In Carthage, where he was sent to complete his education, Augustine set up house with a young woman with whom he had a son; following his parents’ orders, he left her to marry another woman whom his mother had picked for him, but the second marriage did not take place. Augustine became a teacher, worked in Rome and then in Milan, where he was instructed by the aged Ambrose, an old friend of his mother’s. In his youth, Augustine had been seduced by the Manichaeans, whose doctrine proclaimed that the universe was the fruit of two independent principles, Good and Evil, permanently in conflict. Now, under the influence of Ambrose and of the writings of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, he abjured the Manichaeans (he was to become one of their fiercest enemies), accepted the religion of his mother, and decided to devote his life to God. He returned to Africa, where he founded a religious community. In 396 he was made bishop of Hippo. The Vandals invaded North Africa in 428 and two years later besieged Augustine’s city. Augustine was then seventy-six years old. He died in the fourth month of the siege, on 29 August 430.
All his adult life, Augustine was conscious of the haunting shadow cast by the books he’d read in his past; he knew that his old love for Virgil coloured all his reading and writing, and the alluring influence of the pagan classics troubled him deeply. Horace (whom Augustine had also read in his youth and much admired) had written an epistle to a young student of rhetoric, Lollius Maximus, telling him that he was re-reading Homer, and that, in his opinion, Homer, better than any rhetorician, could show us ‘what is honest and what dishonest, what is useful and what is noxious’. ‘Even now that you are still young and your heart pure,’ Horace urged, ‘take my advice, trust him who is wiser than you. The new cask preserves long afterwards the scent of the wine poured into it.’8 Augustine turned Horace’s words around and used them as a warning against allowing young children to read Virgil: ‘they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds,’ he wrote, ‘so that they may not easily forget him.’9 Horace, Augustine agreed, was right: the books we loved best in our youth keep haunting us throughout our life. Therefore, since he could not uproot them from his soul, he needed to find a method to convert these ancient stories into cautionary tales in spite of themselves, thereby satisfying both Augustine’s taste for good literature and his demand for higher morals – in effect, having his classical cake and eating it too. ‘Can any schoolmaster in his gown,’ Augustine asked, ‘listen unperturbed to a man who challenges him on his own ground and says “Homer invented these stories and attributed human sins to the gods. He would have done better to provide men with examples of divine goodness”? It would be nearer the truth to say that Homer certainly invented the tales but peopled them with wicked human characters in the guise of gods. In this way their wickedness would not be reckoned a crime, and all who did as they did could be shown to follow the example of the heavenly gods, not that of sinful mortals.’10
Augustine put his own advice into practice. The City of God, for example, begins with a long analysis of the various ways in which the ancient authors described and commented on the fall of Troy – authors other than Homer, since the Iliad ends before the destruction of the city. This classic example allowed Augustine better to praise the building of a heavenly city, and to cite the heroes of Greece and Rome in order to enhance the greater example of the Christian martyrs. The arguments are mostly convincing because Augustine is an extraordinary rhetorician well versed in the methods of Cicero and yet, at the same time, the reader feels that the scent of the early wine has not vanished entirely, and that the boy who wept for Dido, and ‘was sad not to be able to read the very things that made me sad’, is still there, lusting for his beloved books. In his attempt to reconcile past and present cultures, it wasn’t clear whether Augustine eventually came to understand that it wasn’t necessary to forgo either. For Christianity, the reading of the ancient authors lent the new faith a prehistory and a universality. For the ancient world, it meant continuity and transmission of intellectual experience.
Fifteen hundred years after Augustine, one of his distant readers, the German poet Heinrich Heine, gave the division between pagans and Christians yet another twist, forcing a choice between that which Homer and the Greeks represented – an archetypal conception of Beauty – and that which the Judaeo-Christian world sought to impose: a dogmatic and divinely revealed Truth. In the last poem he wrote, ‘For Mouche’, a fortnight before his death in Paris in 1856, Heine described a disturbing dream. Heine sees a dead man (Heine himself is that man) lying in an open sarcophagus, surrounded by bits of broken sculpture. The sarcophagus is decorated with scenes taken both from classical mythology and from the Old Testament. Suddenly, quarrelling voices break into the quiet of the place.
Oh, the argument will never end.
Always will Truth quarrel with Beauty.
The human host will always split
In two halves: Greeks and the Barbarians.11
CHAPTER 6
Other Homers
Achilles only exists because of Homer.
François-René de Chateaubriand,
Preface to Les Natchez, 1826
Almost a century and a half after Augustine’s death, a quaestor of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric and minister to three of his successors, Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, wrote a treatise on religious and civil education called Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum in which, for the first time, instructions were given on how to study the liberal arts in the context of the Christian doctrine. Time abbreviated both the author’s name and that of his book, which became known as Cassiodorus’ Institutiones and was considered an essential learning tool well into the Renaissance. The Institutiones is divided into two parts. The first is a guide to scriptural study and to the art of collecting and copying manuscripts; the second is an encyclopaedic treatment of the seven liberal arts. According to Cassiodorus, all the arts, ancient and modern, are to be found ‘in essence’ in the Holy Scriptures: all wisdom and all art comes from them, and even the pagan writers (such as Homer) received their illumination from the eternal Word of God, not yet revealed but ever-present. One of Cassiodorus’ early works is the Expositio Palmorum, a detailed and methodical examination of the Psalms. Here Cassiodorus analysed the text that would sustain the argument of the Institutiones. Did not Psalm 19 clearly say that ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ everywhere and in all time? Did it not declare that ‘There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard’? For Cassiodorus, anyone in any age was therefore capable of learning from that all-embracing voice.1
But which was the best language to learn this heavenly wisdom? In 324 ad, shortly before the birth of Augustine, the Emperor Constantine had transferred the seat of government to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, a city which was to become the centre of all political and cultural activities. By the eighth century, even though the laws of Byzantium, in order to satisfy both halves of the Empire, were being translated into Latin and Greek, only Greek was held to be the natural language of literature and philosophy, and therefore the business of monasteries and colleges. Children, from the age of eight on, were taught elements of Greek grammar not only through pious works but also by means of anthologies of the classics, including selections of Homer. After learning the rules of the language by heart, the student was supposed to compose poems and speeches imitating the ancient models. These formal tasks reached their absurd peak with a teaching exercise called the schedograph. This consisted of the dictation of a text with as many homonyms and rare words as possible, so that the student would have to learn the spelling of the first by context and of the second by memorizing an abstruse vocabulary. Memory played an important part in Byzantine education: after several years of schooling, students were expected to know the Iliad by heart.
Principal among the schools of higher learning was the Royal College of Constantinople whose president was pompously called the Sun of Science, while his twelve assistants, the twelve professors of the various faculti
es, were known as the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac. The College possessed a library of over 35,000 volumes, including many Greek works, among them a manuscript of Homer written on a roll of parchment 120 feet long, said to be the intestines of a fabulous serpent.
In the seventh century ad, Egypt had ceased to be part of the empire, and parchment began to replace the Egyptian papyrus, just as papyrus had, in the seventh century BC, as mentioned earlier, replaced parchment among the Greeks. The invention of lower case cursive allowed scribes to produce more copies at a lower cost, since fewer pages were needed to hold a given text. More readers were therefore able to become familiar with the whole of an original work, rather than with a selection compiled in an anthology, in order to transcribe or annotate it. For the Byzantines, the craft of literature was above all copy and gloss, and originality was deemed a worthless endeavour, except when displaying one’s knowledge of arcane words and phrases. A deliberate preciousness clung to the Byzantine appreciation of the classics, and the Greek writers of Constantinople imitated the ancient models without aspiring to either their charm or their power. ‘Their prose,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry: their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose. The tragic, epic and lyric muses were silent and inglorious: the bards of Constantinople seldom rose above a riddle or epigram, a panegyric or tale; they forgot even the rules of prosody; and with the melody of Homer yet resounding in their ears, they confound all measure of feet and syllables in the impotent strains which have received the name of political or city verses.’2
Gibbon’s judgement is perhaps too harsh. If the wordsmiths of Constantinople were not as admirable as their ancestors, they nevertheless produced some remarkable work, especially in the realms of history and biography, in which Homer’s influence was heard as a distant beat. For any educated person at the court, familiarity with some of Homer’s work was a mark of distinction. An anecdote recorded in the eleventh-century chronicle of Michel Psellus illustrates the point. During a court procession, an onlooker, seeing the beautiful imperial consort Sclerena go by, softly quoted the first part of a line from the Iliad, in which the Trojans, speaking of the beautiful Helen, say: ‘It were no shame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should suffer long for a woman such as she.’ At the time, Sclerena ‘gave no sign of having heard the words, but when the ceremony was over, she sought out the man who had uttered them and asked him what they meant. She repeated his quotation without a single mistake, pronouncing the words exactly as he had whispered them. As soon as he told her the story in detail, and the crowd showed its approval of his interpretation of the anecdote, as well as of the Homeric reference, she was filled with pride, and her flatterer was rewarded for his compliment.’3 Sclerena hadn’t read the Iliad, and yet, in her eyes, apposite knowledge of Homer granted the courtier a certain prestige.
By the end of the fourth century, the division between the Greek east and the Latin west half of the Empire became more evident. In the east, Church and state lent its citizens the sense of living in a divinely appointed Christian realm, while in the west, service to the emperor and service to the Christian authorities were seen as two separate duties. Intellectually, the east held as essential the traditional study of the classics, both Greek and Latin; in the west, classical scholarship was judged part and parcel of pagan beliefs. Therefore, while Homer continued to be edited, studied and read in Constantinople, in Rome he all but faded from the memory of readers. Many Roman Christians now believed that their intellectual duty was exclusively to the revealed New Word and felt no deep attachment to the old written culture; consequently, they may have experienced no compunction in throwing away the old papyrus scrolls in which the classical texts were preserved.4 While in the east, Bishop Athanasius told holy virgins ‘to have books in their hands at dawn’, in the west, Christians quoted Augustine who had written approvingly of holy men who lived through ‘faith, hope and charity – without books’.5
The dispute that had preoccupied Jerome and Augustine, between Roman Christianity and ancient Rome, was largely to blame for the neglect of classical culture. In 382, the statue of the goddess Victory, symbol of Rome’s glory since the times of Augustus, was removed from the altar of the senate house by imperial orders, to placate the Christians among the senators. The spokesman for the pagan majority was Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, father-in-law of the philosopher Boethius (both of whom, years later, under Ostrogothic rule, would be accused of treasonable dealings with Constantinople and tortured to death). Symmachus argued eloquently not for the suppression of Christianity but for Christian tolerance ‘of the age-old cult of his class’, noting that surely the emperor had nothing to gain by outlawing the rites of his own ancestors. ‘Was not Roman religion (and here is the heart of the matter) inextricably tied to Roman law? If one part of the heritage went, must not the others follow?’6 Symmachus’ quiet argument was answered by the bishop of Milan, Augustine’s instructor, St Ambrose. He accepted the points made by his opponent, and yet the question, he said, was not an intellectual but a political one. If the emperor agreed with the pagans, the bishops would withdraw their support of the government. The Christian threat won the battle.
When the Gothic king Alaric, who had invaded the Italian peninsula in 401, besieged and entered Rome nine years later, the fall of the city was perceived as a punishment willed by the ancient gods on the followers of the new one. The Goths too were Christians: they had been converted in the midfourth century by a Greek preacher called Ulfilas who, being a follower of the Arian heresy, taught that while God the Father was divine, Jesus his Son was not. For the Roman Christians, the fact that the invaders were heretics compounded the humiliation. It no longer seemed important even to attempt reconciliation with the pagan past. For a time, the ancient texts were still preserved and studied in monasteries and abbeys, and copied in both secular and religious workshops. But with the fall of the Gothic kingdom, after the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 and the beginning of the long wars that devastated the Italian peninsula, the culture of books, in which libraries were the traditional vessels for preserving the memory of a society, all but disappeared from everyday life.7 For a people who had undergone two sieges in the space of four decades, books became objects and relics rather than vessels for stories, and even the tale of the archetypal siege vanished into the obscure past. Homer became a monument, known by hearsay to exist somewhere and dutifully respected from afar.
In the east, however, Homer continued to be read and was recognized as part of the social imagination. Though only certain sections of the poems were quoted or glossed, and knowledge of his work was, by and large, reduced to a few set-pieces, Homer’s presence was felt across the whole cultural landscape. Perhaps a sense of this ghostly influence can be had by considering the many attempts to contradict, undermine and even deny his stories. Though Homer’s poems were, for the Byzantine scholars, exalted literature worthy of imitation, several other texts competed with them for pre-eminence, and these in turn gave rise to a vast secondary literature. According to the literary historian Proclus, probably writing in the second or fifth century ad, there existed a group of epic poems known as the Epic Cycle and composed in Homer’s time or earlier, from which Homer himself might have drawn his material. Of the six epics dealing with the Trojan War only a few quotations survive, but their titles and contents were preserved in a manuscript of the Iliad now in Venice.8 The longest is the Cypria, a sort of prequel to the Iliad, which begins with the Judgement of Paris, when Aphrodite promises the Trojan prince the love of Helen as a reward for declaring her the most beautiful of the goddesses. The Aithiopis follows on from the funeral of Hector at the end of the Iliad up to the death of Achilles and the dispute of Ajax and Ulysses over his armour. The Little Iliad (once attributed to Homer himself) continues the story from the adjudging of the armour to Ulysses to the entry of the Wooden Horse into Troy. The narrative is then picked up by the Ilion Persis (The Sack of Ilion) which
chronicles the fall of the city and ends with two sacrifices and a departure: Polyxena slaughtered at the tomb of Achilles and Hector’s son killed by Ulysses, while the Greeks sail home threatened by an angry Athena. Finally, the five books of the Nostoi (The Returns) follow the fate of the victors: Menelaus’ voyage to Egypt and his successful homecoming, Agamemnon warned by the ghost of Achilles that he will be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, the shipwreck and death of Ajax, the long journey home of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. Ulysses’ further adventures are told in the Telegony, a sequel to the Odyssey: after Penelope’s suitors are buried, Ulysses sails off to Thesprotia (a last adventure forecast by Tiresias9 ) where he marries the queen, fights a war, returns to Ithaca, and is killed there by his son Telegonos, born from the enchantress Circe. Upon discovering his mistake, Telegonos, accompanied by Penelope and Telemachus, takes the body back to his mother, who makes them all immortal.10
The Epic Cycle was at the origin of what has been called ‘the Trojan genre’, and served as source material for innumerable writers. Notable among these was Quintus of Smyrna, an educated Greek living in Asia Minor in the third century AD who wrote a ‘complete’ (and grisly) history of the Trojan War known as the Posthomerica, in a style imitating Homer’s.11 But the most famous of all the Trojan stories were two firsthand accounts supposedly written by a couple of soldiers who had taken part in the war, Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, and who were thought to antedate Homer by several centuries. A number of Byzantine writers based their stories on Dictys’ account, A Journal of the Trojan War; fewer on that of Dares, The History of the Fall of Troy, perhaps because Dictys had offered the Greek version of the facts, while Dares had told that of the Trojans.12 Furthermore, Dictys’ narrative went on to tell the story of how the Greek victors returned to their homelands, thereby providing a useful bridge from the Iliad to the Odyssey. Far from being authentic records of the events, both accounts were probably composed in Greek in the first century ad. These original versions have not survived, with the exception of a small fragment of Dictys’ text, discovered in 1899 on the back of an income tax return for the year 206 ad.
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 6