When Mussato spoke of pagan poetry, he meant, first and foremost, Homer. Even though the Latin classics had pride of place in the libraries of the Renaissance, Homer was considered the fountainhead, the primordial spring without which there would have been no culture. For that reason, when Dante meets the great writers of antiquity in the first circle of his Hell, he has Homer, brandishing a sword to indicate the supremacy of epic poetry, appear at the head of the delegation of writers. Homer and his colleagues come forward to greet, first Virgil – ‘Honour the highest of poets, his shadow which had left, returns’ – and then, to Virgil’s amusement, Dante;3 that is to say, first the master poet who sang of the triumph of Rome, and secondly (but this is in the future) the master poet who sang of the triumph of Christianity.
Homer exercised on Dante and his contemporaries an influence in some ways similar to that which the gods effected on the ancients. As depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey (but in much of the later literature as well), Zeus and his fellow divinities walked among the mortals, inspiring them, haunting them, seeking their glory or their death, or just being a nuisance (as when, in the Iliad, Athena pulls Achilles’ hair).4 They were phantom presences in heaven and material representations in marble and bronze in the temples, but they were also alive in bedrooms and markets and battlefields, sitting by mortals in their studies or accompanying them on their voyages. After Plato’s death, his disciples defended Homer’s notion of the gods as ‘spies in disguise’, which Plato himself had ridiculed; in his gossipy books, Plutarch spoke again and again of the appearance of the gods among men; and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius meditated on the divine presences ‘visible as the stars in the sky but also present as friends and instructors in dreams’.5 For Augustine, however, only one God filled the world with His presence. The philosopher and dramatist Seneca, writing in the first century ad, offered a middle way. For him, not the gods but the great writers and thinkers of antiquity lived among us. ‘Only men who make Zeno and Pythagoras and Democritus and the other high priests of liberal studies their daily familiars, who cultivate Aristotle and Theophrastus, can properly be said to be engaged in the duties of life,’ he wrote. ‘It is a common saying that a man’s parents are not of his own choosing but allotted to him by chance. But we can choose our own genealogy.’ Pointing at his library, Seneca argued that these great men could share with us their experience. ‘Here are families with noble endowments: choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater will it become. These will open the path to eternity for you and will raise you to a height from which none can be cast down. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, or rather, of transforming it into immortality.’6
For Mussato, Dante, and their contemporaries, Seneca’s argument was commonplace. To the company of the poets of Greece and Rome were assimilated the Fathers of the Catholic Church, so that, in the same way that Mussato could address Livy as his master in his Historia Augusta,7 Petrarch could later engage in a dream dialogue with St Augustine.8 These relationships were devotional, similar to those that readers have with their favourite books.
Only Dante’s case is different. Dante was the first nonclassical writer to be treated by his contemporaries as equal to the great Greek and Latin authors, a position that he himself did not find surprising:
The sea I travel is no longer travelled.
Minerva fills my sails, Apollo leads me,
And the Nine Muses point me towards the Polar Star.9
Even then, Dante knew that he couldn’t tell his story all by himself: he required divine guidance. Homer had started the tradition by which the poet establishes his authority not as the inventor but as the performer of tales that a divine voice has dictated. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey begin by asking the Muse to sing the chosen subjects: the rage of one man, the cunning of another. There is, however, a difference between the two beginnings. In the Iliad, the earlier poem, Homer humbly leaves the stage to the Muse alone: ‘Goddess, sing the rage…’ But in the Odyssey, the poet allows himself to appear as the receiver of the song: ‘Sing to me of the man, Muse…’ Virgil and Dante profit from the daring intrusion of that ‘to me’. Virgil, in the Aeneid, asks the Muse to recall for him the cause of the war that set Aeneas on his journeys.10 Dante too, in his Commedia, invokes the Muses for help, but so that his memory, capable of ‘setting down’ what he saw on his marvellous journey, might now reveal to him its excellence in the telling.11
G. K. Chesterton remarked that it isn’t necessary to have read the classics in order to accept the fact that they are classics;12 in other words, we can take it as read that Cervantes, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are ‘important’ writers, in the sense that they have carried import for successive generations of readers. When we finally come to them (if we finally come to them) singly and on our own terms, we rescue from the blanketing notion of classic a primary judgement and a personal meaning: ‘I like – or I don’t like – Homer’s books, and this is what they say to me.’ Dante’s own knowledge of the classics was limited to what was available in the Latin original, especially Horace, Seneca and, of course, Virgil. Of the great Greek tragic poets that Dante has Virgil introduce as his fellow residents – Euripides, Antiphon, Simonides, Agathon ‘and several other Greeks with laurel wreaths’ – Dante had no knowledge except by hearsay; neither Sophocles nor Aeschylus are mentioned because, in the fourteenth century, their names had fallen into oblivion and Dante had never heard of them. Even Euripides was known only by name since none of his works was available.13
Dante and his contemporaries accepted the time-honoured glorification of Homer as an undisputed fact, and read him, if at all, in Latin translations such as the popular anonymous paraphrase of the Iliad known as the Ilias latina, probably written in the first century AD. Petrarch kept, with devotional care, a Greek manuscript of Homer which he didn’t know how to read. To the friend who sent it to him from Constantinople, he wrote: ‘Your Homer lies mute by my side, while I am deaf by his, and often I have kissed him saying: “Great man, how I wish I could hear your words!”’14 At Petrarch’s suggestion, and with the help of Boccaccio, their friend Leonzio Pilato, a Calabrian monk of Greek origin, translated the Odyssey and the Iliad into Latin, both very badly.15
Dante acquired his Homer through Virgil. ‘If indeed he knew nothing of the Greek original,’ George Steiner remarked, ‘Dante’s clairvoyant genius intuited, discerned the Homeric presence in the Aeneid.’16 In this sense, Virgil was not only Dante’s guide through Hell, he was also his source and inspiration, and through him Dante was able to enjoy the experience of Homer’s work. Virgil was for Dante, among other things, a poet who had clearly identified the Roman Empire as a unified cultural world, a world that, in Dante’s time, aspired to that same unification: spiritual, under the sceptre of a God-chosen pope, and material, under that of a God-chosen emperor. Those who obeyed the laws of God as dictated by His two servants were rewarded; those who broke them had either to undergo a redemptive purge or, if the fault was too serious, suffer a dreadful and eternal punishment. Dante’s Commedia, the account of his cautionary excursion to the Kingdom of the Dead, is therefore divided into three parts. The first, Hell, is the dwelling-place of those condemned absolutely, a funnel-shaped pit that runs from the northern hemisphere to the centre of the earth; the second, Purgatory, where souls are redeemed after death, is a high mountain that rises on an island in the southern hemisphere; the third and last, Paradise, is a place beneath the ten heavens of medieval astronomy which form all one single heaven.
The model for Dante’s Commedia is a composite of many sources, from Homer (via Virgil) to Arabic accounts of Muhammad’s journey to the other world, the Mi’raj; one version of the latter was translated into Castilian by order of Alfonso X, and then into Latin, French and Italian, the last of which Dante probably read. Even though the complex a
rchitecture of the afterlife realm is, to a large degree, Dante’s own, the foundation-stone is Homer’s.
CHAPTER 9
Homer in Hell
The noise, my dear! And the people!
Ernest Thesiger, on being asked about serving in the
First World War, 1950
Homer’s Hell has no remarkable physical features. According to the Odyssey, it is a simple, schematic dwelling-place for the souls of the dead, ruled unobtrusively by the god Hades. There, according to the witch Circe, Ulysses must travel in search of instructions for his voyage home when, after keeping him for a year as her lover, Circe at last consents to let him go. But first, she tells him that he must ‘travel down/to the House of Death and the awesome one, Persephone,/there to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes’. Ulysses is terrified. ‘Circe, Circe,’ he cries, ‘who can pilot us on that journey? Who has ever/reached the House of Death in a black ship?’1
Circe gives Ulysses precise instructions. Driven by the North Wind, his ship will cut across the River Ocean and reach the dark, desolate coast of Persephone’s Grove. From there he must descend to the Kingdom of Hades and to the waters of the Acheron into which flow two smaller rivers, that of Fire and that of Tears (the latter a branch of the Styx or Stream of Hate). Here Ulysses must make offerings to the dead and wait for them to appear, and eventually the ghost of Tiresias will tell him by what means he may return to Ithaca.2 Ulysses follows Circe’s instructions to the letter.3 (Later on, in Book XXIV, there will be a second excursion to the Underworld, when Hermes leads the ghosts of the slaughtered suitors ‘past the White Rock and the Sun’s Western Gates and past/the Land of Dreams’, into the ‘fields of asphodel’.4 No doubt there are several routes to Hell.)
Homer had described a place without graded categories, an Underworld in which souls wander about, incorporeal and listless, like the inmates of a retirement home, some still suffering from regret for what they have done or left undone on earth, others undergoing hideous tortures decreed for them by the gods: Tityus devoured by vultures, Tantalus condemned to eternal hunger and thirst, Sisyphus ineffectually rolling his boulder up the hill. Though Pindar, in the sixth century BC, located specific areas in the Underworld for the ‘happy shades’,5 Homer’s dead are never pleased to be where they are. ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!’ says the ghost of Achilles when he sees him. ‘By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man… than rule down here over all the breathless dead’6 (a sentiment echoed in Ecclesiastes 9:4, where it is written that ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’).
Homer’s account proved not vivid enough for Virgil. In the Odyssey, since Circe has described in detail the route to the realm of Hades, there is little for Ulysses to do in the next episode but follow her instructions. Twelve lines suffice to chronicle his journey, a further sixteen to narrate the sacrificial offerings to the dead. Then, as Circe had predicted, the ghosts arrive in awful droves:
Brides and unwed youths and old men who had suffered much
and girls with their tender hearts freshly scarred by sorrow
and great armies of battle dead, stabbed by bronze spears,
men of war still wrapped in bloody armour – thousands
swarming around the trench from every side –
unearthly cries – blanching terror gripped me!7
The arrival of the dead is horrible; compared to the overwhelming menace of the moaning crowd, the individual spirits who thereafter dialogue with Ulysses are tame in their demeanour. It is the swarm of souls that haunts the reader, as Homer knew it would, since he repeats it at the end of the section, with almost identical words:
… the dead came surging round me,
hordes of them, thousands raising unearthly cries,
and blanching terror gripped me…8
Homer’s ghastly picture of the dead as a confused mingling of sexes and ages, occupations and social classes, extends across many hundreds of future years and will eventually take on its most recognizable shape towards the middle of the fourteenth century in the danse macabre,9 a human chain in which Death leads by the hand all men and women on earth, from pope to humble peasant. The earliest depictions of the danse macabre appeared in Europe in the early fifteenth century: on the walls of the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris; in the cloister of old St Paul’s in London; in the Marienkirche of Lübeck.10 A century later, Hans Holbein the Younger produced a series of woodcuts illustrating the Dance of Death that became the subject’s standard iconography, translated in the twentieth century as the Triumph of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal and as its mirror image, the Triumph of Life, at the end of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2.
The sight that confronts Ulysses is one of wretched things rising in the air, a storm of howling ghosts conjured up by the sacrificial offerings, all generations mingled. But not only death is common to us all: in order to round the circle of human life, Homer broadens the image to include the newly born. In Book VI of the Iliad, on the bloodied battlefield, the Lycian Glaucus, fighting on the side of the Trojans, is taunted by the Greek Diomedes, who will reveal himself to be Glaucus’ friend. Glaucus says:
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.11
The souls that meet Ulysses are like an autumn whirlwind. Glaucus describes the dead as ‘old leaves’ but recalls their counterpart, left unmentioned in the Odyssey, the promised new budding in the spring.
A similar throng of souls confronts Virgil’s Aeneas in the Underworld. In Homer, the ghosts descend upon Ulysses; in Virgil, the ghosts crowd the shore in front of him, forced to wait one hundred years before they are allowed to cross over (like a throng of refugees, the twenty-first-century reader will say). The frightening description ends with one of Virgil’s most famous, most beautiful lines: ‘tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore’.
Matrons and men were there, and there were great-hearted heroes
Finished with earthly life, boys and unmarried maidens,
Young men laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes;
Multitudinous as the leaves that fall in a forest
At the first frost of autumn. (…)
So they stood, each begging to be ferried across first,
Their hands stretched out in longing for the shore beyond the river.12
Virgil, remembering his Homer, uses in the Aeneid the leaf metaphor in the Iliad to illustrate the phantom hordes of the Odyssey and, with that overlapping of images, the dead become innumerable, including all generations of men and women, falling to the ground autumn after autumn. Suddenly the reader realizes: I too shall be one of them.
Dante has this reading firmly in mind when he describes the corresponding scene in his Commedia. Led by Virgil, Dante has crossed the Gate of Hell and reached, like Ulysses and Aeneas before him, the shores of Acheron and the legions of dead.
As in Autumn the leaves detach and fly
One after the other, until the branch
Sees on the ground all of its mortal coils (…)13
In Homer, the dead surge up in crowds, and men come and go like leaves: the accent is on the cyclical nature of succeeding generations. In Virgil, the dead are as many as the leaves that must fall when autumn comes: the accent is on the number. And now, to the notions of perpetual movement and infinite quantity, Dante adds that of individual fate, of each leaf coming to its own singular end, ‘one after the other’. André Malraux, describing the death of his protagonist in the 1930 novel La Voie royale, has him say this: ‘There is no… death… There’s only… me… me… who’s dying…’14 Equally, Dante insists that the verb ‘to die’ must always be conjugated in the first person singular. Where Virgil has used cadunt (‘fall’) to describ
e the action of the leaves, Dante uses si levan (‘they fly off’, ‘they detach themselves’), granting each leaf and, by implication, each soul, a voluntary movement.15 Death is our allotted end, Dante seems to say, but it is also an act for whose quality we ourselves are responsible. That each of us dies is decreed; the act of dying is ours, individually. (In the Second Circle, the souls of the lustful are tossed about like leaves in a howling wind, but each separate soul has its own story.)
Dante’s inheritors took advantage of his reading of Homer through Virgil. Milton, in Paradise Lost, placed the composite image in a Virgilian landscape to describe Satan’s legions at the edge of the Sea of Fire.
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High over-arch’d embow’r.16
Two centuries after Paradise Lost was published, Paul Verlaine, with Dante in mind, reverted to Glaucus’ image, not as depicting the numerous dead but just the poet himself.
And I depart
on an evil wind
That carries me off
This way and that
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 8