Introduction
Auerbach's seminal Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is more than 65 years old,Reference Auerbach2 but it has, in the words of Edward Said, in his illuminating introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition, ‘an amazing staying power’.Reference Said3 Auerbach traces the ways in which a set of European authors represent reality. His enterprise is quintessentially comparative, as is befitting someone who belongs to the German academic tradition of Romance studies, other conspicuous representatives of which are Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius. Romance studies, which comprise the study of the literatures deriving from Latin, foremost, French, Italian, Spanish, are inherently comparative, and it is this attitude that Auerbach has demonstrated throughout his academic career. Like Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, he believed in European literature as a unity. Thus, as Said writes: Auerbach was ‘a man with a mission, a European and (Eurocentric) mission it is true but something he deeply believed in for its emphasis on the unity of human history’ (Ref. 3, p. xvi). Auerbach believed that literary histories could be written of European literature, just as his own Mimesis was one such history. This belief in the validity, humanity, and unity of European literature was of course also a cri de coeur: Mimesis was written during the Second World War when Auerbach as a Jew was exiled to Istanbul, and in his Epilogue he writes that he hopes his book ‘will bring together again those whose love for our western history has serenely preserved’ (Ref. 2, p. 557).
Auerbach's Mimesis is quintessentially comparative in that in successive chapters he discusses authors such as Homer, Tacitus, Petronius, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Stendhal and Flaubert, that is to say the highlights of European literature, and traces the development of the stylistic means used by them to represent reality, by which he primarily means everyday reality. But Auerbach is also explicitly comparative, directly comparing two texts, as he foremost does in the celebrated first chapter on Homer and the Ancient Testament. Famous though it is, this chapter has been shown by many to be seriously flawed in the picture it sets up of the Homeric epics as a one-dimensional, perspectiveless story peopled by static and shallow characters.Reference Köhnken4 But then, as Porter has analysed well,Reference Porter5 Auerbach was not interested in giving an objective picture of Homer. His first chapter has a statement to make. On the one hand, there was a movement in Nazi Germany that questioned whether the Jewish Old Testament belonged to the Christian Bible. On the other hand, Homer was the most important and highest valued text of classical philology, an academic discipline that in the course of the nineteenth century had started to exclude the Near East, under the influence of anti-Semitism. Against this background we can see how Auerbach's bringing together and comparing exactly these two texts, the one suspected, the other venerated, is an act of revolt in itself. But he goes further than this, in that his picture of Homer is decidedly negative. As Porter puts it: ‘Homer shrivels beside the Jewish bible, which in turn excels in every way’ (Ref. 5, 19). This is Auerbach's subtle revenge on some of the intellectual strands in his fatherland.
Much more could be said about Auerbach, but for the purposes of my argument it suffices to keep in mind that he, as a matter of course, treated Homer both as the starting point of a history of European literature and as a comparandum with the bible. Where do we stand now anno 2014? How is Homer and, more in general, ancient Greek literature looked at from a comparative perspective? What is at stake when we compare literary texts from different ages and nations? And what are the methodological issues involved?
Homer and the Bible
Auerbach was not the first to compare Homer and the Bible, but to do so had become less fashionable in the nineteenth century due to anti-Semitism in academic circles.Reference Burkert6 After the Second World War, however, this approach was taken up again: classicists gained access to oriental texts, which were increasingly anthologized and translated, and biblical scholars, starting to look at the Bible as a form of literature, turned to Homer as an example of an early literature with exquisite poetical qualities. Two scholars have taken the lead in this comparative exercise: Walter Burkert and his Die orientaliserende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (1984), and Martin West and his The East Face of Helicon (1997).Reference West7
When we compare the comparative exercise of Burkert and West with that of Auerbach we may note one major difference: whereas the latter was just comparing, although as we have just seen not in an entirely value-free way, Burkert and West are comparing with an eye on showing the dependence of Greek literature on Near Eastern literature. Near Eastern literature comes first, not so much in an aesthetic way, as it had been for Auerbach, but historically: the Near East is the model of Greece. As West writes, the Greek poets of the archaic age, foremost Homer and Hesiod, were greatly indebted to the Near East ‘for mythical and literary motifs, cosmological and theological conceptions, formal procedures, technical devices, figures of speech, even phraseology and idioms’ (Ref. 1, 596). And in that same year, the archaeologist Sarah Morris writes: ‘In the final analysis, it may be a greater challenge to isolate and appreciate what is Greek in Homeric poetry than to enumerate its foreign sources.’Reference Morris8
The parallels between early Greek literature and Near Eastern literature are indeed overwhelming. Let me recall some of the more famous ones: both the Gilgamesh epic and the Odyssey start with an opening that introduces a hero who has wandered wide and seen many things; both Gilgamesh and Achilles in the Iliad have dear companions, Enkidu and Patroclus, who die and with whom they talk even after their death; both the Gilgamesh epic and the Odyssey know the technique of the long embedded story told by the main character himself; both Near Eastern texts and the Homeric epics know battle scenes and divine councils; both the Hittite text Kingship in Heaven and Hesiod's Theogony recount a myth of succession, one generation of gods replacing another, until the storm-god Kumarbi/Zeus established his rule forever.
Nobody will or can deny the existence of these parallels. More problematic is their evaluation. For what are we dealing with here: with borrowings by one literature from the other or with narrative universals? In other words, what kind of comparison are we making: a historical one, when comparanda are compared that are related to each other or are the result of cultural contact, or a typological one, when comparanda are compared that are not related to each other or the result of cultural contact?Reference Nagy9 It is clear that Burkert and West are making a historical comparison. The Greeks were influenced by Near Eastern literature, with Greek poets somehow translating or paraphrasing Near Eastern written literary texts.
Recent research has somewhat softened the outlines of the Burkert–West thesis. Thus, Haubold suggests that we should look at the level of genre rather than that of individual parallels. He argues that there existed a Near Eastern genre of cosmic history, to which the texts of early Greece belong.Reference Haubold10 Henkelman proposes a more diffuse process of mutual influencing, and via oral rather than written texts:
Mesopotamian oral tradition is often neglected in the debate on Aegeo-Asian cultural receptivity, though it is of fundamental importance for explaining how certain themes and motifs could emanate from their Mesopotamian context and recur elsewhere. Greek texts rarely are a direct reflection of Akkadian, Sumerian or Aramaic literary texts, but should rather be seen as solidified samples taken from a broad stream of tales that were subject to constant adaptation, variation and contamination and that circulated within an ancient cultural continuum stretching from the Aegean to Iran and beyond.Reference Henkelman11
But the parallels brought up by West and others could also be of a typological type. Here we might recall another landmark of comparative literature: Maurice Bowra's Heroic Poetry, written in 1952.Reference Bowra12 His study discusses the genre of heroic poetry, drawing its examples from all over the world: Greece, the Near East, Germany, England, France, Norway, Spain, Russia, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Siberia, Sumatra, Japan, and Africa. It turns out that these heroic poems share an amazing number of characteristics. Bowra hardly goes into the question as to how to explain these similarities, but it would seem that he is making a typological comparison and looks at heroic poetry as a universal:
The conception of the hero and of heroic prowess is widely spread, and despite its different settings and manifestations shows the same main characteristics, which agree with what the Greeks say of their heroes. An age which believes in the pursuit of honour will naturally wish to express its admiration in a poetry of action and adventure, of bold endeavours and noble examples. Heroic poetry still exists in many parts of the world and has existed in many others, because it answers a real need of the human spirit. (Ref. 12, 2–3)
Provided the right conditions are there, a certain type of literature will develop, so Bowra suggests, and this makes his approach a typological one. Should we follow this typological approach, then the parallels between Greece and the Near East that are adduced by West and Burkert need not automatically point at cultural interdependence but might be no more than that: parallel manifestations of universal themes and techniques.
This line of thought is perhaps – and somewhat paradoxically – reinforced by another study of Martin West, which he published in 2007: Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Reference Watkins13 In it he lays bare the Indo-European pedigree of the early literature of the Greeks (who arrived in Greece probably from somewhere north of the Danube around 2300 BC). Let me give just one famous example. In Homer we find the concept of kleos afthiton, immortal fame such as only poetry can give heroes. This concept has clear Indo-European roots, in that it is also found in the Indian Rigveda as sravas … aksitam. West's study provides long lists of Indo-European elements in early Greek literature.
Now what I find striking and puzzling is that the same literary phenomena, e.g. epithets or comparisons, are called by West a borrowing from the Near East in one book, an Indo-European feature in the other book, without an explanation of how we should relate these two observations. This lack of a synthesis of his two books has been well set out by Allen in a review of Indo-European Poetry and Myth:
One limitation lies in its relationship to another view presented by the same author. W.'s last major comparative undertaking, The East Face of Helicon, Oxford 1997, argued that early Greek poetry down to Pindar and Aeschylus was ‘pervaded by influences from West Asiatic literature and religious thought’ (p. 459). In the present book, as one turns from the details about funeral rituals on the penultimate page to the final witty elegy, one feels acutely the absence of a conclusion bringing together the two works, which were originally conceived as constituting a single undertaking (as is clear from the Preface to the earlier one). The East Face is often referred to, but no attempt is made to estimate the relative weight or differential distribution of the West Asian and IE inputs to Greek poetry and myth – a pity, since W. must by now be better equipped than anyone else in the world to tackle the topic. Given that a comparative linguist would probably establish the contours of a language family before tackling loan phenomena, one question that arises is whether, had the books been written in reverse order, they would have turned out differently. Take for instance the motif of the overburdened Earth and her complaint to a supreme god. As has long been recognised, Ge's complaint to Zeus, which causes the Trojan war, parallels Prithivi's complaint to Brahma, which causes the central Mahabharata war. Since a third parallel occurs a millennium earlier in Atrahasis (a Babylonian mythological poem), W. judges that the motif is not Graeco-Aryan but rather spread both west and east from Mesopotamia. However, the argument from chronology does not merit so much weight, and a Graeco-Aryan common origin remains likely.14
This reviewer deplores the lack of a synthesis of West's two magisterial works, but like him keeps thinking in terms of a historical comparison: thus he speaks of the ‘West Asian and IE inputs to Greek poetry and myth’. However, when we realize with Bowra that epithets and comparisons are found in all heroic poetry, should we not rather consider them universals? Or could they perhaps be both? Could it be that the Greeks had epithets and comparisons since these are narrative universals, but was the concrete form of these epithets and comparisons flavoured first by their Indo-European roots and later by their cultural contacts with the Near East? I have no certain answer to my own questions but merely signal the problems involved in undertaking comparative exercises, problems to which I will return in the second part of my paper. For the moment I conclude that anno 2014, any scholar who like Auerbach wants to compare Homer and the bible will have to look both east and north of the Helicon, to both Near Eastern and Indo-European contexts, and will have to take up a position in the debate of historical versus typological.
I turn to Auerbach's second comparative strategy: comparing Homer and later European literature.
Ancient Greek literature and European Literature
Auerbach was, again, not the first nor the last scholar to make Homer the starting point of a history of European literature. For instance, Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction from 1961,Reference Booth15 in which he traces the ways in which narrators such as Fielding, Dickens, Flaubert, and James steer the reception of their story, starts his first chapter with a discussion of Homer. And much earlier the Roman professor of rhetoric and literature, Quintilian, called Homer ‘the ocean from which all rivers flow’ (Institutio oratoria 10.1.46), referring to the fact that so many rhetorical and literary devices are already to be found with that poet. More in general, classical literature has been considered the ocean or fountainhead of European literature. Thus, in their study The Nature of Narrative from 1966 the American literary scholars Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg write: ‘The classical literature provides us with prototypes of virtually all later narrative forms and with paradigms of the processes which govern their interaction and evolution.’Reference Scholes and Kellogg16 Following the lead of these scholars I have been supervising for some ten years now a project that sets out to describe in detail ancient Greek narrative, so as to allow us to understand its status as the prototype of later European narrative.
The theoretical underpinning of the project is narratology, the systematic analysis of narrative texts, including the role of the narrator and his addressee, the narratees, time, space, characterization, and point of view or focalization. Thus, each volume of the project deals with one element of narratology: the first volume discusses ‘narrators and narratees’, the second ‘time’, the third ‘space’. The corpus consists of the whole of Greek literature, starting with Homer in the seventh century BC and ending with Heliodorus in the fourth century AD.Reference de Jong17 The project is an international one, in which some 16 scholars from Europe and the United States participate.
The structure of each volume is such that it starts with an introduction in which I explain and illustrate the most important theoretical aspects of the topic under discussion, thus setting up a kind of checklist. As illustrations I always use passages from modern novels, so as to show, right from the start, the continuity of the narrative techniques to be explored in Greek literature. In the ensuing chapters the contributors deal with the authors on which they are experts and (1) investigate whether the devices listed in the introduction are found in their author, (2) analyse how these devices are used, and (3) compare this use with that by earlier or sometimes later authors. In this way a history is written, not so much of ‘man and work’ but of narrative forms.
After I had published the first volume in 2004 I discovered that what I had been doing was the kind of diachronic narratology that leading narratologist Monika Fludernik had been advocating in an article in 2003.Reference Fludernik18 In ‘The diachronization of narratology’ she observes that despite an ‘impressive variety of new narratological approaches … there has been comparatively little interest on a theoretical level in the history of narrative forms and functions’ (Ref. 18, p. 331). She argues that narratology should reorient itself in the direction of diachronic inquiry, and in the remainder of her paper proposes a programme for such an inquiry and discusses one specimen from English literature. As one of the elements of her programme she mentions:
the various narratological categories that clutter the traditional narrative typologies: focalization, person, tense, etc. Not only will it be interesting to find out when certain techniques or constellations were first used, or when they became current and, even later, predominant, but also it will be exciting to take up the question of refunctionalization. Do certain features and techniques acquire a different function at crucial points of the restructuring process of the narrative paradigm? (Ref. 18, pp. 333–334)
It is clear that what Fludernik here describes is exactly the line of inquiry I follow in the Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. These chart when devices are first found, when they disappear or resurface, and how their function may change over time.
An Illustration: Prolepsis in Ancient Greek Literature
Let me illustrate the possibilities of diachronical narratology with the device of anticipation or prolepsis. The following selection of instances, chronologically ordered and deriving from the whole history of ancient Greek narrative, gives an idea of the many functions to which this device can be put.
Homer Iliad 11.602-3 (circa eighth-to-seventh century BC)
Achilles, who has withdrawn from battle, notices that many Greek heroes are wounded and calls his friend Patroclus:
and he heard it from inside the barrack, and came out
like the war god, and this was the beginning of his doom.
In what follows Achilles will ask Patroclus to inquire how the Greeks are faring in his absence. The result will be that Patroclus returns to battle in Achilles’ armour and is killed. The effect of this ominous prolepsis therefore is pathos. From the beginning, the fate of friendly Patroclus is sealed.
Herodotus Histories 7.213 (circa 430–420 BC)
Herodotus tells the famous story of the battle at Thermopylae, when a small group of Greeks under Spartan command decide to stay and resist the overwhelming forces of the Persians. They find themselves in a narrow pass and therefore are able to hold the Persians at bay:
When the king [the Persian king Xerxes] was at a loss how to deal with the present difficulty, the Greek Ephialtes ... came to speak with him, thinking so to receive a great reward from Xerxes, and told him of a path leading over the mountain to Thermopylae, and thereby was the undoing of the Greeks who had stayed there. This Ephialtes afterwards fled to Thessaly, for fear of the Spartans … and a long time after that … he was slain by Athenades, a man from Trachis.
The effect of this prolepsis is moralistic: revealing the death of Ephialtes at the very moment when he betrays his fellow countrymen the Herodotean narrator shows that the traitor will get his just deserts.
Euripides Bacchae 50-2 (406 BC)
In the prologue of the play the god Dionysus reveals to the public that he has come to Thebes disguised as a mortal man, in order to punish the city and its king, Pentheus, for not reverencing him. He has led the female inhabitants of the city to the nearby mountain of Cithaeron and now announces that
if the city of the Thebans seeks in anger and with arms to take the bacchants from the mountain, I will join battle at the head of the maenads.
On account of this announcement the public will expect a military encounter between god and king, whereas the actual denouement is much more subtle and cruel: Pentheus is induced by Dionysus to dress up like a woman and spy on the women on the mountain, but is killed by them. The prolepsis here is a red herring, used to spring the public a surprise later in the play.
Xenophon Apology 30-1 (circa 390–355 BC)
Xenophon is giving an account of Socrates’ famous trial and last days. The philosopher was charged amongst other things with corrupting the youth of Athens, while he himself and his followers claimed that he made them better citizens. Sentenced to death and about to die Socrates predicts the downfall of the son of one of his prosecutors exactly because he lacks a sound advisor like himself:
‘And I predict that he will not continue in the slavish occupation that his father has prepared for him, and because he has no serious advisor, he will fall into some shameful desire and will advance far in villainy.’ His speech was no lie, for the young man took pleasure in wine and never stopped drinking day or night and in the end became worthless both to his friends and to himself.
This prolepsis, the truth of which is immediately confirmed by the narrator, serves to characterize Socrates as a wise man.
Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica 3.744-8 (300–250 BC)
The Greek Argonauts, having come to Colchis to get back the Golden Fleece, have enlisted the help of the Colchian princess Medea. At night she is sleeplessly considering her position, which entails betraying her country and following Jason to Greece:
The night was now drawing darkness across the earth. Sailors on the open sea looked from their ships towards Helike and the stars of Orion, the traveller and the gatekeeper were already longing for sleep, and an exhausted slumber embraced a mother whose children had died… But Medea had not been overtaken by sweet sleep.
Apollonius includes in this description of night amongst other things the figure of a mother whose children have died. The narratees, knowing from Euripides’ Medea the future fate of Medea (in Greece she will be left by Jason in favour of another wife and kill their children to avenge herself), cannot but read this reference as a prolepsis.
Polybius Histories 3.118.7-9 (circa 150–120 BC)
The Greek historian Polybius has just recounted the crushing defeat of the Romans by the Carthaginians at Cannae and then continues:
the Senate neglected no means in its power, but exhorted and encouraged the populace, strengthened the defences of the city, and deliberated on the situation with manly coolness. And subsequent events made this manifest. For though the Romans were now incontestably beaten and their military reputation shattered, yet by the peculiar virtues of their constitution and by wise counsel they not only recovered their supremacy in Italy and afterwards defeated the Carthaginians, but in a few years made themselves masters of the whole world.
This prolepsis seems a consolation for the Roman narratees: now the Romans were defeated but soon they would themselves defeat the Carthaginians and become masters of the world.
This one example must suffice to give an idea of the rich potential of diachronical narratology, of investigating the forms and functions of what could be called the narrative grammar of the ancient Greeks. The project Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative limits itself to ancient Greek literature. But how about Greek literature and European literature? Can we draw one continuous line from Homer to Virginia Woolf, as Auerbach did, and if we do so what kind of comparison are we making: a typological one or a historical one? It is to this question that I will turn for my last part.
Another Illustration: the ‘Anonymous Traveller’ Device
In order to test the possibilities of European literary historiography, I use the ‘anonymous traveller’ device.19 What I mean by this will become clear from the following.
George Eliot Scenes of clerical life, chapter 2 (1858)
More than a quarter of a century has slipped by since then, and in the interval Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as other market-towns in her Majesty's dominions. By this time it has a handsome railway station, where the drowsy London traveller may look out by the brilliant gas-light and see perfectly sober papas and husbands alighting with their leather bags after transacting their day's business at the county town.
The ‘anonymous traveller’ device means that an anonymous person is introduced through whose eyes a setting or situation is described. This device is found throughout European literature, both modern and ancient. I will give a handful examples of what is in fact a huge corpus, this time employing a reverse chronological order, going back in time.
Stendhal The Red and the Black, 1, 1 (1830)
The small town of Verrières may be regarded as one of the most attractive in the Franche-Comte. [Description of its natural surroundings.] No sooner has one entered the town than one is startled by the din of a noisy machine of terrifying aspect. [Description of the machine.] This work, so rough to the outward eye, is one of the industries that most astonish the traveller who ventures for the first time among the mountains that divide France from Switzerland. If, on entering Verrières, the traveller inquires to whom belongs that fine nail factory which deafens everybody who passes up the main street, he will be told in a drawling accent: ‘Eh! It belongs to the Mayor.’
This instance in fact continues for more than a page. Stendhal uses the astonished eyes of a traveller from Paris who arrives for the first time in the provincial town of Verrières to describe it and its inhabitants. The choice of a traveller from Paris is of course significant because the entire novel will deal with the vicissitudes of one inhabitant of the provincial town, Julien Sorel, in Paris.
Procopius De aedificiis 1.11 (circa AD 550)
For someone sailing from the Propontis towards the east side of the city, there is to the left a public bath.
In the Greek we find a dative participle and such dative participles featuring an anonymous ‘someone’ who sails, travels, passes, crosses, etc, are found all through Greek and Latin literature as a way of introducing descriptions of countries, buildings, or localities.
Isocrates Panegyricus 133 (380 BC)
The Athenian orator Isocrates in this speech, or rather pamphlet, is urging his compatriots to fight against their eternal Angstgegner the Persians:
I think that if some persons should come here from another part of the world and would become viewers of the present state of affairs, they would charge us both [i.e. the Athenians and the Spartans] with utter madness, because we risk our lives in this way, fighting over trifles, though it is possible in security to enjoy a wealth of possessions, and impoverish our own territory while neglecting to exploit that of Asia.
Isocrates uses the ‘anonymous traveller’ device in order to make his compatriots look at their behaviour, their continuous fight with the Spartans, with fresh eyes and see the madness of it.
Homer Iliad 4.539-44 (circa eight-to-seventh century BC)
Then no longer would a man having arrived on the scene make light of the action, who still unscathed by throw or stab of the sharp bronze would roam at the battle's centre, and Pallas Athena would lead him having taken his hand, and drive back the volley of spears. For on that day many Trojans and Greeks lay stretched side by side, face down in the dust.
In this passage, finally, the Homeric narrator uses the anonymous traveller as a kind of embedded war-reporter who roams over the Trojan battlefield protected by Athena and can vouch for the intensity of the battles there fought.
Having assembled such a collection of instances of the ‘anonymous traveller’ device we may again ask ourselves the same question posed earlier with regard to the parallels between Greek and Near Eastern literature: can we merely make a typological comparison, viewing the ‘anonymous traveller’ device as a narrative universal that pops up autonomously from time to time in different literatures? Or can we make a historical comparison, assuming that one author was influenced by the other? Following the example of Auerbach's Mimesis, we would discuss the many instances of the device without commenting on the relationship between them or asking ourselves whether one author was influenced by another one. But if we would follow the example of Auerbach's contemporary, Ernst Robert Curtius, we probably would defend the second, historical position. In his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages he passionately argues for the concept of a unified European literature, in which ‘literary constants’, as he calls them, are discernible: once invented, a literary device becomes a heritage that is taken over in a hundred forms by later generations.Reference Curtius20 One of his examples is the device of the Muse, which we encounter for the first time in Homer and which is then taken up by innumerable later European authors. The anonymous traveller perhaps could be considered such a literary constant of European literature.
Once again, I do not feel able to give a definite answer to my own question. Being trained as a narratologist, a theory which very much is a product of the structuralism of the 1960s of the previous century, I am keen on detecting similarities between narrative devices that are found in different texts. Occasionally it is possible to show that devices are taken over by one author from another, for instance Apollonius Rhodius consciously imitating Homer. But very often it is extremely hard to prove historical connections: has George Eliot derived her idea of the drowsy London traveller from Stendhal's astonished Parisian one?
Perhaps a kind of middle way can be envisaged. It may be helpful to think of narrative devices such as the anonymous traveller in terms of what Richard Dawkins has baptized memes: units of cultural transmission that are reproduced by imitation, the cultural counterparts of genes.21 As examples, he mentions tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, technologies, ceremonies, etc. Thinking in terms of memes has the advantage that we can imagine the process of the dissemination of narrative devices in terms of one author not so much consciously taking over something from another but rather simply using a device that he or she somehow came across in another text, which copied it from another text and so on. Narrative devices would spread in the manner of the Chinese whispers game, with one participant copying the words of another without knowing what the original message was or who was the original sender. In this way we avoid the question of whether George Eliot consciously imitated Stendhal, without having to resort to the other extreme of countless different authors independently inventing the same device.
With this tentative suggestion I end my discussion of ancient Greek literature as a test case for European literary historiography, 65 years after Auerbach. Despite the methodological problems involved, I think that to write the history of European literature is an extremely rewarding task. As we all know, the project of Europe as an economical and political unity has at the moment reached a critical phase. Literary scholars can contribute to this issue by showing the cultural unity of Europe, a mission that is just as urgent now as it was in 1946 when Auerbach published his Mimesis.
Acknowledgements
This is a – lightly revised – version of a paper the author delivered at a meeting of the Classics and Oriental section of the Academia Europea at its annual meeting in Bergen, 2012.
Irene J.F. de Jong studied classics at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2000 she has held the chair of Ancient Greek at that university. She has published extensively on Homer, Herodotus, and Euripides, and her work has been translated into Spanish and New-Greek. Recent publications include: Homer Iliad Book XXII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); (as editor) Space in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2012). She was visiting professor at University College London and Yale University, and is a member of the Academia Europaea. She is on the editorial board of Mnemosyne, the Dutch international journal for classical studies.
