Were Homer's epics a Greek analogue to the Bible?

by savedlatin77

I just finished I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, and in the chapter 'Socrates and Homer', he says:

Homer, as the Bible to the Greeks, could be quoted on either side of most controversies since he is as rich in ambiguities and contradictions as our Holy Writ.

Is the comparison between Homer and the Bible accurate for 5th and 4th century Greece? Did they go back to The Iliad and The Odyssey in much the same way Christianity or Judaism look at the Bible?

I know Stone isn't a historian, but he seems to have done a lot of research in the book.

Brassica_Catonis

Kind of, in the sense that Homer was as universally known among (educated?) Greeks in the classical period as the Bible was in the middle ages and beyond. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not considered holy texts in the same way as the Bible was - Homer was not seen as completely infallible - but the texts were the authoritative foundation of all literature and knowledge, and subject to similar levels of study as the Bible later would be.

So for example the fifth-century historian Herodotus references Homer many times throughout his work. At least once he directly disagrees with Homer: "for I know of no Ocean river; and I suppose that Homer or some older poet invented this name and brought it into his poetry" (2.23). Thus, as mentioned, Homer is not an infallible holy text; rather, he is a poet, and poets are expected to invent certain things. Other times, Herodotus uses Homer to support a point he's trying to make: when he claims that Scythian cattle don't grow horns, he quotes from the Odyssey to support this claim (4.29). More interesting is the extended passage in which Herodotus argues that Helen was was not actually at Troy during its siege by the Greeks, but in Egypt. This information he claims to have heard from Egyptian priests, and he supports his point by quoting several passages of Homer, who "knew this story, too; but seeing that it was not so well suited to epic poetry as the tale of which he made use, he rejected it, showing that he knew it" (2.116). Here we have Herodotus directly engaging with Homer, and coming up with quite an inventive interpretation to support his own point, much as the Bible can be interpreted to support or oppose just about anything. Homer continued to be seen as the foundational authority into the Roman period: Strabo, in his Geography, spends a large part of his introduction arguing that Homer was the first geographer, and justifying those statements of Homer which appear inaccurate.