According to Socrates, Homer was not an educator; he did not know how to make men better and he possessed no real knowledge, only the art of imitation, which is why he was neglected by his contemporaries. Had Homer and the other great poets been able ‘to help men achieve excellence’, he asks, would his fellow men ‘have suffered him and Hesiod to roam about rhapsodizing and would they not have clung to them far rather than to their gold, and constrained them to dwell with them in their homes, or failing to persuade them, would themselves have escorted them wheresoever they went until they should have sufficiently imbibed their culture?’ Plato must have conceived these words tongue firmly planted in his cheek, thinking of the fate of poor Socrates, the greatest educator of all, condemned to death by the society he strove to make better. Obviously Plato knew (all artists know) that society, whatever pittance it may accord to grants, prizes and memorials, always fails to honour and reward adequately those who, through craftsmanship and imagination, strive to make us better, and that its citizens, wherever and whenever, will always cling to their gold rather than to their goldsmith. As in all his dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as pursuing an argument to whatever corner it might lead, making no absolute claims and reaching no unimpeachable conclusions. ‘I cannot agree with you,’ says Hippias to Socrates in another of the dialogues. Socrates answers: ‘Nor can I agree with myself, Hippias, and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument.’4 There speaks a man not afraid of allowing his thoughts absolute freedom to explore.
Whether convincing or not, Plato’s argument against Homer has haunted our societies since he first put it forward. It is the great paradox: we build societies in order to become happier and wiser; art, even the greatest art, grants us only the vicarious impression of both. Homer, who first and best created for us the spectacle of human shadows in constant battle, longing, suffering and finally dying, is of all the most guilty, and must be held responsible for his progeny. When the Curate and the Barber decide to burn Don Quixote’s library because, they believe, the books are responsible for the knight’s madness, they come upon the Amadís de Gaula, the earliest of all novels of chivalry printed in Spain. ‘As the dogmatizer of such an evil sect,’ the Curate thunders, ‘we must, without any excuse, condemn it to the flames.’ But, counters the Barber, ‘it is also the best of all the books written in this genre and thus, as unique of its kind, it must be pardoned.’5 The paradox is apparent in Plato: for all of art’s supposedly noxious influence, Homer retains pride of place in Plato’s library, surfacing at every occasion to illuminate a passage or provide a poignant reference: there are 331 references to Homer and his works in Plato’s Dialogues. ‘Do you yourself not feel [poetry’s] magic and especially when Homer is her interpreter?’ asks one of those who have listened to Socrates’ arguments. ‘Greatly,’ Socrates answers. And at the end of Book IX, when one of the participants observes that such an ideal state as the Republic can be found in no place on earth, Plato lends Socrates an implicit reference to Homer that, by its very use, undermines the severity of the explicit ban. ‘It makes no difference whether it exists or ever will come into being,’ says Socrates. That is to say, it does not matter whether the Republic is built of stones and mortar or whether it remains an ideal, ‘a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen.’ What matters to Plato is the truth of the model, just as in the Iliad, for example, what matters is not the tragic outcome itself, but the ‘model’ upon which the battle has been fought, as to us, its readers, the ‘models’ of life set out in the two poems. These ideas, via Plato, will be the Homeric inheritance of the justice-seeking Don Quixote, of Dostoevsky’s idiot prince, even of Kafka’s Josef K and of Melville’s Ahab, each searching for the larger shape of his struggles and journeys within the little patch of universe he has been allotted. This then is Plato’s (perhaps reluctant) reading of Homer: that our life must be lived to the best of our ethical abilities.
With Aristotle, the figure of the anecdotal man – the old, blind, wandering bard – faded into that of the literate, inspired poet. Homer came to mean his works, whether written by the poet himself or set down for posterity by others. For Aristotle too, Homer was the ultimate poetic reference, and not as an instance of the dangerous dream-life but as a craftsman’s model, the example to be followed by those who aspired to high art, in tragedy as well as comedy. ‘As in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too laid down the main lines of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire.’6 For Aristotle, Homer was not the ancient singer but the author of established texts, a master fully in control of his creation, and both the Iliad and the Odyssey (as well as a now lost mockheroic poem called Margites) were exemplary solid works not subject to the fallible memory or the imperfect technique of the bards charged with performing them.
Though implicit references to Homer’s books go back to the mid-seventh century BC, in the works of poets such as Alcman of Sardinia, Archilochus of Paros and Tyrtaeus of Attica, the earliest acknowledged readings date from two centuries after his books were supposedly composed. According to Cicero, Homer’s books were given their definitive written form in Athens under the tyrant Pisistratus, in the sixth century BC.7 The first known commentary on Homer (arguing that his books were allegorical, not historical accounts) is by a contemporary of Pisistratus, Theagenes of Rhegium, of whom we know nothing except that he wrote a priggish poem advising a youth called Cyrnus to stick with the aristocratic party and avoid the nasty democrats. In the fourth century BC, the Attic orator Lycurgus, says Milton in the Areopagitica, ‘was so addicted to elegant learning as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer’,8 presumably edited for the common reader. Four centuries later, commentaries on Homer were already so abundant and detailed, that sixty-two lines from the Iliad (the famous ‘Catalogue of Ships’) provided a certain scholar, Demetrius of Scepsis, with material for thirty volumes, now lost.9
Not only scholars knew their Homer. Greek colonists exported his books to their many outposts. In Italy, about the time of the foundation of Rome in the eighth century BC, Homer was deemed an essential part of a cultured person’s world. The tomb of a twelve-year-old boy discovered in the Bay of Naples held, among various objects his parents had placed there to console the child in the afterlife, a cup inscribed with three lines of Greek. The first line is difficult to decipher, but the second and third read:
I am the cup of Nestor, a joy to drink from,
but anyone drinking from this cup will be struck at once
with desire for lovely-crowned Aphrodite.10
The reference is to the Iliad: Achilles, seeing that the Trojans have pushed the Greek army back to their camp, sends his friend Patroclus to find out what is happening. Old King Nestor receives him in his tent where drink and food has been set out, notably a splendid cup,
studded with golden nails, fitted with handles,
four all told and two doves perched on each,
heads bending to drink and made of solid gold
and twin supports ran down to form the base.
An average man would strain to lift it off the table
when it was full, but Nestor, old as he was,
could hoist it up with ease.11
The cup placed in the tomb might have served at drinking parties where participants would demonstrate their ‘heroic strength’ by lifting it and perhaps quoting the appropriate Homeric lines. A moving comparison is implied between old Nestor, still able to lift the cup, and the boy who died before being able to demonstrate his manly strength.
CHAPTER 4
Virgil
Virgil, it appears, was the first – in literature, at least – to apply the linear principle: his hero never returns; he always departs… Had I been writing The Divine Comedy, I would have placed
this Roman in Paradise: for outstanding services to the linear principle, into its logical conclusion.
Joseph Brodsky, ‘Flight From Byzantium’, 1985
By the third and second centuries BC, Homer’s poems were being studied at the Library of Alexandria by remarkable scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and, perhaps the most erudite of all, the grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace. The editing method they followed, by and large, was this: first, the authorship of a text was historically verified; the text was then meticulously edited and divided into books or chapters; finally, commentaries, exegeses and scholia were gathered and annotated to facilitate its interpretation. Zenodotus began work on Homer’s poems by collating various copies of a presumed lost original. He deleted obviously ‘foreign’ elements, marked questionable verses with a horizontal stroke to the left of a particular line, and placed an asterisk next to those passages about which there might be some doubt, but which, in his learned opinion, had indeed been composed by Homer.1 Aristarchus revised Zenodotus’ work and added his own learned commentaries. For philological reasons, Aristarchus suggested that certain sections of the poems were later additions: among others, the story of the nocturnal expedition during which the Trojan spy Dolon is captured in the Iliad, Book X, and the 120-odd verses at the end of Book XXIII of the Odyssey, in which Ulysses and Penelope, lying in bed, tell each other their adventures. Contemporary research has tended to agree with him.2 Aristarchus’ painstaking erudition became legendary, so that, in his wake, any exacting critic became known as an aristarchus. Thanks to the efforts of all these scholars, the texts of Homer’s poems were largely stabilized; later work done in Byzantium, during the early Middle Ages, completed the work of the Alexandrians.
Available now in authoritative editions, Homer became the inspiration for the first Greek novelists who, from the first century BC to the fifth century ad, produced a series of popular love stories (‘pathos erotikon’) for which they adopted not only Homer’s subjects and themes, but especially his storytelling techniques and stylistic choices. Chariton, Xenophon, Longus (author of the famous pastoral story Daphnis and Chloë ) and Heliodorus made use of Homeric narrative devices such as the first-person account that Ulysses delivers at the Phaeacian court in Books IX to XII of the Odyssey, the shifting points of view from the particular to the general and vice versa in the Iliad and the beginning in medias res, in the middle of the story.3 Thanks to them, these complex ways of creating character and plot, and of granting the reader emotion and conviction, became established as the primordial elements of fiction-telling.
In Rome, the Iliad and Odyssey were thought of as models to be copied or translated, to be then interpreted as allegories or taught as moral stories. ‘What happened’ became both history and fiction, fact and symbol. In the third century BC, Livius Andronicus, a Greek captive from Tarentum, produced a version of the Odyssey in Latin which Horace was to judge, 250 years later, as archaic, harsh and vulgar.4 Nevertheless, the book became greatly successful and was used as a school text for the next three centuries. As if Greek history had been not only translated but transmigrated into the history of Rome, Roman children were introduced to Homer at the very start of their schooling. Commenting on the difficulty first-year law students experienced at the Roman court, Pliny the Younger wrote that ‘boys begin their career at the bar with Chancery cases just as they start with Homer in school: in both places they place the hardest first.’5 Children were taught that Ulysses ignored the Sirens in the same way the soul should ignore the senses (the image was so popular that it appeared on tombstones),6 and that Achilles’ anger showed how bad temper always turns against us. Horace, who learned Homer by heart at school, under his teacher’s cane,7 listed in one of his Epistles a number of these moral lessons and concluded, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that through such stories ‘The Greeks must expiate their rulers’ folly’.8
Though Livius Andronicus introduced Homer to the Latin reader, it was Virgil who made Homer a Latin author by adoption. Virgil’s Aeneid, perhaps the greatest Roman literary achievement, is explicitly modelled on Homer’s poems, and if Virgil owes an immense debt to Homer, the reverse is also true, because after Virgil, Homer acquired a new identity, that of Rome’s earliest myth-maker. During the first Roman centuries, three legendary figures competed for the position of founder of the city: Romulus who, with his twin brother Remus, was supposed to have been suckled by a shewolf, Ulysses the traveller, and Aeneas, the survivor of Troy. It was Marcus Terentius Varro, ‘the most learned of Romans’,9 according to the rhetorician Quintilian, who, in the first century BC, established Aeneas as the winner. Following the genealogy granted him by Homer (‘Aeneas whom the radiant Aphrodite bore Anchises/down the folds of Ida, a goddess bedded with a man’)10 Varro established a detailed list of the ports of call on Aeneas’s route from Troy (Ilion) to Italy and confirmed the claim of Julius Caesar that his family, the gens Iuilia, were descended from the goddess of love via the Trojan refugee.11 But it was Virgil who transformed the legend into something resembling history, lending the defeated Trojans a posthumous victory over their enemy. Thanks to Virgil, the works of Homer, which had seemed until that point to be merely stories (albeit masterly) of battling and travel, were read after Virgil as inspired premonitions of the world to come: first of Rome and its imperial power, and later of the advent of Christianity and beyond.
Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro) was born in the Etruscan town of Andes, near Mantua, on 15 October 70 BC: his family name was probably Etruscan; his first name, a conventional Roman tag. Though his earliest biographies, written long after his death, made him out to be the son of a poor itinerant potter who married the daughter of one of his employers, Virgil was in fact a Roman citizen by birth, whose family held official posts of some importance in the Roman administration. During all of his childhood and youth, of which we know very little, Italy was ravaged by civil war, first in the struggles for power between Marius and Sula, then between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Only in the year 31 BC, did the victory of Augustus at Actium put an end to the upheavals. Perhaps due to poor health, Virgil never held an administrative or military position, nor did he aspire to become a lawyer or a senator. He never married.
At the age of seventeen, Virgil left the countryside for Rome. An early short poem, in an anthology which may not be entirely by his hand, reveals Virgil’s intentions of abandoning youthful scribbles and dedicating himself to serious studies instead:
Leave me Muses, you too, goodbye to you,
Sweet Muses, because I will confess the truth,
Sweet you have been, and yet you could sometimes
Revisit my papers: decently: not often.12
In Rome, the young Octavius (who was to become the emperor Augustus) may have been Virgil’s patron; in that case, it was probably for him that Virgil composed his Eclogues in the manner of the Greek poet Theocritus. The Eclogues made him famous. He was recognized and hailed in the streets, a painful experience for a shy man, who in such cases would seek refuge in the nearest house. Life in Rome became too exhausting and Virgil retired to Naples, where he spent most of his remaining years. In 19 BC, he set off with Augustus on a trip to Greece, but he soon became seriously ill and returned to die in Brindisi.
Virgil wrote slowly: the Eclogues took him three or four years; the Georgics, dedicated to Augustus’ chief minister, the rich Maecenas, seven or eight. We know that Augustus read the Georgics around 29 BC, when Virgil was just over forty, and, whether through imperial encouragement or through a private sense of having acquired the necessary skills, Virgil now felt ready to undertake a more ambitious project. At about this time, he started work on a new poem which, like his two previous books, would carry a Greek name: the Aeneid.
At home, Virgil must have learned some Greek together with his Latin, since there were many Greek emigrés in Tuscany, but it was the poet Parthenius of Nicaea, author of a catalogue of erotic myths, who is said to have taught him in depth the language
of Homer.13 The Roman province of Greece, known as Achaea (a word that echoes Homer’s designation), was for the Romans both a subservient colony and the ancient source of their own culture, with all the hierarchical implications of this dual identity. For the Romans of Virgil’s time, Greece was attractive and exotic: the cultured Romans who travelled there visited the temples and palaces, studied the religious mysteries, brought back art objects to decorate their own households, and imitated the ‘Greek manner’ by growing beards and taking boyfriends. In all this, however, they ostentatiously remained the masters.14 In the Aeneid, Aeneas’s father warns his son never to forget that, however magnificent the art and culture of other civilizations (namely that of Greece), Romans are, and will remain, the rulers. Many an imperialistic credo is built on a similar distinction and has for today’s readers a familiar ring:
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 4