Why Homer Matters (8 page)

William Flinders Petrie in Abydos, Egypt, 1922.

To help with those documents he had with him his old friend, an Oxford Assyriologist, the Reverend Professor Archibald Sayce. “The floating sand of the desert,” Sayce wrote the next year, “was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters … They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.” It's an image from Shelley, the world after Ozymandias: ancient texts blowing in tatters and fragments across the Egyptian desert.

But then Flinders Petrie came across the greatest of all his treasures. On the morning of 21 February 1888, under the head of a woman who was not named on her coffin and was buried in an otherwise unmarked stretch of the necropolis, he found a large roll of papyrus, a papyrus pillow. This was no chance leftover. “The roll had belonged to a lady with whom it had been buried in death,” Sayce wrote. “The skull of the mummy showed that its possessor had been young and attractive-looking, with features at once small, intellectual, and finely chiselled, and belonging distinctively to the Greek type.”

The papyrus had been damaged in its outer leaves, but Petrie began to unfold it, as if he were looking into the innards of a wasp's nest, and peering beyond the outer covering found himself reading the Greek numbers twelve and eighty, and the names Agamemnon, Achaeans, Corinth. The roll with which the young woman had been buried was the first two books of the
Iliad
and, here from book 2, Flinders Petrie, with the sand of the Sahara blowing around him, was reading lines from the Catalogue of Ships, Homer's enumeration of the Greeks who sailed to Troy.

This Hawara Homer, written on papyrus in about
AD
150, is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, its lines numbered by Flinders Petrie in August 1888. It is one of the most time-vertigo-inducing objects I know. In columns aligned left, the clear Greek capitals are spooled out across the reedy, vegetal surface of the papyrus sheets. There are no gaps between the words, but they are entirely legible, the relaxed and masterful calligraphy rolling on for line after line like a wave that will not break. This is a text to travel to the next world with, the strokes in each letter just curved away from straightness, so that in its combination of open
o'
s and
u'
s and the
w'
s of its omegas, and the slight flexing in the pen strokes of its
k'
s and
n'
s and
t'
s
,
this is one of the greatest images of the generous and beautiful word ever made. Other contemporary manuscripts found by Flinders Petrie are far more sketchy and scratchy, less steady in their progress across the page; but this is Homer as monument, as scripture, as “the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead.”

The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. By the time the unnamed woman was buried with this precious pillow in the Hawara necropolis, Homer had already become the Homer we now have.

The key phase in this creation of the Homer that Roman, Byzantine, late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe all thought of as the undeniable text was in the halls of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Between the third and second centuries
BC
, a sequence of great Alexandrian editor-scholars, enormously funded by the wealth of the Ptolemies, the rulers of Egypt, created the monumental Homer that is visible in the Hawara grave, the Byzantine codex Venetus A and in the minds of Alexander Pope and John Keats. That Alexandrian era is the narrow neck through which an earlier and rather different Homer passed.

The famous library of Alexandria was not just a gathering of texts but far more energetic and dynamic than that, a massive multidisciplinary research institute, an engine for establishing Alexandria as the center of the civilized world. By royal edict from the Graeco-Egyptian dynasty of pharaohs, no ship could call at the port of Alexandria without being searched for the books it carried. Every one would be copied with unforgiving exactness and marked in the catalog as “from the ships.” Occasionally the librarians held on to the original and returned the copy.

The Alexandrian library was the repository for Greek culture, the place in which the plays of the Athenian tragedians and the works of Plato and Aristotle were preserved, but it was devised and run on a Near Eastern model. For thousands of years it had been the practice of great Near Eastern kings to establish libraries and archives on a scale that individual Greek city-states had never come anywhere near. Alexandria fused Babylon and Nineveh with Athens and Sparta.

With thirty to fifty state-funded scholars at work in the library, the head librarian also the royal tutor, and the agents of the Ptolemies scouring the Mediterranean for copies of all books—magic, music, metaphysics, zoology, geography, cosmology, Babylonian, Jewish, Greek and Egyptian thought—the Alexandrian library was a grand central knowledge machine. It was an exercise in cultural dominance, tyranny through control of the word. By the first century
BC
, it was thought that the library contained 700,000 papyrus rolls, 120,000 of them poetry and prose, all stored and labeled and cataloged in their own tailored linen or leather jackets.

This industrial-scale exercise in cultural imperialism left its impress on Homer, and the key to the Alexandrian changes is in the large number of marginal notes in Venetus A. The Byzantine scholar in about 950 copied out the text the Alexandrians had bequeathed to him. In his wide margins, he wrote down many of the remarks they had made, not only about Homer but about previous commentators on him. It is Homer as a mille-feuille: one leaf of scholarship laid on top of another for centuries. Other medieval manuscripts have their own additional notes, or
scholia
, and some of the papyrus fragments, including the Hawara
Iliad
, also have marginal notes from these editors.

It is difficult to escape the idea that the Alexandrian editors, who seem to have limited themselves to commentary rather than cuts, wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurize him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city, to make of him precisely the dignified monument that the family of the young woman in Hawara had placed beneath her head in death. There was a long tradition of treating Homer like this.

In Plato's
Republic
, written in about 370
BC
, Socrates maintained that Homer would be catastrophic for most young men in the ideal city. Poetry itself was suspect, and dangerous if it disturbed the equilibrium of the citizen, but in some passages Homer stepped way beyond the mark. He quotes the beginning of book 9 of the
Odyssey
, when Odysseus is about to sit down to dinner in the beautiful palace of the king of the Phaeacians.

Nothing, Odysseus says, is more marvelous in life than sitting down to a delicious dinner with your friends, the table noisy and the waiter filling the glasses. “To my mind,” Odysseus says cheerfully, looking round him at his new friends who have saved him from the unharvestable sea, “this is the best that life can offer.” Not for Socrates or his pupil Plato: “Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.”

That frame of mind undoubtedly governed the editing process in Alexandria, and its presumptions appear at every turn. Toward the end of book 8 of the
Iliad
, Hector is making a speech to the Trojans. It has been a long and terrible day on both sides. Among the many dead, Priam's son Gorgythion had been hit hard in the chest with an arrow.

Just as a poppy in a garden, heavy

with its ripening seeds, bends to one side

with the weight of spring rain;

so his head goes slack to one side,

weighed down by the weight of his helmet.

Night is now falling, and Hector is encouraging the Trojans to prepare themselves for the following day. He has been like a hound in the battle, pursuing the Greeks as if they were wild boar, slashing and scything at their legs in front of him, his eyes glittering in the slaughter like the god of battle. The corpses have piled up on the field like the swaths of a hay meadow newly mown and yet to be gathered. There is scarcely room for a body of men to stand together. Hector, though, has summoned the Trojans “to a place that is clear of the dead” and now speaks to them of the state they are in. They should feed their horses, light fires, roast the meat of sheep and oxen, drink “honey-hearted wine” and eat their bread. In Troy itself, the old men and the young boys should stand on the walls and the women light great fires in their houses, all to keep a watch so that the Greeks should not “ambush” them. The word he uses is
lochos
, the same as will be used in the
Odyssey
to describe the Greeks hiding in the Trojan Horse, and which has as its root
lechomai
, meaning “to lie down.” The implications are clear: the Trojans stand to fight; the Greeks do so cheatingly, creepingly. The ambush, the covert attack, is the kind of violence the Greeks would do. This is Hector speaking as the man of the city, defending it against the treachery of its assailants, a man who in almost every line is the voice of his community.

The Alexandrian editors accepted these noble statements without demur. In these passages Hector fitted the idea of restrained nobility which the Hellenistic Greeks required of Homer. But Hector then moves up a gear and goes on to speak of the next day and of himself. The Greeks are no better than “dogs, carried by the fates on their black ships.” Hector will go for Diomedes in the morning, and Diomedes will lie there, “torn open by a spear, with all his comrades dead around him.” And Hector himself will be triumphant: “I myself wish I might be immortal and ageless all my days, And that I might be honored just as Athene and Apollo.”

A peppering of special marks in the margin, hooks and dots, all carefully transcribed by the Byzantine scholars, signals the Alexandrian editors' anxiety at the vulgarity of these lines.

This apparent self-promotion and self-assertion—can that really be what Homer intended for him? In the third century
BC
, Zenodotus, the first librarian at Alexandria appointed by the Ptolemies, rejected the line about the fates and their black ships. Aristarchus, his great second-century successor, agreed with him. And when Hector went on to claim immortality, Aristarchus thought his words “excessively boastful,” not the done thing, and highly suspect. In Aristarchus's mind, although not entirely clearly, these lines were probably not Homeric.

It is as if these editors were trying to make Homer into a proto-Virgil, to turn Hector into Aeneas, to transform the Greek epics into tales of irreproachable moral instruction, and in doing so to reduce their emotional and psychological range. But Homer was greater than his editors, rougher, less consistent and less polite, a poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite.

A page from the Byzantine Venetus A manuscript of the
Iliad
with editorial anxiety marks in the margin.

Compare Hector's words with the speech made by the British officer, lieutenant colonel Tim Collins in the Kuwaiti desert about twenty miles south of the Iraqi border on 19 March 2003, the eve of the allied invasion of Iraq. Collins had found a place where he could address the men of the First Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment. In his Ray-Bans, with his cigar in his hand and a certain swagger, speaking off the cuff to about eight hundred men standing around him in the middle of a dusty courtyard, he spoke as Homer had Hector speak.