The Reception of Homer and the Egyptians In the Renaissance

Octavian Rosca a changé la photo du groupe.

The Reception of Homer and the Egyptians In the Renaissance

During the Middle Ages, the heroes of the Trojan war were considered to be dukes, counts, and knights, and their adventures and personalities were known not through Homer but by way of Ovid, Virgil, Statius, Dictys, Dares, Benoît, and Guido. The medieval Iliad was reduced to a Pindarus Thebanus de bello Trojano, a summary of the epic poem in mediocre Latin hexameters.

The translation of Homer into prose that Boccaccio had requested and Pilato had accomplished filled Petrarch with pleasure; but he probably read it for its moral teaching just as he had read the Aeneid. Pilato’s attempt was not to remain a solitary one. However, Homer was not truly read in the West before Angelo Poliziano set out to complete the translation of the Iliad started by Carlo Marsuppini, though he did not get beyond book V. 20 Like Petrarch, Poliziano read Homer in quest of moral teaching.

The same concern was manifest among the first publishers of Homer, Chalcondyles, and Acciaiuoli, who, in the Florence edition of included a speech on Homer by Dion Chrysostomus, as well as a biography of Homer attributed to Herodotus and Homer’s Life and Poetry attributed to Plutarch. The later editions and translations of Homer became enriched with increasingly numerous allegorical commentaries. The movement culminated with a number of publications, including Porphyry’s Homeric Questions and The Cave of the Nymphs in Eustathius’s commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, Proclus’s Homeric commentaries (treatises V and VI of the Commentary on the Republic) in the Homeric Allegories attributed to Heraclitus in and an anonymous work titled Moral Interpretation of Odysseus’s Travels. Jean de Sponde was the only one who resisted this movement, which entailed the inclusion of the means for moral interpretation of the text along with the text itself. In 1583, he published in Basel a text devoid of moralizing explanations.

Other scholars dealt with Homer, no longer from a more or less moralized literary perspective but rather from a historical viewpoint by using arguments drawn from Euhemerism. In his Antenor (Padua Lorenzo Pignoria attempted to show that Antenor was the true founder of Padua. Reiner Reineck described Odysseus’s travels through most of the countries of Europe. Samuel Bochart, a disciple of the British theologian Julius Cameron, set out to prove that Odysseus’s adventures took place along the coasts of the Latium and Campania. Francesco Bianchini developed a theory according to which Zeus had been king of Ethiopia; Juno, queen of Syria; Neptune, prince of Caria; and Apollo, prince of Assyria. Finally, Hermann von der Hardt went so far as to claim that Odysseus should be identified with Thesprotus of Pandrosia, who had fortified Mount Hypatus, represented by the Trojan horse, from which he emerged to found colonies in various places.

A third group of scholars established all sorts of parallels between Homer on the one hand and the Old and New Testaments on the other. Some even found traces of Christian doctrines in Homer, a discovery they also made in Plato, Seneca, Orpheus, Virgil, and other Greek and Roman authors. Thus J. B. Persona, Nicolas Bergmann and Johannes Roth succeeded in turning Homer, if not into a Christian theologian, at least into a Christian philosopher. As for Jacques Hugues he was convinced that the fall of Troy must be interpreted as the synthesis of the taking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians on the one hand and by the Romans on the other; hence the lack of compunction with which he identified Helen with the “incarnate god,” blind Tiresias with Abraham; Cassandra who predicted the fall of Troy, with Jeremiah; and so forth. Zachary Bogan offered an enormous compilation of passages in Homer that he believed paralleled the Bible.

Finally, James Duport thought that the moral doctrines propounded by Homer came to him from the studies of the Old Testament he had done in Egypt. He thus wanted to show the superiority of Christ over Apollo, of David over Pindar, of Paul over Seneca, and of Solomon over Homer, and he exhorted his readers to be Christians first and admirers of Homer, Aristotle, and Cicero second. Moreover, explained Duport, when Homer described the gardens of Alcinoos, he had a vague memory of the Garden of Eden, and likewise the narrative of the attack of the Giants and the Titans against Olympus came from the memory of the building of the tower of Babel. The numerous traces of Hebrew wisdom dispersed in Homer’s epics are what explains Plato’s aversion for him, for Plato was not capable of understanding this profound poetry with its abundant mysteries.

Homer had acquired all the knowledge he hid in the Iliad and the Odyssey during his years of study in Egypt. This was a widespread opinion, even among the Greeks, who credited several other personalities, including Solon, Thales, Plato, Eudoxus, and Pythagoras, with journeys to Egypt, the source of all civilization. To the Christians, however, Moses was more important and more ancient than Homer; therefore, according to the various authorities, either the poet had taught the lawgiver or the lawgiver had taught the poet.

This is the context of the discovery of the Hieroglyphica in 1419 by Christoforo de Buondelmonti, an associate of the antiquarian Niccolo Niccoli. This work was supposed to have been written in the Egyptian language by a priest called Horapollo and translated into Greek by a certain Philip. On the basis of 189 examples, the Hieroglyphica bring out the similarities between pagan and Christian interpretations of animals: the pig symbolizes a harmful man, the weasel a weak man, the swan an elderly musician, and so on. After its publication in Greek in 1505, this odd dictionary of symbols was republished at least thirty times in Latin, French, Italian, and German translations.

The fashion for Egypt that this work generated was intensified by awareness of the existence of a bronze table decorated with hieroglyphs and silver figurines which was actually a fake owned by Cardinal Bembo. While still in the museum of the Duke of Mantua, the relic known as the Bembine Table was copied and engraved by Vico of Parma, who published the first engravings of it in Venice in 1600. At the request of Marcus Velser, Pignoria reprinted Vico’s engravings and added explicative texts to them. Even though Pignoria was not able to dissociate the gods and goddesses of Egypt from the hieroglyphs accompanying their representations, he attempted to identify them, recounted their history, gave an idea of their cult, and established their relations with their emblematic animals along with the signs that identified them.

In the third volume of his Oedipus Aegypticus, Athanasius Kircher, putting his imagination to the service of his immense erudition, undertook a much less sober interpretation of the Mensa Isiaca, the name he gave to the Bembine Table, which by then had disappeared. He divided the Mensa Isiaca into series of triads that all originated in the three central figures of Egyptian theosophy: father, power, and spirit; or faith, truth, and love. Each square centimeter of the Bembine Table was used to describe the detail of the descending chain leading from the Ideas of God to matter.Despite their lack of authenticity, the Hieroglyphica and the Bembine Table rekindled the Renaissance’s interest in allegory and symbols.

The immense popularity of the Hieroglyphica led to the production of dictionaries offering a compilation of symbols. The first dictionary of this genre was that of Piero Valeriano Bolzani. In his inscription dedicating the book to Cosimo de Medici, Valeriano Bolzani evoked his conversations with Cardinal Bembo about the obelisks in Rome and Roman monuments that were as worthy of preservation as Michelangelo’s statues in the Saint Laurence basilica. In 1576, the Hieroglyphica by Celio Agostino Curio, Bembo’s publisher and the historian of the Saracens, was published as an appendix to an edition of Valeriano’s work. Two major names stand out among Valeriano’s successors: Nicolas Caussin and Athanasius Kircher.

In Paris in 1618, Father Nicolas Caussin had published an Electorum symbolorum et parabolorum historicarum syntagmata, which included Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, a summary of Valeriano’s work, and a number of texts on hieroglyphs.
In 1630 Pietro della Valle bought the manuscript of a Coptic-Arab dictionary on which Athanasius Kircher based his book Prodromus coptus, published in 1636. It was a Coptic grammar and vocabulary, preceded by a preface that was five times as long as the body of the work. Though far from perfect, this manual still remains the basic work for Coptic studies. In 1664 Kircher had published in Rome a Lingua aegyptiaca restituta, which corresponded to Pietro della Valle’s dictionary and included in an appendix ten essays on subjects pertaining to Egypt.

In 1650 the Obeliscus pamphilius was published in Rome; it dealt more precisely with the interpretation of symbols. Two years later Oedipus aegyptiacus; hoc est universalis hieroglyphicae veterum doctrinae temporum iniurai abolitae instauratio was published in four folios, the whole consisting of more than two thousand pages, in which Kircher describes the religion, culture, and politics of Egypt. Here, Adam was born of parents whose origin went back to the moon, and he himself was a priest of the moon. Adam beseeched human beings to worship this heavenly body, until Seth taught him the true path. Human beings, however, did not renounce the worship of heavenly bodies, and even at that time Adam, Eve, the serpent, Cain, and Seth were looked upon as divinities in the context of a theology that Shem had carried into Egypt and that became more and more degraded, thus making possible the apparition of the Egyptian pantheon.

Moreover, all languages derive from Hebrew, the language that was taught to Adam by revelation at the same time as the other sciences. But the first human beings to make use of the symbol defined as “the sign signifying a hidden mystery” were the Egyptians. The Greeks learned from them.

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