Why Homer Matters (40 page)

They writhe a little with their feet but not for very long.

It is, in Odysseus and Telemachus, a moment of pure pitilessness and, in Homer, of pure pity. Homer loves birds. Athene has been there, just a moment before, as a swallow up in the rafters of the palace. The word Homer uses for the pitiability of the girls' death,
oiktista
, is always used to describe the mournful notes of the song of the nightingale, Penelope's own heart-bird. There can be no doubt where Homer's sympathies lie. The suffering of those poor hanged girls, strung up with their feet quivering and kicking under the noose, their toes an inch or so from the ground beneath them, summons all the ghosts of Beslan, Srebrenica and Aleppo. An air of trouble thickens around this crime, and any identity you might have felt with Odysseus is threatened by it. An unbridgeable distance seems to open between us. It is a step too far, an ancientness too far. But Homer remains on our side of the divide, and it is clear that if Odysseus thinks he can solve life's problems by the ferocious imposition of moral authority, Homer, the poem, knows you cannot.

*   *   *

All that remains is for Odysseus to be at one again with Penelope. She tests him, famously, with the suggestion that they should move their bed from “the well-built bridal chamber,” where it had been ever since he left for Troy. She knows, and he knows, but she does not yet know that the man in front of her knows, that the bed can never be moved, because Odysseus had built it around a living, long-leafed olive tree that had been growing in the courtyard for more years than anyone could remember. Their marriage bed is no temporary construction, but built for continuity and fixity, not afloat on the world but rooted in it. Odysseus, the great storyteller, had made it from living, inherited materials, had cut it and trimmed it and had beautified it with gold, silver and ivory inlays. The bed, in other words, like the raft he made, is another version of the great epic poem, made and remade, the reshaping of an inheritance to a new and ever more beautiful purpose.

When Penelope sees that Odysseus knows what she knows, that theirs is a marriage of true minds, and that their companionship is in the knowledge of the world they share, “her knees are loosened where she sits, and her heart melts … and in tears she throws her arms around his neck and kisses his face.”

This is what, in the most literal translation that makes sense in English, Homer says:

As when the land appears welcome to those who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas, and only a few escape the grey water by swimming to the land, with a thick scurf of salt coated on them, and happily they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; so welcome is her husband to her as she looks at him, and she cannot let him go from the embrace of her white arms.

These verses dance around the edges of tenderness. Odysseus has returned from the sea, but Penelope recognizes him as her homeland, the shore on which she can at last set foot after too long adrift on the chaos of her life. Understanding comes in seeing things from the other side. The language is clotted with formulas, the stock phrases used in every part of the poem: the strong-built ship, the gray water, the description of the sea merely as evil, her white arms. These are the words of antiquity, a frame of inherited sobriety and seriousness for the emotion that can scarcely be contained within them. What is painfully and marvelously real lies within the embrace of what is profoundly shared and ancient.

 

CONCLUSION: THE BRIGHT WAKE

Homer does not provide any kind of guidance to life if the lessons derived are the usefulness of violence, the lack of regret at killing, the subjection and selling of women, the extinction of all men in a surrendering city or the sense that justice resides in personal revenge. That recipe for gang hell has always been troubling to the civilized. Pope was shocked at the “spirit of cruelty which appears too manifestly in the
Iliad
.” William Blake blamed Homer for desolating Europe with wars. Joel Barlow, the American friend of Thomas Paine and advocate of Enlightenment virtues, lectured the governing classes of a misguided Europe on how Homer was satisfactory as a poet,

but he has given to military life a charm which few men can resist, a splendor which envelopes the scenes of carnage in a cloud of glory, which dazzles the eyes of every beholder. Alexander is not the only human monster that has been formed after the model of Achilles; nor Persia and Egypt the only countries depopulated for no other reason than the desire of rivalling predecessors in military fame.

What is valuable and essential in these poems is the opposite of that: the ability to regard all aspects of life with clarity, equanimity and sympathy, with a loving heart and an unclouded eye. Homer knows more than the people in the poems can ever know. He knows more than the Greek warriors on the Trojan beach and more than the citizens of Troy. He even knows more than Odysseus and can look down on Odysseus, despite his failings, with paternal love. Homer matters because Homer, in a godlike way, understands what mortals do not. He even understands more than the gods, who emerge from the poems as sometimes terrifying but unreliable, intemperate and eventually ridiculous beings. That is his value, a reservoir of understanding beyond the grief and turbulence of a universe in which there is no final authority.

I am aware of how twenty-first-century this sounds—Homer with no trust in the metaphysical; a multiculturalist, able to empathize with both gang and city; a fusionist, seeing in Odysseus a man who might bring together the virtues of both worlds; even a liberal and feminist, who has a deep understanding of the dignity and beauty of women, their central role in human destiny. Nevertheless, it is a picture of Homer that seems true, and it is not a sentimental vision. The depiction of wrongness is fundamental to it. In a review of the harsh, extremist essays of Simone Weil, Susan Sontag speculated on why these dark Homeric qualities are so necessary.

There are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Homer's embrace of wrongness, his depiction of a world that stands at a certain angle to virtue, is the heart of why we love him. He does not give us a set of exemplars. These poems are not sermons. We do not want Achilles or even Odysseus to be our model for a man. Nor Penelope or Helen for a woman. Nor do we want to worship at the shrine of Bronze Age thuggery. What we want is Homeric wisdom, his fearless encounter with the dreadful, his love of love and hatred of death, the sheer scale of his embrace, his energy and brightness, his resistance to nostalgia or to what the American philosopher Richard Rorty described as “belatedness.” Most literature and philosophers, Rorty wrote, put value only in the past.

Nietzsche, at his worst, gestured towards some narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake. Carlyle gestured towards some contented peasants working the lands of a kindly medieval abbot. Lots of us occasionally gesture in the direction of the lost world in which our parents or our grandparents told us they grew up.

Homer doesn't do that. There is no sense that he has come late to life. These epic poems may enshrine the past, but they exist in a radiant present and in that way are hymns to present being. The English poet Alice Oswald has described recently how Homer is infused with this glowing sense of reality. Ancient critics “praised Homer's
enargeia
,” she wrote in the foreword to
Memorial
, her beautiful and stripped-down translation of the
Iliad
, “which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality.' It's the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.”
Enargeia
, a noun derived from the Greek word
argos
, meaning “bright” or “shining,” is “the quality of having brightness in it,” of being vividly there. For Greek rhetoricians
enargeia
was a necessary aspect of description, or
ekphrasis
, a word that literally means “a telling out.” And that pair of terms encapsulates the Homeric ideal: Homer's greatness is in his telling out of the embedded vivid, the core of life made explicit. Homer is not Greek; he is the light shining in the world.

He provides no answers. Do we surrender to authority? Do we abase ourselves? Do we indulge the self? Do we nurture civility? Do we nourish violence? Do we love? Homer says nothing in reply to those questions; he merely dramatizes their reality. The air he breathes is the complexity of life, the bubbling vitality of a boat at sea, the resurgent energy, as he repeatedly says, of the bright wake starting to gleam behind you.

 

NOTES

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FOREWORD

poet of a boom:
For most of the early twentieth century, in the wake of the discoveries at Troy and Mycenae made by the romantic German businessman/archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, Homer was thought to describe the palatial Mycenaean world of ca. 1450 to ca. 1200
BC
. Sir Moses Finley, in
The World of Odysseus
(New York: Viking, 1954), demolished that idea and considered Homer a product of the ninth or tenth century
BC
. For a clear and comprehensive discussion of the current orthodoxy that considers Homer an eighth-century poet and his use as “an archaeological artifact,” see Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,”
Classical Antiquity
5, no. 1 (Apr. 1986), 81–138. Gregory Nagy, in
Homeric Questions
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), argued that the poems did not reach their definitive form until the sixth century
BC
, but the archaeologist Susan Sherratt's “Archaeological Contexts,” in John Miles Foley, ed.,
A Companion to Ancient Epic
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 119–42, insists on the syncretism of early Mediterranean cultures. Their core characteristic was the fusion of stories and ideologies. The Homer poems, she says, are the clearest example of “the ideological bricolage” of different cultures spread across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and over a time period that stretches from at least 1800 to 800
BC
(p. 139). In the Mediterranean everything was borrowed and shared, and that meeting of cultures is both Homer's subject and his method. Sherratt's point is that no picture of Homer can be pinned to a particular moment in that long millennium, nor could it be complete without looking for a deep prehistory to the epics, back to the beginning of the second millennium
BC
or farther. In the “social fluidity and instability” of that deep past were stories and questions that would have appealed to the audiences of the equally troubled ninth and eighth centuries
BC
more than the steady bureaucratic calm of the intervening palatial period of the late Bronze Age (p. 138).

Epic's purpose:
See the many essays in John Miles Foley, ed.,
A Companion to Ancient Epic
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

a revelatory fresco:
This is the watercolor reconstruction made for Blegen by the Anglo-Dutch artist and architect Piet de Jong, first published in Carl W. Blegen, “The Palace of Nestor Excavations of 1955,”
American Journal of Archaeology
60, no. 2 (Apr. 1956), 95–101, plate 41 (b&w). Mabel L. Lang, in
The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia
, Vol. 2,
The Frescoes
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), after a decade of heroic work with burned and intransigent materials, reconstructed the fragments differently and separated the bard from the bird. But there is no certainty here. Emily Vermeule, in her review of that book in
The Art Bulletin
52, no. 4 (Dec. 1970), 428–30, was skeptical about Mabel Lang's reconstruction.

leaving Homer's own:
See Casey Dué, “
Epea Pteroenta
: How We Came to Have Our
Iliad
,” in
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the
Iliad, edited by Casey Dué (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 19–30.

“the neon edges”:
Christopher Logue,
War Music
(London: Faber, 2001), 54.

“Warm'd in the brain”:
Alexander Pope,
Iliad
XX.551.

“like furnace doors”:
Logue,
War Music
, 193.

“sometimes travels beside”:
George Seferis, “Memory II,” lines 5–9, from Logbook 3, in
Complete Poems
, trans. and ed. by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard (1995; reprint, Greenwich: Anvil Press, 2009), 188. Seferis may have been thinking of the cosmic power of Apollo himself, the god of truth and poetry, becoming a magical dolphin in the
Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo
: “In the open sea Apollo sprang upon their swift ship, like a dolphin in shape, and lay there, a great and awesome monster, and none of the crew gave heed so as to understand; but they sought to cast the dolphin overboard. But he kept shaking the black ship every way and made the timbers quiver. So they sat silent in their craft for fear, and did not ease the sheets throughout the black, hollow ship, nor lowered the sail of their dark-prowed vessel, but as they had set it first of all with oxhide ropes, so they kept sailing on; for a rushing south wind hurried on the swift ship from behind.” Eventually, the god-driven ship grounded on the beach at Crisa, not far from Delphi, and “like a star at noonday, the lord, far-working Apoll
ō
, leaped from the ship: flashes of fire flew from him thick and their brightness reached to heaven.” As translated by H. G. Evelyn-White in
Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica
(Cambridge, Mass: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, p. 395ff.