Daniel: You know that feeling when you have a brilliant, original idea... and then you find out some guy in ancient Greece already wrote an epic poem about it 3,000 years ago? Sophia: Oh, I know that feeling. It’s every shower thought I’ve ever had. It’s humbling, and a little bit infuriating. Daniel: It's completely humbling! And it's basically the story of all Western culture. Every great story we tell, whether it's about a great war or a long journey home, seems to lead back to this one foundational source. Sophia: Okay, what prompted this existential crisis? Don't tell me you're trying to write an epic poem again. Daniel: Not this week. It's all in this incredible book we’re talking about today, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography by Alberto Manguel. Sophia: A biography of a book? How does that even work? Books don't have lives, do they? Daniel: Well, that's the genius of it. Manguel argues they do. And he is the perfect person for this. He's this Argentinian-Canadian writer who, in his youth, used to read aloud to the blind literary giant, Jorge Luis Borges. So for him, books aren't just objects on a shelf; they are living, breathing things with their own life stories, their own travels, their own histories. Sophia: Wow. Reading to Borges. That’s a credential. So this isn't a biography of some old blind poet named Homer? Daniel: Exactly. The book has been praised for this unique approach, though some readers find it more of a sweeping cultural history than a deep dive. But Manguel’s point is that the question "Who was Homer?" is maybe the least interesting one. The real story is the life of the poems themselves. How have the Iliad and the Odyssey survived for three millennia, and what have they become? Sophia: I'm intrigued. A book with its own life story. Where do we even begin with that?

Daniel: We begin with the idea that we never, ever read Homer with fresh eyes. Manguel’s central metaphor is that of a palimpsest. Sophia: A palimpsest. I love that word, but can you break down what it really means in this context? Is it like a document that's been written over and over again? Daniel: Precisely. It's an old manuscript where the original text has been scraped off and a new one written on top, but faint traces of the old one still remain. Manguel argues that reading Homer is exactly like that. We're not just reading a 3,000-year-old text; we're reading it through all the layers of interpretation that have been piled on top of it for centuries. Sophia: So we're seeing the original text, but also the ghosts of all its previous readers. Daniel: The ghosts of its readers, its translators, its critics, even its haters. To make this concrete, Manguel starts with a stunning modern story. In the 1990s, the Colombian Ministry of Culture started this program of itinerant libraries, basically books delivered on the backs of donkeys to remote, war-torn villages in the mountains. Sophia: A donkey library. I love it already. Daniel: The librarians would leave a crate of books and come back a few weeks later to swap them out. In one village, they came back, and the villagers gave back all the books except one. They refused to part with it. The book was a Spanish translation of The Iliad. Sophia: No way. Why that one? Of all the books, a dense, ancient epic about the Trojan War? Daniel: The librarians were just as baffled. They asked the village elder, who was acting as the local librarian, why they wanted to keep it. And the villagers’ answer was simple and profound. They said, "Because it is the story of us. It tells our story." Sophia: Wow. That gives me chills. These people, living through a modern civil war, saw their own lives—their own struggles, their own losses, the feeling of being pawns in a game played by distant, capricious powers—reflected in this ancient poem. Daniel: Exactly. They weren't reading it as a historical document about Achaeans and Trojans. They were reading it through the palimpsest of their own experience. And that’s just one layer. Think about the philosophical layer. Plato, for instance, famously wanted to banish poets like Homer from his ideal Republic. Sophia: Right, because he thought art was just a cheap imitation of reality and that it stirred up dangerous emotions. Daniel: Yes, he argued that art is a copy of a copy, twice removed from the truth. He worried that watching Achilles grieve or rage would make the citizens weak and emotional, rather than rational and controlled. But here’s the irony: Plato critiques Homer constantly. He can't stop talking about him! The book points out there are over 300 references to Homer in Plato's dialogues. Sophia: So even the haters keep the book alive? By arguing with Homer, Plato was adding another layer to the palimpsest, ensuring that future generations would have to read Homer to understand Plato. Daniel: You've got it. Every time someone engages with the poems, whether it's with love like the Colombian villagers or with criticism like Plato, they add another layer of meaning. The poems don't just exist in the past; they are continually being reborn in the present. Sophia: That completely changes how I think about reading a classic. It’s not a monologue from the past; it’s a conversation that’s been going on for thousands of years, and we’ve just walked into the room. Daniel: And it's a conversation that has been happening in every major culture. It's not just a Western thing. Which brings us to how these poems became a kind of cultural chameleon.

Sophia: A cultural chameleon. I like that. So it’s not just that we see ourselves in Homer, but that we actively reshape him to look like us? Daniel: We absolutely do. And sometimes it's a very deliberate, high-stakes act of cultural appropriation. The most famous example is Virgil. The Romans had a bit of an inferiority complex when it came to the Greeks. They had the military might, but the Greeks had the culture. So, the Emperor Augustus effectively commissions Virgil to write a national epic that can stand up to Homer. Sophia: And that's the Aeneid. Daniel: That's the Aeneid. And what Virgil does is brilliant. He basically performs a cultural heist. He takes the structure of Homer's epics—the first half of the Aeneid is a journey like the Odyssey, the second half is a war like the Iliad—but he flips the script. In the Iliad, the Trojans are the losers. In the Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas escapes the fall of Troy and, after a long journey, founds the race that will become Rome. Sophia: So he gave the losers a posthumous victory! He made the fall of Troy the necessary first step for the rise of Rome. Daniel: It’s an incredible act of literary propaganda. He effectively makes Homer a Roman author, turning the Greek epics into a prophecy of Rome's greatness. And you see this pattern repeat. Fast forward to the Islamic Golden Age in Baghdad. Scholars there are translating and studying all the Greek thinkers. They see Aristotle not as an ancient figure, but as a contemporary, someone to argue with in a living dialogue. Sophia: And Homer gets pulled into this too? How did they handle the polytheism, the very un-Islamic behavior of the gods and heroes? Daniel: They did what every culture does: they adapted it. They interpreted it through their own lens. Some Islamic philosophers, like Al-Farabi, saw Plato’s ideal republic and Muhammad’s umma as two versions of the same idea. They used Homeric stories to illustrate Islamic principles. Fragments of the Iliad even show up in Arabic adventure stories, like the tales of Sindbad the Sailor, but they're changed. The characters and motivations are tweaked to fit an Islamic worldview. Sophia: This is blowing my mind. But the most audacious example has to be Dante. Hold on. You're saying Dante put Homer in Hell? Dante, who revered the classics? And he couldn't even read Greek! That takes some serious nerve. Daniel: It's the ultimate power move. Dante lives in a world where Greek is largely a lost language in the West. He knows Homer only through Latin summaries and through Virgil, who he chooses as his guide through the afterlife. And in his Divine Comedy, he creates this hierarchy. In Limbo, the first circle of Hell, he places the virtuous pagans—the great thinkers and artists who lived before Christ. Sophia: So not tortured, but not in Heaven either. A kind of VIP section of Hell. Daniel: A very charitable location, yes. And who does he see leading the pack of great poets? Homer, holding a sword, symbolizing his supremacy as an epic poet. He's followed by Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. And Virgil, Dante's guide, introduces them. In that moment, Dante is doing something extraordinary. He's acknowledging his debt to the classical tradition, but he's also subtly placing himself in their lineage. He's positioning himself as the sixth in that great company, the one who will write the great Christian epic. Sophia: Wow. So he honors Homer by making him the 'sovereign poet,' but he also puts him in his place, literally, within a Christian cosmos. He's both a fan and a judge. Daniel: It's a perfect example of the palimpsest. Dante is reading Homer through the layer of Virgil and through the thick layer of his own Christian faith. He creates a new Homer, a "Christian Homer," that serves his own grand artistic vision. Sophia: So we have all these different Homers—Plato's, Virgil's, Dante's. It almost makes you wonder... who was the real Homer? Or was there one at all?

Daniel: And that is the great literary detective story. For most of antiquity, nobody doubted Homer was a real person. He was the foundational figure of Greek culture. Aeschylus, the great tragedian, said his own plays were just "slices from the great banquets of Homer." But there was always a mystery. Even in ancient times, seven different cities claimed to be his birthplace. Sophia: "Seven cities warr'd for Homer, being dead, Who, living, had no roof to shroud his head." I remember that line. It’s the classic story of the starving artist, famous only after he’s gone. Daniel: Exactly. And because there was so little real information, a whole industry of fake biographies popped up, giving him a detailed life story, a genealogy, even a cause of death. But the real earthquake in Homeric studies came much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Scholars like Friedrich August Wolf in Germany started analyzing the texts and argued that the Iliad and Odyssey weren't written by a single person. Sophia: The collective theory. That "Homer" was more like a brand name for a whole tradition of oral poets, or rhapsodists, who performed these stories for generations, with the poems only being written down much later. Daniel: Precisely. Wolf saw the poems as an archaeological site, with different layers of composition built up over time. This was a radical idea, and it blew the whole field open. It shifted the question from "Who was Homer?" to "What is Homer?" Is he a person, or an idea? A creator, or a creation? Sophia: And this is where the really wild theories come in, right? Daniel: This is where it gets really fun. Enter Samuel Butler in 1897. He's an English novelist and critic, a bit of a maverick. He re-reads the Odyssey and gets this feeling that something is... off. He says the author makes mistakes that a man wouldn't make, but a young woman might. Sophia: A woman wrote the Odyssey? That's a blockbuster movie right there. What was his evidence? Daniel: It's a mix of clever observation and, let's be honest, some pretty wild speculation. He argues the geography is all wrong for Ithaca but fits perfectly with the coast of Sicily. He points out that the author seems to know a lot about running a household but is fuzzy on things like, say, the parts of a ship. He notes that the female characters—Penelope, Nausicaa, Circe—are incredibly strong and complex, while the men are often portrayed as slightly foolish. His conclusion? The Odyssey was written by a young, unmarried Sicilian woman. Sophia: That is an amazing theory. How was it received? Was he just dismissed as crazy? Daniel: By the academic establishment? Absolutely. They met it with what Manguel calls "scornful silence." But Butler's theory, even if it's not provable, did something incredibly important. It broke the spell of reverence. It treated Homer not as a marble bust in a museum, but as a text to be engaged with, argued with, even rewritten. Sophia: It gave readers permission to have their own relationship with the text. Daniel: Yes! It paved the way for later writers to do the same. T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—imagined Homer as an old British gentleman. And more recently, Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad, which retells the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and her twelve hanged maids, asking the very uncomfortable questions the original text glosses over. Sophia: "What was Penelope really up to?" and "Why were those maids killed?" I love that. It’s taking the palimpsest and deliberately writing in the margins, giving a voice to the silenced. Daniel: And that's the ultimate point. The poems are so powerful, so fundamental, that they can withstand—and even thrive on—these constant reinventions. Rudyard Kipling has a great poem where he imagines Homer as a fellow thief, writing: "When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre, / He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea; / An’ what he thought ’e might require, / ’E went an’ took – the same as me!"

Sophia: So, in the end, Manguel's 'biography' isn't about finding the 'one true Homer.' It's about showing that Homer is everyone. He's the Colombian villagers, he's Virgil's Aeneas, he's Joyce's Leopold Bloom, and maybe he's even a young woman in Sicily. Daniel: That's the heart of it. The poems have survived not because they are fixed and unchanging, but because they are endlessly adaptable. They are a mirror. Manguel closes his book with a reference to a story by his old mentor, Borges, called 'The Immortal.' In it, a character discovers that he is Homer, but that over the centuries, he has also been everyone else. He says, "I have been Homer; soon, I shall be Nobody, like Ulysses; soon, I shall be every man, I shall be dead." Sophia: Wow. That's a powerful line. The poems achieve immortality precisely because anyone can inhabit them. Daniel: They become a vessel for our own lives. We all have our wars, our battles with rage and grief like Achilles in the Iliad. And we all have our long, winding journeys home, our struggles to find our way back to ourselves, like Odysseus. The poems aren't just stories we read; they are maps for the stories we live. Sophia: That’s a beautiful way to think about it. It makes me want to pick them up again, not as homework, but as a mirror. It makes you wonder, which character from these epics do you see most in your own life? Are you fighting a war like Achilles, or are you on a long journey home like Odysseus? Daniel: A question for all of us to think about. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.