V
The Iliad and the Odyssey
From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly, that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact hell.
GOETHE, letter to Schiller1
In Book VIII of the Odyssey, the blind bard Demodocus entertains King Alcinous and his anonymous guest, whom we know to be Odysseus, with songs about Greek deeds during the Trojan War. In particular, he sings of the wooden horse. The Phaeacian court is attentive; twice the guest sheds secret tears into his rucked-up hood.
He weeps, the poem says, the way a woman weeps for her husband. It is an arresting simile: this most masculine of men is emasculated by deep feeling. But the poem does not leave it there. Like many epic similes it works towards metamorphosis. Here is Samuel Butler’s prose translation of the passage:2 “Odysseus was overcome as he heard him, and his cheeks were wet with tears. He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself on the body of her husband who has fallen before his own city and people, fighting bravely in defence of his home and children.” It is so real to him that, helpless to affect the narrative (it is now history and cannot be touched), all he can do is lament in the unbridled yet formal way of Mediterranean mourning. The poem follows the woman in her grief: “She screams aloud and flings her arms about him as he lies gasping for breath and dying, but her enemies beat her from behind about the back and shoulders, and carry her off into slavery, to a life of labour and sorrow, and the beauty fades from her cheeks—even so piteously did Ulysses weep …” Only Alcinous hears his stifled lamentation.
The simile is not content simply to illuminate its immediate visual and emotional context. The woman Odysseus is likened to reminds us of all Trojan women but especially of Hector’s widow, Andromache.3 She laments, but her lamentations are interrupted by her captors, who herd her and her sister into captivity and slavery. The poet fades out the simile with a simple finality, “and the beauty fades from her cheeks.” A cruder translation says, “while with most pitiful grief her cheeks are wasted.” The metaphor is conducted in the present tense.
This is the impact Demodocus’ poem has on Odysseus, as it would on any man who is capable of being moved by heroism and tragedy. The experience belongs not to the victorious Greeks but to their foes, and yet after victory they can feel for and, more important, feel with the victims. This is also the power of the Homeric poems themselves. They are about wars and victors but the victims have a palpable and at some points an equal reality. Though the “insistently male orientation” of the Iliad has been noted, there is even in that poem a strong sense that, in the world that underpins the epic deeds of the main story, there exist people whose heroism, on a different scale, merits inclusion if only by way of simile. Thus in the Iliad, Book XII, we read, in Butler’s version, “But even so the Trojans could not rout the Achaeans, who still held on; and as some honest hard-working woman weighs wool in her balance and sees that the scales be true, for she would gain some pitiful earnings for her little ones, even so was the fight balanced evenly between them till the time came when Zeus gave the greater glory to Hector son of Priam, who was first to spring towards the wall of the Achaeans.” What, we may ask, once this startling image has had its incongruous impact, is this spinner—a mother with hungry children, perhaps a widow since she is sole provider, or a woman whose husband is away at war, a Penelope who weaves and unweaves—doing in the thick of battle, not only with the heroes but with Zeus himself, to whom she ultimately is the point of comparison? Is she another one of the bereaved? In Book VIII we have already seen Zeus with his golden scales. In Book XVI they are there again: Hector realises that the “scales of Zeus” are now weighted against him. In Book XXII the golden scales dip decisively, and Achilles knows the day is his.4 Yet the most memorable scales are those of the widow spinner.
Even heroes can be even-handed in describing their foes. Standing on the battlements, Priam notes how much larger the gathering of men is than when he and his armies fought in Phrygia as allies, against the Amazons. He spots Odysseus and describes him as fleecy and ramlike, keeping his ewes in line. Antenor interposes: he recalls how Odysseus and Menelaus came to discuss Helen with Priam before war began. He recalls how well they spoke: first Menelaus, direct and rather precipitate, and then Odysseus, seeming slow-witted, but then unfolding a speech that dazzled and persuaded. In the Iliad, certainly, Odysseus is a rhetorician, always politic, sent on missions as a trusted emissary of Agamemnon. In the Odyssey, he is released from direct responsibility to a king. Whenever he comes into contact with courts or with common people and his story is required, he becomes a poet, sometimes telling the truth, sometimes inventing a fictitious life to keep himself safe.
The first evidence of his poetic talents comes just after he meets Nausicaa. Naked, holding a branch before his private parts (her maids having run off because he emerged like a lion from his bed of leaves), he addresses her. He says he has been adrift for twenty days. Dazzled by her beauty, he com pares her to a lovely palm tree he saw once at Delos, near Apollo’s altar. It is a pretty image, certainly, and the mention of Delos calls to mind not only the gods born there, Athena and Apollo, but the great festival and the poetic activities that it hosted.
At the Phaeacian court, after Demodocus reduces him to tears and draws his identity from him, it is his turn to sing his story to the assembled court. The king, he says, requires him to revisit an unspeakably painful subject. (One of Virgil’s most famous lines, put into the mouth of Aeneas, is based on this speech: Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem.) Odysseus wonders how to shape his tale (“What shall I tell first, what shall I save to tell you until later?”). His concerns are those of the narrative artist, to get it in the right order and proportion so that it will affect his audience properly.
When he is telling the Cyclops story, he reports on how he and the crew had stocked up on strong sweet wine. This is a crucial ingredient in drugging the monster. In terms of plot, it is crafty of Odysseus to put in the crucial detail well in advance of the point when the wine will be made use of. He prepares the story. Certainly his telling of the fantastic adventures he has undergone is fast-paced and thrifty. His visit to the underworld at Circe’s command (Book XI) is a complicated weave of memory and prophecy, and the poet Odysseus handles it well. Indeed, his success is such that in the midst of his account of the dead he asks for largesse from the assembled court, and when the figurative hat is passed around he does remarkably well. He returns to Ithaca in a Phaeacian ship ballasted with Phaeacian treasure.
His creative phase is not over. Having told Alcinous’ court the truth, he must make a fictional life to hide behind while he tests the ground at Ithaca. Athena turns him into a bald shrivelled old man and he visits the swineherd Eumaeus. He sits wizened and smelly under a cloak and tells his old retainer a plausible life story, developing one he first told to a handsome young shepherd (Athena, disguised), when he woke up on the unrecognised shore of his homeland that morning. Later he repeats the tale to the suitors.
The Iliad and Odyssey were intended for recitation, not by a hero but by a rhapsode. They were delivered at a certain speed and many of the effects which detain us as readers would have been at best fleetingly sensed by a member of an audience. But if they were recited regularly and people heard them again and again, and if the versions they heard were indeed, thanks to Solon and Pisistratus and even Onomacritos, the same, they would have heard more at each performance. Thus in time the self-subversiveness of these poems which anchor the Greek imagination, and in which Greek philosophy and drama have their origin, would have communicated itself to many. Whatever the brutality of the deeds recounted in the poems, what marks them both is their balance (to take up the image of the scales), an absence of partisanship, a reluctance to moralise. One is tempted, even in this age of relativities, to speak of the poems’ objectivity, their insistence on telling it (even the fantasy passages in the Odyssey, even Xanthus, the loquacious horse in the Iliad) how it was.
This involves an absence of sentimentality. What feelings are expressed belong to the characters and their situations, and the poem reports without colluding in them.
“Poets and their audience,” Taplin insists, are a constant theme in the Odyssey. He exaggerates, but we do meet our first poet in line 150 of Book I. Phemius (“Famous”) sings to the cithern harp. We ignore his song at first because we are listening to Athena, disguised as Mentes, talking to Telemachus about his father and prophesying his return. When she has departed, Telemachus realises a god has been with him. Phemius is still singing, bitter tales of the returning Achaeans. Penelope comes down the long stairway from her high room and tells the singer to desist. But Telemachus overrides her instructions. The poet should sing “what he has a mind to; bards do not make the ills they sing of; it is Zeus, not they, who makes them […] Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man’s matter, and mine above all others—for it is I who am master here.” To modern eyes, certainly, Telemachus comes across as a young man with much to learn about good manners, and women.
Here the verse is listened to and it has an impact on Penelope and the suitors. The theme of return is itself inadvertently prophetic in this context. Phemius the bard leads a charmed life: he and Medon the herald alone are spared by Odysseus in Book XXII, when the suitors perish. He insists that he sang for the suitors unwillingly.
Those of us with a memory of school Latin may share a pro-Trojan take on the Trojan War. This is because Virgil, praising his emperor through legendary narrative in the Aeneid, knows that the Roman empire has its origins in the Trojan defeat, followed by the Trojan hero Aeneas’ epic journey to Italy. By the time of Virgil, poets no longer aspired to the inclusive objectivity of Homer. Homer did not, as one critic claims, side with Troy because it was on his side of the Aegean: he belonged (a man of Smyrna) to the East. But his lack of bias does have the effect of seeming to commend Phoenician, or “eastern,” values to Greek audiences that may have been a bit short on civility and sophistication when the poems were first recited. Ford Madox Ford makes no bones about it: the war was “an immense Affair—an immense, almost chemical reaction between a higher, more luxurious and more aesthetic civilisation from the East, attacking or attacked by a relatively lean, relatively puritanical, relatively, perhaps, better armed civilisation coming from the West.”5 The effects of Homeric even-handedness may be political, but they are not political by design, and their politics will be different in different ages. Perhaps Homer in the Iliad tells the truth. Troy was a handsome, civilised city with open spaces; it is described as having broad streets and horse pastures within the walls. The Greek camp was temporary, without history, without elegance, though because nine years had passed there was some solidity to it. Achilles’ hut was well built (Book IX). Defences are suddenly erected and as suddenly breached during the course of the poem. The bivouacs are mapped in Homer’s mind, a kind of corniche with Ajax at one end and Achilles at the other. The camp, in which the men enjoy temporary women, is flanked by the ships, a perpetual reminder of arrival and departure. The Greeks don’t belong. Unlike the later seafaring Greeks, they have come not to establish a colony but to sack a great city and then go home with the booty. They are in some respects little better, and little worse, than pirates.
The Trojans, on the other hand, whether inside the walls of their city or on the rare night when, getting the upper hand, they risk camping on the plain, belong, much as the stars belong in heaven. So at the end of Book VIII they are evoked: “Thus high in hope they sat through the livelong night by the highways of war, and many a watch fire did they kindle. As when the stars shine clear, and the moon is bright—there is not a breath of air, not a peak nor glade nor jutting headland but it stands out in the ineffable radiance that breaks from the serene of heaven; the stars can all of them be told and the heart of the shepherd is glad—even thus shone the watch fires of the Trojans before Ilium midway between the ships and the river Xanthus. A thousand camp-fires gleamed upon the plain, and in the glow of each there sat fifty men, while the horses, champing oats and corn beside their chariots, waited till dawn should come.”
At some time between 750 and 650 BC, says Taplin, the two epics we associate with the name of Homer were written, or written down. He tries to reconcile the idea of a rooted “oral tradition” with the participation of an actual author. The poet we call Homer flourished on “the northern-Aegean coast of Asia Minor in the Smyrna area” and acquired his art from other bards. “I take it as axiomatic that these great works of art would not have come into existence without an audience.”6 This is not a very helpful axiom because “we have no firm external evidence of Homer’s audience or circumstances of performance.”7 So Taplin tries to discover things about Homer’s audience from the poems, both from what they say about poets and audiences and from the ways in which they speak. We can assume that the audience would have known the larger story and expected to see where consequences arose. Everything from Paris’ abduction to the sack of Troy is contained as it were metonymically in the text.
Taplin believes the audience for Homer was unitary, with shared values and perspectives. Yet if the poems came from an oral tradition, or if there was room for variations in a scripted performance, the audiences would have elicited different versions from place to place, season to season, performance to performance; in sophisticated centres, a discriminating audience might engage critically with the rhapsode, the way Socrates does with Ion. Elsewhere, a star performer would be greeted with adulation. Audiences must have differed, too, at different periods. An oral tradition might have addressed Greeks right through the “dark age” between the Trojan War and the writing down of the poems. A ninth- and a seventh-century audience would have had little in common. Readers of written versions would again be quite different from the auditors of their day.
We know nothing for sure “about the original circumstances of production,” Taplin concedes. “Production” is a curious word to use for the recital of the poem or its composition out of pre-existing songs. Modern theory is drawn to analogies between manufacture and creative work, forgetting that “production” is systematic, its processes mechanical, replicable, whereas creation is neither. He is drawn to using the word “production” because he has a sense of the determining role of “consumers” (the audience) in that “production.”
Taplin identifies “internal audiences,” those represented in the poems themselves, but cautions us: they “should not be treated as direct or ‘literal’ evidence for the world of the external” or actual “audiences—though that does not mean that there is no relationship between them.” Critics and scholars tiptoe about, fearing to assert too much. It is worth remarking that, unlike Virgil, Dante, Langland, Camoões or Milton, the poet in these poems never steps out of the fiction into a “real” world, never turns to address us as a man narrating a story. Taplin is convinced (we may not be) that both Homeric poems were created “very much for the same audiences and occasions,”8 despite the quite marked differences in tone, structure, character and ethos between them.
Blind Demodocus’ performance of a poem not unlike the Iliad has its effect on Odysseus. Odysseus himself sings of his own deeds, and lies about his own deeds, with eloquence and at length, to noble and rustic auditors. The Iliad itself contains no such accounts of performance. Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix on their embassy to sulking Achilles, to try and persuade him to return to the warring fold (Iliad IX, 86–91), find him “playing on a lyre, fair, of cunning workmanship, and its cross-bar was of silver. It was part of the spoils which he had taken when he sacked the city of Eetion, and he was now diverting himself with it and singing the feats of heroes. He was alone with Patroclus, who sat opposite to him and said nothing, waiting till he should cease singing.”9 Perhaps from time to time they would exchange the song, Patroclus (who, it is well to remember, is older than Achilles) taking up the familiar stor
y and moving it forward, then handing it back to his friend. This private scene, the accompaniment provided by a harp which is the spoils of some previous sacking, is remote from the performances of Demodocus and Odysseus in the Odyssey. At the end of Book VIII of the Odyssey King Alcinous explains human suffering in the strangest way: “The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about.” And he urges his nameless guest to come clean: “Did you lose some brave kinsman of your wife’s when you were before Troy? a son-in-law or father-in-law—which are the nearest relations a man has outside his own flesh and blood? or was it some brave and kindly-natured comrade—for a good friend is as dear to a man as his own brother?”10
In the Iliad no such aesthetic malice is attributed to the gods. The “deeds of men,” the feats of heroes, are what Achilles sings in his private symposium with Patroclus, suggesting a much later convention of performance. This is not a poet singing, however, but a warrior; and when he sings it is not to aggrandise himself but to pass the time, to remember, to entertain. The singer here is himself historical, part of the world of which he sings. Odysseus fulfils the same role in Odyssey XI, 367ff, but celebrates his own deeds, not without a degree of self-censure. He and Achilles are different in kind from Demodocus, a mere rhapsode, led in to the feast to entertain the mysterious visitor and the Phaeacian court. When he starts to sing we are near the opening lines of the Iliad.11 Though blind, Demodocus makes his audience see the things and deeds that furnish the Greek and the Trojan worlds. He also fulfils a liturgical function in singing of Aphrodite, Ares and Hephaestus, using words that might well become the Homeric Hymns.12 He is paid with food and drink.
The First Poets Page 13