Homer

Reading notes

• Ad Atticum 8.11 §3 So great an Iliad of evils

  "An Iliad of evils" (Ilias kakon) was a Greek proverb for a vast accumulation of disasters, taking Homer's epic of the Trojan War as the byword for prolonged catastrophe.

• Ad Atticum 9.5 §3 that hero in Homer

  The hero is Achilles, who in the Iliad chooses to avenge his fallen comrade Patroclus even though his mother Thetis warns that his own death must follow Hector's. Cicero casts himself as Achilles and Pompey as the comrade-benefactor he cannot abandon.

• Ad Familiares 10.13 §2 it was not Ajax, not Achilles, but Ulysses whom Homer called

  Cicero quotes the Homeric epithet ptoliporthion ("sacker of cities"), applied to Odysseus/Ulysses; Ajax and Achilles were supreme fighters but Odysseus — the strategist who devised the Trojan Horse — actually ended the war. The implication is that Plancus, like Ulysses, must be the man who finishes the job.

• Ad Familiares 13.15 §1 never did they persuade the heart within my breast

  Greek quotation (Iliad 9.345, spoken by Achilles): 'all' emon ou pote thumon eni stethessin epeithen.' Cicero uses Homeric epic to describe, with self-deprecating irony, his own decision not to join Caesar's campaign --- as though he, like Achilles, refused to be moved by appeals to glory. [Greek phrase noted: three Homeric and one Euripidean tag in this letter.]

• Ad Familiares 13.15 §2 I hate the wise man who is not wise on his own behalf

  Euripides, fragment 905 Nauck: 'miso sophisten, hostis ouch hautoi sophos.' Cited as the 'true precepts of Euripides' against Homeric heroics; Cicero presents the elder Precilius as endorsing this pragmatic wisdom, even while also quoting the Homeric ideal of aien aristeuein ('always be foremost') --- a deliberate paradox flattering Caesar by showing Cicero has chosen philosophical retirement, not opposition.

• On Divination §1.52 a certain Homeric verse

  The line Socrates dreamed (Iliad 9.363) speaks of reaching fertile Phthia on the third day; he read it as foretelling that his soul would reach its true home, his death, after three days.

• On the Nature of the Gods §2.166 to attach particular gods, as companions

  Balbus reads Homer's habit of giving each great hero (Ulysses, Diomedes, Agamemnon, Achilles) a guardian deity as a poetic expression of the truth that the gods take thought for individual men.

• Tusculan Disputations §1.37 Homer's whole \textit{Summoning of the Dead [Greek: nekyia]}

  The Nekyia is the underworld book of the Odyssey (Book 11), in which Odysseus summons and converses with the dead. Cicero treats it as the fountainhead of the poetic underworld-fictions he is debunking.

• Tusculan Disputations §5.114 It is handed down too that Homer was blind

  The ancient tradition that the poet Homer was blind. Cicero turns it to his purpose: Homer's vivid "painting" of scenes he could not see proves that the mind's pleasures do not depend on the eyes.