem is in broad outline twofold, with numberless ramifications and sub-issues. Why does Plato repeatedly attack and even exile the greatest cultural authority of the Greek world? And why does he do so while quoting Homer abundantly (more often than any other poet or prose writer) and even incorporating many features of Homeric poetry in his artistically written dialogues?

This volume concentrates on the various kinds of response to the Plato-Homer controversy on the part of Platonically minded writers, while also including a few other kinds of reaction from just outside that circle. Strategies of reconciliation are many, including both allegorical and non-allegorical approaches, involving myth, mimesis, inspiration, wisdom, theology, etc. The volume presents original treatments of major figures, such as Porphyry and Proclus, as well lesser-known or researched authors or texts in this context (e.?g. Platonic Dubia and Spuria, etc.), and non-Platonists (Xenophon, Aristotle, scholiasts, etc.) who can serve as enlightening comparative figures.

The recent literature on the Homer-Plato question in Antiquity mostly concentrates on single authors, and very few if any deal with its reception in the Platonic tradition as a whole. This publication is timely as it builds on and goes beyond significant articles and book chapters, such as in Richard Hunter's Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: The Silent Stream (2012) and The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey (2018), and Christina-Panagiota Manolea's Brill's Companion to the Reception of Homer from the Hellenistic Age to Late Antiquity (2022).

The rest of the introduction briefly summarizes each paper in a somewhat different order from the broadly chronological one followed in the volume, dividing them into three groups: 1. Plato's criticism (in part) criticized (3 papers), 2. Comparative reception (6 papers) and 3. Modes of discourse, allegorical and not (7 papers).

1 Plato's Criticism (in part) Criticized

Michele Corradi in his paper "?s??? p??t?µ?? t?? ????e?a?: A Hidden Dialogue between Aristotle and Plato on Homer" explores some of Aristotle's allusive responses to his teacher in the Poetics, taking up Plato's invitation to Homer's supporters to demonstrate poetry is not only pleasant but also useful (607d?-?e). Using the term mimesis in Chapter 24 with the same meaning Plato gives to it in Republic Book 3 (393a?-?394a), Aristotle defends Homer as the artist par excellence, because he knows how to give his characters prominence through direct speech. Aristotle secularizes and defends the notion of inspiration in terms of the poet's nature and human beings' natural disposition to imitate. In considering Homer the exceptional poet capable of composing both tragedy and comedy, Aristotle implicitly follows Socrates' lead in the Symposium (223d3?-?6), where the skilful poet is said to be able to compose in both genres, thus apparently establishing a link between Homer and Plato, who unites tragedy and comedy in his dialogues by following Homer's example.

François Renaud in "The Voice of Homer and That of His Characters: The Criticism of µ?µ?s?? (Resp. 393d?-?394e) and Its Varied Reception" examines Socrates's theory of poetic discourses, according to which simple narration is superior to mimetic style, and various reactions to it. First, a scholium defends Socrates' apparent lack of distinction between poet and characters, or the monophonic character of Homeric poetry, underscoring Homer's talents in exhibiting his powers of expression through his characters. Second, Porphyry and Plutarch defend the distinction between poet and characters as a confirmation of, and complement to, Plato's view: Porphyry explains apparent contradictions in Homer by referring to the character who speaks; Plutarch claims Homer judges and corrects the words and behaviour of his characters (see De Sanctis' paper). Finally, two grammarians, Aristarchus and Athenaeus, defend the distinction between Homer and his characters in implicit and open opposition to Plato respectively.

In "Poetic Enthusiasm: The (Mis)Fortune of a Platonic Image" Carlotta Capuccino analyses and criticizes Plato's subversion of the traditional meaning of poetic inspiration in separating it from knowledge, and the long-lived tradition of misunderstandings following this separation. Plato's novelty, notably in the Ion, consists in making the poet's enthusiasm a passive state, as opposed to its source, the Muse's knowledge. While poetic enthusiasm would be irrational and passive, coming from without, philosophic inspiration would be intellectually active and from within. Plato sees a continuum uniting poet, rhapsode, rhetorician and philosopher, but regards the philosopher's inspiration alone as having cognitive value. Cicero will later defend the traditional conception of the poetic inspiration as divine, but follow Plato in linking poetry with rhetoric, verse recitation with speech delivery. Likewise, Horace will combine human skill and divine inspiration, but considers the divine gift as natural talent and inspiration mere metaphor. Surprisingly, both seem to attribute to Plato himself the fortune of the traditional image of the inspired and wise poet. Over the centuries, inspired poetry will be highly praised, but severed from knowledge, and linked to the imagination instead of reason, as is typically found in the Romantic conception.

2 Comparative Reception

Francesca Pentassuglio's "Homer at the Banquet: Xenophon's Symposium and Plutarch's Symposiaka" offers a complex intertextual reading of Homer in the social context of the symposium as portrayed in Xenophon's eponymous work and Plutarch's Table Talks. Xenophon criticizes Homer's alleged encyclopaedic knowledge and its presumed usefulness, while reinterpreting and adapting Homeric references in various argumentative contexts. Plutarch refers to Homer and Xenophon separately, since he quotes Homer regarding questions, while Xenophon does so about jokes. Plutarch occasionally adopts toward Homeric poetry a critical posture influenced by Plato, but mostly uses it as literary canon and as source of moral exempla (see De Sanctis' paper). In Xenophon's Symposium Homeric poetry is not criticized per se, but as the object of memorization of an alleged encyclopaedic knowledge, while he draws freely upon it on such subjects as on eros. Unlike Xenophon's Symposium, Plutarch in Table Talks presents Homer's encyclopaedism in exclusively positive terms, quoting Homer as an authority on historical, scientific, metaphysical, psychological, and ethico-political matters.

Marta Antola in "The Way of Acting as Homer's Odysseus: A Response to the Plato-Homer Question from Plato Onwards" identifies and analyses, in Plato and Plotinus, a particular use of Homer which she calls "erotic strategy," exemplified by Odysseus. This strategy allows Odysseus to survive dangers of physical eros in favour of a non-physical eros, notably when facing Calypso and Circe as forces of seduction or physical eros ("physical" broadly conceived as bodies and body-related discourse), thus yielding instead to his eros for his fatherland. Socrates adopts the erotic strategy with various characters in the Platonic dialogues (Charmides, Protagoras, Thrasymachus, etc.). Similarly to Odysseus, he resists physical eros to contemplate the meta-physical, namely Beauty and the Good, conceived as a return home (Tht. 176a?-?b, Phdr. 246d?-?e). Finally, Plotinus in the Enneads explicitly refers to Odysseus' episodes with Circe or Calypso, exhorting himself and his companions to "put out to the sea, as Odysseus did" and so "fly to our dear country," taking these Homeric episodes as having hidden meaning (8.16?-?21). He appears to escape the pull of physical eros and return to the "home of the soul," following the pull of an eros of things meta-physical, himself (in Porphyrius, Vita Plotini 22?-?23. Odysseus, Socrates, and Plotinus thus take on a comparable erotic strategy in favour of meta-physical eros, allowing them to survive and...