Both stories were translated into Latin and, in this new version, Dares’ account, since it narrated the events from the point of view of Aeneas’ people, now became more popular than his Greek colleague’s among the inheritors of the Roman Empire. Dares’ text was quoted as the primary source by all those who retold the history of Troy, overtaking the popularity of the Iliad. As mentioned, Homer had been criticized for depicting the gods as prone to all the human foibles and interfering with the affairs of mortals. Dares (and Dictys) referred to the gods only as figures of reverence and placed the responsibility for the fighting on the shoulders of human beings alone. For many centuries, the chronicles of Dictys and Dares were considered to be authentic documents, written, as it were, one against the other. Not until the beginning of the eighteenth century did confidence in their veracity diminish, when the scholar Jacob Perizonius proved beyond doubt that both men were consummate forgers13 .
Towards 1165, a clerk from Normandy, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, serving in the entourage of King Henry II, based his account of the Trojan War, Le Roman de Troie, on the chronicle of Dares. One day, says Sainte-Maure, in Athens, a scholar named Cornelius ‘was searching all over in a library for learned books, when he came across the history that Dares had composed in the Greek tongue’. Cornelius translated it into Latin, and it was this translation that Sainte-Maure says he followed ‘word by word’ in his own book. Though Sainte-Maure acknowledged Homer as ‘a clerk of extraordinary talent and full of wisdom’, Dares’ chronicle was, in his opinion, even better, since the Trojan soldier had taken part in the events he described, while Homer had obtained his facts by hearsay. Sainte-Maure acknowledges that he hasn’t read Homer himself, but that he obtained his information on the poet ‘from the source’ (i.e. Dares). Sainte-Maure presents himself simply as a translator for the benefit of those who can’t read Latin script (the ‘illitterati’), explaining that he intends ‘to translate it into Romance from the Latin in which I found it, if I have the intelligence and the skill, so that those who don’t understand [Latin] letters can nevertheless delight in the story’.14
Of the lengthy poem, one episode in particular – not in Dares but invented by Sainte-Maure – caught the imagination of those who ‘delighted in the story’: the tragic love of the Trojans Troilus and Cressida (named Briseida in the Roman de Troie). Briseida, beloved of Troilus, is forced to leave the city when her father Calchas defects to the Greek side. The Greek Diomedes sees her and falls in love with her, and, after some hesitation, Briseida accepts Diomedes’ proposal. She gives him, as a token of her love, the right sleeve of her dress, and the forlorn Troilus is killed in battle by Achilles.
Two centuries later, the Sicilian writer Guido delle Colonne wrote (without acknowledging the source) a Latin prose version of Le Roman de Troie which was later translated into English by John Lydgate,15 but it was Geoffrey Chaucer who first rendered Sainte-Maure’s story into English. His Troilus and Criseyde16 inspired the Scottish poet Robert Henryson to produce a sequel, The Testament of Cresseid, in which the unfaithful young woman is punished by the gods with leprosy and dies after receiving alms from Troilus who fails to recognize her in her pitiful state.17 In 1474, William Caxton included the story (by then extremely popular) in his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.18 Finally William Shakespeare, who famously had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’,19 and therefore almost certainly had not read Homer in the original, made use of these various English versions as sources for his Troilus and Cressida.20
CHAPTER 7
Homer in Islam
There is not only Arab poetry: foreign nations also have
their own. There have been Persian poets and Greek
poets. For instance, Aristotle, in his Logic, praises the
poet Umatîrash (Homer).
Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddima, 1377
While in Byzantium the study of Greek was, by and large, the study of antique models, in the centres of Arab culture (first Baghdad, and later Cairo, Damascus, Cordoba and Toledo) the study of Greek literature was perceived as a dialogue between contemporaries. Aristotle and Plato were not figures from a misty past: they were active voices in constant dialogue with their readers, readers who were also their promulgators and conveyors through translation and commentary. In the ninth century, the great Abu Uthman’Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz, known simply as Jahiz, accused scholars of preferring Aristotle to the Koran, without acknowledging that he himself had followed the philosopher in several of his books.1
Although translation of foreign literature into Arabic can be said to have begun in the mid-eighth century during the rule of the celebrated Abassid caliph al-Mansur, with the Indian story collection Kalila and Dimna, Ptolemy’s Almagest and Euclid’s Geometry, among others,2 the great tradition of translation from the ancient Greek was firmly established a century later, starting with a dream. One night in Baghdad, the Caliph al-Ma’mun, known as ‘Lover of Knowledge’ and son of the famous Harun al-Rashid (who, as a character in the Arabian Nights would delight the European imagination in later centuries), saw a pale, blue-eyed man with a broad forehead and frowning eyebrows. With the assurance of dreamers, the caliph understood that the stranger was Aristotle.3 Al-Ma’mun and Aristotle talked all night. In the morning, and as a result of the encounter, the caliph ordered that a library should be founded in Baghdad that would house a translation centre devoted mainly to the works of the philosopher. The centre was placed under the direction of the scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-‘Ibadi who, assisted by a school of disciples, translated into Syriac and Arabic almost the entire corpus of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and science.
Hunayn often made use of his knowledge of Homer to help clarify certain obscure images, unknown names and difficult analogies in the classical Greek texts. Because Hunayn knew his Homer, he was able to explain to his readers that, for example, the Cyclops mentioned in a certain book was ‘a giant whose name was Cyclops’ and that when the monster Scylla received the epithet ‘Hound of the Sea’, it was because Homer had compared her cries to the yelping of a pup.4 According to his contemporary, the scholar Yusuf ibn Ibrahim, Hunayn had begun his scholarly career as a brilliant though over-inquisitive student in Baghdad. He had shown such a passionate curiosity in class, that his teacher, exasperated by the constant flow of questions, had ordered him out of the lecture hall, and the young man, taking the dismissal to heart, had left Baghdad without letting anyone know where he was going. Two years later, Ibrahim found himself called to the bed of a patient of Greek ancestry, whose aunt had been a Greek slave of Harun al-Rashid. There he noticed a strange man, his hair falling over his face in the fashion of Byzantium, who was reciting Homer in the original to his ailing host. The stranger was Hunayn, returned to Baghdad with a word-perfect knowledge of Homeric Greek.5
Beyond the fame acquired for the excellency of its translations, the centre’s prosperity was largely due to monetary incentive: sponsors paid generously for translated works that lent them intellectual and social prestige among the Baghdad aristocracy. Translators were highly specialized; they had no overall knowledge of Greek but acknowledged being familiar with the style and vocabulary of only certain authors. For instance, translating a medical text by the second-century physician Galen, Hunyan comes upon a quotation from a play by Aristophanes and confesses to the reader: ‘But I am not familiar with the language of Aristophanes, nor am I accustomed to it. Hence, it was not easy for me to understand the quotation, and I have therefore omitted it.’ Not all translators displayed (or display today) such disarming honesty.
Although poetry was not part of the centre’s mission, a few fragments of Homer were translated as well, as attested in several collections of philosophical sayings, some reliable and some apocryphal, and in Arab versions of Greek authors who had quoted Homer, such as Aristotle himself. So great was the thirst for these ancient texts that to the recognized works of acclaimed writers were added pure inventions, as for instance the Kitab al-Tuffaha (‘Book of the Apple’), a glo
ss of Plato’s Phaedrus accompanied by a series of meditations supposedly jotted down by Aristotle on his death-bed.7 Biographies of Homer, ‘the wandering poet’ as he was known, were included in dictionaries and encyclopaedias.8
Just as the pagan authors had served in Christian Europe as a source of analogies to prove the superiority of the religion of Christ, so the Islamic writers made use of the Greek corpus (and to a lesser extent of the Latin one) to prove the truth of the Koran. Examples drawn from the Greek authors served to illustrate the laws that rule the soul, according to the words of the Prophet Muhammad. The tenth-century scholar al-Farabi, the foremost logician of his time, was one of the most important and influential of these commentators. After studying in Baghdad with the disciples of Christian scholars from Alexandria, al-Farabi settled in Damascus where, in relative seclusion, he wrote the critical treatises on Aristotle, Plato and Galen that earned him his fame. In these, al-Farabi set out his belief that philosophy, like religion, can help us attain the truth, following a different path and beckoning to all kinds of travellers. Each of these paths, the religious and the philosophical one, offered two levels of pursuit. The highest, that of metaphysical enquiry, was meant for the few whose intelligence or gifted spirit allowed them to comprehend complex abstract formulations; the other, available to the common majority, was followed through stories, myths, riddles and parables. In an ideal society, both paths, and both levels in each path, coexisted with more or less ease, though there were scholars who thought that the exponents of the lower level (poets and mythographers such as Homer, and ‘everyday prophets’, as the philosopher al-Saraksi called ambulant preachers) were charlatans. Plato had put it more sternly when he called them ‘falsifiers of the truth’ and, as mentioned, banned them from his Republic. Al-Farabi was less severe. Muhammad had declared that the ideal community of the faithful constituted an umma, a perfect city-state; for al-Farabi, Plato’s ideal republic and Muhammad’s umma were two incarnations of the same idea, and though one disallowed poets and the other did not, both spoke of the same holy place.9 In this context, Homer’s poems, though not as exalted as the works of Aristotle and Plato, deserved to be read because, albeit their watereddown, vulgar idiom, they too held inklings of the truth.
As far as we know, no version of Homer’s work was produced during the golden period of Arabic translation. A few Abassid scholars were aware of the contents of the two poems, and fragments of the Iliad and the Odyssey appeared in popular narratives: for instance, several of Ulysses’ adventures surface in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor.10 A late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century anthology of military exploits, the Raqa’iq al-hilal fi Daqaiq al-hiyal (‘Cloaks of Fine Fabric in Subtle Ruses’), includes a potted version of Achilles’ wrath and the killing of Hector. The source, of course, may not be Homer but one of the many other retellings of the story of Troy.
We are told how the King of the Greeks of Byzantium used cunning when he invaded Ifriqiya [Phrygia] and the population learned of this well enough in advance for them to organize resistance and entrench themselves in a city [Troy] that he besieged for a long time to no avail. The city gate withstood all his attacks. Among the citizens there was a man called Aqtar [Hector] who was very daring and courageous. Anyone who fought him was invariably killed. The King of the Greeks [Agamemnon] was told of this.
He had a commander named Arsilaous [Achilles], unsurpassed for his bravery throughout the world. Following an outburst of anger from the King, he had refused to take any part in the war. The King had asked him to, but he did not obey. The King then said: ‘Spread the rumour that our enemy Aqtar has captured the brother of Arsilaous.’
The latter was distressed when he heard the news. He looked everywhere for his brother, but could not find him. Then he asked for his weapons and went out against Aqtar. He fought against him and took him prisoner, and led him before the King of the Greeks. The latter put Aqtar to death. The people of Ifriqiya and all their supporters were terrorstricken when they found out that their hero was gone. The King of the Greeks, with Arsilaous, attacked the city, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy and conquering the region.11
Two important changes are introduced in this version of Homer’s story. Hector hasn’t killed Achilles’ ‘brother’ – it is only a rumour spread by Agamemnon. Achilles does not kill Hector; he only captures him, and it is Agamemnon who orders the execution. In the Arabic telling, Agamemnon is the secret protagonist of the story.
The great Arabic translation schools began to decline towards the end of the tenth century, but the impulse to bring into one’s own language the wisdom expressed in that of another continued long afterwards. The Arab scholars who had rendered the Greek works into their tongue and enlivened them with their own comments, had done so less out of a will to preserve the Greek culture (the Persian heritage was for them as important as the Greek) than for the sake of what has been called ‘appropriation and naturalization’,12 absorbing another culture into their own. Now, from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, many of these Arab versions of the Greek classics were in turn translated into other languages, particularly Latin and Hebrew. In Sicily, but especially in Spain, the works of Aristotle annotated by al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes acquired a new life through fresh glosses and interpretations. Some fiction and poetry, too, entered Europe in Arabic versions and was then rendered into local tongues, so that the handful of Homeric episodes that had metamorphosed into an Arabic setting underwent a further transformation and became Spanish romances, Provençal canzones, French fabliaux and German Märchen.
Centuries later, in 1857, Wilhelm Grimm, one of the brothers of fairy-tale fame, suggested that Homer’s stories, which in the original were told as legends, with a historical basis, that happened in a specific time and place, had been carried throughout the world and had changed over the centuries in the telling. They became folktales set in the indefinite past (‘Once upon a time’) and featured generic heroes with names such as Hans, Elsie or Jack.13 How far Homer’s poems travelled is a matter of conjecture but, for instance, scholars have recognized in an Icelandic saga composed about 1300, The Story of Egill One-hand and Asmundr the Berserks’ Killer, the influence of the Odyssey, in particular the story of the encounter between Ulysses and the Cyclops,14 which later, in English folklore, became ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
It must be said that Arab translators were not solely responsible for the renewed European awareness of its Greek heritage.15 Far from it; most of the great poetry and theatre arrived much later and through different byways. And yet, either as translated text or read in the original Greek, through commentaries and glosses or as literary hearsay, broken up into stories and specific characters, whether as historical facts or as allegories and symbols, the poems of Homer gradually filtered back into the imagination of medieval Europe. Writing in the early sixteenth century, Juan de Mena, in the Preface to his Iliad, attempted to explain the mechanics of this late transmission to King Juan II. Authors such as Avicenna, he said, were like silkworms who wove their own books out of their entrails, while he worked like the bees ‘who steal the substance from mellifluous blossoms in other men’s orchards’. ‘A great gift I bear,’ Mena assured his king, ‘if my thieving and looting does not corrupt it, nor my bold and fearless daring, and that is to translate and interpret such a seraphic work as Homer’s Iliad, from Greek carried into Latin and from Latin into our vulgar Castilian mother tongue.’16
A book’s influence is never straightforward. Common readers, unrestricted by the rigours of academe, allow their books to dialogue with one another, to exchange meanings and metaphors, to enrich and annotate each other. In the reader’s mind, books become entwined and intermingled, so that we no longer know whether a certain adventure belongs to Arsilaous or to Aquiles, or where Homer ends Ulysses’ adventures and the author of Sindbad takes them up again.
CHAPTER 8
Dante
Dante – known to that gentleman as an eccentric man in the natur
e of an Old File, who used to put leaves round his head, and sit upon a stool for some unaccountable purpose, outside the cathedral at Florence.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1855–7
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, scholars and poets returned, once again, to the questions that had preoccupied Jerome and Augustine regarding the relationship between Homer’s stories and the stories of the Bible. Allegorical interpretations continued, but these were accompanied by a search for correspondences between what the ancients had told and what the Church had revealed, establishing a sequence of parallel readings that honoured one without dishonouring the other. A tradition of typological commentaries on the Old and New Testaments was already common in art and literature, setting side by side episodes of the former with those of the latter: for instance, the tree from which Adam ate the forbidden fruit next to the Cross on which Christ died for our salvation. Accordingly, a similar typology was established between Homer and the Bible: between, for example, Achilles in the Iliad and David in the Old Testament, or between the stages of Ulysses’ return and the troubled exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. In the early fourteenth century, Albertino Mussato, the most celebrated of the members of the cenacolo padovano or Paduan Circle of Latin poets, argued that the pagan writers had expressed the same ideas as those found in Scripture, but in the form of enigmas or riddles in which they had secretly announced the coming of the True Messiah. Their poetry, Mussato boldly declared, was ‘a second theology’,1 a notion that Petrarch was later to invert as ‘theology is poetry that comes from God’.2
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