Pliny knew very well that representations of Homer were imaginary projections and nothing more, all of them driven by a powerful desire to put a face on a name. Nor was Pliny’s insight exceptional among the ancients. Whenever they were faced with a claim about Homer or his likeness, they too had to struggle with competing impulses, which typically took the form of the admission “I know very well that the evidence of Homer before me is the result of illegitimate imaginary construction, a mere stab in the dark, but I will treat it as if it were authentic, valid, and probative just the same.” Such is the logic of fetishistic illusion, which overcomes the oddity of the experience that Pliny so perceptively puts his finger on: For how can you feel a sense of loss for something that you never possessed to begin with? One obviously can, which does not yet give us much information about the nature of the loss; it merely confirms its effects. The effects of this kind of thinking were confirmed in practice: Homer may have been lost forever, but his cultural value and cachet were inextinguishable.

Evidently, the mystery of Homer could chafe and attract in equal measures, and at one and the same time. The more one sought to pin down facts about Homer’s physical appearance and his life, the harder it proved to do so. As the urge grew greater, so did the corresponding anxiety. After antiquity, attempts to capture Homer’s likeness in a visual medium continued to rely almost exclusively on citations and re-elaborations of the ancient tradition’s own guesswork: they constituted a continuation of the ancient series.

Ancient portraiture solved the problem of representing Homer by skirting it. Artists produced images that declared their generic character with an iconography that in effect said, This is (a representation) of Homer. Then they added details that gave their images an effect of the real and the illusion of authenticity: a twist of hair here, a crease of flesh there, extra contouring on the cloak, a certain heaviness in the eyelids, and so on. Where the particulars failed to convince, the typological character of the portrait stepped in to assure the beholder’s gaze that it was at least trained on an identifiable subject: portrayed in any given instance was, if not the reality, then at least the idea—someone’s idea, or antiquity’s collective idea—of Homer.

Pliny knew very well that representations of Homer were imaginary projections and nothing more, all of them driven by a powerful desire to put a face on a name. Nor was Pliny’s insight exceptional among the ancients. Whenever they were faced with a claim about Homer or his likeness, they too had to struggle with competing impulses, which typically took the form of the admission “I know very well that the evidence of Homer before me is the result of illegitimate imaginary construction, a mere stab in the dark, but I will treat it as if it were authentic, valid, and probative just the same.” Such is the logic of fetishistic illusion, which overcomes the oddity of the experience that Pliny so perceptively puts his finger on: For how can you feel a sense of loss for something that you never possessed to begin with? One obviously can, which does not yet give us much information about the nature of the loss; it merely confirms its effects. The effects of this kind of thinking were confirmed in practice: Homer may have been lost forever, but his cultural value and cachet were inextinguishable.

Evidently, the mystery of Homer could chafe and attract in equal measures, and at one and the same time. The more one sought to pin down facts about Homer’s physical appearance and his life, the harder it proved to do so. As the urge grew greater, so did the corresponding anxiety. After antiquity, attempts to capture Homer’s likeness in a visual medium continued to rely almost exclusively on citations and re-elaborations of the ancient tradition’s own guesswork: they constituted a continuation of the ancient series.

Ancient portraiture solved the problem of representing Homer by skirting it. Artists produced images that declared their generic character with an iconography that in effect said, This is (a representation) of Homer. Then they added details that gave their images an effect of the real and the illusion of authenticity: a twist of hair here, a crease of flesh there, extra contouring on the cloak, a certain heaviness in the eyelids, and so on. Where the particulars failed to convince, the typological character of the portrait stepped in to assure the beholder’s gaze that it was at least trained on an identifiable subject: portrayed in any given instance was, if not the reality, then at least the idea—someone’s idea, or antiquity’s collective idea—of Homer.