![]() 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. ![]() New translations − both into Latin and the vernacular – were fragmentary and tentative, despite the calls from authoritative patrons to replace Leontius Pilatus’ early attempt. 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. From that moment on, we would have expected Homer to have received a hearty welcome and rapid progress in the literary canon. Book VI of the Aeneid reveals a prophecy for Aeneas by the Sibyl of Cumae stating that a Latin-born Achilles, who is also the son of a goddess, exists (Aeneid, Book VI, lines 8990). 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. The second half of the Aeneid, Books VI through XII, follow similarly to what happens throughout the Iliad. ![]() It can take years of studying to reach that level. 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. Reading the Iliad in Greek is an extremely difficult task: differente dialects, rare verbal forms, archaisms, etc., are very common. Homer's Iliad enjoys two available translations into Latin, one heavily abridged, and the other apparently unabridged but with only Book 1 currently accessible. ![]() Our perception that Homer was always the cornerstone of the Western canon needs a profound rethinking. ![]()
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