Why Homer Matters (23 page)

Only because Homer survives can you understand entirely what the Iberian symbols hint at. Like the many-ringed shields of Extremadura, Achilles's shield has a threefold rim, and there are five layers to the shield, all constructed within its governing circularity: the earth and heaven, sea, sun and moon at the full, all the famous stars, marriages and feasts, dancing men, with flutes and lyres playing, an argument over the blood-price payable for the victim of a murder, with wives and little children standing on the walls of a besieged city. Fate herself appears here in a robe that is “red with the blood of men,” but this is neither a sentimental nor a tragic vision of the world: everything is here, plowlands and cornlands, harvest and sacrifice, “fruit in wicker baskets” and a dancing floor, like the one at Knossos in Crete, with young men and women together. In bronze, tin, silver and gold Hephaestus made a depiction of the whole world of sorrow and happiness, of justice and injustice, fertility and pain, war and peace. Many shields in Homer are described as “the perfect circle”—a visual signal which confronts the sharp, narrow insertion of the blade. Even the Greek word for a shield,
aspis
, means the smooth thing, the thing from which roughness has been smoothed away. Achilles's shield is only the most perfect. In Homer, as in Extremadura, the shield is the encompassing symbol of the warrior king.

Then come the weapons: sword, spear, dagger, bow and arrow, very occasionally a quiver and almost invariably a chariot, with the horses attached, their bodies shown in profile, the chariot in plan, drawn like this in Portugal and Spain, but also, extraordinarily, appearing in the same way on the Bronze Age rock carvings of southern Sweden.

The weapons are the necessary instruments of the martial life, the tools for establishing central aspects of the hero complex: maleness, heroic individuality and dominance. It is what comes next that reorientates any flat-footed view of Bronze Age warrior heroism. These killer chieftains were obsessed with male beauty. The great Greek heroes all have blond hair (unlike the Trojans, who are dark-haired), and they have lots of it, lustrous, thick hair being an essential quality of the hero. Achilles had hair long enough for Athene to grab him by it when she wanted him to stop attacking Agamemnon. Hector's hair, after his death, lay spread around him in the dust. Paris, the most beautiful of all warriors in the
Iliad
—too beautiful—so rich and thick was his hair that he looked like a horse, “who held his head high and his mane streamed round his shoulders.” The male gods are just as thickly maned. And the beauty of the warrior chiefs is inseparable from their power as men.

All of this appears on the stelae of the Iberian chiefs. Beyond their weaponry, carefully picked out on their memorial slabs, appears all the necessary grooming and beauty equipment: mirrors, combs, razors, tweezers, brooches, earrings, finger rings and bracelets. These accessories of male beauty are not consigned to some private preparatory ritual. Making the Bronze Age warrior beautiful is central to the idea he had of himself. Here is the handsome gang leader, made more handsome by what he wears and how his body is prepared for its appearance among men. None of this culture would be possible without the bronze blades, but those blades are not its destination; they are the means to reach what these other precious objects describe: the mirror for a powerfully present idea of the self; the comb for grooming the beautiful hair; tweezers more likely to pluck an eyebrow than to take a splinter from flesh; brooches, earrings, rings and bracelets to adorn the beautiful man. When the river gods of the Trojan plain wish to attack and destroy Achilles as he is on his rampage, clogging their streams with the slaughtered dead, one says to the other in encouragement: “His strength can do nothing for him, nor his beauty, nor his wonderful armor.” Beauty is one of the elements that make him the most terrifying of men. The mirror, the comb and the tweezers are also instruments of Bronze Age war.

There is another detail that recurs on many stones, almost the only exception to the otherwise crude depiction of the heroes' bodies. Time and again, the fingers of the warrior-hero's hands are shown outstretched, explicit and bigger than-life-size. His hands seem to matter more than any other part of his body, perhaps because they were the part of him with which he imposed his power on the world around him. The hand is the agent of the burning warrior self, the essential instrument of the weapon-wielding man. That is also the role played by hands in the Homeric epics. Both Hector and Achilles have “manslaughtering hands,” and it is Odysseus's hands that are steeped in blood as he exacts his final revenge on the suitors. It is as if the hands had concentrated in them all the destructive power of the warrior-hero. And when, in the
Iliad
's culminating scene of mutual accommodation, Priam, the king of Troy, comes to Achilles in the Greek camp, it is through the hands that the drama is played out: “Great Priam entered in and, coming close, clasped Achilles's knees in his hands and kissed his hands, the terrible man-slaughtering hands that had slaughtered his many sons.”

Homer rings those repetitions like clanging bells at moments of intensity and high purpose. And here, the word “hand” continues to boom on through the meeting. Achilles hears Priam's plea for the body of his precious son Hector to be returned to him for burial. That pleading love of the father makes him think of his own distant father in Phthia. Priam's words “roused in Achilles a desire to weep for his father; and he took the old man by the hand, and pushed him gently away. So the two of them thought of their dead and wept.” And again, when they had finished weeping, Achilles “took Priam by the hand” and spoke to him words of pity and shared understanding of the pain men suffer in a careless world. The outstretched fingers of the Iberian warriors also carry all that love and violence within them.

There is one further object that binds Homer and the Extremaduran stelae. On one stone after another, alongside the killing equipment and the beauty equipment, is something at the heart of the Bronze Age warrior world: the lyre. Some lyres are drawn many-stringed; a few are as large as the giant universe-shields; on many stelae, the lyre is shown as no more than a simple frame with two or three strings across it. But all of them signify the same thing: here is the instrument with which this warrior can sing heroic songs of deathless glory. The weapon, the beauty equipment and the lyre are all integral to his world. He exists in memory; in some ways he exists
for
memory. Just as Odysseus sings the tale of his own adventures when he finds himself at dinner with the king and queen of the Phaeacians, Achilles is a man who sings heroic songs of deathless glory. That is how the other heroes find him when in book 9 of the
Iliad
they come to his shelter, hoping to persuade him to rejoin the battle.

And they come to the huts and the ships of the Myrmidons [Achilles's men] and they find. Achilles delighting his mind with a clear-toned lyre, fair and elaborate, and on it is a bridge of silver; this he took from the spoil when he destroyed the city of Eëtion. With it he is delighting his heart, and he sings of the glorious deeds of men; and Patroclus alone sits opposite him in silence, waiting until Aeacus's grandson should cease from singing.

Like Glaucus's account of generations of men following each other, just as spring leaves follow the leaves that had fallen in the autumn before, this is a moment when the passage of Homeric time stops for a second and when, in its privacy and lovingness, the world of brutality withdraws with the help of a lyre. That is what the presence of the lyres on the Spanish stelae says: not only is Homer
about
the heroic world; Homer
is
the heroic world. It is the realm of gang violence, in which pity and poetry have a central place.

If there were any doubt that song was a central part of the warrior complex, a discovery in one of the remotest parts of northwest Europe in the summer of 2012 changed all that. Archaeologists working in the High Pasture Cave on Skye found the burned and broken remains of the bridge from a late Bronze Age lyre. Homer—or at least the forms of warrior song on which the deepest elements of Homer draw—was a universal presence across the whole of Bronze Age Europe.

The Iberian stones might be seen as a kind of heraldry, the symbol-cluster for an armed knight. But they are also the first European biographies: he drove a chariot, strung a bow and killed with it, wielded spear and sword, held the shield, was beautiful and generous, lived here, sang his song. It seems from the distribution of the stelae that each warrior territory was no more than about twenty-five miles across. Seen as a kingdom, that is exceptionally small. But seen as an assertion over the landscape by a single powerful individual controlling about 270,000 acres, it is impressive. These are not petty empires but great estates. They are gang territories, equivalent to the “kingdoms” described in the Homeric catalog of ships. Nowhere are there any great buildings or constructions. All focus is on the power-body of the chieftain. His men cluster around him. His individual destiny is bound up with theirs and with the fate of the kingdom. It seems unlikely that many of these “kingdoms” outlasted the life of the man who made them. It is a place of endless, repetitive violence and competition, in which “who your father was” is important, but not enough. Honor must be revalidated in each generation. An unused sword rusts in the scabbard, and, as Glaucus said, each life can only follow the ones that came before, like the generations of the leaves.

Some of the stelae show that story. One of the richest is now in the Museo Arqueologico Provincial in Córdoba. It was found in April 1968 by some farmworkers at the foot of an ancient wall, a good block nearly six feet high and about thirty inches wide. They hauled it onto their tractor, carelessly smashing the sides and scratching the face of the stele, and took it to the nearby estate of Gamarrillas, thinking it might be good for building stone. But they noticed the engravings on one of its faces. By chance some archaeologists working nearby saw it for what it was and saved it.

A huge warrior figure dominates the scene, with outstretched hands and his penis hanging beneath him. He has a bracelet on one arm, and his whole torso is decorated with what might be a patterned cloth, his armor or maybe a whole-body tattoo. Even like this, scratched into limestone, he radiates significance. Of his chieftainliness there is no doubt. There is a little brooch next to his head, and his fighting equipment is gathered in the spaces around him: a spear, a shield, and a sword in his right hand, still in its scabbard. Beneath him is a comb, a shield and what may be a woven carpet. This is how he was in the glory of his life. But this stone also records his death. He is accompanied by his hunting dogs, both visibly male, and by his chariot. Around them groups of mourners hold hands, maybe dancing. There are no faces. All is in the body. This is a life that was lived and is now over. But for all that, an atmosphere of Homeric transience is soaked deeply into these little figures. Like the epic poems, this stone is a regretful glance back to a wonderful past, which, like the man, is gone.

Most of the stelae were thrown down, taken away and dumped after they were set up. Others were deliberately effaced. But that should come as no surprise in a world of constantly shifting chiefdoms, a power-churn where no glory lasted more than a generation or two. The same circumstances that gave rise to the stelae, to the warrior complex of which they are such vivid testimony, would also guarantee their destruction. Like the weaponry, the killing, the grooming, the insistent body-focus and the presence of the lyres, this delight in the destruction of the enemy is everywhere in Homer too, above all in the exulting over the corpse of a defeated enemy.

When one hero kills another in Homer, there is no grief or sympathy across the divide. It is a moment of triumph, when maleness achieves its undiluted self-expression. In book 11 of the
Iliad
, as one example, Odysseus is on his destruction-drive and fixes his spear into the back of a Trojan called Sokos, thrusting it straight in between the shoulder blades, so that the point comes out of Sokos's chest. The Trojan then thumps to the ground—
doupeo
—and Odysseus stands over the dead body.

Ah Sokos, son of battle-minded Hippasos, breaker of horses, death has been too quick for you and ran you down; you couldn't avoid it, could you, poor wretch? Your father and oh-so elegant mother will not close your eyes in death now, but the birds that eat raw flesh will tear you in strips, beating their wings thick and fast about you; but to me, if I die, the brilliant Achaeans will bury me in honor.

There is no pity in this. The destruction Odysseus celebrates is wonderful to him. Nothing is more beautiful than the sight of Sokos's dead eyes staring at the sky. Odysseus is happy at the dreadfulness he has done to that man and his now-grieving family. He has destroyed the power of that dynasty and enhanced his own. There is no sense of tragedy. He has merely defaced their memory. Their stone is down and gone; his remains upright, triumphant, crowing.

Richard Harrison has emphasized the loneliness which this ideology imposed on the warrior hero. “He is a unique and isolated figure,” Harrison has written,

whose arm is strong and deadly; he is devoted to combat, which he actively seeks out; he is detached from ordinary social space and so is shown to be tremendously swift, able to cross time or distance between worlds; and he is a very dangerous person in society and is therefore much better detached from it and sent away on a quest where he cannot harm ordinary mortals.

That loneliness clearly attached to Hector; to Agamemnon in his pomposity, his distance from love; to Odysseus on his journeying; even to Paris, the loathed creator of the war. Heroism disconnects. And the loneliness applies to no one more than to Achilles, as profoundly isolated as any figure in world literature. In his great and terrible confrontation with Hector in book 22 of the
Iliad
, after Hector has killed Achilles's great friend Patroclus, Achilles makes the ultimate statement of heroic loneliness, the isolation of the warrior which is also the dominant image on the Iberian stelae: a big man surrounded by his things, very occasionally by some mourners or even cowarriors, but essentially alone, trapped in the glory of his violence. “Hector, you, the unforgivable, talk not to me of agreements,” he says, using the word
agoreue
for “talk,” the word used in the
agora
, the meeting place where citizens come to mutual accommodation. Achilles does not belong there; he belongs in the wild.