Status Updates From Homer's Readers: A Historic...

"But it remains a beguiling fact that the Iliad's readers generally remember Homer's horses less for their military uses than because they can also speak, weep, and drink wine. "

Longinus: "The whole Iliad, written at the height of the poet's inspiration, is full of dramatic action, while the Odyssey is mostly narrative, which is characteristic of old age. One might compare the Homer of the Odyssey to the setting sun: the grandeur remains but not the intensity. The tension is not so great as in those famous lays of the Iliad, the great passages are not sustained without weakening...

Slow going - 4 to 6 minutes a page now.

(Neoclassical humor)

Sarrasin:

Nine Years, Achilles, fair as Day,
And valiant as his Sword in Battle,
Cry'd for his Mistress, ta'en away,
Like Little Master for his Rattle

(1774)

René Rapin on book 23 of the Iliad (1664): "Would someone on a two-year voyage from the Indies to Paris spend a month in Dieppe playing backgammon?"

Homer is still being allegorized. The Iliad remains recalcitrant, but the Odyssey continues to deliver messages for our times. ... contemporary practitioners read the Odyssey as an allegory (a word they choose to avoid) of man's search for identity or struggle for self-awareness, this theme acquiring for many of Homer's current readers the vogue that moral didacticism had for the Renaissance.

Rabelais: "Do you really believe that when Homer was writing the Iliad and the Odyssey he was thinking of those allegories that Plutarch, Heraclitus Ponticus, Eustathius, and Cornutus imposed on him and that Poliziano then stole from them all? If you believe that, then you're miles away from my opinion, which is that Homer no more dreamed that nonsense than Ovid in his Metamorphoses dreamed of the Gospels ".

"Alexander Pope was the last of Homer's commentators to make full use of the allegorical tradition. He was plainly uncomfortable, tolerating and even endorsing allegorism when it seemed to work within the poems to broaden and deepen their significance, but impatient with its fine-spun to interpretations, once calling them "whimsies" that "I leave just as I found'em, to the Reader's Judgment or Mercy. "

"With encouragement like this, the allegorists could feel that anything is possible. "

This obscure book on obscure stuff that, at least here, the world has gotten past and forgotten about, it an absolutely wonderful. Here on the allegorists attempts on yhe Iliad. These allegorists faded out by the 19th century (but include Alexander Pope)

On the history of Homeric commentary:

Yet all of this has been part of the experience of reading Homer, and it behooves us to be tolerant, reminding ourselves that the enthusiasm of our own time for oral formulas and literary symbols may seem as quaintly irrelevant to future generations as we find the allegories of the Neoplatonists

I'm not reading this so much as peaking in. I liked this quote a lot