The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

THREE

Loving Homer

HOMER-LOVE CAN FEEL LIKE a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every nook of your consciousness. What would Homer have had for breakfast? (Oil, honey, yoghurt and delicious bread. One of the things that is wrong with the Cyclopes is that they don’t eat bread.) Or a picnic? (Grapes, figs, plums, beans.) How did he feed his heroes? (Grilled meat and thoroughly cooked sausages.) What did he think of parties? (He loved them: no moment was happier for a man than sitting down to a table loaded with wine and surrounded by his friends.)

These were questions the Greeks asked. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates was impressed by Homer’s decision, for example, that no hero should ever eat iced cakes: ‘all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind’. Protein – well salted, not boiled – was the stuff for heroes. And it had to be red meat; fish was the last resort,fn1 and chickens had yet to arrive from the Far East: they reached the Aegean in about 500 BC, known to the Greeks as ‘the Persian Bird’.

I have a way now of finding Homer wherever I look for him. No encounter, no landscape is without its Homeric dimension. In a way, Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half-discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom. There must be a name for this colonisation of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past. Possession, maybe? Mindjack? In one of his Socratic dialogues, Plato has a wonderful image for the secret and powerful hold that Homer has on his listeners. Socrates is talking to Ion, a mildly ridiculous rhapsode, a man who made his living by reciting and speaking about Homer. ‘I am conscious in my own self,’ Ion tells Socrates in phrases which even two and a half millennia later have a whiff of the stage, ‘and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.’ If Greeks had moustaches, Ion would be twirling his.

The Socratic eyebrow rises a little, but he then tells Ion the truth, a little slyly, the Socratic wisdom masquerading as flattery. ‘The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer,’ Socrates says,

is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.

The poet, Socrates tells him, is ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ – Homer not as great bearded mage, but like the bird Blegen found, or a mosquito, a flitting bug – of no substance, swept here and there on the winds of poetry. ‘There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.’

Plato affects to despise poetry, for the way it interferes with the rational mind, but it is clear that he was in love with it, moved by it as much as Ion could ever hope to be. And he identified the mechanism: there is no act of will in loving Homer. You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you. And so, like Ion, you hang as a curtain ring from him, who hangs from the Muse, who hangs from her father Greatness and her mother Memory.

I cannot go for a walk in the English chalklands without imagining the cold damp Iliads that must have been sung there. Every burial in an English Bronze Age round barrow must have had a version of these heroic songs sung at its making. But Homer is also in the Hebrides and off the coast of Ireland. Traditions of heroic song have endured there. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate on Harris by his Macleod chief, for which he had to pay ‘1 panegyrick poem every year’. That is Homeric rent. Wild unadorned landscapes or places of great antiquity summon his archetypes and their stories. Pope thought that for Virgil, Homer and nature were indistinguishable, and for me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.

No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in Book 3 of the Odyssey, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in Book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso’s island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in Book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, coloured by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very centre of the Odyssey, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.

In the Iliad, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in Book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a sea shore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon’s terror:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once,

where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,

praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth

that they might bring the proud heart of great Achilles

round with speed and ease.

It is also the place of grief, where later in the Iliad, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night to

wander in anguish, aimless along the surf, and dawn on dawn

flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.

As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawnlit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf: no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.

As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer than the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The set-up for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These are the scenes which have the oldest form of Greek in them, and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.

And so today a friend – Martin Thomas – stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying not shouting the goodbye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulae, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment, and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.

So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudder-stock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?

Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So, today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.

But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice, and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.

Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is ‘rosy-fingered’, but she also sometimes sits ‘on her golden throne’ as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear ‘her veil the colour of saffron’, krokopeplos, the crocus-cloth, the warmest colour in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of wellbeing and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the colour is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and ‘strike the sea with their oars’.

That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can’t help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke – a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping on to the perfect skin of the sea – I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.

But you long for wind. You imagine wind before it comes. You look for it on the water. None of this is far from praying for wind, or even sacrificing for it. Part of the Homeric ritual is to make a libation to the goddess as you leave. And the goddess whom you choose summons her own kind of wind. So Athene, never moderate, owl-eyed, all-seeing, sharp beyond all human understanding, sends a fierce wind for Telemachus as he heads out from Ithaca to find his father, a wind from the west ‘that bellowed roaring over the wine-coloured sea’. His voyage is anxious, uncertain, driven by that demanding mentor.

At the same time, somewhere else in the realms of fantasy and loss, his father is being given a wind by the amorous goddess Calypso who has imprisoned him on her island of deliciousness for the last seven years. He has been sitting weeping on the shore, longing for home. Now at last she will release him, and her wind is like her, all-embracing, warm and seductive, a sleep-with-me wind sending him on his way. He spreads his sail gladly to it, a bosom of wind, wafting him away from her comforts to the world of truth and reality.

As the wind comes, they hoist ‘the white sail’, the sail fills, ‘and the wind and the helmsman guide the ship together’. It is an act of cooperation between man and the world, a folding in of human intention with what the world can offer. The ship is a beautifully made thing, as closely fitted as a poem, as much a mark of civilisation as any woven cloth, and the wind in the Odyssey, when it is a kind wind, is a ‘shipmate’, another member of the crew. It is not the element in which you sail but a ‘companion’ on board. The human and divine dimensions of reality meet in it.

And now, when I am out in the sound, and the right wind comes, I think of it like that, as something else to be welcomed aboard. That coming of the wind is a moment when you can’t help but smile, when the world turns in your favour. It is also a moment of extraordinary potency in Homer, never more than when in the Iliad the Trojans find themselves in a terrifying and difficult phase of the battle and things are against them, until they see Hector and his brother Paris coming out of the gates of the city, armed, ready to help. It is, the poem says, like that moment when the crew has been struggling for too long with the oars, and their arms are weary, and they have been praying for wind, and then, as a blessing, the wind seems to come and the weariness drops from their bodies and they can rest in its strength and power: ‘So these two appeared to the Trojans, who had longed for them.’

Matching that instant of relief and triumph is another, almost at the other end of the Iliad, when the winds become the indispensable companions of the heroes. Achilles has made the great funeral pyre on the beach for Patroclus. Timber has been cut and carried, and the pyre is now a hundred feet in each direction. Animals have been slaughtered and the fat laid on the pyre. But it will not light, and Achilles realises he has failed to do one thing: he must pray to the two winds, the west wind and the north wind. And they come, sweeping in from their distant dwelling places, driving the clouds before them. A vast, inhuman blaze erupts in the pyre, and under the winds’ fierce encouragement, one shrieking blast after another, it burns all night long, incinerating everything but the bones. Only then do the winds retire

Back towards home again, over the Thracian sea,

And it heaved with a long, groaning swell as they crossed it.

The wind never comes unsummoned, or in a solid block. All you feel at first is a finger or two, the faint chilling of the skin on the cheek, or stroking the nape of your neck. But then it builds a little, one finger becomes five, the canvas stirs, like a dog in a bed, begins to acquire a form, and the boat gains a sense of purpose, a coherence it had lacked as it slopped in the chop or swell. The wake slowly starts to bubble behind you, ‘the gleaming wake’ that runs behind Homeric ships as a sign of life and excellence, the cockpit drains gurgle with the air sucked through them, and with tiller and sheet in hand you sit up and pick your course across the sea. That is the Odyssean moment: everything liquid but directed, everything mobile but related: the sea itself, your boat in it, the air and its winds, all the possibilities. The ritual is done, the routines have been followed, and your chances are now set fair.

Of all Homeric departures, none is more poignant than when Odysseus and his men, right in the centre of the Odyssey, set off for Hades, to hear from the blind seer Tiresias the way home to Ithaca. Circe, ‘the trim-coifed goddess’, as Ezra Pound described her, has set them on their way. They have no choice. Only Tiresias can tell them the way home. They have made all their tackle secure and provided themselves with food and drink. The wind has joined the crew and is now there alongside the helmsman, guiding ‘the black ship in the bright sea’ as their companion. But neither Odysseus nor any of his men are making this voyage with any hint of delight. This is a journey down and under the world, into the dark places, into themselves as much as to the edge of the physical universe. As the wind holds fair for them, they sit on their benches and grieve. Big, heart-wrenching tears fall on the pale timbers of the deck. The wind is taking them towards a terrifying destination, the place of death which Odysseus has so far exercised all his wit and skill to avoid. The wind knows nothing of that and propels their ship onwards, its red-painted bows plunging and rising with each oncoming sea, the swells breaking and surging around the stempost, while above that foam of life the wind never falters or wavers:

The wind caught the sail, bellying it out, and the blue-shadowed waves resounded under the fore-foot of the running ship as she lay over on her course and raced out to sea.

Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

Sun to his slumber, shadows over ocean.

FOUR

Seeking Homer

ALL MODERN VERSIONS OF Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison. In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad which seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the ‘germana et sincera lectio’, the real and uncorrupted reading.

Villoison thought he had discovered the essence of a work by a single poet called Homer. But he had sown the seeds of his own demise. The idea was already in the air in the eighteenth century that Homer was not one poet but many, and that the poems were the product of a whole culture, not an individual genius. Villoison’s discovery turned out to be the Copernican moment. The mass of alternative readings rejected by the Alexandrian scholars itself threw doubt on the idea of a single great original text. They had chosen to make a single Homer, but looking further back in time it seemed as if there were multiple Homers to choose from. William Cowper, the English lover and translator of Homer, read Villoison and stood aghast at the fragmentation of his hero. As he wrote to his friend the Rev. Walter Bagot in the winter of 1790:

I will send you some pretty stories from [Villoison] which will make your hair stand on end, as mine has stood on end already, they so horribly affect, in point of authenticity, the credit of the works of the immortal Homer …

Homer now was not one but many, and most of them obscure. In 1795 Villoison was challenged by the young, highly analytical German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. How could Villoison tell if the decisions made by the Alexandrian editors were the right ones? Surely what Villoison had published was evidence that the Iliad, as they all knew it, was a set of late, corrupt and unreliable texts, brought together in one poem but with their origins in bardic songs which had been radically altered by every hand they had passed through. The originals were unrecoverable. Homer, whoever that was, could never now be known.

The scene was set for the long struggle over the so-called ‘Homeric Question’ raised by Wolf which has lasted ever since. ‘Some say, “There never was such a person as Homer,”’ the English essayist Thomas de Quincey joked in 1841. ‘“No such person as Homer! On the contrary,” say others, “there were scores.”’ Nevertheless, the text of the Iliad over which the battles were fought between the lumpers and splitters, the one-Homer advocates and the scores-of-Homer advocates, the Homerophiles and Homerophobes, continued to be almost precisely the one published by Villoison in 1788.

He was not the first in the field. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, who had come to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Soon other copies were being printed in Milan, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Paris and London. And behind those first printed books stands a long manuscript history. Many of the medieval manuscripts of Homer migrated late to the European libraries, because in the early Middle Ages Homer was unread in Europe. Dante had Virgil call him the ‘sovereign poet’, but Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek, and even though the great fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch owned a copy of the Iliad – he was the man who used to kiss it in reverence – he could not understand a word it said. However, he wrote, ‘was dumb to me and I am deaf to it’.

Nevertheless, Homer continued to lurk in the European mind: pervasively there but rarely seen. Medieval Odysseys are scattered through scholarly Europe, in Cambridge and London, Milan and Munich, Naples and Moscow, in Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Vienna. There are Iliads in the Bodleian in Oxford (from the twelfth century), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (a copy which probably came from Mount Athos), in the Escorial and in Florence. Through these few precious manuscript books, Homer survived in medieval Christendom.

All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the Doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.

From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans travelling in Egypt took Homer further back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer them for sale. Pieces found their way into gentlemen’s libraries across Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Egyptologists began a more systematic search for these ancient documents, none more assiduous than the thoroughly unkempt, restlessly energetic and no-sock-wearing Englishman William Flinders Petrie. He was a man who since boyhood had understood that the careful unravelling of historic deposits layer by layer, an exfoliation of the past, was the only way to approach them. In the winter of 1887 he began to dig in the large necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayum depression to the west of the valley of the Nile.