The Iliad and the Odyssey have been required reading in Western culture from its beginnings, despite the mystery surrounding their date and authorship and despite their obvious blemishes—the inconsistencies, repetitions, and anomalies—which have led to their impeachment as products of a single mind. We might as well ask with Gilbert Murray, the future Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford writing in 1907, “Now why is it that the Iliad is a good poem when it has so many of the characteristics of a bad one?”

All the uncertainties about Homer and his poems notwithstanding, their place in the Western cultural imagination has been unrivaled. Indeed, as secular texts with no pretensions to revealed truth, and yet conferred with nearly biblical stature already in antiquity, the Homeric poems have enjoyed a status in world literature that is absolutely unique. Not even Vergil, the great poet of the Romans and of later Latin readers, could escape the long shadow cast by his Greek predecessor. Though it was Vergil, the most Christian-friendly of the pagan poets, who escorted Dante most of the way to Paradise, it was Homer, not Vergil, whom Dante called “the sovereign poet” (Omero poeta sovrano) without ever having read a word of him.

How can we account for Homer’s standing and his enduring attraction? Whatever the answer, approaching the question will involve confronting the monumentality of his two poems, less their quality as great works of literature than their role as cultural icons, as signifiers of value, and as landmarks in the evolving relationship between literature and culture. To look at Homer in this way is to consider his place—the very idea of Homer—in the culture wars of antiquity and modernity. But it is also to recognize that the meaning and value of Homer (provisionally, the poet and the poems that have been attributed to him) are the products of a particular kind of fascination: they have been a compulsive and productive source of culture since antiquity. This achievement is all the more remarkable given the fact that nothing whatsoever is known about Homer. Who he was, when and where he lived and died, what he sang or wrote, whether he was blind, and so on—all this is unknown and, alas, unknowable.

The oddity of the situation cannot be emphasized enough. An absolute chiffre, Homer is a peculiar kind of object in the history of culture inasmuch as he enters the cultural record as an object that is lost from the moment it is found. And with each new attempt to “discover” the true Homer again, that primordial loss is repeated as well. The real problem, then, is not just that Homer is an unknown object whose identity is clouded over with endless uncertainties, nor even that Homer may never have existed as an identifiable person, as is widely believed today. It is that Homer is an impos­sible object, an entity who only becomes tangibly real and actual in the very failed effort to grasp him. A Homer like this, about whom nothing is known, cannot help but produce a sense of puzzlement, not simply at the level of his texts but in the very conception of Homer as the author of his poems. “Homer” simultaneously names this predicament of logic and conceals it from view, which has ensured that Homer continues to exist even if the person never did, but also that he is continually enlisted in causes that were never his, like a blank check.

A simpler way of putting the problem is to recognize that Homer’s status—his monumentality and his value—was never a self-evident given: it was not bestowed on him from birth. On the contrary, it had to be repeatedly struggled over, argued, established, and reestablished over time, which is to say that the monument of Homer had to be built and rebuilt from one generation to the next. And because it did, Homer has for the most part appeared not only as the oldest poet in the West but also, paradoxically, as the youngest. The usual claims that Homer possesses a value that is innate, inviolable, and everlasting cannot escape the irony that those very same claims are not themselves inviolable and everlasting. Not only have they proved eminently contestable, as will become abundantly clear in this book, but they have also assumed radically different meanings as historical circumstances change. Looking at Homer from this angle, as an object of cultural production rather than as a producer of literature, is an invitation to study the intellectual and cultural history of value, and that is one way in which I would like the following pages to be understood. Homer will in a sense merely be our guide.

A perspective like this can throw a valuable light on the often circuitous logic of culture. Logic or illogic? For leaving aside the nearly self-evident truism that what is finally at stake in the contests over Homer are the identities of the various combatants involved, surely Homer’s greatest attraction has to lie not in his greatness, however that comes to be defined, but in his utter mystery and unreachability. Consequently, if there is any value at all to Homer, it has to be sought in the very indeterminateness of his definition and his unrivaled mystique, which have provoked intense reflection and served as an instrument of endless debate, contest, and redefinition. One suspects that in settling on Homer as an object of contention, the ancients and the moderns have made a rather telling choice, one that ceaselessly authorizes the imaginative work of culture. Culture is not just an arena of contestation. It is a deviously calculating and self-enabling  thing.

But while Homer offers clues to many of the larger processes by which the core values of a culture come to be shaped and revised, he also has a particular story to tell that is all his own. The question of how the idea of Homer came to signify differently in different cultural settings over long stretches of time involves a history that is both rich and at times utterly bizarre. And so this book is meant to expose some of the marvelous strangeness that the problem of Homer has produced over the millennia and continues to produce today.