Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey

by Alberto Manguel

  Among the literary works of ancient Greece, the Homeric poems may have been the first to take advantage of the possibilities offered by written language: greater length, since the composition no longer needed to be short enough to be held in the poet’s memory; greater consistency, both of plot and character, than that of oral poetry; greater continuity, because the written text permitted comparison with earlier or later narrative passages; greater harmony, since the eye could assist the composing mind by enriching the purely aural rules of versification with those of the physical relationship between the words on the page. Above all, the poem set down in writing allowed the work a wider, more generous reach: he who received the poem no longer needed to share the poet’s time and space. An alphabetic writing system had reached Greece not earlier than the ninth or eighth century BC; before that, there was a gap of 200 to 300 years following the collapse of Mycenaean culture and the disappearance of the writing system known as Linear B. The first examples of alphabetically written literary compositions are from the mid-eighth century: the ‘Phoenician letters’ as Herodotus called them.5 In Book VI of the Iliad, Glaucus tells the story of how his grandfather was sent off with a message to the king of Lycia, instructing him to kill the bearer: ‘[He] gave him tokens,/murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet.’6 It is conceivable that the author of the Iliad had recourse to such signs and tablets, and that he composed some of his work in written form. For certain modern scholars,7 it is possible that the original Ionian composer (or composers) of the Iliad and the Odyssey wrote out the text of the poems not on tablets but on papyrus scrolls from Egypt. The Ionians of the seventh century BC were enterprising merchants who set up shop as far as the western reaches of the Nile delta and down to the Second Cataract; the names of the most adventurous ones appear engraved on the thigh of one of the colossal statues of Abu Simbel. From Egypt, they brought home the wonderful invention of the papyrus scrolls which, according to Herodotus, they continued to call diphterai or ‘skins’ since their own books were made of vellum. If Homer did indeed write out his poems, then their length was in great measure determined by how much text one of these scrolls could contain: the division of the Iliad and the Odyssey into twentyfour cantos each is possibly the consequence of this physical limitation.8

  Before deciding whether Homer composed orally or in writing, it was deemed useful to establish whether he indeed existed in the first place and, if so, where he was born and how his life developed. The location of his birthplace became a much-disputed question and seven cities famously claimed to be the true one: Chios, Smyrna, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos and Athens. In time, the question acquired a variety of allegorical interpretations. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the English poet Thomas Heywood saw in the dispute over Homer’s birthplace a parable of the poor artist who attains fame only after death:

  Seven cities warr’d for Homer, being dead,

  Who, living, had no roof to shroud his head.9

  Miguel de Cervantes, instead, recognized in the uncertainty of Homer’s birthplace a sign of Fame’s equanimity, since it allowed more than one town to share in the poet’s glory, as was the case with his Don Quixote ‘whose birthplace Cide Hamete was unwilling to state exactly, because he wished that all villages and cities of La Mancha contend amongst them to adopt him and claim him as theirs, as the seven Greek cities contended for Homer’.10

  One of the oldest traditions affirmed that Homer had come into the world on the island of Chios, and the lateseventh-century BC ‘Hymn to Delian Apollo’ (attributed in antiquity to Homer) presented itself as the work of ‘The blind man who lives in rugged Chios’.11 Eventually, Chios asserted its pre-eminence, and visitors today are still shown the hollow in a rock about four miles from the island’s main town, where Homer and his descendants, known as the Homeridae, were supposed to have sat and sung poems to one another. Two further arguments sustain Chios’s candidature. First, the language of the poems is mainly Ionic, spoken by the early Greeks who settled on the west coast of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, including Chios; although it may have been the conventional language of epic poetry, which Homer adopted for that very reason. Second, especially in the Iliad, there are references to the geography of this area, such as the mountain peaks of Samothrace seen from the plain of Troy, that can only be known to someone familiar with the landscape. To compete with Chios, the island of Cos claimed to be Homer’s burial-place, a claim that Cyprus in turn contested. Cyprian tradition asserted that a native of Cyprus, a woman called Themisto, was Homer’s mother, and that Homer chose to die there where her bones lay buried.12

  During the third and second centuries BC, perhaps out of a need to lend further detail to Homer’s evanescent character, there appeared several spurious biographies attributed, for the sake of verisimilitude, to well-known authors. The longest was thought to be the work of Herodotus (an attribution long proved false) and gave a list of Homer’s many travels as well as a detailed genealogy: a woman called Cretheis, not Themisto, is mentioned as Homer’s mother.

  The Life of Homer attributed to Herodotus was written in the fifth or fourth century BC. Its author was perhaps a native of Smyrna, since he gives Smyrna as Homer’s birthplace in what is surely an attempt to glorify the city (‘That Homer was Aeolian and neither Ionian nor Dorian is proved by me in what I have written,’ the author says with admirable confidence). Whatever the nationality of its author, the Life of Homer, like Homer’s poems, was composed in Ionian Greek13 and shows a perfect familiarity with the dialect and customs of that area.

  According to the story, Homer’s grandparents died young and left their young daughter Cretheis in the care of their friend Cleanax. After a few years, Cretheis fell in love and became pregnant; for fear of scandal, Cleanax dispatched her off to the newly built city of Smyrna. Homer’s birth, the author explains, took place exactly 168 years after the War of Troy, by the banks of the river Meles. Cretheis named the boy Melesigenes after the river, as Milton reminds us: ‘Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call’d.’14 When the time came, Cretheis sent her son to school where, because of his wonderful abilities, he was adopted by the teacher who foretold a brilliant future for him and allowed him the run of the establishment. A visitor to Smyrna convinced Melesigenes to leave the city and take to the sea. From ship to ship, he crisscrossed Poseidon’s realm and visited the places his Ulysses would visit later, including, of course, Ithaca. On board, and for the first time, he began to compose poems to the great delight of his companions. From then onwards, the people he met became characters in the works that still lay in the future: the friendly Mentor from Ithaca, the bard Phemius, Mentes, lord of the Taphians, the leathersmith Tychios who made the shield for Ajax. The lively author of the Life of Homer accuses others of making things up: for instance, he says that, though the inhabitants of Ithaca claim that it was among them that the poet went blind, it was in fact in Colophon that this happened – a point, he adds, on which all Colophonians agree. Apparently, the change of name from Melesigenes to Homer took place in Cimmeris, where the blind poet proposed to the local senate that, in exchange for bed and board, he would make the town famous with his songs. The senators (in the tradition of most government bodies) refused, arguing that if they set this dangerous precedent, Cimmeris would soon be overrun with blind beggars (‘homers’ in Cimmerian) seeking handouts. To shame them, the poet adopted the name Homer.

  In the sixth century BC, the philosopher Heraclitus accepted as a fact that Homer had died of disappointment at not being able to solve a children’s riddle about catching lice.15 The author of the Life of Homer disputes this, and has Homer die on the island of Ios, not from being unable to guess a riddle but from ‘a weakness of constitution’.16 Throughout the biography, and with inspired hindsight, the author depicts scenes from the Odyssey in Homer’s life – Homer’s mother cards wool and weaves like a faithful Penelope; the goatherd Glaucos receives Homer hospitably, just as Ulysses will be welcomed home by the faithful swineherd
Eumaeus – and builds up the classical picture of Homer as the blind bard, travelling from place to place, singing his marvellous poems.

  From very early on, Homer was identified with one of his own characters. For his listeners and readers he was a rhapsodist, composer and performer of epic songs, a ‘king of poets’ who sometimes was called upon to compete with others. Heraclitus thought that, on one such occasion, Homer had competed with Hesiod in a recital contest.17 The description of a bard’s performance appears in the Odyssey, when, at the court of King Alcinous, the blind bard Demodocus sings three stories to the sound of a kittara or lyre: first, a ‘song whose fame had reached the skies those days’, on ‘The Strife between Odysseus and Achilles’;18 later, to please the crowds, ‘The Love of Ares and Aphrodite’;19 and finally, at Ulysses’ leave-taking, the tale of the Wooden Horse and the Sack of Troy.20 The first and last are wonderful moments of story within story, since Ulysses himself, unrecognized, is part of the audience and weeps at the memory of his retold past. (Another bard, the Ithacan Phemius, is described earlier on, performing for Penelope’s suitors at Ulysses’ court.)21

  Of the early bards or rhapsodists we know almost nothing, except that many of them were blind, travelled from town to town, and performed in public places and in royal courts. We know (Homer himself tells us) that they were meant ‘to sing the famous deeds of fighting heroes’22 (Homer’s word for ‘poet’ is ‘aoidos’, ‘singer’) and that they depended on the generosity of their listeners for bed and board. Reflecting on what he regarded as the exaggerated protraction of the final events in the Odyssey, T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) observed that ‘Perhaps the tedious delay of the climax through ten books may be a poor bard’s means of prolonging his host’s hospitality.’23

  The traditional role of the poet-singer survived well into our time. In the 1930s, the American Milman Parry and his disciple, Albert Lord, discovered, through their work on the bards of the ex-Yugoslavia, a number of popular singers in Muslim Serbia (‘guzlars’) steeped in an ancient epic tradition very similar in form and style to that of Homer, whose poems showed a high incidence of ‘formulaic’ language. In broad terms, Parry and Lord suggested that the Odyssey and the Iliad might have been sung in a manner resembling that of these Balkan bards whose songs were transmitted orally from generation to generation, and who, with the assistance of a string instrument, improvised on set texts and lent individual intonations and stresses to particular passages of a chosen poem.24 That is to say, on the basis of established formulae and using stories their audiences knew well, the bards sang poems that turned out to be new on each occasion.

  Three centuries after Homer, by the fourth century BC, the accoutrements of the bard had changed. Though he still remained ‘the interpreter of the poet’s thought’,25 he no longer used a lyre to accompany his words: now he dressed fashionably and carried an emblematic walking-stick. ‘I am often envious of you rhapsodists in your profession,’ says Socrates, not without a certain irony. ‘Your art requires of you to go in fine array, and look as beautiful as you can, and meanwhile you must be conversant with many excellent poets, and especially with Homer, the best and most divine of all.’26

  How much of their poems the ancient Greek bards invented and how much they performed by rote, how strictly they were supposed to adhere to an original and how the selection of their repertory was made, are questions to which we have no clear answers. Homer, alone among the bards, emerged in the popular imagination as having perfected his art to such an extent that it became the measure of all excellence, never to be surpassed. An undated ordinance attributed to Solon, Pisistratus or Hipparchus, states that both the Iliad and the Odyssey should be recited in their entirety at the Panathenaea, a festival held in July in honour of the goddess Athena:27 Homer was the only poet thus honoured and his biographies filled a popular desire to know more about the celebrated author.

  And yet, the fact that Homer has a biography (or several) does not, of course, prove that he existed. ‘Some say,’ wrote Thomas De Quincey in 1841, ‘there never was such a person as Homer.’ ‘No such person as Homer! On the contrary,’ say others, ‘there were scores.’28 It may be that Homer was born not as a man but as a symbol, the name that the ancient bards gave to their own art, turning a timeless activity into a legendary primordial person, into a celebrated common ancestor of all poets, the first and the best. When Parry interviewed the Balkan guzlars and asked them for the names of the most admirable among them, several mentioned a master-bard called Isak or Huso, a prodigy who lived longer than any normal man and whose birthplace was disputed. His repertory was immense and it included all the best-known songs, but none of the witnesses had ever attended one of his recitals, only heard about it from other sources.29 It is possible that Homer was born by much the same process.

  What qualities might explain Homer’s early celebrity? Homer’s poems offered two unifying elements to the scattered Greek cities of Homer’s age: common stories and common gods. ‘Now in the contest between city and tribe,’ noted the historian Gilbert Murray, ‘the Olympian gods [Homer’s pantheon] had one great advantage. They were not tribal or local, and all other gods were. They were by this time international, with no strong roots anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some local god; they were full of fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to be made “Poliouchoi”, “City-holders”, of any particular city, still more ready to be “Hellânioi”, patrons of all Hellas.’30 Homer’s poems became the canonical texts that offered a cosmopolitan view of the gods and heroes; they were the reference against which documentary truths and metaphysical arguments could be tested. Two schools of thought reflected this dual reading. On the one hand, historians argued that the legends were versions, more or less accurate, of factual evidence. The historian Strabo, for example, argued that the Odyssey was written to teach geography: ‘Homer must be excused (…) if he mixed fantastic elements in his stories because they are meant to inform and instruct.’31 On the other hand, the philosophers contended that the legends were allegories which concealed a sort of poetic proof. The Stoics in particular used Homer to illustrate and validate their discourse; Aristotle, however, refused to allegorize the mythical stories.32

  ‘For the philosopher,’ concludes the historian Paul Veyne, ‘myth was an allegory of philosophical truths. For the historians, it was a minor deformation of historical truths.’33 For both, Homer was the unavoidable reference. These two views of Homer echoed far into the future, both in the explorations and discoveries of the numerous schools of archaeologists who, following the early Greek historians, believed that the stories were true and that Homer described the events and their setting with illuminating accuracy, and in the countless allegorical readings that surface in every age, from the versions taught in Roman schools to present-day mirrorings of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

  By the sixth century BC, Homer had become not only the greatest of poets but the master whose view informed the entire Greek conception of the world, both of mortals and of gods, or of mortals who try to be heroes among gods who don’t shine for their exemplary conduct. ‘Homer and Hesiod,’ wrote the philosopher Xenophanes, ‘have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adultery and cheating on one another.’34 In this uncertain universe, as Homer made clear, human beings had to depend on their own resources and wit, not on the unreliable divine behaviour. As a cautionary tale, few episodes are more atrocious than the gods’ dealings with the Trojan Hector in the Iliad. At first, Hector is helped by Zeus and by Apollo; then, at a certain arbitrary point, they abandon him to his own luck. Worse still, the goddess Athena deceives him by passing herself off as one of Hector’s own brothers, and encourages him to fight Achilles who she knows will certainly kill him.35 Homer’s gods can be vicious and deceitful.

  However, in certain cases (though not by any means in all), the behaviour of Homer’s mortal heroes was something to which a just man might aspire.
A professional ethos was developed among the Greek warrior class, recognizing that cool-headed tactics and loyal comradeship made for better fighters, and so it became important to study in Homer the errors of Agamemnon, the devotion of Achilles to Patroclus, the resolution of Hector, the mulled-over experience of Nestor, the wily strategies of Ulysses. In this context, a formal education was deemed impossible without reference to Homer’s work. The young Alcibiades, during a visit to a grammar-school c. 430 BC, asked the teacher for one of Homer’s books and, being told that there was none, gave the poor man a blow with his fist.36 A school without Homer was not a school: worse, it was a learning place without the means of learning excellence.

  CHAPTER 3

  Among the Philosophers

  [Homer’s work] forms a world in itself… which one can study to the end of time and still feel that one is inside an epitome of the entire literary cosmos.

  Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings, 1975

  Though Homer might have been ‘best and most divine’ for Socrates (or rather for Plato, who made Socrates pronounce this encomium), he also presented a philosophical dilemma. In the Republic, Plato draws an analogy between human beings and the societies they build, society seen as a reflection of the human soul, divided into the governing, the military and the merchant classes, which loosely correspond to human intelligence, courage and appetite (though this is a gross simplification of Plato’s complex and open view.)1 From this ideal state, the artisans of the false must be banned: that is to say, those who make images of images have no place in a well-regulated world, since they produce nothing that is true. An artist will, for example, create a couch in a picture or in a poem, inspired by the couch a cabinet-maker makes, in turn inspired by the primordial idea of a couch created by the godhead. Even Homer (and here begins Plato’s battle with the poet he most admires) cannot be allowed in the ideal republic because, not only does he put forward images that are untrue, he presents men and women with whose faults we sympathize, gods and goddesses whom we must judge as fallible. Literature, Plato says (and for Plato, Homer is its greatest literary craftsman), feeds that part in our soul that relishes ‘contemplating the woes of others’, praising and pitying someone who, though ‘claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief’. This ‘is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight’ and, to avoid it, we should ‘disdain the poem altogether’; otherwise, ‘after feeding fat the emotion of pity there, it is not easy to restrain it in our own suffering.’2 (‘That’s the price we have to pay for stability,’ says the Platonist Controller in Aldous Huxley’s 1933 utopia, Brave New World. ‘You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed high art.’ )3 Because, as Socrates tells his listeners, ‘high art’ especially corrupts us, whether we ourselves are good or bad, by pretending to offer spiritual enlightenment and a vicarious experience of the world, since in doing so it prevents us from seeking true self-knowledge and self-criticism. We think we know who we are by believing that we see our reflection in the characters of Achilles, Ulysses, Hecuba, Penelope. We stop defending Troy: we know that the walls will crumble. We stop searching for Ithaca: we know that, whatever we do, we will reach home at last.