Literary reception follows direct and circuitous paths. In a fundamental analysis of the commentaries of Homeric epic in sixteenth-century France (2007), Philip Ford chronologically charts the particularities of this transmission. Marc Bizer chooses a more indirect road. In examining humanist interpretations of the Iliad and Odyssey, he details the subtle interrelations of conflicting political theories presented in imaginative literature and polemical discourse and reflected in the controversies defining royal authority. The writing of such a study requires courage and compass. Nonetheless, in spite of the complexities of this history, he skillfully guides the reader on a journey that elucidates the intricate interweaving of humanist readings of ancient texts and their parallels in political practice.

Divided into two parts, the study reviews the assimilation of Homeric epic and hermeneutics into French political discourse and the response to these interpretations influenced by religious conflicts. Although shifting from humanist debate to governmental issues, this examination centers attention upon the nature, place, and role of royal rule. In determining the scope of this sovereignty, humanists relied upon ancient antecedents. Cristoforo Landino’s allegorical exegesis of Virgil’s Aeneid invited Guillaume Budé’s reading of Homeric texts that, recalling ideas in Pseudo-Plutarch’s Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, results in an outline of the education of the prince, the importance of eloquence, and the use of prudence. Odysseus becomes a “philosopher-traveler” (55), and Jean Dorat’s teaching of this “allegorical wisdom” becomes “proverbial knowledge” (26). Theses evolve into antitheses. Acute analysis reveals Du Bellay’s transformations of Odysseus in the Regrets from epic hero to elegiac wanderer who questions court politics and royal supremacy. Etienne de la Boétie, in his De la servitude volontaire, elevates Du Bellay’s subtle satire against the state to a sharp defiance against tyranny. Absolutism depends upon obedience, servitude, and devotion, but the application of Odysseus’s clearsightedness urges the unsubjugated to form consensus and control. Ideological battles ensue, and Ronsard perceives a conflict between established thought and individual interpretation in the writing of his epic La Franciade. In describing the rise of the French monarchy from its Trojan origins, he justifies authoritarianism but, like Etinenne Pasquier, doubts its validity.

In the second section Bizer describes the intersections between Homeric interpretation and the Wars of Religion. The Catholic pamphleteer Jean Begat defines monarchy as a Homeric idea that affirms absolutism and assures religious unity. An anonymous Protestant responds that scripture designates the king as a servant of God. Guillaume Paquelin, a moderate Catholic, reinstates the relevance of Homeric thought and, like Budé and Dorat, sees the monarch as a practitioner of prudence, mercy, and justice. The Protestant Jean de Sponde does not contest Homer’s significance; but, in exercising moderation, the king, he contends, must place his subjects’ concerns before his own. Thus, in answering to God, he must respect limits, for abuse of monarchical power incites resistance. Robert Garnier’s tragedy La Troade, a reworking of Euripides’s and Seneca’s dramatic renderings of Homeric narrative, becomes a theatrum mundi enacting the oppression and senseless sacrifice of religious strife. Capriciousness, arbitrariness, and self-interest lead to unrelenting violence. These oppositions prompt a dialectical resolution. In particular, Montaigne identifies Homeric themes both as depictions of civil chaos and as an affirmation of divine sovereignty. Like La Boétie he advises the individual to evade tyranny; and, as man conforms to divine truth, monarchs as God’s earthly agents exercise rightful authority. Bizer’s interpretation that preserves friendship, absolutism, and religious doctrine provides a conclusion that Montaigne seems to subvert at the end of “De l’expérience” (Essays 3.13).

Through perceptive and intelligent analyses of Homeric allusions in sixteenth-century French texts, Bizer breaks important new ground in our understanding of the interrelationships of imaginative literature, polemical discourse, political disquiet, and governmental authority. This study, moreover, poses questions that encourage exploration: the use of genres in Du Bellay’s poetry, the political dimensions of dialogue, and Platonic interpretations of Homeric myth that may have shaped Renaissance readings. In disentangling the convergences and divergences of thought in the establishment of political authority, Bizer has produced a significant study in literary reception and, if I may paraphrase Rabelais (Tiers Livre, ch. 13), assigns Homer as the “père de toute politique.”