Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey

by Alberto Manguel

  Exactly like

  A leaf that’s dead.17

  Verlaine employed the plural image in the singular; Gerard Manley Hopkins, contemporary of Verlaine, held it up as a mirror to a child, addressing her in the second person:

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  Leaves like the things of man, you

  With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

  …

  It is the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret you mourn for.18

  In a famous letter to the imperial vicar Can Grande della Scala, Dante explained that every image in the vast pageant of the Commedia is to be read in four senses: literal, allegorical, anagogical (spiritual) and analogical (by analogy).19 That is to say: one, the dead are as ‘thick as autumnal leaves’; two, all men will suffer ‘the blight man was born for’; three, we must accept death as the ‘evil wind’ God has willed for us, but we must attempt to depart gracefully, carried ‘this way and that’; four, as we are told in Ecclesiastes, ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.’20

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, describing the ruins of Pompeii in the autumn of 1820, gave the image a further twist. He inverted the sense of the comparison and lent the falling leaves the quality of wandering ghosts.

  I stood within the City disinterred;

  And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

  Of spirits passing through the streets;21

  Like several of Dante’s images, the autumnal dead illustrate the Thomist tenet in which Dante believed: that man can only attain perfection in the afterlife by reaching his end in the correct manner – though he may have been unable to make explicit the exact meaning of ‘correct’. At the same time, by association with terrestrial things (trees, wind, earth) Dante’s images ground in our everyday experience the higher metaphysical realities.22 This latter point is important: what happens on the Otherworld journey only attracts Dante’s attention if it relates to the spiritual outcome of the subject;23 in the case of the ghostly crowd, numerous as leaves, what matters to him is the fact that the dead risen in the Odyssey were once the seasonal flesh and blood described in the Iliad. Homer made the observation, Virgil saw the association, Dante drew the conclusion.

  CHAPTER 10

  Greek versus Latin

  When a Prince lacks a Homer, it means that he is not worthy of having one.

  Fénelon, Dialogues des morts: Homère, 1692–6

  Given Homer’s role as founding father of these narratives, why does Dante place Homer in Hell? Dante’s Hell is not absolute: it is a cautionary place that Dante the poet is given the grace to see while he (the man Dante) still has the opportunity to repent of his sins. In this vision of the afterlife, Dante lodges Homer, together with the other pagan poets, in a suburb of that Hell, as a charitable alternative that is Dante’s own invention.

  In Dante’s Hell, souls descend by their own choice, as a result of the life they have led; the greater the error of a soul’s conduct on earth, the deeper its place. The divisions are strict and many. After Hell’s entrance gate comes the vestibule of intellectual cowards, where dwell the souls of those who remained undecided in their choice between good and evil. Next, on the edge of the pit of Hell, begins the First Circle or Limbo. Here dwell the souls of infants who have died unbaptized, and of those who, having practised a moral life, chose not to enter the Christian fold, such as Avicenna and Averroes.1 This is the home of the virtuous pagans such as Homer whose ‘honoured names echo in your life and won them grace in heaven’,2 but who, having lived before the coming of Christ, ‘were not able to adore God properly’. Movingly, Virgil adds: ‘Of that lot am I.’3 To Homer and his friends, Dante grants a moated castle surrounded by seven walls and a green meadow. Allegorically, the moat represents earthly possessions or the art of rhetoric; the walls, the seven liberal arts or the intellectual and moral virtues. Homer remains exalted.

  The artists of the Renaissance adopted this notion of Homer as first among these ancient ‘virtuous pagans’. In about 1470, in his Palace of Urbino, the Duke Federigo de Montefeltro, said to be ‘the most learned man of his learned court’, placed in his study twenty-eight portraits of celebrated historical figures: Ptolemy next to King Solomon, Virgil next to St Ambrose, Seneca next to Thomas Aquinas and, of course, Homer leading the lot. Though Federigo preferred the philosophers to the poets, Homer could not be absent in a cultured man’s workshop.4

  When, three decades later, in 1508, Raphael was asked by Pope Julius II to decorate his chambers in the Vatican, the twenty-three-year-old painter chose for the room overlooking the Belvedere Gardens the theme of Mount Olympus, home of the pagan gods, and gave Homer pride of place. In the days of ancient Rome, the Vatican Hill had been consecrated to Apollo, and it was Apollo that Raphael decided to depict, playing, instead of the classical lyre, the Italian lira da braccio, a sort of lute of nine strings popular in the Renaissance, to symbolize the contemporary presence of the god. Around Apollo are grouped eighteen poets, ancient and modern, with blind Homer presiding, stage right, a sort of secular Trinity, over Dante on his right hand and Virgil on his left.5

  Greek scholarship flourished some time after Boccaccio and Petrarch’s incipient efforts, thanks largely to the Greek exiles fleeing from the Turkish invasions. After the conquest of Constantinople by Mehemet II, on 29 May 1453, a number of accomplished Hellenists migrated to Florence, Rome, Padua and Venice, setting up schools of Greek and working on editions of Greek manuscripts. In Venice, thanks to their erudition, the printer Aldus Manutius was able to produce some of the most exquisite versions of the classics, notably, around 1504, several editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.6 Familiarity with the classics became essential for a person of social standing. The sophisticated scholar Tommaso Parentucelli, who in 1447 was elected pope under the name of Nicholas V, was said to be ‘as fond of books as the Borgias were of women’ and to have paid ten thousand gold pieces for a translation of Homer.7

  The educational treatises of the time underline the importance of teaching Homer and Virgil to young children, because ‘this is a knowledge which all great men have possessed’.8 ‘Homer, the prince of poets,’ wrote the philosopher Battista Guarino, ‘is not difficult to learn, as he seems to have been a source for all our [Latin] writers. Their minds will delight in Virgil’s imitation of him, for the Aeneid is like a mirror of Homer’s works, and there is almost nothing in Virgil that does not have an analogue in Homer.’9 Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who became Pope Pius II, found an exquisite reason for studying the ancient authors: ‘The commerce of language,’ he wrote, ‘is the intermediary of love.’10

  Like Piccolomini, Popes Paul II and Paul III had a good knowledge of Greek, but not his firm belief in the importance of the survival of the ancient cultures. Paul II, an eclectic collector, a lover of sports and lavish parties, and the founder of Rome’s first printing-press, issued a ban forbidding schools to teach children the pagan poets. Paul III, a patron of artists such as Titian and Michelangelo, established in 1542 the Congregation of the Roman Inquisition or Holy Office whose mission, among many others, was the banning of heretical and pagan works.11 Between 1468, when Paul II ordered the suppression of the prestigious Roman Academy, which he suspected of performing pagan rituals under cover of studying the classics, and Paul III’s death in 1549, interest in Greek studies on the Italian peninsula began an irreversible decline.12 There were, however, a few enlightened interludes. Shortly after his election to the Holy See in 1513, Leon X, second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ordered that the Roman Academy be reopened and that a college for young Greek students be founded under the direction of the eminent scholar Giovanni Lascaris. The Quirinal College was active for approximately seven years, during which it educated a select number of young boys of Greek ancestry in Greek language, literature and thought. A letter has been preserved from a Greek notary established in Venice which gives a
detailed account of the ceremony during which the children welcomed the pope with elaborate salutations in ancient Greek, using terms borrowed from the classic authors, notably from Homer.13

  Greek scholars started to emigrate to the northern countries, and humanists such as Erasmus, Thomas More and Guillaume Budé, benefiting from their knowledge, carried on the work of commentary and editing. Peter Schade, a twenty-four-year-old friend of Erasmus and professor of Greek at Leipzig University, published in 1518 a book entitled Discourse on the Need to Learn Different Languages in which he ardently defended a multilingual culture. To the opposition’s argument that God had punished humankind with the plurality of tongues after Babel (according to Genesis 11:1–9), Schade answered with the notion that God is a polyglot (‘God understands the tongues of all people’) and that angels and saints, being our intercessors, are also polyglots by necessity. ‘Indeed, if they did not understand prayers conceived in any language, it would be useless for a German or a Frenchman to murmur a prayer in their mother tongue addressed to saints of other nationalities. Certainly, they would be thus no less ridiculous than if they attempted to speak to the dead.’14

  But after the Reformation, Latin was confirmed as the language of the Catholic Church, and Greek that of Protestant culture (not counting, of course, the endemic languages into which the Protestant Bible was translated). The Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) forbade Catholics the reading of the Greek and Hebrew Bible except in the case of appointed scholars, and in the eyes of the Church of Rome students of Greek became synonymous with heretics. As a consequence, several Greek scholars were burnt at the stake in 1546 as ‘offenders of the faith’, by the Catholic king of France, François I, in spite of the royal devotion to the arts and letters. In the Protestant countries instead, the study of Greek was assiduously encouraged and, even in the Protestant colonies, Greek became part of the ordinary school curriculum. In 1788, for instance, in the Danish Virgin Islands, the Rector Hans West opened in Christiansted a school to teach the children of planters the works of Homer and other classical poets.15 Not knowing Greek became, in Protestant countries, a mark of ignorance. In Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the foolish principal of the University of Louvain in Belgium makes this boast: ‘You see me, young man, I never learned Greek, and I don’t find that I have ever missed it. I have had a doctor’s cap and gown without Greek; I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; I eat heartily without Greek; and, in short,… as I don’t know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.’16

  This division had far-reaching consequences: from the seventeenth century onwards, Homer was being rigorously studied in English, German and Scandinavian universities, while in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and Italy he was being neglected for the sake of Virgil and Dante. The first Spanish translation of the Odyssey made directly from the Greek, by Gonzalo Pérez, was published in Amberes in 1556, and hardly distributed; the Iliad, in a version by García Malo, also from the Greek, had to wait until 1788 and met with as little success. For centuries, Spanish-language readers learned their Homer through quotations in classical texts or through a handful of Latin translations. This remained the norm long into the nineteenth century. When Miguel de Unamuno was given the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca in 1891, it was pointed out that the celebrated intellectual had no Greek. Juan Valera, chairman of the committee that had selected him, explained: ‘None of the other candidates knows Greek, so we selected the one most likely to know it.’17 The first encyclopaedia written in Spanish, the Silva de varia lección by Pedro Mexía, was published to great acclaim in 1540 in Seville.18 Though it purports to be a compendium of ‘books of great authority’, its references to Homer, since the author knew no Greek, are few and most likely taken from either a Latin translation of the Iliad that appeared in Basel in 1531,19 or from quotations of Homer by other authors. When Mexía does mention Homer’s works, he chooses only the best-known episodes, such as Hector addressing his horses in Book VIII of the Iliad or Aeolus giving the number of winds in Book X of the Odyssey.

  Only a handful of Spanish writers defended Homer against his disparagers. The poet Francisco de Quevedo, for instance, mocked the ignorance of those who invented ‘shameless lies against Homer and false testimonies in order to raise altars to Virgil’20 and, in a somewhat convoluted prose, accused these pseudo-scholars of perjury: ‘In all ages there have been infamous men who have preferred to lend infamy to those who are famous rather than become famous themselves, being as they are, infamous.’21

  A learned writer, the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, published in 1689 a curious imitation of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora under the title ‘The Dream’, in which she mentioned Homer as the ‘sweetest of poets’ who wrote of ‘Achillean feats and Ulysses’ martial subtleties’. Though she had only read him in the works of other contemporary writers, such as the German scholar Athanasius Kircher,22 this did not prevent her from exalting his perfection: ‘It would be easier,’ she said, ‘to remove from the fearful Thunderer his lightning… than half a line of verse dictated to [Homer] by propitious Apollo.’23

  For Francis Bacon, instead, writing in 1609, Homer was a familiar instrument of poetical instruction, to be consulted carefully and constantly. To dismiss the poets of old because of their ‘casual licentiousness’ (as the Council of Trent had decreed) ‘would be rash, and almost profane; for, since religion delights in such shadows and disguises, to abolish them were, in a manner, to prohibit all intercourse betwixt things divine and human.’24

  For Sor Juana, Homer was an uncontested, unread reference; for Bacon, he was a sourcebook to be studied and analysed. This divided inheritance was passed on to the Americas and was reflected in their lifestyle and in their libraries. In the United States, the elite chose to model its architecture after the tenets of the Greek Revival, while in Latin America the bourgeoisie chose to fashion its houses after the French and Italian baroque. In the north, Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau read Homer; south of the Rio Grande, José Martí, Rubén Darío and Machado de Assis read Virgil.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ancients versus Moderns

  How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!

  A Victorian lady upon seeing Antony and Cleopatra

  played by Sarah Bernhardt in 1899

  Michel de Montaigne, writing in the last decades of the sixteenth century, chose Homer as one of the three ‘most excellent of men’ of all time (the other two were soldiers, Alexander the Great and the Theban commander Epaminondas). Confessing that his Greek was not up to truly appreciating Homer, whom he knew mainly through Virgil, Montaigne granted the blind bard primacy because of the far-reaching power of his invention. ‘Nothing lives on the lips of men,’ wrote Montaigne, ‘like his name and his work: nothing is as known or accepted as Troy, Helen and his wars – that may never have taken place on real ground. Our children are still given names which he forged over three hundred years ago. Who does not know of Hector and Achilles? Not only individual lineages but most nations seek their origins in Homer’s inventions. Mehemet II, Emperor of the Turks, wrote thus to our Pope Pius II: “I am amazed that the Italians should band against me, since we both have a common Trojan origin and, like the Italians, I have an interest in avenging the blood of Hector on the Greeks whom they however favour against me.” Isn’t all this a noble farce in which Kings, Republics and Emperors, all play their parts over many centuries, and for which this vast universe serves as a stage?’1

  To his cast of farce-players, Montaigne could have added writers and scholars. From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the study of Homer in France became embroiled in what came to be called ‘the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns’, a hundred-year-long quarrel in which both sides held confused and contradictory opinions. According to the anciens, the classics were the admired model to be imitated and continued; according to the modernes, traditional literature was a creative millstone and writers and artists ought to be
able to invent something distinctively new. The modernes defended Christianity over paganism; the anciens, the official power of the king at Versailles against the mundane intellectuals of the Paris salons. The debate covered many subjects: the use of Olympic gods or angels and demons in epic poetry, the language (Latin or French) in which public inscriptions should be written, the inclusion of colloquialisms and common actions in literary compositions. With aristocratic haughtiness, modernes such as Charles Perrault, author of the famous fairy-tales, admitted Homer’s importance but scoffed at him for being vulgar:2 for comparing the retreating Ajax to a stubborn ass beaten by children,3 or for presenting a princess who declares that she must go down to the river to do her brothers’ laundry.4 Perrault’s attitude towards Homer, wishing that he were purged of vulgarity, was compared by the critic Sainte-Beuve to that of the child who wants his mother to read him a story, saying ‘I know it isn’t true, but tell me the story anyway.’5 The anciens said that they admired Homer in spite of all his coarseness and incivility.

  One of the anciens, the twenty-three-year-old Jean Racine, whose mastery of Greek, even at that age, was remarkable, responded by praising Homer’s sense of ‘what is true’. Racine had little patience with what he considered pretentious niceties. ‘Those husbandry terms,’ he wrote, ‘are not as shocking in Greek as they are in our tongue, which has little tolerance for anything, and which will not approve of composing eclogues about farmers, like Theocritus did, nor that one speak of Ulysses’ swineherd in heroic terms. Such delicate sentiments are nothing but weakness of character.’6

  Racine had the knowledge, memory and literary acumen to back his opinions. Born in 1639 and orphaned at a very young age, Racine was educated at the Cistercian School of Port-Royal. He completed his education in Paris and, after considering and rejecting an ecclesiastical career, settled in Paris in 1663 to become a writer. Once, when he was still an adolescent at Port-Royal, he had discovered Heliodorus’ novel, written in the late second century AD, Aethiopica or The Loves of Theogonis and Charicles, inspired by the stories of Homer. The Aethiopica was an example of the kind of literature frowned upon by the Cistercian monks. Therefore, the sexton, finding the boy reading it in the Abbey forest, pulled it out of his hands and threw it into a bonfire. Racine managed to secure a second copy which was also discovered and condemned to the flames. He then bought a third copy and learned the text by heart. Then he handed it over to the sexton, saying: ‘Now you can burn this one too.’ We are told that, likewise, Racine had also been able to memorize much of the Iliad and the Odyssey.7