Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Did he write his renderings down? To my eye and ear, the Homeric epics could never have been expressed with Homer’s beautifully concealed artfulness had they been committed only to memory. Peoples of oral cultures are famous for prodigious feats of memory, feats impossible to the literate, but they do not produce artifacts of such elegant refinement as the Iliad and the Odyssey, stories so leanly structured that nothing is repeated without purpose, few strings remain untied, and so much is left unsaid—left, in other words, to reverberate and extend itself in the imaginations of individual members of the audience. From a vast epic cycle of oral stories (most of them now forgotten or known to us only in later summaries), Homer made severe choices, leaving out most of the stories (or leaving them in only by delicate allusion), giving us in the Iliad but a few crucial weeks in a ten-year war and setting these entirely—with almost claustrophobic intensity—on the Trojan coast. The Odyssey gives us—by cinematic flashbacks—ten years of Odysseus’s adventures but narrates directly just the small number of days that lead to the hero’s return to Ithaca and the revenge he takes there.

  These are works that one artist had the leisure to write and rewrite, to double back over, to shorten and extend as he saw fit. Though he relied on the long tradition of oral conventions that the illiterate bards had employed—especially their use of metrical tag lines (“godlike Achilles,” “the Achaeans’ fast ships,” the “deep-breasted women” of Troy)—he made something essentially new, two epics, each divided into twenty-four books, each book designated by one of the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpha and ending with Omega. No one can now affirm absolutely that Homer himself, whose very existence we are reduced to speculating about, made the twenty-four divisions. But these episodes are the work of a skilled artist, each with its own internal unity—a beginning, a middle, an end—and an organic relationship to the greater whole of the poem of which it is part. Was Homer literate? I would bet on it.

  A few decades ago it was fashionable to assert that these poems were merely collections of oral folktales, stitched together by performing rhapsodes (literally “stitchers of song”), that they did not have a common author, and that “Homer” was simply a convenient designation of the ancient world. Now the tide has turned; a slight majority of contemporary scholars tends toward the likelihood of one author who, if not literate, at least dictated his poetry to others. Only a few tin-eared commentators continue to insist that the poems are oral compilations; those who still insist on two Homers point to differences in the language in the two poems, to differences in outlook between them, and to an undeniable falling off in the power of the poetry at the end of the Odyssey, which almost all would acknowledge to be a later composition than the Iliad. But the theory that best answers these objections is that the Iliad is a young man’s poem, that Homer’s worldview underwent transition and even transformation as he aged, and that he may have died before he could quite finish the second poem, which was then finished off by a disciple.

  For all that the Iliad has enjoyed primacy through most of literary history—and was certainly held by the Greeks (and all subsequent warrior societies almost up to our own day) to be the greater of Homer’s two works—it offers us the conventional wisdom of the ancient world: in this fated universe, ruled by passions human and divine, violence is inevitable, whether the violence of the gods or the violence of man against woman or of man against man. “It is a law established for all time among all men,” Xenophon would write, echoing much of the Iliad’s wisdom, “that when a city is taken in war, the persons and the property of its inhabitants belong to the captors.” No Geneva conventions to be observed here, as we look forward to Andromache’s life of concubinage and endless servitude; and much of the Iliad conforms to this dreary fatefulness about human prospects. Someone, alas, will always be angry and violent, if not Agamemnon, Achilles, if not Hera, Zeus. The great gods of the Greeks are neither the Titans nor the Olympians but Might and Luck; and war is the relentless engine of Homer’s Iliad.

  And yet, even in the Iliad, Ares, the god of war, is the most hated of all the gods. When Thetis gives her son Achilles new heavenly armor made for him by the crippled smith god Hephaestus,2 Homer devotes more than a hundred lines to a description of the great shield whereon Hephaestus forges “two noble cities filled/with mortal men.” One city is at war, surrounded by “Strife and Havoc … and violent Death”; the other, filled with “weddings and wedding feasts” and courts that dispense only justice, is not merely a city at peace but the City of Peace, surrounded by “broad rich plowland” and harvesters reaping ripe grain. There is a vineyard “loaded with clusters”:

  And there among them a young boy plucked his lyre,

  so clear it could break the heart with longing …

  And the crippled Smith brought all his art to bear

  on a dancing circle, broad as the circle Daedalus

  once laid out on Cnossos’ spacious fields

  for Ariadne the girl with lustrous hair.

  Here young boys and girls, beauties courted

  with costly gifts of oxen, danced and danced,

  linking their arms and gripping each other’s wrists.

  And the girls wore robes of linen light and flowing,

  the boys wore finespun tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil,

  the girls were crowned with a bloom of fresh garlands,

  the boys swung golden daggers hung on silver belts.

  And now they would run in rings on their skilled feet,

  nimbly, quick as a crouching potter spins his wheel,

  palming it smoothly, giving it practice twirls

  to see it run, and now they would run in rows,

  in rows crisscrossing rows—rapturous dancing.

  A breathless crowd stood round them struck with joy

  and through them a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang,

  whirling in leaping handsprings, leading on the dance.

  Peace may be only an impossible ideal in the Iliad, but we cannot doubt which city Homer would prefer. He loved and longed for the leisure and playfulness that peace makes possible. He stood with the historian Herodotus, who would one day write: “No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace: in peace children bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their children.”

  THE GLORIES OF WAR have faded considerably by the time Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, tries to make his way home from Troy. The hero of Homer’s second poem is no shining demigod but a man using all his wiles and wits to get himself out of one fix after another. Odysseus is polytropos (a man of twists and turns), polymetis (versatile), polytlas (long-enduring), and polymechanos (a great tactician)—all those polys (meaning “very,” “much,” or “many”) crediting him as the pinnacle of canny resourcefulness. He doesn’t so much attack his enemies head-on with brute strength as find a clever way around the many monsters he encounters. Whether he faces the land of the Lotus-eaters (whose drug makes men forget their homes), the hideous giants called cyclopes, Aeolus king of the winds, the cannibal Laestrygonians, the witch Circe, the Sirens whose enchantments lure all sailors to their deaths, or the impossibility of steering a safe course between the jagged rock of Scylla and the gigantic whirlpool of Charybdis,3 he defeats all challenges with cunning, occasionally with the bold lies that human speech makes possible. He manages to survive even a visit to Hades, the Greek underworld. In the ancient world, Odysseus the dissembler was thought contemptible, a second-rate hero when placed against the noble Achilles. To the modern reader, Odysseus is a far greater hero than a petulant boy who leaves the playground with his toys.

  The character of Odysseus is so subtle that this second work of Homer could not be understood much before the modern period. Only in the early eighteenth century did the distinguished Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley, naming the poems by their Greek titles, begin the process of redeeming Odysseus’s story from the reproaches leveled against it: “Take my word for it, poor Homer … wrote a sequ
el of songs, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment; the Ilias he made for the men, and the Odysseis for the other sex.” Though Bentley was quite right about the circumstances of performance in Homer’s day, he was probably a little off about the audience for the Odyssey, which was almost certainly performed for both sexes. Still, there is a delicious bit of truth in his remarks, for in the Odyssey Homer found the subject of his old age, female sensibility—not an outright rejection but certainly an epic-long negation of the strutting male militarism of the Iliad.

  In the Iliad, the worst opprobrium that one hero can hurl at another is to call him “a woman.” In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are overcome repeatedly by “tides of sorrow” as they recall their lost homes, “consumed with grief and weeping live warm tears”—just the words Homer used in the Iliad to describe Andromache on the verge of losing her man. Yes, in the Iliad Achilles and Priam weep together once—at the climax of the poem—but the Odyssey contains an inexhaustible torrent of tears. Odysseus, stranded on Calypso’s island, weeps for his lost home. He weeps again at the performance of a harping bard who sings a song entitled “The Strife Between Odysseus and Achilles,” an allusion to a piece of the prehistoric epic cycle otherwise unknown to us:

  but Odysseus, clutching his flaring sea-blue cape

  in both powerful hands, drew it over his head

  and buried his handsome face,

  ashamed his hosts might see him shedding tears.

  But later, when the same bard, blind Demodocus, “the faithful bard the Muse adored above all others”—no wonder the self-praising Greeks thought Homer was here referring to himself—sings the story of the Greeks’ treacherous Wooden Horse that brought Troy down, Odysseus comes apart, no longer shielding his sorrow from public view:

  but great Odysseus melted into tears,

  running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks …

  as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,

  a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen,

  trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.

  Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,

  she clings for dear life, screams and shrills—

  but the victors, just behind her,

  digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders,

  drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain,

  and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.

  So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now.

  In his sympathetic response, Odysseus has surpassed even Hector, the most humane male figure of the Iliad. The unthinkable has come to pass: Odysseus has become Andromache. When, in Book 16 of the poem, Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, recognize each other at last, their mutual tears know no limits:

  “No, I am not a god,”

  the long-enduring, great Odysseus returned.

  “Why confuse me with one who never dies?

  No, I am your father—the Odysseus you wept for all your days,

  you bore a world of pain, the cruel abuse of men.”

  And with those words Odysseus kissed his son

  and the tears streamed down his cheeks and wet the ground,

  though before he’d always reined his emotions back.…

  Odysseus sat down again, and Telemachus threw his arms

  around his great father, sobbing uncontrollably

  as the deep desire for tears welled up in both.

  They cried out, shrilling cries, pulsing sharper

  than birds of prey—eagles, vultures with hooked claws—

  when farmers plunder their nest of young too young to fly.

  Both men so filled with compassion, eyes streaming tears,

  that now the sunlight would have set upon their cries

  if Telemachus had not asked his father, all at once,

  “What sort of ship, dear father, brought you here?—

  Ithaca, at last.”

  Likewise in the eighteenth century, the first century capable, I believe, of appreciating what Homer was up to in the Odyssey, the percipient Samuel Johnson remarked, “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.” Such a sentiment was seldom, if ever, expressed with such conviction by any commentator before the eighteenth century, except the mysteriously godlike Homer, so refreshingly unpartisan, so unideological, and so confoundingly secular in his old age. Johnson’s “end” is not anyone’s end in the Iliad, but it is Odysseus’s homely purpose, which would only have earned him the contempt of Achilles and the whole procession of heroes. All Odysseus wants to do is make it back to his wife, son, and home. Another towering figure of the English eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift, himself a clergyman, ridiculed the hair-splitting theological divisions of Christianity that had led to the bloody wars of religion in the previous century. So much needless bloodshed over such paltry prizes had at last alerted the most penetrating observers to the smothering dreariness, the insurmountable fecklessness of war.

  In the nineteenth century, as passionate theological commitments began to ebb in Europe, Odysseus really began to come into his own as a figure of further poetic inspiration. Alfred Tennyson in “Ulysses” (the Latin form of Odysseus’s name) saw him in his never-say-die posture as the quintessential modern hero (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”) for whom experience itself is the ultimate object:

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows, for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  Ignoring Homer’s longing to end with the hero at rest at home, the far more upbeat Tennyson sends him off adventuring again; and for Tennyson, as for Greeks many centuries after Homer, the shadowy realms of Hades have been transformed into the Happy Isles—the Elysian Fields of later Greek mythology, where the great and the good are spared the dark near nonexistence of Hades.

  In the twentieth century, Constantine Cavafy, a native of Alexandria who wrote in modern Greek, saw the Odyssey as a metaphor for the journey of life, the end of the journey being not nearly as important as the journey itself. In his much-quoted poem “Ithaca,” he advises the reader:

  Hope the way is long.

  May there be many summer mornings when,

  with what pleasure, with what joy,

  you shall enter first-seen harbors …

  Keep Ithaca always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what has been ordained for you.

  But do not hurry the journey at all.

  Better if it lasts many years;

  and you dock an old man on the island,

  rich with all that you’ve gained on the way,

  not expecting Ithaca to give you wealth.

  Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey.

  Without her you would not have set out.

  She has nothing more to give you.

  For James Joyce, Odysseus served as the archetype around which he built the character of Leopold Bloom, Dublin’s “wandering Jew” in Ulysses, the twentieth century’s most characteristic masterpiece. Bloom, the perpetual outsider, must best the many monsters of modern life, using only his wits. His adventures, which take place not over the course of ten years but within the compass of one day, are the ordinary adventures of an ordinary life and have mythological reverberations in the mind of Bloom, who experiences them. His “journey to Hades,” for instance, paralleling that of Homer’s original, holds none of the outsized epic terrors that faced Odysseus but is only a visit to a Dublin cemetery, prompting Bloom to reflect on the various, once prominen
t Dubliners buried there—Joyce’s equivalents of Homer’s legendary heroes—and to think (in the haphazard, pedestrian way human beings actually think about such things) about the mystery of death: “Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings.” Circe’s cave in Homer becomes Bella Cohen’s whorehouse in Joyce. The faithful Penelope becomes the more realistic Molly—Bloom’s “home” and the object of all his striving—dreamy and unfaithful, if faithful in her fashion.

  Each of these interpretations can find some justification in Homer. Odysseus, who asks to be strapped to the mast so that he can hear the irresistible song of the Sirens as his ship passes their island, does not let his ears be stopped with wax, as do his crew. Though he knows he cannot allow himself to be drawn by the song, he knows, unlike his men, that he must allow himself to hear it. The premium Homer’s Odysseus thus places on experience is used to appropriate effect by Tennyson and Cavafy—even if each poet knowingly contradicts a central Homeric theme, Tennyson by suggesting that his hero became bored after he got home and yearned for further adventures, Cavafy by giving all material value to the adventures and none but formal value to the homecoming. Joyce’s insight is deeper, appreciative of the unexpectedly, even shockingly antiheroic nature of Homer’s second text and its status as the world’s first comic novel—and first romantic comedy—albeit a comedy that dramatizes “a world of pain.”

  Surely no modern author has reconfigured the adventure of Odysseus/Ulysses more appositely than did W. H. Auden in “The Wanderer,” which is a short summation in a modern idiom of much of the emotional content of Homer’s second poem: