Baricco lays his finger on a terrible paradox. We know that the murderous violence of war is terrible, and yet something in us loves the spectacle. When Ulysses and Telemachus attack the treacherous suitors, Homer compares the vengeful king and his son to eagles attacking small birds that cringe under the clouds:
… the eagles plunge in fury, rip their lives out – hopeless,
never a chance of flight or rescue – and people love the sport.5
People love the sport. Writing in 1939 on the notion of force in the Iliad, Simone Weil noted that the prevailing feeling throughout the poem is one of bitterness, ‘the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt. Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the domination of force, is loved but loved sorrowfully, because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him.’6 Only someone who has suffered through war, injustice, misfortune, someone who has learned how far ‘the domination of force’ extends ‘and knows how not to respect it, is capable’, according to Weil, ‘of love and justice’. Perhaps this is what Dante had in mind.
To expose soldiers to this paradox, in the first year of the Second World War, the poet and critic Herbert Read compiled an anthology, The Knapsack, small enough to be packed into a kit. Three extracts from Chapman’s Homer begin his selection: the invocation to Ares from his translation of Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice, Agamemnon taking up arms in Book XI of the Iliad, and the forging of Achilles’ shield in Book XVIII. Read said that he was guided in his choice by both a wish to avoid the ‘sustained tone of moral seriousness’ and a ‘certain abstractness’ in the idealism of other war anthologies, as well as a desire to show ‘the dialectic of life, the contradictions on which we have to meditate if we are to construct a workable philosophy’. ‘In war,’ Read argued and in the daily struggle of everyday life, it is a workable philosophy that each man has to construct for himself if he is to preserve a serene mind.’7 The wish for a ‘serene mind’ occurs in the invocation to Ares in the Battle.
On the one hand, we cannot deny the benevolent ideals that sometimes lead to war, the heroism and altruism with which it is sometimes fought, and the freedom from oppression that is sometimes its consequence. With the excuse of best intentions, Homer lovingly describes the sword piercing the flesh, the spurting blood, the broken teeth, the marrow oozing from the severed bones, and Ajax speaks of ‘the joy of war’8 and Paris strides into battle ‘exultant, laughing aloud’.9 On the other hand, the slaughter, the destruction, the suffering of every kind brought on by war, cannot be defended10 and, doubtlessly, Homer loathed war. ‘Atrocious’, ‘scourge of men’, ‘lying, two-faced’, he calls it. And Zeus himself speaks of ‘the horrid works of war’.11 Pity and mourning, and a plea for compassion, are never far from the battlefield. It is not by chance that supplications (first, of the priest of Apollo, Chryses, for his daughter taken by Agamemnon, and last, of King Priam for the body of his son Hector) begin and end the Iliad.
The extraordinary power of the Iliad comes from the fact that it holds the tension between these two truths. Emile Zola, writing from the perspective of nineteenth-century realism, refused Homer any such subtlety. ‘In his books, the heroes are nothing but gang bosses. There, women are raped, people are duped, they insult one another for months, they cut one another’s throats, they drag around the corpses of their enemies. Read the novels of Fenimore Cooper about the Indians, and you’ll see the similarities.’12 Zola was mistaken: Homer is never merely descriptive and certainly never commonplace. It is easy, for a modern reader, to confuse the use of conventional epithets with conventional descriptions, but the fact that the epithets themselves are fixed by convention does not mean that they are synonymous: Homer knew sixty-odd ways to say ‘so-and-so died’ and they are all different.
War, Homer explicitly tells us, has its place in the universe, as represented in the shield that the smithy-god Hephaestus has crafted for Achilles.13 It is divided into five circles. In the middle are the earth, the sky and the sea. Next come two cities, one at peace, showing everyday activities such as a wedding and a lawsuit, the other under siege, depicting men preparing an ambush while the elders, the women and the children cower behind the walls. The third circle shows the four seasons; the fourth, a ritual dance; and finally, the fifth and last is an image of Ocean, the river that in Homer’s time was also the edge of the world. Framed by the cosmos, the world of humankind naturally includes the activity of war, counterpoised to the arts of peace. Achilles’ shield (like the whole of the Iliad, and also the Odyssey) shows how fully Homer understood our ambiguous relationship to violence, our desire for it and our hatred of it, the beauty we ascribe to it and the horror it makes us feel, so that when faced with it, we are forced to look both ways. Two examples from the Iliad will illustrate the point.
Book VI begins with the Greek and Trojan forces battling on the plain of Troy, between the rivers Simois and Xanthus. One of the Trojans called Adrestus (there are three of that name) is caught alive by Menelaus after his horses have bolted and he is hurled to earth from his chariot. Menelaus rises over him, ‘his spear’s long shadow looming’, and Adrestus hugs his captor’s knees and begs him to spare him for a rich ransom. Adrestus’ pleas move the king and, just as he is about to hand him back to an aide to be taken as prisoner to the ships, Agamemnon appears and chides him for his weakness. Menelaus, we must remember, is the injured party, Helen’s husband; Agamemnon, though supreme commander of the Greek army, is only Menelaus’ brother. And Agamemnon says:
Why such concern for enemies? I suppose you got
such tender loving care at home from the Trojans.
Ah would to god not one of them could escape
his sudden plunging death beneath our hands!
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly,
not even he escape – all Ilium blotted out,
no tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!14
Goaded by his brother, Menelaus shoves Adrestus with his fist and Agamemnon stabs the fallen man ‘in the flank and back’. Adrestus falls down dead, face up, and Agamemnon ‘dug a heel in his heaving chest/and wrenched the ash spear out’.15
A second example. Almost at the end of the Iliad, the angry Achilles pursues Hector outside the walls of Troy. Both are soldiers, both have blood on their hands, both have loved ones who have been killed, both believe that their cause is just. One is Greek, the other Trojan, but at this point their allegiances hardly matter. Now they are two men intent on killing one another. They run past the city walls and past the double springs of the river Scamander. And at this point, Homer breaks off his description of the fighting and pauses to remind us:
And here, close to the springs, lie washing-pools
scooped out in the hollow rocks and broad and smooth
where the wives of Troy and all their lovely daughters
would wash their glistening robes in the old days,
the days of peace before the sons of Achaea came…
Past these they raced…16
The scene of war, says Homer, is never only that of war: it is never only that of men acting out in the present the events of the day. It is always the scene of the past as well, a display of what men secretly once were, revealed now in their ultimate moments. Confronted with the imminence of violent death, war also confronts them with the memory of days of peace, of the happiness that life can, and should, grant us. War is both things: the experience of an awful present and the ghost of a beloved past.
Also, reparation for the future. Priam’s supplication to Achilles fulfils not just a traditional obligation or a sentimental act of mourning. It takes place so that a circle might be closed, a
nd so that those who have suffered might be comforted. In the Underworld, when Ulysses meets the unfortunate Elpenor who was killed just before leaving Circe’s island and left unburied, the ghost addresses his old captain with these words:
My lord, remember me, I beg you! Don’t sail off
and desert me, left behind unwept, unburied, don’t,
or my curse may draw god’s fury on your head.
No, burn me in full armour, all my harness,
heap my mound by the churning grey surf –
a man whose luck ran out –
so even men to come will learn my story.17
This is, in essence, what allows war to acquire its redemptory sense: the knowledge that the dead can help us not to forget injustice. From Priam’s plea to have the body of his son restored and Elpenor’s to have his body cremated, to today’s demands that war graves be opened in Latin America, Bosnia, Spain and dozens of other places, our healthy impulse is to restore to the dead their rightful role as memorials. In this way, as Homer knew, we can, simultaneously, both loudly abominate their loss and lovingly honour their sacrifice.
Shortly before his death in 1955, the American poet Wallace Stevens wrote this Homeric definition of war:
War has no haunt except the heart,
Which envy haunts, and hate, and fear,
And malice, and ambition, near
The haunt of love…18
CHAPTER 22
Everyman
They say Ulysses, tired of astonishments,
Wept for love at once again seeing his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is like that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of mere astonishments.
Jorge Luis Borges, Arte poética, 1958
In 1949, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called ‘The Immortal’, later included in the volume The Aleph,1 and inspired perhaps by his reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and H. G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind. It begins with an epigraph taken from Francis Bacon: ‘Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.’
In London, in the early days of June 1929, the Princess of Lucinge received from the antiquarian bookseller Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna the six volumes of the first edition of Pope’s Iliad. The man, she said, had singularly vague features and spoke several languages badly. Later she heard that he had died at sea, on board the Zeus, and that he had been buried on the island of Ios. In the Iliad’s last volume she found a manuscript written in a Latinized English.
The manuscript tells the story of a Roman tribune who, stationed in Thebes, witnesses one sleepless night the arrival of a rider coming from the east. The man, bloodied and exhausted, falls from his horse and asks the name of the city’s river; the tribune tells him it is called the Egypt. The rider explains that the river for which he searches is another, a secret river at the edge of the world that purifies men of death, and on whose farthest shore rises the City of the Immortals. The man dies and the tribune is filled with the desire to find the city. At the head of two hundred men, he sets out in search of it. The lands they cross are wild and strange; the men mutiny; the tribune escapes after being shot with an arrow. Feverish, he wanders in the desert; when he wakes, he finds himself, hands tied, in a stone niche carved out on the slope of a mountain. At the foot of the mountain is a brackish stream; beyond it rises the City of the Immortals. There are other niches on the slope and in the valley, as well as shallow holes in the sand; from these he sees grey, naked men emerge into the sunlight. The tribune guesses that these are the Troglodytes, a tribe that lacks speech and eats serpents. Devoured by thirst, the tribune throws himself down the slope and drinks from the stream. Before losing consciousness, he inexplicably repeats a few Greek words:
And men who lived in Zelea under the foot of Ida,
a wealthy clan that drank the Aesepus’ dark waters –2
After many days and nights he manages to cut his bonds and shamefully begs or steals his first ration of serpent’s meat. The desire to enter the City of the Immortals continues to haunt him. One day, he decides to escape the Troglodytes at the time when most of them leave their holes to look towards the west, without even noticing the sunset. At midnight he reaches the city and sees with relief (‘because man so abominates novelty and the desert’) that one of the Troglodytes has followed him.
But the City of the Immortals, built on a sort of plateau, shows no points of entrance, no stairs or gates. The fierce sun forces him to take refuge in a cave. Here he finds a well and a flight of steps that leads into the lower darkness; the tribune descends and loses himself in a labyrinth of identical galleries and chambers. After many attempts, he emerges into the city itself and sees, looming ahead, a palace of many shapes and heights. He feels that this building is older than man, older than the earth itself, and that its age suited the labours of immortal craftsmen. He thinks: ‘This palace was built by the gods.’ Then he explores it, and corrects himself: ‘The gods who built this are dead.’ He notices its peculiarities and pronounces: ‘The gods who built this were mad.’ The tribune realizes that the city is not a labyrinth like the one he was lost in underground. ‘A labyrinth is a house built to confuse men; its architecture, rich in symmetries, is subject to this purpose.’ The architecture of the palace lacks any purpose whatsoever: corridors lead nowhere, windows are unreachable, doors lead to wells, staircases run upside down. Horrified, he escapes.
When he comes out of the cave, he finds the Troglodyte lying at the entrance, tracing incomprehensible signs in the sand. The tribune feels that the creature has been waiting for him; that night, on the way back to the Troglodyte village, he decides to teach him a few words. The Troglodyte reminds him of the dog Argos in the Odyssey; he decides to give him the dog’s name. Day after day, the tribune attempts to teach Argos to speak. First months, then years pass, unsuccessfully. At last, one evening, it starts to rain. The entire tribe, in ecstasy, greets the falling water. The tribune calls to Argos who has begun to whimper. Suddenly, as if discovering something lost and forgotten long ago, the Troglodyte utters a few words: ‘Argos, dog of Ulysses.’ And then, still not looking at the tribune, quotes a line by Homer, ‘a dog on piles of dung from mules and cattle’. The tribune asks him what he knows of the Odyssey. Because the Troglodyte’s Greek is poor, he must repeat the question. ‘Very little,’ the Troglodyte answers. ‘Less than the poorest bard. Eleven hundred years must have gone by since I invented it.’
That night the truth is revealed to him. The Troglodytes are the Immortals; the brackish stream, the river sought by the rider. As to the famous city, the Immortals had destroyed it nine centuries ago and from its ruins they had built the senseless city the tribune had seen ‘as a parody or an inversion, and also as a temple to the irrational gods who govern the world and of whom we know nothing, except that they are not like men’. That was the last physical endeavour of the Immortals. Judging all enterprise fruitless, they decided to live in thought only, in pure speculation. After building the city, they forgot it and went to dwell in the caves.
Homer tells the tribune the story of his old age, and of the voyage he undertook, like that of Ulysses, to discover the land of men who ignore the sea and don’t eat salt. He lived for a century in the City of the Immortals and, when they tore it down, he advised building the other one, as he had sung the Battle of the Mice and the Frogs after singing the Trojan War. ‘It was like a god creating first the cosmos and afterwards chaos.’
The tribune realizes that drinking from the stream has made him immortal too, and sadly reflects that being immortal is something banal: with the exception of man, every creature enjoys immortality, because it ignores death. The divine, terrible, incomprehensible thing is to know that you are immortal. The slightest thought is the beginning or the end of an invisible design; an evil act may be performed so that in the future good may come o
f it. Given an infinite time, every action is just, but also indifferent: there are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; after an endless number of years, the impossibility would be not to compose, even once, the Odyssey. For the Immortals, therefore, everything must take place again, nothing can happen only once, nothing is precarious. The tribune and Homer part company at the gates of Tangiers: they do not say farewell.
The tribune recalls some of his further adventures: taking part in the battle of Stamford in 1066, although he cannot remember on what side he fought; having been a scribe in Bulaq who copied out the story of Sindbad; having played chess in a Samarkand prison and studied astrology in Bikaner and Bohemia. In 1714, in Aberdeen, he subscribed to Pope’s translation of the Iliad which he read with great delight; in 1729 he discussed the poem with a professor of rhetoric called Giambattista. On 4 October 1921, the ship taking him to Bombay stopped on the Eritrean coast; on the outskirts of the port he tasted the water from a clear stream: as he rose, a thorn pierced the back of his hand. The pain made him realize that, once again, he was mortal. That night he slept until dawn.
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 18