Reassessing Homer in the Platonic Tradition

Plato’s famous and infamous criticism of Homer was the climax of a series of attacks by early thinkers on the first and greatest Greek poet Homer. It triggers an even longer series of responses attempting either to justify further "the old quarrel between philosophy poetry" (Pl. Resp. 607b-c), or, in most cases, to reconcile the two great authors. The so-called Plato-Homer problem is in broad outline twofold, with numberless ramifications and sub-issues. Why does Plato’s Republic repeatedly atta