“But if we are seeking the origin of this oratorical power, we find poets, I think, to be the most ancient of all authorities and authors… We have it on record that there were philosophers even earlier.”
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— Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus
This sentiment from the Roman orator Cicero represents more than a simple historical observation. It is an intellectual earthquake. For centuries, Western thought had placed the poet Homer at the very beginning of its literary timeline. He was the fountainhead, the singular genius from whom poetry, philosophy, and culture flowed. However, Cicero subtly dismantled this myth. He proposed a history that stretched back even further, into a time before the supposed beginning. This assertion of “poets before Homer” was a radical idea that would echo through centuries of literary and historical thought.
Cicero’s claim invites us to look past the monumental figures we often see as starting points. Source Instead, it encourages a search for the deeper, continuous streams of human creativity. This article explores the profound legacy of Cicero’s challenge. We will trace its influence on scholars, its validation by modern archaeology, and its enduring importance for how we understand the very nature of cultural origins.
The Titan at the Dawn of Literature
To grasp the weight of Cicero’s statement, we must first understand Homer’s towering stature in the ancient world. The Greeks and later the Romans did not merely view Homer as an early poet; they saw him as the poet. His epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, formed the bedrock of education. Students learned to read and write by studying his verses. Moreover, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle engaged deeply with his work, either as a source of wisdom or a subject of critique.
For them, Homer was not just the originator of epic poetry but also the first theologian, moralist, and historian. Consequently, he represented a definitive starting point for civilization itself. Everything that came after was, in some way, a response to him. This perception created a powerful narrative of a singular, miraculous origin for Western literature. It was a simple, compelling story. However, Cicero, with his deep interest in the long history of rhetoric, suspected the story was incomplete.
Cicero’s Argument in Context
Cicero was not a literary critic in the modern sense. He was a statesman, lawyer, and philosopher obsessed with the art of rhetoric. His primary goal was to establish a prestigious lineage for oratory, tracing its roots as far back as possible. He believed that powerful speech was not a recent invention but the culmination of a very long tradition of human wisdom. Therefore, in works like Brutus and De Oratore, he looked for the earliest practitioners of eloquence.
By positing poets and even philosophers before Homer, Cicero was arguing for a continuous, evolving tradition of thought. He suggested that Homer did not emerge from a vacuum. Instead, he inherited a rich, pre-existing oral culture. This re-framing served a crucial purpose for Cicero. It allowed him to connect his own Roman oratorical traditions to a deep, ancient wellspring of human expression that predated even the most revered Greek figures. Consequently, his argument was as much about Roman cultural legitimacy as it was about Greek literary history.
The Idea’s Long Journey Through Time
Cicero’s claim did not immediately overturn tradition, but it planted a seed of doubt that would sprout centuries later. Scholars in different eras returned to his idea, using it to support new ways of thinking about the past. The legacy of his assertion unfolded slowly, gaining momentum with each new intellectual movement.
Renaissance and Enlightenment Inquiry
During the Renaissance, humanist scholars were dedicated to recovering and understanding the complete classical past. Cicero’s works were central to their studies, and his suggestion of a pre-Homeric world would have intrigued them. It aligned with their desire to map the full expanse of ancient knowledge. Later, during the Enlightenment, a new spirit of critical inquiry took hold. Scholars began to question the traditional narratives about ancient texts.
This culminated in the “Homeric Question,” most famously articulated by the German classicist Friedrich August Wolf in the late 18th century. Source Wolf and others argued that the Iliad and Odyssey were not the work of a single man but were likely collections of older oral poems stitched together over time. Cicero’s ancient assertion provided a classical precedent for this kind of thinking. It demonstrated that even the ancients themselves had questioned the myth of the single, original author.
Vindicated by Archaeology
For centuries, the debate remained purely textual and theoretical. No one had concrete proof of poets before Homer. That all changed in the 19th century with archaeological discoveries in Mesopotamia. The unearthing of the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations revealed a world of literature that was centuries, even millennia, older than the Homeric epics. The most stunning discovery was the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Here was a sophisticated epic poem with complex characters, profound themes of mortality, and a great flood narrative that predated both Homer and the Bible. This discovery provided dramatic, irrefutable evidence for what Cicero had only been able to speculate. It proved that complex literary creation was not a Greek invention but a much older human practice. The timeline of world literature had to be completely redrawn, pushing its origins deep into the Bronze Age Near East.
A New Model for Cultural Origins
The confirmation of pre-Homeric literature did more than just change a historical timeline. It fundamentally altered our understanding of how culture develops. The old model, centered on a single heroic figure like Homer, gave way to a more nuanced, evolutionary perspective. This new model suggests that culture arises not from isolated acts of genius but from a continuous and collaborative process of tradition and innovation.
Great works like the Iliad are no longer seen as a miraculous beginning. Instead, we now understand them as brilliant culminations of long-standing oral traditions. Homer, whether a single person or a name for a tradition, was an inheritor, not an originator. This insight extends far beyond classical studies. It informs how we analyze the development of music, art, and religion. It teaches us to look for the forgotten predecessors and the collective cultural currents that make individual genius possible.
Conclusion: The Enduring Search for Beginnings
Cicero’s claim about poets before Homer was a brief but powerful moment of intellectual curiosity. He dared to question a foundational myth of his culture. He imagined a history deeper and more complex than the one that was commonly accepted. While he lacked the evidence to prove his case, his intuition has been profoundly vindicated by modern scholarship and archaeology.
The legacy of his assertion is a testament to the importance of questioning our origin stories. It reminds us that history is rarely a story of singular, clean beginnings. Instead, it is a vast and interconnected web of influences. The search for what came before our canonical texts—the voices lost to time—continues to drive our quest for knowledge. In that sense, we are all still following the path that Cicero first charted over two thousand years ago.