Why Homer Matters (18 page)

The mysterious hinges at Pylos and Knossos were, it now seems, the only parts of portable writing tablets that survived the fires that brought the life of those palaces to an end. But the situation those objects describe—writing as the reserve of a specialist minority in royal households; folding tablets in which written messages, unintelligible to the majority of people, could be carried abroad to foreign courts; the tablets stored for keeping in the writing offices of the palace administration—finds a vivid echo in a moment from the
Iliad.

It is the story the Lycian warrior Glaucus tells Diomedes when they meet in battle and Diomedes asks him who his ancestors were. Glaucus's grandfather, he says, was a beautiful young hero called Bellerophon. He was living in Corinth, at the court, when the queen of Corinth fell in love with him. She was originally from Lycia, in western Anatolia, where her father was king. At the sight of Bellerophon she became crazed with lust, but he held her at bay. Her frustration mounted, and she came to the point where if she could not sleep with him she wanted him killed. She went to her husband and told him that Bellerophon had tried to seduce her, to sleep with her against her will. If the king had any dignity at all, he would have him murdered.

The king balked at the idea of performing the killing himself, but instead “he quickly sent him off to Lycia, gave him some fatal tokens, scratching many deadly soul-tormenting signs in a folding wooden tablet, and ordered him to show them to the queen's father, who was king of Lycia, so that he might die.”

Bellerophon, without being able to read it himself, was carrying his own death warrant with him into exile. When he reached Lycia he showed the mysterious signs to the king, who was able to read them, and then subjected him to a series of murderous tests. But Bellerophon behaved so heroically, overcoming every challenge, that he emerged triumphant and came to father three children, one of whom was Glaucus's own father.

The world of this tiny, famous incident is almost Arthurian: its elevation of honor, its secret lusts in palace corridors, its conscious stepping beyond the ethics of the battlefield. It is, in fact, a deeply traditional folktale, elements of it found all across the preserved literatures of the Near East. But what of the writing, those mysterious and dangerous signs? What does this description of writing say about the Homeric moment?

The Greek king could have had something written, presumably by a scribe, but Bellerophon could not read what it was. Writing was something that belonged to royal administration, not to members of the court. The text was also inaccessible to the poet telling the tale, and seems mysterious, half magical to him. The king in Lycia could read it or have it read to him, but still it has the quality of a spell, those many dangerous signs crammed into the folding wooden tablet Bellerophon brought him.

This story is, in other words, an illiterate description of something written, seen more as an object than a message, its means of communication arcane and beyond ordinary understanding. It is a tiny glimpse into the Mycenaean world, profoundly different from both the Greek world after 750
BC
, when ordinary wine drinkers could scratch hexameters into wine cups, and from the Greek world between 1200 and 750, when no one could write at all and there were no palaces or archive rooms within them. The Bellerophon tale, in other words, is the mark of the
Iliad
being at least as old as the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.

But that is far from the end of it. A Mycenaean palace might have been the world in which the
Iliad
—or an
Iliad
—was sung. It is not the world the
Iliad
describes or in which it began. That world, in which a Greek warband confronts a non-Greek city; in which Greek adventurers find themselves at sea in a world of settlement and order, profoundly unlike their own mobile, predatory, unsettled lives; in which they know about gold and weaponry and fine things but look on palaces and cities as belonging to others—that world can only have been earlier.

Clues to these ancient ghostly layers are everywhere in Homer. As the great American archaeologist of the Bronze Age world, Emily Vermeule, professor of archaeology at Harvard, said of the Homer she loved, deep tradition “floats all through the songs as dust through air.” About 20 percent of the whole of Homer looks as if it was originally composed in a Greek that was earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets, that is, before 1400
BC
. That antiquity can be seen above all in the way what are called preverbs relate to the verbs they modify. In Linear B, as in later classical Greek, a phrase the equivalent of “the situation described earlier” might be written as “the aforementioned case.” In Homer (and in other early languages of the Indo-European family) it often takes the form of “the afore case mentioned.” The preverb floats free of the verb. A “predetermined outcome” can in Homer, but not in later Greek, be a “pre outcome determined.” This small clue makes it clear that Homeric Greek is in many parts earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets.

It has long been a puzzle to Homeric scholars that some lines in Homer don't scan properly. But they can be made to scan if you assume that certain words had another letter in them: the
digamma
or
wau
, which was pronounced like the English
w
, and which had mostly disappeared by the time of the Linear B tablets, and is absent from the text of Homer as it has been preserved. Agamemnon is
anax andrōn
(the lord of men) in the text that has survived; the phrase only scans if you assume that it was originally
wanax andrōn.
The Greek for wine is
oinos
, but its original form is more familiar:
woinos
. These words that only work in their early form include the descriptions of the giant man-encircling shield carried into battle by Ajax. That kind of shield had been replaced by a little round shield as early as the fourteenth century
BC
, but the Iliadic words that had originally accompanied it survived in epic. Battle equipment, word-form and verse-form all point in the same direction: Homer's foundations are in prepalatial antiquity, a poem stretching at least as far back as the seventeenth century
BC
.

*   *   *

That is the evidence in the language, but archaeology feeds into this too, nowhere more spectacularly than in the objects discovered in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Go to the beautiful halls of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens—make it midweek in midwinter, and you will have them entirely to yourself—and what you will find there is an electrifying encounter with the past. The Shaft Grave treasures are from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries
BC
. The dead and their possessions were laid on the floor of a deep shaft, which was then roofed over and a mound built above it. They are from the time before any great fortresses or palaces were built in mainland Greece. The famous gates and ramparts at Mycenae and at Tiryns are all later. The blazingly rich objects in the graves come from a Greek warrior world, where all value was to be found in the glory of the individual body and its accoutrements. This is an essentially mobile world, in love with horses, chariots, ships, weaponry, hunting, adornment, beauty, gold and song. The people in the graves were undoubtedly entranced by the contemporary richness and glamor of the Minoan civilization in Crete and the almost unimaginable wealth of Egypt. Evidence of borrowings—or thefts—from those cultures is everywhere in the grave goods. But the Shaft Grave world was not yet palatial. From all the evidence found by more than a century's intensive archaeology, it was the bodies of the great, not the city of Mycenae in the sixteenth century
BC
, that were rich in gold. These kings and queens must have rustled with gold, jangled with it as it hung from their ears and wrists, amazed onlookers with it, standing before them in high, pointed diadems and perfect, imperishable gold foil.

This body-enriched but monumentless life is strikingly like the world of the Greek warriors in the
Iliad
. When the German businessman and romantic Heinrich Schliemann first dug into the Mycenae graves in the wet autumn of 1876, he wrote to his friend Max Müller, describing how he was reduced to
weighing
what he was finding.

There are in all five tombs, in the smallest of which I found yesterday the bones of a man and woman covered by at least five kilograms of jewels of pure gold, with the most wonderful, impressed ornaments; even the smallest leaf is covered with them. To make only a superficial description of the treasure would require more than a week. Today I emptied the tomb and still gathered there more than 6/10 kilograms of beautifully ornamented gold leafs … I telegraphed today to
The Times
.

It is held up as one of Schliemann's great errors that he identified the warriors he found in those graves with the Homeric heroes. It is still thought to have been the crassest of his anachronisms, since the orthodoxy continues to think, as the classical Greeks did, that the Trojan War was fought in around 1200
BC
, and that the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are at least 350 years too early to have had anything to do with that war. But that dating has nothing to secure it beyond the guesses made by the classical Greeks. Evidence of destruction at Troy itself has been found at a series of archaeological horizons from 2200
BC
to 1180
BC
. Any one of them might have been the war of the
Iliad
, except for this one reason: Homer in the
Iliad
describes the Greeks as a prepalatial warrior culture, very like the world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Greeks as seen in the
Odyssey
, which in these lights can only be the later poem, colored by the great period of Mycenaean palaces, have clearly begun to adopt the habits and structures of the Near Eastern palace culture. Nothing of that, though, appears in the
Iliad
. There is certainly no better reason to associate Homer with the Troy of about 1200
BC
than with a city many centuries earlier.

And so this book, like Schliemann, has a different suggestion to make: the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are contemporary with, or probably slightly later than, the deepest levels of the Homeric poems. The objects in the graves are their own best evidence of a pre-urban, marginal, heroic world whose inhabitants look very like the people Homer portrayed.

The faces on which Schliemann stumbled are the faces of men as they are found in the
Iliad
. The usual image of the most famous mask, with the ears laid out to the side, gives the wrong impression, reducing the severity it intends. As you can see from the creases in the gold, those ears, much of the beard and the upper rim of the mask should be folded away from the face, leaving the features naked and prominent.

It is a battle face, not a portrait of an individual but the face of the warrior king: brutal, excluding and potent, as intense as any Renaissance inquisitor, nothing more resolute than that wide, closed mouth and the jaw gripped behind it. It is the face-helmet of fixed glory. Stare into its rebarbative blankness, appeal to it, and it will not respond. Its gold shines; it does not care. It can hurt, but you cannot hurt it. Here is Agamemnon in his
aristeia
, his power-drive toward supremacy, his best moment, his excellence, his moment of prowess. And in that focus of power his strange, coffee-bean eyes can be seen as either closed in self-absorption and self-regard or slitted in concentration. There is vanity here—his mustache tips are just tweaked upward; a little sprig of hair grows just below the lower lip—but at root this face is the pitilessness of dominance.

Hold that face in mind and read Agamemnon's demeanor in book 11 of the
Iliad
as he wades through “the slayers and the slain.” Under his violence, men fall like trees under a woodman's ax. He drives his spear through a Trojan's forehead, “and the spear is not stopped by the helmet, heavy with bronze, but passes through it and through the bone, and all the brain is splashed inside.” The next man is speared in the chest “by the nipple,” and the third killed with a sword-cut close to the ear. The next two, brothers, beg Agamemnon not to kill them. They speak to him “weeping, with gentle words,” offering him bronze and gold and iron from their father's house, but “ungentle is the voice they hear,”
ameiliktos
, meaning “unsoothed,” the opposite of “darling.” He stabs one of the boys in the chest and slices off the arms and then the head of the other with his sword, the head rolling through the surrounding crowds of warriors like a round stone. Agamemnon is a fire in the forest and a lion in the mountains. His hands are spattered with the filth of blood. The chariots of those he has killed run driverless through the battlefield, the horses “longing for their incomparable charioteers,” but those men are now lying on the earth, “more loved by the vultures than by their wives.”

Every Trojan warrior stands away from Agamemnon, trembling like a hind that sees a lion devouring her young and can do nothing to protect them. Agamemnon is that lion, eating the inward parts of those he kills. He kills a man, Iphidamas, just married, whose wife would now have “no joy of him,” and then, in a frenzy of repetition, Iphidamas's brother, whose head Agamemnon cuts from his body with his sword. It has been a fiesta of severance, a destruction of human beings, but more than that, a destruction of human bonds. Agamemnon is edge-honed violence, his victims essentially their ligatures and sinews. It is the meeting of blade and connective tissue.

Only when wounded in the arm does Agamemnon withdraw from his unforgiving crusade. As his wound begins to dry, pain starts to afflict him: “And just as when the sharp pain strikes a woman in labour, the piercing dart sent by the bitter goddesses of childbirth, so sharp pains break in on the strength of Agamemnon.” Those words are a measure of the grace and wisdom of this beautiful and terrifying poem. The pain suffered by the unforgiving agent of death and termination is like the pain of a woman as she gives birth to new life. What Agamemnon has done is to cut the connections between men and their fathers, men and their brothers, men and their wives, even men and their horses. But as his comparator for that slicing away of meaning, Homer summons the agony of childbirth, the root connectedness of humanity.