Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank all who made possible the publication of this book. An earlier version of portions of Chapter 3 appeared as “Socrates’ Critique of Homer’s Education in the Republic,” in Liberty, Democracy, and the Temptations to Tyranny in the Dialogues of Plato, edited by Charlotte C.

I completed this book during the academic year of 2020-2021 in Munich, Germany, thanks to a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation Fellowship. I am grateful to the Siemens Foundation for its generosity and I am most grateful to its director, Heinrich Meier, for his tremendous support, his critical advice concerning the book manuscript, and his friendship.

For their generous financial support, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, and Davidson College. My thanks go as well to my editors at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl and Robert Dreesen, for their invaluable support and assistance throughout this project. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for the Press for their helpful criticisms and suggestions. For their indispensable assistance, during the challenging academic year of 2020-2021, in tracking down and sending me countless books and articles on interlib­rary loan while I was in Munich, I thank the Davidson College

Acknowledgments

interlibrary loan coordinator, Joe Gutekanst, and the students who helped him: Chris Freel, Yunah Han, Sabria Jackson, Jake Matthews, and Annabel Winters-McCabe.

During the years I worked on this project, it was my great good fortune to be invited to lecture on Homer and Plato at a wide variety of insti­tutions of higher learning: the University of Texas at Austin, Baylor University, the University of Dallas, Concordia University in Montreal, Colgate University, Carleton College, Christopher Newport University, the University of Notre Dame, Canisius College, the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich, Mercer University, Emory University, Shanghai International Studies University, Sun Yat-Sen University, and Renmin University. The scholars and students at these institutions helped me greatly with their penetrating questions, criticisms, and comments, and I am exceedingly grateful to them. My thanks go as well to the always challenging and instructive students at Davidson College and Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China, who took classes with me on Homer, Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche.

Robert C. Bartlett, Hannes Kerber, Rasoul Namazi, Thomas L. Pangle, Richard S. Ruderman, and Brian J. Shaw carefully read sections of the book manuscript and offered me the benefit of their candid and construct­ive criticisms. I thank them most warmly. I thank as well Wei Chaoyong, Judd Owen, Bill Parsons, Peter Schafer, Anna Schmidt, Devin Stauffer, Nathan Tarcov, Wenchi Xiong, and Ying Zhang for their incisive com­ments on my work and their friendly advice, assistance, and encourage­ment. My late and much missed friend Steven Kautz also helped me greatly in the early stages of this project with his sage counsel and valuable suggestions.

Finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my daughter, Lucia, and my son, Matias, for being an endless source of joy, wonder, and pride to their father; and above all, to my wife, Alejandra Arce Ahrensdorf, who, as ever, but especially during these past two challenging years, has supported me with her boundless energy, her tremendous patience and good humor, her always astute and timely advice, her guidance, and her love.

Homer plays an important but overlooked role in the history of political philosophy. Plato identifies Homer not only as a poet - “the best and most divine of the poets” and the first “teacher” and “leader” of the tragic poets - but also as the educator of Greece concerning the gods and human excellence and as the “general [àòðàòïóîѵ]” or leader of “all” the pre-Socratic philosophers except for Parmenides.^[1] Plato suggests that Homer offers through his poetry a philosophic education, one that seeks specifically to liberate his audience from a pious reverence for the gods and to encourage them instead to rely on human reason.² Nevertheless, Plato attacks that education as ineffective - as inadvertently harmful to both political society and philosophy - and seeks to replace it with a new, philosophic, Platonic education. Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two leading philosophic critics of Plato, both invoke Homer in their arguments against Plato and his legacy. Machiavelli suggests that, in contrast with Plato, whose teachings concerning imaginary republics and principalities

¹ Ion 530b9-10; Republic 595b9-c2, 598d7-e2, 599c6-d2; Theatetus 152c8-153a2. All translations from Greek texts are my own.

² Consider as well the statements of Montaigne that Homer “laid the foundations equally for all schools of philosophy” (1976, 377) and of Vico that all philosophers up to his own time viewed Homer as “the source of all Greek philosophies” (1999, 386; see 355-356). Consider also Kurt Riezler’s essays, “Homer’s Contribution to the Meaning of Truth” (1943) and “Das Homerische Gleichniss und der Anfang der Philosophie [The Homeric Simile and the Beginning of Philosophy]” (1968; originally published in 1936). For the identification of Homer with the origin of the idea of enlightenment, see Horkheimer and Adorno (1972, xvi, 13-20, 32-36, 43-80).

render his followers deluded and weak by insisting on the goodness of human beings and ignoring their actual wickedness, Homer is a truthful and effective teacher of princes. Nietzsche contends that, in contrast with Plato, whose Platonic education - or Platonism -paved the way for a Christian culture that warred against human nature, stifled human nobil­ity, and obscured the true nature of philosophy, Homer founded the greatest culture humanity has ever known, one that allowed human nature to flourish, celebrated human nobility, and paved the way for philosophic greatness. In this book, I examine what light Homer sheds on the thought of these philosophers and what light these philosophers shed on the thought of Homer.³

When Plato founded the philosophic tradition that has lasted down to our own day, he did so, in large part, through his poetry. It was through his dialogues that Plato first presented to the world a literary portrayal of the philosopher as a distinctively heroic type of human being, a portrayal so powerful that the philosopher Socrates was to be compared repeatedly with such heroic figures as Alexander, Cato, and Jesus,⁴ and was to inspire a long line of philosophic followers and admirers.⁵ It was

³ For a critical analysis of the view, originated by the political philosopher Giambattista Vico, that Homer, either as a primitive poet or as the fictitious name of a tradition of primitive bards, merely reflected the culture in which he lived, see Ahrensdorf 2014, 1-19.

⁴ For the comparison between Socrates and Alexander the Great, see, for example, the Emperor Julian Letter to Themistius the Philosopher 264b-d; Montaigne 1976, 614; Jonathan Swift, “Of Mean and Great Figures, Made by Several Persons” (1772) in Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, 83-84, in Spiegelberg 1964, 72; Voltaire, “ Socrate, ” in Dictionnaire Philosophique, in Spiegelberg 1964, 181; Frederick the Great, Letter to Voltaire (February 16, 1774), in Spiegelberg 1964, 219.

⁵ Consider the statement of Seneca (Epistulae Morales 6.6): “Plato, Aristotle, and the whole host of sages who were to go each his different way derived more benefit from the character of Socrates than from his words.” See also Mill’s remark: “The same inspiring effect which so many benefactors of mankind have left on record that they experienced from Plutarch’s Lives, was produced on me by Plato’s pictures of Socrates...” (1957, 31). See as well, for example, Cicero Tusculan Disputations 1.29.70-71; Seneca Epistulae Morales 6.6, 54.10; De Providentia 3.4; De Tranquilitate Animi 5.2-3; Epictetus Discourses 2.99; Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae 1.3; Goethe, Letter to Herder (early 1772), in Spiegelberg 1964, 228; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Plato, or the Philosopher” in Representative Men (1850), in Spiegelberg 1964, 131-134. especially through his Apology, Phaedo, and Republic that the “divine” Plato effectively replaced the image of the philosopher as a disreputable moral and religious skeptic with the new image of a sage who pro­pounded such morally edifying and pious doctrines as those of the separ­ate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul.^[6] So successful was Plato’s poetic transfiguration of the reputation of philosophy that, even though the Athenians had persecuted philosophers as a whole^[7] and had con­victed, condemned to death, and executed Socrates in particular for injustice and impiety, Plato was allowed by the Athenians to found a school of philosophy, the Academy, that drew students from all over the classical world and that lasted for over eight hundred years and hence endured past the end of the classical world and well into the postclassical, Christian, medieval era.^[8] What is more, impressed by the moral and pious image of the philosopher created by Plato’s writings, the early Christians, St.

Yet, as Plato himself acknowledges, there was a venerable philosophic tradition prior to his, a tradition founded by Homer. Even though Plato criticizes Homer sharply, he does not criticize Homer for being intention­ally hostile to philosophy. Indeed, Plato’s Socrates presents Homer as friendly to philosophy and even as a philosophic thinker himself. In the Republic he speaks of Homer as a wise man comparable to such philoso­phers and sophists as Thales, Pythagoras, Protagoras, and Prodicus (600a4-d4). In the Theatetus, Socrates identifies Homer as the forerun­ner, “general,” and apparent inspiration for such Greek philosophers and sophists as Protagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, indeed, for “all... the wise ones” except the philosopher Parmenides.¹² Socrates suggests there as well that, by stating, through the mouth of Hera, that Oceanus was the “origin [yενsσιν] of the gods,” Homer covertly set forth his own thesis that “all things... are offspring of flowing and motion” - that is, that all things are products of natural rather than supernatural forces - and thereby founded the philosophic tradition of skepticism concerning the gods exemplified later by Heraclitus, Empedocles, Protagoras, and others.¹³ As Leo Strauss noted, it is in Homer’s poems that the founda­tional philosophical term “nature [φuσιν]" first appears in extant Greek literature, in the Odyssey, where the god Hermes reveals to Odysseus that there is a certain fixed order of the world - a natural order - that limits the power of the gods.1^{[11] [12] [13] [14]} Homer’s recognition of a natural order apart from divine will and his consequent skepticism regarding the rule of the gods over humans would seem to identify Homer as a philosophic thinker.

Yet even if, as Plato intimates, Homer shares with philosophers a certain rationalist and humanist outlook, Homer clearly differs from such philosophers as Plato and those who followed him. Even though Homer alludes to the existence of a natural order, he does not present explicitly philosophic arguments concerning that order. Even though Homer’s characters raise far-reaching questions concerning the relation between gods and humans - as well as concerning the goodness of virtue, the reasonableness of the life devoted to virtue, and the nature of death - Homer does not present explicitly philosophic characters in his poems, who speak of philosophy, argue for the philosophic life, and live that life. Indeed, the word “philosophy” never appears in his poems. One might therefore conclude that Homer is at most a proto-philosophic poet, who anticipates philosophic concerns without being fully aware of those con­cerns and who anticipates the philosophers’ celebration of the life of the mind without being fully aware of, much less living, that life.¹⁵

However, Plato himself suggests an alternative view of Homer. For in addition to Plato’s Socrates’ suggestion that Homer is the forerunner of and inspiration for such philosophers as Heraclitus and Empedocles, Plato’s Protagoras suggests that Homer lived the life of the mind but deliberately hid that way of life. As Plato’s Protagoras observes, Homer was the first of a long line of cautious wise men or “sophists” - of men who both possessed and taught wisdom - who sought “to make a disguise for themselves and to cover themselves with it, some with poetry, as in the case of Homer and Hesiod and Simonides,” in order, Protagoras claims, to avoid popular hostility (Protagoras 316d3-9).1⁶ What is more, Plato’s Socrates notes in The Sophist (216c4-d2) - with a citation from the Odyssey (17.486) - that genuine philosophers hide themselves from all those around them by pretending to be something other than philosophers:

For on account of the ignorance of the rest, these men - those who are not in a fabricated way but genuinely are philosophers - certainly take on all sorts of appearances and “range through the cities,” looking down from on high on those ^{[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] below. And in the opinion of some they are worth nothing, and of some every­thing, and at times they take on the appearances of statesmen, and at times of sophists, and there are times when they give the impression that they are altogether mad.}

Through these passages, Plato suggests that Homer is a philosophic thinker, who lives the life of the mind but deliberately hides it by pretend­ing to be merely a poet or, more precisely, a divinely inspired singer. As Plato’s Socrates remarks in the Republic, Homer’s teaching is “composed among hidden thoughts” (378d3-e1). In this way, Plato anticipates the contention in the ancient Life of Homer, traditionally attributed to Plutarch, that Homer was “the first to philosophize in ethics and phys­ics,” that he offered an education in philosophy and thereby inspired all subsequent philosophers, but that he did so “through certain riddling and mythical speeches... so that the ones who love learning together with a certain taste for what the Muses inspire, being led in their souls, might more easily seek and discover the truth, while the unlearned may not look down on these things which they are not able to comprehend” (B 144, 92; see 92-160; see also Proclus Republic 1.44.14). Plato also foreshadows Vico’s statement that all philosophers until his own day described Homer’s wisdom as a “hidden wisdom [sapienza riposta],” one that can be discovered only with intelligence and effort by those who study his poems.1⁷ If one should object that it is unreasonable to describe as a philosophic thinker one who is so reticent in presenting himself as a philosophic thinker and his teachings as philosophic teachings, one might defend this description of Homer by citing the example and the words of Plato himself. For in his Second Letter, Plato states that “nor are there, nor will there ever be, writings of Plato, but those now spoken of are of a Socrates become beautiful and young” (314c2-4). And as Plato explains in the Seventh Letter, the goal of his writings is not to present his teachings openly and explicitly but rather to intimate the truth to those “few who are capable of discovering [it] for themselves by means of slight indication” (341d2-e3).

Over the course of the history of philosophy, two thinkers, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, have invoked the philosophic poet Homer in their cri­tiques of the philosophic tradition founded by Plato. It was Homer, the successful teacher of princes, whose account of Achilles was imitated by such excellent men as Alexander the Great, and through him, Julius

^{17 Vic}o 1999^, 355^-35⁶; 1977^, 543^-545.

Caesar; who taught “covertly [copertamente]” such vital lessons as the importance for rulers of imitating the harsher qualities of beasts as well as the finer qualities of men; and whom Machiavelli invoked against the Plato “who imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.”¹⁸ And it was Homer who founded the noble culture of the Greeks, the “highest culture” the world has ever seen, whom Nietzsche invoked against Plato, the man who destroyed that culture and thereby paved the way for the slave morality of Christianity, and subsequently the herd animal morality of the democratic world and “the overall degeneration of man”: “Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism [Plato gegen Homer: das ist der ganze, der achte Antagonismus].^,,1⁹

What, then, is the relation between the philosophic thinker Homer and these three foundational philosophers? Are Homer and Plato, as Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche suggest, fundamentally in opposition to one another? Are Machiavelli and Nietzsche genuine followers of Homer? Did Plato truly seek to replace the culture created by Homer? Did Machiavelli and Nietzsche truly attempt to restore that culture? Furthermore, and more substantively, what light do these philosophic educators shed on the question of the best education for human beings, an education that addresses both the need to cultivate the human mind and the need to maintain a stable and healthy political society?

In order to explore these questions, this book will examine, first, at some length, Homer’s philosophic education of the Greeks, then Plato’s critique of that education, and finally the role played by Homer in the critiques of Plato by Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Throughout, I will ana­lyze, especially Plato’s critique of Homer, but also the invocations of

¹⁸ Prince 4.17, 14.60, 18.69, 15.61. All English quotations from The Prince, with a few slight alterations for greater literalness, are from the translation by Harvey C. Mansfield, 1998. Citations are by chapter and page numbers from this edition. Italian citations are from the Piero Gallardo edition, 1966.

¹⁹ Nietzsche, Human All Too Human 1:262, 2:219; “Attempt at Self-Criticism” 1; The Genealogy of Morality 1.11, 3.25; The Birth of Tragedy 13; Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, 202-203. See also Twilight of the Idols 9.47, 10.2. Emphases in the text. Although I generally follow the translations of Kaufmann and the Cambridge University Press translations by Hollingdale, Nauckhoff, Diethe, and Norman, I do at times alter them to make them more literal and to follow a bit more faithfully the German text of Nietzsche’s complete works (for example, the emphases), 1981, edited by Karl Schlechta. For the German text I have also consulted Nietzschesource.org, where one may find a digital version (edited by Paolo d’Iorio) of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.

Homer by Machiavelli and Nietzsche, on the basis of Homer’s text. In this way, I hope to explain the fundamental agreements and disagreements between Homer and these philosophers, to clarify what is distinctive about Homer as a thinker, and to show what distinctive light a study of Homer can shed on the thought of Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. In my previous book on Homer (Ahrensdorf 2014), I analyzed Homer by focusing on his account of the gods and heroes. While the present study inevitably builds on my previous account of Homer, it focuses more directly on Homer as a philosophic thinker and teacher, in conjunction with - and in conversation with - those philosophic thinkers and teachers who discuss him most, especially Plato, but also Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

To preview the conclusion of my study, I show here that an examin­ation of Homer as a philosophic thinker brings into sharp relief the revolution in human affairs brought about by Homer’s great critic, Plato. For Homer established a way of philosophizing that was eminently discreet. The philosophic poet sought to foster a humanistic and tragic culture that pointed to the philosophic life as the best way of life but that did not openly celebrate that way of life lest its radical freedom of mind weaken the moral and religious underpinnings of society and provoke deadly persecution. This model of philosophizing, of composing works that present moral and political life in such a way that points to philoso­phy without explicitly praising philosophy, was followed by such figures as the tragic and comic poets and Thucydides down to the time of Plato. But Plato offered a powerful critique of Homer’s poems as harmful both to political society and to philosophy; boldly departed from his model of discreet philosophizing; and openly celebrated the philosopher as the greatest of human beings, at the very least worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of civilizational heroes, along with the warrior, the prophet, and the statesman. Through his powerful, poetic presentation of Socrates in his dialogues - first and foremost in the Apology of Socrates, Phaedo, and Republic - Plato effectively established the figure of the philosopher in the public mind as a hero comparable to - indeed, superior to - an Achilles or Antigone or Pericles. The key to Plato’s success, and the price of his success, was his presentation of the philosopher as a defender of morality and religion rather than the skeptic he was hitherto suspected of being. Thanks to Plato, the philosopher was to be honored, not as a gadfly who questioned the sacred moral and religious beliefs of society, but as a sage who propounded edifying and congenial moral and religious teachings. In this way, Plato was able to implant firmly the image of the philosopher as a singularly admirable and venerable human being in the public imagination.

This achievement of Plato’s had a profound effect on politics, religion, and philosophy itself, a profoundly problematic effect in the eyes of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. For Machiavelli, Plato’s public celebration of the life of philosophic contemplation over the active life of politics effectively deprived politics of dignity, vigor, and thoughtfulness and also deprived philosophy itself of sobriety and clarity. Accordingly, Machiavelli sought to counteract the problematic achievement of Plato by celebrating the political life - the life of Achilles - even more than Homer does, as by far the most fulfilling way of life for human beings, while withdrawing the philosophic life - Machiavelli’s own philosophic life - far from the public eye, barely visible in his principal works. In this way, Machiavelli sought, in some measure, to return to the pre-Platonic, Homeric understanding of the proper relation between philosophy and politics, according to which the philosopher presents the political life in all its grandeur but indicates - in Machiavelli’s case, very quietly - how the problems of that life point beyond it to the philosophic life.

Nietzsche too criticized Plato for having praised the philosophic life in such a way as to deprive the active political and military life of the honor and vitality it enjoyed in the Greek culture founded by Homer. In this respect, Nietzsche may appear to have hoped to reverse Plato’s achieve­ment by somehow restoring a Homeric culture. But Nietzsche ultimately criticized Plato more seriously, not for celebrating the philosophic life as the best way of life for a human being, but rather for presenting the philosopher as a champion of morality and religion and thereby obscur­ing the freeminded and skeptical nature of the philosopher. Rather than seek to reverse Plato’s achievement in establishing the philosopher as admirable in the public mind, Nietzsche sought to revise that achievement by publicly celebrating the philosopher, like Plato and unlike Homer, but, unlike Plato, by presenting the philosopher as a moral and religious skeptic - not only as a gadfly but even as an immoralist and AntiChrist - in order to clarify especially for potential philosophers the truly radical nature of philosophy. Reflecting upon the philosophic think­ing of Homer, then, can help us to recognize the full force of Plato’s critique of Homer and the breathtaking boldness and tremendous signifi­cance of Plato’s achievement in winning honor for philosophy, and also to appreciate the powerful concerns expressed by Machiavelli and Nietzsche regarding that achievement.