# Homer — Tusculan Disputations character guide

> Homer in Tusculan Disputations by Cicero.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Homer

**First appearance:** 0001-tusculan-disputations

## Snapshot

The Greek poet whose epics Cicero treats as the fountainhead of literature and a constant source of lines about death, grief, and the shadowy afterlife.

## Who they are

Homer enters the dialogue as the oldest and most authoritative of the poets, the standard against which Cicero measures Rome's late arrival to literature and the model he quotes when he wants to examine what the Greeks imagined about the dead. The tension Homer represents is between poetic grandeur and philosophical truth: his verses move the soul, but Cicero must decide how far their pictures of the underworld can be trusted. His recurring presence gives the early argument its literary texture and shows that the question of death was first raised, for Rome, in Greek song.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/tusculan_disputations_se/characters/homer
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