Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson Page B

every hand they had passed through. The originals were unrecoverable. Homer, whoever that was, could never now be known.
    The scene was set for the long struggle over the so-called Homeric Question raised by Wolf which has lasted ever since. “Some say, ‘There never was such a person as Homer,’” the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841. “‘No such person as Homer! On the contrary,’ say others, ‘there were scores.’” Nevertheless, the text of the Iliad over which the battles were fought between the lumpers and splitters, the one-Homer advocates and the scores-of-Homer advocates, the Homerophiles and Homerophobes, continued to be almost precisely the one published by Villoison in 1788.
    He was not the first in the field. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, who had come to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Soon other copies were being printed in Milan, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Paris and London. And behind those first printed books stands a long manuscript history. Many of the medieval manuscripts of Homer migrated late to the European libraries, because in the early Middle Ages Homer was unread in Europe. Dante had Virgil call him the “sovereign poet,” but Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek, and even though the great fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch was said to have owned a copy of the Iliad— he was used to kiss it in reverence—he could not understand a word it said. Homer, he wrote, “was dumb to me and I am deaf to it.”
    Nevertheless, Homer continued to lurk in the European mind; pervasively there but rarely seen. Medieval Odyssey s are scattered through scholarly Europe, in Cambridge and London, Milan and Munich, Naples and Moscow, in Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Vienna. There are Iliad s in the Bodleian in Oxford (from the twelfth century), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (a copy which probably came from Mount Athos), in the Escorial and in Florence. Through these few precious manuscript books, Homer survived in medieval Christendom.
    All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.
    From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans traveling in Egypt took Homer farther back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer