In Defense of Homer

In Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue, Peter J. Ahrensdorf investigates Homer’s teachings on the nature of human excellence. Unconventionally, Ahrensdorf argues that Homer is one of the West’s principal philosophic thinkers, and deserves to be studied in similar manner to Plato and Aristotle.

Such a position would not have been controversial in classical Athens, where Homer was regarded as the teacher of the ancients. In the Republic, Socrates says that Homer is the one who knows “all the human things that have to do with virtue and vice and also the divine things.” As late as the 16th century, Montaigne could say that Homer “laid the foundations equally for all schools of philosophy.”