Man of a Thousand Faces, A review of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography, by Alberto Manguel in Claremont Review of Books, June 13th, 2008.
It is said that the young Alcibiades, visiting a grammar school around 430 B.C., asked the teacher for a volume of Homer and, hearing there was none, struck the hapless teacher and left. Ancient geographers like Strabo thought to learn their art from the blind bard; Stoics studied what they considered Homer's didactic allegories. Military commanders pored over his lays so as to avoid Agamemnon's errors and mimic Odysseus's guile. Socrates called Homer the "best and most divine" of poets, and Plato's dialogues, for all their censure, refer to him, by one estimate, 331 times. Plutarch claims that Aristotle himself prepared an edition of the Iliad for his pupil Alexander, who kept the book "with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." A 2nd-century B.C. marble relief depicts Homer as Father of Humankind, crowned by Time and Space themselves.
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