Homer, in Latin?

Keen readers will notice a curious fact in my novel, The Welsh Dragon. When Henry Tudor meets Anne of Beaujeu in France, she tests his education by making a comment about Odysseus. He passes her test by thinking back to his Latin reading lessons.

But…didn’t Homer write in Greek?

This isn’t a typo or a mistake.

In the Canterbury Tales, written about two hundred years before Henry Tudor, Chaucer casually references several of the heroes of the Trojan War. This implies that not only was Chaucer, a literate member of court with close ties to John of Gaunt, familiar with those tales, but that he also believed his audience would be familiar with them, as well.

However, they would have read them in Latin, not in the original Greek. Following the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church was the one institution providing any sort of cohesion or order to Western Europe. To maintain Christianity amid waves of pagan tribes streaming into Italy, Gaul, and Hispania, they did everything they could to emphasize Catholic thought and repress positive representations of paganism.

The most critical texts—Aristotelian and Platonic texts that influenced early Christian thought and vital works like those of Galen—were translated into Latin and preserved. Many others deemed too tainted by pagan thinking were repressed. While unfortunate, doing otherwise could have undermined the last pillars propping Europe up at the time.

Many Greek texts were largely lost to European audiences in the 15^th century. The Arabic world, stretching from Iran to Spain, preserved them (albeit, some of them as abridgments ascribed to Muslim thinkers like Ibn Sina). When Muslim Toledo fell in 1085, the Castilians inherited a massive library of original Arabic and Greek texts. Immediately, the translation school in that city set to work translating them first into Castilian, and then into Latin for distribution to learning centers throughout Europe. Paired with the works preserved by the Church, this effort flooded Europe with ancient learning.

However, they were written in Latin, not their original languages. Indeed, those with the wealth needed to achieve a classical education would have learned Latin by reading works like The Iliad and The Odyssey. And, the stories themselves were well-known enough by reference to be conversationally understood.

But, as a result of religious conflict and a desperate need to preserve order, entire generations would have grown up thinking Greeks had written those texts in Lain.