Oct 06, 2021

Read an excerpt from Professor James I. Porter’s book, Homer: The Very Idea, on Lapham’s Quarterly. The excerpt is titled, “Whose Homer Is It Anyway? Creating a Composite Character Out of Depictions of the Ancient Poet.”

Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past.

James I. Porter is the Irving Stone Professor of Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Homer: The Very Idea, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, and The Sublime in Antiquity.