Why Homer Matters (35 page)

The bath for Homer is always a gesture of welcome, the physical metaphor for the domestic embrace. Perhaps the most famous bath in Greek antiquity is the one in which Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae after the war. But that is not a Homeric story; it is the bleak invention of Aeschylus in the
Oresteia
. For Homer, whether it is the bathing of Odysseus after battle, or Telemachus on his visit to Nestor at Pylos, the bath is always beautiful and integrative, a moment of absorption.

Intriguingly, there is nothing uniquely Greek about this. The Homeric word for a bath,
asaminthos
, like hyacinth and labyrinth, comes from an unknown, non-Indo-European language spoken in the Mediterranean before the Greeks arrived there. It may have been the language of Minoan Crete. The unwashed Greeks coming down from the north borrowed the word as they borrowed the thing and the habit. The story of the hero returning home to the deliciousness of a bath is distributed all across the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. It is a shared symbol of homeliness and well-being. Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Uruk in south Iraq, who had also been journeying in the wilderness, in search of wisdom, cleansed its filth from his body as he came home to the city,

washing his long hair clean as snow in water … throwing off his furs and letting the sea carry them away, so that his fair body could be seen. Let the band around his head be replaced with a new one. Let him be clad with a garment, as clothing for his nakedness. When he gets to his city, when he finishes his journey, may his clothes show no sign of age, but still be quite new.

When Jacob returns in Genesis to Canaan, he tells his household first to “wash yourselves and change your clothes,” because in this shared Near Eastern culture, the thought-world to which the Homeric Greeks were so anxious to belong, no homecoming could be complete without the cleanness and sense of renewal that a bath can give you. Sinuhe, Gilgamesh, Jacob and Odysseus all soaked themselves in the same delicious soapiness.

You can still find beautiful baths in the palaces on Crete and at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns on the mainland. Some are adorned with fish and the wavy lines of comforting water. Among the austere stoniness of those excavated sites, the baths become emblems of the longing to which the Homeric mind was prey. Nothing could be more inviting, more soaked in the desire for peace and civilization in a troubled world. The bath stands in opposition to Odysseus's sufferings on the open sea. Here the water will merely lap at his limbs; the giant sea bream on the walls of the bath are his cohabitants in their shared springwater pool, the painted sea-waves no more than the memory of grief.

And so when Odysseus has at last made the frightening witch Circe submit to his will, he can allow her maidservants, the “daughters of the springs and the woods and the sacred rivers which run down to the sea,” to prepare him a bath. One of these girls, he recalls,

brought in the water and lit a blazing fire under the big cauldron so that the water grew hot. When the bright copper was boiling, she eased me into the bath and washed me with water from the great cauldron, hot and cold mixed as I desired, allowing it to run over my head and shoulders, washing the pain and weariness from my heart and limbs. When she had washed me and rubbed me with oil, she dressed me in a warm fleece and a shirt around my shoulders and led me to the hall, where she had me sit on a silver-studded chair with a stool to rest my feet.

But there is this difference: lying in their baths, Sinuhe, Gilgamesh and Jacob could all know they were returning to a home they could trust. Singularity and obviousness cluster around their bathrooms. But Homer is subtler than the Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Hebrew storytellers, because complexity and multiplicity, the fusion and stirring of meanings, is central to his purpose. Odysseus, when slipping into the delicious, erotic balm of Circe's bath, is still years and miles from home, his “mind wandering, far away, lost in grim forebodings.” Circe is only the illusion of home and love, the wish-fulfillment version to which the traveler will always succumb. Her bath is a taunt and a punishment. Odysseus—and his listeners—must wait for the real thing.

*   *   *

A sidelight equivalent to Sinuhe's is thrown on the Homeric Greeks in the astonishing archive of 30,000 cuneiform clay tablets recovered from the capital of the Hittites at Hattusa, near Bogaskale in central Anatolia. Contrasts and parallels abound here too. The Hittites were another Indo-European people who came south into Anatolia during the centuries after 2000
BC
, infiltrating and then taking over the territory of the non-Indo-European Hatti, finally pushing on their southern frontier against the fringes of the great Mesopotamian powers and even the Egyptian empire.

Such close contacts with the ancient civilizations to the south meant that the Hittites adopted the literate, urbanizing habits of the Near East far earlier than the Greeks. By the time of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the Hittites were already running an enormous, bureaucratically organized empire, with a network of military roads strung across it, stretching from Lebanon to the shores of the Aegean.

They kept their records in both Hittite and Akkadian, the Babylonian language that had become the lingua franca of diplomacy and government across the whole region from central Anatolia to the Tigris and the mouths of the Nile. The clay cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa are the file copies retained by the Hittite foreign office after the original treaties, usually on bronze or occasionally silver or iron tablets, had been sent to the other parties.

They give glimpses of an embracing power-world which carries echoes of life in the palaces at Troy, the fifty sons and sons-in-law gathered around Priam, the overwhelming nature of inheritance and the sense of greatness rippling down from its kingly source. The quasi-medieval atmosphere at these gatherings could not be farther from the high-risk anarchy barely an inch below the surface at any meeting of the Greek chieftains. One Hittite treaty, as its tablet records, was concluded in a great and ceremonial meeting

in the city of Urikina in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili; Prince Tashmi-Sharumma; Prince Hannutti; Prince Huzziya; Ini-Teshshup, king of the land of Carchemish; Ari-Sharumma, king of the land of Isuwa; Amar-Mushen, uriyanni; Halpa-ziti, commander of the troops of the right; Prince Heshni; Prince Tattamaru; Prince Uppara-muwa, overseer of the golden grooms; Prince Uhha-ziti; Sahurunuwa, chief of the wooden-tablet scribes; Hattusa-Kurunta, general; Prince Tarhunta-piya; Lugal dLamaa, commander of the troops of the left; Ali-ziti, chief of the palace servants; Tuttu, chief of the storehouse; Palla, lord of the city of Hurma; Walwa-ziti, chief of the scribes; Alalimi, chief of the cupbearers; Kammaliya, chief of the cooks; and Mahhuzzi, chief of the offering officials.

Whether it is Victorian India, Tenochtitlan, medieval Bohemia, shogun Japan, the world of
The Leopard
or Bronze Age Anatolia, this is the air breathed in any court, dense with rank, title, glamor, precedence and surely a hint, here and there, of what is called, even now in palaces, Red Carpet Fever: excitement at being connected with the royal.

That self-importance surfaces in Homer in the overbrimming superciliousness of the Phaeacians, condescendingly welcoming the shipwrecked seafarer Odysseus to Alcinous's regal halls. The Phaeacians “never suffer strangers gladly.” They don't like him much, nor he them. Even here, as he is accepting their hospitality, Homer gives him the traditional epithet he shares with Achilles and Arēs, the god of war:
ptoliporthos Odysseus
(city-ravaging Odysseus).

They guess he might be captain of a ship full of men who are
pr
ē
kt
ē
res
—an interesting word, with its origins in the verb for “to do,” meaning that Odysseus comes over to the Phaeacians not as a nobleman who can play athletic games but as the leader of a band of practical, pragmatic practicers of things, merchants in other words, dealers, or as Robert Fagles translated it “profiteers,” freebooters who blurred the boundary between trader and pirate. Nothing irks Odysseus more powerfully than the suggestion that he is merely a sea-robber or tradesman. Is he not a hero? Has he not fought at Troy? Has he not suffered at sea? But the suspicion won't go away. When he and his crew find themselves facing Polyphemus, the Cyclops, the same idea recurs. “Strangers, who are you?” the Cyclops asks them. “Where do you come from, sailing over the sea-ways? Are you trading? Or are you roaming wherever luck takes you over the sea? Like pirates?”

Perhaps this is a reflection in Homer of a reality that the poems do their best to conceal. Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains might think of themselves as noble kings, the fit subjects for epic. Homer does its best to portray them as that. The civilized states of the Mediterranean saw them as anything but. What were they but the “much-wandering pirates” Odysseus sometimes talks about, taking what they could from the wealth of the world around them, hugely status-rich in their own eyes, virtually status-less in the eyes of those they were coming to rob? It is exactly how Odysseus himself describes his behavior as he leaves Troy. “From Ilium the wind carried me,” he tells the Phaeacians, “and brought me to the Cicones.” This was a tribe, allied to the Trojans, who lived at Ismarus on the shore of the Aegean, somewhere north of Samothrace. “There I destroyed the city,” he goes on quite straightforwardly, using a term to mean that nothing was left, “and killed the men. And from the city we took their wives and many possessions, and divided it among us, so that as far as I could manage, no man would be cheated of an equal share.” It is one of the moments in which Homer coolly reveals the limitations of Odysseus's mind. Our hero thinks he is telling his hosts how excellently he behaved, ensuring that unlike Agamemnon he did not mistreat his men. But he is blind to the significance of the actions preceding this exemplary fairness, the piratical destruction of an entire city and the enslaving of its women.

The same uncertain status of the pirate-king lies behind one of Odysseus's most famous sleights of hand. He and his men are suffering at the hands of the Cyclops. The Cyclops wants to know who Odysseus is. In his answers, he says that his name is “Nobody.” The Greek for that is either
outis
, which sounds a little like
Odysseus
if spoken by a drunk or slack-jawed giant; or
m
ē
tis
, which also sounds like the Greek word for cleverness, craftiness, skill or a plot. When Polyphemus calls for help, the other Cyclopes ask who has hurt and blinded him. “Nobody!” he answers, or “Cleverness!” and so his friends—and the audience—can only laugh.

It is a nifty trick, but the story means more. Odysseus is indeed a nobody, essentially homeless, for all the illusions of an Ithaca floating somewhere beyond the unreachable horizon. His own naming of himself as a Nobody is an oblique and dreamlike reflection of exactly what the Phaeacians think of him. He may be king of Ithaca, the son of Laertes, a man whose fame has reached the sky, but that is not how the world of the
Odyssey
treats him. Everywhere he arrives anonymous, not somebody but nobody. Even when he comes home, he is more beggar than king, unrecognized by wife, son, subject or retainer. That double status is at the heart of the
Odyssey
: it may describe a historical situation—the marginality of people who were heroes to themselves—but it also addresses a permanent human condition. My own world may cultivate me, ennoble me, even heroize me, but what possible significance beyond the confines of home can those labels have? What possible standing could Odysseus have “in the city of Urikina, in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili”?

*   *   *

In about 1350
BC
, a treaty was drawn up between the Hittite Great King and a man known as Huqqana. He was from Hayasa, a region on the frontiers of the Hittite empire, in northeastern Anatolia, in what would later become Armenia. Hayasa, in a way similar to the condition of Greece in the centuries after 2000
BC
, was an agglomeration of tribal chiefs, with no overarching or supreme leader. Because of this, and because of its incipient and eruptive anarchy, it was not, as far as the Hittites were concerned, part of the civilized world. The Hittite Great King, who referred to himself as “My Majesty,” had married off his sister to Huqqana in a form of political alliance, but there was anxiety in the air. How could he be sure that Huqqana, this man from beyond the borders of acceptability, would behave?

The expectations were not good. The Hittite king called his new brother-in-law “a low-born dog.” Huqqana mustn't gossip, which he would be tempted to do: “Given that they now bring you up to my palace and that you hear about the customs of the palace it is important! You shall not divulge outside the palace what you know or what you hear.”

More problematic was the question of sex.

Furthermore this sister, whom I, My Majesty, have given to you as your wife, has many sisters from her own family as well as from her extended family. For us the Hittites, it is an important custom that a brother does not take his sister or female cousin sexually. It is not permitted. Whoever does such a thing is put to death. Because your land is barbaric, it is in conflict [without law]. There a man quite regularly takes his sister or female cousin. But among the Hittites, it is not permitted.

Huqqana has to learn that he should treat women courteously and with dignity, an instruction that brings with it echoes of the distinction in the
Iliad
between Greek and Trojan treatment of women.

Then, strikingly in the middle of all this treaty language, the Great King of the Hittites tells Huqqana a story, or at least reminds him of one, which can't fail to drive the point home. Huqqana, when he came to the palace, was to be careful around the women he met there. “When you see a palace woman, jump out of the way and leave her a broad path.” Did he remember the story of Mariya, clearly someone who had once been close to him, perhaps another chieftain from Hayasa?