Why Homer Matters (11 page)

Boardman thought that about five hundred people might have lived here, in about fifty houses spread over ten acres. Their lord and master would have occupied the
megaron
, and there the heroic songs would have been sung. There is no grandeur. It is a rough, overt power structure. The plain below the acropolis may be covered in olives and mastic bushes, and its harbor is there so that these people can reach out to lands beyond those horizons, but this miniature city is up here for protection. Emporio is both closed and open, a place to withdraw into and from which to venture out. It is a place belonging to robber-traders, at least half piratical, needing to rely on imported grain for its sustenance, perhaps from Egypt, perhaps from the Black Sea, and to export its wine and oil and gum for its currency, but inseparable from violence. Here it is possible to feel that Homer is the product of an essentially marginal world, away from the great civilizations, the lords of Emporio fascinated by the great but not able to count themselves among them.

If Homer was an ancient inheritance in the eighth century
BC
, as I believe it was, already a thousand years old, this is the sort of place in which that memory would have been treasured and nurtured, where the Keatsian sense of enlargement and the surge of greatness would have been experienced by the young men hearing the stories, no doubt inspiring their own visions of love and violence. Just as much as Athens or Alexandria, places like this would have been links in the chain.

Only the phlomis and the thorns grow on the eastern shore of Chios; the only colors are the sand-washed blue of the sea and the rust stains in the limestone of the cliffs. Here and there the cushion tufts of a low thistle show purple in its nest of thorns. On a stony path just above the sea, with a swell breaking on the shore, I found a young kid, perhaps born that spring and now laid out on a rock, dead and as dry as parchment. It had been preserved by the drought. Its leather collar with bell was still around its neck, its yellow plastic ear tags pinned into its ears, its hooves tucked up under its chest, where its ribs, like flat, blanched pencils, just protruded from the coat. The teeth were made prominent by the shrinking of the lips, but otherwise it was almost perfect, as if in the drought one day it had simply lain down and died. Touchingly, its head was turned as if it were trying to lick its own flank. The eyes were gone, and you could look through their sockets into the skull. It was the Homeric world: brutal, perfect, without euphemism, but somehow enshrining a longing for something better, softer, more forgiving.

The Homeric poems, or at least versions of them, were written down somewhere very like this, perhaps in about 725
BC
, or maybe as much as a century later. Precision is almost certainly irrelevant; there can be no ruler-drawn horizon at which the written Homer begins.

If Homer is from this moment, the poems are the product of a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness. The
Iliad
is soaked in retrospect. The
Odyssey
, the twin and pair of it, is filled with heroic adventurism and the sense of possibility, as if it were an American poem and the
Iliad
its European counterpart.

There is no doubt that the poet of the
Odyssey
knew the
Iliad
. The
Odyssey
, with extraordinary care, is shaped around the preexistence of the
Iliad
. It fills in details that are absent from the earlier poem—the Trojan Horse, the death of Achilles—but never mentions anything that is described there. That discretion and mutuality is present on a deeper level too. So, where the
Iliad
is a poem about fate and the demands that fate puts on individual lives, the inescapability of death and of the past, of each of us being locked inside a set of destinies, the
Odyssey
, for all its need to return home, consistently toys with the offer of a new place and a new life, a chance to revise what you have been given, for the individual—or at least the great individual—to stand out against fate.

The two poems talk across that divide. The
Iliad
is rooted in the pain of Troy, the singular place and the sense of entrapment that it brings to everyone involved. The
Odyssey
is constantly free and constantly inventive. That difference is reflected in the two heroes. Achilles is fixed into rage, into the need to fulfill his fate, fixed into having to revenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

These are the two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path. That is the great question the poems pose. Which will you be? Achilles or Odysseus, the monument of obstinacy and pride or the slippery trickster in whom nothing is certain and from whom nothing can be trusted? The singular hero or the ingenious man?

The
Iliad
embraces an earlier, rawer, more heroic and more tragic past. The
Odyssey
looks forward, takes modern dealing and adventuring and casts a magic spell over it so that it becomes a strange and idealized version of the trading and colonizing life. The
Iliad
is a picture of what we think we once were and maybe long to be; the
Odyssey
a version of what we are and what we might yet be. There is no need to put a date on those perspectives; their prospect and retrospect are everlasting dimensions of the human condition. In any age, the present is no more than the saddle of level ground at the pass, an instant of revelation in front of you and abandonment behind. Like all great art, Homer is essentially transitional, emergent, hung between what is lost and what does not yet exist.

*   *   *

In a way that remains permanently and inevitably uncertain, the Phoenician alphabet arrived in the Greek world, probably in the ninth century
BC
, from the trading ports of the Near East. Powerful currents were running between the Near East and the Aegean. Craftsmen, foods, spices, herbs, precious metals, ways of working that metal, myths, metaphysical ideas, poetry, stories—all were flooding in from the east, and the alphabet came with them. Unlike the earlier complex scripts, the simple Phoenician alphabet wasn't confined to high-class scribes, and the Greeks soon bent it to their own use, adapting Phoenician letters for vowels and for
ph-
,
ch
- and
ps
-, which do not occur in Phoenician. Like the songs of Homer themselves, the Greek scripts they developed varied from place to place, but of all the scraps and fragments of early Greek text that have survived from the eighth century, none is more suddenly illuminating than a small reconstructed object from the island of Ischia, at the far western end of the Greek-speaking world, guarding the northern entrance to the Bay of Naples.

Ischia now is a dream of well-being, a sharply dressed salad of an island, rising to a high volcanic peak in Mount Epomeo, rimmed in lidos and those in search of rheumatic cures, but with a lush greenness which must have seemed to any Aegean sailor like an oasis of welcome. It is a version of Calypso's island, balmy, seductive, inviting, somehow suspended from mundane realities. The sun comes up over the shoulder of Vesuvius on the mainland and lights the lemon trees and the figs. Mounds of bougainvillea and ipomoea clump and tumble down the hillsides. A milky haze hangs all morning over an almost motionless sea. Bees hum in the rosemary flowers, and crickets tick in the grass.

Ischia offered the early Iron Age Greeks more than exquisite comfort. When the first settlers came here in about 770
BC
from the Aegean island of Euboea, they set up the earliest, most northern and most distant of all Greek colonies in Italy. They chose it because the northern tip of the island provides the perfect recipe for a defensible trading post: a high, sheer-walled acropolis, Monte Vico, with sheltered bays on each side, one protected from all except northerlies, the other open only to the east. Between the two a shallow saddle is rich in deep volcanic soils where a few vine and fruit trees still grow among the pine-umbrellaed villas and the swimming pools. Here, beginning in the early 1950s, the archaeologist Giorgio Buchner excavated about five hundred eighth- and seventh-century
BC
graves that reveal the lives of people for whom the Homeric poems were an everyday reality.

This little Greek stone town was called Pithekoussai, Ape-island, perhaps from the monkeys they found here on arrival, or more interestingly as a name suitable for people who were seen from the mainland as vulgar and adventurous traders, laden with cash, irreverent and with uncertain morals, enriching themselves on the edge of the known world (
pithekizein
meant “to monkey about”). It was an astonishing and wonderful melting pot, four thousand people living here by 700
BC
, nothing halfhearted about it, nor apparently militaristic. People from mainland Italy, speaking a kind of Italic, were living here, with Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon, Byblos and Carthage, Aramaeans from modern Syria and Greeks. The archaeologists found no ethnic zoning in the cemetery. All were living together and dying together, buried side by side. There was little apparent in the way of an ethnic gap between these people. It was a deeply mixed world. Iron with the chemical signatures of Elba and mainland Tuscany was worked here in the blacksmiths' quarter and sold to clients in the Near East. Trade linked the island with Apulia, Calabria, Sardinia, Etruria and Latium as well as the opposite Campania shore. No other Greek site in Italy has objects from such a vast stretch of the Iron Age Mediterranean.

Buchner found no hint in any of the graves of a warrior aristocracy. The only blades were a few iron knives, awls and chisels. The leading members of the Pithekoussai world were from a commercial middle class, some with small workshops for iron and bronze, many with slaves of their own. The style of burial marks the difference between those classes: the slaves hunched fetally in small and shallow hollows, no possessions beside them; their masters, mistresses and their children laid out supine, in plain and dignified style, accompanied by simple but beautiful grave goods.

Much of their pottery came from Corinth and Rhodes, and what they didn't import, they copied. Small Egyptian scarabs were often worn as amulets by the children and went to their graves with them, along with stone seals from northern Syria and one or two Egyptian faience beads. There are some fine red pots made in the Phoenician city of Carthage on the North African coast, and silver pins and rings from Egypt. A tomb of a young woman buried in about 700
BC
was found with her body surrounded by little dishes from Corinth and small ointment jars, seventeen of them, around her, a dressing-table-full. Men also had little fat-bellied oil jars with them, some no more than an inch high and an inch across, pocket offerings, maybe used in the funeral rites. A fisherman was buried with his line and net; only the bronze fish hook and the folded-over lead weights of the net have survived. These men were all buried in the way of Homeric heroes, their bodies cremated on wooden pyres and then interred with the charred wood and their possessions beneath small tumuli.

Nothing is coarse or gross. Big-eyed sea snakes and fluent, freely drawn fish decorate the gray-and-ocher pottery. There are flat-footed wine jugs, suitable for a shipboard table. One big dish is decorated with a chariot wheel, perhaps another faint heroic memory. Some pots are decorated with griffins from patterns that had their distant origins in Mesopotamia, others with swastikas that probably originated just as long ago in the Proto-Indo-European cultures of the Caspian steppe.

Fusion and mixture, a kind of mental mobility, is the identifying mark of this little city. It was not a luxury civilization, but as you spend a morning walking around the empty, cool marble halls of the Pithekoussai Museum in the Villa Arbusto, peering in at the pots, you can feel the stirring of life in this distant and adventurous place 2,700 years ago. It doesn't take much to see the wine being mixed in these bowls, poured from these jugs or drunk from these cups, nor the glittering fish hauled up in these nets or the goods loaded on distant quays and beaches and sold from here to curious buyers on the mainland of Italy.

The design on the shipwreck
crat
ē
r
from Pithekoussai in Ischia.

And the museum holds its surprises. One late-eighth-century
crat
ē
r
originally made in Attica, a bowl for mixing wine and water, depicts this world in trouble. On its gray and rapidly painted body, a ship floats all wrong in the sea, turned over in a gale, its curved hull now awash, its prow and stern pointing down to the seabed. Everything has fallen out. Wide-shouldered and huge-haunched men are adrift in the ocean beneath, their hair ragged, their arms flailing for shore and safety. Striped and cross-hatched fish, some as big as the men, others looking on, swim effortlessly in the chaos. A scattering of little swastikas does little to sanctify this fear-filled waterworld. One man's head is disappearing into the mouth of the biggest fish of all. It is a disaster, fueled by the fear the Greeks had of the creatures of the sea, alien animals which, as Achilles taunts one of his victims, “will lick the blood from your wounds and nibble at your gleaming fat.” The scene is no new invention; it is painted with all the rapidity and ease of having been painted many times before.