Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Even the solemn Walter Bagehot from the heart of industrial England declared that “a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” Today the best American poets still test themselves as translators of Homer.
The Iliad and the Odyssey took form centuries before the invention of the Greek alphabet. We still know very little about the language that the prehistoric migrants brought into Greece, and from which the language of Homer grew. Only after World War II, and its advanced science of cryptography, was the earliest Greek writing deciphered by the precocious English architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956). As a boy his twin passions were the classics and cryptography. At fourteen he heard Sir Arthur Evans describe a mystifying pictographic script he had uncovered on the clay tablets at Knossos, which he called Linear B. At the age of eighteen the determined young Ventris put his clues together in a paper for the American Journal of Archaeology. When Ventris returned from the war in 1949, he applied the latest statistical techniques to the growing data of archaeology from mainland Greece. He made his dramatic announcement on BBC radio in 1952. The mysterious Linear B, he revealed, was an archaic form of the classical Greek language. (Its undeciphered predecessor Linear A still awaits another Michael Ventris.) It was a syllabic script of some ninety signs in which the ancient language of Mycenae had been written from about 1500 B.C. Then, about 1200 B.C., in a rare example of lost technology, writing disappeared from the Greek mainland. Five hundred years passed before language was again written. Finally, around 700 B.C. the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet into a phonetic way of writing their own language. It was during this interregnum of the spoken word, when there still was no way of writing Greek, that the Homeric epics came into being.
The Homeric epics, then, were inevitably an oral creation. They were recollections of bards in an era when there was no writing. How, without writing, were works of such length and complexity first put together? And then perpetuated? (A skilled Serbian bard who was recently engaged to sing a poem as long as the Odyssey, took two weeks, performing two hours morning and afternoon, to complete his tale.) In our literate age when printed matter is cheap, it is more difficult than ever to imagine how the Iliad and the Odyssey were created.
Still, in the last half century we have learned more about the creation of these long oral epics than was learned by Homeric scholars in the preceding thousand years. We owe this to a bold young American scholar, Milman Parry (1902–1935), who was inspired to go to the mountains of Yugoslavia, where illiterate bards still sang heroic epics to illiterate audiences. There he hoped to recapture the oral age. There he hoped to relive, as classical scholars before him had not, the tasks and talents of Homeric bards and the hopes and delights of their audiences. And there indeed he witnessed spectacular bardic feats. Contrary to modern assumptions, the bards do not recite lines that they have memorized. Instead, they compose anew before each audience, putting together their tale with poetic embellishments as they go along.
The bards, Parry found, were but skillful improvisers from a limited and familiar stock. Drawing on a repertoire of traditional themes—the promise of Zeus, the anger of Achilles, the ransoming of Hector’s body, the beauty of Helen and her kidnapping by Paris—they composed their song anew for each occasion. The episodes were held together by familiar phrases, which they used again and again, recognized by the audience as the proper idiom of song. In phrases like “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “owl-eyed Athena,” “city-sacking Achilles,” “sea-girt Ithaca,” which the modern reader tolerates as literary cliché, Parry found clues to the composition of oral epics. Stock phrases, ready-made to fit the meter of a Homeric line, gave the bard breathing space to choose the next episodes. To describe Achilles in the Iliad, there are at least thirty-six different formula-epithets. The one to be used depends on the space in the line and the needs of the meter. In the first twenty-five lines of the Iliad there are twenty-five such formulas or pieces of them. A full third of both the Iliad and the Odyssey is composed of lines repeated elsewhere in the same poem.
The bard was singing to an audience. These listeners who could not read could not leaf pages to see how the story ended, nor look backward or forward to count the repetitious formulas. What they heard gave them both the joy of recognition and the pleasure of suspense. No wonder Homer expressed his doubts that mere Memory could be the mother of the Muses. Odysseus praised the “inspired” bard Demodokos and when Odysseus returned to Ithaca and was tempted to kill Phemius who had sung to the Suitors, the bard begged
You will be sorry in time to come if you kill the singer of songs. I sing to the gods and to human people, and I am taught by myself, but the god has inspired in me the song-ways of every kind. I am such a one as can sing before you as to a god.
No mere reciter of a fixed text, the self-taught Homeric bard was inspired by the gods and by the audience. While an actor in our literate age is circumscribed by the written word, the oral bard was far freer to respond to his audience. Each performance was spontaneous and unique, not only in how it was sung, but even in what was sung. We cannot find a literary original for an oral poem. Yet the different surviving versions have an uncanny similarity, as if copied from a divine original!
It is no wonder, then, that Homer remains a mystery. Who was Homer? This so-called Homeric Question has provoked some of the bloodiest professorial battles. Speculation about Homer has itself spawned fantasies of epic proportions. Homer himself became a myth.
The ancient Greeks had no doubt that Homer was a real person. Before the Great Age, until about 450 B.C., they put his birthplace on the little island of Chios, off the western coast of Asia Minor, where his epics were being sung by people who called themselves Homeridae, descendants of Homer. Herodotus (fifth century B.C.), the knowledgeable nephew of a practicing bard, said that Homer had lived four hundred years earlier and named him as the author of the two great epics. By the early fifth century B.C., Homer had already become so myth-heroic that several different towns, including Athens, claimed to be his birthplace. But how did his works reach mainland Greece, and how did they first acquire a fixed literary form like that which survives? No satisfactory answer has been agreed on for any of these questions. Greek patriots like to believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey were a spontaneous, divinely inspired emanation from the Greek people. If Homer, the perfect poet, was descended from Orpheus, then excrescences and imperfections must be later corruptions.
…
Fixed texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to have appeared with the return of writing in the fifth century B.C. The rise of a small literate class brought the new pastime of people reading privately to themselves. And this brought a trade in manuscripts as the oral epics were written down. One scholarly tradition credits the first fixed written texts for the Iliad and the Odyssey to the decrees of Solon, who in the sixth century B.C. ordered regular recitations of the works of Homer. Most historians claim that it was the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus who decreed a written text for Homer.
The written text provided both an object of idolatry and a convenient target for academic critics. Plato’s attack on the baleful influence of Homer testified to his uninterrupted influence. Aristotle declared that “the structure of the two Homeric poems is as perfect and the action in them is as nearly as possible one action,” as can be, and his authority prevailed. The light of Homer shone undimmed throughout the Christian “almost Greek-less” Middle Ages. Then Homer became the leading figure in the classical revival of the Renaissance. Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Lorenzo Valla all were acolytes. The first printed edition of Homer, in 1488, confirmed his reign as prototype of poet
ry and epic.
Poets have tested themselves by translating Homer into the idiom of their time. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) opened his admired version of the Iliad in 1720:
The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian woes, O goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unbury’d on the naked shore
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sov’reign doom, and such the will of Jove.
Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour
Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power?
Which, for Robert Fagles in 1990 became:
Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
The progress of modern Western thought entertains us with a kaleidoscope of opinions, “facts,” and fantasies about Homer. In the running battle between “the Ancients,” and “the Moderns,” Homer was ex officio commander of the Ancient forces. A scholar could make a reputation by a new strategy or slogan. The French Abbe d’Aubignac (1604–1676) berated “illiterate” Homer for bad taste and immorality, then erased him as a person who never existed. The works, he said, were pieced together by some crude editor. In the next century the English scholar Richard Bentley (1662–1742) pitied “poor Homer” as “a primitive provincial who wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, 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.”
The rising social sciences produced a whole new library of Homeric speculation. Perhaps, after all, there really was nothing supernatural about Homer, and his works were simply a product of his age. The burgeoning ideas of biological evolution that Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles’s versatile grandfather, prophetically expressed in his Zoonomia (1794–1796) had a Homeric counterpart. A German professor Friedrich A. Wolf (1759–1824), a friend of Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his Prolegomena to Homer (1795) showed how the Homeric epics had emerged from the processes of social evolution. First composed orally about 950 B.C., in an age without writing, he explained that they were repeated and modified by four centuries of bards. After being written, they continued to evolve in response to changing ideas. Although there probably was a Homer, the unity of the epics emerged only over the centuries. Wolf gives a hint of the fashionable new optimism before the products of evolution as he dissolved Homer into the elusive processes of history.
After Wolf, the Homeric mystery was compounded and illuminated by comparative literature, philology, sociology, archaeology, and anthropology. Had the Iliad and the Odyssey been pieced together, like the German Nibelungenlied, or the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, from many separate original “lays”? If this was how it had happened, then their glowing epic unity was more miraculous than ever. Or did the élan vital that Henri Bergson saw in biological evolution also create new artistic species?
Still some faithful remained. Heinrich Schliemann, inspired by Homer, believed that the Iliad was literal history. Digging at Hissarlik, Homer’s Troy, he used the facts of archaeology and the relics that he unearthed to prove that myth and history were somehow one. Were the Homeric myths themselves a kind of history?
The new halo with which Schliemann crowned Homer invited academic fury. The leading German classicist, Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), found the author of the Odyssey “a not very gifted patch-worker” (ein gering begabter Flickpoet). But oddly enough, the new science of comparative religion restored Homer’s epics to the canon of sacred documents. Combining Wolf’s evolutionary arguments with the “higher criticism” of recent biblical scholars, the English master translator Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), showed that, like the Old Testament, the Iliad and the Odyssey accreted by tradition. Of course Murray did not solve the Homeric riddle, but he put Homer’s works securely among the highest mysteries of Creation. Were the gods jealous of this Homeric mystery? Was there a curse like that on violators of the pharaoh’s tombs? The two bold scholars who did most to tear the veil of mystery from Homer, Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Michael Ventris (1922–1956), both came to an early, untimely end.
Homer’s world of gods and goddesses bypassed the perplexing questions of the first Creation of the earth and of man. In the Iliad and the Odyssey we see man and the gods fully matured. If Homer ever was troubled about how or why the world came into being, he does not share his concern with us. The full-grown gods’ loves and hates provide the motive power, the sources of defeat or victory, success or catastrophe in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Achilles, whose wrath is the theme of the Iliad, is the son of Peleus, who is the grandson of Zeus, and of the Nereid Thetis whom the gods had given in marriage to Peleus. Never are the gods absent from the story as we watch Aphrodite, protectress of Helen, and Apollo, the protector of all Troy, struggle vainly against “the plan of Zeus.” The Odyssey, too, glows with the divine, the miraculous, and the preternatural. Under the watchful eyes of Zeus, we see Odysseus’ seduction by the goddess Calypso, his encounter with the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclopes, Circe, and finally his voyage to Hades. The Greeks every day saw men and women aided or frustrated by the whims or purposes of the gods. This they found more urgent and more interesting than speculation over how and why it all began.
So, too, by showing their gods and goddesses as immortal men and women with all the human passions, fears, and hopes, they made men and women the more godlike. The hybrid nature of man would remain a dominant theme in Judaism and Christianity. The Greeks shaped their gods in man’s image. They made man their point of departure, and for them the problems of Creation were only afterthoughts. But Judaism and Christianity would turn the question around, and start from God. By making man in God’s image, they committed themselves to facing the Mystery of Creation, with endless consequences.
The Greeks replaced cosmology with genealogy, leaving us an ample and explicit account of the births and families of the gods. It was Hesiod (c.750–675 B.C.), another epic bard, whose Theogony (Birth of the Gods) became the canon. We can follow Hesiod in the lively translations by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Less shadowy than Homer, Hesiod was a most un-Homeric gloomy figure. His father emigrated from Asia Minor to Boeotia in central Greece. One day, he recalled, there appeared to him the Helikonian Muses:
“Listen, you country bumpkins, you swag-bellied yahoos,
we know how to tell many lies that pass for truth,
and we know, when we wish, to tell the truth itself.”
So spoke Zeus’ daughters, masters of word-craft,
and from a laurel in full bloom they plucked a branch,
and gave it to me as a staff, and then breathed into me
divine song, that I might spread the fame of past and future,
and commanded me to hymn the race of the deathless gods,
but always begin and end my song with them.
As the Muses commanded, Hesiod produced a poetic genealogy of the gods.
Hesiod also produced mundane poems of moralism and everyday life. His lazy brother Perses, with lies and bribes, had tried to steal Hesiod’s share of their father’s estate. One happy result of this family quarrel was Hesiod’s Works and Days. In this long poem (828 hexameters) Hesiod lectures his brother (and his whole corrupt age), with reminders of how Prometheus was punished for his theft of fire. Incidentally, Hesiod provided some of our earliest d
etails of the rigors, pleasures, and temptations of archaic Greece, its peasant ways and the perils of its seafaring. And he sings of the decline of humankind from the earliest Golden Generation who “lived as if they were gods, their hearts free from all sorrow, by themselves, and without hard work or pain; no miserable old age came their way.… All goods were theirs.” Then the foolish Silver Age, followed by the Bronze Age of strength and strife.
And I wish that I were not any part
of the fifth generation
of men, but had died before it came
or had been born afterward.
For here now is the age of iron.…
when guest is no longer at one with host,
nor companion to companion
when your brother is no longer your friend,
as he was in the old days.
In his Theogony, Hesiod, going back to the very beginning, provides a gory and sexually explicit chronicle of the births of the gods. Every act of Creation was an episode of divine loves and hates. “It was Homer and Hesiod,” Herodotus writes, “who composed a ‘theogony’ for the Greeks, and who first gave the gods distinctive titles, and defined their forms and functions.” Hesiod did not invent the gods but he gave them genealogical respectability. Unlike what we read in Genesis, Hesiod shows us not the Act of Creation but countless acts of procreation.
Chaos was born first and after her came Gaia
the broad-breasted, the firm seat of all
the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos,
and the misty Tartaros in the depths of broad-pathed earth
and Eros, the fairest of the deathless gods;
he unstrings the limbs and subdues both mind
and sensible thought in the breasts of all gods and all men.
Chaos gave birth to Erebos and black Night;
then Erebos mated with Night and made her pregnant
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 5