Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  had in his head more than seventy tales lasting at least one hour each, and some novels lasting seven to nine hours, one of them running to 58,000 words, which is nearly as long as Homer’s Odyssey … [He] could talk for eight hours at a stretch, almost without a pause. On the nearby island of Barra, Roderick MacNed is reported to have told tales every winter night for fifteen years without ever repeating himself. On the Scottish mainland, in Lochaber, John Macdonald recorded over six hundred tales, each of them a comparatively short story complete in itself. An Irish taleteller recorded over half a million words of tales he knew.

  The idea of human memory in monumental form allows one to push Homer beyond the ninth or tenth centuries BC. The epic poem, seen as the deepest of all recording mediums, releases Homer from time constraints, allowing his tales to plunge far back into the centuries before writing. It is a kind of time-release not unlike standing on a peak in Darien, seeing the Pacific widths of the past expanding before you. Parry was only partly right; it now seems clear that his model is one way, but not the only way, that Homer works. Homer unites and combines the formulaically made with the acutely remembered and the sparklingly invented. In the substance of its poetry, Homer is the inherited tradition in its multiple forms: both alive as the poem composed in performance and fixed, as monumental as the stone over a grave mound, the memorial of great things done long ago. Multiple in origin, multiple in manner and multiple in meaning, Homer in this light both knows the deep past and moves beyond it. He is both South Uist and Sfakia. And so the question emerges: what is it that Homer remembers?

  7 • HOMER THE REAL

  Homer is haunted by the threat of transience, by the way memory fails and meanings drift in the face of time. That slide into insignificance summons his tenderest and most lyrical moments. So in book 6 of the Iliad, when the battle is well under way and all is in a roar, “the terrible noise” of it stoked by the commanders on both sides, a brazen, brutal shouting, something else emerges. The Greek warrior Diomedes, second only to Achilles as a man with an appetite for killing, is pumped with rage and the need for death. He is conducting his drive, his aristeia, through the Trojan ranks. Death awaits anyone he meets.

  Quivering with battle-lust, he comes across a young warrior from Lycia, an ally of the Trojans. This is Glaucus, whose name means “the gleaming one,” a word used by Homer to describe both the sea and the eyes of the wisdom goddess Athene. Here, surely, is Diomedes’s next victim. But instead of surrender or any display of weakness, Glaucus appears to him, like other heroes, “shining” and “glorious.” Diomedes guesses he might be a god, and as such intensely dangerous. He isn’t, he is mortal, and so Diomedes asks him about his ancestry, who his father and grandfather might have been.

  It is a traditional conversation, important for a hero, as his own self-esteem is bound up with the knowledge that his victims are themselves of good lineage, but also a kind of time mark: two warriors meeting in battle are not merely themselves; they are the vehicles for their own pasts. A man is his ancestry, and just as this poem is the poem the tradition is now singing, these men are the future their fathers and grandfathers dreamed of.

  Nevertheless, Glaucus resists the expectations. “Why ask about my birth?” he asks Diomedes in return, and a pause, a slowness, pools out into the flow of violence and grief. The noise of war rolls on in the background, but immediately, here, in the present, with you the listener looking on, a scene unfolds that exists in its own bubble of quiet, delivering a kind of precious and individualized oasis amid all the horror. In some of the most famous lines in the Iliad, Glaucus reflects on the meaning of life and death.

  As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men.

  And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth,

  But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again.

  So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies.

  For Glaucus, all life goes back into the earth and returns again. Earth’s abundance and earth’s indifference are the same thing. But this resolved simplicity in the face of death, a philosophical calm and a knowledge that the armies of men gathered on the Trojan plain are “as many as the leaves and flowers that appear in the spring”—that is not the usual Homeric attitude. Glaucus may think of himself as one leaf in the centuries of leaves, a transient phenomenon, an irrelevant individuality, but that acceptance of transience is not what most of the poem thinks or most of the heroes in it. For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life’s central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

  It is also what the poem itself is intended to cure. In scene after scene, Homer quietly shows its listeners that it knows more and remembers more than men usually know or are able to bring to mind. The whole of the Iliad is a hymn to the scale of remembering of which epic is capable. The world forgets, but the poem remembers, and that knowledge is the source of Homer’s repeated sad-eyed, bloodhound irony on the nature of life. Only the gods can know as much as the poem knows.

  Almost at the beginning of the Iliad, the first time the Trojans move out of the city and onto the plain to confront their enemies, to face either death or the possibility of renown and glory, Homer describes the landscape beyond the gates. On the open plain there is a tomb, a high burial mound or tumulus, of the kind found across the whole of Bronze Age Eurasia, from Bahrain to Sweden and from Sussex to the deserts of Kazakhstan. It is the tomb of Myrine, a mythological Amazon warrior queen, who conquered Anatolia and died in battle. The poet knows the story, but the Trojans have entirely forgotten it. Myrine has disappeared from their minds; instead they know the site as “Thicket Hill.” The great mound has today sunk from memory. Only Homer and the gods know that a great woman is buried there.

  Near the city but far out in the plain, there is a steep hill with clear space around it so you can pass on either side; this men call Batieia, but the immortals call it the grave mound of Myrine.

  Homer knows something else, a delicate and transient fact about Myrine. She was polyskarthmos, a dancer, “much-skipping” as the word means literally, and “very frisky,” a phrase used for calves or lambs playing on the springtime grass. Epic poetry serves us well by redeeming from the distant past such a fragile and transient thing as the gaiety and dance steps of a long-dead warrior queen.

  Though human memory lasts only three generations at best, the poem becomes an act of memorialization, fixing the past into an everlasting song. Agamemnon may lust after the possessions that victory offers him, objects “such as will remain in the minds of men who are yet to be.” But he is wrong about that, because we have no idea what those looted goods were, knowing only what the poem has preserved.

  Epic is different from life. The present moment might be seen as a blade, cutting the past from the present, severing now from then, but poetry binds the wounds that time inflicts. As Odysseus says, the Muse provides “her own way” for poets and storytellers, a path of song, on which events from the past will continue to live in a present reality. It is inconceivable that the epics, for all the pressures of composition-in-performance, did not attend to inherited realities, beyond the moment in about 700 BC or soon after when Homer was first written down. The poems are littered with hints and suggestions of the ancient. Iron, which by the time of Emporio and Pithekoussai was the material out of which farm instruments were made, is often treated in Homer as the most precious and rare of metals, to be carried home as booty in the same class as gold and bronze, the stuff of strange dark jewelry and, as Hector says of Achilles’s iron heart, capable when heated of a mysteriously powerful reddened glow. That is exactly the position of iron in the Bronze Age before 1200 BC. Homeric warriors carry “silver-riveted swords,” which are found in the graves at Mycenae from the sixteenth century BC but scarcely later. Shields in the form of either large figures-of-eight or huge towering constructions behind which a man can hide as if behind a city wall—these are both Homeric pieces of equipment that are never found by archaeolog
ists from contexts later than the fourteenth century BC. Helmets made of boars’ tusks sewn to a leather backing, each helmet requiring the tusks from at least forty boars, are found in Mycenaean graves and in Homer but never in contexts nearer the Iron Age. This is the equipment of a profoundly ancient world.

  In the Odyssey, Homeric bards sing to gatherings of elegant aristocrats and their followers, attentive around the formal hearth, in complex, many-roomed and multifloored palaces, in which kings and their queens happily ordain a well-ordered life, the like of which are not found in archaeology after the cataclysms of 1200 BC, but which are the baseline of the Mycenaean civilization before it. Much of that poem addresses the agony of rootlessness, the lack of civility in an ill-governed house, the failure of Greeks to be civilized; but the rest of it portrays what looks like a Mycenaean world, a world in which the war is over and the Greeks have come to rest. These poems must at least have passed through a palatial phase for them to be so familiar with the workings and architecture of that life. And in the Iliad one element in particular of that palace environment seems to guarantee that at least in part Homer belonged to the palatial phase of Greek Bronze Age civilization.

  In the late nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, the greatest of all Aegean archaeologists—Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans and Carl Blegen—working at Mycenae, at Knossos in Crete and at Pylos in the Peloponnese (with others following at Chania, Thebes and Tiryns), found a series of clay tablets in which some kind of writing had been scratched before they dried. Small, gray, slightly roughly made things, these tablets were clearly not public objects. They are clay notes and records for private reference, not public display.

  At Pylos, they came from within a few yards of where Carl Blegen found the fragments of the wonderful fresco showing the poet with his lyre and the bird of poetry taking wing in front of him. For decades no one could interpret the scratched signs, but in the early 1950s, through a combination of American and English analysis (feeding off the cryptography techniques developed in World War II), it became clear that the language they were written in was a form of Greek that was in use between about 1400 and 1200 BC. These Linear B tablets (Linear A was a similar, earlier, Cretan script, yet to be deciphered), once they had been understood, turned out to be the checklists and storeroom accounts of clerks working in the administrative offices of these early Greek palaces. They were everyday files, dealing with employees, religious functionaries, chariots and other military equipment, food stores, domestic animals, regional officials and palace servants.

  Judging from impressions on the clay, they had been kept either tied together in bundles or in baskets on shelves, which had collapsed in heaps on the floor during the final conflagrations of these palaces, the heat by chance baking and preserving the clay. Nothing on any of them even faintly resembled nonbureaucratic life, let alone the energized emotional realities to be found in Homer. It was a filing system, which like the workings of most bureaucracies remained hidden from the mass of the population: an essential part of the way the world works, entirely obscure to the mass of people inhabiting that world.

  In what became known as the Archive Room at Pylos, Carl Blegen, on the very first morning of his dig in 1939, began to uncover the cache of Linear B tablets. By the end of that first season, his team had found six hundred. In the southern corner of the same room, traces of burned wood and seven small and very badly corroded hinges were found. Other similar hinges had been found at Knossos by Evans in 1900. Both sets of hinges and the little nails attached to them were too small to have belonged to a box of any size. They could not have been the remains of hinged containers for the tablets, because few such tablets could have fitted inside them. No one could guess what lids or doors they were for.

  Only when another discovery was made in 1982 did the significance of these tiny clues become clear. Off the coast of Lycia, at Ulu Burun, about six miles southeast of Kaş in southwestern Turkey, a local sponge diver stumbled on the wreck of a Bronze Age ship. A piece of firewood on board, freshly cut, was dated to 1306 BC.

  The objects the wreck contained provided the most time-shrinking set of insights into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth century BC. The ship had been sailing west toward the Aegean from the Near East, heavily laden with ten tons of large copper ingots from Cyprus and a ton of tin ingots, perhaps brought to the Mediterranean coast from the great tin mines in Afghanistan. The standard copper-to-tin ratio for making bronze is 10:1. The metals in the Ulu Burun cargo could make enough bronze weapons to equip an army.

  Together with those bulk goods was an extraordinary collection of riches: glass ingots, logs of Egyptian blackwood—a kind of ebony—ostrich eggshells, perhaps to make cups, inlaid seashell rings, elephant tusks, more than a dozen hippopotamus teeth and the shells of tortoises which the excavators think were the soundboxes for musical instruments. Little pots contained coriander and nigella seeds, rose-scented oils, olive and almond oil. There was gold jewelry from Canaan and Egypt, and precious mugs and cups made from tin. The ship carried equipment for building, fishing and war, presumably for sale, or perhaps to be distributed as gifts to those in power, and also the personal possessions of the people on board. Most of them seem to have been either Cypriot or Canaanite, traders coming west with the luxury goods of the East, but there were three men on board who had different origins. One wore a sword of which the nearest equivalents have been found in Sicily and Albania, as well as a bronze pin, and had some spears and a stone mace, of which the nearest parallels have been found in Romania and Bulgaria, on the western shores of the Black Sea. This was a man from the shadowy north, traveling in the Mediterranean, also now making his way back west, perhaps to Greece, perhaps to his homeland.

  Alongside him were two men from Mycenaean Greece, their possessions appearing in pairs, carrying with them the kind of bowls and plates they were used to at home, as well as their razors, their bronze knives and the engraved stones, their seals, with which they signed off documents and packages by pressing the engraved surface into clay balls attached to the binding strings. From mainland Greece, many seals and sealings survive. Perhaps these two men were accompanying some of these precious goods back from the Near East to the court of their king in Greece. In Egyptian and Hittite royal documents, such ambassadorial figures, overseeing the exchange of valuable goods between brother-kings, are a constant element in Bronze Age diplomacy.

  The late-fourteenth-century BC realities of the Ulu Burun wreck—all now to be seen in the beautiful, cool, darkened rooms of the museum in Bodrum—were accompanied by one other extraordinary and revelatory object: a writing tablet made out of two boxwood leaves, with ivory hinges at one side, and hollowed-out panels on the inside of each leaf into which wax could be poured to make the writing surface. The bed of each panel is roughly cross-hatched to make a good, binding key for the wax. The closed tablet could be held shut with fixings on its outer edge, and that is probably how it was when the merchant ship went down; the outer surface of the tablet is far more worn than the inside. The wax itself entirely disappeared in the thirty-three centuries the tablet spent in the sea. Nor was any stylus found with the Ulu Burun tablet, perhaps because it was made of wood or horn, but metal ones have been discovered in Anatolia, with a writing point at one end (the Greek word graphein, later meaning “to write,” originally meant “to draw with a point” or “to scratch”), and at the other a flat spatula for revision, smearing out marks in the wax.

  The mysterious hinges at Pylos and Knossos were, it now seems, the only parts of portable writing tablets that survived the fires that brought the life of those palaces to an end. But the situation those objects describe—writing as the reserve of a specialist minority in royal households; folding tablets in which written messages, unintelligible to the majority of people, could be carried abroad to foreign courts; the tablets stored for keeping in the writing offices of the palace administration—finds a vivid echo in a moment from the Ili
ad.

  It is the story the Lycian warrior Glaucus tells Diomedes when they meet in battle and Diomedes asks him who his ancestors were. Glaucus’s grandfather, he says, was a beautiful young hero called Bellerophon. He was living in Corinth, at the court, when the queen of Corinth fell in love with him. She was originally from Lycia, in western Anatolia, where her father was king. At the sight of Bellerophon she became crazed with lust, but he held her at bay. Her frustration mounted, and she came to the point where if she could not sleep with him she wanted him killed. She went to her husband and told him that Bellerophon had tried to seduce her, to sleep with her against her will. If the king had any dignity at all, he would have him murdered.

  The king balked at the idea of performing the killing himself, but instead “he quickly sent him off to Lycia, gave him some fatal tokens, scratching many deadly soul-tormenting signs in a folding wooden tablet, and ordered him to show them to the queen’s father, who was king of Lycia, so that he might die.”

  Bellerophon, without being able to read it himself, was carrying his own death warrant with him into exile. When he reached Lycia he showed the mysterious signs to the king, who was able to read them, and then subjected him to a series of murderous tests. But Bellerophon behaved so heroically, overcoming every challenge, that he emerged triumphant and came to father three children, one of whom was Glaucus’s own father.