Eustathios of Thessalona: pagan elements in some Homeric citations on Iliad VI and the Christian commentator

Abstract

The present article demonstrates the way in which the byzantine scholar of the 12th century, Eustathios of Thessalonica, treats and integrates in his Commentary on Iliad some of the Homeric citations. Precisely, our interest is to show how the Christian commentator treats the pagan elements and the polytheistic expressions of the Homeric text. By a comparative lecture between the Homeric citations in the poetic text and those in Eustathios, we attempt to demonstrate the Christian modifications of the scholar in the Homeric text, the anti-pagan commentary that he invents, the replacement of the polytheistic expressions of the Homeric text by a monotheistic version, and the «method » of the scholar to modernize, in a way, the Homeric text in his era.