The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Some modern scholars would sweep it all away: “There is, in my view, no point in searching for ‘Homer’ by the marshlight of a pocket biography of the author. Even if this were a good way of approaching literature in general, we simply do not have the material.”5 Such categorical purism—we cannot know and therefore we waste time in considering—impoverishes our reading in another sense. Each life of Homer tells us something about changing attitudes to the poet and the poems; those attitudes tell us something about the work and the poet himself. Factual veracity apart (and what biography can be precise about the content of any fact and its relation to the content of other facts?), the apocryphal lives tell us critical truths about the poems’ place in cultural hierarchies as they developed, what they meant, what they did. In the fragments of the Margites, implausibly attributed to Homer, a poet writes: “There came to Colophon an old man and divine singer, a servant of the Muses and of far-shooting Apollo. In his dear hands he held a sweet-toned lyre.” One word here is true: “dear,” a true response. To say that we can know nothing of the poet’s life is undeniable; but through the lives and the poems ancient readers inferred a great deal about their poet’s nature and their own. Modern readers should not allow themselves to be so impoverished by a pragmatic sense of historical fact as to miss out on the construction and reconstruction of Homer’s lives.

  An initial search must be through the poems themselves, where we look for evidence of “the person of Homer.” There is an ancient adage: Homeron ex Homerou saphenizein: “You ought to read Homer by his own light.” In Works and Days Hesiod stands up, identifying himself and his situation in some detail. Not so Homer. There is an occasional shadow grin: bards appear in the poems (are they Homer? are they like Homer?). There are moments of opinion and point of view which cannot be assigned to any one of the many speakers in the poems; but can they be assigned to an author? There is nothing actually solid to get hold of, except at one point in the apocryphal “Hymn to Delian Apollo” where the “I” declares:

  And you, O Delian virgins, do me grace,

  When any stranger of our earthy race

  Whose restless life affliction hath in chase, Shall hither come and question you: “Who is,

  To your chaste ears, of choicest faculties

  In sacred poesie, and with most right

  Is author of your absolut’st delight?”

  Ye shall yourselves do all the right ye can

  To answer for our name: “The sightless man

  Of stony Chios. All whose poems shall

  In all last ages stand for capital.”6

  No false modesty or demurring here. This “I,” in George Chapman’s version, is sure of his mighty pre-eminence. He will “propagate mine own precedency” wherever there are “well-built cities” or “human conversation is held dear.” The poem will thrive in an urban world, those city-states where many people live, solid communities with buildings made of wood and stone, in which there is leisure for human conversation and a sense of its value. The polis, or city-state, is a necessary institution for the Homeric rhapsode; within it, even if the economic base remains largely agricultural, the way of life is urban, the citizen travels out in the day to manage his slaves and work his land, and returns at evening to be a town-dweller.

  In the eighth century BC communities gathered around strong lords, the basilees.7 A century later and there were in various parts of Greece communities which, though not democratic, had a sense of mutual objectives which included self-preservation and the development of those common customs which would in retrospect be described as a culture. The little cities were surrounded by supporting fields and pastures. Laws were written down.

  Countrymen became poli-tical, polis-beings. The focus of public, and therefore poetic, life was the agora, often crowded with statues of notables and memorials to legendary and mythical events. In the agora (from the verb ageirein, to assemble) was “the prytaneion, the bouleuterion, the court of justice and one or more temples; it was also used for public meetings and games.” Burckhardt stresses how “even the Achaean camp before Troy had its agora with altars to the gods, where justice was meted out.”8 And yet, in Homer there is “no trace of the dissembling that is the consequence of social life.”9 The city is where the poems find patrons, are edited, performed, and yet it in no way compromises or attenuates the innocence of imagination that shaped them.

  The Homer of the “Hymn to Delian Apollo” is unlikely to be the same man who, a couple of centuries earlier, composed or collated or recited the two epics on which our poetic tradition is itself founded. Some of the human traits the hymn evokes adhere to the popular sense of Homer: he is blind (like Demodocus,10 the bard in the Odyssey), he is matchless and proud (like Odysseus himself, who sings false and true deeds in the courts and farmyards that he visits). Yet nothing here firmly connects the poet of Chios with the poet of the epics. This makes him rather an ideal poet from Aristotle’s point of view: “Homer, admirable in all respects, has the special merit of being the only poet who rightly appreciates the part he should take himself. The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this that makes him an imitator. Other poets appear themselves upon the scene throughout, and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few prefatory words, at once brings in a man, or woman, or other personage; none of them wanting in characteristic qualities, but each with a character of his own.”11 He remains in effect anonymous. Indeed, he may be worse than anonymous: conceivably an authoring, even a collating, individual we might call Homer never existed at all, though the poems and their attribution survive.

  No one spoke the mixture of dialects in which “his” epics are composed; there are numerous incongruities and anachronisms within the narratives; there are as many fundamental differences as similarities between the forms and techniques of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most scholars are now agreed that the Homeric Hymns come from a variety of periods and therefore a variety of authors: none belongs by rights to him. The Homeric apocrypha, too, seems sometimes to parody, sometimes to contradict the voice and values of the two great epics.

  After examining the poems and finding limited information there, critics turn to the biographies of Homer. Here are copious pickings. The poet fell two lives short of being a cat: seven classical lives survive in part or in whole, each giving a rather different inflection to the poet, his actual name, place of birth, parentage, period. The most classical of nineteenth-century English poets, Walter Savage Landor, remarked: “Some tell us there were twenty Homers; some deny that there was ever one. It were idle and foolish to shake the contents of a vase, in order to let them settle at last. We are perpetually labouring to destroy our delights, our composure, our devotion to superior power. Of all the animals on earth we least know what is good for us. My opinion is, that what is best for us is our admiration of good. No man living venerates Homer more than I do.” Landor seems to say we do better to regard what we have and shy away from unverifiable speculation. Biography, as opposed to hagiography, can diminish its subject.

  If a poet called, or referred to as, Homer ever lived, we will want to know about the life because it will tell us something of the poetic intention, the formal and thematic choices made, the emphases of class and tone. Until the late eighteenth century it was a given that the same author composed the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Hymns and much else that survives as fragment or rumour. Thucydides adduced, without doubting its attribution, the “Hymn to Apollo.” Longinus believed that the Odyssey was inferior to the Iliad. Neither man doubted Homer’s existence. Indeed, no one assumed his non-existence. Antiquity believed in him; doubt is a modern, Enlightenment phenomenon, and total erasure was a programme that began in the twentieth century.

  Confusion begins before the beginning of the story. Two ancient biographers declare without a grain of doubt that Homer’s father was Maeon, another says Meles (who is also a river: divine parentage). Other candidates are Mnesagoras, a merchant-trader called Daëmon, a
nd Thamyras. In Egypt it was thought that a priest-scribe by the name of Menemachus begat him. The most suggestive and convenient candidate, from a narrative angle, is Odysseus’ son Telemachus himself. It certainly would explain Homer’s inwardness with the geography of Ithaca and the life of his … grandfather. The story comes to us on divine authority: when the emperor Hadrian made inquiries of the Pythian Sybil, she told him that Homer was Ithaca-born, sired by Telemachus. The sibyl calls him “the heavenly siren.”

  If biographers find it hard to pin paternity on a single man, maternity is equally plural. Was his mother Metis, Critheis, Themista or Eugnetho? Was she a woman of Ithaca sold into slavery by Phoenician merchants or pirates? (The distinction between the two vocations was no clearer then than it is now.) Given his talents, it is more probable, some argued, that his mother was the Muse Calliope. After all, Orpheus’ mother was a Muse. The Pythian Sybil nominated Polycasta, a daughter of old Nestor, the once vigorous, now wheezy, wise hero who fought at Troy in the Iliad and lavishly entertained Telemachus in the Odyssey. We must let the sibyl, directly inspired by Apollo, have the last word.

  One genealogy makes Hesiod and Homer contemporaries and first cousins. They were not the best of friends. They share a famous common legend. King Paneides at Chalcis commanded a contest between the two poets at his brother’s funeral games. The form of the contest is such that Hesiod is the challenger and Homer the reigning champion. Hesiod needs only one victory; Homer cannot sustain a single defeat—an unequal playing field for Homer, though it acknowledges his superiority. Hesiod’s victory is pigmyish, and the story belongs more to him than to Homer.12

  One aspect of Homer modern readers sometimes find rebarbative, especially in the Iliad: the poems’ insistently male orientation and address. Even the wonderfully rendered material textures of objects, the ingredients and the smells of cooking, the delicate discrimination in description do not outweigh the largely male cast of characters, the unrelieved harshness of the underlying reality of the poems, the ways in which the libidinal element itself is made harsh. There are few lyrical moments, few moments of reflective repose. Intimacy is absent, even in the defining scene when Odysseus brings Penelope at last back to the marriage bed. It is hardly surprising that Homer’s translators have been, for the most part, male. In George Steiner’s anthology Homer in English, only two women appear among the dozens of translators and adaptors. Barbara Leonie Picard’s version is a scaling-down of the original so that the poetry will prove harmless for young readers—a prose version with Disney overtones. Thelma Sargent confines her efforts to the Homeric Hymns.

  Was Homer’s real name Meles, Melesigenes or Altes? “Homer” was a kind of—we cannot call it a nom de plume—nickname. Some said he was so called because men of Cyprus handed his father to the Persians as a slave and omeros means “hostage.” Aeolians called a blind man “homer”—“he who sees not”—but scholars dispute this etymology.13

  We do not know his father, his mother, or his own “real” name. We are uncertain of his birthplace, his class origins, his patrons, his audience. We start with a remarkably clean slate. We can either walk away or allow ourselves a few moments of traditional history, also known as legend, and range over the ancient world. The best-known version of the life is the one dubiously attributed to Herodotus. From that and other sources we can devise, as readers did right up to the eighteenth century, a more or less cogent story.

  Aeolia in Asia Minor was the destination for immigrants from Greece, especially from Thessaly. A poor man, Menapolus, arrived there, at Cyme, the city from which Hesiod’s father later departed, migrating west. Menapolus married, had a daughter called Critheis, and died. She was left in the care of Cleanax of Argos. Incautious during her adolescence, she had a son. He was born in Boeotia (Critheis was bundled off to bear him secretly there, in what would be Hesiod’s landscape) and, being near the river Meles, he was named Melesigenes. Mother and child returned to Aeolia.

  A teacher of literature and music called Phemius lived at Smyrna. He employed the young mother to look after his house, and, since he was paid in flax for his teaching, it became her job to spin it. Soon he offered to marry her and adopted Melesigenes, who, he reckoned, would go far if he was properly brought up. Phemius’ expectations were fulfilled. Indeed, the boy outstripped his master and when Phemius died he inherited the school, which he managed with skill and success. The people of Smyrna admired him and his reputation spread abroad.

  An unusually engaging and persuasive traveller called Mentes came from far-off Leucadia,14 on the other side of mainland Greece, north of Ithaca. He talked Melesigenes into taking a sabbatical from teaching. The young pedagogue deserved to see the world. They set off on what would now be called an odyssey, sailing in the general direction of Mentes’ homeland and eventually—conveniently, fatefully—reached the island of Ithaca. Like many intellectuals, Melesigenes had trouble with his eyes, and they grew worse in Ithaca. Mentes left him there to the care of a man called Mentor, not an ophthalmologist but a sympathetic and wise friend. Mentor (a name familiar to readers of the Odyssey) told him the Ithacan legends of Odysseus. Melesigenes began to conceive his poem, walking the very hills that Odysseus knew. People of Ithaca claimed that Melesigines went blind on their island. The people of Colophon back in Lydia also claim his blindness, as though the poetic affliction conferred a special, local virtue. No matter where his eyes finally gave out, he returned in time to Asia Minor, to Smyrna, and applied himself to the study of poetry.

  It was hard to re-establish himself. Poverty drove him on to Larissa, and then back to Cyme. He was not wholly forgotten, made friends there and, the author of the Life of Homer declares, “Even up to my time, the people who lived there would point out the very place where he sat reciting his verse.” The spot was held to be sacred, as was the poplar tree that had sprung up at Melesigenes’ arrival. He dazzled the elders with his power of reciting. He bargained with them: in return for a stipend he would bring fame to their city through verse.

  The city assembly was inclined to honour this unusual “homer” (“blind man”) but some killjoys cavilled: provide for one homer, whatever his talents, and you’ll be expected to provide for all the rest. In the end the assembly voted against granting the poet a pension. He left a curse on the town: it would never produce a poet to celebrate it. He went on to Phocaea, south-west of Cyme, where a man called Thestorides, exploiting his need, gave him house room and encouraged him to write poems which the host deceitfully passed off under his own name. While he lived chez Thestorides (to whom he addresses an epigram), he is said to have composed the Lesser Iliad and the Phocais; though the Phocaeans say that he composed the latter among them. These may have been the works Thestorides laid claim to. Homer did not relish the role of ghost writer. Departing, he declared (more mildly than a modern poet might do), “Many things are dark to us, but nothing is more unknowable than the human heart.”

  Life continued to frown on him. One day merchants from Chios heard him reciting. Thestorides, they reported, was reciting virtually the same verses on their island. He went to Chios to confront his plagiarist. The journey was long. After mishaps he reached Pithys. He wandered lost until he heard goats bleating and was assaulted by guard dogs. Glaucos, a goatherd, came to his rescue and Homer told his tale. Deeply affected, the countryman provided him with bed and board. Next day he reported Homer’s arrival to his master. The master interviewed him and was impressed with how Homer replied and how much he seemed to know. He induced him to stay as a tutor to the children, and expelled the scheming, capricious Thestorides from the island.

  Homer set up a school in Chios. It was successful and at last the poet prospered. A guild of rhapsodes, or bards, the Homeridae, was established, legend says under his initial tutelage, and survived for several generations, a proper singing school. He married and fathered two daughters. One died a spinster, the other married a native of the island.

  His fame spread; he was urged to visit Greece
, where his name was already known. Being something of a businessman, he prepared by composing verses to flatter the Athenians. He set out for Samos, where he was made welcome and recited verse at major festivals and gave great delight. By this means and by finding patronage from the rich he made a living. One apocryphal Homeric poem is associated with his stay there, the Oikalias Agosis (“The Taking of Oechalia”). A historian tells how Creophylus of Samos had Homer for his guest and as a token of gratitude received not the dedication but the actual attribution of the poem. Others suggest that the author was Creophylus, and Homer lent his name in return for hospitality. Callimachus has the poem speak its origin: “I am the work of that Samian who once received divine Homer in his house. I sing of Eurytus and all his woes and of golden-haired Ioleia, and am reputed one of Homer’s works. Dear Heaven! how great an honour this for Creophylus!”

  Perhaps reluctantly, Homer set off in the spring for Athens. He was entertained in Athens by Medon, then the leader of the city. On a cold day he made the verse about the blessed hearth fire. Eventually he wandered on to Corinth, where he recited successfully, and then to Argos, where he performed Iliad II, 559–68, with two extra verses. The extra verses praise the Argives, his audience and hosts, demonstrating how a performer might adapt his text to please local audiences. The leading Argives were delighted and showered him with expensive gifts. They set up a brass statue, decreeing that sacrifice should be offered to Homer “daily, monthly, and yearly; and that another sacrifice should be sent to Chios every five years.” He crossed to Delos, where, “standing on the altar of horns,” he recited his “Hymn to [Delian] Apollo.” It is a wonderfully impressive if wholly implausible image: Homer standing between the horns and celebrating his patron god. The Ionians made him a citizen of each one of their states, and a poem was written “on a whitened tablet” which he dedicated “in the temple of Artemis.” Homer sailed to Ios afterwards “to join Creophylus.” When he reached the island, as the Pythian Sibyl had predicted, he suddenly sickened and died.