Pleasure as Pedagogy in the Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer

Title: "Pleasure as Pedagogy in the Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer"

The perils of poetic pleasure represented a significant source of concern in ancient education. The second book of Plato’s Republic famously grapples with the risks of exposing children to seductive stories in Homer and Hesiod; it insists that they hear only “the most noble stories told to encourage virtue” (κάλλιστα μεμυθολογημένα πρὸς ἀρετήν, 2.378d-e). Similar anxieties permeated postclassical traditions of literary criticism and pedagogical writing as well. Plutarch’s How to Study Poetry compares the hazards of poetic fiction to the hallucinatory experience of consuming cuttlefish or Egyptian drugs (15b-c), while the orator Quintilian urges teachers to preselect for copying exercises only verses that “teach something virtuous” (honestum aliquid, Inst. 1.1.35).

This paper analyzes pedagogical strategies for poetic pleasure in the Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer. The Essay is an anonymous educational manual once attributed to Plutarch but more likely composed in the third century CE. Although the limited scholarship on this treatise has explored its philosophical implications for Homeric reception (Montiglio 2011, Niehoff 2012, and Sheppard 2014), I discuss the text’s teachings on epic poetry and pleasure in the context of Greek grammar instruction.

I present this paper in two parts. The introduction addresses questions of the Essay’s dating, authorship, and genre. Drawing upon the Greek progymnasmata (“preliminary exercises”) and the invectives of Sextus Empiricus, I posit that the anonymous author writes in the context of and in competition with postclassical educators at the level of advanced grammatical / pre-rhetorical training (Morgan 1998, Cribiore 2001). This circle demonstrated expertise not only through a deep mastery of Homer, but also through their ability to critique and improve upon prior instructional strategies (Scarpat 1952).

The latter half of my paper conducts close readings of several passages within the Essay in order to argue that the text adopts an innovative approach to the problem of pleasure in the Iliad and Odyssey. I begin with the Essay’s defense of Homer in its introduction and conclusion. Here the author instructs students that the presence of pleasure and pain in the epics are “to the readers’ benefit” (ὠφέλιαν τοῖς ἐντυγχάνουσι, c. 218). I then turn to chapters 6 and 92 of the Essay in order to elucidate the treatise’s broader framing of “pleasure as pedagogy”: the notion that Homer harnesses the pleasures of both virtue and vice in order to engage and teach. The Essay describes how the reader “may not only take pleasure in the parts [of Homer] that astonish and charm (τοῖς ἐκπλήττουσι καὶ θέλγουσι τέρπεσθαι) but may also be persuaded more easily by the parts that help him towards virtue” (πρὸς ἀρετὴν ὠφελοῦσι πείθεσθαι, 6). Grammar students must therefore learn to detect where the poet “allegorizes” (ἀλληγορεῖσθαι), “hints” (αἰνίσσεται), and “intimates” (ὑποδεικνύς) through storytelling. In this way, the Essay inverts Plato’s instruction to place virtue before pleasure in the Greek literary curriculum and instead teaches us to achieve virtue by immersing ourselves fully and consciously in the delights of Homer.