Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hobbes writes Homer

The work deals with the political value of the translations of the Homeric poems made by Thomas Hobbes in the 70s of the XVII century. Under censorship and at the fringes of the political debate, the philosopher, in the last years of his life, could not write freely. So he started to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English. These works have been considered as a sort of a mere diversion for a long time, an amusement or - at the most - as a great performance of erudition of an old man who wanted to keep his mind trained in the last years of his life. In spite of this, starting from the suggestion of Eric Nelson who, in the General Introduction to his edition of the Hobbes' translations of the Homeric poems (Oxford: 2008), writes that they are "a continuation of Leviathan by other means", the book - through a lexical analysis - finds and shows those elements of political theory that Hobbes discussed by this unusual means, a means which allowed him to bypass censorship and continue spreading his political thought.