Why Homer Matters (12 page)

There is no need to attach the name of Odysseus to this; nor of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet swallowed by a fish, his story exactly contemporary with this pot. It is merely the story of life on the Iron Age seas, the reality of shipwreck, the terror of the sea as a closing-over element filled with voracious monsters. In a later, Western picture, the large-scale catastrophe of the ship itself would have been the focus. Here it is pushed to the outer margin and made almost irrelevant; the central characters are the men, their hair and limbs out of order, the experience of human suffering uppermost. In that way, this is a picture from the Homeric mind.

Then, in a room hidden deep in the museum, you find the other transforming dimension of Pithekoussai: these people wrote. Shards from the eighth century
BC
are marked or painted with tiny fragments of Greek. One has the name Teison, perhaps the cup's owner. A second, on a little fragment of a cup, says “eupoteros”—meaning “better to drink from.” A third, also in Greek, written like the others with the letters reading from right to left as they are in Phoenician, and with no gaps between the words, says, fragmentarily, “
… inos m' epoies[e]
.” The verb
poieo
has the same root as “poetry,” and the inscription means “someone whose name ended in -
inos
made me”—Kallinos, Krokinos, Minos, Phalinos, Pratinos? This is no scratched graffito, but painted as part of the geometric design. It is another first: the oldest artist's signature in Europe.

By 750
BC
at the latest, writing had seeped into all parts of this expanding, connecting, commercial, polyglot world. Pithekoussai is not unique. Eighth-century inscriptions, many of them chatty, everyday remarks, with no claim to special or revered significance, have survived from all over the Aegean and Ionian Seas. These aren't officious palace directives, but witty remarks, sallies to be thrown into conversation.

And, as a wonderful object on Ischia reveals, Homer played his part. It was found in the tomb of a young boy, perhaps fourteen years old, who died in about 725
BC
. He was Greek, and unlike most of the children was cremated, an honor paid to his adulthood and maturity. In his grave his father placed many precious things: a pair of Euboean wine-mixing bowls from the famous potters of their home island, jugs, other bowls, and lots of little oil pots for ornaments.

The greatest treasure looks insignificant at first: a broken and mended wine cup from Rhodes, about seven inches across, gray-brown with black decoration and sturdy handles. Scratched into its lower surface on one side, and not at first visible but dug away a little roughly with a burin, are three lines of Greek, the second and third of which are perfect Homeric hexameters. Not only is this the oldest surviving example of written Greek poetry, contemporary with the moment Homer is first thought to have been written down; it is also the first joke about a Homeric hero.

In the
Iliad
, during a passage of brutal bloodletting and crisis for the Greeks, the beautiful Hecam
ē
d
ē
, a deeply desirable Trojan slave-woman, captured by Achilles and now belonging to Nestor, mixes a medicinal drink for the wounded warriors as they come in from battle: strong red wine, barley meal and, perhaps a little surprisingly, grated goat's cheese, with an onion and honey on the side. Hecam
ē
d
ē
did the mixing in a giant golden, dove-decorated cup belonging to Nestor, which a little pretentiously he had brought from home: “Another man could barely move that cup from the table when it was full, but old Nestor would lift it easily.”

Near Eastern stories tell of giant unliftable cups belonging to heroes from the far distant past. And in the tombs of warriors on Euboea from the ninth century
BC
there are, along with arms and armor, some big bronze cheese graters, now thought to be part of the warrior's usual field kit, perhaps for making medicines, perhaps for snacks.

So this little situation—the Nestor story, the unliftable cup, the Euboean inheritance, and the presence at a drinking party of wonderfully desirable women—has deep roots. Remarkably, they come together in the joke and invitation scratched on the Ischian cup. “I am the cup of Nestor,” it says,

                                   good for drinking

Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully

crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.

The Pithekoussaian trader was turning the Homeric scriptures upside down. This little cup was obviously
not
like Nestor's cup, the very opposite in fact: all too liftable. Its wine was
not
to cure wounds received in battle. It was to get drunk at a party. And drinking it would
not
lead to an old man's interminable reminiscing over his heroic past. No, the cup and the delicious wine it contained would lead to the far more congenial activity of which Aphrodite was queen: sex. This elegant little wine cup, treasured far from home amid all the burgeoning riches, gold and silver brooches, success and delight of Pithekoussai, a place supplied with beautiful slave-girls taken from the Italian mainland, was for the drinking of alcoholic aphrodisiacs. The inscription was an eighth-century invitation to happiness.

The distant past might often seem like the realm of seriousness, but the Ischian cup reorientates that. The first written reference to Homer is so familiar with him, and so at ease with writing, that in mock Homeric hexameters it can deny all the seriousness Homer has to offer. Homer and his stories were so deeply soaked into the fabric of mid- to late-eighth-century
BC
Greek culture that dad-style jokes could be made about him. And that makes one thing clear: here, in 725
BC
, is nowhere near the beginning of this story. The original Homer is way beyond reach, signaling casually from far out to sea.

There is only one aspect of grief associated with the sophisticated optimism and gaiety of this story, and it is inadvertent. The father offered this cup to his fourteen-year-old son in the flames of the funeral pyre, where it broke into the pieces which the archaeologists have now painstakingly gathered and restored. Death denied the boy the adult pleasures to which these toy-verses were inviting him. And that is another capsule of the Homeric condition: the Odysseyan promise of delight enclosed within the Iliadic certainty of death.

 

6 • HOMER THE STRANGE

The Pithekoussai wine cup marks the limits of the written Homer. It is the edge of a time-cliff; step beyond it, farther back in time, and the ground falls away. In that disturbingly airy and insubstantial world out beyond the cliff face, before the eighth century
BC
, Homer is unwritten, existing only in the minds of those who knew him.

It is a disorienting condition for our modern culture: how can something of such importance and richness have had no material form? How can the Greeks have trusted so completely to their minds? At home in Scotland, I sometimes go up to the edge of the sea cliff above the house, looking down to the fulmars circling in the four hundred feet of air below me. Again and again, the birds cut their effortless disks in that space, turning in perfect, repetitive circles, in and out of the sunlight, scarcely adjusting a feather to the eddies, but calm and self-possessed in all the mutability around them; and I have thought that in that fulmar-flight there may be a model of the Homeric frame of mind. You don't need to fix something to know it. You know it by doing it again and again, never quite the same, never quite differently. You may even find, in that tiller-tweaking mobility—a slight adjustment here, another there—that you know things that the rigid and the fixed could never hope to know. The flight is alive in the flying, not in any record of it. And perhaps we, not Homer, are the aberration. Of about three thousand languages spoken today, seventy-eight have a written literature. The rest exist in the mind and the mouth. Language—man—is essentially oral.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets,
wrote
his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better? Both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are riddled with internal contradictions. No self-respecting poet would allow such clumsiness.

The great eighteenth-century Cambridge scholar Richard Bentley—the dullest man alive, according to Alexander Pope, “that microscope of Wit,/Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit”—thought that Homer wrote “a sequel of songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made for the men and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not connected together in the form of an epic poem till … about 500 years after.” Homer was no longer a genius; he was the work of an editor-collector, perhaps not entirely unlike Professor Bentley himself.

Later microscopes of wit thought there was not even one author, but a string of minor folk-poets whose efforts had been brought together by the great Athenian or even Alexandrian editor-scholars. The Prince of Poets had been dethroned. The scholars had won. And so the nineteenth century was animated by the debates between Analysts and Unitarians, those who thought Homer had been many and those who continued to maintain that he was one great genius.

The argument lasted for over a century, largely because of the sense of vertigo a multiple Homer induced. If Homer was dissolved into a sequence of folk-poets, one of the greatest monuments of Western civilization no longer existed. Nevertheless, these were the preconditions for the great discoveries about Homer made in the early twentieth century by the most brilliant man ever to have loved him.

Milman Parry is a god of Homer studies. No one else has made Homeric realities quite so disturbingly clear. Photographs show what his contemporaries described, a taut, focused head, a man “quiet in manner, incisive in speech, intense in everything he did.” There was nothing precious or elitist about him, and his life and mind ranged widely. For a year he was a poultry farmer. Along with the technicians at the Sound Specialties Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, he was the first to develop a recording apparatus that didn't have to be interrupted every four minutes to change the disk. He took his wife and children with him on his great recording adventures in the Balkans and at night sang songs to them that mimicked and drew on the epic poems he had heard in the day. At Harvard, where he became an assistant professor, he took to washing his huge white dogs in the main drinking-water reservoir for the city, stalking about the campus in a large black hat with “an aura of the Latin quarter” about him, regaling his students with the poetry of Laforgue, Apollinaire, Eliot and e.e. cummings. Supremely multilingual, at home in Serbo-Croat, writing his first articles and papers on Homer in French, this was the man who pulled Homer back from its academic desert into life.

Milman Parry, 1902–1935.

Parry was born in June 1902 and brought up a Quaker in the sunny sterilities of Oakland, California. From that clean, germ-free youth he plunged off into ancient Greek at Berkeley, and while still there, writing the thesis for his master's degree, jumped to the idea that Homer was neither a great poet making these poems from nothing nor a collection of minor folktales somehow strung together, but the combination and fusion of those two ideas: a poet working within a great tradition which had deep roots and multiple sources. The poems were composed by a man standing at the top of a human pyramid. He could not have stood there without the pyramid beneath him, and the pyramid consisted not only of the earlier poets in the tradition but of their audiences too, the whole set of assumptions and expectations in which the poems swam. Homer—try thinking of it as a plural noun—were the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture. At different moments in their evolution, the songs would have sounded different, but there is no need to assume that they would have been cruder or worse. At any one moment the singer is standing on the human pyramid beneath him. Hear them as they should be heard, and you will have the sound and meanings of the distant past in your mind and ear.

Parry was a romantic, who loved the ancientness of the past for itself and for its stark difference from twentieth-century America. The motivations apparent in Keats are in Parry too. For the classical scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, brought up in an elite and aristocratic culture, Homer may have seemed like a contemporary, his words on honor and self-sacrifice to be taken as relevant instructions for the noble life. The only task was to clean Homer up, to make Homer more like them, to classicize him, to rid him of his repetitiveness and his awkward lack of savoir faire, to translate him, as Pope had done, with many delightful felicities overlying the raw Greek.