Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea…
Odyssey I.1-4 (tr. Richmond Lattimore)
Every so often, reading even relatively formulaic texts, you come across an unexpected comparison or insight, one that sticks with you after the rest of the text is long forgotten. I was recently reading an anthologized eulogy of one scholar, the 17th-century theologian Denis Pétau, by another, Henri Valois, apparently a former student of Pétau’s in Paris. No teacher could wish for greater and more pious praise than Valois showers upon Pétau, master of all (intellectual) trades, but his love for Pétau – and his own immersion in the classical world – may come out most in a little preamble in which he compares Pétau to Ulysses/Odysseus in his versatility and flair for exploration. Pétau, Valois tells us, sailed the Seven Seas of Scholarship and returned from his wanderings with an understanding “of all matters human and divine.” Before that comparison, though, we get a striking bit about Homer (whose precedent Valois says he will follow), why the Odyssey begins the way it does, and why people like travel (and travel literature):
Et Homerus quidem cum omnium animos ad audiendum allicere vellet, in ipso carminis vestibulo pollicetur dicturum se de homine multiformi morum varietate praedito qui multas urbes regionesque peragrasset, qui plurimorum hominum mores atque instituta penitus cognovisset. Quippe ille vatum prudentissimus optime norat cunctos mortales plurimarum rerum notitia imprimis delectari, eamque ob causam aut ipsos peregrinari maxime velle, aut certe eorum qui peregrinati sunt casus varios atque eventus libenter audire.
Homer, too, wishing to draw everyone’s attention to listening [i.e. to his poetry], at the very opening of the poem [i.e. Odyssey I. 1-3] promises that he will tell of a man endowed with a manifold variety of manners (multiformi morum varietate)1 who wandered through many cities and lands, (and) who came to know deeply the customs (mores) and ways of life (instituta)2 of very many people. For that wisest of bards knew very well that all men are especially delighted by knowledge of very many (different) circumstances (plurimarum rerum), and that for that reason they either desire very strongly to travel abroad (peregrinari) themselves or at least enjoy listening to the various haps and mishaps (casus…atque eventus) of those who have traveled abroad.
Source: Henrici Valesii oratio in obitum Dionysii Petavii Societatis Iesu theologi habita anno 1653
- An expansive rendering of the much-discussed Homeric epithet polytropon (Livius Andronicus, the first translator of Homer into Latin, gave us versutum almost two thousand years earlier, in the third century BCE). ↩︎
- Homer has just “mind” (noon, Attic noun), echoed later (and more literally) by Valois, in his praise of Pétau, with the word ingenia. ↩︎
Gemmae Latinae 