An Untimely Iliad: Eoban, Virgil, and a Belated First in the History of Homeric Translation

When the German poet Helius Eobanus Hessus published his translation of the Iliad in 1540 after a decade’s worth of work, he became the first person to translate an entire Homeric epic into Latin verse. This significant if surprisingly belated “first” in the history of Homeric translation has not hitherto been adequately contextualized as a product of late Humanism. My paper not only reconstructs Eoban’s translation practice, but also proposes a novel interpretation of his Homeri Ilias as programmatically anachronistic.

The astounding lapse of more than 1,700 years between Livius Andronicus’ highly abridged Latin Odyssey and Eoban’s comprehensive version of the Iliad likely results from a combination of factors. In antiquity, a complete poetic translation of Homer seems to have been hampered by an elite disinterest in an integral Latin Homer (McElduff 2013, 164–67; Cè 2020, 143–79). In the Renaissance, by contrast, the early efforts of Petrarch and others were frustrated by a lack of linguistic ability in Greek, a deficit amplified by the particular challenges of Homeric diction and grammar (Sowerby 1997; Foley 2016, 25–33).

The first part of my paper offers a fresh analysis of Eoban’s intertextual process and private correspondence to demonstrate that the German poet drew extensively on previous Latin translations in composing his verse Iliad. Specifically, I identify three types of underlying materials. The first of these comprises ancient Roman authors who selectively translated individual Homeric passages throughout their literary oeuvres (especially Cicero, Horace, and Virgil); the second group is constituted by partial poetic translations of the Iliad from the Renaissance, including Homeric versifiers of the Quattrocento (Marsuppini, Poliziano, Romano), as well as Erasmus’ Adages (Wolfe 2015, 57–111); the third category consists in Lorenzo Valla’s transposition of the Iliad into Ciceronian prose and Andrea Divo’s word-for-word crib—two very dissimilar non-poetic renderings of the epic.

Building on the temporal syncretism of Eoban’s working method, the paper’s second part argues that anachronism is central to the meaning of Homeri Ilias. On a technical level, the poet’s decision to translate the Iliad into a noticeably Virgilian idiom—acknowledged in the praefatio and the translation’s marginal notes (Knauer 1964, 74–75)—is at odds with the growing contemporary interest in a pre-Virgilian Homer. The result is a marked engagement with tensions already present in the Italian Renaissance between Homerism and Virgilianism (Rubinstein 1983).

Coming after the vernacular translations of the New Testament by Luther and Tyndale and the publication of Homeric poetry in French, Spanish, and German (Bleicher 1972, 107–117; Serés 1989; Ford 2006), Eoban runs counter to the zeitgeist in his use of Latin but, at the same time, betrays unease about his chosen target language: his German audience, he suggests, may be better understood as a community of Latin speakers. The resulting Homeri Ilias will go on to inform Latin verse translations of Homer for the next two centuries, in Switzerland, Croatia, and Mexico (Mundt 1988; Laird 2012; Šoštarić 2015), casting its poet as a conflicted innovator who writes on the brink of popular Humanism. My paper identifies in Eoban’s work a fundamentally Neo-Latin answer to an increasingly vernacular question: what is the place of ancient epic in a modern world?