Homeric pathos is of a different order from that achieved by other poets or by the dramatists who are Homer’s ultimate heirs. In the Iliad, he tells us of an awful death, and, once the warrior is disposed of, he evokes, briefly, the world out of which that warrior came to bleed and die on the windy plain of Troy. In this way, without sentimentality, a circumstantial account of a death juxtaposed with a circumstantial account, epithetical and elliptical, of a life, releases pathos. Moral judgement is withheld: we may come up with regret, sadness, a sense of futile loss, but these are our response, not the poet’s. There are few poems in which we are left so free to feel and to align ourselves as we wish with one side, one god, one hero, or another. Facts as much as characters have an inviolable (or at least an unviolated) integrity. Because of this lucid neutrality in the delivery, the poems do not provoke our objection to the intense violence or the values that seem to motivate the protagonists, divine and human.
When translators render the epithet for Odysseus “wily,” we should be prepared to insist that surely “wily” belongs to a later, ethically charged diction: wiliness suggests a calculation of motive, whereas what marks Homer’s Odysseus is his knack, at the level of instinct, of individual survival. Odysseus functions well in council because he speaks well; but he loses all his men, all his ships, and all but the last helping of treasure, as he makes his journey home in ten years, a return which took some of his fellow-warriors a couple of weeks. Wily? Our problem with Odysseus is, in a sense, a semantic one: we misunderstand him because we are conditioned by the classical and its aftermaths. We find it hard to tune in to the pre-classical, without the continual fuzz of a later static marring our reception.
Homer’s world is strange but at the same time literal in its feel. The name and the thing named belong together, irony (the first instrument of classic artifice) has not prised them apart. Here mere sentiment has no place. When I speak of the literal feel of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I mean a literal feel not only of the landscape, but of the larger geography; not only of the characters at rest, but of the characters in motion. The heroisms become credible because the smaller deeds are credible; the fantastic journeys of Odysseus are believable because the world through which Telemachus sails, and in which Odysseus fights to regain his wife, his house and his kingdom, are real.
What constitutes this reality? Byron, outraged that certain critics doubted the literal existence of Troy and the facts of the war itself, reflected in his journal in 1821, “We do care about ‘the authenticity of the tale of Troy.’ I have stood upon the plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810 … I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise it would have given me no delight.”37 The abundance of italics expresses enthusiasm, the over-emphasis of an imagination somewhat injured in its needed certainties.
Rhys Carpenter’s Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics would have driven Byron to an even earlier grave, since he sees the matter of Homer as largely fictitious. But other critics, equally scholarly and trusting more in the persuasive impact of the verse and the correlations between what the poem says and what topography and archaeology reveal, take an opposite view. They do not treat the poems as revelation, but they do approach them as a kind of rhetoricised history. Denys Page in History and the Homeric Iliad believes the poem reflects the conflict between Achaeans (based in Rhodes) “and the league of Assuwa, to which Troy belonged, at the time when Hittite power was waning.”38
There are certainties in the poems. Charles Maclaren, founder of The Scotsman newspaper, depending in 1822 on “Homer’s facts” rather than the geographer Strabo’s speculations, correctly identified the site of ancient Troy with Hisarlik in Turkey. The poem, despite alluvial changes in the landscape, earthquakes and the apocalyptic work of Poseidon, provided him with a literal, lived geography that answered to the physical plotting of the poem. Troy stood on the site that the Greco-Roman New Ilion later occupied.39 When a modern critic declares that “[i]nappropriate questions”—largely to do with factuality in the poems—“will lead to false answers,”40 we can only reply that in the matter of fact and literal truth few questions addressed to the poem are likely to be inappropriate; and the answers received will not necessarily be false.
It is in the nature of oral traditions to be conservative. When writing is not the currency of knowledge, law, genealogy and the transmission of fact, the oral record is preserved with as much zeal and precision as a written account would be. There are forms, mnemonics, verbal formulae to facilitate the accurate preservation of facts, rules, liturgies, legends. Where verse narrative, which is a form of history and genealogy, is concerned, the same disciplines naturally apply. Growth and change, variation and decoration, are strictly regulated by a respect for the integrity of the material being carried forward. And an oral tradition is retentive, even when the man or woman who carries the record in memory is uncertain of a meaning. Forgetting meanings does not mean the language that conveys them has forgotten.
An oral tradition is, thus, first of all a recording tradition with developed mnemonics. What it selects, assembles and presents it does not distort or falsify. The purpose of recording is to preserve rather than to mutate or embellish. It is reassuring, though not surprising, to discover that the historical books of the Bible, for example, are vindicated time after time by archaeology; archaeology and geology are confirming the factuality of much of Homer. We now have Nestor’s bathtub, discovered at Pylos, a significant curiosity that raises hopes that much else, of perhaps greater moment, will work its way back to the surface of the soil.
J. V. Luce insists on the almost absolute accuracy of Homer’s descriptions of landscape, taking into account alluvial and other changes.41 He writes “in the firm belief that ‘truth to life’ is Homer’s paramount concern in local description.” Luce believes that the Homeric rhapsode’s audience would have been familiar with the topography and scenic qualities of many of the places described; the poet’s accuracy when describing non-fantastic landscapes was crucial to his credibility. By the time the poems were put in something like the form in which they survive, between 750 and 700 BC, the Troad was fully colonised by Aeolian Greeks, and Ithaca “an important staging post on the route to the new Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily.”
The strong little city-states had begun some time before to send out colonists and the apoikiai, or colonies, were developing. They were not all colonies in a pejorative modern sense, necessarily, rather more like settlements, spreading especially to the west. Many Greeks were not only familiar with the seaways of the world into which they were expanding but also insistently conscious that wherever the currents took them, they belonged to Greece, and were not and would never be barbarians. Certain mainland events developed, the Olympic Games in the Peloponnese and other festivals elsewhere, which had the role of reconnecting ceremonially the scattered Hellenic settlements with the motherlands, mainland and island. Olympia burst into activity in the mid-eighth century BC, Delphi and Delos two or three decades later; and many other sanctuaries leave traces of substantial development around 700 BC. The Delphic Oracle was important in authorising and legitimising settler expeditions, and votive offerings were displayed there. Two great poems celebrated the various peoples and charted the scattered lands of the Greeks, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were transmuted into cultural touchstones of the Greeks and performed at civic and religious festivals, a reminder of heroic roots and of the sources of a common culture.
Luce knows that his theory depends on some close geological analyses. “The precise position of the shoreline at the time of the Trojan War, say 3,250 years ago, has not been finally determined, but most, if not all, of the plain that now extends northwards from Troy to the Dardanelles (Hellespont) is the product of alluviation since c. 1250 BC.”42 Similarly, recent archaeology has established how much larger Troy was than earlier explorations suggested: a principal city and trading centre. Many of the olde
r objections to Homer as geographer and historian have weakened in the light of recent explorations.
Homer is a poet, Homer is a historian. To insist on the modern separation of those two roles is to impose an anachronism on him. One could say that the phenomenon we call Homer is as much historical as poetic, and that the function of mnemonics, as etymology affirms, is memory. Memory is history set in order. As Luce points out, “Paradoxically, illiteracy was a safeguard rather than a threat to the authenticity of the tradition.”43 Homer presents us with a synthetic world, a world that never was in quite the forms proposed, a texture of vivid details, anachronisms, dictional syntheses. Yet the poems are what we “know” of the ancient Greeks, almost all that we know, tempered by archaeology. Early historians took Homer to be early history. This is the Greece we, and they, related to and visualised most comprehensively. In Book IV of the Iliad, for example, we encounter a theme that develops through the rest of the poem: the horror of death, especially the deaths of young men, in war, with precise descriptions of entry wounds, exit wounds, the way men bleed, how they fall, the noises that their falling makes and that they make in falling. The poem dwells on the number of brothers engaged in the action, many of them killed together, the poet each time casting a regretful glance in the direction of the bereaved.
“Homer’s facts” is a reassuring phrase. But like Homer himself, the facts were first believed in,44 then regarded as “poetical,” part of a make-believe that, surely, is in the very nature of poetry. Poets make their freedom by breaking the rules of fact. Sir Philip Sidney, in The Apology for Poetry, summarises Renaissance critical thought and affirms this view. He does not express a universal truth: this is certainly not the case with the archaic poets.
The Greeks first appear in history in 1600–1200 BC, “the age reflected in the epics of Homer, in whose narrative the land is ruled by all-powerful monarchs holding court in impressive palaces amid the trappings of great wealth … For long the picture he presented was thought to be the stuff of mythology. Then, in the nineteenth century, archaeologists began to unearth remains that revealed the sober reality behind Homer’s words …”45 Jacob Burckhardt marvelled at how Strabo credits Homer with factual accuracy, preferring the poet’s version to the physical evidence of ethnography.46
On what grounds can the facts of a poem be believed? If it comes from a genuine oral tradition, we must define (as far as we can from the unverifiable evidence at our disposal) the nature of an oral tradition and what happens to it when it is stilled in the luminous amber of writing. In a fourth-century BC account of Homer and Hesiod, Alcidamas (the probable author) declares: “Let us then thank [Homer] thus for his playful entertainment; and as for his origin and the rest of his poetry, let us hand them down through the gift of accurate memory for the common possession of those Hellenes who aspire to be Lovers of the Beautiful.” Here the amber seems to displace the historian. Lesky says it is “unnatural” to record or transcribe the oral tradition: “one is compelling a flowing stream to freeze at one point.” Yet the value of what is frozen, assuming the stream is not thawed and re-frozen in a different form, possesses behind the mimetic devices a very powerful charge of the reality from which it sets out.
In 1795 F. A. Wolf published the first serious case for regarding the Iliad and the Odyssey as compilations of miscellaneous poems rather than organic, single-authored works in their own right. Taplin is willing to concede that this might be so, but in order to have his cake and eat it, he insists that the poet who did the assembling was “so much the best of the poets who contributed to them that he is The Poet.”47 George Steiner is similarly minded. “I have always believed our Iliad to be the product of an editorial act of genius, of a marvellously shaping recension of the voluminous oral material at the time in which new techniques of writing, and of the preparation of papyrus or hides in quantities sufficient for so extensive an inscription, made this recension practicable. I take the editor of genius to have been the author of the Odyssey. In older age, perhaps, and at some ironic distance.”48 He speaks of the Iliad as compiled, the Odyssey as composed (it has an ironic purchase on the actions and values of the first). If Taplin and Steiner are correct, editors can rejoice, because a good editor or recensionist, on the authority of these critic-scholars, can be identified with and then identified as the poet himself.
The leading exponents of the oral composition theory, Milman Parry (who died at the age of 33, in 1936) and Albert B. Lord, author of The Singer of Tales (1960), effected the most radical change in Homeric scholarship since the texts were set down in authoritative form in Athens under Pisistratus. Steiner and Taplin are trying to take advantage of their findings and theories, which affect our approach to all primitive and ancient poetry, without quite abandoning the notion of an identifiable individual Homer. But for Parry and Lord the issue was less the unknowable Homer, more the knowable poems, and their take on the particulars of the verse itself made sense of the mixture of dialects, the copious anachronisms, the epithets and other forms of repetition. It also cast light on the odd pieces of the poems which seem not to fit, the occasional contradictions in the plots, the inconsistencies of character and action. “Parry’s work on the mechanics of Homeric diction,” writes Gregory Nagy, “has caused a serious problem of esthetics for generations of Hellenists reared on the classical approaches to the Iliad and Odyssey: how can compositions that have always seemed so deliberate and integral in their artistry result from a system of diction that is so mechanical—one might almost say automatic? For various Homeric experts the solution lies in objecting to various aspects of Parry’s findings: the genius of Homer must somehow be rescued from the workings of a formulaic system. For me, however, it is easier to accept Parry’s work and to proceed from there by looking for a solution in the factor of tradition itself.”49
Until the “oral traditionalists” found their voices and, more, began the close analysis of the formulae which underlie the composition of the Homeric poems, there was one principal way of reading them: as deliberated, finished works, with identifiable unities. This approach assumes that the poems we have are substantially whole, discrete and complete. A new way of reading Homer, which takes nothing for granted, inquires into the poems’ formation, and it comes up with results which unsettled classical studies and which, despite attempts at assimilation by later critics, remain an obstacle to anyone keen to return to the old days when the utter difference of the world in which the Homeric poems were composed and assembled need not be acknowledged, and the fact that Homer was European meant that in some curious way he was “like us.”
Beyond metre, Parry and Lord set out three primary mimetic devices we can identify and appraise. The celebrated epithets, “grey-eyed Athena,” “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “Hector tamer of horses,” are an initial clue. Then there are lines and whole passages that are repeated. When one figure commands another to take a message, the message is reported verbatim; when an action is repeated or imitated, the same language is used. Indeed, runs of lines from the Iliad recur in the Odyssey. Finally, there are the formulae which, working with and within the metre, structure certain kinds of diction, certain recurrent gestures, into similar or identical form.
Milman Parry showed how the epithets work in the dactylic hexameter. They are varied according to their position in the line, but the device is systematic, what Parry calls “extension” and “economy.” The system is mimetic: not that it imitates or mimes what it is about but that it is a device for linguistic remembering which is, at the same time, a way of creating and rewarding the auditor’s expectation. Much of the Homeric poems is off the peg, that peg being the conventions of an oral poetry which have survived into the written-down form.
Most scholars now agree that the poems attributed to Homer either derive from or are combinations of verse narratives that existed in an oral tradition. We must remain alert to the otherness of the oral tradition. It may have been developed originally to preserve genealogies, historical incide
nts, laws, rituals and legends that went into the formation and definition of a tribe or community. Even when written down and extended by successive redactors, the oral elements show through and are part of the way in which the poetry means, part of the way it touches and preserves the very world that has vanished from under it. Among the most clear-headed and rigorous of Parry’s heirs is Gregory Nagy, who makes assumptions so radical about the nature of the Homeric texts that, if accepted, they would require an even more thoroughgoing rethinking of them than has yet occurred. Though the poems are in a profound way pre-determined, he insists that the “literary intent” is present, but it “must be assigned not simply to one poet but also to countless generations of previous poets steeped in the same traditions.” For him, “the artistry of the Homeric poems is traditional both in diction and in theme” (my italics). We must seek out “not so much the genius of Homer but the genius of the overall poetic tradition that culminated in our Iliad and Odyssey.” Nagy’s understanding of the consequences of his argument is subtle, not least because it makes sense of the “surprise” of Homer’s sudden presence, and of the rootedness of the Homeric in the ages before writing, or between traditions of writing. “To my mind there is no question … about the poet’s freedom to say accurately what he means. What he means, however, is strictly regulated by tradition. The poet has no intention of saying anything untraditional. In fact, the poet’s inherited conceit is that he has it in his power to recover the exact words that tell what men did and said in the Heroic Age.”50 Thus Nagy makes a compelling virtue of necessity.
How is oral poetry analogous to, and how does it differ from, a tradition of written composition? Where in our considerations does authorship lie? We know it is futile to look for Homer, but is it equally futile to speculate that a “Homer” never existed at all? Lesky, attempting to reconcile the discoveries of Parry and Lord with the older tradition, suggests that despite oral elements, the Homeric poems were written, and initially the texts were handed down amongst rhapsodes, often guilds or even family units. “What we hear of the Homeridae of Chios—the ‘sons of Homer,’ his ‘school’—is to be interpreted in this sense. Light is thrown on the activity of these men by the tradition that Solon or Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus arranged to have all the Homeric poems recited at the Panathenaea by relays of rhapsodes.” Xenophon in his Memorabilia describes rhapsodists as “very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very idiotic themselves.”
The First Poets Page 10