The Roman poet Vergil used the great Homer

as a model to express for his contemporaries the new spirit of Augustan Rome.

The evangelist Mark has used the beauty of the Homeric schema to bring Christian tradition for his fellow Christians into an easily remembered and narrative form (see my letter to the editor in the FAZ of February 5, 2008).

Goethe used the Faust material to bring the conflict between tradition, enlightenment and revolution closer to his theatre audience.

And Homer? What Vergil considers to be the state of the art in science and Markus considers plausible, the rootedness in an older literary tradition, has also made Schrott plausible for the Iliad.

All three authors, Vergil, Mark and Homer stand at a turning point and are already part of the new era, just like Vergil and Markus, Homer does not remain in the learned, Assyrian tradition, but founds a new literary school and promotes a new, a Greek cultural identity.