Homer

It is now generally agreed that the Iliad and Odyssey evolved over many centuries, originally as songs. Wandering around the homesteads and halls of the Greek world were the singers, men of prodigious memories who had mastered the art of communication through verse. Research in the Balkans, notably in the early part of the last century by the American scholar Milman Parry, has shown how formidable the skills of such singers could be and how sophisticated their techniques. One Bosnian Muslim was found to have held in his mind twice as many lines as the Odyssey and Iliad combined. In fact, researchers exploring Asian and African epic verse have found that the Homeric epics are comparatively short in comparison. The singers did not simply rely on memory. Serial recordings of the survivors of this tradition show they have an extraordinary ability to improvise, never repeating the stories in the same way, and continually refashioning their themes.

The singer may draw on folk memories but his song will also be shaped by his audiences. His living depends on his ability to maintain their interest hour after hour by the firelight, possibly night after night. His instinct will be to sense their needs and improvise accordingly. In a number of different cultures the predominant need has been to hear of the founding heroes of the nation. The Epic of Gilgamesh from Sum-eria, the Song of Roland and other epics set at the time of Charlemagne, the legends of Arthur and his knights belong to the same tradition as the Iliad and Odyssey. The first written version often emerges hundreds of years after the events it claims to describe, by which time its links with actual historical events have become tenuous. (Research on the Song of Roland, first written down about ad 1150, has shown it to be a massive distortion of the eighth-century events it claims to record.) So one must imagine the singer, ‘Homer, as presenting just part of his repertoire in what survives and in a version that is one of many possibilities. This helps explain the immediacy of the epics.

What Parry demonstrated was how the internal consistency and structure of each song solidified with time. The singer relied heavily on a number of formulas, such as ‘swift-footed Achilles, or full lines—‘When early-born rosy-fingered dawn appeared’—which fit the metre and can be used again and again, particularly when the singer needs a pause to reflect on the next development in his plot. What controlled the composition was the need to maintain the rhythm and power of the verse, and the words chosen by the poet to fill gaps between the formulas were those that fitted the metre rather than those that necessarily made good sense. The poet was concerned above all to maintain an emotional impact through the steady, almost ceremonial, intonation of the verse, rather than to tell a coherent story.

As a result, the recitations of the epics must have been events full of emotional charge that it is difficult for a modern audience to re-create. Peter Brook, the British theatre director who has specialized in taking his productions into traditional cultures worldwide, describes a visit of his troupe to remote villages in Iran in 1970. Here the tradition of Ta’azieh still survived. The Ta’azieh are mystery plays that deal with the martyrdom of the early Islamic prophets. The play watched by Brook was

Led by a musician, and as he began his chant Brook records, ‘His emotion was in no way his own. It was as though we heard his father’s voice, and his father’s father’s and so back. He stood there, legs apart, powerfully, totally convinced of his function and he as the incarnation of that figure who for our theatre is always the most elusive one of all, the hero.’ As the action developed and the leading character walked off to what the audience already knew would be his death, the watching villagers became drawn in. ‘I saw lips trembling, hands and handkerchief stuck in mouths, faces wrought with paroxysms of grief. First the very old men and women, then the children and the young men on bicycles all sobbed freely.’ What Brook goes on to call ‘the inner echo’ has been found when a community identifies totally with its traditions. The same thing may have happened to the listeners of Dark Age Greece.

As an epic reaches coherence, possibly after centuries of fluid development, there may be a moment when it becomes part of the cultural heritage of the community, and then there is a strong impulse to preserve it in a more stable form for future generations. At some point a final author or authors, ‘Homer’, put the Iliad and Odyssey into a coherent form, adding connecting passages and improving overall consistency. The identity of Homer is still unknown and probably will remain so. The leading scholar of the literature of this period, M. L. West, argues that the name itself is a later construction but that a single poet worked on the Iliad over a lifetime and a different author was responsible for the Odyssey. In the original tradition, Homer is a native of the island of Chios or the nearby coastal town of Smyrna, but more recently it has been suggested that the Ionic dialect that predominates in the final version of the poems is the native one of western Ionia, possibly the island of Euboea, rather than of the settlements of the eastern Aegean. Embedded in the verse are words and formulas some scholars date back to Mycenaean times and there are possibly even links to the epics of the Near East, another theme explored in detail by M. L. West (see his The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford and New York, 1999). It remains the convention to use the name ‘Homer’ to describe the ‘author’ of the two epics. (For further studies of Homer see Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death, Oxford, 1980, and more recently R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer, Cambridge, 2004.)

Why was there a desire to record the Iliad and Odyssey in writing? The singers moved in the world of the aristocratic chieftain and his retinue, a world described in the Odyssey itself where Odysseus seeks hospitality in the hall of the king of the Phaeacians. It is possible that aristocrats, feeling their own traditions under threat in the fast-changing world of the eighth century, were the prime movers in guarding their heritage through writing it down. The development of vowels made the whole process much easier.

The Iliad and Odyssey have very different themes but they are episodes of a common story, an expedition by Greeks (‘Achaeans’ Homer calls them) overseas to the city of Troy in pursuit of the beautiful Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, who has been carried off by Paris, a son of king Priam of Troy. It takes ten years of battle, siege, and cunning before Troy falls, leaving the surviving Greek heroes free at last

To make their way homewards to their long-missed wives and families. (Moses Finley’s The World of Odysseus, new edition, 2002, New York, first published in 1954, remains a classic introduction to this world.)

Tradition sets the Trojan War in Mycenaean times, long before the eighth or seventh centuries when the poems were first written down. Such an expedition by a group of Mycenaean chieftains and their men to the coast of Asia Minor ties in well with the aggressive nature of Mycenaean expansion. Troy was a prosperous settlement on the coast just south of the entrance to the Black Sea, access to which it may have controlled, and it was certainly a potential target for greedy Greek warriors. There is even evidence of destructions of the city at the time of greatest Mycenaean expansion in the fifteenth century and later in the twelfth. (See Barry Strauss, The Trojan War, New York and London, 2007, for a recent account of the background evidence.)

However, there is no evidence to link the Mycenaeans with these destructions (one of which was almost certainly due to an earthquake). It is more likely that the core of the epics preserves more general memories of the Mycenaean age when men fought far from home and raids and sieges were part of everyday life. A great deal of material was added very much later than Mycenaean times. The Lelantine war between rival Greek cities of Euboea split the Greek world in the later part of the eighth century (see p. 156) and the experience, possibly fresh in the mind of Homer and his audiences, could well have been woven in with the earlier folk memories. If the need to create emotional impact is what defines the form of the epics, then the background of Homeric society does not have to be an accurate portrayal of any period but a pastiche which is continually developed with Bronze Age memories existing alongside contemporary experience.

The world Homer portrays in the Iliad is one of violence, often presented in a horrifying form. The bulk of the poem is taken up with the continuous ebb and flow of battle between Greeks and Trojans before the walls of Troy. The epic begins with the anger of Achilles, one of the Greek hero warriors. He has been forced by the leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon, to surrender a girl won as a prize. The real question is honour and time, ‘prestige’. The proud Achilles feels humiliated by the way he has been ordered about by a man whose authority he regards as less than supreme. Homer immediately confronts the reader, or listener, with the validity of anger and stubbornness displayed against authority in a context when lives can all too easily be lost. And lost they are as Homer describes how warrior after warrior is annihilated in the ensuing skirmishes. Each of the dead is given just enough background to place them as individuals (an approach brilliantly developed in the elegiac poem Memorial by Alice Oswald). Honour and dignity deserve to be defended but what are the effective means of doing so? Homer himself does not offer his own view but allows his characters to reflect on the dilemmas that the unfolding of events imposes on them. This is the mark of any great work of literature and many see the Iliad as the greatest. (My favourite translation of both the Iliad and the Odyssey is by the late Robert Fagles in the Penguin Classics Edition (1991 and 1996). The Forewords by Bernard Knox are also excellent.)

So this is an age, and here a specific situation, where authority is fluid. Wealth and high birth will give an individual a platform, and status can be won by appropriate valour on the battlefield. Off the battlefield leaders must win or maintain status through the skill they show in enthusing and persuading others. There is no democracy here but the people expect to be given reasons for action and can be guided towards it either in preparation for war or in the more peaceful setting of Ithaca where elders address a people’s assembly. So speeches play a prominent part in both epics with dialogues that follow in debate providing a precedent for Greek tragedy and, through that, western theatre. They can be formal speeches with a crowd to be persuaded, as in the confrontation between Achilles and Agamemnon in Book I of the Iliad, or conversational as between Odysseus and his wife Penelope where a more intimate relationship has to be negotiated.

In his pique, Achilles refuses to fight, even wishing destruction on his own side. Eventually, as the Trojans, under their great war leader Hector, son of Priam, drive back the Greeks to their ships, Achilles relents so far as to lend his war armour to his companion Patroclus. Patroclus is killed and this, rather than the fate of his countrymen, finally impels Achilles to revenge. ‘His thoughts are wild, like a lion who gives in to his great force and overmanly heart and goes against the flocks of mortals to seize his feast,’ as Homer puts it. In war Achilles is a machine who moves forward slashing and stabbing without mercy. He kills Hector, who has himself been described as if he were a fire raging across the mountainside, and mutilates his body so that he can drag him off behind his chariot. This is the symbolic moment when Troy is doomed, the eventual fate known to every Greek but not the focus of the few days of combat described in the Iliad. As Achilles broods on his victory he is disturbed in the night by old king Priam, coming alone to ransom his dead son. For Achilles the myth that violence and killing leads to glory is broken as he sits with the old man and at last understands the pity of war. He has already been told that he himself will soon die, and Priam’s presence makes him realize the effect his death will have on his own ageing father.

In the Odyssey, the war has been won and Odysseus, one of the Greek war leaders, makes for his homeland, Ithaca. The poem opens with his faithful wife Penelope in their palace at Ithaca besieged by boorish suitors who hope to make her their wife. She is still hoping against hope that Odysseus has survived Troy. Unknown to her, Odysseus is alive but has been entrapped by the goddess Calypso. Zeus finally persuades the goddess to let him go but he is shipwrecked by the sea god Poseidon, who bears him a grudge. Odysseus is washed up in the kingdom of the Phaeacians, where he is rescued by Nausicaa, the daughter of the local king, Alcinous. Offered hospitality and entertained with games and poetry, Odysseus relates a whole series of fantastic adventures he has undergone since leaving Troy. They include the capture of himself and his men by the Cyclops, one-eyed giants, his temptation by the Sirens, and sailing between the twin horrors of the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Restored to good health by the welcome of the Phaeacians, Odysseus eventually leaves for Ithaca. He lands there disguised as a beggar, but is gradually recognized by those who know him from many years

Before, among them his faithful dog, Argus, and his old nurse. After destroying the suitors in a scene as violent as any in the Iliad, he is finally reunited with Penelope in a moving scene of middle-aged love.

The world of the epic is one of superhuman heroes, many of whom are directly descended from the gods. When one of them arrives at the scene of battle he can transform the whole course of events by his exploits. (Appropriately the ‘great’ heroes of Homer, Achilles and Hector, arrive for battle in four-horse chariots—the horses are even given names and lower their heads in mourning when their owner dies.) Achilles seems able to kill men in their hundreds without pausing for rest. However, even heroes die—this is the distinction between them and the immortal gods. Hector and Patroclus fall in the course of the Iliad and the imminent death of Achilles is predicted. Homer does not even offer his heroes the possibility of an afterlife, other than in the most shadowy form.

What matters above all in the Iliad is honour, preserving dignity in the face of the horror of war, a point developed three centuries later by the tragedian Sophocles. A ‘good’ man is one who shows strength, skill, and courage in battle. He must negotiate his hero status in that period, all too short for many, between reaching manhood and meeting death. The fragility of human existence is at the core of both Homer’s epics. However, the heroes are no stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen. Their plight intensifies their emotions. They sob openly when companions die and are torn with grief at what might happen to their wives and children after they themselves have died. (This is what later disturbed the philosopher Plato who felt that the display of emotion degraded the rational soul.)

It is part of Homer’s appeal that he is able to present another world in contrast to that of war, one of peace in which everyday life is carried on in well-ordered domesticity. Even in the midst of war Troy preserves an atmosphere of civilized living. Priam’s palace is ‘built wide with porches and colonnades of polished stone’, and deep in its cellars are great treasures. There is courtesy and kindness among the city’s inhabitants. In the Odyssey there is more scope for the rituals of hospitality in the aristocratic halls where local lords sustain their relationships by feasting and the giving of luxury gifts—bronze cauldrons, fine fabrics, gold and silver. The guest is welcomed. He is washed by the servant girls, fitted out in fresh clothes, and fed. Later his story is listened to with respect and then he is bedded down on the porch, while the lord and his family retire to their own bedrooms.

In these homes the influence of wives is strong. They have a major role in running the household, supervising weaving and the grinding of corn by servant slave girls, watching over the stores, and bringing up their children. While the heroes expect to have women around them available simply for sex, they treat their aristocratic wives with respect. Penelope, for instance, has some sort of emotional equality with her husband. They talk together before making love and share a cosy intimacy as fellow high-status members of their society (although Penelope’s son Telemachus treats his mother with less respect). Arete, wife of king Alcinous of Phaeacia, is described as honoured by her husband as no other wife in the world is honoured. ‘Such has always been the honour paid to Arete by Alcinous and her children and

By the people here, who gaze at her as at a divinity and greet her with loyal words whenever she walks about the town, because she is full of unprompted wisdom.’ (Translation: Walter Shewring.)

In a violent and unsettled age, however, there was no doubt that women were desperately dependent on the protection of their husbands. Hector’s wife Andromache is all too well aware of the impulses that drive men to fight. ‘Your own vital energy will destroy you’, she tells her husband. Some of the most heart-rending scenes in the Iliad come when Andromache realizes what her fate will be if Hector dies. She will probably be dragged off as a captive and become a slave and unwilling sexual partner to a Greek warlord. Penelope, too, is alone. Her son, Telemachus, is at the threshold of manhood but still not assured enough to be able to offer protection to his mother against her persistent suitors. She has to rely on her own guile to delay accepting any of them as a husband, and the situation is only resolved when Odysseus, aided now by Telemachus, slaughters them. Yet she has retained her integrity and status throughout and the appreciation of a woman who sustains her chosen role under enormous provocation and temptation is one of Homer’s achievements.

Set against scenes of both peace and war and often woven into them is the natural world. Homer never forgets the rhythms of everyday life and the backdrop of sea, sunlight, and stars. Outside Troy the Greek armies bed down for the night by their watchfires:

As stars in the night sky glittering round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory when the air falls to a sudden windless calm. . . all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear and the shepherd’s heart exults—so many fires burned between the ships and the [river] Xanthus’ whirling rapids. (Translation: Robert Fagles)

In the Odyssey, a poem of longing par excellence, Odysseus is impatient to set out on the final journey to Ithaca:

Odysseus all the while kept turning his head towards the glowing sun, impatient for it to set, because he yearned to be on his way home again. He was like a man who longs for his evening meal when all day long his two dark red oxen have drawn his jointed plough over the fallow; thankful he is when sunlight goes; he can limp home to his meal at last. (Translation: Walter Shewring)

The gods play an essential but ambivalent role in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer presents them as a closely connected family with their home on Mount Olympus: Zeus and his wife Hera, their children, Ares, the god of war, and Hephaestus and, by Zeus’ other liaisons, Apollo and Athena. However, they seldom work in unity. In the Odyssey Athena acts as a protecting goddess for Odysseus while Poseidon, Zeus’ brother, is out to upset him. In the Iliad the gods are even more partisan. Hera and Athena are violently against the Trojans while Apollo takes their side. The gods can also act unscrupulously with each other to get their way. Hera tires Zeus with lovemaking so that she can put her own stratagems in hand while he is recovering in sleep. While this adds to a sense of tragedy, the helplessness of humanity if the gods

Are aroused, it also enlarges the possibility of individual humans forging their own ethical positions independently of the gods. There are instances in both epics when the heroes ponder on the best course to take. They are even free to attack the gods, as Agamemnon does on one occasion, berating Zeus for his cruelty to men.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that Homer has made to European literature is to provide a model of human beings who place their own dignity before submission to the whims of the gods, something later lost in the Christian tradition where challenging God becomes unacceptable in conventional literature. Here the comparative lack of distance between humanity and the gods allows a psychological complexity that adds to the sophistication of the work. Yet there are always limits, set by the gods, beyond which behaviour is unacceptable. The dreaded crime of hubris, overweening pride, will always be punished. In the brutal scene towards the end of the Odyssey where Odysseus slays the suitors he tells how he is justified because of their refusal to show the appropriate respect to those around them. They have flouted the limits of ‘divine law’ by their shameless bullying of the isolated Penelope and their exploitation of her hospitality. It is the gods’ will that they should die.

For later generations Homer remained a great moral teacher. In a vast cache of papyrus texts found in the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Homer leads the classical authors with some thousand fragments of his work. In fifth-century Athens boys would learn the epics by heart and not only absorb a heritage but understand appropriate behaviour in different contexts from the many different types of relationship portrayed. The tragedies of the Trojan War become inextricably linked to Greek mythology and drama. The emotional power of Homer persisted into the Roman period. Part of his enduring genius lies in his portrayal of heroes as fully human beings whose dilemmas remain real to his readers nearly three thousand years later. Through Homer the Trojan War continues to haunt the European consciousness as the archetype of all wars and the dilemmas and dangers for all that violence brings.