Why Homer Matters (9 page)

“We go to liberate, not to conquer,” Collins began, half remembering echoes of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Yeats, all mingling with the modern everyday in his ear.

We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.

Alongside that restraint and magnanimity toward the enemy, and the sense that he is speaking as the representative of a great civilization himself, is something else. “I expect you,” he said, addressing his young soldiers, most of them from poor Catholic northern Irish backgrounds,

to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose … The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction … As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity … If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.

Hector wants his men to rock the Greeks' world. There is an element of pretension and self-aggrandizement in both of them, but the modern British officer and the Bronze Age poet both know more than the scholar-editors in their Alexandrian halls. Homer's subject is not elegance but truth, however terrible.

The Alexandrians were keen on more than a moralized Homer. Their huge and careful gathering of texts from across the ancient world and from any passing ship was a complex inheritance, a braided stream they tried to purify and make singular, to make one Homer where previously there had been many.

They did their job with scholarly decorum, sometimes deleting lines from the text they bequeathed to the future, usually in their commentaries doing no more than casting doubt on what Homer was meant to have said, marking the text with a skewer, an
obelos
, in the margin, as if to pin the error to the spot. If Homer got things wrong—killing off a warrior who then reappeared in the battle a few lines later; if he repeated a line or group of lines with no variation; if it seemed as if something had been pushed into the poem at a later date; or if Homer's ancient words simply didn't make sense to Hellenistic editors—these were all grounds for severe judgment in Alexandria. Homer had to be kept up to his own standards.

Before that Alexandrian edit, Homer was a not a single monumental presence in the ancient world but a voluble, chattering crowd of multiple voices. Ancient authors quote lines from Homer that do not appear in the post-Alexandrian text. Occasionally a piece of papyrus will have an odd or variant equivalent for a well-known line. Different Greek cities had their own different Homers. Crete had its own, as did Cyprus, Delos, Chios and Athens. Alexandrian scholars knew versions from Argos in the Peloponnese, from Sinop
ē
on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey and from the great Greek colony of Massalia far to the west, beneath what is now Marseilles. There were more epics than merely the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, filling in the gaps of the story which the poems we know only hint at. Homer was said to have written them all. Aristotle had a different version of Homer from Plato's and prepared another for his pupil Alexander the Great, to take with him on his world adventures into Asia. Homer ripples around the ancient Mediterranean and even farther afield, taking on local color, not a man or a poem but flickering, octopus-like, varying, adopting the colors of the country he found himself in. None of these local versions survives as more than a reference or two in ancient scholarly notes, but they hint at a reality that would have made William Cowper's or Alexander Pope's hair stand rigid. Homer, before Alexandria, was multiplicity itself.

It's as if in that Alexandrian moment Homer's radiant, ragged beard and hair were trimmed and neatened for a proto-Roman world of propriety and correctness.

Roughness characterizes the world before the great pruning. In this way Homer is unlike any historical writer. The usual idea—that copying makes a text increasingly corrupt through time—must be abandoned and the opposite assumption made. As Homer traveled on through time, passing in particular through the rigorous barbers' salon of the Alexandrian scholars, the more regular he became. In the words of Casey Dué, professor of Classics at Houston and editor of the Harvard Homer multitext project: “The further back in time we go, the more multiform—the more ‘wild'—our text of Homer becomes.” Homer is not orderly. Hope to trace him back to his essence, to the tap root, and you find yourself lost among the tangle of his branches. Homer's identity was in his multiplicity, his essence was in his lack of it, and he soon sinks back into the world from which he came.

Homer is never there. He is the great absentee, always slipping between the fingers, a blob of mercury on a bed of wax. Nothing reliable can be said about him: his birthplace, his parents, his life story, his dates, even his existence. Was he one poet or two? Or many? Were the Homers women? Samuel Butler, a great Victorian translator of the
Odyssey
, thought that its poet must have been a girl from Trapani in Sicily, “young, headstrong and unmarried,” partly because she was “so exquisitely right” in her descriptions of “every single one of [her] women,” partly because she made such girlish mistakes. Would a man ever have thought, for example, that a ship should have a rudder at both ends? Homer does, twice, in the
Odyssey
, book 9, lines 483 and 540.

This Homeric unpindownability has inspired eccentrics. Craziness abounds. Medieval Italians, who could not read Greek, used to keep copies of the
Iliad
and kiss them for good luck. Lawrence of Arabia thought he was qualified as a translator of the
Odyssey
because, among other attributes, he, unlike most Greek professors, had “killed many men.” No point in trying to read Homer unless you had blood on your hands. One scholarly work in Italian has revealed that Homer was Swedish and that his Mediterranean was in fact the Baltic. Another recently showed that the
Iliad
is an ancient guidebook to the stars. According to a careful and immensely detailed study written by a Dutchman, Homer was from Cambridgeshire, the Trojan War happened on the Gog Magog Hills near Cherry Hinton, “Sparta” was in Spain and “Lesbos” was the Isle of Wight. Henriette Mertz, a Chicago patent attorney, thought that Calypso lived in the Azores, that Scylla and Charybdis were Homer's descriptions of tidal movements in the Bay of Fundy, Newfoundland, and that Nausicaa and her father lived in the Caribbean.

None of this is new. Plutarch (
AD
ca. 46–120) thought Calypso's island was five days' sail from Britain out in the North Atlantic, perhaps in the Faroes. Earlier still, many lives of Homer were written in the ancient world, some now preserved in precious early medieval manuscripts that are stored in some of the great repositories of Europe. They are rich in creative detail, but, like so much else to do with Homer, all of them were made up. In the library of the Medicis in Florence you will find a fourteenth-century manuscript that describes the way in which Homer lived and worked and sang his poems on Chios, the desiccated rusk of an island off the Aegean coast of Turkey. According to a ninth-century manuscript now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, he was born in Smyrna, on what is now the Turkish mainland. Others say in Ithaca, as the grandson of Odysseus, or so the Pythia in Delphi told the emperor Hadrian when he inquired; or in the Argolid, where Agamemnon had ruled in Mycenae; or in Thessaly, in the harsh and half-civilized north of Greece, the northern zone on the edge of civility from where Achilles came; or, as a manuscript now in Rome claims, in Egypt, because his heroes had the habit of kissing each other and that was an Egyptian practice. Even, in time, the Romans themselves claimed him as one of theirs. An eleventh-century manuscript now in the royal library in the Escorial outside Madrid adds Athens to the list. Many claim he was born, or died, or at least lived for a while, on the island of Ios in the Cyclades. In other words, he came from everywhere and nowhere.

The life of Homer lurks in this way in the subconscious of the European imagination. He is present in the archives but mysteriously absent. And hanging over all the suggestions in these ancient lives, which are thought to draw on ideas of Homer that emerged in about the sixth century
BC
, is a deep air of doubt. Did Homer really come from any of these places? Homer, even in the tradition of the ancient lives, seems to exist as a kind of miasma, a suggestion of himself, more an idea than a man, a huge and potent nonbeing.

But from these muddled, uncertain texts one or two beautiful suggestions do emerge. In the ninth-century life of Homer now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, the author—himself anonymous—compiled the verdicts he could glean from the past, and quoted Aristotle from a book called
On Poets
which is otherwise now lost. “The people of Ios, Aristotle said, record that Homer was born from a spirit, a daimon, who danced along with the Muses.” His mother, a girl from Ios, had got pregnant with the daimon. So it was as simple as that: like Jesus and Achilles, Homer was half human. And his flesh was infused not with mere godliness but with the spirit of poetry. Just as Aesop never existed but was a name around which traditional fables gathered, Homer was the name given to the poems his world composed.

The word Aristotle used for this moment of fusion carries some wonderful implications. The Greek for “dance with” is
synchoreuo
, meaning “to join in the chorus with.” The
choreia
of which the Muses and Homer's daimon father formed a part was a singing dance—words, music and movement together. The same word meant both the tune they danced to and, by extension, any orderly circle or circling motion. Even the islands of the Cyclades, of which Ios is one, arranged as they are in a wide circle on the horizon around the sacred island of Delos, were thought to be a
choreia
. It was, in essence, any beautiful turning in motion together, especially of the stars. Buried in this half-mystical genealogy is the understanding that Homer's poems are the music of the universe.

Another life, said to have been written by Plutarch, the Greek historian of the first century
AD
, and perhaps genuinely drawing on Plutarch's lost books, says straightforwardly that Homer's fatherland was nowhere on earth; his ancestors came from “great heaven” itself: “For you were born of no mortal mother, but of Calliope.” Calliope was the muse of epic poetry. Her name means “beautiful voice,” and she was the daughter of Zeus, the all-powerful king of the gods, and of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. This is not the language we now use. It is even a little off-putting, too high, too reminiscent of murky paintings on ignorable ceilings, but it says what seems to be the truth. There was no human being called Homer; his words are the descendants of memory and power, the offspring of the muse who had a beautiful voice. The myth itself identifies something that biography and geography can only grasp at. Homer is his poetry. No man called Homer was ever known, and it doesn't help to think of Homer as a man. Easier and better is to see him abstractly, as the collective and inherited vision of great acts done long ago. The poems acknowledge that. In the first lines of both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, they call on the muse as their own divine mother, the source of authority and power, to tell the tales the teller is about to begin.

The name Homer—which is pronounced in Greek with a short
o
and a long
e
,
Homeeros
, making it stranger than you had imagined, from a more distant world—may mean “blind,” at least in the dialect of Greek spoken on Lesbos. From the name came the tradition that Homer was blind, although that too was fiercely disputed by the ancient authors.

Or it may mean something stranger still: a “connector” or even “bond.” Homer, perhaps, was the man who joined, in the way of the poet, things that might otherwise have lived apart: different elements of the inherited stories or those stories and the audiences who listened to his telling of them.

There is another tradition, related to that one, which runs through all his ancient biographies. Homer was not his original name, perhaps only given him when he went blind or became a hostage (another possible etymology). His original name in this version was Melesigenes, perhaps because he was born by the river Meles, which runs through Smyrna, now Izmir, or more intriguingly because the name can mean “caring for his clan.” This Homer is to be seen as the man who cared for his people, his inheritance, his race descent, the way he came into being, his origins. Homer is what looked after the source, what found, remembered and transmitted truth from the distant past. In that meaning of his name, his essence is not his smart newness, his ability to connect, but the antiquity of the tales he tells. He is the embodiment of retrospect.

All poetry is memorial. Much of it is elegy. The earliest to have been found was dug up by Victorian archaeologists in Sumer, in what is now Iraq, on a tablet marked with wedge-shaped cuneiform symbols pressed into the wet clay before it dried. The fragmentary poems in the clay were written in about 2600
BC
, perhaps two thousand years before the Homeric epics were first written on papyrus. But that first written Sumerian poetry is not about the springtime of the world. Poetry begins by looking back to the beautiful past with a song about Ashnan, the goddess of grain, and her seven sons, opening with these chantable, formulaic repetitive lines.