The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  He died of a kind of humiliation. Sitting on the shore one day he heard the sound of fisher lads returning from their work. “Oh young sirs, hunters of the creatures of the deep, have you caught anything?” “Everything we caught we left behind,” they said, “and we bear away everything we failed to catch.” Homer could not fathom the reply, so they had to explain it to him. They had caught no fish, but they had been catching their lice, and those that they caught they pinched and flicked away, leaving them behind, and those that they did not catch were still upon their bodies. Homer remembered with a sudden chill the prophesy that he was to die in Ios. He lurched to his feet and started to hurry off, but the ground was slippery and he fell upon his side. On the third day after his accident, he died and was interred in Ios. He had composed his own epitaph which—to hell with modesty—forthrightly declares: “Here earth covers the sacred head of divine Homer, the glorifier of hero-men.”15

  Pausanias, who began life as a Homeric scholar but gave up because the subject was so vexed with controversy, wrote his Guide to Greece with Odysseus as a kind of tutelary spirit. The index lists Odyssey as passim. The travel-writer tells how there was an oracle recorded beneath a bronze portrait of Homer which predicted that he would seek his father’s country but die and be buried in his mother’s. “The people of Ios point out Homer’s tomb in the island, and Clymene’s in a different part of it: they say she was Homer’s mother.” (So much for Critheis.) “But the Cypriots, who also lay claim to Homer, say that a woman of Cyprus called Themisto” (so much for Clymene) “was his mother, and that Euklous foretold the birth of Homer in these verses” (which Pausanias then quotes).16 Pausanias refuses to offer a firm opinion on the matter. He had left such controversies behind. A modern guidebook says that at the northern tip of Ios flows the creek of Plakotós, and there in 1770 a Dutch traveller said he had found the tomb of Homer. All he did for certain was to break into some prehistoric graves.

  Surely we see Homer in the many ancient busts and statues? A version of him, in any case: the earliest known portrait dates from 460 BC, centuries after his death. The life-size statue has vanished but copies of the head, thought to be relatively faithful, survive.17 Homer is old, blind, head slightly tilted to the left as though listening. His face is lean, long, made to seem even longer by the downward strokes of the beard. A handsome old man, a kalos geron, he wears his hair carefully arranged on top, loose at sides and neck. Bald pates characterise statuary elders. The style of drawing hair forward, partly to conceal the baldness, is a common feature of archaic coiffing; viewers would have recognised this Homer as being from a time long before their own, and this added authority to his works. The truth is what has stood the test of time. There is no portrayal of the adolescent Homer. In fact, no portraits of young poets or philosophers survive. Youth and truth were never complementary.

  Most of the cities which laid claim to Homer issued coins with his head on them. In the fourth century Ios issued an arresting portrait coin, assimilating the poet to the figure of Zeus. On this coin he does not appear to be blind. The eye has a pupil rather than a blank or a sealed lid. Smyrna minted coins at the beginning of the second century BC where Homer is Zeus-like, but “in place of a thunderbolt” he wields a book roll. Other versions—for instance, the coins of Chios—show him reading the Iliad to himself, or meditating.18

  In these contrasting verbal and visual impressions of Homer and his story not a single detail can be verified, though the geography of each variation is plausible and scholar-critics have been known to invest lifetimes and fortunes in proving what is unprovable and warring with foes as ill-armed as themselves. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the mathematical geographer (second half of the third century BC), also doubted Homer’s geography.19 He says, “You will find the island of Aeolus when you find the cobbler who sewed the bag for the winds.”20 Samuel Butler sides with Eratosthenes; his verdict is amusingly just: “Homeric commentators have been blind so long that nothing will do for them but Homer must be blind too. They have transferred their own blindness to the poet.”21 But then Butler’s theory of the female author of the Odyssey, Homer in a gown, is itself not wholly without smoke, mirrors or a white stick.

  Against the zealots, there have always been sceptics for whom the story seemed in certain places too specific, in others too vague, as though various islands and towns had invested in the account so as to derive some benefit even from a spurious association with Homer. Untruths and implausibilities were less a matter of deceit by local tourist boards, more the result of an impassioned respect for the poet. Aelian recalls how in Alexandria “Ptolemy Philopator erected a temple to Homer and placed within it a magnificent seated statue of the poet and, in a semicircle around him, all the cities that laid claim to him.” Strabo saw another such temple in Smyrna.22 Sculptural reliefs show Homer enthroned, laurel-crowned, while the Muses and other representative figures dance attendance. His two great poems may be portrayed as boys kneeling or squatting beside his seat, and there are sometimes mice (representing the Batrachomyomachia, or “The Battle of the Frogs and Mice”) nibbling crumbs near his feet.

  In the seventeenth century, doubts start to bleach out the Life. They begin within the story itself and have to do with the poetic intentions of the poet Homer. The despotic classicist Richard Bentley23 categorically declares: “Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for small comings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. These loose songs were not collected together, in the form of an epic poem, till about Pisistratus’ time, about five hundred years after.” Maybe wrong, maybe right. Sceptics who propose alternative narratives provide us in the end with accounts as suppositious as those they try to adjust or displace. Perhaps more suppositious, given that they are at least two millennia further away from Homer than the “biographers” were.

  Be that as it may, over the last three centuries, Homer has flickered on and off, he has changed form like Proteus in the cave, and no single critic has managed to hold him still and force an “I am” from his lips. He has been fragmented by some into a committee of Pisistratean redactors; others see him as multiple. Was he two or even three original writers, or no one at all, like Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave? Others dissolve him into the solution of “an oral tradition.” If there is no such poet as Homer, what do we make of the poems, what is their authority, how do we discuss a poem without an author, a poem of multiple authorship, a poem sung and finally written down after centuries, a poem whose existence, or at least its survival, is a function of tradition rather than individual literary imagination? We are a world away from the flustered old poet slipping and falling on a muddy track in Ios, and further still from the young man on his travels, stopping off at Ithaca and leaving his eyesight there.

  There is something unprecedented (and unrepeated) about the way the poetry of the Iliad and Odyssey affects reader or audience, something which even a decent translation communicates to the attentive ear. This “something” has to do with how the language relates to the things it names, how the words relate to the world that they portray. It is more than a matter of using verbs, active verbs, much more frequently than most Greek poets do, in some passages more frequently than nouns; it is more than how he enacts thought, embeds it in the action through the use of such verbs, embodies it. It is more, too, than the extensive use of dialogue, the sometimes virtually performable disposition of the language in its sequence and characterisation. It starts in the unique nature of the language that is deployed.

  Homeric diction is a composite of different dialect strands, not resolved into a standard language but retaining the oddnesses of different speech, as though a poet wrote in Scots, South African, Texan and Jamaican, all in a single poem, from hemistych to hemistych. The language deploys not only different dialects, but different periods of dialect. We meet Ionic (from the islands), the basic language of the poem, and Aeolic (from Asia Minor);24 forms from one and the other are mixed without particular pattern.
An Aeolic form may be chosen over an Ionic for metrical reasons, but when there is no metrical determinant there is no logic in the choice of one or the other. Then there are Attic (Athenian) forms from the time of Pisistratus, when the texts of the poems were put into something like their present form.

  Though historically Ionian supplants Aeolian, in Homeric verse the elements do not appear as successive layers but are mixed. One might call it an artificial language, but it does not have the feel of conscious contrivance or the systematic qualities of a deliberate invention. It seems rather to have evolved, with chance inclusions and exclusions occurring for reasons we cannot confidently infer. The result is a melding of linguistic and cultural heritages and periods. There are more complex dialect features foreign to the likely time of composition, for example outcrops of Arcado-Cypriot, the Greek of the Myceneans five hundred years “before Homer.”25 The language mix is clearly not a late phenomenon: it is endemic in the evolving of a poem handed down in an oral tradition. We will consider the phenomenon of the oral tradition below.

  Oliver Taplin makes much of the combinations, geographic and temporal variegations, that occur line by line, phrase by phrase, and then affirms a paradox which is partly true, one that we experience even at the remove of translation: “… this special poetic language will not have struck its hearers as artificial or outlandish, precisely because they knew it and expected it as the language of hexameter poetry. It is the language proper to the occasion that they will have assimilated from childhood.”26 Artificial the language is, outlandish it is not. Familiarity may have dulled but cannot erase the fact that, like liturgical language or sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Biblical translation, an appropriate idiom not continuous with any form of local speech has been devised and, while it is central to a culture, it is received as proper and not interrogated. An expressive distance between the Homeric idiom and the language spoken in the street or the agora was obvious and undeniable. Because the Homeric poems are not in a language that ever lived as a single spoken dialect, but rather in an amalgam with a special diction, formulaic phrases, repetitions and the like, it is possible to say that even the ancients heard and read Homer rather as we read Greek or Latin, or the King James Bible, as a language that is authoritative, stable, complete: the old lexicographer’s dream of a language of fixed meanings. It could not be added to: it was the more living for never having quite lived, except in the poems.

  For the reception of poetry, the consequences of using such a language are quite radical. Doctor Johnson makes an interesting point about the inimitable, irreducible simplicity of Homer’s language. “Virgil wrote in a language of the same general fabric with that of Homer, in verses of the same measure, and in an age nearer to Homer’s time by eighteen hundred years, yet he found, even then, the state of the world so much altered, and the demand for elegance so much increased, that mere nature would be endured no longer; and perhaps, in the multitude of borrowed passages, very few can be shown which he has not embellished.”27 Embellishment is what comes after Homer. There are certainly elaborate and elaborated passages in the poems, but little is included for purely decorative reasons, little simply to please the readerly eye. William Gell in 1807 published the first serious topographical account of Ithaca, Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca, “not entirely without hopes of vindicating the poem of Homer from the skepticism of those critics who imagine that the Odyssey is a mere poetical composition.”28 That word “mere” isolates the peculiar virtue of Homer’s verse: it is not fanciful, poetical, artificial. For Homer a rose is a rose is a rose.

  The Austrian scholar Albin Lesky says that in Greek epic poetry the language is always “conditioned by metre.”29 It is a simple point, but one worth making. In translation that specific condition is replaced by other conditions (iambic pentameter, poulter’s measure, rhyme, etc.), yet the conditioning specific to the Greek, to Homer’s curious version of Greek, and the relationship between the conditioning and that synthetic language, is precisely the poetry. It is not just prosody but diction and the whole strategy of delivery that are entailed. “In the comparison of Homer and Virgil,” Dr. Johnson declares in his Life of Dryden, “the discriminative excellence of Homer is elevation and comprehension of thought, and that of Virgil is grace and splendour of diction. The beauties of Homer are therefore difficult to be lost, and those of Virgil difficult to be retained.”30

  Use of the Greek hexameter for epic poetry probably goes back very far in time: Homer (even in the apocryphal poems) is versatile, but his versatility is expressed wholly in hexameter, with variety but without variation, no embedded earlier or other prosodies. Variety is achieved by means of subtle substitutions within the metrical pattern, reversals and sanctioned “irregularities,” but most of all by the use of extended syntax that runs on over the line ending (enjambement) and by the range of effects that can be achieved by positioning the caesura, or pause, within the line, even introducing secondary caesuras. This freedom within a framework of constraint sustains the shifting tonalities of the poem, its sudden changes of key and register.

  Mikhail Bakhtin insists that the epic “was never a poem about the present, about its own time” and the discourse of epic is inevitably—in this case formulaically—remote from the “discourse of a contemporary about a contemporary addressed to contemporaries.”31 All this suggests a relationship between the language and the world it portrays that is highly artificial, staged, remote. Yet the opposite is true.

  Reading Chapman’s translation of Homer for the first time, John Keats wrote one of his most famous sonnets:

  Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  What affects Keats, who cannot read the Greek original, is at once the grandeur of Homer’s poems and their new-minted immediacy. George Chapman remains Homer’s most famous English translator, though his translations are little read nowadays. He completed the Iliad in 1611, the Odyssey in 1616, and the Homeric Hymns in 1624. “The work that I was born to do, is done,” he declared.

  He made a fundamental mistake at the outset: he took Homer to be “learning’s sire.” It was and is a common error. For him, Homer is a moral teacher: history and story are secondary to the psychological and ethical truths that they illuminate. The literal is not enough; he must seek out a deep sense in each phrase and action. He assumes that Homer, though remote in time and language from seventeenth-century England, was nonetheless not unlike himself. As many translators of Homer do, he over-interprets and interpolates in the very process of translation. Yet the original is so powerful that it overcomes the bias and ideology of the translator: Keats responds not to Chapman’s moral sense of Homer but to the amazing, morally neutral new planet (Iliad) and new sea (Odyssey) tha the presents.32

  Chapman did have more than an inkling of the difference of Homer’s poems from anything else he had read, a difference in kind from all the poetry they give rise to. Prefacing the Iliad, he writes, “It is the part of every knowing and judicious interpreter, not to follow the number and order of words, but [my italics] the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently.” The “interpreter”—and what more primary interpreter is there than a translator?—weighs the “sentences” (here signifying the underlying, weighty significance of the verse rather than its syntactical struc
tures) and tries to render the material things themselves. W. H. Auden gets closer to Homer than most modern poets, not only in his apocalyptic “The Shield of Achilles” but in his calm appraisal of the poet: “The world of Homer is unbearably sad because it never transcends the immediate moment; one is happy, one is unhappy, one wins, one loses, finally one dies. That is all.”33 Homer’s is a tragic world in a special, pre-classical sense: tragedy dwells not in the protagonists, their relationships and fates, but in the nature of existence itself. The understanding that comes from it is tautological, an understanding of itself.

  This is why we accept even brutal and incomprehensibly cruel events in Homer, especially the deaths of men portrayed as generous, lively, and tangential to the main conflict. Bernard Williams calls Homer’s world pre-philosophical: how things are is not constantly patrolled by a theoretical sense of how things should be in moral terms. Homer, like Thucydides in his histories and Sophocles in his plays, “represents human beings as dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly, with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency,” for example, the fantastic world through which Odysseus sails, “and in itself is not necessarily well adjusted to ethical aspirations.”34 To read a poetry wholly without “ethical aspirations” and to leave ethical aspiration out of our reading provides us with an experience, a discipline, which we can get in no other poetry of comparable richness and complexity to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jacob Burckhardt quotes a repeated line from the Iliad, “always to do the best and to outdo others,”35 and comments: “this does not imply that the hero is an ideal of humanity. All his actions and his passions go to extremes; what is ideal in him lies in the beauty and freshness he embodies … [H]e represents the wholly unspoiled, spontaneous egoism of human nature.” But, carried away in the cadence of his sentence, Burckhardt overshoots the landing-strip: “unrepentant but great-hearted and benign.”36 As soon as the word “benign” is introduced, his argument is fudged.