Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey
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Shortly before his death in 1832, Goethe finished the last section of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. In it, he hails his century as one fortunate enough to have witnessed the rebirth of Homer. ‘Happy is that literary age,’ he wrote, ‘when great works of art of the past rise to the surface again and become part of our daily dealings, for it is then that they produce a new effect. For us, Homer’s sun rose again, and according to the requirements of our age… No longer did we see in those poems a violent and inflated heroic world, but rather the mirrored truth of an essential present, and we tried to make him as much ours as possible.’20
CHAPTER 16
Homer as Symbol
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, 1690 (posth.)
Friedrich Nietzsche had little time for Goethe’s views on Homer, which he found ‘incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art grows – the orgiastic. Indeed I do not doubt that as a matter of principle, Goethe excluded anything of the sort from the possibilities of the Greek soul. Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks.’1 Like Goethe, Nietzsche had read Homer very young. The gifted son of a pastor, he studied in both Bonn and Leipzig and was elected to the chair of classical philosophy at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-five. During his professorship, three years later, he wrote his first great book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, in which he began to outline his theory about the driving forces of Greek culture. But already in his inaugural lecture at Basel, in 1869, he had pronounced the question on Homer that unwittingly echoed Vico’s and foreshadowed Jung’s: ‘Has a person been made out of an idea or an idea out of a person?’2
For Nietzsche, no one could read Homer’s books as Homer wrote them: we read not the stories he told but interpreted versions of those stories. ‘Why did the whole Greek world exult over combat scenes of the Iliad?’ he asks in a posthumously published fragment. ‘I fear that we do not understand these sufficiently in a “Greek” manner; indeed, that we should shudder if we were ever to understand them “in Greek”.’3 What allows for these individual readings is that, at the core of ancient Greek culture, is a living tension between, on the one hand, a tendency towards order and individual fulfilment (which Nietzsche called ‘Apollonian’) and, on the other, violence and destructive rapture (‘Dionysian’). In this context, Homer was for Nietzsche a creative Apollonian force that wrote his poems ‘in order to persuade us to continue to live’.4 Homer’s gods justify human life by sharing it with us mortals; for his heroes, the greatest pain is therefore to leave this life, especially when one is young. Nietzsche saw Homer as the ‘total victory of the Apollonian illusion’, an illusion that entails believing ourselves worthy of being glorified, and therefore imagining beautiful gods who are our own reflection. In this, he joins Schiller’s characterization of Homer as a natural poet. ‘By means of this mirage of beauty,’ concludes Nietzsche, ‘Hellenic “will” battled with the talent, correlative to the artistic talent, for suffering and the wisdom of suffering, and as a monument to its triumph stands Homer, the naïve artist.’5
Seventeen years after writing this, in 1889, in Turin, the syphilis from which Nietzsche had suffered for years manifested itself in serious mental disturbances. To the bewilderment of his hosts, Nietzsche locked himself in his room, pounded the piano night and day, pranced about naked, singing loudly, and performed autoerotic Dionysian rites. When a local doctor for the insane came to examine him, Nietzsche cried out: ‘Pas malade! Pas malade!’ At last his friends convinced him to leave Turin and return to Basel. In 1900 he died in Weimar, dressed in a white robe and recognizing no one.6
Nietzsche’s poetical reading of Homer had placed him on the opposite side of Wolf’s unsentimental investigations, though both believed that Homer was an abstract noun, a classic concept rather than a historical person. Homer’s poems were a different matter. Nietzsche (and perhaps Wolf as well) understood that one of the qualities of a classic is that it elicits from the reader a double sense of witnessed truth: that of poetic artifice and that of experienced reality, or, in Nietzschean terms, that of Apollonian illusion and that of Dionysian struggle.
Sigmund Freud, writing in 1915, some six months after the outbreak of the First World War, suggested that something like this split perception of the world manifested itself in our relationship with death.7 He did not refer to Nietzsche: his biographer, Peter Gay, remarked that ‘Freud treated Nietzsche’s writings as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied.’8 Freud did, however, follow Nietzsche in noting that the value we place on life after death was a development of post-Homeric times and, like Nietzsche, quoted in support of his theory the answer Achilles gave to Ulysses in the Underworld. For Ulysses (that is, the living, for whom death is still unimaginable), death is a form of heroic fulfilment. He says to Achilles that he should not grieve at having died because:
Time was, when you were alive, we Argives
honoured you as a god, and now down here, I see,
you lord it over the dead in all your power.9
As mentioned, Achilles furiously denies this: he does not believe in the necessary advent of death and in whatever value we may grant it. His only concern is life, which he no longer has, and against which he will trade any reward of fame or glory. And this is the same Achilles who, in the Iliad, telling the young son of Priam that he will not spare his life, is suddenly aware that one day he too will die:
… even for me, I tell you,
death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
when a man will take my life in battle too.10
Achilles knows that he is mortal and, at the same time, refuses to accept the final fact. Freud argued that, like Achilles, our unconscious ‘does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our “unconscious” – the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses – knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it, contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative content. Thus there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death.’ And Freud adds: ‘This may even be the secret of heroism.’11
Homer and the ancient world (especially that of the Greek tragedians) provided Freud with a useful vocabulary of what he called ‘symbols’ and lent him key words for the abstract concepts he dealt with in his psychoanalytical investigations. These sometimes took on the concrete shape of art objects which he enjoyed collecting throughout his life. In his study, first in Vienna, then in London, he kept dozens of Egyptian, Greek and Roman figurines and pottery, ‘strewn over every available surface: they stood in serried ranks on bookshelves, thronged table tops and cabinets, and invaded Freud’s orderly desk, where he had them under his fond eye as he wrote his letters and composed his papers’.12 It was as if the presence of signs from the past helped him find the words for naming that which the unconscious would not even deny. To one of his patients, he explained that his fondness for the ancient world served as a useful mirror for his practice. ‘The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.’13 But, as Peter Gay remarked, ‘this weighty metaphor does not exhaust the significance of this addiction for Freud’.14 Freud found in Homer and his world a constantly changing trove of symbolic readings which, as his own work proved, reflected the tension between contradictory revelations. As if echoing the dialogue between Andromache and Hector in Book VI of the Iliad, Freud wrote: ‘We recall the old saying, Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want to preserve peace, arm for war.’ And he concluded: ‘It would be in keeping with these times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.’15
F
reud drew cautious parallels between archaeological discoveries and psychological truths, suggesting symbolic links between, for instance, the memory of disappeared civilizations and the group psychology of certain social upheavals. ‘If all that is left of the past are the incomplete and blurred memories which we call tradition, this offers an artist a peculiar attraction, for in that case he is free to fill in the gaps in memory according to the desires of his imagination.’16 In the same way, Freud’s psychoanalysis (one of his more intelligent disciples argued) confronts us ‘with the abyss within ourselves’ and forces on us ‘the incredibly difficult task of taming and controlling its chaos’.17
Carl Gustav Jung tempered what he considered a reductive method in Freud’s reading. For Jung, ‘Those conscious contents which give us a clue to the unconscious background are incorrectly called symbols by Freud. They are not true symbols, however, since according to his theory they have merely the role of signs or symptoms of the subliminal processes. The true symbol differs from this and should be understood as an expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way.’18 For Jung, only certain images, fully denoting an idea in all its sprawling and even contradictory complexity (Plato’s metaphors or Christ’s parables) were ‘genuine and true symbols’. Homer, who knew this, did not end the Iliad with the narrow image of death. Just before the closing verses, he joined the grief of the defeated to the grief of the victors, and conjured up the memorable image of both combined in one, that, as Jung thought, surely ‘cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way’. Agreeing to let old Priam have the remains of Hector, Achilles instructs the serving-women first to ‘bathe and anoint the body’ so that the father will not see the corpse of his son in a shameful state. And then Achilles lifts Hector up in his own arms and lays him down on a bier and, as he does this, he calls to his beloved Patroclus, whose murder he sought to avenge by the killing of Hector, and addresses the ghost of his friend:
‘Feel no anger at me, Patroclus, if you learn –
even there in the House of Death – I let his father
have Prince Hector back. He gave me worthy ransom
and you shall have your share from me, as always,
your fitting, lordly share.’19
In 1908, the English poet Rupert Brooke attempted to disclose both the symbolic or ‘poetic’ and the historical or ‘realistic’ readings of Homer in a double sonnet which he imagined as a possible forked ending for the Iliad. Though hardly a professional soldier (he died of blood poisoning in 1915 on his way to fight in the Dardanelles) Brooke is today mainly remembered as a war poet on the strength of the first lines of ‘The Soldier’, written in the year of his death: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.’
Brooke’s Homeric poem, ‘Menelaus and Helen’, reads:
I
Hot through Troy’s ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam’s palace, sword in hand, to sate
On that adulterous whore a ten years’ hate
And a king’s honour. Through red death, and smoke,
And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,
Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.
He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim
Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.
II
So far the poet. How should he behold
That journey home, the long connubial years?
He does not tell you how white Helen bears
Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,
Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold
Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys
’Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice
Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.
Often he wonders why on earth he went
Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.
Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;
Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.
So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;
And Paris slept on by Scamander side.20
CHAPTER 17
Homer as History
… but where I sought for Ilion’s walls,
The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1819–24
Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur archaeologist who died a decade before Nietzsche, shared this double vision of the Iliad, both as invention and as history. Schliemann was less interested in the truth of the person Homer (though Schliemann thought he had indeed existed) than in that of his poems. Schliemann believed that, if properly deciphered, Homer’s books, poetical inventions as they were, could provide an accurate guide to the physical site of Troy.
According to Schliemann (who also confessed that he was prone to lying and exaggeration), his passion for Homer began in his early childhood, when his father would recite for him at bedtime the adventures of the Homeric heroes. The boy was so enthralled by the stories that, one Christmas when he was ten, he presented his father with the gift of ‘a badly written Latin essay upon the principal events of the Trojan war and the adventures of Ulysses and Agamemnon’.1 Because of the family’s position, the boy was unable to attend college; he was instead apprenticed, at the age of fourteen, to a village grocer and quickly forgot most of what he had learned at home.
One of the picturesque characters in Schliemann’s village happened to be an apprentice miller, a young man who had once studied the classics but had since become a pitiful drunk. Rumour had it that he had been expelled from school for bad behaviour and that, to punish him, his father, a Protestant clergyman, had made him learn the miller’s trade. In despair, the young man had taken to drink but had not, however, forgotten his Homer. One evening, the drunken miller staggered into Schliemann’s shop and, in front of the astonished boy, recited one hundred lines of ancient Greek in resounding rhythmic cadence. Schliemann did not understand a single word but the music of the verses made such an impression on him that he burst into tears and asked the man to repeat them again and again, bribing him with tumblers of brandy. ‘From that moment on,’ he later confessed, ‘I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness to learn Greek.’2
A chest ailment made it impossible for Schliemann to continue working at the grocer’s and, in search of new employment, he travelled to Hamburg, where he found a position as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Venezuela. A storm stranded the ship on the Dutch coast and Schliemann, believing destiny had decreed that he live in Holland, settled down in Amsterdam as a filing clerk. He decided to study languages and learned in quick succession English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, but not until 1856, at the age of thirty-four, did he begin to study his beloved Greek. Some time later, a number of successful business transactions left him with a huge fortune. In his accounts of these adventures, Schliemann doesn’t tell us what those transactions were, but his vast correspondence reveals that he was involved in various unscrupulous dealings: the commerce of saltpetre for gunpowder during the Crimean War, the purchase of gold from the Californian prospectors during the gold-rush, the buying and selling of cotton during the American Civil War.3 A rich man at last, Schliemann was now able to fulfil his dream of visiting ancient Greece and exploring the places described by Homer. In this he was astonishingly successful. In 1873, using the Iliad as his travel guide, Schliemann unearthed, beneath the town of Hisarlik in north-western modern Turkey, the fabled city of Troy – not one but nine strata of Trojan cities.
Contrary to Schliemann’s own marvellous account, he did
not immediately stumble on the site. From the seventeenth century on, readers had imagined that it was possible to find ‘Priam’s six-gated city’, as Shakespeare called it in Troilus and Cressida. John Sanderson, Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador, wrote that twice he had set off in search of Troy, first in 1584 and then in 1591, unsuccessfully. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the search continued intermittently. Robert Wood published a book in 1769, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, that, though not proposing an exact location for the city, described the changes in the topography that would probably have taken place since Homer’s time (changes which we now know to be correct).4 Some fifty years later, the armchair archaeologist Charles Maclaren correctly suggested that Troy’s location was in Hisarlik, but the first serious diggings of the site were begun by Frank Calvert, a scholarly Englishman who had lived in Turkey all his life. Schliemann, whose sights were at first fixed on another location, finally agreed with Calvert’s choice and joined him in the excavations.
Calvert and Schliemann soon had a falling out. Calvert publicly expressed his opinion that there was missing in the site an essential link between two strata, between that of the prehistoric occupation of the city and that of the so-called Archaic style of approximately 700 BC. In other words, there was no evidence of roughly 1200 BC, the time of the Trojan War itself. Schliemann was furious and accused Calvert of being ‘A foul fiend… a libeller and a liar’. A few weeks later, Schliemann was vindicated. On 31 May 1873 he uncovered, in the stratum he had argued was Homer’s Troy, a treasure of copper cauldrons full of golden and silver cups and vases, copper lance-heads and an astonishing collection of gold jewellery: rings, bracelets, earrings, diadems and one ornate headband. To record the find, Schliemann had his wife photographed in what he called ‘the Jewels of Helen’.5 Though the jewels now appear to have been dated correctly to the time of Homer’s Troy, the ‘treasure’ itself was probably found by Schliemann over various weeks, scattered about in a number of places and then gathered in order to make believe that they were all part of one lot. Most of Schliemann’s finds were stored in Berlin, from where they mysteriously disappeared after World War Two. Until recently, all that remained of the gold of Troy were later finds: a pair of earrings, a necklace, a few rings and some pins, on display at the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul. Then, in 1993, the vanished treasure was discovered in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where it had been deposited by the Russian Army. Though a German-Russian treaty has since been signed, allowing for the return of Schliemann’s finds to Berlin, in 2004 the Association of Russian Museum Directors blocked the procedures in retaliation for the looting of Russian museums by the soldiers of the Third Reich.