Why Homer Matters (36 page)

And for what reason did he die? Did not a lady's maid walk by and he look at her? But the father of My Majesty himself looked out of the window and caught him in his offence, saying “You—why did you look at her?” So he died for that reason. The man perished just for looking from afar. So you beware.

Just as the
Tale of Sinuhe
reorients the Homeric vision of the hero and allocates him effectively the role of thug, the story of Mariya, the Hayasa warrior chief who dared look at one of the lady's maids of the Hittite court, puts the skids under the bland assumption, underlying much of that Iliadic world, that women were for the taking.

Other intriguing historical realities appear in these Hittite documents. They are late in this story. By the fourteenth century
BC
, the Mycenaean Greeks had established their palaces on the mainland, had become at least administratively literate themselves and were now dominant in Crete and across the Aegean. They had entered a form of existence that had absorbed much of the organized state apparatus and mentality of the Mediterranean world. By now they were as Trojan as the Trojans.

All that, in the lightest of touches, is confirmed in the Hittite documents. In a treaty drawn up in about 1250
BC
between the Great King of the Hittites and the king of Amurru, in northern Lebanon, the Great King, as ever, tells his treaty partner how to behave.

If the King of Egypt is My Majesty's friend, he shall be your friend. But if he is My Majesty's enemy, he shall be your enemy. And the Kings who are my equals in rank are the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria and the King of Ahhiyawa.

That last name should leap out at you. After many decades of acrimonious scholarly debate, it is now generally accepted that Ahhiyawa is the Hittite transcription of Achaea, the Homeric name for Greece, and that the king of Ahhiyawa's inclusion in this most distinguished list of the great powers of the late Bronze Age is a mark of the Mycenaean triumph. That great quasi-imperial status does not reflect the atmosphere of the
Iliad
, nor of Odysseus, the homeless, the wandering albatross of the southern sea. By the time these treaties were being drawn up, the Greeks were no longer the outsiders; they had become members of the Mediterranean power network.

Not that that peace prevailed. The margins of these states were ragged and contested, and the great kings were always planning and making moves against each other in the crush zones between their empires. On the western margins of Anatolia, where the king of Ahhiwaya could wield most power, he consistently troubled the allies of the Great King of the Hittites. At some time before 1400
BC
, a Hittite ally in the far west of the Hittite zone of influence, Madduwatta, was attacked by a king of “Ahhiya” and driven out of his lands, at least until the Hittites came to his aid. When the old Hittite king died, his son wanted to remind Madduwatta of the service that had been done to him.

The father of My Majesty saved you, together with your wives, your sons, your household servants and together with your infantry and your chariotry. Otherwise dogs would have devoured you from hunger. Even if you had escaped you would have died of hunger.

The most fascinating word in this extraordinary document is the name of the ruler of Ahhiya: he is called Attarissiya. That is not a Hittite name, nor is it exactly Greek, but it may well be what “Atreus” sounded like to a Hittite—the name in Homer of the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, itself perhaps a derivative of
atrestos
, “the untrembling, the fearless.”

From these few threads some kind of fabric can be woven, describing a tense, mutually suspicious and occasionally violent relationship between the Greeks and the Hittite empire. Attarissiya had invaded Hittite territory with foot soldiers and a hundred chariots, and had also fought alongside Madduwatta in an attack on Cyprus. Another warrior, the Greek king's brother, the Hittites called Tawagalawas or Tawakalawas, which is the way they might have heard the name of a Greek called Eteocles (which happens to be the name of Oedipus's son). A letter also survived in the foreign office archives in Hattusa, from a Greek they knew as Kagamunas or perhaps Katamunas, a name which has been interpreted as Kadmos, the greatest of the Thebans.

It is like a picture of the post-Homeric world, one that the rulers of the great Mycenaean palaces might have recognized, but surviving only in the most fragmentary and enigmatic of splinters. Part of this jagged Greek–Hittite boundary of the thirteenth century
BC
was a pair of places called in the documents “Taruisa” and “Wilusa.” Hittite scholars are now certain that these are the names of places referred to by Homer as Troy and Ilios. They may be two places conflated in the
Iliad
or a region and its capital. In a treaty with the Great King of the Hittites, the king of Wilusa is addressed as Alaksandu. That is a Hittite version of a Greek name, Alexandros, the alternative name which the
Iliad
gives to Paris, Priam's son. By the time of these late documents, Troy had become a Greek-governed city, absorbed into the Greek world, at archaeological levels where shards of Mycenaean pottery have also been found. If there had ever been a Trojan war, it had already happened, and the Greeks had won.

The relationship remained tense between the Hittite king and the Greek prince at Troy, and the treaty includes some significant instructions sent out to this marginal kinglet from the imperial capital far to the east. The Hittite administration was keen to impose the written word as the medium of communication between them and the modern test of authenticity. “People are treacherous,” the Great King told Alaksandu.

If rumours circulate, and someone comes and whispers to you “His Majesty is undertaking something to do you down, and will take the land away from you, or will mistreat you in some way,” write about it to My Majesty. And if the matter is true, when I, My Majesty, write back to you, you shall not act rashly.

That sounds like an instruction from the urban to the oral world, from the literate Near East to a culture that had yet to think of writing as a central aspect of government. It is one of the great transitions of history—the Homeric horizon, caught at the very moment the Greeks were crossing it.

*   *   *

A third, suddenly reorienting view of these relationships appears in, of all places, the Old Testament. Just at the moment the Greek king Attarissiya was raiding Anatolia and Cyprus, in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries
BC
, and establishing settlements which archaeologists have been uncovering in the last few decades, the cities around Gaza in southern Canaan were taken and occupied by people whom the Jews called the Philistines. They had been drawn to the markets and the grassy downland of southern Palestine, where beautiful pear and almond orchards surround the mudbrick villages and where cattle and horses can graze on the clover and young barley of the open plains. Their lands—Philistia—are now the gentle, hilly farmland of southwestern Israel. “Philistine” in Hebrew means “the invader” or “the roller-in,” and from the style of their rock-cut chamber tombs, the pottery they made once they had arrived in Canaan and from the form of their own names, it is clear that these Philistines, arriving from out of the west, were Mycenaean Greeks, cruising the Mediterranean seas, searching out new lands, ready to fight whomever they found there.

The war in Canaan between Greek and Hebrew was long and grievous, but at its symbolic climax, as depicted in the First Book of the Prophet Samuel, the readers are treated to one of the most hostile depictions of Homeric warrior culture ever written. The Philistines had taken up position on a hillside at Socoh in the rolling agricultural country of the Judean foothills, a few miles west of Bethlehem. A champion came out of the Philistine camp, a man called Goliath, to challenge the Israelites drawn up on the opposite hillside.

Goliath is a huge, clumsy, half-ludicrous, threatening and contemptible figure. He is, even in the earliest and least exaggerated manuscripts, six feet nine inches tall, wearing the full equipment of the Homeric hero: a bronze helmet on his head, bronze armor on his chest, bronze greaves on his legs and carrying a sword and dagger of bronze. Everything about him is vast. His armor weighs nearly 140 pounds, the head of his spear fifteen pounds.

Massively overequipped, a cross between Ajax and Desperate Dan, Goliath stands there shouting across the valley at his enemies:

Why do you come out to do battle, you slaves of Saul? I am the Philistine champion; choose your man to meet me. If he can kill me in fair fight, we will become your slaves; but if I prove too strong for him and kill him, you shall be our slaves and serve us. Here and now I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man … and we will fight it out.

The stolidity of the Greek, his philistinism, his need to spell everything out, to put his own self-aggrandisement into endlessly self-elevating words—all of that comes out of Goliath like the self-proclaiming spout of a whale. But this is exactly what in the
Iliad
one Greek warrior after another liked and needed to do. Shouted aggression, the Homeric
haka
, was the first act of any Greek battle.

“When Saul and the Israelites heard what the Philistine said, they were shaken and dismayed.” It was not in them to make the symmetrical response—you shout at me, I'll shout at you—which is one of the foundations of the Homeric system. And so a painful and faintly ludicrous asymmetrical situation developed. “Morning and evening for forty days the Philistine drew near and presented himself,” standing there, twice a day for a month and a half, bellowing across the valley like a giant bronze cuckoo clock.

The shepherd boy David, the youngest of his family, whose brothers are in the Israelite host facing the Philistines, is told by his father, Jesse, to take some loaves and cream cheeses to their commander. He arrives there and to his amazement sees and hears Goliath shouting away. “Who is he,” David asks, “an uncircumcised Philistine, to defy the army of the living god?” That is not a Greek question. A Greek would have understood what Goliath was saying, and would have responded by strapping on his armor. Defiance and the locking of horns was no more than a recognition of Homeric reality. When Saul, the king of the Jews, finally accepts that David might respond to the challenge of the Greek giant, he tries to dress him in his own armor. David accepts it meekly but then hesitates and proclaims his difference.

“I cannot go with these because I have not tried them.” So he took them off. And he picked up his stick, and chose five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he had with him as a pouch. He walked out to meet the Philistine with his sling in his hand.

It is a version of the Homeric arming of the hero and the single-combat meeting of warriors, the
monomachia
between Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Ajax, Achilles and Hector, which anchors the whole of the Homeric experience. But this is more like a parody of it than a borrowing. The unprotected boy, with his shepherd's bag and stick, crouches down in the brook running between the two embattled hillsides, and with his fingers in the water, picks out the plain smoothness of five good stones. No love affair with bronze, no sharpness, no self-enlargement. In everything David does, and in every lack he suffers, there is one implied and overwhelming fact: the god of the Israelites. In his presence the difference between armor and armorlessness, bronze and flesh, is like smoke in wind.

And the Philistine came on and drew near unto David and the man that bare the shield went before him. And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. “Am I a dog that you come out against me with sticks?” And he swore at him in the name of his gods. “Come on,” he said, “and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.”

David told him that he would kill him and cut off his head,

and all the world shall know there is a god in Israel. All those who are gathered here shall see that the
LORD
saves neither by sword nor spear; the battle is the
LORD
's and he will put you all into our power.

And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.

Is there any wonder that this story has lasted as long as Homer? Those forty days of shouting, all the grandeur of bronze, the whole rhetoric of assertive Homeric heroism, is now clogged with the mud filling Goliath's mouth and nostrils. A painting by the young Caravaggio, now in the Prado, of David after the death of Goliath is, in this way, one of the most beautiful commentaries on Homer that has ever been made. It is Caravaggio's least violent and most understanding version of that subject. Michelangelo had shown David on the Sistine Chapel ceiling with his sword in midswipe over Goliath's neck. Titian had painted a butcher's view of the cut neck itself. Caravaggio himself would later paint ferocious and tragic images of David holding the severed head (a head which bears the painter's own grieving features), but this first David of his is soaked in calm. The boy looks as if he is about twelve years old. His body is wrapped in a loose white cloth. His lower legs are bare and his feet inelegant, the toes slightly misaligned, with dirt under the nails and a soreness around them. Nothing is idealized. Goliath's vast dead hand remains clenched on the ground, and blood has dried on his big severed head, around the wound left by David's slung stone, the puncture through which the heroic balloon has collapsed.

What survives in the painting is the beauty of the boy, his intentness on the knot as he ties a cord around Goliath's hair, his simplicity, his seriousness, his lack of bombast. He kneels on the giant Greek chest, from which the head was severed, as if on a workbench, blood just staining his hand, his own face in shadow, a face of humility, the heroism entirely inward. This is the view of Greek heroism given us by the Hebrew scriptures: weak and bombastic compared to the clarity and strength of the pious mind.