It's doubtful whether Homer may really be called "very martial" - I'd rather say he saw and sang the whims and glories of his world with lucid impartiality (at the courts of noble warriors, of course) - can't imagine him fiddling war propaganda for an ignorant vulgar criminal and his stupid way of primitive violence. Consider the martial spirit being so popular in my country from the Union Wars until the untergang did not produce much writing that might have been called "literature", or even "readable" - literature just ignored it - and at the time when Germany was in a political state that fits into your description of "liberal democracy", when all the leftists were where they belonged, or in exile, or dead, and martial spirit was at its climax, our literature was a matter of the exiled. Propaganda for military aggression is incompatible not only with great literature, but with culture as a whole. And there's nothing homeric about it.
Peace, joerg from Suebia Lawrence Helm schrieb:
(...)Now as to JB’s disparaging remark about our sporadic fits of martial passion, speaking as one given to such fits (most here don’t have them), let me remind him that the father of Western Literature was the very martial Homer; who demonstrated that a martial spirit is not incompatible with the creation of great literature.(...)
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