THE FIRST AND MOST VALUABLE LITERARY MONUMENT
It is truly impressive that, over the course of 25 centuries, both literature and the visual arts have drawn inspiration from the myths and legends born in Greece. ‘The Iliad’ is more than just a masterpiece; it is not merely a legend, but a myth set against a backdrop of reality. Its theme is the Trojan War, and it recounts the siege of this city in Asia Minor (Ilium) by the Achaean or Greek troops. The plot sets the duration of this campaign at 10 long years, but Homer presents it to us in a series of episodes spanning 51 days.
Certain recurring themes appear in ‘The Iliad’: a sense of honour, the joy of living, a taste for bold assertions, virile values, love and friendship. The society of the gods mirrors that of men, with the same qualities and the same flaws. For this reason, both ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ were the true sacred texts of the Greek world. For the ancient Greeks, Homer was The Poet, the
sole poet and something more: the custodian of the Hellenic Spirit in its original purity, the master of all Wisdom, the guardian of Tradition.
The Iliad is the oldest written poem in Western literature. It consists of 15,691 verses composed of hexameters (technically perfect six-foot lines used in Homeric poetry). The heroic spirit is the most prominent feature of the Iliad. The warriors in the poem belong to the high nobility, for whom the greatest glory is victory in battle.
A long period elapsed between the historic Trojan War (1200 BC) and Homer (8th century BC), comparable to the time between the Battle of Roncesvalles ‘The Entry into Spain’ (777 AD) and the establishment of
‘The Song of Roland · Charlemagne’ as the oldest text we know of from the Carolingian Cycle (12th century).
GREEK EPIC POETRY
Epic poetry was disseminated through the recitation or singing of professionals who presented the material from memory before an audience, which was sometimes the refined company of a court and at other times the popular and motley crowd of a town square. The epic is not intended to be read in solitude or before a small group. This is the characteristic that has defined all the chivalric poems of all times and all countries.
Homer’s world is the world of the mecenates that scholars have rescued from oblivion and the ashes. It is the world of the House of Atreus and the Golden Fleece, of the founding of Rhodes and the destruction of Thebes, of Achilles, Patroclus, Helen and Paris, of the crimes of Oedipus and Clytemnestra.
THE ONLY EXISTING ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPT OF HOMER’S WORK
More books have been published about Homer than about Cervantes, Goethe or Shakespeare, more than about Atlantis or the Pyramids of Egypt. Throughout antiquity, ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ were attributed to a single author: ‘The Blind Man’ (the meaning of Ho meerós). According to ancient thought, physical blindness was commonly associated with spiritual clairvoyance, the prophetic gift and divination. If Herodotus is to be believed, Homer died on the island of Samos in 850 BC, after having composed many other minor works such as the ‘Hymn to Apollo’ mentioned by Thucydides. Seven cities vied for the honour of being the poet’s birthplace. The island of Chios, cited by Pindar and Simonides, seems to be the most reliable.
The museum on Chios is dominated by the impressive bust of Homer, discovered by the archaeologist Anderson, and by the bronze plaque containing the first 14 verses of ‘the Iliad’, unearthed by Professor Kondoleos Stephanou.
HOMERI ILIADIS PICTAE FRAGMENTA AMBROSIANA
Ilias Picta –The Illustrated Iliad– is a 5th-century Byzantine illuminated manuscript preserved in the Ambrosian Library. Written on vellum, it comprises fifty-one folios containing fifty-eight images depicting scenes from Homer’s Iliad, with the text of the poem in Ancient Greek on the reverse. In the 12th century, the miniatures were cut out and pasted into a paper codex of Calabrian-Sicilian origin containing material from the Homeric corpus. The manuscript belonged to the scholar Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. Following his death, Federico Borromeo acquired his entire library to establish the collections of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1609. The book was rediscovered in 1811 and was preserved by the librarian Angelo Mai.
Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli argued in a series of studies that the codex was produced in Constantinople, but in the early 1970s, Guglielmo Cavallo suggested, on the basis of palaeographic criteria, that it was more likely the text was written in Alexandria—a thesis that had already been defended by Kurt Weitzmann. The evidence is insufficient to settle the matter.
The Ambrosian Iliad stands as clear testimony to the enduring ideal of paideia as a defining social value for the late and post-Roman elites. This codex was undoubtedly commissioned and produced at great expense. Its large format and the abundance of illustrations make it clear that it was, above all, a display book, a visible testament to visitors to the palace of its owner, Emperor Anastasius I ?, and to the great value he placed on mastery of the classical literary tradition. This manuscript is the only extant illustrated copy of Homer’s work and, alongside the Vergilius Romanus and the Vergilius Vaticanus, is one of the oldest illustrated manuscripts of classical literature to have survived from antiquity.
