When it comes to things like when and where Homer lived, however, the earliest sources are already unreliable.
Herodotus, known as the first historian, saw Homer, along with the poet Hesiod, as having invented Greek mythology, calling them the first to “give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms.” “It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully,” he writes with evident ambivalence. In his Poetics, the philosopher credits the poet with inventing epic, drama, and comedy. It’s a reminder that, even for Aristotle, Homer was more a legend than a man. (It wasn’t until the twentieth century that art historians determined that the figure was Aristotle earlier identifications included a contemporary of Rembrandt’s, the writer Pieter Cornelisz Hooft.) In other words, Aristotle is a human being like us, albeit an extraordinary one. Homer, however, is a white marble bust-a work of art within a work of art. Aristotle is portrayed realistically in the dress of Rembrandt’s time-sumptuous white shirt, simple black apron, and broad-brimmed hat. Yet the painting hints that Homer doesn’t quite belong in the same dimension of reality occupied by you, Aristotle, and Rembrandt. Tradition abolishes time, making us all contemporaries. Here you are in the twenty-first century, contemplating a painting made in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, which portrays a philosopher who lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C., looking at a poet thought to have lived in the eighth century B.C.
The Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years.
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