Why Homer Matters (24 page)

There are no oaths sworn between lions and men, nor do wolves and lambs come to some arrangement in their hearts. They are filled with endless, repetitive hate for each other. Just so, it is impossible for you and me to be friends, nor will there be any oaths between us till one or other is dead, and has glutted Ares, the god of war, who carries his tough leather shield, with his blood.

In Celtic Ireland, on the far western edge of this hero world, where round, ridged leather shields have been dug from Bronze Age bogs, stories from the heroic age have been recorded in which “the heroes gave orders that they should be buried standing upright, fully armed on a prominent hill, where they could face their enemy, awaiting the moment of resurrection when they would fight again and by this means continue to protect their people.” Those same upright warriors, continuing to haunt the living world, as enraged and violent as they were in life, also appear in the Icelandic sagas. Perhaps these are stories of the ultimate, cosmic loneliness, a measure of the inadequacy of the heroic idea, which only that weaponless, hand-connecting moment between Priam and Achilles could hope to assuage.

 

9 • HOMER ON THE STEPPES

The origins of the Greeks—or at least those people who would in time become the Greeks—were not in the Mediterranean. At some point they moved south and west in search of lands they wanted to claim as theirs, but at the deepest levels they were strangers in the southern sea. Fundamentally they were northerners, their roots in the steppelands of Eurasia, the oceanic river of grass, five thousand miles long and up to a thousand wide, that runs from Hungary to Manchuria.

Homer is full of half-buried memories of that northern past, and his recollections hint at another non-Mediterranean world, far from water, far from cities, landlocked, dominated by an enormous sky, horse-rich, focused on flocks and herds and the meat they provide, violent, mobile and heroic. This steppe-world is the place from which Achilles comes. It is not the Homeric foreground, because Homer is inconceivable without sailing ships, cities and the sea—without everything bound up in the name of “Troy”: civilization, the seaborne raid, the connection to the East—but that other northern place lurks as a kind of murmured, ancestral layer, a subconscious.

The dates are hazy, but the Greeks may have come to Greece at some time between about 2200 and 1700
BC
. Their origins are obscure. It is possible that the last move was south from Albania. There are early graves both there and in northwest Greece that look as if they might record the movement of people who would soon be in the Peloponnese. In the way the graves are built, and from the objects they contain, they seem to be the precursors of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Before that, the Greeks, or the pre-Greeks, may have lived on the banks of the Danube or elsewhere in the Balkans. And before that they almost certainly lived farther to the east, perhaps in the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian, in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia.

Nothing is certain, and the hints are fragmentary at best. But if you withdraw a little, and look not for exactness but for the broad northern culture-world out of which the Greeks emerged into Europe, perhaps at some time around 3000
BC
, things become paradoxically clearer. Clues are everywhere: in the language itself, in archaeology, in the words of the Homeric poems and in the echoes of those poems that can be found all across the Eurasian world.

*   *   *

Right in the middle of the
Odyssey
, when Odysseus has penetrated to the depths of Hades and is talking there, anxiously and intently, to the blind seer Tiresias, long dead, he asks him about his own future, what will become of him. Tiresias knows that Odysseus is longing for nothing more than “a sweet smooth journey home,” but, instead of guidance, he tells him the story of the books of the
Odyssey
still to come, the sufferings and anxieties he will undergo, the “world of pain” he will find in Ithaca. And then the old seer says something else, strange for classical Greeks, enigmatic today.

Once Odysseus has killed the suitors in his palace, Tiresias says, he will not yet have arrived home. For his true homecoming, he must leave Ithaca again and begin a second odyssey, not a sea journey this time but on land, another voyage in search of peace.

You must go out one more time.

Carry your well-planed oar until you come

To a race of people who know nothing of the sea,

Whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers

To ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,

The wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign—

Unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it:

When another traveller falls in with you and calls

That weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,

Then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth

And sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,

Poseidon.

Only then, in that sea-free place, will Odysseus's demons be stilled and the uncertainties that have haunted his life laid to rest. That northern winnowing scene is a dream of home.

Tiresias goes on: once Odysseus has appeased the power of Poseidon, he should turn to the immortal gods, “who hold broad heaven in their hands.” He should relinquish sea for sky. And only after that sky world has embraced him will Odysseus be able to die “in the ebbing time of a sleek old age,” as Richmond Lattimore translated Homer's phrases, the world of the sea eased from his mind, his soul now as calm and reflective as a dark, northern, freshwater pool.

Image-ideas cluster around Tiresias's gnomic instruction. The oar becomes the winnowing fan, the sea becomes the earth, the wind, which would have driven Odysseus's ship across the sea or nearly destroyed him on his raft, becomes the breeze that sorts the grain from the chaff, as each fanful is thrown up and the lighter dust blown away. The Greek word for the winnowing fan is
athereloigos
, meaning the “destroyer of bristles” (
ath
ē
r
, plural
atheres
), the husky sheaths of the grain. But
ath
ē
r
can also mean anything difficult or prickly: the spines of a fish or the barbs of a weapon. So the winnowing fan is also a smoother of barbs, a spike remover, the tailor of life. The grains will emerge clean and pure, and the jagged world of hostility will float off on the breeze. Only here, deep in the land, will certainty be recovered. Poseidon, the god of wrongness whose origins, at least in part, are Mediterranean, as the great defender of Troy and enemy of Odysseus, the presider over storms and earthquakes, who has dominated the poems and been at the heart of their sufferings, will at last be put in his place.

Is there some historical root to this moment? Are Tiresias's words a form of archaic memory, fueled by the idea that somewhere in the world, a long way from Greece, is a place where the troubles that afflict Odysseus and the Greeks do not obtain? Where there is no sea, nor even any hint of the sea, and which is not subject to the near constant sequence of earthquakes and tempests that besiege and break on Greece and Anatolia? Is Tiresias reaching far back to a time when the Greeks did not yet know Greece but were living the life of seminomadic pastoralists, planting their grains, tending their flocks, ignorant of salt and ships? Is this, in other words, a kind of retrospective pastoral, a Greek vision of an abandoned Eden? Did life to the Greeks, at some half-acknowledged level, seem better before all the temptations and threats of the Mediterranean life disturbed their certainties? Was the movement south a transition into risk? If it was, Homer is the record of what happened when that risk was taken.

There is another remembered story of Odysseus, not in Homer, but recorded from Sophocles in some rough Latin notes of plays and myths which have otherwise disappeared. Telemachus, Odysseus's son, is one month old when Palamēdēs, a messenger arrives from Agamemnon, instructing Odysseus to come to the war against Troy. Odysseus reacts as Achilles might, skeptically, reluctantly, and to escape the summons pretends to be mad. He takes a donkey and an ox, yokes them together on the same plow, as no man ever has or would, and when he has cut the first furrow he sows it not with seeds but with salt. Palamēdēs doubts Odysseus, and to test him takes the baby Telemachus and puts him down on the unbroken grass in the path of the plow.

As Odysseus approaches his son he turns the plow aside, bending the furrow away from his baby's flesh, and by that swerve shows he is sane. He loves his son more than he loves himself, and so has no choice but to go and suffer at Troy. He takes with him a murderous loathing for Palam
ē
d
ē
s, the clever diplomat. In time Odysseus concocts accusations against him, that he is secretly colluding with the Trojans against the Greeks, and finally stones him to death as a liar and traitor.

It is a suggestive enmity, a twin of Tiresias's promise of a final ease in the distant north. The southerner brings only years of pain. Faced with his invitation, Odysseus sows antiseeds, not fruitful but toxic, not land riches but sea poison, not fecundity but sterility, not northern contentment but southern trouble. Palam
ē
d
ē
s is Mediterranean man, the inventor of counting, money, weights and measures, jokes, dice, military ranks, the letters of the alphabet and the making of wine. He represents everything the south has to offer, including submission to an overall king in Agamemnon. He is, in his slickness, the enemy. Tiresias holds out the possibility of comfort in the north; Palamēdēs promises only southern suffering.

No two worlds could be more different than the grasslands of the steppes north of the Black Sea and the craggy broken boundaries of the Mediterranean. In Greece every view is contained and defined by its mountains. Every place is a shard, sharp-edged, hardened and definite. Boot leather is torn into shreds there. “Our land, compared with what it was,” Plato wrote famously of the Greece he knew, “is like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease. The fat soft parts have gone, and all that remains are the bones.” On the steppe, the bones remain invisible, coated in a pelt of grasses on the high plateaus between the river valleys, thickening into forest and marsh where those rivers make their way to the south. The Mediterranean landscape is fiercely located, subdivided by its mountain ridges, every corner separate from every other. But look across the steppe, and you see only more of what is already at your feet.

Everything is continuous there. The air you breathe is the air of the universe. Horizontality is all, and this is the continental-oceanic, a place that cares less about fixity than movement, less about detail than about the endlessness of things. And if landscapes can create mentalities as well as reflect them, it is possible to think that the steppelands lie at the root of the Achilles frame of mind: long-horizoned; looking for the profound and the eternal; attuned to the cosmic; indifferent to possessions; passionate, totalizing; vertigo-inducing in its relationship to death and fate; both giving and denying significance to human desires and triumphs.

It is possible to think that in the
Iliad
Achilles speaks for that deep northern past. He comes from somewhere else. He is half divine, has no identifiable city and was brought up by a centaur in the mountains. His homeland is farther north than anyone else's in Homer. His story is strangely disconnected from everything else in the
Iliad
; he will be killed before the sack of Troy, he goes off on plundering expeditions all around western Anatolia, and the whole account of recovering Helen would be complete without him.

Achilles does not fit with the world in which he finds himself. He holds himself physically and psychologically removed from the rest of the Greeks. He speaks the truth to them in a way no one else can. He is dense with both love and violence, the two bound together in his heart, his greatest love (for his friend Patroclus) summoning his greatest violence (for his enemy Hector). Those who are close to him adore him; those at a distance both fear and despise him. But his central quality is an inability to conform to what the world around him accepts as real.

In all these ways, Achilles confronts the forces of the sophisticated south and sets himself against them: he cannot tolerate the overarching kingliness of Agamemnon, he scorns the political sophistication and smooth-talking of Odysseus, he despises Hector, and like all warriors he wants to destroy the city. Homer calls him (as he does both Ar
ē
s, the great northern god of war, and Odysseus) “the city destroyer.” And when Achilles attacks the bodies of the Trojans and their horses, the image that Homer brings to mind is not individual death but “the smoke ascending into the wide sky/from a burning city with the anger of the gods let loose upon it.”

Achilles carries a presouthern, preurban, precomplicated world of purity and integrity within him.

He first appears most fully himself—before the lunacy of grief over Patroclus's death transforms him—in the speech he makes to Odysseus in book 9 of the
Iliad
. For days the war has gone badly for the Greeks. Agamemnon has stolen Briseis from Achilles. She is the girl he loves, the “bed-girl of his heart” as he calls her, and because of that theft, imposed by Agamemnon's assumption of greater authority over him, Achilles has withdrawn from the battle, has wished death and violence on the Greeks and has witnessed their catastrophic failure in the war. Now Agamemnon, desperate with the successes of the Trojans, wants to make amends, to offer Achilles not only the return of Briseis but shiploads of prizes and treasures. He sends Odysseus to make the offer, and in reply Achilles states his magnificent, troubling credo.

Just before Odysseus comes to his shelter, Achilles has been singing to Patroclus of the glorious deeds of men, of the heroic past. When he arrives, Achilles does what the hero should, and provides for his guests the meat from fat sheep and fat goats and the meaty backcuts of a great pig “rich with fat.” All is ritualized and made proper, and the scene is one that would have occurred in thousands of chieftains' huts over thousands of years in the grasslands of Eurasia.