The Geography of the Iliad in Ancient Scholarship.

Abstract

Ancient Greek scholarship on Homer’s Iliad is known largely through scholia: marginalia in medieval manuscripts condensed from classical, Hellenistic, and Roman-period. Among the interpretive issues the scholia cover is geography, particularly where the places described in Homer correspond imperfectly, if at all, to places in the known world. These discrepancies are problematic in antiquity for both geographers and literary critics because Homer’s authority, even on matters outside the realm of poetry, is seldom challenged. This dissertation examines the elaborate strategies used in ancient scholarship to defend the poet’s authority, concluding that the construction of place in Homer is, for ancient writers, an integral part of his reliability. I first focus on the poem’s most crucial location, the city of Troy itself—the nature and location of which has been debated by moderns and ancients alike. The latter ultimately uphold Homer’s description of the city by emphasizing its absolute destruction: Troy’s canonical doom ensures that it never, in any historical period, has to be exactly as the poet described it. Chapter 3 moves from the geographical center of the poem, Troy itself, outward through the Trojan-allied territories of Asia Minor. I argue that the ancient sources, starting with the notoriously sparse Trojan Catalogue, read these allies as occuping a conceptual, rather than a physical, space along the periphery. Their uneasy relationship to the Trojan ruling elite, as well as their marked barbarianness—a trait ancient Greek readers are eager to maximize—lends them a dysfunctionality that assists the scholia in their reading of Homer as a constant philhellene, even in a poem about Greek dysfunction. Chapter 4 treats the Catalogue of Ships, which describes an exhaustively detailed list of places outside the actual scope of the Iliad—since they are all in the homeland the Greeks left behind them—and yet crucial for its construction of place. The scholia’s admiration of the Catalogue extends to the poet who created it, whose ability to describe Greek places, even though ancient biographies place him outside the Greek mainland, becomes normative for later discussions of these territories. They therefore reinforce Homer’s authority.