Why Homer Matters (31 page)

Homer usually talks with a mysterious decorum about acts of extreme and horrifying violence, perhaps as a product of the poem evolving over generations, so that a kind of linguistic dignity is laid over the top of the violence itself; but have no doubt, the words of the gangsters reflect a Homeric reality, nowhere more than in book 10 of the
Iliad
. The behavior that book describes is peculiarly horrible, a stripping away of any skin of dignity and nobility. Like “two lions into the black night/Through the carnage and through the corpses, the war gear and the dark blood,” Odysseus and Diomedes slink off toward the Trojan line.

They come across a young Trojan, Dol
ō
n, out in the night and set off to chase him, “like two rip-fanged hounds that have sighted a wild beast, a young deer or a hare.” They catch him, and he stands in front of them in terror, gibbering and in tears. The two Greeks interrogate him, smiling, getting out of him any information they can, but he knows what is to come. He begs for his life, reaching up to the chin of Diomedes, asking for mercy, but Diomedes

                 strikes the middle of his neck

With a sweep of the sword, and slashes clean through both tendons,

And Dol
ō
n's head—still speaking—drops in the dust.

This is the most shocking moment in Homer, part of a hideous murder-run in the dark, with many dead, and booty taken, including wonderful horses and chariots, at the end of which Odysseus laughs aloud, has a swim in the sea and then a beautiful bath. Its amusement and delight at violence leaves a hollow in the reader's heart, which is scarcely filled by the way the Greeks “vaunt” over the bodies of the people they have killed, calling them fools, telling the world of their own excellence, their right to stand over the dead and damaged body of the rival. This is also how gangsters “trash talk.” “I got your punk ass,” Bobcat tells one of his victims, “and now look at you … Now if you'd paid this cheese [money], you'd have been all right, but now you fucked up, you bleeding and shit … you talking about your ribs broke. Now what the fuck?”

Words are a way of making it hurt. This is the hero delivering justice, telling his victim, and his audience around him, just how powerful he is in the world. “Catching and punishing those who have wronged them makes offenders feel mighty,” Jacobs and Wright say, “while at the same time it masks their objective impotence.” “I had an adrenaline rush,” one of their informants told them about a particularly horrible piece of violence, “like I was the shit, like I was in control.” “I felt like I was in some pussy,” another said after using a baseball bat to break the legs of a man who had vandalized his car. “You know [like I] busted [a] nut”—or ejaculated.

This elision of self-enlargement, sexual gratification and extreme violence to other men's bodies lurks in the subtext of Homer. A theater of sex and violence is at the heart of both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
: the stolen woman Helen; the twice stolen woman Briseis (once from her family, all of whom Achilles has murdered, once from Achilles, who comes to love her); the recurrent boast that the Greeks will kill the Trojan men and take their women, as they have taken other women from other cities; the sexual battening on Penelope by the suitors; the savage retribution exacted by Odysseus on those who have wanted to have sex with Penelope, and then on the women of his own household who had had sex with those suitors. This is a core reality in Homer, which finds its explicit echoes in gangland.

Colton Simpson, from South Central Los Angeles, was fourteen in 1980. His mentor Smiley, his “road dog,” his running mate, glows to him like a hero, just as Achilles and every Indo-European hero has always glowed: “When he smiles it's as if the light, the sun behind him, fills me, fills each and every one of us standing there before him.”

When the law is no good, the only justice that makes sense is retaliatory, and that is the governing ethic of the Greeks in the
Iliad
. It is the dark heart of the gang on the beach, where
personal affronts attack identity
, where
counterstrikes tend to be excessive,
where
minor slights are interpreted as major blows to character
, where warriors
rely on the honor that accrues to those who demonstrate prowess in disputes
, where
honor is accumulated much like real capital and bringing someone down for what he did to you raises your worth in the eyes of your peers
, where
intolerance earns respect
and
strength is protective.
Every one of those phrases in italics is used by Jacobs and Wright to describe life in the murderous slums of St. Louis, Missouri; every one also describes the world of the
Iliad
.

The city itself floats in the half distance, a dream world of order, where the warrior is not constantly under test, where he can rely on those who are around him and who love him. The marginalized gang members, shut out beyond its walls, can only look on with envy and loathing.

Violence in the warrior gang is a means to survive and prosper. Without violence they would shrivel and fade, beaten by the city, by the pointy heads and the Brahmins. Violence is only doing what justice requires them to do. Violence is their destiny. And it should come as no surprise that these gangs must also have their epics. “No one forgets who was killed where and for what purpose,” the Berkeley sociologist Martín Sánchez-Jankowski wrote. “Some Chicano gang members can tell you who was killed twenty years ago, before they were born, because this history has been passed down to them, these members have attained a degree of immortality, which mutes the fear of death and much of its inhibiting power.” The gangs treasure
kleos aphthiton
, deathless glory, because in their vulnerability and their transience, the way in which there is nothing beyond their bodies and the memory of their actions, they need it more than anyone who is lucky enough to live in the law-shaped, law-embraced, wall-girdled city.

There is a code of conduct within the gang, as there is among the Greeks. Neither rape nor fighting with weapons was allowable within any of the thirty-eight gangs studied by Sánchez-Jankowski. The same kind of sanction exists within the Greek camp, although the natural fissiveness of all gang life is reflected there too. Achilles and his men come within a whisker of leaving Agamemnon's coalition. Nevertheless, there is a rawness in modern gang life and their talk—the gang term for a gaping wound is “a pussy”—from which Homer holds back. The LA gang world takes delight in the explicit elision of sex and violence, dominance and abuse, in a way that Homer buries and dignifies. The latent sexuality that is threaded through the poems never quite breaks the surface. Homer can be horrifyingly direct and concrete but is never ugly, as if the language has been washed and cleansed in the centuries over which the poems evolved. The trash talk of the Greeks on the beach is conveyed in terms that could be heard in the halls at Pylos. The words of the desperate men in South Central LA and East St. Louis perform some archaeology on that Homeric language, stripping away its civility, exposing the body and the suffering beneath; but that should not be seen as some kind of return to truth. Homeric truth, the meaning of Homer, is about the integration and fusion of qualities, the acquired wisdom of Homer knowing warrior rage intimately but seeing and hearing it through the words of the city.

*   *   *

For the Greeks, the great urban civilizations of the Mediterranean lay temptingly and glitteringly to the south, and you might wonder why, of all the places they might have chosen for their encounter with the city, Troy became Homer's focus. Is there any evidence that in the years of the Greek arrival, in the centuries around 2000
BC
, Troy was the site worth sacking?

It was certainly not the richest, biggest or most powerful city of the Near East. Seen from the churning dynamos of money and power in Egypt and Mesopotamia, or from the great port cities of the Levant, Troy, on the far northwestern corner of Anatolia, can have looked like little more than a regional outpost of the urban world, a place that did indeed have a citadel and a lower city, but which was nevertheless on the very margins of the urban universe. But seen from the other direction, “in the eyes of its northern neighbours,” as the Oxford and Sheffield archaeologists Andrew and Susan Sherratt memorably put it, “Troy must have been the brightest light on the horizon.” It sat at one of the great crossroads of antiquity, performing the role later filled by Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul, controlling the routes between both the Aegean and the Black Sea and Anatolia and southeast Europe. The persistent north winds that blow across windy Troy, and a steady north–south current through the Dardanelles, meant that no sail-driven ship could make its way north there. Every cargo had to be landed. Every precious object coming west from Anatolia of necessity passed through this four-point pivot. Every movement from the north into the Mediterranean, and every Mediterranean desire to reach the Danube, the gold of Transylvania, the great rivers of the Pontic steppe and the copper mines that lay beyond them, or the metals coming from the Caucasus—all had to come through Troy.

The great Trojan treasures found by Heinrich Schliemann are now in Russia, where they were taken by the Soviets at the end of World War II. The silver and gold vessels, the bronze, the jewelry and the astonishing carved stone axes were buried in Troy perhaps as early as 2400
BC
or as late as 1800
BC
. Schliemann named what he found “Priam's Treasure,” and from the very beginning was ridiculed for imagining that the levels of the city in whose ashes they emerged, Early Bronze Age Troy II, a thousand years or more before the conventional date of the Trojan War, could have had anything to do with Homer's Trojan king.

But just as at Mycenae, Schliemann's suggestion is worth considering. He had found a burned layer along with a gate and a tower, and considered them “the ruins and red ashes of Troy.” In just the same way, his assistant Wilhelm Dörpfeld later settled on Troy VI, destroyed in about 1300
BC
, and the Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen came down in favor of Troy VIIa, which came to an end soon after 1200
BC
. That remained the modern consensus under the huge German excavations from 1988 to 2003 led by Manfred Korfmann. But, as the British archaeologist Donald Easton has written, these were “three different sets of material evidence all supposed to prove the same identification and authenticate the same event.” There is nothing to associate Homer with any archaeological remains at Troy. The only pointer toward a date around 1200
BC
is the guess made by Herodotus in his history. But his guesses, and those of other classical Greeks, were stabs in the dark at a time when no one knew how to date the distant past. There is certainly no better reason to associate Homer with the Troy of about 1200
BC
than with a city a millennium earlier. And if finds are anything to judge by, the later Troys seem to have been poorer than the city Schliemann identified as Priam's. Just as it is possible to imagine that the warriors in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are themselves not the ancestors of the Homeric heroes but their sons and grandsons, there is nothing inherently unlikely in Schliemann's suggestion that the Trojans of about 2000
BC
were living in the city to which the Greeks laid siege.

Sophia Schliemann, aged twenty-two, wearing “The Jewels of Helen,” Athens 1874.

Nothing found in later levels of Troy can in any way match what Schliemann found here. It was a mass of gold and silver: six gold bracelets, two gold headdresses, one gold diadem, four golden basket-earrings, fifty-six golden shell-earrings, and 8,750 gold beads, sequins and studs. The jewelry was probably made in Troy. A great deal of evidence for smelting and casting has been found in the city. But these treasures are also signs of Troy's connections north and south. The tin the Trojans used for their bronzes probably came from Afghanistan. The beautiful golden basket-shaped earrings which Schliemann found are identical to others that have been found in Ur in Mesopotamia. There is amber here from Scandinavia, even a bossed bone plaque of a kind found at Castelluccio in Bronze Age Sicily.

Troy was the great entrepôt at the interface of the northern and southern Bronze Age worlds. The only way that Afghan tin and the Mesopotamian ways of working gold could have made their way to Bronze Age Transylvania and Hungary was through the Trojan gateway. No equivalent of Troy existed farther north or west. Only the palace center at Knossos in Crete could rival the extent of Troy in the centuries after 2000
BC
. Just as the Vikings and the Crusaders would later lust after the riches of Byzantium and Constantinople, the Greeks longed for Troy.