Byron admired Pope’s Iliad. He had read Homer in the original, and Pope’s less than accurate rendering of Homer’s Greek did not diminish for him the force of Pope’s poetic language. In 1834, John Stuart Mill complained that the classical curriculum in England ignored history and philosophy in favour of philology and poetry, preferring to teach Homer rather than Plato.15 Although this was not entirely true (the classic philosophy scholars of Oxford and Cambridge are proof to the contrary), Byron’s Greece is indeed that of the Iliad and the Odyssey rather than that of Socrates and his disciples.
For Shelley too, Greece was Homer. Homer’s poems, he wrote in A Defence of Poetry in 1821, ‘were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations.’16 Except that, more than Shelley himself, it was his contemporaries who attributed to Shelley and to his fellow poets the ancient features of classical heroes: Shelley as Patroclus, Byron as Achilles, and something of this must have been felt by Byron when he chose to sail for Greece on 13 July 1823 ‘to seek in action the redemption he had not found in thought’.17
Of course, for both Shelley and Byron, Homer’s Greece was more than just a catalogue of noble examples. Greece represented for Byron an idealized utopian past as well as the betrayed present in which the governments of Europe had allowed an usurper (the Ottoman Empire) to plunder the sacred inheritance.
Oh, thou eternal Homer! I have now
To paint a siege, wherein more men were slain,
With deadlier engines and a speedier blow,
Than in thy Greek gazette of that campaign;
And yet, like all men else, I must allow,
To vie with thee would be about as vain
As for a brook to cope with Ocean’s flood;
But still we Moderns equal you in blood;
If not in poetry, at least in fact;
And fact is truth, the great desideratum!
Of which, howe’er the Muse describes each act,
There should be ne’ertheless a slight substratum.18
If Homer had created the model both of craft and theme, then, Byron believed, it was the modern poet’s task to translate both elements into a contemporary idiom. The subjects of war and travel in the Iliad and the Odyssey were recast into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819–24), in which both heroes have something of Ulysses in their makeup and become the privileged witnesses of less than heroic Troys. In Don Juan, for example, memory of Homer’s story serves as a debasing mirror for the Siege of Ismail of 1790, when the Russian forces took over the Ottoman stronghold – a muddled feat which in turn reflects, for Byron, the political turmoil of Europe after Napoleon.
But now, instead of slaying Priam’s son,
We only can but talk of escalade,
Bombs, drums, guns, bastions, batteries, bayonets, bullets,
Hard words, which stick in the soft Muses’ gullets.19
What was honourable combat in Homer’s Iliad becomes, in the morally impoverished early decades of the nineteenth century, little more than official murder. With a side stab at Wordsworth in his ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, Byron comments:
‘Carnage’ (so Wordsworth tells you) ‘is God’s daughter’:
If he speak truth, she is Christ’s sister, and
Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.20
Literary craft was another matter. By and large, Byron’s enjoyment of Homer did not prompt him to imitate the master. Only occasionally did Byron pick up a Homeric epithet or simile and make it his own, perhaps because he felt that the popular devices of one age lose both power and familiarity when applied in another.
Homer, like Milman Parry’s guzlars, used formulae and conventions of various kinds to construct his work which (again, like the guzlars) he manipulated in order to convey, enlarge, contradict or subvert the meaning. It is impossible for us, at a distance of many centuries, to know how Homer’s audience received these devices, whether they looked for faithful adherence to tradition or whether they expected an original twist to the formulae.
The Homeric conventions are of various kinds. Some are formulaic phrases, even entire lines of verse, to begin a story or introduce a teller, like the ‘They lived happily ever after’ or the ‘Once upon a time’ of folktales, as, for example: ‘So Proteus said, and his story crushed my heart’,21 or ‘When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more’,22 repeated throughout the works. Others are formal epithets (Parry called them ‘ornamental epithets’) that accompany a person or place as a title: ‘Menelaus the red-haired king’ or ‘the strong-built city of Athens’, equivalent to calling Richard Nixon ‘Tricky Dick’ or referring to Chicago as ‘the windy city’. Certain translators (Robert Fitzgerald, for instance23) choose not to reproduce these conventions, possibly because they believe that, while Homer’s listeners might have found the epithets almost inaudible but necessary, a modern audience would judge their repetition trite or tedious. Borges suggested that for the poet, to say ‘divine Patroclus’ was simply the conventional correct form of address, just as we say ‘to go on foot’ and not ‘by foot’.24 But these conventions no longer seem like conventions to us: the ‘rose-red fingers’ of Dawn may strike a new reader as delightfully quirky instead of formally expected.
Conventions also dictate the description of certain actions such as the killing of a soldier. When, in the Iliad, Laogonus is killed by Meriones, or Erymas by Idomeneus,25 the chronicle of these deaths doesn’t follow an individual course but a set pattern that begins with mentioning the point of impact (‘under the jaw and ear’, ‘straight through the mouth’) and ends with a traditional periphrasis for death (‘hateful darkness gripped him’, ‘death’s dark cloud closed down around his corpse’). They are not intended to be realistic descriptions. Rather, they are the equivalent of other established literary sequences in certain genre fiction, such as describing the crime early in a detective novel, and the suspects all gathered in one room at the end.
Perhaps the best known of these conventions, and the one that has had, for the readers of Homer, the strongest effect, is the extended or epic simile. Unlike an ordinary metaphor that catches qualities in one object which it ascribes to another, thereby creating a new literary space in which what is said and what is implied intermingle and increase, the epic simile places side by side two different actions that don’t blend but remain visually separate, one colouring or qualifying the other. Of these, there are over two hundred in the Iliad alone. In Book XVI, after the Trojans, led by Hector, have succeeded in driving the Greeks back to their ships, Patroclus, dressed in Achilles’ armour, counterattacks and pushes the Trojans back to their walls. The scene is one of gruesome savagery.
As ravenous wolves come swooping down on lambs or kids
to snatch them away from right amidst their flock – all lost
when a careless shepherd leaves them straggling down the hills
and quickly spotting a chance the wolf pack picks them off,
no heart for the fight – so the Achaeans mauled the Trojans.26
For Homer and his audience, wolves preying on sheep and the unreliable shepherd-god not paying due attention to his flock were no doubt common experiences, and the image must have soon become conventional through repeated usage. By the time the simile reached the eighteenth century, though wolves continued their ancestral butchery outside the city walls, the image had become more domesticated, and Byron’s audience certainly had less direct experience than Homer’s of the savagery of wolves. However, it is one of the few formulae that Byron chose to borrow from Homer. The first line of ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ echoes the savage image without dwelling on it:
&nb
sp; The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…27
The line is powerful, and manages to lend to a stale device a degree of vividness it perhaps never possessed: first we see the Assyrians descending, then our eyes are directed towards the wolf attacking sheep, and we are left to draw our own conclusions.
Sometimes a poet will reverse the process, and lead us upstream from the second element of the comparison to the first, without beginning with ‘as’. This is a famous sonnet by the Argentinian poet Enrique Banchs; the beast in question is not a wolf but a tiger; the simile is the same:
Turning his iridescent side in sinuous step
The tiger passes sleek and smooth as verse
And fierceness polishes the hard and terse
Topaze of his vigorous cold eye.
He stretches the deceitful muscles out,
Malevolent and languid, of his flanks,
And lies down slowly on the dusky banks
Of scattered autumn leaves. Now all about
The jungle slumbers in the silent heat.
Between the silken paws the snub-nosed head,
The still eye fixed impassively ahead
While nervously the tail, with steady beat,
Thrashes a guarded threat against the straight
cluster of nearby branches. That’s my hate.28
Violence and hatred like a wild beast, a wild beast like violence and hatred: not every reader is convinced by the comparison. In one of his comic poems, the American Ogden Nash poked fun at ‘the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson’:
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.29
Nash’s joke raises a serious point. No image is solely metaphorical; it elicits from the reader a literal interpretation at the same time as it conjures up a poetic coupling, none of which is ever exhaustive. As in Dante’s multiple levels of reading, the Homeric image is simultaneously a conventional formula, a realistic description, a metaphor and an analogy.
Madame de Staël, Byron’s brilliant contemporary, argued that it was in fact those very images that rendered Homer great, not his ideas, which she found shallow. Against the classic models of the pagan world she set the new world of Christian northern Europe, Germany in particular – ancient form against Romantic feeling. ‘Homer and the Greek poets,’ she wrote in 1800, ‘were remarkable for the splendour and variety of their images, but not for any deep thoughts of their mind… Metaphysics, the art of bringing ideas into widespread use, has much quickened the step of human spirit; but, in the act of making the road shorter, it may at times have stripped it of its more brilliant aspects. Every object presents itself in turn to Homer’s gaze; he does not always choose wisely, but he always depicts it in an interesting fashion’.30 In fact, like Pope, she praised Homer’s invention. For Madame de Staël, Homer was a craftsman, not a thinker, a purveyor of splendid pictures, not of ideas.
CHAPTER 14
Homer as Idea
As learned commentators view
In Homer more than Homer knew.
Jonathan Swift, On Poetry, 1733
In 1744, the year of Pope’s death, Giambattista Vico, former professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples and appointed historiographer of King Charles de Bourbon, published the third revised edition of his revolutionary La scienza nuova or The New Science. Misunderstood or ignored by his contemporaries, Vico proposed a cyclical theory of history that began with Homer and his poetic knowledge, and eventually returned to it, in an ever-ascending spiral. Philosophers in Vico’s age offered two conflicting theories of knowledge: the first was based on evidence and argument, ‘the philosophy of life and existence’, while the second was centred on introspection and thought, ‘the philosophy of the irrational’.1 Vico offered a third possibility: the imagination, an independent power of the mind that he called fantasia. Poetic images, such as those created by Homer to tell ‘true’ stories but condemned as lies by Plato, were not ‘concepts in poetic cloaks’. These universali fantastici or ‘universal images born from the imagination’ were to be considered on their own terms. Western philosophy had always seen these images as literary or rhetorical and, because they were not conceptual, they were regarded as ‘not philosophical’. In contrast, Vico took Homer’s side against Plato’s rationalism and argued for a knowledge he called sapienza poetica or poetic wisdom, whose driving force was memory, the goddess Homer knew as Mnemosyne. ‘Memory,’ wrote Vico, ‘has three different aspects: memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship. For these reasons, the theological poets called Memory the mother of the Muses.’2 Later, James Joyce was to sum up Vico’s notion as ‘Imagination is the working over of what is remembered.’3
In Book II of the Iliad, when Homer is about to list the gathering of the Greek armies on the plain outside Troy, he stops his narrative and invokes the Muses. Partly, this is the literary device that became codified in the Middle Ages as excusatio propter infirmitatem (‘an apology for one’s own shortcomings’); partly, it is a way of lending verisimilitude to the telling by shifting responsibility: ‘It is not I who says this, but something greater than I, and therefore it must be true.’
Sing to me now, you Muses who hold the halls of Olympus!
You are goddesses, you are everywhere, you know all things –
all we hear is the distant ring of glory, we know nothing –
who were the captains of Achaea? Who were the kings?
The mass of troops I could never tally, never name,
not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
a tireless voice and the heart inside me bronze,
never unless you Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus
whose shield is rolling thunder, sing, sing in memory
all who gathered under Troy.4
The Muses can ‘sing in memory’, that is to say, they can speak the truth embedded in memory. It is not the poet who knows, but the daughters of Mnemosyne, notably the Muse Urania, whom Homer calls the Muse of divination, and of the knowledge of good and evil (only later will she become the Muse of astronomy). From this concept, Vico developed the notion that poetic wisdom does not belong to one poet but to a people, and that ‘there is no authorship to Homer’s works in the ordinary sense of the word, but that the mind of the Greek people is their author’.5 For Vico, Homer was not a person but ‘an idea’.6
Some fifty years later, Friedrich August Wolf, who most probably had not read Vico, developed a similar theory about Homer and his poems. A pious legend has it that this son of a modest schoolteacher was the first student of philology of any German university and that, in order to discourage him from pursuing what appeared to be a fruitless career, the university authorities explained that, once he had graduated, there would only be a couple of poorly paid openings for a philology professor. Wolf answered that this didn’t worry him, since he only required one. Indeed, at the age of twenty-four, he became professor of philology at the University of Halle, where he began to develop his Homeric theory. The resulting book, written in a complicated, almost impregnable Latin, was eventually published in 1795 as Prolegomena ad Homerum.7
At the time, German readers relied on two potent guides to ancient Greek culture. One was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the celebrated classical scholar who had risen from cobbler’s son to one of the most erudite men of his age, and who had summed up the Greek ideal as ‘a noble naïvety and a calm greatness’.8 The other was Johann Heinrich Voss whose magnificent translations of the Odyssey in 1781 and the Iliad in 1793 proved that modern German could serve as a powerful medium for epic poetry by employing a pattern of verses of varying lengths (dactylic hexameters) that
allowed great freedom of expression and the full use of a rich vocabulary.
Wolf’s arguments opposed both the reverential consecration of Winckelmann’s Homer and the untouchable nobility of his verse in Voss’s rendition, and called for a serious investigation of how books such as the Iliad and the Odyssey had come into being. With his Prolegomena, Wolf gave birth to the new science of classical studies or Altertumswissenschaft.
At about the same time, in France, in the aftermath of the querelle, the brilliant polymath Denis Diderot found in Homer an example of that which, in his opinion, should be left behind if enlightened progress was to be made. It was not that Homer didn’t move him or that he thought the Iliad lacked the realism Diderot sought in art. He admitted, for example, that Homer was capable of powerfully conveying the horrors of war: ‘I enjoyed the sight of crows in Homer gathered around a corpse, tearing the eyes out of its head and flapping their wings with delight.’9 But Homer could be understood as a counter-argument to the Enlightenment’s view of a world driven by rationality alone, a view put forward, for instance, in Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream of 1769. The book, intelligent and humorous, consists of a series of philosophical dialogues in which Diderot proposes a revised materialist account of human history and animal life, suggesting that emotions, ideas and thoughts could be explained through biological evidence, without recourse to theology or spirituality, and dismissing all uncritical reverence for the past. Diderot’s Encyclopédie, in seventeen large volumes of text plus eleven of illustrations, edited together with Jean d’Alembert and published between 1751 and 1772, attempted to define ‘science, art and craft’ through rational methods only, and included under innocuous headings dangerous subjects such as religion and systems of government. Under the general entry for ‘Greek Philosophy’,10 for instance, Diderot amused himself in dismissing Homer as ‘a theologian, philosopher and poet’ and quoted the unattributed view (which he admits, ‘demonstrates a want of both philosophy and taste’) that Homer was an author ‘unlikely to be read much in the future’. Vico had suggested that Homer was the product of the heroic cycle in society’s development. For Diderot, Homer belonged to a primitive, superstitious age.
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