Why Homer Matters (19 page)

The Shaft Grave Greeks, in this vision, are the people of the blade and the mask, the Trojans of the loom and the embrace. One slices and rejects, the other weaves and holds; but Homer stands beyond and embraces them both. He makes a poem of death that is itself a thing of woven beauty. That is the essential picture of the
Iliad
, a great history cloth, a tapestry of sorrow, in which the noncity is set against the city, where the marginal and contingent confronts the settled and the secure. The poem is hinged to that difference: the loved against the abused, the creative against the destructive forces of life. And the fact of the poem itself is a kind of superweaving, a weaving of severance and weaving into one shining cloth of understanding.

You can find that love of complexity in the Mycenaean halls of the Athens museum. Take, for example, the interlaced spirals on one of the beautiful golden cups, almost certainly a hospitality cup for drinking on shared, ritual occasions. Its decoration dramatizes those moments. The spirals are formed into upper and lower bands. Trace individual lines in the patterns, and you will find that the spirals in one set of lines roll from right to left, those in the other from left to right. Each tightens into a knot, meets its opposite there and then spirals out and onto the next encounter. At the same time lines from each band reach out and intertwine with lines from the bands above and below.

This is a culture entranced with the meeting, engaging, twisting, intertwisting and emerging of different cross-currents. Spirals are everywhere, in the gravestones showing spearmen in chariots hurtling into battle, on pots and on architectural masonry, on the beautifully chiseled platforms for the thrones of Mycenaean kings, on a golden breastplate bubbling with the swirl of life. The spirals might be taken as abstractions of the waves of the sea, but they are more than that: a recognition that this pattern of bind-and-release, alternating connectedness and separateness, is intimate with the nature of existence, of the thinking mind, the experiencing heart, the world that weaves and severs.

In book 14 of the
Iliad
, as deep trouble is afflicting the Greeks, Nestor, the old king of Pylos, stands outside his own shelter in the Greek camp and looks dazed at the confusion around him.

As when the open sea is deeply stirred by the ground-swell

But stays in one place and awaits the rapid onset of tearing

Gusts, not rolling its surf onward in either direction

Until Zeus drives the wind down to decide it:

So the old man ponders, his mind caught between two courses.

That is as near as poetry could get to what archaeologists call the “antithetical spirals” that colonize such large areas of Mycenaean decoration and thought: dynamic, self-interlacing, not fixed but entranced by the very concepts of mobility, complexity and dynamism.

But there is a delicate and fluttering sensibility here too. In Grave III, where Schliemann found the remains of three women and two children, crowned with the most astonishing sun-embossed diadems of gold foil, their dresses scattered like spring meadows with gold roundels and flowers, he also found a set of impossibly flimsy golden scales, the bar from which the two pans hung made of foil so thin that anything more than the weight of a butterfly would have bent it. And on those scales, the Mycenaean craftsmen had impressed into the metal precisely that: fat-bodied butterflies, their wings fitting the scales on which they rested.

All this makes one thing clear: there is no need to assume that this early, prepalatial
Iliad
was some kind of brutalist crudity of bloodlust and violence, indifferent to the subtleties of moral atmosphere that are part of the deep weave of the poems. The early
Iliad
was as alert to irony, tragedy, poignancy and humanity as the
Iliad
we know. As Emily Vermeule once told a gathering of American classicists:

Philologists often dislike, and reject, the idea that the early
Iliad
was good, and so beloved that great poetic effort and training were devoted to conserving it with all its archaisms and outmoded armor. They often prefer a late genius Homer who unified the design and gave new subtlety to the characters. This is because we still like to believe in progress, and that each generation somehow improves over the one before it; so, Homer should be as close to the civilized and lovable Us as we can make him, not some primitive singer of the remotest past … [But] poetically and archaeologically, early is not always the same as primitive.

Look, for example, at the two most pitiful and most fully realized deaths in the
Iliad
, those of Achilles's dear friend Patroclus and of Hector, the champion of Troy. The same lines are given to their moment of dying, and only to them.

He speaks, and as he speaks the end of death closes in upon him,

And the soul, fluttering free of his limbs, goes down into Death's house

Mourning its destiny, leaving behind its youth and manhood.

The Greek of those lines is as ancient as any in Homer, and yet they are also among the most poignant. The little soul leaves with nothing but regret. Death is not a release into beautiful immateriality but an expulsion from vivid life. Death is exile from light. The lovely limbs and eyes of Hector and Patroclus are now inert and glazed; the soul is nearly nothing without them.

Later images on Greek pots sometimes show a tiny, mothlike figure, more wing than body, hovering on the head or shoulders of the heroes who just died. Emily Vermeule, in a connection typical of her bright genius, reported an experiment performed by a doctor in Düsseldorf who had placed the beds of his dying patients on extremely sensitive scales, so that he could measure their weight immediately before and after death. The difference, he found, was twenty-one grams, three-quarters of an ounce, the weight of the soul.

How can these objects and images not be evidence of a Homeric sensibility in sixteenth-century
BC
Mycenae? The love-denying mask of Agamemnon; the vision of the mayfly-soul, sadly departing the man in whose body it had found such radiant life; the antithetical interlace of a mind caught between two courses; the presence of tenderness allied in your everyday life to desperate violence.

Again and again in his similes, Homer knows that life is fragile, love suffers hurt and death comes; and that the moments on a hillside in the springtime, when the flowers are emerging in the turf, the sheep are giving milk and what looks like a mist of new leaves is just breathed into the dark of a winter wood, are more precious than any gathering of metal from slaughtered enemies or the rape of their wives.

There is no need to patronize the past or to assume that we somehow have a fineness of moral vision to which the warrior culture of Homer and the Shaft Graves had no access. But can one push on beyond this moment of the early Greeks in Greece? Does Homer have his roots in anything earlier than what can be found at Mycenae? He does. But here the path bifurcates: from Greece and the Aegean, the undoubted setting of the Homeric poems, one road leads north and west into Europe and the borders of Europe and Asia; the other goes south and east toward the great palace civilizations of Crete, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Homer exists at the confluence of those two giant streams; in many ways his subject is what happens when those two streams meet and mingle. Homer
,
often seen as the template from which many later encounters of west and east are drawn, is better understood as the great meeting of north and south, what happens to northern adventurers in a southern world. That meeting lies at the roots of Greek civilization, and stemming from it is much of the later history of Europe.

 

8 • THE METAL HERO

In the Stone Age, before man went in search of metal, you could have picked up nodules and nuggets of copper lying on the surface of the earth or glimmering in the sandbanks of any stream. In some places, like the great copper body at Parys Mountain in Anglesey, copper was so thick in the groundwater that perfect branches, plant stems, leaves and nuts of the metal could be found in the dirt, where the mineral had somehow replaced the organic matter buried there.

All over Eurasia, that native copper was beaten into disks and rosettes, badges and brooches, and occasionally little needle-sharp awls and burins for working leather. In about 8000
BC
in Anatolia, in Syria and northern Mesopotamia, people began to smelt it, the first smiths, magicians of heat and strangeness, drawing the metal out of the ores in which it is usually found. The heat of a pottery kiln is enough to release the metal from its oxides and sulfides, but even so the glowing emergence of a material that stayed flame-bright when cool can only have summoned a kind of awe. It may even be that the Arthurian story of the sword in the stone is a folk-memory of this emergent miracle: gleaming strength drawn from a rock.

From about 5000
BC
, people all over Europe and Asia started hardening the copper, perhaps first by chance, by mixing arsenic with the metal when it was molten. But copper and these copper-arsenic alloys were rather soft, not the revolutionary material that after 3000
BC
would transform Eurasia. Only then did someone, probably in Anatolia, discover that if you added tin to copper, you could produce a metal that not only would take a high shine—a brazen, visual hardness—but was physically hard and could be sharpened to a fierce and lasting edge. This tin-copper alloy was bronze, and it would change the world. There is some tin in Anatolia, but in most places it is rare or absent, and across the bulk of the bronze-making world it had to be imported from elsewhere. Still nobody is certain where that tin for the Bronze revolution came from: perhaps from Bohemia in the Czech Republic, maybe from Cornwall, but more likely from Afghanistan. Whatever the origins of the tin, travel and connection become central to the culture of Europe. For the first time in the European Bronze Age (2500 to 800
BC
), the exotic became desirable and the distant prestigious. It became a world of interconnectedness, a culture founded on mobility, with ideas, beliefs and ways of life all traveling along the seaways and river routes of Europe and western Asia.

“The broad picture,” as the Bristol archaeologist Richard Harrison has written, “is of a continent with an imaginative map of itself that knew, through objects from faraway places, that other worlds existed and that they shared values as well as objects.” A necklace of Baltic amber, found in a grave in Wiltshire in England, was made of beads shaped in Mycenae. The Nebra sky disk, found in central Germany, was made of Austrian copper, Cornish tin and Cornish gold. A Bronze Age wreck off the south coast of Devon carried a Sicilian sword. A piece of amber has been found at Bernstorf in Bavaria, inscribed with a word written in Linear B, the Greek spoken in Mycenae, along with gold diadems that resemble those from Mycenae itself. Afghan lapis lazuli appears in Greek graves. Folding chairs in Danish graves were made on patterns that recur in Greece and in Egypt.

Were these movements of things accompanied by people? Or was it only that objects were passed from hand to hand across Europe? Shipwrights in Bronze Age Scandinavia made craft that bear a striking resemblance to Greek prototypes. Carvings of otterlike animals on some Swedish tombs look very like the creatures engraved on Mycenaean signet rings. How did those ideas get there? Did Bronze Age Greeks actually make their way to Denmark?

The teeth of an early Bronze Age man who was buried not far from Stonehenge in southern England bear trace elements that show he grew up somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Near him another man was buried, his relative, perhaps his son, with the same slightly faulty bone structure in his feet, whose teeth revealed that he had grown up in southern England. Cross-continental journeys were certainly possible in the Bronze Age, but was the whole of this proto-Europe alive with adventurers and travelers? Or people whose journeys were not of their own volition? Chemical analysis of the teeth enamel from twenty-four people roughly buried in a series of late Bronze Age pits at Cliffsend in Thanet in northeast Kent, from around 1000
BC
, shows an extraordinary set of international origins. Just over a third were from Kent (strontium and oxygen isotopes in drinking water carry unique chemical signatures), another third from southern Norway or Sweden, a fifth from the western Mediterranean and the rest undetermined. Many of these people left their birthplaces when they were children between three and twelve years old. One old woman buried in Thanet was born in Scandinavia, moved to Scotland as a child and at the end of a long life finished up in Kent. Almost certainly these people were slaves.

Certain clusters of human genes (the haplogroup E3bIa2), which have their heartland in the copper-mining districts of Albania and are found in the people living there now, rarely appear elsewhere in Europe, except in two specific concentrations: one in the modern inhabitants of Galicia in northwest Spain, the other in the people of northwest Wales, both important centers of copper mining in the early Bronze Age. It seems inescapable that these genes are the living memories of Bronze Age people traveling the width of a continent to exploit the magical metal.

Bronze began to transform the Near East and to have its effect in China, the Indus Valley and the Aegean. Troy, on the far northern edge of that urban belt, became a trading city, controlling routes to the north. City-states emerged, along with writing, bureaucracies, specialist traders and central authoritarian government. Woven textiles were traded up into the Caucasus in return for copper from increasingly well-developed mines. In a belt that stretched east across the Asian continent, and of which Troy and the beautiful cities visited by Odysseus are the emblem and embodiment, urban civilizations emerged.

At the same moment, but farther north, the new metal had an equally powerful effect on human history. A different, nonurban Bronze-based culture emerged. A cluster of economic, social, military and psychological changes came about in a wide swath of country which stretched from the steppelands around the Caspian Sea through the Balkans and on into northern Europe. These changes created the civilization of which Achilles is the symbol: not a city world but a warrior elite, ferociously male in its focus, with male gods and a cultivation of violence, with no great attention paid to dwellings or public buildings, but a fascination with weaponry, speed and violence. The heroes of this warrior world were not the bureaucrats of the cities farther south, or the wall builders, or the defenders of the gates, but men for whom their individuality was commemorated in large single burials, often under prominent mounds, on highly visible places among the grazing grounds cleared for their herds. Meat mattered in this warrior world, largely as a symbol of portable wealth when on the hoof and as the material for feasting when dead and cooked.