Professional archaeologists and academic classicists were enraged by Schliemann’s audacity and attempted to dismiss his findings. Matthew Arnold called him ‘devious’. The orientalist Joseph Arthur, Count de Gobineau said he was ‘a charlatan’. Ernst Curtius, excavator of Olympia, branded him ‘a swindler’. In these attacks there were at least four issues at play: first, what the academics considered the insolent intrusion of an amateur into their professional field; second, the highly disturbing notion that poetry might not be pure invention, but might instead provide accurate depictions of the material world it portrayed; third, the inevitable conclusion that the Iliad and the Odyssey might have their origin in days far beyond the heroic age of Greece, in the pre-classical and nebulous times outside the reach of the university curriculum. Finally, they questioned the veracity of Schliemann’s assumptions, arguing that the ruins he had uncovered were not those of Homer’s Troy (which now we know occupy the stratum identified as Troy VIIa).
To Schliemann’s daring imagination, these academic quibbles must have sounded like a reproach made to someone who has discovered the rabbit-hole leading into Wonderland, that this was not the actual entrance through which Alice herself descended. But Schliemann persisted. He described the ruins he had uncovered as ‘Troy, the city besieged by Agamemnon’, and the precious objects he had unearthed as ‘the treasure of King Priam’, because, he wrote, they were ‘called so by the tradition of which Homer is the echo; but as soon as it is proved that Homer and the tradition were wrong, and that Troy’s last king was called “Smith”, I shall at once call him so.’6 Whatever the criticism of the professionals, in the popular eye Schliemann became a hero, the discoverer of a world believed until then to be purely imaginary.
CHAPTER 18
Madame Homer
If [the critic Desmond MacCarthy] sincerely wishes to
discover a great poetess, why does he let himself be
fobbed off with a possible authoress of the Odyssey?…
I have often been told that Sappho was a woman, and
that Plato and Aristotle placed her with Homer and
Archilochus among the greatest of poets.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’, 1920
Some twenty-five years after Schliemann’s discoveries, in 1897, Samuel Butler published in London a little book called The Authoress of the Odyssey: Who and What She Was, When and Where She Wrote.1 The son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, Butler had by then tried his hand, mostly with fair success, at a dozen different activities, from sheep farmer in New Zealand (which gave him the setting for his utopian fantasy Erewhon) to painter, theologian, poet, scientist, musician, classicist and novelist (his best work, The Way of All Flesh, was published posthumously, in 1903). Butler believed that a careful reading of the Odyssey could prove that the author was, not a blind male bard, but a young unmarried woman, and a native of Sicily. He placed her life roughly between 1050 and 1000 BC and argued that she had before her, while she worked, Homer’s Iliad from which, from time to time, ‘she quoted freely’. Butler dismissed Wolf’s theories of a multilayered authorship, which he ridiculed as ‘the nightmares of Homeric extravagance which German professors have evolved out of their own inner consciousness’, but he conceded that two distinct poems, ‘with widely different aims’, had been cobbled together to make the Odyssey as we know it. With happy nonchalance, Butler said that he had based his theory on a comment made in passing by the scholar Richard Bentley (who had so flippantly dismissed Pope’s translation) that the Iliad was written for men and the Odyssey for women. Butler denied this notion of an exclusive audience, arguing that the Odyssey ‘was written for any one who would listen to it’, but maintained, however, that ‘If an anonymous book strikes so able a critic as having been written for women, a prima facie case is established for thinking that it was probably written by a woman.’
The idea had come to Butler in 1886. He had been writing the libretto (and much of the music) for a secular oratorio based on the travels of Ulysses, and decided to re-read the Odyssey in the original, something he hadn’t done for many years. ‘Fascinated, however, as I at once was by its amazing interest and beauty, I had an ever-present sense of a something wrong, of a something that was eluding me, and of a riddle which I could not read. The more I reflected upon the words, so luminous and so transparent, the more I felt a darkness behind them that I must pierce before I could see the heart of the writer – and this was what I wanted; for art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist.’3
Once certain of his intuition, Butler found in the Odyssey the facts to sustain it. For example, he discovered in the poem mistakes that, he said, ‘a young woman might easily make, but which no man could hardly fall into’. Among these, he listed: believing that a ship had a rudder at both ends (in Book IX); that well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree (Book V); that a flying hawk could tear its prey while in the air (Book XV). He then proceeded to map out carefully the palace of Ulysses to prove that only a woman would know what took place in all quarters of the building and, when certain descriptions presented problems, he argued again that only a woman would have no qualms about ‘shifting the gates a little’ for the purpose of her story. Finally, ‘When Ulysses and Penelope are in bed… and are telling their stories to one another, Penelope tells hers first. I believe a male writer would have made Ulysses’ story come first and Penelope’s second.’4
Butler then considered a problem which scholars have been confronting since the early days of Homeric commentary: that Ulysses’ description of Ithaca doesn’t correspond exactly to any known Greek island:
Sunny Ithaca is my home. Atop her stands our seamark,
Mount Neriton’s leafy ridges shimmering in the wind.
Around her a ring of islands circle side-by-side,
Dulichion, Same, wooded Zacynthus too, but mine
lies low and away, the farthest out to sea,
rearing into the western dusk
while the others face the east and breaking day.5
The topographical references Homer gives us for Ithaca are detailed and vivid, but they don’t match the ones of the Ithaca we know today. It has often been suggested that Homer, composing his poem somewhere in Asia Minor, had just invented the description of Ulysses’ home which he had never seen, or was misinformed about it. A recent theory suggests that Ithaca was in fact an island that has now become part of the mainland: the westernmost tip of Cephalonia, known as Paliki.6 Butler imagined instead that there was, in Homer’s time, another island called Ithaca, which he located in the area around Trapani in Sicily. Butler chose ‘the lofty and rugged island of Marettimo’7 as the most likely candidate.
Classicists and historians received the book in scornful silence or with finger-wagging disapproval. As late as 1956, the American historian Moses I. Finley accused Butler of taking for granted ‘that not only was the author(ess) of the Odyssey a Victorian novelist, but that the values and emotions of the characters in the poem were identical with those of his own time’.8 The criticism is fair. And yet, quirky and unconvincing as Butler’s theory might be, it established a precedent for a particular relationship to the classics that would become almost commonplace among writers of the twentieth century. Instead of viewing the work as a hallowed summit readers can never quite reach and in whose shadow they strive, as Goethe had suggested,9 Butler proposed a level ground on which both share a common space that can be entered, inhabited, renamed and reshaped in an endlessly renewed process. The process itself was, of course, not original, and yet its shameless appropriation had a pleasing cheek about it. But then Butler never lacked self-confidence. He once remarked to his friend William Ballard that when Perseus had come to free Andromeda, the dragon had never felt in better health and spirits, and was looking remarkably well. Ballard said he wished that this fact appeared in the poets. Butler looked at him and observed: ‘Ballard, I also am “the poets”’.10
Writing in the
same ironic vein, in 1932 T. E. Lawrence imagined Homer, the author of the Odyssey, not as a young Sicilian lady but as an old British gentleman. ‘[A] bookworm, no longer young, living from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic. Married but not exclusively, a dog-lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired. Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of the Iliad, with limited sensuous range but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures. A lover of old bric-à-brac, though as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott… He loved the rural scene as only a citizen can. No farmer, he had learned the points of a good olive tree. He is all adrift when it comes to fighting, and had not seen deaths in battle. He had sailed upon and watched the sea with a palpitant concern, seafaring being not his trade. As a minor sportsman he had seen wild boars at bay and heard tall yarns of lions… Very bookish, this house-bred man. His work smells of the literary coterie, of a writing tradition. His notebooks were stocked with purple passages and he embedded these in his tale wherever they would more or less fit. He, like William Morris, was driven by his age to legend, where he found men living untrammelled under the God-possessed skies. Only, with more verbal felicity than Morris’, he had less poetry.’11
Like Butler and Lawrence, the writers who followed began to establish a companionable relationship with Homer. In our time, Margaret Atwood, perhaps with an eye on Butler, took up Homer’s account of Ulysses’ return and re-imagined it from the point of view of Penelope and her maids.12 In Book XXII of the Odyssey, after Ulysses shoots Antinous, one of the two leading suitors, and reveals himself to the rest of the astonished men, he begins killing them one by one with the assistance of Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius. The goatherd Melanthius tries to arm the surviving suitors but is quickly found out, tortured and put to death. Ulysses, having run out of arrows, puts on his armour and finishes off the suitors with his sword and spear, while the twelve maids who have slept with them are strung up by their necks with a ship’s cable. After the massacre, Ulysses purges his palace, halls and court, with cleansing fumes. Atwood found the story unsatisfactory. There are, said Atwood, ‘two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies.’13
Butler thought that these ‘inconsistencies’ were simply due to the fact that Homer was a woman. ‘All readers,’ Butler wrote, ‘will help poets, playwrights and novelists, by making believe a good deal, but we like to know whether we are in the hands of one who will flog us uphill, or who will make as little demand upon us as possible.’ And in the scene of the killing of the suitors and the hanging of the maids, Butler argued that the former mode prevailed, since in his opinion, the authoress of the Odyssey identified herself here with Penelope (though Butler believed that she depicted herself in the poem as Nausicaa). ‘She does not care how much she may afflict the reader in his efforts to believe her – the only thing she cares for is her revenge. She must have every one of the suitors killed stone dead, and all the guilty women hanged, and Melanthius first horribly tortured and then cut in pieces. Provided these objects are attained, it is not necessary that the reader should be able to believe, or even follow, all the ins and outs of the processes that lead up to them.’14
Atwood doesn’t find the mechanics of the scene implausible, only the story itself. For Atwood’s Penelope, the killing of the maids is the result of a terrible error. In her version, when Ulysses asks the nurse Eurycleia to choose twelve of the fifty household maids to be sacrificed, the old woman, not knowing Penelope’s plot, chooses the twelve faithful ones who pretended, following Penelope’s instructions, to be rude to their queen. And then Penelope imagines a more sinister explanation. ‘What if Eurycleia was aware of my agreement with the maids – of their spying on the Suitors for me, of my orders to them to behave rebelliously? What if she singled them out and had them killed out of resentment at being excluded and the desire to retain her inside position with Odysseus?’15
Whichever the cause, the twelve maids killed ‘as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings/against some snare rigged up in thickets’16 (as Homer movingly describes them) haunt the reader’s imagination, and Atwood’s version links their story to contemporary accounts of mass rapes, and the attendant ostracism from their own people, of women in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and many other of today’s battlefields. If, as Butler suggested, the author of the Odyssey was a woman, she would have no doubt been aware that rape is (like anger, revenge and plunder) a weapon of war. According to Atwood, the fury of the murdered maids haunts Ulysses like a curse throughout eternity, infecting him with the constant wish ‘to be anywhere and anyone else’. As we have seen, Dante and Tennyson echo that curse.
Readers will never be quite certain whether Butler put forward his authorship proposal in earnest or not. If it wasn’t, then he had more of a talent to be witty than to recognize the wit of others. After he told William Thackeray’s eldest daughter, Lady Ritchie, of his Odyssey theory, she responded by announcing that she had one of her own: that the sonnets of Shakespeare had been written by Anne Hathaway. Butler didn’t get the joke. He repeated the story, shaking his head and muttering, ‘Poor lady, that was a silly thing to say.’17
In the years following the publication of Butler’s book, though in academic circles the old questions kept being batted about (was Homer a singular or plural author, or was he an author at all?), in fiction and poetry Homer began to be treated as a living author rather than as a resident of Olympus, and the legacy of Greece and Rome as common contemporary property to be pilfered at will. If Butler too was ‘the poets’, then the identification worked both ways, and Homer became (in Butler’s eyes, at least) an ancient Butler. Rudyard Kipling, for whom our understanding of the present is helped by mirroring what we know of the past, believed that it was useful to make these far-fetched associations: to learn from the merits and faults of the Roman Empire to criticize the Empire of Queen Victoria, to read in the stories of the Middle Ages how to live better lives in our own times, to find in Horace and in Shakespeare models for the present writer’s craft. His portrait of Homer illustrates the point very clearly:
When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took – the same as me!
The market-girls an’ fishermen,
The shepherds an’ the sailors, too,
They ’eard old songs turn up again,
But kep’ it quiet – same as you!
They knew ’e stole; ’e knew they knowed.
They didn’t tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at ’Omer down the road,
An’ ’e winked back – the same as us!18
CHAPTER 19
Ulysses’ Travels
Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
Since Homer was now a man of a thousand faces – a young Sicilian woman, a literary gentleman, an uneducated busker – he could then just as easily be an Irishman in exile. His heroes could fight the daily battles of an ordinary Dublin citizen. They could travel the labyrinthine city from adventure to adventure like a soldier returning home or like a son in search of his father. They could be our contemporaries, since Homer had foreseen everything and, as the German poet Durs Grünbein remarked, ‘the present is wind in the eyes of Homer ’.1 They could feel surrounded by an ever-tempting sea that lent its colour, wine-dark or snot-green, to its poets. They could attempt to be, if not good (James Joyce used the German word ‘gut’) then at least ’gutmütig’ – decent.2
Like Butler, Joyce assumed that he too was ‘the poets’, and at first the young Joyce was of two minds about allowing Homer into their company. To the writer Padraic Colum, the twenty-year-old Irishman declared that he ha
d no interest in Homer, whose epics, he felt, were ‘outside the tradition of European culture’.3 In his eyes, the only European epic was Dante’s Commedia. Possibly this extreme view was the result of his Irish Catholic upbringing, since the Counter-Reformation ideology, with its profound distrust of Greek, lived on strongly in most Catholic countries. Joyce had studied Latin at school: later, when living in Trieste, he picked up a few words of modern Greek but deeply regretted his ignorance of Homer’s tongue. To his friend Frank Budgen, a civil servant posted in Zurich, he said: ‘But just think, isn’t that a world I am peculiarly fit to enter?’4
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