Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Everything is continuous there. The air you breathe is the air of the universe. Horizontality is all, and this is the continental-oceanic, a place that cares less about fixity than movement, less about detail than about the endlessness of things. And if landscapes can create mentalities as well as reflect them, it is possible to think that the steppelands lie at the root of the Achilles frame of mind: long-horizoned; looking for the profound and the eternal; attuned to the cosmic; indifferent to possessions; passionate, totalizing; vertigo-inducing in its relationship to death and fate; both giving and denying significance to human desires and triumphs.

  It is possible to think that in the Iliad Achilles speaks for that deep northern past. He comes from somewhere else. He is half divine, has no identifiable city and was brought up by a centaur in the mountains. His homeland is farther north than anyone else’s in Homer. His story is strangely disconnected from everything else in the Iliad; he will be killed before the sack of Troy, he goes off on plundering expeditions all around western Anatolia, and the whole account of recovering Helen would be complete without him.

  Achilles does not fit with the world in which he finds himself. He holds himself physically and psychologically removed from the rest of the Greeks. He speaks the truth to them in a way no one else can. He is dense with both love and violence, the two bound together in his heart, his greatest love (for his friend Patroclus) summoning his greatest violence (for his enemy Hector). Those who are close to him adore him; those at a distance both fear and despise him. But his central quality is an inability to conform to what the world around him accepts as real.

  In all these ways, Achilles confronts the forces of the sophisticated south and sets himself against them: he cannot tolerate the overarching kingliness of Agamemnon, he scorns the political sophistication and smooth-talking of Odysseus, he despises Hector, and like all warriors he wants to destroy the city. Homer calls him (as he does both Arēs, the great northern god of war, and Odysseus) “the city destroyer.” And when Achilles attacks the bodies of the Trojans and their horses, the image that Homer brings to mind is not individual death but “the smoke ascending into the wide sky/from a burning city with the anger of the gods let loose upon it.”

  Achilles carries a presouthern, preurban, precomplicated world of purity and integrity within him.

  He first appears most fully himself—before the lunacy of grief over Patroclus’s death transforms him—in the speech he makes to Odysseus in book 9 of the Iliad. For days the war has gone badly for the Greeks. Agamemnon has stolen Briseis from Achilles. She is the girl he loves, the “bed-girl of his heart” as he calls her, and because of that theft, imposed by Agamemnon’s assumption of greater authority over him, Achilles has withdrawn from the battle, has wished death and violence on the Greeks and has witnessed their catastrophic failure in the war. Now Agamemnon, desperate with the successes of the Trojans, wants to make amends, to offer Achilles not only the return of Briseis but shiploads of prizes and treasures. He sends Odysseus to make the offer, and in reply Achilles states his magnificent, troubling credo.

  Just before Odysseus comes to his shelter, Achilles has been singing to Patroclus of the glorious deeds of men, of the heroic past. When he arrives, Achilles does what the hero should, and provides for his guests the meat from fat sheep and fat goats and the meaty backcuts of a great pig “rich with fat.” All is ritualized and made proper, and the scene is one that would have occurred in thousands of chieftains’ huts over thousands of years in the grasslands of Eurasia.

  Odysseus then lists to Achilles the wonderful things that Agamemnon wants to give him: seven tripods that the fire has not touched; ten talents of gold; twenty shining cauldrons; strong horses, winners in races, that have won prizes for their swiftness; seven women skilled in noble handiwork from Lesbos, including Briseis herself, the girl Achilles loves. And there is the promise of much more, options on the future: things from Troy; more women from Troy; one of Agamemnon’s own daughters as a bride; cities in Greece with lovely meadows outside them, grass as high as a horse’s eye, places where men can live rich in cattle and flocks of sheep.

  But Odysseus is slippery, and although most of his speech to Achilles repeats exactly what Agamemnon had said to him, he does not repeat the high king’s final riling words: “Let him submit himself to me, since I am so much more kingly.” Odysseus suppresses those phrases, knowing that the steppe consciousness of Achilles will not accept an overking. Nevertheless, that subtext persists in the proposal he makes. There is something nauseating in the accumulated enticements Agamemnon offers. They miss the point. Long, long ago, in the first lines of the poem, Achilles called Agamemnon “the greediest, most possession-loving of men,” and this list of offered possessions is a pollution of the air he breathes. He knows Odysseus is there to lie to him. He calls him “many-wiled,” the trickster. “As I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks another.” Instead of that clever, southern talk, he will “speak what I want to speak.”

  That relentless focus on his own individuality drives the lines forward. Achilles cannot escape from the idea that Agamemnon has been sleeping with Briseis. That vision, in the present tense, haunts him. Agamemnon has her. He has his way with her, still, now, “the bed partner of my heart.” The overking’s cumulative greed has taken even her. He has made her an object too. Agamemnon does not know the meaning of love. All he can imagine is ownership, and all Achilles can think of is Agamemnon’s repeated, horrible owning of his girl.

  It is the most passionate speech in Homer, confused, proud, enraged, Achilles seeming not to know that Agamemnon has offered to give Briseis back. Instead, Agamemnon the criminal persists in his mind in an eternal present of wrongness, shameless as a deceiver, a man whose honor is rusted and corrupt. “Hateful in my eyes are his gifts. His gifts are my enemy. I count them at a hair’s worth.” Then Achilles lists the cities of the south, the great riches of Orchomenos and Thebes, and Troy itself, “where treasures in greatest store are laid up in men’s houses.” (These phrases, in one of the ironies of Homeric archaeology, led Heinrich Schliemann to dig at Orchomenos in search of the gold Achilles despised.) But Achilles will have none of it. Gifts that numbered as many as the grains of dust and sand in the world would not persuade him to change his mind until Agamemnon “has paid him back the pain he has done to him.” That is something which by definition Agamemnon could never do. “All the wealth of Troy is not worth what my life is worth.”

  These are great statements. They rage at the triviality of ownership. They are unforgiving in their contempt for the greedy, Christlike in their abrasive, revelatory scouring of the facts and desires of power. Achilles speaks again of possessions, this time not the blandishments of cities but things that would have been familiar in the steppeland of the north.

  Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting,

  and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses,

  but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted

  Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.

  Death overwhelms every other meaning. What can matter in the face of mortality? Agamemnon is puerile and disgusting, Odysseus is a liar, Hector is pathetic; only by stepping outside the value system of the world can you find any value. It is one of the riches of Homer’s characterization of Achilles that what he says is not consistent. He toys with the idea that he might go home and marry a lovely girl, settle down and enjoy the possessions his father had won. But alongside that he recognizes that we are all vagabonds on earth, nothing belongs to us, our lives have no consequence and our possessions are dross. We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of s
tuff which the Mediterranean world provides, all of it more modern than Achilles can allow himself to be. He is the voice of the northern, shiftless past, asserting the claims of a higher steppeland purity against the material greed and ignobility of the fixed and southern present.

  The power of the poem lies in the understanding that these things cannot be reconciled. The Iliad’s subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be. Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world? Do you, like Odysseus, manipulate it? Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that? Or do you, like Achilles, believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honor as the only things that matter in the face of death? These questions are urgent for Homer because the arrival of a steppe culture at the gates of a city made them urgent. There is more to the Achilles story than this: in the course of the poem he suffers, grows, loses himself in the violence of grief and finally comes to a new and deeper understanding, but in this great speech of steppeland consciousness, Homer bequeathed to us the first unforgiving idealist of our civilization.

  * * *

  Greek is part of the Indo-European language family that stretches from Ireland to remote valleys in the deserts of western China, from Sweden to India, from Spain to Lithuania. It has been known since the late eighteenth century that the languages in this family are each other’s siblings. In every one of them, common roots can be found in both vocabulary and grammar. Those connections can only mean that each of the daughter languages descended from a mother language spoken somewhere in the distant past before its speakers moved off into the many corners of the continent. So a man who is my brathair in old Irish is my frater in Latin, my brođor in Old English, my broterèlis in Lithuanian, my bratrŭ in Old Church Slavonic, my phrater in Greek, my bhrátar in Sanskrit and my procer in a dead language called Tocharian B, once spoken in the desiccated valleys of Chinese Turkestan, eight thousand miles from the Irish monks and their brethren on the shores of the Atlantic. Languages that can have had no chance of having borrowed words directly from each other nevertheless demonstrate intimate family connections. They carry the marks of their own inheritance; like verbal tumuli, these words enshrine their own history.

  Linguists have long realized that if they could establish the words that were shared across these vast distances—particularly by now well-separated languages—they might be able to reconstruct the world in which the original Proto-Indo-European language was spoken. This is the great paradox of language: words are the least substantial medium in which meaning can be formed, but they can preserve hints and suggestions of the ancient past when material remains scarcely can. Of course languages evolve, but words that have been transmitted only in speech can nevertheless retain something in their core that is resistant to the erosions of time.

  Working over two centuries, linguists have been able to create an astonishingly detailed shared word-picture of the Proto-Indo-European world of about five thousand years ago, the world from which Achilles came. It sounds, first, like a dream environment, teeming with life; wolves, lynxes, elk and red deer, hares, hedgehogs, geese and cranes, eagles and bees, beavers and otters (their name the same word at root as both “water” and “hydro”) have cognates in all of the Indo-European languages. There are no shared words for laurel, cypress or olive: this cannot have been a Mediterranean place. But cattle and sheep are both there. This is a milky, yogurty existence, with words for butter, cheese, meat, marrow and manure, for steer, calf, ox, cow and bull. These people were lactose-tolerant, feeding off the all-important transfer of nutrients (via hay and cheese) from summer grass to winter food. A verb for the driving of cattle, and a word for a large cow-sacrifice, are spread across the whole Indo-European language-world. The original word for a dog is closely bound up with the word for sheep: the first Indo-European dogs look as if they were sheepdogs, and the word for sheep, with the root pec- (as in “pecorino,” the Italian sheep cheese) is related to the word for wealth (as in “pecuniary”). It seems as if the riches of these people might have been in the animals they kept.

  The language does not describe a completely mobile world. Its inhabitants had pigs, which are no good for nomadic pastoralists (both “swine” and “pork” are Proto-Indo-European words), because pigs refuse to be driven in the way sheep and cattle happily will be, and so the Proto-Indo-European people must have been at least partly settled, with places in which the words for grain, sowing, quern, plow, sickle, yoke and oxen all had a part to play. So their world oscillates between the mobile and the fixed, the rooted and the rootless, the raid or the drive away from home and the companion sense of home and hearth.

  The language family to the north of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, spoken by the hunter-gatherers in the forests of northern Eurasia, has no words for any buildings beyond their tents. But Proto-Indo-European is not quite like that. These people had words for house, hearth, post, door, doorpost, hurdle, wattle, wall and clay. Their buildings were clearly substantial, wooden, closable. They also had a word for refuge or fort, but no word for city. Nor is there any hint in the language of anything resembling public architecture: no temple, no palace, no public square.

  Their villages were clusters of houses, and the word for a village was the same as the word for a clan. The language makes the point clearly enough: what mattered about these places was not the buildings but the people within them. This is not a monumental world, but one centered on the lives of clannish groups of families. They had metals. They spun thread, wove cloth and sewed. And they had wheeled vehicles, and boats for crossing rivers and lakes, with oars but no sails.

  This reimagining of a distant world is one of the triumphs of linguistics. None of these claims about the Proto-Indo-European way of life is a guess; all are founded on a careful analysis of the inherited languages. And the reconstruction has penetrated beyond the physical. It is clear that the culture was male-dominated, that individuals considered themselves heirs of their fathers and that girls left their native homes to live in the houses of their husbands and their husbands’ families. The word for marry—when applied to men—is intimately connected with the word for lead. Men “led” women to the marriage bed.

  It seems likely that young men in the Proto-Indo-European world were organized into warrior bands, perhaps raiding parties, and they used bows, arrows, clubs, cudgels and swords. Society may have been organized into three ranks: farmers, priests and a warrior elite, out of which the chieftains and even kings emerged. The word for king embodies the principle of order, a meaning still implicit in the English word “rule,” with a connection between “rex” and “right,” between ordaining the world and possessing it, but there is also evidence in the inherited languages of a powerful sense of hospitality and its duties. “Guest” and “host” are different descendants of the same root, a measure of the mutuality buried within them. The mutual giving of gifts, the swearing of oaths and the expectations of loyalty from that behavior are all evident in the descendant languages. Trust was part of the Proto-Indo-European moral consciousness.

  It is possible to push farther in, beyond their external lives. Linguists can reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European word for belief, kred-dhehl, whose descendants have reached us in the form of “creed” and “credo.” That original compound word seems to have meant “heart-put/place,” so that belief is the place where you put what matters most to you. There is, in other words, clear linguistic evidence of a commitment to otherness, a mental life beyond the self. But not much of a pantheon can be reestablished. Nearly all the gods of Olympus in Homer are Mediterranean borrowings; the only undoubted exception is Zeus, the male sky god, whose name means “the sky,” with a further derivation buried within that, as the word for sky comes from a root that means “the shining.” God is the shining father, life is lived in his light, and when the great heroes are described in Homer either as “brilliant” or as “godlike,” the connection is the same: they are glowing in a light derived from the po
wer of that shining sky. The sky is the great permanence. In its divine brilliance, there is no change.

  Beneath that steppe-sense of the governing sky there is a parallel and contradictory aspect of the Indo-European mind. In every daughter language from Iranian to Hindi, to Hittite, Greek and Roman, all the Romance, Slavic and Germanic languages, Irish and the other Celtic languages, finite verbs are forced into a precise tense. Nothing in Indo-European can escape being located in the time at which it occurred. In other languages, such as the Chinese language family, there are no tenses, and it is possible to blur those distinctions, for actions to be described without it being clear when they happened. Not in the Indo-European languages; this particular form of consciousness is trapped in an awareness of time passing. Homer’s and Achilles’s agonies over the transience of glory; the very fact of epic poetry as a way of denying the effects of time; even the creation of the tens of thousands of Bronze Age tumuli marking the landscapes of Eurasia from Bahrain to County Clare—all are products of that time-dominated frame of mind, the awareness of the passing of things which lies at the deepest levels of the way we think. It is the governing polarity: the sky persists in a way that is outside time; nothing that is done on earth shares that eternity. Homer is framed around that recognition, and it is one in which, for example, the idea of a Messiah could never have originated. There is no closing the gap between the eternal and the transitory. Gods and goddesses might sleep with men and women, and have children with them, but those heroic children can only ever be mortal.