Why do Plato and Aristotle consider Homer the greatest tragedian?
Petr Donskoy
The shadow of Homer stretches far over the ancient Greek world; unsurprisingly it is also evident in the work of its two greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Both admire Homer for the mastery of his art; despite Plato's fervent stance against poetry, he recognizes the beguiling power that epic and tragedy hold, and the effect Homer's poetry can exact on the human soul, while Aristotle, in rebuttal to his teacher's challenge, virtually equates Homer's work with tragedy for their shared elements – for him, Homer is both the antecedent to tragedy, and a virtuoso of that literary medium. To begin with Plato, it helps to examine briefly his general view of poetry. Plato’s disdain towards the genre becomes evident in the Republic. From the outset of his Callipolis thought experiment, Plato seeks to exclude it, for reasons outlined in Book 10. Fundamentally, poetry portrays subjects that are the antithesis to Plato’s ideal philosophical man, who would not even grieve the loss of a son. By contrast, both tragedy and Homer (as well as the less notable epic poets) portray heroes, who are supposedly greater and better than the ordinary Greek (as acknowledged by Plato 1 ), subjected to the utmost limits of suffering. In fairness, when Plato praises Homer as 'most poetic, first among tragic poets', 2 he does not explain fully the reasoning behind this statement. However, we can largely deduce his logic by taking together his critique of tragedy whenever Homer is used as an example. Plato's views on the relation between Homer's epic and tragedy become clear when he castigates Homer’s portrayals of Achilles, Priam, even Zeus in his mourning for Sarpedon, 3 as they would be harmful to the upbringing of his guardian class. Plato abhors the power of poetry to corrupt even the best men, apart from a select few, as it whets the appetitive part of our soul, throwing it into chaos and therefore leading to injustice; we are borne along by the gust of our emotions with the characters and events portrayed, deprived of the rational power to suppress this outburst.
To put it simply, Plato protests against the poetic representation of extraordinary character subjected to extraordinary suffering, and it is this that makes Homeric epic so close to tragedy.
1 Rep. 387e9, 388a6, b4, 605d1, 606b1. 2 Ibid. 607a2. 3 Ibid. 387d-388.
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