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The Mediterranean of Louis XV 255
aligned oneself in relation to the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes—the
Greek poet was always imagined enthroned on Chios
scribbling away in his study. The idea that his work was that of
an illiterate and what’s more, an itinerant bard roaming around
the coast of Turkey was apparently first advanced by Robert
Wood (1717?–71) in A Comparative View of the Antient and
Present State of the Troade: To Which is Prefixed an Essay on
the Original Genius of Homer (1767) 42 (Fig. 10.3). Wood toured
Greece and the Near East extensively in the 1740s. His most
innovative ideas were the result of layering his own travel
experiences over Homer’s descriptions, something that had
never been done by any serious scholar. None of those engaged
in the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes had ever visited Greece.
For Wood, Homer was ‘a traveller of curiosity and observation’.
43 He realized that the entire narrative framework of the
Iliad and the Odyssey depended on Homer’s experience of
the geography of the Aegean Sea. Wood concluded that Homer
saw Greece entirely from the Turkish coast and that his descriptions
of landscapes can only be reconciled with an ‘Ionian point
of view’. 44 Significantly, Wood criticized the failure of modern
translators, notably Alexander Pope, to understand Homer’s
point of view. For Wood, the text was not merely a linear
narrative but a map of experience. He imagined Homer pointing
out landscape features around his audience and connecting his
subject to the spot where the recital took place. The relationship
between the human and divine planes described in the Iliad only
made sense if one triangulated the geographical features described
by Homer: ‘If we form to ourselves a just idea of the
respective situation, distance, and perspective, of Olympus,
Ida and the Grecian Camp, we shall find Homer’s celestial
geography so happily connected with his Map of Troy, that
the scene is shifted from one to the other naturally.’ 45 For
Wood, the Iliad and the Odyssey were as much about the actions
of Gods and heroes as the experience of landscape, experiences
based on navigation as the principal means of displacement
(Fig. 10.4).
42
The edition of 1767 was limited to seven copies.
43
R. Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer: With a
comparative view of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade (London,
44 45
1775), 34. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 132.