Why Homer Matters (51 page)
Authors: Adam Nicolson
suffering and death
See also
Iliad
Troy
archaeology
Greek governance of
Homer and
Olympus and
treasures of
weaving
women of
See also
Trojan War
Turkestan
Turkey
Tyre
Tyro
Ukraine
Ulu Burun ship wreck
unliftable cup
Ur
Ural Mountains
Uruk
Usatovo
Vatican
Venetus A
Venice
Biblioteca Marciana
Ventris, Michael
Vermeule, Emily
Vesuvius
Vienna
Vikings
Villoison, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de
Iliad
edition
Virgil
Aeneid
vocabulary
Vujnovi
Ä
, Nikola
Wales
wandering
warriors
Bronze Age
hair of
hands of
heroism
horses and
lyre of
Proto-Indo-European
shields
stone stelae
Trojan War and
See also specific warriors;
Trojan War; weaponry
water
baths
See also
sea
weaponry
bronze
in graves
rape and
See also specific weapons;
warriors
weaving
Weil, Simone
“The Poem of Force”
wind
sailing ships and
wine
jugs and cups
winnowing fan
Wolf, Friedrich August
Homeric Question
women
childbirth
graves of
Greek vs. Trojan treatment of
Helen
Hittite
hung by Odysseus
Penelope
Proto-Indo-European
slaves
theft of
of Troy
weaving
See also specific women and goddesses
Woolf, Virginia,
A Room of One's Own
Wordsworth, William
world of the ancient Greeks
World War II
cryptography
Wright, Richard
writing
early Greek
Homer
Linear A
Linear B
Phoenician alphabet
tablets
Xanthos
Yeats, William Butler
Young, Douglas
Yugoslav
guslars
Zacos, George
Zenodotus
Zeus
The battle face of the
Iliad
: brutal, excluding, potent. One of the golden masks discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae in 1876.
Throbbing with desire for the Sirens, Odysseus, bound to his ship, resists the illusions of nostalgia. From a storage jar made in Athens in about 480
BC
.
A 6th-century
BC
lekythos
shows the tiny mosquito of a dead man's soul half-hovering above his head. For Homer, life itself was rich, life-after-death terminally diminished.
“Battle was sweeter to them than the land of their fathers.” The sword-bearing charioteer, hunched over in his war-lust, drives against an enemy. A limestone stele from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, ca. 1600
BC
.
A gold drinking cup covered in the interlaced, bind-and-release spirals which entranced Homer's world.
Scales in the Shaft Graves, made of gold so thin they could only have weighed the butterfly souls impressed on them.
His father's son: tiny, dead Mycenaean princelings went to their graves encased in gold, front and back, a habit of reverencing the children of the great which goes back to the steppes.
Odysseus, half-dead from days at sea, emerges naked and a little rough, to find Nausicaa on shore. A 5th-century Athenian party cup shows the scene which, in Chapman's translation, first convinced John Keats of Homer's greatness.
The
Iliad
in Extremadura: a Late Bronze Age stele now in Badajoz shows a warrior, his sword and the giant shield marked with the concentric rings of the cosmos.
Metal heroes: Extremaduran figures with shield, swords, bow, spear and two objects central to the hero-complex: a bubble-handled mirror, for beauty, and a musical instrument, for epic song. Both men have large, “man-slaughtering-hands.”