Let others fashion from bronze more lifelike, breathing images –
For so they shall – and evoke living faces from marble;
Others excel as orators, others track with their instruments
The planets circling in heaven and predict when stars will appear.
But, Romans, never forget that government is your medium!
Be this your art: – to practise men in the habit of peace,
Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors.15
Hearing that Virgil was hard at work, Augustus was eager to know exactly what the poem was about. He may have suggested to his favourite poet that an epic on the origins of Rome, glorifying of course his own rule, might be welcome. We know that Augustus wrote to Virgil from Spain, asking to see even a fragment. Virgil declined. Years later, Virgil agreed to read out loud to the Emperor three books of the first half of the poem: the fall of Troy, the death of Dido, and Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld. We know (because Virgil’s secretary Eros tells us) that he wrote a page in the morning and then corrected it throughout the day until little was left of the original lines. He compared this method to a bear giving birth to her cubs and then licking them into shape. It isn’t obvious that Augustus understood him: ‘How could you ask that Caesar’s pride admit the concept of metaphor, since Caesar never accepted the humility of perception?’ asked Hermann Broch in his novel The Death of Virgil.16
Virgil was a keen, scholarly reader of Homer, not only of the poems but also of the ancient commentaries. Homer had told, first, of the siege of Troy, distilling the agonies of a tenyear-long war into forty days of fighting; and second, the return of one of the warriors, clever Ulysses, through a sea of troubles to his home in Ithaca. Virgil, accordingly, structured his poem in two parts: the first (Aeneas’s flight and travels) based on the Odyssey; the second (his battles leading up to the foundation of Rome) on the Iliad. Legend has it that, before he died, Virgil asked his friends to burn the manuscript. Whether he was dissuaded or whether his friends chose to disobey, the book was soon after edited and widely distributed. Certain readers have felt that the second half of the Aeneid has something a little disappointing about it, less because Virgil did not have the time to polish it than, as Peter Levi has perceptively pointed out, because Virgil ‘did not understand the fundamental principle in Homer’s world, that poetry belongs to the defeated and the dead’. In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas the hero was necessarily a victor, founder of the dynasty whose present inheritor was Augustus himself. There are no true victors in Homer.
For a number of reasons, Aeneas was the obvious Homeric hero to choose as the protagonist of a Roman epic, someone who intuits that, as Virgil has it, ‘An age shall come, as the years glide by,/When the children of Troy shall enslave the children of Agamemnon.’17 Aeneas was the inheritor of the glory of Troy, a fate attributed to him implicitly in the Iliad where Achilles taunts ‘the great-hearted fighter’ and asks him whether his courage will really allow him to challenge Achilles ‘In hopes of ruling your stallion-breaking friends/ and filling Priam’s throne?’18 Aeneas was a well-known hero: his escape from Troy, bearing his father Anchises on his back and leading away his infant son, was depicted in many frescoes, painted vases and mosaics, and was therefore constantly present in the popular imagination. Early writers19 had continued his adventures all the way from Troy to the shores of Italy, and had suggested that he had conveniently settled in the neighbourhood of what was to become Rome. Already in the third century BC, the Latin poet Naevius had referred to Aeneas as ‘the father of the Roman people’20 and two centuries later, Lucretius began his lengthy poem On the Nature of Things by invoking the ‘Mother of the Aeneadae, darling of men and gods, increase-giving Venus’.21
Homer’s heroes have a pleasing complexity, a randomness of character that troubles the reader with endlessly rich interpretations. Outside allegorical readings, the psychology of Achilles, for instance, or of Ulysses, is rewardingly bewildering. Achilles – sulking, egotistical, brave, faithful in his loves, lacking compassion towards his victims but capable of magnanimity, ‘a kill-ease’ to use Lewis Carroll’s pun22 – has a kaleidoscope personality that never quite resolves itself, not even at the end of the book. Even his essential anger is multifaceted, impossible to define exactly. His anger at Agamemnon’s military incompetence is not the same as his anger at Agamemnon’s insulting treatment, which is again quite unlike his feelings after the death of Patroclus. ‘Wrath’, ‘anger’, even ‘mania’ have been chosen to define the passion that triggers the narrative, each word qualified in turn to give it a particular tone.
Different translators have rendered the first line of the Iliad into English in different ways. In 1616, George Chapman, whose translations so impressed John Keats, conceived it as: ‘Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that impos’d/Infinite sorrows on the Greeks.’23 Thomas Tickell, in 1715, suggested ‘Achilles’ fatal Wrath, whence Discord rose/That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber’d Woes,/O Goddess sing.’24 Alexander Pope published in 1715–20 a controversial Iliad that began like this: ‘Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring/Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!’25 In 1880, Henry Dunbar translated it as: ‘The baneful wrath of Peleus’ son, Achilles, goddess sing.’26 Among the twentieth-century translations, A. T. Murray gave the line as ‘The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles.’27 W. H. D. Rowse summed it up as ‘An angry man – there is my story: the bitter rancour of Achilles, prince of the house of Peleus.’28 H. D. F. Kitto’s version was: ‘Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son.’29 Richard Lattimore’s read: ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus/and its devastation.’30 Robert Lowell came up with: ‘Sing for me, Muse, the mania of Achilles/ that cast a thousand sorrows on the Greeks.’31 Robert Fagles, whose translations are used in this book, rendered it as ‘Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.’
A similar sampling of tempers (and equal problems of range) arise in every language into which Homer has been translated. Juan de Mena, in 1519, translating from a Latin version, was ploddingly explicit: ‘Divinal musa, canta conmigo, Omero, la ira del sobervio hijo de Peleo – es dezir Archiles’32 (‘Divine muse, sing with me, Homer, the ire of the haughty son of Peleus, that is to say, Achilles’). In 1793, the German Johann Heinrich Voss began his Ilias with the simplest rendition: ‘Singe den Zorn, o Göttin, des Peleiaden Achilleus’33 (‘Sing the wrath, O Goddess, of the Peleian Achilles’). Almost a hundred years later, Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle attempted le mot juste: ‘Chante, Déesse, du Pèléide Akhilleus la colère désastreuse’34 (‘Sing, Goddess, of the Peleian Akhilleus the disastrous wrath’). The twentieth-century Brazilian poet Haroldo do Campos was concise: ‘A ira, Deusa, celebra do Peleio Aquiles’35 (‘The anger, Goddess, celebrate, of Peleian Achilles’). ‘To call Achilles’ anger “terrible”,’ wrote the nineteenth-century scholar Juan Valera, commenting on a later Spanish version that spoke of ‘terrible wrath’, ‘is to translate badly. [The word Homer uses] comes from the Greek verb “to lose, to destroy” and means “fatal, pernicious, unfortunate, harmful”, all of which are not terrible but something more than terrible. There are terrible things in the world that lead to no harm whatsoever, but Achilles’ anger was not one of them. (…) The sound Apollo’s arrow makes when shot is terrible, the eyes of Minerva shine in a terrible manner, a terrible fire burns over the head of magnanimous Achilles. Finally Priam, when Helen comes to see him, seems in her eyes venerable and terrible, and yet Priam intends no harm to Helen, nor does he hurt her in any way; rather he treats her with fatherly kindness, even though he fills her with terror and shame. Who has been harmful is Helen, harmful to Priam, without for that reason having been terrible.’36
Why is anger, Achilles’ anger, the subject of the Iliad? Because, in Homer’s telling, it is the driving force of the war, without which there would be no story. And yet, Achilles’ anger is neither constant nor clear.
It covers a vast range of angers, and Homer carefully describes the circumstances under which they arise – fury at Agamemnon’s insult, pique at the suggestion of giving up Briseis, spite when begged to join his comrades, sullenness when Patroclus asks to borrow his armour, frenzy at Patroclus’ killing, rage against the assassin Hector. Even when dead, Achilles is not rid of his anger. In the Underworld, when Ulysses visits him, he bridles at the suggestion that death might be a good place.37 The historian Nancy Sherman, discussing the make-up of the military mind, argues that, though anger is as much a part of war as weapons and armour, it is of military value only when held in control. The Stoics, though they believed that anger, like all emotions, is a voluntary state, denied that it is an acceptable warrior-like quality, since it distorts our view of the world. Sherman notes that, to temper the feeling of anger, the Stoics proposed an apatheia, ‘a freedom from passions in which there is no frenzy or rage, no annoyance or bitterness, no moral outrage.’38 In the nineteenth century, Stendhal associated this steadfast state with the heroes of Greece and Rome. ‘I’ve forgotten to be angry!’ says Fabrice in The Charterhouse of Parma. ‘Am I perhaps one of those great courageous beings of which antiquity has given the world a few examples? Am I a hero without knowing it?’39 If Fabrice is an ancient hero, he is certainly not a Homeric one. There is no apatheia among Homer’s heroic characters.
In Virgil, this variety of emotional traits is much simplified. Not that the psychology of the characters is less believable; it is only less ambiguous, with the exception perhaps of Queen Dido who casts her abused, mournful shadow well into our time. Aeneas, however, has appeared to some readers as too single-minded, too word-perfect. ‘We will always admire more the Achilles described by Homer, with all his defects, than the perfect hero incarnated by the Aeneas of Virgil, because of the illusion and persuasion that render the former more believable,’ observed the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi,40 careful reader of both.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the heroes are in the hands of gods who, if not mad, at least behave in an erratic manner. In the Aeneid, because their designs, however whimsical, have already been laid out by Homer, the gods seem to have a clearer purpose, so that the misfortunes that befall Aeneas or the difficult decisions he must make (to leave Dido, for example) acquire a specific meaning in the fateful story. In Homer, the funeral of Hector and the arrival in Ithaca are powerful moments in the dramas, and the last ones, but they are not conclusions. The implicitly announced foundation of Rome is not only the conclusion of the Aeneid; it is its raison d’être. ‘How shall it end now?’ asks Jupiter to Juno in the final lines. And then, following Juno’s answer, the god commands:
‘All will be Latins, speaking
One tongue. From this blend of Italian and Trojan blood shall arise
A people surpassing all men, nay even the gods, in godliness.’41
Augustus could not have wished for a better ending.
CHAPTER 5
Christian Homer
I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt;
in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the
redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the
message of Art that has made these hands blessed.
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, 1906
After Virgil, and from the very first centuries of the Christian era, the Church fathers attempted, not so much to reconcile Homer with the godliness of the authority of the vera religio, but to find in the tenets of that religion gaps into which Homer might fit. God had created the book of the world in which we are all written, and His Son had corrected in his blood our errors; now the new stories were forced to share the shelf which until then had been allotted exclusively to Homer.
For the great scholars and readers of the early Church, the apparent conflict between the old pagan literature and the dogma of the new faith presented a difficult intellectual problem. One of the most learned of these Christian scholars, St Jerome, attempted throughout his long life to reconcile the two. Jerome realized that he could never honestly disclaim Homer as his own beginning, nor could he ignore the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure Homer’s books had given him. Instead, he could create a hierarchy, a gradus ad Parnassum of which Homer and the ancients were the necessary grounding, and the Bible the highest peak.
Jerome was born in Dalmatia around 342. Though his parents were Christian, he wasn’t baptized until his eighteenth birthday. He studied Latin in Rome under the guidance of the celebrated scholar Aelius Donatus, author of the most popular of medieval grammar books, the Ars grammatica. Thanks to Donatus, Jerome became thoroughly familiar with the great names of antiquity, names which he later quoted copiously in his writings. In his thirties, he travelled to Syria where he learned Hebrew from a distinguished rabbi and lived among the hermits in the deserts near Antioch. He was ordained priest but did not exercise his office; instead, he became secretary to Pope Damasus I who ordered him to revise the Latin translation of the New Testament, from the Hebrew and Greek.1 Jerome did more than revise it: he rewrote most of it, as well as translating afresh a large part of the Old Testament. The colossal achievement, the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, ensured his intellectual fame, and became the standard version of Scripture for the next fifteen centuries. The long hours he toiled on this commission, urged on by his impatient patron, the meticulous research he undertook to overcome the obstacles presented by the original, and the pittance he received for all his work, inspired the Catholic Church to name him the patron saint of translators.
In an autobiographical letter to a friend, Jerome recounts a dream which soon became famous. To follow his religious vocation and in compliance with the precepts of the Church, Jerome had cut himself off from his family and renounced the luxuries (especially ‘dainty food’) to which he was accustomed. What he could not bring himself to do was to abandon the library that, ‘with great care and toil’, he had put together in Rome; racked by guilt, he would mortify himself and fast but ‘only that I might afterwards read Cicero’. A short time later, Jerome fell deathly ill. Fever caused him to dream and he dreamt that his soul was suddenly caught and hauled before God’s judgement-seat. A voice asked him who he was, and he replied: ‘I am a Christian.’ ‘Thou liest,’ said the voice, ‘thou art a follower of Cicero, not of Christ. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”.’2 Overcome with dread, Jerome promised God that ‘if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied thee’. But the great oath was too onerous and impossible to keep: every reader’s memory furnishes him with remembered books, whether he desires it or not, and even if Jerome had firmly resolved never to read worldly books again, the ones read in his youth would open their pages for him, calling up line after line in front of his mind’s eye, and he would have broken his oath through powers beyond him. Jerome then changed his promise to one that seemed more reasonable: ‘to read the books of God with a zeal greater than I had previously given to the books of men’.3 Jerome promised God to make use of the ancient authors in order to better read His word.
In his childhood, Jerome had befriended a boy called Rufinus who, in later years, became his strongest intellectual opponent. Rufinus, intent on persecuting his one-time friend, prompted a Roman orator called Magnus, to raise once more the question of pagan versus Christian culture, and ask Jerome why he so often made use of the writings of the ancients in his ecclesiastical work, ‘contaminating the sacred with the profane’. Jerome answered with an impassioned defence of the classics, giving arguments that were used for centuries afterwards. Jerome suggested that every reader, by culling and interpreting, transforms an old text into a new one, one capable of shedding light upon problems ignored by the original author. ‘My efforts,’ wrote Jerome of his readings, ‘promote the advantage of Christ’s family, my so-called defilement with an alien increases the number of my fellow servants.’4 Above all, were not the words of Christ to be treated w
ith the uttermost respect, and therefore translated into the best and purest words available? And was not the best and purest tongue that of the old masters, whose devices and styles needed therefore to be studied? Erasmus, who annotated Jerome’s letters, pointedly asked: ‘Is the profession of Christ at odds with eloquence? If Cicero speaks eloquently about his gods, what prevents a Christian from also speaking eloquently about holiness and true religion?’5
A contemporary of St Jerome, St Augustine, was also, in his youth, a great reader of the classics, but when the problem of conflicting cultures presented itself to him, his answer was not that of Jerome’s. Augustine was born in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, in 354. His mother was a Christian, and though she tried to teach her son the faith of her Church, he was clearly more drawn to the old stories of Greece and Rome – more Rome than Greece since, as he tells us, Greek held little charm for him as a child, and even as an adult he was not able to understand the language fully.6 Perhaps because he could not read it properly, he disliked Greek literature. ‘Homer,’ he says, ‘as well as Virgil, was a skilful spinner of yarns and he is most delightfully imaginative. Nevertheless, I found him little to my taste. I suppose,’ he adds apologetically, ‘Greek boys think the same about Virgil when they are forced to study him as I was forced to study Homer.’7
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 5