Controversy and mudslinging are not new features of the Homeric tradition.  We are told that, in 1715, soon after Alexander Pope published the first volume of his translation of the Iliad, the eminent poet was assailed by Britain’s most fearsomely competent Hellenist, Richard Bentley.  Bentley, with the insufferable bluntness that had made him famous (or infamous), told Pope, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  Pope revenged himself on Bentley in his satirical Dunciad by portraying the scholar as a pedantic bore who “made Horace dull, and humbled Milton’s strains.”