Why Homer Matters (26 page)

Grief and triumph; a sense of irony and even tragedy; an overwhelming and dominant masculinity, thick with competitive violence; a small but hierarchical society, strung between a seminomadic way of life and one that was settled in small wooden houses; a vivid background in the natural world; a valuing of cattle and meat; in love with horses; no understanding of the city or of any relationship to the sea—all of that is implicit in the shape of this reconstructed language, and all of it looks very like the background to the world of the Greeks in their camp on the Trojan shore.

But where and when can this world be located? That question is still far from being answered. There is plenty of evidence, but none of it adds up. Language cannot be attached to preliterate archaeological remains, and modern genetic evidence is still too confused for any clear outline to be derived from it.

Nevertheless, it seems clear from the memories embedded in the daughter languages that the Proto-Indo-Europeans came from a place where they could grow crops (or at least harvest wild ones) and maintain herds of grazing animals on extensive pastures. They could not have been desert, mountain or forest people. They did not live in the arid south or the frozen north. There is a word in the original language that might mean beech tree, birch tree or oak tree. And another that might mean salmon, or maybe sea trout, or maybe trout. This looks like a temperate, river-valley existence. But the grazing animals would have required expansive grasslands too. These people have a word for bee, but there are no bees east of the Urals, so they can only have been on the western, European side of those mountains. The presence of many farming words means that they must have been farming before about 2500
BC
, which is thought to be the last possible moment before the original group broke up and scattered across Europe and north Asia.

These clues scarcely pinpoint a region, and people's idea of the ancient homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their
Urheimat
, has wandered all over Eurasia. Originally it was thought to be in Afghanistan, but it has migrated from Bactria to the Baltic, to the Pripiat marshes in Poland, to Hungary and the Carpathians in general. The Nazis, identifying their race-vision with this linguistic category, and preferring the term “Aryan” (the name of an Indo-European people in Iran) to “Indo-European,” located the homeland in Germany. Some still favor Armenia in northwest Anatolia, but a modern consensus has for the time being settled on the steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas.

For the purposes of understanding the roots of the Homeric vision, it doesn't much matter where this notional homeland was. The elements of a river-valley-plus-grazing landscape extend across the whole of the western steppe, from the Danube to the Caucasus and beyond. And fascinatingly, there, in the remains of settlements, and in the burial mounds, or kurgans as they are called in Russia, which decorate the landscape, archaeologists have discovered many objects and signs of life that look distinctly as if Achilles had passed that way.

*   *   *

Of all the steppe-Homer linkages, the most powerful is the horse. It was probably domesticated on the steppe in about 4200
BC
, first as food and then to be ridden. A man on foot in the modern Eurasian steppe can shepherd no more than two hundred sheep; one on a horse can manage a flock of five hundred. It was a revolutionary difference. This early riding was not yet the militarized pastoral nomadism associated with the Scythians or the Mongols. Nothing of that kind would emerge until after 800
BC
, but the speed of the horse, the invention of the bit and the bridle, the control they gave to a rider, the ability to accumulate great reservoirs of meat, to raid and withdraw from pedestrian settlements—all of it changed people's lives and would change history.

The great grasslands of the steppe were now available to a mobile, horse-mounted people in a way no one could have attempted before. Giant flocks were grazed on the giant grasslands. The men who could control them became leaders and chieftains. Mobility and glamor had arrived, and the horse was a version of power that the great men tamed and dominated (both descended from the same Proto-Indo-European root,
demha
). The careful husbandry of the Neolithic farmers was now overlaid with the rush and glamor of horse-based life. The human steppe cultures began to revere the power of the horse, fusing their visions of human power with equine beauty. The word at the root of “equine” means “quick” in Indo-European languages, and the horse and its speed, the ripple and sheen of horse muscle, became central to these people's idea of greatness.

The disconnected limbs of the horses that appear all over later prehistoric Europe, on coins or in hill figures, are the horses seen in this magic, dematerialized way. They are more spirit than body, often with huge, disproportionately alert eyes, their whole being prancing, all curve in their haunches, all muscle in their neck and back, the tension in them not unlike the tension in a ship under sail at sea. Tautness, urgency and stretch are their governing qualities. Here the horse is something like the wind, not dominated by man but coexisting with him, an extension of the possibilities of life.

A first-century
BC
gold coin or “stater” of the Celtic Parisii tribe, near Paris.

Some clues to this world of the horse can be found at a timber town, not that large, about 150 yards across, at a place called Sintashta, on the banks of the wide, gravelly Sintashta River, sweeping down through the grasslands east of the Urals and on the borders of Kazakhstan. A timber-reinforced wall with gates and towers surrounded the buildings, with a V-shaped ditch outside it. Inside there were about fifty houses (some have since been eroded away by the river), and in all of them people had been making bronze and copper swords, knives and axes.

It was clearly a violent, warrior society, with the need for weaponry and a defensive enclosure. In the nearby cemetery, more than half of all the people were buried with weapons, including nearly all the men, but some were also buried alongside something else, quite new: war chariots with light, spoked wheels. They are the oldest chariots to have been discovered, dating from about 2100–1800
BC
, precisely the same moment as this book has been arguing for the genesis of the
Iliad
. The Sintashta people cannot be the ancestors of the Greeks—who must already have been far to the southwest of there—but to archaeologists it looks as if they might have been the ancestors of those Indo-European-speaking people who were making their way east of the Urals and on to northern India.

The Bronze Age White Horse at Uffington, Oxfordshire, England.

Sintashta—and some twenty equivalent settlements have now been found—is a cousin to the Homeric world. Here, as in Patroclus's tomb in the
Iliad
, whole horses were sacrificed at the burials. Drivers were buried with bone, disk-shaped cheekpieces, critical elements in the kind of bridle needed for tight control of chariot horses. There are some flint blades in the graves, which are thought to have been made for javelins—those light spears that can be thrown by a warrior on the ground or from a chariot. The chariots themselves are clearly fast, light war machines, quite different from the heavy transport wagons that had been around on the steppe for a thousand years. These have spoked not solid wheels about three feet in diameter and are designed to be driven at a gallop. The chariot itself would have been skeletal, consisting of little more than a few struts. In the
Iliad
it is possible for one man to pick up a chariot to move it out of the way.

This combination of things is deeply Homeric; chariot races fill the penultimate book of the
Iliad
, at the funeral games Achilles stages for Patroclus, where skill in driving, in turning corners, could only have been achieved with the new cheekpiece bridles. At the same time, it is clear from the funerals of both Hector and Patroclus that these were giant communal events, great crowds of people attending the funerary rites of the heroes. Here too at Sintashta, one burial has the bones of six horses, four cows and two rams killed for the death of the great man. Archaeologists calculated that those animals would have provided two pounds of meat for each of three thousand participants. It so happens that the giant kurgan near this animal feast would have taken, it is thought, three thousand man-days to build, just as in Homer the people of Troy and the men of the Greek camp build for many days the funeral pyres for their fallen heroes. Horses, chariots, bronze weaponry, multiple animal sacrifices, massive meat feasts, chiefdoms, wall-defended camps, huge funeral rituals, spectacular communal displays—the
Iliad
and Sintashta belong to one culture world, and that world is the Indo-European steppe.

One last intriguing element appeared at Sintashta: some great men were clearly celebrated in death and their fame consolidated by a great communal outpouring of love and grief. Glory gathers around these funerals. But in life there is no such distinction visible in the wooden houses at Sintashta, no palaces, no apparent grandeur, no hierarchy in the buildings. Here, then, in Sintashta, were warrior chiefs who loved speed, who loved horses, who loved fame but who were not focused on the riches or comfort of the places in which they lived. They were, in other words, not Agamemnon but Achilles, the choosers of glory in battle, not men who were greedy for possessions. Here in Sintashta were not only the cousins of the Greeks but the world from which Achilles came.

Horses mattered to the Homeric Greeks: both Poseidon and Athene were horse gods, drawing on the power of unpredictability, the horse's muscled body, the possibility they always seem to harbor of violence and suddenness, the fire in the eye. This deep Indo-European horse-experience explains its prominence in Homer. It is an inheritance from the steppelands, which can otherwise seem a little mysterious. No fighting happens on horseback in Homer. It is ships, not horses, that have brought the Greeks to Troy. Chariots are used in battle as little more than taxis. The Trojans are city people on the shores of a strategic waterway from the Aegean to the Black Sea; horse mobility is not at the practical heart of their lives. And yet horses rule in Homer.

Achilles, Nestor and even Odysseus are deeply connected with them. Achilles has a herd with him at Troy. His horses speak and weep. He is at times, in the speed of his running, compared to “a prize-winning horse” himself. And it is one of his own horses, Xanthos, who tells him of his death to come. But it is the Trojans and their allies whose lives are drenched in the image and potency of the horse. The Trojans were Indo-Europeans too, having arrived in Anatolia earlier than the Greeks, and despite their city existence they continued to practice some of the habits of the steppe world from which they had come. They are, as fellow descendants of the steppe, the great horse people of Homer. The finest horses of all belong to the Trojan allies from Thrace, a region which for Homer stretches north from the Aegean with no boundary. Those horses are in effect the spirit of the north, whiter than snow, as fast as the wind, terrible, shining like the sun.

“Breaker of horses” is one of the Trojan epithets. Hector, in one of the most beautiful of all warrior similes in the
Iliad
, is

like a horse that has fed his fill at the manger, who breaks his halter and runs over the plain, wanting to bathe in the fair-flowing river, and feels exultation in his limbs, holding his head high while his mane floats streaming around his shoulders and he glories in his own splendor as he runs to the pastures and the dwelling places of the mares.

The horse is what the hero might dream of being. Aeneas has horses that come from a line bred by Zeus, the great sky god of the north. The Trojans sacrifice live horses in the river Scamander that flows past their walls. And the horse dominates the names of Trojan warriors. Quick Horse, Raid Horse, War Horse, Black Horse and Good Horse all go out to battle for Troy, sounding like a band of Comanches.