How to Avoid Rotten Tomatoes
Those were the mini versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. In the hands of a professional, the stories could last for days. Yes, days. Instead of television, people would listen to professional singers, or bards, recite epic tales. Homer calls these early singers aoidoi.
Performing one of these stories was a colossal task that required a man and a musical instrument to stand in front of a crowd and sing. (And yes, they were all men, these aoidoi. For all that talk about them inventing democracy, the Greeks weren’t the most progressive society.)
The crowds would gather around the bard as if they were at a rock concert. If someone wanted to throw a rotten tomato at the guitarist/lyre-player for flubbing a chord, they didn’t have to have good aim. It paid to be flexible, and not just for ducking rotten fruit.
Close enough to smell them sweat. Ancient odeon in Ephesus, Turkey.
If an audience began to get restless, a bard would simply switch gears and invent a new line or tweak an old line of the story. Of course, these bards weren’t ding-dongs. Their new version would sing the praises of their listeners and the bard would make them feel special by showing how their city was particularly brave or how it had sent more men with Agamemnon than any other.
A bard didn’t memorize every line of an epic poem. He used a basic structure of repetitions, plots, and themes to help guide him. The epics had a vast numbers of lines to remember—over 25,000—which explains why it took days to complete. It was also easier to remember the same few names for Achilles, that swift-footed stud, than making up an awesome new one every time.
swift-footed stud:
Called “epithets,” these repetitious nicknames helped singers plug in something familiar and gave them more time to think of the next line. Swift-footed Achilles was always popular.
This basic structure of the story acted as a road map, and it gave the bard something familiar to toss into his performance while he thought of his next line—a cool line, a line that would keep him from getting hit in the head with a rotten tomato. Because let’s face it, memorizing days-upon-days-worth of story isn’t fun for anybody.
As a result, The Iliad and The Odyssey weren’t fixed stories; they were more like Jell-O. They could wiggle a lot, but still keep their overall form. These aoidoi were the real creative forces behind the details and drama of each epic tale.
In later centuries, performers looking for fame and fortune—called rhapsodes—recited these stories at big festivals. Their name literally means “stitchers of songs.” They sewed all the different versions together to create their own according to their tastes and talents. Poor rhapsodes didn’t get a musical accompaniment during their competitions, though—they recited alone and crossed their fingers that their voices didn’t break.
Because of this oral tradition, there were probably a lot of different versions of the stories floating around the ancient world. Audience pressure, current events, and changing values all helped shape the Homeric epics as they were told and retold for hundreds of years. In fact, the oldest papyrus fragments from the second century BCE contain different lines from our modern edition of Homer’s epics. That’s six hundred years after the first supposed written copy.
A rhapsode in action, which means a lot of staff leaning.
We have no idea how much our versions vary from the original performances of these stories. And we never will, unless someone invents a time machine. Fingers crossed.
Like a Roach
It’s clear that both The Iliad and The Odyssey stem from oral tradition and that they existed before writing. Homer lurks in there somewhere, but where is anyone’s guess.
All that genius coming from one man made even the Ancient Greeks a little suspicious. Everyone from Socrates to Plato debated his existence. That didn’t mean the Greeks didn’t always love him, because they did. At least seven places tried to claim their city as his birthplace.
To the Greeks, Homer was the best and greatest poet, the father of all literature. To early scholars, it seemed one minute the Greeks were living in the Dark Ages, just trying to survive, and the next, two fully-formed epics sprang out of the universe, perfect in every way.
sprang:
Early scholars of Homeric poetry even started calling him The Big Bang of Western literature. They didn’t know about poor, forgotten Gilgamesh—see chapter 5.
But now you know the truth: oral transmission through centuries of singers and performances helped shape those epics. Not some blind guy with a reed pen following Achilles around asking for his autograph.
And the Award for Craziest Theory Goes To . . .
Because Ancient Greece existed a long time ago (hence the ancient part), it’s hard to figure out exactly what happened during the Trojan War, and if it’s at all like The Iliad shows it. Nobody knows who Homer was or when exactly The Iliad and The Odyssey were created, but that doesn’t stop people from coming up with some pretty interesting theories. Here are a couple of them.
Co-evolution
This theory claims that the stories evolved with something else—in this case, it’s the alphabet.
The Phoenicians, the Greeks’ neighbors, brought the royal color purple, their gods, and luxury goods like ivory to Greece. Arguably, the Greeks had all these things before, but the Phoenicians had a certain Je ne sais quoi.
Je ne sais quoi:
French for: “I don’t know what.” Usually a special “I don’t know what.” The Phoenicians had flair, and the Greeks liked what they saw.
They made them look so much better. The Greeks couldn’t help but trade with the Phoenicians and, as a result, they came into contact with a little something called the alphabet.
Sure it didn’t look like our alphabet today; it was missing a few letters. You’d call them vowels, which seems important today, since all the cool words (i.e., almost all words) need vowels.
Some scholars believe the Greeks loved the oral versions of Homer so much that they developed their own version of the Phoenician alphabet, vowels included, in order to write them down. In other words, Homer’s stories and the Greek alphabet co-evolved together.
That may or may not be the truth, but it’s definitely true that the earliest the poems could be from is the Archaic period—when the Greeks started trading with the Phoenicians and found the alphabet.
Crystallization
According to this theory, the stories were retold over and over until they settled into their current version and were written down then.
Some scholars think the epics were crystallized in Athens, since Athens was a center of learning in Ancient Greece. And during the Classical period—480 to 323 BCE—Athens was the belle of the ball. The Persian Wars had ended, and life was good (unless you were a woman or a slave). Democracy was fully developed (unless you were a woman or a slave), lots of building took place, and education was at its zenith (unless you were a woman or a slave—see a pattern here? It’s good to be a free man in Ancient Greece).
Every year, Athens held the Panathenaic festivals to honor Athena’s birthday, the city’s patron goddess. Any Athenian could attend (unless you were a slave. Yay for women!). The festival lasted for days and one of the highlights was the contests—both athletic and musical. If a singer wanted to win a prize (and they all did), he usually recited Homer.
These Athenian singers didn’t have the same freedom as their bard counterparts. They couldn’t throw lines in willy nilly if they wanted to win the prize. They had to belt out the whole epic in standard form. To help them memorize the “right” version, they first memorized a written poem, just like you do for classes.
It’s possible one tyrant of Athens had the stories all compiled and written down to help those poor singers out.
tyrant:
A tyrant wasn’t necessarily evil in Ancient Greece—it just meant an aristocratic guy seized power illegally. But he wasn’t necessarily a bad ruler. Some were pretty great like Pisistratus who is possibly the tyrant who
had the Homeric epics written down, and who gave money to farmers to help with their olive crops.
Homer was many things to many people, and that’s how he’s survived this long. He was better at adapting to the changing times than a cockroach. Who knows, Homer may survive a nuclear apocalypse right along with the roaches. He’s already survived thousands of years of war and peace.
Sneakier than a Spy
Homer first impacted his own culture, giving the Greeks heroes morals they could all aspire to have, including honor, virtue, and fame at all costs. If the Greeks had a Bible, Homer would have been it. Cities, like Athens and Sparta, would even use passages from the Homeric epics to settle city debates.
Rulers such as Xerxes of Persia and Alexander the Great found all that honor, virtue, and fame pretty heroic. It’s no coincidence that both paid their respects to Homer in the Greek way: with sacrifices at Troy, the site of The Iliad, before their own major wars.
They say Alexander the Great even slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow—right next to his knife. Although how he slept with all those long, unwieldy scrolls under his pillow is another question.
The idea of a book bound with pages wasn’t around yet.
excellent in war:
This may be his biographer, Arrian, putting words into Alexander’s mouth, though.
Alexander claimed The Iliad taught him how to be excellent in war, and maybe he was onto something. He only consolidated the largest empire the world had ever seen up to that point.
Alexander loved Homer so much that he dreamed of him at night (supposedly). The blind bard would read The Odyssey to him and Alexander was all ears. Alexander even had the sneaking suspicion that Homer really wanted him to build a great city in Egypt—the city of Alexandria, to be precise—and all the clues to accomplishing this were in his poems.
All this led to the founding of the Great Library of Alexandria by one of Alexander’s generals, which was a pretty big deal. Men (sorry, ladies) sat around discussing the grammar and underlying meanings of these centuries-old stories, among other things. The Great Library of Alexandria also played a part in starting modern Western grammar studies, so really it’s Homer you have to thank for weekly grammar quizzes.
Probably dreaming of the next city to conquer.
The oldest extant fragments of Homer’s stories come from this time and place—the third century BCE. That doesn’t mean the stories weren’t written down before then, just that Egypt has great weather for the preservation of papyri scrolls.
extant:
Anything still around today including architectural ruins, papers, and even people.
Next, Homer infiltrated the Roman Empire. He inspired Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, to write his own epic masterpiece, The Aeneid, which tells the tale of one survivor from Troy—Aeneas. This epic hero goes on to found the Roman people, and Latin, the language the story was written in, goes on to conquer the world, outlasting even the Romans. (But it’s Homer who outlasts everybody.)
While Homer survived the Romans, the Great Library at Alexandria unfortunately did not. Fires ravaged it multiple times over the centuries, and once lost, the scrolls weren’t always rewritten. By the seventh century CE, it wasn’t around anymore, and lots of knowledge was gone forever.
knowledge:
Modern scholars aren’t sure how much knowledge was actually lost or even how much there was to begin with, but early sources estimated a ridiculously hard-to-believe range of 34,000 to 700,000 scrolls!
Luckily, by then Homer had fled east to the Byzantine capital—to Constantinople. Despite being a Christian city, Homer escaped the massacre, proving to be as wily as his character, Odysseus. Teachers used Homeric texts as schoolbooks for kids learning to read. Students would copy out thirty to fifty lines of the poems a day, depending on how much of a teacher’s pet they wanted to be.
The Byzantine Empire proved the perfect place for Homer to lay low for a thousand years or so. It was stable, and its people spoke Greek. But Homer wasn’t done shaping the Western world just yet, and when he finally resurfaced, he did it in his usual style—with a bang.
It’s All Greek to Me
By the fifteenth century, no one in Europe could read Homeric Greek anymore, but people still heard about the blind bard. Poet-type people like Geoffrey Chaucer wrote tales about Troy, even though he never read the Homeric stories. In fact, it was the desire to read the actual Homeric stories that got people interested in learning about the Greeks again. Bang.
Okay, so maybe that sounds small fry, but it’s not. The new Greek love began an era you might be familiar with already. (Here’s a hint: This period involved the likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and it’s not the Ninja Turtles.)
That’s right, you can thank phony Homer for helping to ignite the great rebirth of Western Civilization—the Italian Renaissance. Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio, precursors to the Renaissance, were dying to hear Homer’s words. They commissioned the first translation in centuries of The Iliad and The Odyssey. It wasn’t a great translation, but it started something great.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, people could read all about Achilles’s rage and Odysseus’s cunning once again. (If they could read, that is. The farmer in the dell wasn’t reading, and neither were you back then, unless you were important.) That’s why there are so many buff, naked Greeks running around Italian paintings and on pages of books. Europeans were obsessed, and it didn’t end anytime soon.
With all that renewed interest, people wanted to know if the tales were real. By the nineteenth century, the stories had caught the interest of one Heinrich Schliemann who began a lifelong quest to find historical Troy.
Schliemann’s love of all things Homer was awesome, but his methods . . . not so much. He wanted to find Troy, but a few gold coins jingling in his pocket and ancient jewelry for his wife wouldn’t hurt either.
In order to find as much gold as possible, he took his spade and dug straight down a huge hill through centuries of cities, destroying the Troy of the twelfth-century BCE and a whole bunch of other cities along the way.
twelfth-century BCE:
The century when scholars think the Trojan War of The Iliad happened.
The Greek goddess of luck, Tyche, must have been with him though, because the lucky nitwit managed to not only find the gold of Troy, but Mycenae, too, which was the supposed home of Agamemnon.
His impressive discoveries spurred modern archaeology. Instead of rich noblemen traveling the world and digging up cool, old stuff to show off in their estates, now archeology became more scientific and specialized. The objects found in the ground weren’t squirreled away in big houses anymore, but rather catalogued, studied, and put on display in museums for everyone to learn about and enjoy. Of course, we can’t give all that credit to Schliemann, since he just took a spade, dug straight down into a hill and struck Troy, but his colleague, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, used his head for more than a hat rack.
During their search for Homer’s legendary cities, Dörpfeld noticed something. He realized that the soil had different layers. Eureka! The layers could be used to date all the stuff coming from the soil, just like geologists were already doing for rocks. If a terracotta pot was buried lower than a piece of gold jewelry, then that pot was probably older than the gold. This method has come to be called stratigraphy, and it’s the core of archaeology to this day.
Over the years, Homer has helped shaped literature, language, art, and poetry. His legend helped give rise to the Renaissance and to modern archaeology. In many ways, he’s the basis for Western civilization. All that, and he didn’t even get a Ninja Turtle named after him.
What Do You Think?
Was Homer a poet, a scribe, a compiler, an Alexandrian scholar, an Athenian tyrant, or someone else altogether?
Chapter
10
Prester John
A Real John Doe
Lived: India, Central Asia, and Ethiopia (Immortal)
Grabbing a Piece of PJ Pie
Prester John was immortal. Until suddenly he wasn’t and the world forgot about him. But if this were the year of our Lord, circa 1145, then he would be kind of a big deal in certain circles. Circles that included nervous knights and hopeful popes. Being immortal and super rich can do that to a guy’s reputation.
How big of a deal was Prester John? Well, his kingdom had the Fountain of Youth and rivers that flowed with sparkly jewels instead of boring old water. Europeans—with their decidedly less impressive geography—wanted a piece of the PJ pie, and they didn’t care how old and moldy it got. They kept searching for it century after century.
You could say the Europeans were gullible, but that wouldn’t do justice to the fact that they undertook two crusades and countless expeditions to Africa and Asia just because of a letter allegedly written by the immortal Prester John himself. But gullible doesn’t quite cut it, does it?
Medieval Bishops: More Gossipy than High School Girls?
It all began around 1145, in a setting not too different from a school cafeteria. Bishop Hugh of Jabala went to the court of Pope Eugenius III with an impossible story. A story so crazy the pope couldn’t help but believe it. Apparently, Bishop Hugh had heard of a king who also happened to be a priest—and a really powerful one at that. He ruled over vast swaths of land somewhere vaguely in the eastern direction. His holiness was due to his being the great-times-a-lot-grandson of one of the three Magi, and his kingliness came from having a lot of soldiers willing to cross a desert.
Magi:
In other words, Prester John was related to one of the three Wise Men who visited the baby Jesus in the New Testament.
Famous Phonies Page 10