Why Homer Matters (27 page)

This is the shared horse-matrix out of the north that allowed the Greeks to imagine the best thing they could give the Trojans, the one irresistible gift which that city could not refuse. The Trojans would surely see it as a gift from Poseidon Hippios, their great horse-god protector, the wall maker: a wooden horse that looked like a fortress itself. It took one to know one; the great unifying and shared belief of these two cultures was the giant creature they both feared and revered. It does not appear in the
Iliad
; Homer's great war poem stops short of that moment. Only in the
Odyssey
, in retrospect, is the tale told, twice, each time slightly different, each immersed in tenderness and sorrow.

First Menelaus, the husband of Helen, the aggrieved man from whom Paris stole his wife and thus began the war, tells Telemachus, Odysseus's son, what happened. It was a trick, a hollow ambush, a mark of Odysseus's cleverness, the product of his “dear, steadfast heart.” But as Menelaus tells the tale, he remembers only his wife's enigmatic and mysteriously intimate behavior. The Trojans have hauled the horse into the city, and at night Helen walks around it. It is a thickly sexualized moment; she is close up to the body of the horse, touching it with the tips of her fingers, murmuring gently through the timbers to what she guesses must be the Greeks inside, speaking to each of them in the voice of the wives they have left behind, like a sorceress becoming one by one their loved and longed-for women away in Greece. What multiple treachery is this? The Greeks are there to cheat the Trojans. Only for Menelaus is the voice truly of his wife, but she is the wife who betrayed him. Is this intimacy now an attempt to betray them all again?

Nor is Helen alone. She is accompanied by a Trojan, Deïphobus. He is the brother of Hector and Paris, and is now Helen's latest husband, with whom she sleeps reluctantly and whom she is now also longing to betray. Violence and desire, treachery and strangeness, the threatening closeness of the horse, one of the gods of trouble, fills this scene like an acid fog.

The second time we hear the story, Odysseus is with the Phaeacians, who are the epitome of civilization and wholeness, at a dinner lit with braziers, where a bard is ready to tell any tale the stranger wants to hear. Odysseus asks him to tell the story of the building of the Trojan Horse. The bard obliges but goes on to describe the horror of the sacking of Troy, when Odysseus, accompanied by Menelaus, goes looking for Deïphobus. When they find him they cut him horribly, as Virgil described it in the
Aeneid
: “his whole body mutilated, his face brutally torn, his face and hands, the ears ripped from his ruined head, his nostrils sheared by a hideous wound.”

Odysseus cannot bear the tale he now hears. As he listens, “he melt[s],” Homer says, in a word used for snow in heat, sugar in water, a cloud giving up its rain, flesh falling from a long-dead body, or of a creature that pines away for a companion it has lost. Homer does not stint in describing the depth of Odysseus's grief.

As a woman weeps, lying on the body

Of her dear husband, who died fighting for his city and his people,

As he tried to beat off the day of pitilessness,

And as she sees him lying and gasping for breath

And winding her body around him

She cries high and piercing while the men behind her

hit her with the butts of their spears

and lead her away to captivity to work and sorrow

and her cheeks are hollow with her grief.

Such are the tears that Odysseus lets fall from his eyes.

Nowhere in Homer is the harrowing of war seen more entirely. The horse has summoned the deepest of encounters with the nature of reality. Odysseus is the sacker of cities, the mutilating criminal himself, over whose crimes he now weeps like the victims whose life he has destroyed. Every person here—the bard, the king, the warrior, the weeping widow, the traveler—is understood.

Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means “popular with the people”—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: “The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter.” The song, this poem, this story, is the divine purpose of the war. The war happened so that the poem could happen.

It is the deepest Homeric wink. The Phaeacians are enjoying this, it says, and you are enjoying it too, aren't you? Despite yourself, you love this account of grief, and that pleasure in tragedy is the purpose of the Homeric poems. The poems recognize the dreadfulness of the events they describe; they also understand the pleasure to be derived from hearing of those events. Nothing is theorized, nor is that contradiction resolved, but from these words we understand that the beauty of the poems depends on the horror of what they say.

This is the flagstaff statement in the very first paragraph of Simone Weil's great 1939 essay on the
Iliad
, “The Poem of Force”:

Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, belonged only to the past, have been able to see in the
Iliad
a historical document; those who know how to see force, today as yesterday, at the centre of all human history, can find there the most beautiful, the purest of mirrors.

“Le plus beau, le plus pur des miroirs”
is what the Phaeacian bard was saying. There is no hiding in the
Iliad
, no deceit, no flinching from the view of horror, no reluctance to record the bitter jokes in the face of blood, no sweetening of dismemberment, no pretense that, when the stomach wall is cut, innards do not lurch out onto knees and laps, no forgetting that brains spatter from a spear-mangled head, nor the way wounded, dying men scratch and jerk their life out as they scrabble uselessly at their killers' feet—the word Homer uses means “to clutch at,” “to gather like men picking up the harvested grains”—no screen to shield you from the fire, no euphemism to pretend this isn't the way that men behave, no glaze to cloud “the purest and most beautiful of mirrors.” It is clarity, summoned here by the great horse, that makes the words of the
Iliad
the most disturbing ever written.

*   *   *

Achilles inherited his life from the steppe. Inflation, scale, ambition had come with the horse and its breaking. It was the archaic companionship on which the steppe cultures were built. Equipped with horses and with their carts and heavy wagons, the steppe people could move. They were perhaps driven west by an increasing aridity on the steppe, which reached a peak of dryness in about 2000
BC
, perhaps drawn by the richness of European soils. Wherever they went, they made their burial mounds, which are now to be found all over the steppe and beyond, at Marathon and Troy, on Salisbury Plain and in Denmark, all over Germany, and in Greece, and were probably once above the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, which were flattened only late in antiquity.

Those burial mounds, or kurgans, are houses for the greater dead, the articulate if silent earth equivalents of epic poetry, the memory capsules of giant lives lived in giant landscapes. They first started to appear on the southern steppelands of Eurasia in about 3800
BC
and contain the tutelary objects ancestral to the equipment of the Greek heroes: copper spirals, often in pairs, to hold the braided hair of a single man, the glamor trappings of the decorated body, imported copper beads, almost certainly sewn to clothes that have now disappeared, along with thin sheets of metal like foil armor, and equally thin, insubstantial tubes of copper rolled into cylinders. They had axes with them and copper pendants made in the shape of beautiful freshwater mussel shells. Other shells were carved out of alabaster, and some of the steppeland heroes wore belts of freshwater mussels themselves, each shell carefully perforated where a thread joined it to the others.

In northern Ukraine, at a place called Karagod a few miles short of the border with Belarus, just in the fringe-zone where the southern steppe merges into the coniferous forest of the taiga, there is a small Bronze Age tumulus. The afternoon I was there, a blanket of silence hung in the sunshine. The sandy soil was rutted and dug up by wild boar into raw scrapes. But they were only minor interruptions. The continuous grasslands stretched away in front of me, just as Tolstoy said, the same on the horizon as they were at my feet, full of small, undemonstrative flowers: creamy white scabious, lady's bedstraw, mauve-blue campanulas, the dots of brighter paint in the endless, blond, receding grass.

As I walked through them, green grasshoppers danced up like the bubbles off a newly poured glass of champagne. In the binoculars there was nothing but glow and haze, a slow motility in the distant air, as if the world itself were simmering. I have never been anywhere filled with such languorous, labile beauty. Bugs skittered over the puddles, but everything else slowed in the heat. Cattle grazed in the distance, their legs dipped and narrowing into the pool of haze, while the swallows and sand martins wove in and out of them as if pursuing some hidden, threaded path. A kind of vanilla sweetness wafted from the lime trees, and wild raspberries grew and fruited beneath them. There were patches of lily-of-the-valley in the shade of young oaks. A wide, slow river came sliding out of the north, as unconcerned as a cow at its cud, and by the reedy riverbanks the damselflies performed and danced, pairs of dark wings on electric bodies. The breeze blew up the underside of the willow leaves, silvering them, and in the wind the edges of the water lilies curled up too, lifting one lip away from the water.

Is there anywhere as seductive, as reflective, as this glow-thick grassland? It seems on these continental afternoons as if this might be the remembered nature of the Homeric world, the place to which Tiresias's deep memory was returning. On the evening I was at the kurgan near Karagod, a small posse of horses, roans and grays, ten or eleven of them, their manes and tails swinging in the breeze, came down through the willows and alders in front of me. They were not large animals but independent, swaggering, ganglike, uncowed by work, brushing through the reed bed at the fringe of the river and on through the grass, which like their manes and tails was being stirred by the wind from the east.

They stood half-turned in front of me, a hundred yards away. I don't know if these were wild horses, but the gap between us was electric, its charge full of suggestion and threat. It reminded me of the moment in Edwin Muir's famous 1950s post-nuclear-war vision when late in the summer strange horses came into his collapsed world. These animal companions had returned to join the human beings.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

By an old command to find our whereabouts

And that long-lost archaic companionship.

That remembered paradise appears again and again in Homer, not as part of the present scene of war and trouble, but as the ground against which that grief-ridden existence is compared. War occupies the raging present at Troy, the violence of the sea fills the
Odyssey
, but peace lies in the back of the mind and constantly breaks through into the surface of the poetry. Sleep sits in a pine tree in the likeness of a singing bird. Hector looks down at his baby son and thinks he is as beautiful as a star. Nature is often violent in these comparisons too, filled with wolves, lions, eagles, hawks and vultures, troubled by ferocious rivers and gales over the sea, but throughout Homer the world of peace consistently resurfaces as a place of reproach and yearning, both memory and possibility.

In one comparison after another, windows are cut through the war into that calm-drenched past. The chariot horses of Achilles trample the dead like cattle stepping on the threshing floor, crushing the barley. Menelaus and Agamemnon work their way through the Trojan ranks side by side like a pair of oxen struggling hard as they plow a fallow field. Homer is so in love with this idea of nature as a giant reservoir of stability that at one point in the
Iliad
, midbattle and midcrisis, he describes Hector, just at the point he is charging, armed and shouting, at the Greek enemy, as “a snowy mountain.” Some critics have thought Homer might have meant an avalanche by this, but there is nothing in the Greek to justify that. It can only be that the horror of war summoned, as a kind of longing, an image of nature, vast, still and beautiful, in which violence had no part to play.

It was an Edenic afternoon as I sat on the kurgan and listened to the corncrakes and the quails. The kurgan itself is on a little rise overlooking its shallow valley, a small act of local domination. It is filled no doubt with a warrior and his few possessions. No one has ever excavated this mound, but if it follows the usual pattern, his relatives and descendants are pushed in at the side, over the generations, not disturbing him, but clustering around him, borrowing his significance, some perhaps placed here as human sacrifice around the great man, just as the twelve Trojan boys are sacrificed by Achilles at the grave of Patroclus.

Foxes and badgers have made their home in that kurgan now, and beside a small thorn tree its anciently stored earth pours out of the lip of their dusty entrances. Here, or at Troy, or in Epirus in northwest Greece, or on the downs in England, in Denmark, or on the chalk hills above Dover, every tumulus hints at the same story. These tombs are tattoos, or, more, scarifications, permanent marks, intended to make the skin of the planet meaningful. As epic poetry in turf, their aim is to deny time, making something lasting and resonant in a world that otherwise promises only transience. Every tumulus carries within it the memory of the songs sung when it was made. They are mourning mounds. Every one is invested with that moment of grief. Richness is buried there, because richness is what has died with the great person they contain. And if the earth can say nothing, poetry will remember what was said in these places.