Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  They guess he might be captain of a ship full of men who are prēktēres—an interesting word, with its origins in the verb for “to do,” meaning that Odysseus comes over to the Phaeacians not as a nobleman who can play athletic games but as the leader of a band of practical, pragmatic practicers of things, merchants in other words, dealers, or as Robert Fagles translated it “profiteers,” freebooters who blurred the boundary between trader and pirate. Nothing irks Odysseus more powerfully than the suggestion that he is merely a sea-robber or tradesman. Is he not a hero? Has he not fought at Troy? Has he not suffered at sea? But the suspicion won’t go away. When he and his crew find themselves facing Polyphemus, the Cyclops, the same idea recurs. “Strangers, who are you?” the Cyclops asks them. “Where do you come from, sailing over the sea-ways? Are you trading? Or are you roaming wherever luck takes you over the sea? Like pirates?”

  Perhaps this is a reflection in Homer of a reality that the poems do their best to conceal. Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains might think of themselves as noble kings, the fit subjects for epic. Homer does its best to portray them as that. The civilized states of the Mediterranean saw them as anything but. What were they but the “much-wandering pirates” Odysseus sometimes talks about, taking what they could from the wealth of the world around them, hugely status-rich in their own eyes, virtually status-less in the eyes of those they were coming to rob? It is exactly how Odysseus himself describes his behavior as he leaves Troy. “From Ilium the wind carried me,” he tells the Phaeacians, “and brought me to the Cicones.” This was a tribe, allied to the Trojans, who lived at Ismarus on the shore of the Aegean, somewhere north of Samothrace. “There I destroyed the city,” he goes on quite straightforwardly, using a term to mean that nothing was left, “and killed the men. And from the city we took their wives and many possessions, and divided it among us, so that as far as I could manage, no man would be cheated of an equal share.” It is one of the moments in which Homer coolly reveals the limitations of Odysseus’s mind. Our hero thinks he is telling his hosts how excellently he behaved, ensuring that unlike Agamemnon he did not mistreat his men. But he is blind to the significance of the actions preceding this exemplary fairness, the piratical destruction of an entire city and the enslaving of its women.

  The same uncertain status of the pirate-king lies behind one of Odysseus’s most famous sleights of hand. He and his men are suffering at the hands of the Cyclops. The Cyclops wants to know who Odysseus is. In his answers, he says that his name is “Nobody.” The Greek for that is either outis, which sounds a little like Odysseus if spoken by a drunk or slack-jawed giant; or mētis, which also sounds like the Greek word for cleverness, craftiness, skill or a plot. When Polyphemus calls for help, the other Cyclopes ask who has hurt and blinded him. “Nobody!” he answers, or “Cleverness!” and so his friends—and the audience—can only laugh.

  It is a nifty trick, but the story means more. Odysseus is indeed a nobody, essentially homeless, for all the illusions of an Ithaca floating somewhere beyond the unreachable horizon. His own naming of himself as a Nobody is an oblique and dreamlike reflection of exactly what the Phaeacians think of him. He may be king of Ithaca, the son of Laertes, a man whose fame has reached the sky, but that is not how the world of the Odyssey treats him. Everywhere he arrives anonymous, not somebody but nobody. Even when he comes home, he is more beggar than king, unrecognized by wife, son, subject or retainer. That double status is at the heart of the Odyssey: it may describe a historical situation—the marginality of people who were heroes to themselves—but it also addresses a permanent human condition. My own world may cultivate me, ennoble me, even heroize me, but what possible significance beyond the confines of home can those labels have? What possible standing could Odysseus have “in the city of Urikina, in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili”?

  * * *

  In about 1350 BC, a treaty was drawn up between the Hittite Great King and a man known as Huqqana. He was from Hayasa, a region on the frontiers of the Hittite empire, in northeastern Anatolia, in what would later become Armenia. Hayasa, in a way similar to the condition of Greece in the centuries after 2000 BC, was an agglomeration of tribal chiefs, with no overarching or supreme leader. Because of this, and because of its incipient and eruptive anarchy, it was not, as far as the Hittites were concerned, part of the civilized world. The Hittite Great King, who referred to himself as “My Majesty,” had married off his sister to Huqqana in a form of political alliance, but there was anxiety in the air. How could he be sure that Huqqana, this man from beyond the borders of acceptability, would behave?

  The expectations were not good. The Hittite king called his new brother-in-law “a low-born dog.” Huqqana mustn’t gossip, which he would be tempted to do: “Given that they now bring you up to my palace and that you hear about the customs of the palace it is important! You shall not divulge outside the palace what you know or what you hear.”

  More problematic was the question of sex.

  Furthermore this sister, whom I, My Majesty, have given to you as your wife, has many sisters from her own family as well as from her extended family. For us the Hittites, it is an important custom that a brother does not take his sister or female cousin sexually. It is not permitted. Whoever does such a thing is put to death. Because your land is barbaric, it is in conflict [without law]. There a man quite regularly takes his sister or female cousin. But among the Hittites, it is not permitted.

  Huqqana has to learn that he should treat women courteously and with dignity, an instruction that brings with it echoes of the distinction in the Iliad between Greek and Trojan treatment of women.

  Then, strikingly in the middle of all this treaty language, the Great King of the Hittites tells Huqqana a story, or at least reminds him of one, which can’t fail to drive the point home. Huqqana, when he came to the palace, was to be careful around the women he met there. “When you see a palace woman, jump out of the way and leave her a broad path.” Did he remember the story of Mariya, clearly someone who had once been close to him, perhaps another chieftain from Hayasa?

  And for what reason did he die? Did not a lady’s maid walk by and he look at her? But the father of My Majesty himself looked out of the window and caught him in his offence, saying “You—why did you look at her?” So he died for that reason. The man perished just for looking from afar. So you beware.

  Just as the Tale of Sinuhe reorients the Homeric vision of the hero and allocates him effectively the role of thug, the story of Mariya, the Hayasa warrior chief who dared look at one of the lady’s maids of the Hittite court, puts the skids under the bland assumption, underlying much of that Iliadic world, that women were for the taking.

  Other intriguing historical realities appear in these Hittite documents. They are late in this story. By the fourteenth century BC, the Mycenaean Greeks had established their palaces on the mainland, had become at least administratively literate themselves and were now dominant in Crete and across the Aegean. They had entered a form of existence that had absorbed much of the organized state apparatus and mentality of the Mediterranean world. By now they were as Trojan as the Trojans.

  All that, in the lightest of touches, is confirmed in the Hittite documents. In a treaty drawn up in about 1250 BC between the Great King of the Hittites and the king of Amurru, in northern Lebanon, the Great King, as ever, tells his treaty partner how to behave.

  If the King of Egypt is My Majesty’s friend, he shall be your friend. But if he is My Majesty’s enemy, he shall be your enemy. And the Kings who are my equals in rank are the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria and the King of Ahhiyawa.

  That last name should leap out at you. After many decades of acrimonious scholarly debate, it is now generally accepted that Ahhiyawa is the Hittite transcription of Achaea, the Homeric name for Greece, and that the king of Ahhiyawa’s inclusion in this most distinguished list of the great powers of the late Bronze Age is a mark of the Mycenaean triumph. That great qu
asi-imperial status does not reflect the atmosphere of the Iliad, nor of Odysseus, the homeless, the wandering albatross of the southern sea. By the time these treaties were being drawn up, the Greeks were no longer the outsiders; they had become members of the Mediterranean power network.

  Not that that peace prevailed. The margins of these states were ragged and contested, and the great kings were always planning and making moves against each other in the crush zones between their empires. On the western margins of Anatolia, where the king of Ahhiwaya could wield most power, he consistently troubled the allies of the Great King of the Hittites. At some time before 1400 BC, a Hittite ally in the far west of the Hittite zone of influence, Madduwatta, was attacked by a king of “Ahhiya” and driven out of his lands, at least until the Hittites came to his aid. When the old Hittite king died, his son wanted to remind Madduwatta of the service that had been done to him.

  The father of My Majesty saved you, together with your wives, your sons, your household servants and together with your infantry and your chariotry. Otherwise dogs would have devoured you from hunger. Even if you had escaped you would have died of hunger.

  The most fascinating word in this extraordinary document is the name of the ruler of Ahhiya: he is called Attarissiya. That is not a Hittite name, nor is it exactly Greek, but it may well be what “Atreus” sounded like to a Hittite—the name in Homer of the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, itself perhaps a derivative of atrestos, “the untrembling, the fearless.”

  From these few threads some kind of fabric can be woven, describing a tense, mutually suspicious and occasionally violent relationship between the Greeks and the Hittite empire. Attarissiya had invaded Hittite territory with foot soldiers and a hundred chariots, and had also fought alongside Madduwatta in an attack on Cyprus. Another warrior, the Greek king’s brother, the Hittites called Tawagalawas or Tawakalawas, which is the way they might have heard the name of a Greek called Eteocles (which happens to be the name of Oedipus’s son). A letter also survived in the foreign office archives in Hattusa, from a Greek they knew as Kagamunas or perhaps Katamunas, a name which has been interpreted as Kadmos, the greatest of the Thebans.

  It is like a picture of the post-Homeric world, one that the rulers of the great Mycenaean palaces might have recognized, but surviving only in the most fragmentary and enigmatic of splinters. Part of this jagged Greek–Hittite boundary of the thirteenth century BC was a pair of places called in the documents “Taruisa” and “Wilusa.” Hittite scholars are now certain that these are the names of places referred to by Homer as Troy and Ilios. They may be two places conflated in the Iliad or a region and its capital. In a treaty with the Great King of the Hittites, the king of Wilusa is addressed as Alaksandu. That is a Hittite version of a Greek name, Alexandros, the alternative name which the Iliad gives to Paris, Priam’s son. By the time of these late documents, Troy had become a Greek-governed city, absorbed into the Greek world, at archaeological levels where shards of Mycenaean pottery have also been found. If there had ever been a Trojan war, it had already happened, and the Greeks had won.

  The relationship remained tense between the Hittite king and the Greek prince at Troy, and the treaty includes some significant instructions sent out to this marginal kinglet from the imperial capital far to the east. The Hittite administration was keen to impose the written word as the medium of communication between them and the modern test of authenticity. “People are treacherous,” the Great King told Alaksandu.

  If rumours circulate, and someone comes and whispers to you “His Majesty is undertaking something to do you down, and will take the land away from you, or will mistreat you in some way,” write about it to My Majesty. And if the matter is true, when I, My Majesty, write back to you, you shall not act rashly.

  That sounds like an instruction from the urban to the oral world, from the literate Near East to a culture that had yet to think of writing as a central aspect of government. It is one of the great transitions of history—the Homeric horizon, caught at the very moment the Greeks were crossing it.

  * * *

  A third, suddenly reorienting view of these relationships appears in, of all places, the Old Testament. Just at the moment the Greek king Attarissiya was raiding Anatolia and Cyprus, in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, and establishing settlements which archaeologists have been uncovering in the last few decades, the cities around Gaza in southern Canaan were taken and occupied by people whom the Jews called the Philistines. They had been drawn to the markets and the grassy downland of southern Palestine, where beautiful pear and almond orchards surround the mudbrick villages and where cattle and horses can graze on the clover and young barley of the open plains. Their lands—Philistia—are now the gentle, hilly farmland of southwestern Israel. “Philistine” in Hebrew means “the invader” or “the roller-in,” and from the style of their rock-cut chamber tombs, the pottery they made once they had arrived in Canaan and from the form of their own names, it is clear that these Philistines, arriving from out of the west, were Mycenaean Greeks, cruising the Mediterranean seas, searching out new lands, ready to fight whomever they found there.

  The war in Canaan between Greek and Hebrew was long and grievous, but at its symbolic climax, as depicted in the First Book of the Prophet Samuel, the readers are treated to one of the most hostile depictions of Homeric warrior culture ever written. The Philistines had taken up position on a hillside at Socoh in the rolling agricultural country of the Judean foothills, a few miles west of Bethlehem. A champion came out of the Philistine camp, a man called Goliath, to challenge the Israelites drawn up on the opposite hillside.

  Goliath is a huge, clumsy, half-ludicrous, threatening and contemptible figure. He is, even in the earliest and least exaggerated manuscripts, six feet nine inches tall, wearing the full equipment of the Homeric hero: a bronze helmet on his head, bronze armor on his chest, bronze greaves on his legs and carrying a sword and dagger of bronze. Everything about him is vast. His armor weighs nearly 140 pounds, the head of his spear fifteen pounds.

  Massively overequipped, a cross between Ajax and Desperate Dan, Goliath stands there shouting across the valley at his enemies:

  Why do you come out to do battle, you slaves of Saul? I am the Philistine champion; choose your man to meet me. If he can kill me in fair fight, we will become your slaves; but if I prove too strong for him and kill him, you shall be our slaves and serve us. Here and now I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man … and we will fight it out.

  The stolidity of the Greek, his philistinism, his need to spell everything out, to put his own self-aggrandisement into endlessly self-elevating words—all of that comes out of Goliath like the self-proclaiming spout of a whale. But this is exactly what in the Iliad one Greek warrior after another liked and needed to do. Shouted aggression, the Homeric haka, was the first act of any Greek battle.

  “When Saul and the Israelites heard what the Philistine said, they were shaken and dismayed.” It was not in them to make the symmetrical response—you shout at me, I’ll shout at you—which is one of the foundations of the Homeric system. And so a painful and faintly ludicrous asymmetrical situation developed. “Morning and evening for forty days the Philistine drew near and presented himself,” standing there, twice a day for a month and a half, bellowing across the valley like a giant bronze cuckoo clock.

  The shepherd boy David, the youngest of his family, whose brothers are in the Israelite host facing the Philistines, is told by his father, Jesse, to take some loaves and cream cheeses to their commander. He arrives there and to his amazement sees and hears Goliath shouting away. “Who is he,” David asks, “an uncircumcised Philistine, to defy the army of the living god?” That is not a Greek question. A Greek would have understood what Goliath was saying, and would have responded by strapping on his armor. Defiance and the locking of horns was no more than a recognition of Homeric reality. When Saul, the king of the Jews, finally accepts that David might respond to the challenge of the Greek gia
nt, he tries to dress him in his own armor. David accepts it meekly but then hesitates and proclaims his difference.

  “I cannot go with these because I have not tried them.” So he took them off. And he picked up his stick, and chose five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had with him as a pouch. He walked out to meet the Philistine with his sling in his hand.

  It is a version of the Homeric arming of the hero and the single-combat meeting of warriors, the monomachia between Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Ajax, Achilles and Hector, which anchors the whole of the Homeric experience. But this is more like a parody of it than a borrowing. The unprotected boy, with his shepherd’s bag and stick, crouches down in the brook running between the two embattled hillsides, and with his fingers in the water, picks out the plain smoothness of five good stones. No love affair with bronze, no sharpness, no self-enlargement. In everything David does, and in every lack he suffers, there is one implied and overwhelming fact: the god of the Israelites. In his presence the difference between armor and armorlessness, bronze and flesh, is like smoke in wind.

  And the Philistine came on and drew near unto David and the man that bare the shield went before him. And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. “Am I a dog that you come out against me with sticks?” And he swore at him in the name of his gods. “Come on,” he said, “and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.”

  David told him that he would kill him and cut off his head,

  and all the world shall know there is a god in Israel. All those who are gathered here shall see that the LORD saves neither by sword nor spear; the battle is the LORD’s and he will put you all into our power.