by Colin Wilson
There is one very sound reason for believing that Homer really existed. By studying the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey, scholars have dated the poems to some time between 750 and 650 BC. Now this is a mere two or three centuries before the Golden Age of Athens, the age of Plato and Aristotle and Euripides. In other words, it was closer to the age of Plato than Shakespeare is to our own period at the time of this writing. Moreover, the Greek bards learned their poetry by heart and could recite many thousands of lines from memory – as their modern descendants still can today. So there was no question of Homer being lost in the dim mists of antiquity, in the days before there were any historical records. The memories of the bards themselves were the historical records. And it is impossible to believe that they simply invented a poet named Homer and attributed various poems to him – as unlikely as believing that Sir Isaac Newton was the invention of a group of seventeenth-century scientists, who also wrote his Principia.
What seems to emerge from the available evidence is that Homer was a blind poet who was born some time around 750 BC in Asia Minor (now Turkey) and who spent much of his life in poverty, wandering from place to place, until he found a measure of fame on the island of Chios. Many fragmentary biographies of him exist among the works of the classical writers, the longest and best of which is attributed to the historian Herodotus (known as the Father of History), who was also born in Asia Minor about two and a half centuries later.
Herodotus’s story is as follows. Homer’s mother was a poor orphan girl named Critheis who became pregnant out of wedlock, as a result of which she moved from Asia Minor to a place near the river Meles in Greece (Boeotia) and gave birth to a son, whom she named Melesigenes (pronounced Mellis-igenees), after the river. He was to acquire the nickname Homer (which means “blind man”6) many years later. She then returned to Smyrna (now called Izmir) and became housekeeper to a teacher of literature and music named Phemius, who fell in love with her and married her. So Homer acquired a stepfather who knew all about poetry and music.
The young Homer distinguished himself at school. When his stepfather died – followed shortly by his mother – he took over the school with brilliant success and became something of a celebrity among his fellow citizens. He became friendly with a traveler named Mentes, from the island of Leucadia (now called Leukas) in western Greece, who persuaded Homer to accompany him on his travels and offered to pay all Homer’s expenses. Unable to resist this offer to see the world, Homer set off with Mentes and traveled by land to what is now called Italy. Full of curiosity, he asked questions everywhere he went. But in the course of his travels, he picked up an eye infection, and by the time he reached Ithaca – just south of Leucadia – it had become so serious that Mentes left him behind with a doctor named Mentor. It was Mentor who taught Homer about the legends of Odysseus (whom the Romans would call Ulysses7) and the story of his epic voyage home from the Trojan War. When he came to compose the Odyssey, Homer gave the name Mentor to the teacher of Ulysses’s son Telemachus, and the name has become synonymous with “teacher”. But Mentor was unable to cure Homer’s eye problems. Homer decided to try to get back home, but in Colophon, in Asia Minor, he finally became blind.
Back in Smyrna, he continued to devote himself to poetry. But now he had no school to support him, and he set out on the wanderings that would last the rest of his life. In a place called Neon Teichos (New Wall) he was befriended by an armorer named Tychias and earned his bread by reciting verse. And although poverty drove the blind poet to move on, the inhabitants of Neon Teichos remembered him with affection and would point out the spot where he used to recite. In Cumae, his mother’s birthplace (from which she had fled to conceal her pregnancy), he once again found such a sympathetic audience for his verses that he decided he would like to settle there and asked the town council if they would support him with public funds in exchange for entertainment – promising them that he would make their city famous. But one grumpy councillor declared that if they fed every Homer (“blind man”) who came to Cumae, they would soon be overrun with vagabonds. Thereupon the council decided not to grant the poet’s request. The name “Homer” stuck, however.
Homer moved to nearby Phocoae, on the island of Chios, where a would be poet named Thestorides persuaded him to enter into an odd bargain. Homer would write poetry for Thestorides, in exchange for food and lodging. But his host finally broke his bargain and threw the blind man out. Homer continued as a homeless wanderer, singing for his supper. Sometime later, back on the mainland, he met some merchants from Chios who told him that their local poet, Thestorides, was singing verses that were virtually identical with Homer’s. Enraged that Thestorides was passing off his (Homer’s) verses as his own, Homer hastened back to Chios, where he met a kindly goatherd named Glaucus who put him up for the night in his hut. Homer’s story of his travels so moved Glaucus that he went to his master and asked him to help the poet. The master was scornful, feeling that Glaucus had been taken in by a vagabond. But when he actually met Homer, he was so impressed by his learning and by his poetry that he engaged him as a tutor for his children.
Now, at last, Homer’s misfortunes were over. In the town of Chios he became a celebrity, and when the truth became known about Thestorides, the imposter was driven from the island. Homer became highly successful, both as a poet and a teacher of youth, and he married and had two daughters. Chios became so proud of Homer that it claimed to be his birthplace. As his reputation spread to Greece, he decided to travel there again. On the island of Samos he was recognized and played a part in a religious festival, then was a guest in many rich houses. After this he set sail for Athens but had only reached the island of Ios when he fell ill and died, probably of a stroke. (The legend claims that his death was brought on by frustration at being unable to answer a riddle propounded by the children of fishermen.) But as his fame spread throughout Greece, and bards recited his poems, Chian bards formed a school known as the children of Homer – or Homeridae – which was still flourishing when Herodotus wrote his life of Homer.
So while scholars insist on preserving caution, it seems a commonsense assumption that a blind poet named Homer was born in Asia Minor, traveled in Greece and Italy – perhaps even as far as Spain – settled in Chios, and died on his way to Athens. The school he founded learned his words by heart; why not the events of his life? The dates of these events are altogether more doubtful. Herodotus thinks Homer lived some four hundred years before himself – around 900 BC. A later scholar, Crates, placed him around eighty years after the Trojan War (which has generally been dated about 1180 BC but which modern scholars place as early as 1250 – a question to which we shall return in a moment). We now know that to be virtually impossible; for example, a reference in the Odyssey to the Phoenicians as traders dates it later than 900 BC.
But anyone who has read the two epics will have noticed basic differences between them. Although a great deal longer than the Odyssey, the Iliad covers only a small part of the Trojan War – a few weeks in its tenth year – and is full of slaughter and violence. (The story is a simple one: The Greek hero, Achilles, quarrels with King Agamemnon about a pretty slave girl and refuses to take any part in the battle – until his closest friend, Patroclus, is killed by the Trojan Hector; then Achilles goes out to meet Hector, chases him three times around the walls of Troy, and kills him.) The Odyssey is altogether softer and more lyrical in tone, describing the adventures of Ulysses as he tries to make his way back home from Troy to Ithaca. The Greek scholar Longinus, author of On the Sublime, takes the view that this difference is attributable to the fact that Homer wrote the Iliad when he was young and at the height of his powers, and the Odyssey in old age. But most modern scholars explain the difference by suggesting that two different poets wrote the two works. The author of the Iliad, they claim, was the blind poet described by Herodotus. The Odyssey was written by a later poet, whose identity is unknown. A widely held view is that the Iliad was composed about 750 BC and the Odyssey about 70
0.
There is one very obvious difference between the two poems. In the Iliad, the gods play as prominent a part as the men; they are always interfering in the battle, and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, even swoops down and carries off Paris when he is about to be defeated by Menelaus. In the Odyssey, the gods still interfere in the narrative, but they could be eliminated without making much difference to the story of Ulysses. One example will suffice: when Ulysses is slaying his wife’s suitors, the goddess Minerva (Athena) puts in an appearance, disguised as the estate manager; but after the suitors have threatened her with violent reprisals, she turns herself into a swallow and flies up to the rafters. Such an event, one would expect, would clearly convince the suitors that something supernatural was going on and would lower their morale; in fact, they seem not to notice and proceed to attack Ulysses as if nothing had happened. The appearance of the goddess is not only pointless, it makes the scene absurd. It is almost as if the Iliad belongs to an earlier period of belief, while the Odyssey was written by someone for whom the gods were little more than a convenient plot mechanism.
But if the author of the Odyssey was not the blind Homer, then who was he?
The English writer Samuel Butler became aware of the puzzle in 1891. Butler is best known for his amusing satirical novel Erewhon, but it would be a mistake to think of him as a satirist. He was a serious thinker who devoted an important part of his life’s work to attacking Darwin’s theory of evolution. He objected to Darwin’s view that mutations cause species to change at random and that evolution is due simply to the survival of the fittest. Butler objected that Darwin had “banished God from the universe” and turned the universe into a gigantic machine. He preferred the views of the earlier zoologist Lamarck, who believed that species change because they make determined efforts to change. (For a more detailed account of the problem, see chapter 35.)
At the age of fifty-six Butler decided to compose a cantata entitled Ulysses. (He was also an amateur composer who wrote in the style of Handel.) His librettist, Henry Festing Jones, was relying on Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, but Butler felt he should reread the Odyssey, of which he retained only vague memories from his schooldays. Butler found Homer’s Greek simple and straightforward and decided to make his own prose translation. As he worked, he became aware of a feeling of unease, of “a riddle that I could not read”. The Iliad is full of larger-than-life heroes. The Odyssey, by comparison, struck Butler as far more lifelike, in fact, as a kind of novel rather than an epic, full of real people and real observations. The latter begins by telling how Ulysses’s son Telemachus, sick of the horde of suitors who surround his mother, Penelope, goes off to see if he can find news of his father; he calls on King Menelaus, who is now living happily with his errant wife, Helen of Troy, and the domestic scene has an almost tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Here he learns that his father is a prisoner of the nymph Calypso.
The scene shifts to Calypso’s island, where Ulysses has been allowed to leave (owing to the intervention of Jupiter). But the god Neptune, who disliked Ulysses, caused a storm, which wrecked the hero on the coast of a country called Scheria. Here he was found lying asleep by Nausicaa, the king’s daughter, who took him back to the palace. And here, in due course, Ulysses tells the story of what happened to him after he left Troy (which was captured by means of a wooden horse). At this point, we have a long story-within-a-story, which forms the main part of the Odyssey.
Butler was struck by the realism of the Nausicaa episode and its many homely touches. It confirmed his feeling that the Odyssey was a kind of novel, based on real people. A few books later, after Ulysses has encountered the Cyclops, the god of wind (Aeolus), and the man-eating Laestrigonians, he lands on the island of the enchantress Circe, who changes his men into swine. And it was as he was reading about Circe that Butler was suddenly struck by a dazzling intuition: that Circe was not created by a man but by a woman – and, moreover, by a young one. Closer reading convinced him of this. The males of the Odyssey are wooden creatures compared to the women, who have that touch of life. Butler also concluded that while the author of the Odyssey shows intimate knowledge of the affairs of women, he is often oddly uncomfortable when describing things that are the province of males, especially seamen or farmers. What male would place the rudder in front of the ship? What seaman would believe that seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree? Or make the wind “whistle” over the waters? (It whistles on land, because of obstacles, but there are no obstacles at sea.) What man with any knowledge of farming would make a herdsman milk the sheep, then give them their lambs to feed (presumably with empty udders)? What countryman would make a hawk tear its prey on the wing? The author of the Odyssey makes these curious errors, and many more. Butler goes on to argue with great skill and conviction that the author of the Odyssey had to be a woman, and a young one at that.
Now if, for the sake of argument, we are willing to admit the possibility that the Odyssey was written by a young woman, a kind of Greek Jane Austen or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, then certain things become obvious. The first is that she had a great deal of leisure. In Jane Austen’s day the daughter of a country vicar would have had sufficient leisure to write novels; but in ancient Greece, life was far harder. (What moderns find so hard to grasp is that life in ancient Greece was a poverty-stricken affair, with most people living on a diet of olive oil and vegetables, with some boiled mutton every week or so.) For a woman to have had leisure enough to write, she would have had to have been a member of the aristocracy, one who had servants to look after her. (And we note that even Princess Nausicaa goes to the beach to do her own washing.)
Second, a Greek Jane Austen, like the English one, would have had a fairly restricted knowledge of life (in those days, girls stayed at home), and you would expect her to use her own background in her poem. Butler felt that all the older women in the poem – Helen, Penelope, Queen Arete (Nausicaa’s mother) – are basically the same person and that the same applies to the younger women – Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso – and to the men – Ulysses, Nestor, Menelaus, and King Alcinous (Nausicaa’s father). And if, like any young lady novelist, the authoress of the Odyssey put a portrait of herself into her book, then we have to choose between Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso. Nausicaa is the obvious choice. And presumably, Queen Arete and King Alcinous are portraits of the authoress’s parents.
But if the young authoress knew only her own home, then how did she manage to describe the travels of Ulysses so convincingly? Presumably, by using places she actually knew and transforming them into the lands of Polyphemus, Circe, the Laestrigonians, and so on. In other words, if one could find out where “Nausicaa” lived, one might recognize various features of the poem in its geography.
Now Nausicaa, as we have said, lived in a land called Scheria – which means “jut-land” – a peninsula jutting into the sea, which, according to Homer, was the land of a people called the Phaecians. When the naked Ulysses approaches her on the beach – covering himself with a bough for decency – she gives him food and clothing and instructs him precisely how to get back to her father’s house: “You will find the town lying between two harbors, approached by a narrow neck of land”. Later in the Odyssey, after the Phaecians have taken Ulysses back to his own land of Ithaca, the angry sea-god, Neptune, turns their ship into a rock in the mouth of the harbor. So Butler felt he had a number of clues about Scheria: it had to have a neck of land jutting into the sea between two harbors and a large rock that resembled a ship in the mouth of one of the harbors. It also seems clear from the Odyssey that Ulysses approaches Scheria from the east, so that the harbor must be on the western coast. Butler went to the British Museum and studied a map of Greece and Italy, looking for any west coast that had two harbors on either side of a promontory. He could find only one – the site of the town of Trapani, on the west coast of Sicily. Butler looked at Trapani more closely and became convinced that this had to be the home of Nausicaa. It was the only western coast in the
whole area – including Italy and Greece – that fit the description. There was also a mountain – Mount Eryx – above Trapani, and Neptune is also reported in the Odyssey as threatening to bury the city of the Phaecians under a high mountain.
Two earlier Greek history scholars, Stolberg and Mure, had also been convinced that Mount Eryx fit the geography of the Cyclops episode. And the Greek historian Thucydides, writing around 403 BC, had mentioned that Sicily was probably the home of the Cyclops and the Laestrigonians. In the Odyssey, of course, these episodes take place far from the home of Nausicaa. But what would be more natural than for a young authoress writing a kind of novel about Ulysses to use local scenery as its background?
The next step was to visit Trapani; this Butler did in 1892. Now he had the satisfaction of finding that everything confirmed his views. Admittedly, one of the two harbors was now silted up and contained a saltworks; but it was obvious that it had once been just such a harbor as “Homer” had described. A few miles away, on the lower slopes of Mount Eryx, was a cave that the locals still called the “grotto of Polyphemus”. Near the entrance to the northern harbor was a rock that looked not unlike a ship. Local legend said it was a Turkish pirate ship turned to stone by the Blessed Virgin – obviously a Christianized form of the ancient legend.
Now Butler no longer had any doubt that he was on the right track. He noted that the description of Ithaca in the Odyssey is quite unlike the real Ithaca: it is described as “highest up in the sea” with a clear view to the west, whereas the real Ithaca is completely masked by the much bigger island of Samos (now Cephalonia) to the west. But if the authoress of the Odyssey modeled her Ithaca on the little island of Marettimo, facing the harbors of Trapani, it would correspond to the description in the Odyssey.
A voyage around Sicily convinced Butler that his authoress had simply taken the island she knew and used its scenery as the geographical background for the voyage of Ulysses. Ulysses himself describes how he sailed down to the island of Cythera, just south of Greece, and then was prevented from turning northward (for Ithaca) by strong winds that drove him west to the land of the lotus-eaters, which must have been on the coast of north Africa. But after this, according to Butler, he made for Sicily, to the north, hunted goats on the island of Favagnana (known to the ancients as Goat Island – Aegusa), then landed on Sicily and had his adventure with the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, whose eye he burned out with a stake. Then he sailed north to the island of Aeolus, the god of winds, which Butler identifies as the little island of Ustica. The town of Cafalu, on the north coast, he thinks is the site of the adventure of the man-eating Laestrigonians. The site of Scylla and Charybdis is off the east coast, near present-day Messina. Finally, on his way back, he encountered Calypso’s island, which Butler identifies as the island of Pantelleria. And so back to Trapani – or rather, to Marettimo, which is Homer’s Ithaca.