Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  There is one further object that binds Homer and the Extremaduran stelae. On one stone after another, alongside the killing equipment and the beauty equipment, is something at the heart of the Bronze Age warrior world: the lyre. Some lyres are drawn many-stringed; a few are as large as the giant universe-shields; on many stelae, the lyre is shown as no more than a simple frame with two or three strings across it. But all of them signify the same thing: here is the instrument with which this warrior can sing heroic songs of deathless glory. The weapon, the beauty equipment and the lyre are all integral to his world. He exists in memory; in some ways he exists for memory. Just as Odysseus sings the tale of his own adventures when he finds himself at dinner with the king and queen of the Phaeacians, Achilles is a man who sings heroic songs of deathless glory. That is how the other heroes find him when in book 9 of the Iliad they come to his shelter, hoping to persuade him to rejoin the battle.

  And they come to the huts and the ships of the Myrmidons [Achilles’s men] and they find. Achilles delighting his mind with a clear-toned lyre, fair and elaborate, and on it is a bridge of silver; this he took from the spoil when he destroyed the city of Eëtion. With it he is delighting his heart, and he sings of the glorious deeds of men; and Patroclus alone sits opposite him in silence, waiting until Aeacus’s grandson should cease from singing.

  Like Glaucus’s account of generations of men following each other, just as spring leaves follow the leaves that had fallen in the autumn before, this is a moment when the passage of Homeric time stops for a second and when, in its privacy and lovingness, the world of brutality withdraws with the help of a lyre. That is what the presence of the lyres on the Spanish stelae says: not only is Homer about the heroic world; Homer is the heroic world. It is the realm of gang violence, in which pity and poetry have a central place.

  If there were any doubt that song was a central part of the warrior complex, a discovery in one of the remotest parts of northwest Europe in the summer of 2012 changed all that. Archaeologists working in the High Pasture Cave on Skye found the burned and broken remains of the bridge from a late Bronze Age lyre. Homer—or at least the forms of warrior song on which the deepest elements of Homer draw—was a universal presence across the whole of Bronze Age Europe.

  The Iberian stones might be seen as a kind of heraldry, the symbol-cluster for an armed knight. But they are also the first European biographies: he drove a chariot, strung a bow and killed with it, wielded spear and sword, held the shield, was beautiful and generous, lived here, sang his song. It seems from the distribution of the stelae that each warrior territory was no more than about twenty-five miles across. Seen as a kingdom, that is exceptionally small. But seen as an assertion over the landscape by a single powerful individual controlling about 270,000 acres, it is impressive. These are not petty empires but great estates. They are gang territories, equivalent to the “kingdoms” described in the Homeric catalog of ships. Nowhere are there any great buildings or constructions. All focus is on the power-body of the chieftain. His men cluster around him. His individual destiny is bound up with theirs and with the fate of the kingdom. It seems unlikely that many of these “kingdoms” outlasted the life of the man who made them. It is a place of endless, repetitive violence and competition, in which “who your father was” is important, but not enough. Honor must be revalidated in each generation. An unused sword rusts in the scabbard, and, as Glaucus said, each life can only follow the ones that came before, like the generations of the leaves.

  Some of the stelae show that story. One of the richest is now in the Museo Arqueologico Provincial in Córdoba. It was found in April 1968 by some farmworkers at the foot of an ancient wall, a good block nearly six feet high and about thirty inches wide. They hauled it onto their tractor, carelessly smashing the sides and scratching the face of the stele, and took it to the nearby estate of Gamarrillas, thinking it might be good for building stone. But they noticed the engravings on one of its faces. By chance some archaeologists working nearby saw it for what it was and saved it.

  A huge warrior figure dominates the scene, with outstretched hands and his penis hanging beneath him. He has a bracelet on one arm, and his whole torso is decorated with what might be a patterned cloth, his armor or maybe a whole-body tattoo. Even like this, scratched into limestone, he radiates significance. Of his chieftainliness there is no doubt. There is a little brooch next to his head, and his fighting equipment is gathered in the spaces around him: a spear, a shield, and a sword in his right hand, still in its scabbard. Beneath him is a comb, a shield and what may be a woven carpet. This is how he was in the glory of his life. But this stone also records his death. He is accompanied by his hunting dogs, both visibly male, and by his chariot. Around them groups of mourners hold hands, maybe dancing. There are no faces. All is in the body. This is a life that was lived and is now over. But for all that, an atmosphere of Homeric transience is soaked deeply into these little figures. Like the epic poems, this stone is a regretful glance back to a wonderful past, which, like the man, is gone.

  Most of the stelae were thrown down, taken away and dumped after they were set up. Others were deliberately effaced. But that should come as no surprise in a world of constantly shifting chiefdoms, a power-churn where no glory lasted more than a generation or two. The same circumstances that gave rise to the stelae, to the warrior complex of which they are such vivid testimony, would also guarantee their destruction. Like the weaponry, the killing, the grooming, the insistent body-focus and the presence of the lyres, this delight in the destruction of the enemy is everywhere in Homer too, above all in the exulting over the corpse of a defeated enemy.

  When one hero kills another in Homer, there is no grief or sympathy across the divide. It is a moment of triumph, when maleness achieves its undiluted self-expression. In book 11 of the Iliad, as one example, Odysseus is on his destruction-drive and fixes his spear into the back of a Trojan called Sokos, thrusting it straight in between the shoulder blades, so that the point comes out of Sokos’s chest. The Trojan then thumps to the ground—doupeo—and Odysseus stands over the dead body.

  Ah Sokos, son of battle-minded Hippasos, breaker of horses, death has been too quick for you and ran you down; you couldn’t avoid it, could you, poor wretch? Your father and oh-so elegant mother will not close your eyes in death now, but the birds that eat raw flesh will tear you in strips, beating their wings thick and fast about you; but to me, if I die, the brilliant Achaeans will bury me in honor.

  There is no pity in this. The destruction Odysseus celebrates is wonderful to him. Nothing is more beautiful than the sight of Sokos’s dead eyes staring at the sky. Odysseus is happy at the dreadfulness he has done to that man and his now-grieving family. He has destroyed the power of that dynasty and enhanced his own. There is no sense of tragedy. He has merely defaced their memory. Their stone is down and gone; his remains upright, triumphant, crowing.

  Richard Harrison has emphasized the loneliness which this ideology imposed on the warrior hero. “He is a unique and isolated figure,” Harrison has written,

  whose arm is strong and deadly; he is devoted to combat, which he actively seeks out; he is detached from ordinary social space and so is shown to be tremendously swift, able to cross time or distance between worlds; and he is a very dangerous person in society and is therefore much better detached from it and sent away on a quest where he cannot harm ordinary mortals.

  That loneliness clearly attached to Hector; to Agamemnon in his pomposity, his distance from love; to Odysseus on his journeying; even to Paris, the loathed creator of the war. Heroism disconnects. And the loneliness applies to no one more than to Achilles, as profoundly isolated as any figure in world literature. In his great and terrible confrontation with Hector in book 22 of the Iliad, after Hector has killed Achilles’s great friend Patroclus, Achilles makes the ultimate statement of heroic loneliness, the isolation of the warrior which is also the dominant image on the Iberian stelae: a big man surrounded by his things, ve
ry occasionally by some mourners or even cowarriors, but essentially alone, trapped in the glory of his violence. “Hector, you, the unforgivable, talk not to me of agreements,” he says, using the word agoreue for “talk,” the word used in the agora, the meeting place where citizens come to mutual accommodation. Achilles does not belong there; he belongs in the wild.

  There are no oaths sworn between lions and men, nor do wolves and lambs come to some arrangement in their hearts. They are filled with endless, repetitive hate for each other. Just so, it is impossible for you and me to be friends, nor will there be any oaths between us till one or other is dead, and has glutted Ares, the god of war, who carries his tough leather shield, with his blood.

  In Celtic Ireland, on the far western edge of this hero world, where round, ridged leather shields have been dug from Bronze Age bogs, stories from the heroic age have been recorded in which “the heroes gave orders that they should be buried standing upright, fully armed on a prominent hill, where they could face their enemy, awaiting the moment of resurrection when they would fight again and by this means continue to protect their people.” Those same upright warriors, continuing to haunt the living world, as enraged and violent as they were in life, also appear in the Icelandic sagas. Perhaps these are stories of the ultimate, cosmic loneliness, a measure of the inadequacy of the heroic idea, which only that weaponless, hand-connecting moment between Priam and Achilles could hope to assuage.

  9 • HOMER ON THE STEPPES

  The origins of the Greeks—or at least those people who would in time become the Greeks—were not in the Mediterranean. At some point they moved south and west in search of lands they wanted to claim as theirs, but at the deepest levels they were strangers in the southern sea. Fundamentally they were northerners, their roots in the steppelands of Eurasia, the oceanic river of grass, five thousand miles long and up to a thousand wide, that runs from Hungary to Manchuria.

  Homer is full of half-buried memories of that northern past, and his recollections hint at another non-Mediterranean world, far from water, far from cities, landlocked, dominated by an enormous sky, horse-rich, focused on flocks and herds and the meat they provide, violent, mobile and heroic. This steppe-world is the place from which Achilles comes. It is not the Homeric foreground, because Homer is inconceivable without sailing ships, cities and the sea—without everything bound up in the name of “Troy”: civilization, the seaborne raid, the connection to the East—but that other northern place lurks as a kind of murmured, ancestral layer, a subconscious.

  The dates are hazy, but the Greeks may have come to Greece at some time between about 2200 and 1700 BC. Their origins are obscure. It is possible that the last move was south from Albania. There are early graves both there and in northwest Greece that look as if they might record the movement of people who would soon be in the Peloponnese. In the way the graves are built, and from the objects they contain, they seem to be the precursors of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Before that, the Greeks, or the pre-Greeks, may have lived on the banks of the Danube or elsewhere in the Balkans. And before that they almost certainly lived farther to the east, perhaps in the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian, in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia.

  Nothing is certain, and the hints are fragmentary at best. But if you withdraw a little, and look not for exactness but for the broad northern culture-world out of which the Greeks emerged into Europe, perhaps at some time around 3000 BC, things become paradoxically clearer. Clues are everywhere: in the language itself, in archaeology, in the words of the Homeric poems and in the echoes of those poems that can be found all across the Eurasian world.

  * * *

  Right in the middle of the Odyssey, when Odysseus has penetrated to the depths of Hades and is talking there, anxiously and intently, to the blind seer Tiresias, long dead, he asks him about his own future, what will become of him. Tiresias knows that Odysseus is longing for nothing more than “a sweet smooth journey home,” but, instead of guidance, he tells him the story of the books of the Odyssey still to come, the sufferings and anxieties he will undergo, the “world of pain” he will find in Ithaca. And then the old seer says something else, strange for classical Greeks, enigmatic today.

  Once Odysseus has killed the suitors in his palace, Tiresias says, he will not yet have arrived home. For his true homecoming, he must leave Ithaca again and begin a second odyssey, not a sea journey this time but on land, another voyage in search of peace.

  You must go out one more time.

  Carry your well-planed oar until you come

  To a race of people who know nothing of the sea,

  Whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers

  To ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,

  The wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign—

  Unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it:

  When another traveller falls in with you and calls

  That weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,

  Then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth

  And sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,

  Poseidon.

  Only then, in that sea-free place, will Odysseus’s demons be stilled and the uncertainties that have haunted his life laid to rest. That northern winnowing scene is a dream of home.

  Tiresias goes on: once Odysseus has appeased the power of Poseidon, he should turn to the immortal gods, “who hold broad heaven in their hands.” He should relinquish sea for sky. And only after that sky world has embraced him will Odysseus be able to die “in the ebbing time of a sleek old age,” as Richmond Lattimore translated Homer’s phrases, the world of the sea eased from his mind, his soul now as calm and reflective as a dark, northern, freshwater pool.

  Image-ideas cluster around Tiresias’s gnomic instruction. The oar becomes the winnowing fan, the sea becomes the earth, the wind, which would have driven Odysseus’s ship across the sea or nearly destroyed him on his raft, becomes the breeze that sorts the grain from the chaff, as each fanful is thrown up and the lighter dust blown away. The Greek word for the winnowing fan is athereloigos, meaning the “destroyer of bristles” (athēr, plural atheres), the husky sheaths of the grain. But athēr can also mean anything difficult or prickly: the spines of a fish or the barbs of a weapon. So the winnowing fan is also a smoother of barbs, a spike remover, the tailor of life. The grains will emerge clean and pure, and the jagged world of hostility will float off on the breeze. Only here, deep in the land, will certainty be recovered. Poseidon, the god of wrongness whose origins, at least in part, are Mediterranean, as the great defender of Troy and enemy of Odysseus, the presider over storms and earthquakes, who has dominated the poems and been at the heart of their sufferings, will at last be put in his place.

  Is there some historical root to this moment? Are Tiresias’s words a form of archaic memory, fueled by the idea that somewhere in the world, a long way from Greece, is a place where the troubles that afflict Odysseus and the Greeks do not obtain? Where there is no sea, nor even any hint of the sea, and which is not subject to the near constant sequence of earthquakes and tempests that besiege and break on Greece and Anatolia? Is Tiresias reaching far back to a time when the Greeks did not yet know Greece but were living the life of seminomadic pastoralists, planting their grains, tending their flocks, ignorant of salt and ships? Is this, in other words, a kind of retrospective pastoral, a Greek vision of an abandoned Eden? Did life to the Greeks, at some half-acknowledged level, seem better before all the temptations and threats of the Mediterranean life disturbed their certainties? Was the movement south a transition into risk? If it was, Homer is the record of what happened when that risk was taken.

  There is another remembered story of Odysseus, not in Homer, but recorded from Sophocles in some rough Latin notes of plays and myths which have otherwise disappeared. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, is one month old when Palamēdēs, a messenger arrives from Agamemnon, instructing Odysseus to come to
the war against Troy. Odysseus reacts as Achilles might, skeptically, reluctantly, and to escape the summons pretends to be mad. He takes a donkey and an ox, yokes them together on the same plow, as no man ever has or would, and when he has cut the first furrow he sows it not with seeds but with salt. Palamēdēs doubts Odysseus, and to test him takes the baby Telemachus and puts him down on the unbroken grass in the path of the plow.

  As Odysseus approaches his son he turns the plow aside, bending the furrow away from his baby’s flesh, and by that swerve shows he is sane. He loves his son more than he loves himself, and so has no choice but to go and suffer at Troy. He takes with him a murderous loathing for Palamēdēs, the clever diplomat. In time Odysseus concocts accusations against him, that he is secretly colluding with the Trojans against the Greeks, and finally stones him to death as a liar and traitor.

  It is a suggestive enmity, a twin of Tiresias’s promise of a final ease in the distant north. The southerner brings only years of pain. Faced with his invitation, Odysseus sows antiseeds, not fruitful but toxic, not land riches but sea poison, not fecundity but sterility, not northern contentment but southern trouble. Palamēdēs is Mediterranean man, the inventor of counting, money, weights and measures, jokes, dice, military ranks, the letters of the alphabet and the making of wine. He represents everything the south has to offer, including submission to an overall king in Agamemnon. He is, in his slickness, the enemy. Tiresias holds out the possibility of comfort in the north; Palamēdēs promises only southern suffering.

  No two worlds could be more different than the grasslands of the steppes north of the Black Sea and the craggy broken boundaries of the Mediterranean. In Greece every view is contained and defined by its mountains. Every place is a shard, sharp-edged, hardened and definite. Boot leather is torn into shreds there. “Our land, compared with what it was,” Plato wrote famously of the Greece he knew, “is like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease. The fat soft parts have gone, and all that remains are the bones.” On the steppe, the bones remain invisible, coated in a pelt of grasses on the high plateaus between the river valleys, thickening into forest and marsh where those rivers make their way to the south. The Mediterranean landscape is fiercely located, subdivided by its mountain ridges, every corner separate from every other. But look across the steppe, and you see only more of what is already at your feet.