The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Most Homeric similes deploy not specific but characteristic images which are “universal” in impact, that is, not specific to a certain place or time. The Iliad’s abundant sea and weather similes, for example, belong to the whole Mediterranean. Oliver Taplin insists that the language of Homeric similes is “notably non-formulaic and late.”37 As a device they supplement the narrative, doing what, at times, the narrative cannot do. Agamemnon, at the beginning of the Iliad, is an unjust, petty-minded and monstrous leader. It is hard for the poet to make him less repugnant through action because the time-scale is too tight and the story he is telling will not allow him to add incidents in order to alter the initial impression. As a result, the poem uses similes to build him up, to adjust the focus on him. The similes compare his face with Zeus’, his waist with Ares’, his chest with Poseidon’s; in the end he is like a great bull standing among his grazing cows, a simile notable for its complex literal inappropriateness (unlike Priam’s comparison of Odysseus to a ram), however appropriate the figurative sense. In the first place, does the peaceful bull stand well with the three preceding gods, remembering that when Zeus took bull form it was for libidinal purposes? Or are we to assume that the first three similes, which were meant to evoke the physical power and agility of the king, are switched off when the poem switches on the simile which contextualises this large, powerful figure? Is it appropriate to compare the leader of an invading army to a bull and a herd, which imply a settled rural culture such as the one the Greeks are violating? In making Agamemnon bullish among his herd, what are the feminising implications for the army itself? And there is no peace within the army itself. Compared with the lions in the Odyssey, this particular simile appears inappropriate, disconnected, perhaps super-added by an editor or scribe who felt that Agamemnon needed building up after his poor comportment in earlier passages.

  Many similes come from one world (“modern”) and do not relate directly to the customs or events of the literal world of the Trojan or Odyssean narrative. There is a distance between the audience’s present and the present of the actions the poem recounts. The poem acknowledges and maintains that distance, yet does so without giving a sense of distancing. One key device is the simile’s “presence” in the audience’s world, even if it is anachronistic in relation to the things or events it is illuminating. These are not anachronisms in the way that iron, or burial customs, are anachronistically presented (a function of mis-remembering or forgetting). Nor is the poem archaising. It is making things that are remote and difficult familiar, drawing them into the realm of the imaginable and comprehensible.

  When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar and bedding down in the forecourt, or prodomon, of his house, sees the women servants sneaking out to their amorous assignations with the suitors, two quite astonishing similes are unleashed. In the first (Butler again), “His heart growled within him, and as a bitch with puppies growls and shows her teeth when she sees a stranger, so did his heart growl with anger at the evil deeds that were being done.” His heart crosses gender and is a bitch, but a bitch commanded to obey by a masterful will: “but he beat his breast and said, ‘Heart, be still, you had worse than this to bear on the day when the terrible Cyclops ate your brave companions; yet you bore it in silence till your cunning got you safe out of the cave …’” Powerfully he recalls past events, the effect of patience, the instincts that have drawn him home and the natural protective instincts of any creature. Yet having calmed his bitch-heart, he is nonetheless restless. The simile that follows is domestic and in some curious way libidinal, a blood sausage: “but he tossed about as one who turns a paunch full of blood and fat in front of a hot fire, doing it first on one side and then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon as possible, even so did he turn himself about from side to side, thinking all the time how, single handed as he was, he should contrive to kill so large a body of men as the wicked suitors.” No wonder that Athena comes and cools him down. “My poor unhappy man,” she says, “why do you lie awake in this way? This is your house: your wife is safe inside it, and so is your son who is just such a young man as any father may be proud of.”

  We audiences and readers live in a post-heroic age. The poem concedes that in these latter days men are otherwise than as they were. Their imagination and understanding have altered and diminished. It requires an effort to make sense and enter into the world of big deeds. “Thanks to the repeated phrases and scene-sequences,” says Taplin, “we are in a familiar world where things have their known places. It is a world which is solid and known, and yet at the same time coloured by the special diction with an epic nobility.”38 We grow familiar with the world of the poems through repetitions, which are reassuring and stabilising, and we enter in by means of voices and similes. It is odd to hear the echoes, some of them prolonged, sounding within and between the poems. The Odyssey, Book V opens exactly as the Iliad, Book XI does: Dawn leaves the side of her once mortal lover, Tithonus. The first three lines are identical, the fourth a prosodic echo.

  The gods who were worshipped by the Trojans and the Achaeans went by the same names and had the same characteristics as the gods worshipped in “Homer’s” time. They too help to make the space of the poems familiar. We find ourselves on the terraces of Olympus, watching and hearing gods in their remarkably human-seeming confabulations. Their passions, pettinesses and partisanships are like men’s; their deep parental loves, their settled hatreds, and the scheming social world of heaven itself, are reflected in—or from—the human world (“then” and “now”) above which they hover. The organisation of heaven, with a king, assemblies and the like, is familiar not only from Trojan and Achaean structures but from the later world in which the poems took shape. Trojans and Achaeans pray to these gods; they still ruled Olympus when the poems were composed. Just as we get close to the gods in their exalted palaces, so they get close, intimately so, to the human protagonists of the poems, usually appearing in a plausible human disguise but in the end, by a gesture or by the ways in which they vanish, revealing their true nature. They come down to trick men into irrational acts of bravery or treachery; they come to console, to save, or when a great hero has been killed, to make certain the body is not spoiled, even when, as in the case of Hector, the corpse is defiled time after time.

  The strangest scene in the Iliad occurs between the gods, in Book XIV. Hera sets out to seduce her husband, Zeus, on Mount Ida, in order to anaesthetise him so that the other gods can exercise their wills on the Trojan scene. Powerful, subversive eroticism is the prelude to hideous human combat. Nestor comes out of his hut (he has been bathing Machaon’s wounds) to see the dreadful state of play with the Greeks. The situation is grave, the rows of ships exposed to possible arson. Agamemnon for the second time urges retreat, either to test the army or because he is a coward. Odysseus feels contempt for his king.

  Meanwhile Hera dolls herself up and goes to distract Zeus with erotic exercise. She dresses remarkably (and undresses so). She begs from Aphrodite Longing and Desire (abstractions, not an eau de toilette) to intensify the seduction. With the promise of a golden chair and one of the youngest graces for his bride, she persuades Sleep to come along. Fitzgerald marks the effect of Hera on Zeus: “He gazed at her, and as he gazed desire / veiled his mind like mist …” It is like his first illicit love. He wants her more than all the earlier women he has lain with, and he lists them. The love-making is spectacular and has the desired effect. Zeus falls asleep, and Sleep himself tells Poseidon he is free to urge the Argives on, even to triumph, until Zeus wakes. The battle that resumes is horribly heightened after this powerful romantic interlude. It is as though Hector is pitted as an equal against Poseidon himself. Ajax wounds him with a stone; he is only just rescued from the fray and laid down by the Xanthus, where he recovers. There are deaths, and cries of brutal triumph, in contrast with the divine coition. In the next book Hector kills Patroclus and Troy’s fate is sealed.

  Critics fail too to find a religious or theological consistency
in the poems. It is as though the gods occupy a parallel universe but not a morally higher or better space, and their judgements are as partisan and partial as human judgements can be. Taplin says, “the gods in Homer do not have a theological existence independent of particular poetic context.”39 It is worth remembering that Taplin is the same critic who regards an inquiry into the identity of Homer as a waste of time, and the geographical particulars in the poem to be largely irrelevant. For him it is a work of imagination, and there is a distance between the kinds of truth imagination tells and those that history or religion disclose. If his take on the absence of anything but an aesthetic theology in the poems is true, we will have to conclude that men exist largely in relation to one another and act extremely when those more or less formal relations are disrupted: the gods exist in the poems merely as emanations from or clarifications of the human impulses and conflicts, their existence no more real than that of the similes. Like any reading which tries to confine the poems to the aesthetic zone of the “poetic,” this deprives them of their place in a real world and makes nonsense of the use to which the Greeks put the poems for centuries. It also makes a political reading of the poems (which Taplin is tempted to undertake)40 a little fatuous, rather as though he was attempting a political reading of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” For the Greek audience and readership, the gap between the real and the poetic was not so absolutely marked, but then they had not lived through the European fin de nineteenth siècle.

  An understanding of the strange role of the gods is important to an understanding of the dynamic of the poems. Man is constrained by time, by circumstance, but he is also elevated by the interest of the gods. They care for their own in curiously moving and sometimes helplessly human ways. They are parental, they are amorous. Heroes and mere mortals accept the situation, that gods make things happen but are in turn subject to laws. We can agree that impartial and resolving divine justice is hard to come by in the poems. In the end, there are the scales which Zeus holds up, and objective, final judgement is delivered by a power to which even the gods’ wills are subject, the power of moira (destiny or fate). When Hector in the Iliad Book XXII sees Achilles and begins to flee, the poem provides an abundance of physical detail, architectural and geographical contingencies, which make the city rise up real before us one last time. The heroes run three times around the town, as if they competed in the Games. Zeus is moved and asks the other gods if Hector might be saved or must die. Athena reminds Zeus of moira. Not even Zeus can change its course. Hector dies, and when at last in Book XXIV his corpse is recovered, it is laid out and Andromache holds Hector’s head in her lap, as Achilles had held Patroclus’. Her lament centres on their little son and his short future, subject also to moira. Hecuba laments, then Helen. Priam commands preparations for the funeral. The pyre is built and lighted. It burns, is extinguished, and the bones of Hector are duly gathered and placed in an urn.

  The sharpest contrast between Olympus on the one hand and Troy, the battlefield, the Greek camp, Ithaca with its host of suitors, on the other, is to be found in the palaces of the gods which Hephaistus made, disposed as if on a giant Acropolis where location and scale symbolise the relative importance and power of each god; everything is beautiful, peaceful, stable; there is always a strictly limited cast of characters, each with clear relations and commitments to the human protagonists. In heaven, conflict is often intense, but motive, action and reaction are always clear.

  The gods have a physical reality, they exist in physical terms, they can be seen and touched. In the first place, they have specific, geographical perspectives on the world, they look from and to specific points. They are assigned mountain-tops so that they have a place to alight on brief stopovers when they are travelling and, when human conflict is in progress, the seats with the most theatrically comprehensive views. J. V. Luce takes an interesting instance to demonstrate the virtually cartographic sense we get when a god is positioned in relation to a landscape or view. The poems know the lie of the land, they seem to enjoy aerial perspectives. In Iliad XIII, 3–6, Zeus is sitting atop Mount Ida and looking north. He sees the peoples in sequence, as far north as knowledge could go. In other words, he sees men in context, not an empty landscape. “The scene is accurately envisaged, but its primary function is to provide a theatre for human action.”41 When Poseidon views Troy from the island of Samothrace, most scholars point out that the islands of Imbros and Tenedos would block the view, being between the Trojan plain and Poseidon’s vantage point. But Luce established by observation that the mountains on Samothrace are high enough for the plain to be visible. In any case, on a very clear day, the peaks of Samothrace are visible from Troy. The poem answers and answers to a geographical reality. Then there is Hera, setting off from Olympus to Ida to seduce and distract her husband, the most important seduction in the poem (Iliad XIV, 153–360). Between her departure and arrival are ten places where the journey “touches down.”42 These gods exist not in a parallel geography, but in the very world that men inhabit. For Priam, Zeus rules from Mount Ida, just as he, on a human scale, rules from the city of Troy.

  Gods are like men, but they are not men: this is the important fact. They are immortal: when wounded they are promptly healed; they move in space as though there were no rules of space. They speak a subtly different language from men: for instance, they call what men call the river Scamander the river Xanthus. The river has a god and a being which, in due course, Achilles will violate with corpses and, aided by the gods, will dry back to its bed. Like the divine rivers, the gods exist in time and affect even as they are affected by its passing. Zeus expresses his will, but it is a will pre-tuned to the fact of moira. Much as he would like to, he cannot save Sarpedon and is resigned to the fact (Iliad XVI, 458). His resignation is not shared by other gods who fight against fate but are aware that they will lose in the end.

  If we are still tempted to be chorizontes, the gods are on our side. In the Odyssey the gods are less volatile and more patently “just” than in the Iliad. They are, quite simply, better behaved. It is not due to a later date of composition. “The decisive factor seems to us,” Albin Lesky suggests, “the following: while in the Iliad we have the reflection of a compact and exclusive noble class, the social range of the Odyssey is much wider. In the later work epic poetry had opened its doors to the wishes and beliefs of classes whom the Iliad excluded.”43 Odysseus and Telemachus meet in the devoted swineherd Eumaeus’ emblematic, rough peasant dwelling. Melanthius, the (“swarthy”) goatherd, mistreats Odysseus (XVII); then Melantho, a serving girl, does the same (XVIII). There is also the faithful oxherd Philoetius (“happy fate”) and Arnaios, nicknamed Iros, the real beggar-man whom Odysseus displaces. In the Odyssey real choices appear to be made, less seems predetermined, perhaps because less hangs upon the outcome of the struggle: it is not the collision of states and ideologies but the story of a family, albeit a great hero’s, re-establishing itself. Is it credible that a single poet could have composed two poems with such radically different earthly and Olympian politics?

  The gods enjoy a degree of freedom. They can scheme, they can retard moira even if they cannot prevent or reverse it. Man, on the other hand, is helpless. How then can a narrative of his helplessness be made compelling? We know the end before we have even properly set out; the poems make no secret about Achilles’ or Hector’s fate, about the ultimate destiny of Troy or the eventual success of Odysseus in his return. Indeed they remind us time after time. Yet they do entertain a variety of alternative scenarios, what the critic James Morrison calls “misdirections,” passages where alternative events are unfolded, or where the gods cause an action contrary to what they declare is its purpose.44 Such a technique not only contributes to irony, reversal, surprise; it also causes us to reflect on what would have happened if, for example, Achilles had sailed for home, or Menelaus and Paris had completed their single combat. A story line is given, but the poem can play hard against it. Though, like moira, the known plot wi
ll triumph because the current of history cannot be dammed or turned, at least the bed through which it flows can be broadened. “Misdirection is Homer’s means of testing the limits of his tradition by exploring possibilities outside the standard myth,” Morrison argues. His reading suggests that the maker of both poems was an exceptionally deliberate artificer with clear aesthetic objectives underpinning the narrative, certainly not an absent or distant narrator or an “oral tradition.” Like so many persuasively argued approaches, this is plausible enough to be satisfying while we consider it. It suggests a jazz analogy: “exposition, exploration [misdirection], recapitulation.” But it depends on a crude sense of audience and it forgets that the effects will not work on second reading or performance.