by Homer
Secondly, Homer employs the device of delayed action. His hearers know what is coming, but not how or when. The sinister figure of Achilles is introduced at the beginning of the poem, but only to be withdrawn into the background till we reach Book 9. We are almost lulled into security – but not quite. There are too many references to the absentee for us to forget him. However, when Achilles does come into the foreground again, he removes himself once more with such a show of indomitable pride that we are left wondering how Homer is going to break this adamantine spirit. And we are not surprised to discover that it takes him nine tremendous Books to do so. The same artifice of suspense is used in the Odyssey. There too the chief figure is introduced in the beginning only to vanish and be talked about by other characters till he appears in person in Book 5. Moreover, the parallel in technique extends to the conclusion of both works. In both, Book 22 brings the action to a climax (Hector is killed: the Suitors are disposed of); in Book 23 we have a peaceful interlude (the Funeral Games: Odysseus is recognized by Penelope), and Book 24 provides the resolution of the drama (Achilles obeys the gods and relents: Odysseus is reinstated by divine intervention). This similarity in their composition is one of the many things which incline me to the opinion that one man is the author of both works.
It will astonish people who know nothing of the ‘Homeric question’ to learn that these splendidly constructed poems, and especially the Iliad, have in the past been picked to pieces by the men who studied them most carefully and should presumably have admired them most. They alleged certain incongruities in the narrative and argued that the Iliad is the composite product of a number of poets of varying merit, who had not even the doubtful advantage of sitting in committee, but lived at different times and each patched up his predecessor’s work, dropping many stitches in the course of this sartorial process. Now I think it is generally admitted that Homer did not invent the Story of Troy; also that it was the practice of ancient poets to build up their own edifice with the help of bricks taken from existing structures. In fact we should expect the Iliad to contain quite clear indications that it is the last of a long line of poems. Like Hermes as described by Priam, it bears every sign of good breeding and noble parentage. I have already referred to the evidence of advanced technique which is provided by certain elements in its construction. And I could add other points which in these latter days of literature we are too sophisticated to note with surprise or even to note at all, for instance that in Homer it is already an established convention that the author has been put by his Muse in a position to tell us everything his characters have said or thought, even their last soliloquies. If Homer invented all this technique it would be more than niggardly to deny him originality; but even if we take the likelier view that he inherited a great deal of it from previous poets, we have by no means shown that the Iliad was not his own.
We are left, in the end, with one kind of evidence, and that is psychological. To me, the proof of unity afforded by Homer’s consistency in character-drawing is the most convincing of many. Note first that he does not describe his characters at length; he makes them disclose themselves by what they say and do in the scenes where they appear. Thetis, for instance, the mother of Achilles, is a sorrowful lady, who always has a grievance: her one obsession is her love for her illustrious but ill-starred son, on whose behalf she is ready to pester anyone from Zeus to Hephaestus. From the moment of her first introduction in Book I, through all the episodes in which she reappears, up to the last Book, Homer presents her with complete consistency – and that in scenes which have all been denied a right to their place in the Iliad. I argue that such a high degree of consistency would have proved impossible for more than a single author, particularly without the assistance, in one place or another, of a full-length portrait from the original creator’s pen. The same is true if one follows the major figures – Athene, Odysseus, Nestor, or Helen herself – from the Iliad into the Odyssey. They are always themselves. I feel sure, on general literary grounds, that a fresh author taking them over could not have helped revealing his hand. In fact, any newcomer in the field of Epic poetry who was original enough to have ‘contributed’ to the Iliad or Odyssey, could not have failed, indeed would almost certainly have wished, to leave the imprint of his own mind on his characters. The Attic dramatists, who drew so largely on Homer, certainly showed this very human proclivity. It is difficult to recognize the characters of Homer in their portraits of Helen, Odysseus, Aias, and the rest.
However, it is inconsistencies in the narrative that were the chief weapons of those who tried to pick the Iliad to pieces. I cordially invite new readers to try to find some for themselves, though, unlike Achilles at the sports, I offer no ‘splendid prizes’ for this event. No marks will be given for the discovery of passages where Homer, after killing a man in battle, brings him back to life – this might happen to any author. One mark (out of ten) is allotted for the detection of minor incongruities in timing. For instance, Odysseus in the course of twenty-four hours, besides eating three dinners, does more things than the most energetic hero of a modern adventure story could have done in three days. But the taking of these little liberties with time is part of a dramatist’s privilege, and Homer, particularly in the Iliad, is above all things dramatic. Half the poem consists of speeches and all the rest is put before us as though upon a stage – in fact, Homer invented drama before the theatre was invented to receive it. I might allot as much as two marks to the enquiring spirit who asks how it comes about in Book 3 that Priam, who has had the Achaean chieftains knocking at his gates for nine years, has to ask Helen who is who. But full marks will be given only for the detection of a real flaw which cannot be explained away – as can be done, in my opinion, with all the alleged literary crimes for which Homer was dismembered and served up piecemeal to Victorian schoolboys, myself included.
If we have now re-integrated Homer as one person, or at most two (for I believe I am in the minority in attributing the Iliad and Odyssey to a single author), the next thing that the reader will ask is where the story of the Iliad came from. I wish I could tell him. A great deal of scholarly research has been done on the question. It has become fairly certain that there was an earlier Achilleis or Story of Achilles, indeed several stories in which the angry young hero who refused to fight till the eleventh hour bore other names than that of Achilles. In fact, Homer himself gives us one of these, in which Meleager figures in the leading role, much as in the Odyssey he gives us the ‘Wandering Prince’ once with Odysseus as hero and once with Menelaus. Stories of the siege and sack of towns are by no means missing from the mythology of other races. And it is my surmise that the stories we read in Homer issued, with an esoteric or at least ritual content, from the mouths of wise men who lived long before him; that in the course of centuries they spread across the world, undergoing many changes of nomenclature and language, and sinking to the folklore level, where, even if they were not fully understood, they were at least enabled to survive by their intrinsic interest and excellence; and that in the age of Homer they were raised to what we recognize as the literary level. That is my impression. It would need a good deal to confirm it; and at this point I will only add my own belief that Homer himself did not realize the esoteric content of his tales, if any. He had his own approach to truth, but that was through art.
Is Homer’s narrative in any sense historical? The answer is both yes and no. I do not think that, in telling the story of the Trojan War, he is giving us history, even in its most diluted form. There was a place called Troy (or Ilium) and we know that it was more than once destroyed. But even so, this ten years’ war, as described by him and thrown back a few generations into the past, did not take place (even without the participation of the gods) either at Troy or, in my opinion, anywhere else. It was a fiction of a very special kind, which had existed long before Homer’s time – a fiction that he adorned with the names of people whom his audience believed to be the ancestors of their own ruling princes, and some o
f whom we ourselves may well accept as having lived. If this view is correct, it enormously enhances the merit of Homer’s achievement in building up the tale and the characters who make it. I would rather have the Iliad than a whole shelf of Bronze-Age war-reports, however accurate.
Besides, Homer does give us history – the history of his own world. That statement needs but little qualification. We know from the archaeological evidence that Homer attempts to archaeologize, even to take us into the Mycenaean Age. Nestor’s cup is a case in point – a comparable vessel, with a couple of doves on top of it, was discovered at Mycenae. Yet in Homer’s day there was no science of archaeology, no written history, to assist the historical novelist. Where then did he get these details from the past? I think there is only one answer. He took them from the work of previous poets, in much the same way as he took over from them much of their vocabulary, and even a number of their lines and ways of dealing with recurring situations. Yet in spite of this indebtedness, Homer leaves on our minds the impress of complete originality. It is his own observation of life that he depends on. I am not denying that he invokes the glamour of the mythical past when he confronts Odysseus with the Sirens, or Meleager with the Calydonian Boar. But I feel strongly that in all that matters most, in describing the general structure of society, the relations of men and women to one another, and even the physical circumstances of their existence, he is drawing from contemporary models. I will go even further and say that he could not have done otherwise and at the same time succeeded in holding his audience, who, it must be remembered, did not read him in a printed book with the assistance of learned footnotes, but heard him recite his hexameters to the accompaniment of a lyre, as an after-dinner entertainment, while the wine went round. I maintain that in such circumstances any attempt to describe an alien world must have failed.
Homer, then, appealed to his hearers’ minds through what they knew. For instance, every member of his audience would at once recognize the force of the homely simile in which the Myrmidons are likened to a horde of wasps. By the same token they must have known the lion; and for this reason I mistrust the archaeologists who argue that in the period and place in which they wish to locate Homer lions were extinct. Would any narrator today, in his efforts to bring his story to life, present his listeners every few minutes with a dodo in action? If archaeology cannot fit Homer into a period which contains lions and the rest of the things that he refers to in familiar terms, I feel that archaeology must think again. And to be quite frank it does so – every ten or twenty years. At the moment it is fashionable to place Homer as late as 750 BC. I myself would put him in the tenth century before Christ. But the question of his date is extremely difficult, and my only contention here is that Homer gives us a unified picture of the world that he saw with his own eyes, whatever its exact date may have been. In that sense Homer gives us history – and history of a period about which, but for a few broken relics, we should otherwise have known next to nothing.
There is no need for me to describe Homer’s world as revealed in the Iliad. He does it a great deal better than I could; he looks at it through the eyes of a poet. Hitherto I have discussed him mainly as a constructor of stories; and the problems involved were simple in comparison with the difficulty of assessing him as an imaginative poet. I can make only slanting approaches to this task, and must fall back on some of the new impressions that have crowded in upon me during the many years I have spent in the study of his mind.
I have been struck first by the realism, subtlety and modernity of Homer’s character-drawing. When I say ‘modernity’ I do not mean that we shall meet such characters as Dolon, Paris, Diomedes or Briseis in Piccadilly, but that to Homer they were contemporary and true. He did not summon them from the legendary past: he created them out of his own experience of life. The deep impression of reality which they made upon me entirely banished from my mind (and I hope from my translation) the idea I had received in my schooldays that Homer was harking back to the so-called ‘heroic age’, when ‘heroes’ were apparently as common as blackberries. My illusions were shattered by a single reading of the sordid quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book 1.I soon became convinced that human nature has not materially altered in the three thousand years since Homer wrote; that his people were a great deal more interesting than ‘heroes’; that his poetic achievement in raising them to the tragic level was all the more sublime; and, incidentally, that his whole effect is obscured if one heroizes his men and gods by describing them and making them talk in a pompous and old-fashioned style. In other words, I found that Homer is depicting us in somewhat different circumstances. And I am not at all shaken in this conclusion when he makes his warriors hurl at each other lumps of rock ‘even to lift which was a feat beyond the strength of any two men bred to-day.’ That is merely a conventional tribute to the ancient belief that regression rather than progress is the rule in human affairs.
Another misapprehension that I rapidly corrected was concerned with the humour of Homer. ‘Homeric laughter’ is an unfortunate phrase. When the banqueters on Olympus are doubled up with laughter at the sight of the lame god Hephaestus bustling about in the hall, it is not Homer that is laughing, but the gods he had created. Nor is it pertinent to talk, as Dr Leaf did, of the ‘savage humour’ of his warriors. If you have just saved your own life in mortal combat by killing your enemy, it is ten to one that any joke that may spring to your lips will be completely lacking in urbanity. Homer is more of a realist than his critics, most of whom, I dare say, had never seen a battle. They do not even allow him to relieve a melancholy passage by a lighter interlude. When a hitch occurs in the cremation of Patroclus, and Iris hastens to help Achilles by bringing the Winds to bear on the situation, we are told by Dr Leaf (who does not fail to detect ‘a touch of humour’ here) that the whole scene ‘falls below the dignity of its surroundings’; indeed, ‘an interpolator’ is blamed for the impropriety.
However, the point I wished to make is that Homer’s own sense of humour is a very different thing from that of his creatures. It is a subtle, all-pervading essence, like the perfume of Here’s imperishable olive-oil, which ‘had only to be stirred for the scent to spread through Heaven and earth.’ In his treatment of Heaven it is felt from the moment when Zeus comments with sad resignation on the domestic trouble that Thetis has let him in for, and it penetrates every Olympian scene till the last intervention of the gods, when the disguised Hermes compliments Priam on realizing that he comes of not ignoble parentage. What is so remarkable is the fact that Homer leaves us with the feeling not only that he believes in his gods but that they were indeed very worshipful and formidable powers. Moreover, the Greeks accepted him as their first theologian and the creator of the Olympian religion. I know that there have been other faiths whose devotees were not discouraged from laughing at their gods. But I still think that Homer’s achievement in this respect is unique for a man of letters. And I cannot explain it.
But there is one fact to which I can point. The comic element is introduced almost solely on occasions when gods are shown together, in sympathetic or in hostile action. When dealing with mankind, each in his own capacity, they are far from amusing. Apollo and his Sister Artemis put up a ludicrous show when at war with their Uncle and their Father’s Consort, but Apollo acting on his own in the first pages of the Iliad is a very serious and unpleasant person; and so is Artemis when King Oeneus has miscounted and she sends him the Calydonian Boar. Even Aphrodite, who cuts such a pathetic figure in a pitched battle, is a power whom Helen herself cannot trifle with when she, the goddess of love, is attending to her own business. This, I think, is how Homer saves the face of his gods – with one exception. He gives the War-god many terrible and bloody attributes, but he takes no pains to make us feel that he is much more than a bully. It is possible that the reason why he persistently degrades and ridicules Areas in a poem which is much concerned with battle, is that the Iliad was written not to glorify war (though it admits its fascinatio
n) but to emphasize its tragic futility.
Homer then reveres his gods, but rightly feels that it would be untrue to life to make these formidable creatures take one another as seriously as he takes each of them. They are members of a family and, as such, are all on much the same level, like the members of a human family, the father of which may be a terror to his office-boy but fulminates with less effect at home. Thus, for a realist like Homer, high comedy in Heaven was artistically inevitable.* And of course it was useful in a tragedy by way of relief or of contrast with the melancholy scene below. But Homer’s humour is not confined to Olympus: it pervades the human drama too. Sometimes it comes into this by way of relief, as when Idomeneus and Meriones catch each other taking a rest in the middle of a very terrible battle, or in the brilliant description of the games that follow Patroclus’ funeral. But this is not always so. The delightful account of Agamemnon’s inspection of his troops, when the tactless Commander-in-Chief succeeds in ruffling the feelings of nearly all his senior officers, is not preceded by a passage where the tension is high. In the end, one is forced to the conclusion that Homer could not help seeing humour both on earth and in Heaven. He found it in the very texture of reality. And I hope that he was right.