More or less around the same time, the American Professor Carl W. Blegen discovered six hundred tablets at Pylos in the ruins of a palace of another Homeric monarch, old Nestor. Some ingenious yet extravagant hypotheses were advanced to decipher ‘Linear B’. As usual, Basque, Etruscan, and Hebrew were all evoked. Always without success.
An Archaic Dialect
It was thus in 1952 that a veritable thunder-strike resounded in the heavens of Hellenic studies. A thirty-year old philologist, Michael Ventris, made a staggering revelation: Linear B, the language from the height of Crete, is none other than Greek.
Son of a former officer in the Indian Army, Ventris had had a passion for archaeology since his childhood. A lecture by Sir Evans, which he heard when he was fourteen years old, had been a revelation for him. Thenceforth, he only spent his holidays at the British Museum. In 1940, he published his first article on the ‘Minoans’ in the American Journal of Archaeology. He concealed his age.
For a long time Ventris has been persuaded the Linear B belonged to Etruscan. It was only gradually that the Greek solution appeared to him as ‘inevitable’. In June 1952 he declared to the BBC:
‘After many years of work, I have come to the conclusion that the tablets of Knossos and of Pylos must, in the final analysis, have been written in Greek; a difficult, archaic Greek, to the extent that they are five hundred years older than Homer and written in quite an abridged form. But it is indeed Greek.
With his friend John Chadwick, Ventris treated Linear B as a secret code. In the absence of any bilingual document, he had to demonstrate meaningful occurrences using the ‘combinatory’ method, setting up ‘syllabic grids’. In 1953 he summarised his efforts in an article for the Journal for Hellenic Studies (‘Evidence for Greek Dialects in Mycenaean Archives’), which offered the interpretation of some sixty-five of the ninety signs already identified. Three years later, a book followed up on the article: Documents in Mycenaean Greek.
Chadwick mastered his subject so well that he was able to write in Linear B: ‘John to Michael, Greetings! Today I am going to give the book to the printer. Good luck!’
Gradually, the educated world surrendered to the evidence. As early as 1953, the Times celebrated those who had surmounted the ‘Everest of Greek archaeology’! Linear B is a system of the syllabic type (words are ‘di-vi-ded’). It also includes some ideograms for common vocabulary (man, woman, bronze, chariot, wheat). Numbers correspond to the decimal system, and there were special signs for fractions. As to the difficulties of ‘translation’, they adhere to archaisms, and to the fact that the signs were not originally conceived for the Greek language; they are only a ‘phonetic transcription’ of it.
‘We note indeed’, writes François Chamoux, ‘that the values attributed to the different signs of the syllabary must admit a certain play to lead to a coherent transcription in a Greek dialect, even of a strongly archaic type. Most of the diphthongs are not notes as such, the distinction is not made between short and long vowels, between l and r, etc.’ (La civilisation greque. Arthaud, 1963).110
The tablets are for the most part ‘compatible pieces’ deriving from stewardship services from the palace of Knossos, Pylos, or Mycenae. But they are of immense descriptive interest. They ‘take us back’ to the Mycenaeans like the Salic law takes us back to the Franks or the Domesday Book to the Anglo-Normans.
Beyond the inventories of goods and furniture, or the status of cultic fees, a system of feudal inheritance from the more ancient Indo-European past is also described: a patriarchal civilisation practicing agriculture, stockbreeding, and bronze metallurgy. Imposing fortresses were richly ornamented with hunting and battle scenes on the walls. Fleets submitted to the authority of a prince (anax). Cities were run by a leader, assisted by a ‘retinue’ of companions (analogous to the Germanic Gefolgschaft)111 and by a council of Elders. These were the Achaeans of Menelaus and Agamemnon. The civilisation of which Homer had sung.
Ten years before Pericles, the Greek pantheon was already complete. On the tablets we find the names of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, and perhaps also Dionysus attested by a probable genitive. A dedication is even present ‘to all the gods’ (pa-si-te-o-i).
At Mycenae as in Crete, at Pylos as in Thebes, masters and servants bore Greek names, spoke Greek, and kept their records in Greek.
A Period of more than 3,500 Years
Since then, the perspective proposed by Evans has found itself suddenly reversed: it is Greece who imposed its domination upon the Cretans in the fifteenth century BCE. The absence in the administrative inventories of any mention of insular Cretan dependencies sounds the death-knell of the highly imaginary ‘Minoan thalassocracy’.112
The Greek Dark Age is no longer a chasm between two different worlds, but a point of connection continuing the same mentality. The Mycenaeans are not the ‘pre-Hellenes’; they come wholly from the Greeks.
‘We need to admit’, writes François Chamoux, ‘that the history of Greek civilisation no longer began in the eighteenth century, but at the moment that the first decipherable texts appeared, that is to say, in the middle of the second millennium, towards the end of the fifteenth century, if not even sooner. All Mycenaean civilisation now departs from Hellenism, not merely as a preface, but as the first chapter of its history, which started at least six hundred years earlier than we had believed’.
The Greek language is thus known to us by texts extending over a period of more than 3,500 years. The only other comparable language is Chinese.
The Mycenaean civilisation was replaced by that of the Dorians, who founded Sparta and brought with them the cult of Apollo and the metallurgy of iron. Was the destruction of the palace of Knossos and of Mycenae linked to the natural catastrophes that accompanied the arrival of the ‘Sea Peoples’? The hypothesis has some consistency. It nevertheless runs into a chronological error, since the end of the palatial civilisation is habitually placed around 1450–1400 BCE, whereas the Sea Peoples have scarcely appeared in the Aegean region until around 1,200 BCE. But this difference, perhaps, does not correspond to reality. It could result from the juxtaposition of two different chronologies, one applying to Europe, and the other to Egypt and the Near East. It is also in the process of being ‘reduced’. According to Professor L. R. Palmer, the eruption of the volcano at Thera-Santorini, the invasions of the Sea Peoples, the collapse of the Mycenaean culture at the end Cretan palatial civilisation, as well as the arrival or the Dorians, were indeed situated in the same era. ‘As far as the writing and the language are concerned’, he observes, ‘the tablets of Knossos, dated to around 1,450 BCE, are quite similar to those of Pylos, which date from around 1,200 BCE. Is it possible that the language had remained static during those centuries?’
This hypothesis explains the conservation of tablets and the uniform character of the inscriptions. ‘It was the enormous heat of the final accident,’ recalls Chadwick, ‘which had cooked most of the clay tablets, giving them the hardness of brick or ceramic that allowed them to survive down to our own time’.
Linear A
The Greek poet Menander said: ‘Those who are loved by the gods die young’. The life of Michael Ventris ended on the night of 6 September 1956, near Hatfield. A car accident. The decipherer of Linear B was killed on impact.
The spark was ignited. After the ‘breakthrough’ of 1952, all subsequent works confirmed the conclusions of Ventris and Chadwick. In France, the linguist Michael Lejeune and the philologist Pierre Chantraine were among the first to catalogue them. Tablets are still discovered each year. Thebes, Sparta, and Pleuron still remain to be excavated. (Incidentally, in 1963–1964, it was verified that Sir Arthur Evans had somewhat ‘embellished’ his findings, and that pieces as celebrated as his ‘Prince of the Lilies’, his ‘Three Cretans’, his ‘Seated Goddess’, and his ‘Goddess with Serpents’ were all simply false).
The book by Chadwick was published in Great Britain in 1958. It has taken fourteen years for it to cross the Channel
. But it is lively, precise, and conducted like a police investigation. The postface, dated to 1967, adds some new summaries. There is one discordant note: a fairly pointless preface in which Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who was part of a small group of Marxising Hellenists (Jean-Pierre Vernant, Moses I. Finlay) continues to denounce the ‘Homeric illusion’.
As to Linear A, it is still undeciphered. But the hypotheses are going strong. It cannot be excluded that this script records an Indo-European language from Asia Minor; ‘Luwian’, says Professor L. R. Palmer (Mycenaeans and Minoans, London, 1965), while Professor Simon Davis from the University of Witwatersrand thinks that it is from a dialect derived from Hittite. Stay tuned. We await a new Ventris.
*
Le déchiffrement du linéare B, a study by John Chadwick.113 Gallimard, 238 pages.
Homer and the Homeric Epic
‘The unequal struggle between spiritual values and materialism leads to chaos and despair’, declares Eleftherios C. Mamounas, founder of the International Society of Homeric Studies. More and more, the young restrict their ideals to dubious and degrading pleasures. This deviation is clearly depicted in the Homeric writings. Doesn’t the first verse of the Iliad begin with the word ‘wrath’? Homer has been the witness of men’s weaknesses. By keeping his work alive, we also understand how to defend the values of our own civilisation.
15,693 verses + 12,110 verses: the Iliad and the Odyssey. More than a masterpiece. One of the most ancient monuments of western literature. Not a legend, but a myth embroidered upon a reality.
Not one author from Antiquity has ever contested the reality of the Trojan War. Plato himself, who rejected the ‘ethics’ of Homer, casts no doubt on the event itself. Besides, it is found in other texts (of which there is a previous account wrongly attributed to Dictys of Crete). ‘The very fact’, notes Jean Bérard in his preface to the Pleiade edition (Gallimard, 1961), ‘that in the Iliad and Odyssey, the unusual episodes of the two poems are mentioned by simple allusions is significant: it implies that this legend was known by the poet as well as by all those to whom he addressed himself’.
The date of the storming and burning of Troy is still uncertain. It generally goes back to the vicinity of −1270, the thirteenth century BCE. In 1870, on the mound of Hissarlik (Anatolia), the German archaeologist Schliemann found the ruins of the city of King Priam.
The world of Homer is the Mycenaean world that scholars have restored for us. The Atreidae and the golden fleece. The establishment of Rhodes and the destruction of Thebes. Achilles and Patroclus, Helen and Paris. The crime of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. This universe was destroyed around 1200 BCE. After the Trojan War, Homer tells us, the descendants of Heracles, at the head of the Dorians, established themselves in the Peloponnesus. Thus, with the ‘return of the Heracleidae’, the time of ancient heroes came to an end.
Due to essentially ideological motivations, some authors have sought to deny the identity of the Homeric world and of the Mycenaean civilisation. Moses I. Finley, followed by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, never fail to place Homer’s name in quotation marks, and to ensure that ancient Greek society ‘incontestably recalls the other societies of the same age from the Near East’ (Le monde d’Ulysse. Maspéro, 1969).114 Jean Bérard responds: ‘It can no longer be doubted that the Age of Heroes, to which the epic legends of Greece refer, answers to the archaeological realities of the Mycenaean epoch that the excavations have revealed to us’.
The Sacred Books of Ancient Greece
From the Trojan War, which lasted ten years, Homer retains only two brief episodes: the battle of Achilles and Agamemnon and that which follows; the long wandering of the cunning Odysseus after the sacking of Ilion. Exemplary destinies. Odysseus lives to a ripe old age and reaches his end after a long journey. Achilles has the brief existence of heroes. (One cannot have, at the same time, both endurance and intensity). For one, adventure and love. For the other, war and friendship. The fox and the lion.
The technique of composition is ultra-modern. The first song of the Iliad begins when the war is reaching its end. The Odyssey takes Odysseus from his departure from Calypso, where he remained for seven years. It is only in a secondary episode that the reader is invited to ‘return’. Homer invents the flashback.
The poet sings of exploits, and above all exploits of war. But the clash of weapons does not exclude psychological analysis nor emotional heights. The harshest customs are also the least crude. ‘Achaean society of the heroic age, however it might appear to our modern eyes, is in no way a primitive society. The brilliance of material civilisation and art, as notably testified by the carved gold cups from Vaphio or Dendra, are already linked to a great moral refinement’. (Jean Bérard).
A wealth of images: ‘In the heart of the countryside, where one is without neighbours, the brand is hidden under ash and ember to conserve the seed of fire so one doesn’t have to seek it elsewhere: thus was Odysseus hidden under its leaves’.
Some constants appear in the Iliad: the sense of honour, the joy of living, the taste for affirmation, virile values, love of friendship. The society of gods reflects those of men, with the same qualities and shortcomings. Homer, who conceived them in his image, portrays them with a ‘disregard’ that would scandalise Plato. ‘The gods of Homer are not pure spirits’, writes Professor Albert Severyns from the University of Liège. ‘Given a sensible form comparable to that of the human being, they conduct themselves as mortals would in an earthly society’ (Les dieux d’Homère. PUF, 1966). These are not jealous or severe gods. They are gods who laugh.
It is perhaps for this reason that that the Iliad and the Odyssey were truly, in Flacelière’s terms, the ‘sacred books of Greece’. For the Greeks of Antiquity, Homer was ‘the Poet’. He was unique. But he was also more: repository for the old Hellenic spirit in its purity, master of all wisdom, guardian of traditions. In Athens, Solon and Pisistratus made his work both liturgy and textbook. Every four years, on the occasion of the Great Panatheneia, the two poems were read from end to end. ‘We perhaps forget’, writes Flacelière, ‘that the capacity of ancient audiences was much stronger than ours. At the dramatic competitions of the Great Dionysia alone, held at Athens, the spectators heard probably around eighteen-thousand verses over three consecutive days. The twenty-eight thousand verses of the Iliad and Odyssey, without lyrical division or choral developments, could have been recited at this pace in four days’.
After the Homeric period, the bards115 dispersed throughout the islands and coasts of Ionia, ensured the diffusion of the Iliad and Odyssey, and composed new poems. These are the Homerides. To them we owe a series of accounts that constitute the Epic Cycle. In the Greek world, they provided not only the texts, but also the rhapsodists or reciters.
In the first centuries of our era, the decline of ancient culture lead to the eclipse of Homeric studies. These would only be revived in the tenth century, in Constantinople. In the fourteenth century, they flourished again in Europe. The first printed ‘Homer’ appeared in Florence in 1488. The Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment, were each inspired in turn. Exegeses and critiques proliferated. In the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon and German universities competed in knowledge and ability.
Almost as many books have been published on Homer as on Goethe and Shakespeare, Atlantis, and the pyramids of Egypt. In France, Victor Bérard has attempted to recover the geography of the Achaeans (Les navigations d’Ulysse, 1927–30). Emile Mireaux (Les poèmes homériques et l’histoire grecque. Albin Michel, 1948–49) has sought the secret of Homer in ‘colonial antagonisms’ and the trade of tin. Charles Autran (Homère et les origines sacerdotales de l’épopée grecque. Denoël, 1939–43), who portrays the mysterious castes of Hellenic priests, has seen in the Trojan War an ‘act of purification’ destined to efface a ‘detested impiety’.
All of Antiquity attributed the Iliad and the Odyssey to the same author. The ‘analysts’ have been more sceptical. They have given us ingenious theories which sketch the uncertain conto
urs of a ‘Homer in the plural’. But most of the Homerists have returned to the hypercriticsm that was popular last century among the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans. From 1930, Victor Bérard wrote: ‘Today one is considered the last of the ignorant if they dare cast into doubt the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey, from their first verse to their last, were composed by the blind poet’ (La resurrection d’Homère. Grasset, 1930).116
Blind, Homer was perhaps not. According to the Ancients, ‘material’ blindness was frequently associated with ‘spiritual’ clairvoyance, with the prophetic gift, and with divination. In myth, Oedipus acquired the gift of prophecy the instant that he punctured his eyes. Georges Dumézil has noted other examples of ‘qualifying mutilations’: Odhinn and Horatius Cocles, Tyr and Mucius Scaevola, etc. ‘The greatest of poets must therefore be blind’, writes Robert Flacelière, ‘but in fact, we do not know if he was’.
If we are to believe Herodotus, Homer would have lived around 850 BCE. He possibly composed other, minor works, such as the Hymn to Apollo spoken of by Thucydides.
Seven cities contend for the honour of having given birth to the poet. The island of Chios, in Ionia, cited by Pindar and Semonides of Amorgos, appears to be the best ‘situated’. The place is celebrated for its landscape and its beauty. It owes its name to Chioni, daughter of one of the first kings who was pledged to marry Orion once he had ridden the country of the serpents that infested it. Homer, said Herodotus, would have lived in the village of Pytis, which is today called Pytios. A body of Homerides (the best known being Cynethos of Chios) worked there for a long time. Here we see the ‘olive trees of the master’ and drink an age-old wine, the ‘nectar of Homer’! In the Museum of Chios one finds the head of Homer discovered by the archaeologist Anderson, the Homeric epitaph discovered by Professor Kondoleon-Stephanou, and various other vestiges from Antiquity.
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