Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  One may well wish to ask how such a combination arose that came to affect the whole of subsequent history in the West and in the world. In the past, a great many commentators, whether classicists, politicians, or common readers, were tempted to put a racist spin on this business: we in the West are mentally and spiritually superior to other civilizations; this is why we have conquered. But the pendulum of popular conviction may now have swung the other way; and meditation on the twentieth century, steeped in blood that must, at least in part, be attributed to the Western war machine, has encouraged commentators to a kind of reverse racism: the West is now commonly seen as more savage than other supposedly more pacific, more noble cultures. Both approaches are flawed and fantastic because neither is supported by evidence. In point of fact, the Persians and other peoples conquered by the Greeks would dearly have loved to be the conquerors and would have spared no effort, however bloody, to become so. Such combativeness has been the norm for virtually all those vanquished in the wars of the West, so there is little point to be made in touting the moral superiority of the losers.

  Nor can we legitimately trace some single simple element—say, the way microbes worked in our favor or our strategic geographical position—as giving the West its superiority. Hanson takes to task the popular biohistorian Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) on just this point: “The efforts of those who seek to reduce history to biology and geography deprecate the power and mystery of culture, and so often turn desperate.… Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more—all these play their role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly whether man, nature, or chance is the initial catalyst for the origins of Western civilization [emphasis mine].”

  To inquire into the ways in which an unpredictable historical combination—in this case, the combination of dogged military practicality with unprecedented citizen responsibility—may generate a new cultural force that has tremendous impact on the world over many centuries brings us as close as we are likely to come to the deep mysteries of the historical process. It may be best simply to acknowledge the success of this virtually unbeatable combination and to say, with Dr. Seuss, that it just “happened to happen.”

  1 Pygmy is a Greek word indicating the length of a man’s arm from elbow to knuckles and was used also for a race of midgets of similar length who were thought to live in Ethiopia and to be preyed on by cranes in summer. There is a story that the Pygmies attempted to subdue Hercules, two whole armies of them pinning him down while he slept—an image that Jonathan Swift borrowed for Gulliver’s Travels. When in the late nineteenth century European explorers discovered a dwarfish people in equatorial Africa (and, later, similarly small peoples in parts of Asia), these were with some reason designated “pygmies,” since their discovery seemed to confirm that the Greek legend had some basis in fact.

  2 There are much earlier examples of love poetry—fragments from Mesopotamia dating to as early as the second millennium B.C. and considerable collections from Egypt of similarly ancient dates—but these are all set not as part of a story but as ritualized dialogues or monologues and are normally put in the mouth(s) of a god and/or goddess. Many may have been intended for use in sacred orgies—in which a king would represent the god, a sacred prostitute the goddess—which were certainly commonplace in Mesopotamia. At any rate, these poems tend to be sexually provocative and there is never any suggestion that the lovers are married, in fact quite the opposite. The first (and only) Hebrew example of the genre is the Song of Songs, probably post-Exilic and therefore unlikely to be earlier than the fifth century B.C.

  3 There are vast literatures on what scholars conceive to be the late Western origins of romantic love and the extremely slow evolution of the idea of childhood. See, for instance, Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World and Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood.

  4 The death of Hector on the plain of Troy was considered throughout the classical world to be the acme of the tragic experience in literature, and the passage continued to be held in the same esteem well into the medieval period. An Irish scribe of post-Roman times, having copied out an account of a Latin retelling of Hector’s death, wrote a personal note in the manuscript’s margin: “I am greatly grieved at the above-mentioned death.”

  5 The posture a suppliant had to assume was to kneel before the man to be supplicated, one hand on his knee, the other holding his bearded chin. Needless to say, it was difficult to effect this posture if the potential grantor was bent on avoiding you; and the posture was in itself the nadir of servility.

  II

  THE WANDERER

  HOW TO FEEL

  It is Odysseus, hero of the Odyssey, who dreams up the way to end the Trojan War in Greece’s favor—by sending the Greek fleet from the shore as if it had sailed for home and leaving on the now-empty battlefield outside Troy’s unassailable walls the parting “gift” of an immense Wooden Horse. Once it is within the gates, the horse proves to be hollow and lined with warriors, who descend in the night, open the gates to their concealed fellows, destroy the city, and take the women captive. Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and Andromache, is hurled from the walls, and the Greeks, outrageous in victory, commit many atrocities. By this time, many famous warriors on the Greek side have fallen in battle. Achilles has fallen to Paris, of all people, who (it would be claimed in later times) shot an arrow into Achilles’s heel, his only patch of physical vulnerability. Paris himself has also fallen; and Helen, who had been given to one of his brothers, is returned at last to Menelaus.

  The war done, it takes Odysseus ten years of wandering to return home because he has become the enemy of the sea god Poseidon, who keeps him from reaching his destination. One of his many fabulous adventures is a visit to Hades, the Greek underworld (named for its ruler, who is also called Pluto), in order to consult the famous seer Teiresias. There the souls of the dead lead a vague, insubstantial existence, and there Odysseus meets many of those he knew in life. As Odysseus relates it:

  “But now there came the ghosts of Peleus’ son Achilles,

  Patroclus, fearless Antilochus—and Great Ajax too,

  the first in stature, first in build and bearing

  of all the Argives after Peleus’ matchless son.

  The ghost of the splendid runner knew me at once

  and hailed me with a flight of mournful questions:

  ‘Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of tactics,

  reckless friend, what next?

  What greater feat can that cunning head contrive?

  What daring brought you down to the House of Death?—

  where the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home.’

  The voice of his spirit paused, and I was quick to answer:

  ‘Achilles, son of Peleus, greatest of the Achaeans,

  I had to consult Teiresias, driven here by hopes

  he would help me journey home to rocky Ithaca.

  Never yet have I neared Achaea, never once

  set foot on native ground …

  my life is endless trouble.

  But you, Achilles,

  there’s not a man in the world more blest than you—

  there never has been, never will be one.

  Time was, when you were alive, we Argives

  honored you as a god, and now down here, I see,

  you lord it over the dead in all your power.

  So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’

  I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,

  ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!

  By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—

  some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—

  than rule down here over all the breathless dead.’ ”

  WE TEND TO associate the freewheeling public discussion of the Greeks with their institution of democracy. But the s
oldierly town meetings of the Iliad preceded democracy by two centuries. The political innovation the Greeks called “democracy” began to take shape only in the last decade of the sixth century in one particular city, Athens. Homer, however, gives ample evidence that, long before, Greeks in general were comfortable with a freedom of discussion unknown in other nations. But this freedom progressed virtually in tandem with another innovation of the late eighth century, the alphabet, which in its turn triggered the possibility of widespread literacy.

  Early writing systems—in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and later in Mesoamerica—were pictographic at the outset, employing a picture per word or, in some cases, combining two or more pictures to represent more complex words. These symbols were not related to a particular language and its sounds but might be usable by another language, just as today’s universal road and toilet signs may be comprehensible whether one speaks English, Arabic, or Korean. This was true, also, of the earliest symbols employed in the systems we call Linear A and Linear B.

  But though pictographs may be drafted to represent nouns and fairly low numerals (and were therefore admirably suited to the work of ancient accountants, who could confine themselves to counting the number of chariots and javelins in the armory and the number of horses in the stables), they are less serviceable in representing the multiple forms of a verb and begin to disintegrate altogether under the weight of such linguistic complications as subordinate clauses. So these ancient systems soon added other, more arbitrary signs to represent more accurately the actual labyrinth of language, eventually introducing even symbols that represented some of the syllabic sounds of a specific language. The final network of symbols was a combination of pictographs, considerably stylized and simplified by generations of scribes, and other complicated signs and syllabaries. These hundreds, sometimes thousands, of separate symbols could be mastered only by those who had years to devote to the study. Such cumbersome writing systems became the fuel on which their civilizations ran—the oil of the ancient world. If you participated in ownership, you had it made in the shade. Otherwise, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the main function of such systems was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings”—literacy as oppression.

  Though we don’t know who thought of it, we know where the idea of an alphabet came from: the Levant, that small corridor of coast running from Syria to the Sinai and encompassing Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. The first alphabet was, in the main, a borrowing from the underutilized syllabaries hidden away in the vast network of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Like most inventions, this one probably evolved in several stages and was helped along by more than one inventor. But by the middle of the second millennium B.C., we find a language being written on stones in the Sinai that is neither pictographic nor strictly syllabic, the alphabetic precursor of written Phoenician-Canaanite-Hebrew. This primitive alphabet came to the Greeks probably by way of Phoenician merchants, whose welcome ships, loaded with metals and such exotic materials as the precious red-purple cloth of Phoenicia, plied the whole of the Mediterranean littoral.

  The Greeks added vowels to the Semitic consonants and set this list of pronunciation symbols in an unvarying order, giving us the alphabet (alpha and beta being the first two letters), on which the Romans would subsequently make their own revision—and so bestow on us the very symbols in which the book you hold in your hands was printed. For a long time the Semitic (or, as we would now call it, Hebrew) alphabet and the Greek were written sometimes left to right, other times right to left, oftentimes in a column, circle, or spiral, or as boustrophedon—that is, “turning like an ox plowing a field” in lines alternating right-to-left and left-to-right. It took a long time before the levels of uniformity that we are used to were introduced and became at last unvarying. For all this, it remains true that the Levantine Semites are the inventors of the world’s only alphabet, an alphabet improved by the Greeks and then with only slight variations imposed (very nearly) worldwide by Roman centurions and their successors.1

  Almost as interesting as the invention itself are the uses to which the Greeks swiftly put their writing. If the pictographic systems, in their early incarnations, served simply as accountants’ tools and if the Semitic consonant alphabets were, to begin with, employed to similar purposes—or, in the Sinai, used perhaps to record short prayers—the Greek alphabet, from the first, takes off in a delightfully unserious direction. The earliest inscription we have is scratched on an Athenian wine jug of Homer’s time, proclaiming playfully that

  The dancer of consummate grace

  will take this vase as his prize.

  Not a glint of the green eyeshade of the accountant or a hint of the furrowed brow of the believer. And even when a god is mentioned, as in the three lines of verse inscribed on a drinking cup almost as old as the Athenian jug, found in the Bay of Naples at Ischia, the oldest of Greece’s many colonies, we could hardly ascribe high seriousness to the poet:

  Who am I? None other than the luscious

  drinking cup of Nestor. Drink me quickly—

  and be seized in lust by golden Aphrodite.

  Unlike earlier writing systems, forged to count wealth, to ensure control, to invoke the patronage of a deity, the ancient Greek alphabet announces a civilization of leisure. To hell with your ponderous obsessions; let’s have some wine, women, and song.

  It has long been understood that a fully articulated alphabet served as the medium for the gradual democratizing of the ancient societies in which it was introduced and took hold. The desert amphictyony of the Israelites—memorialized in the Torah’s scenes of Moses in earnest conversation with his people—is the earliest indication in mankind’s historical record of a tribal assembly that welcomed debate. If it seems far from modern democracy, it possessed nonetheless many democratic features we might still long to emulate: spontaneity, face-to-face questioning and counter-questioning, the possibility that even the least participant might have a contribution to make, even to the point of taking seriously what might emerge from “the mouths of infants and sucklings.”

  A writing system of some twenty-odd characters meant that anyone might learn to read, even a child, a woman, or a slave. What empowerment this implied!—especially when considered against earlier systems. But the Hebrew alphabet, because of its lack of vowels, still retained a certain mystery, a soupçon at least of the mumbo-jumbo that had been the stock-in-trade of the scribes and seigneurs of Egypt and Mesopotamia. One needed to know Hebrew well in order to read it confidently. If Hebrew was not your mother tongue, you would always be guessing which vowel sounds to supply between the consonants. But written Greek, because of the addition of vowels, required no subjective judgment or interpretation. It was completely objective, completely out there, completely distinct from the reader. Just as the simplicity of alphabetical writing made possible general access to literacy, which in its turn encouraged democratic give-and-take, the utter objectivity of the Greek alphabet encouraged the demystification of the world.

  One of the most certain byproducts of demystification is irreverence, which made its first recorded appearance in this world of ours on the rim of the Ischian drinking cup of 700 B.C. (or thereabouts), recommending to its imbiber lascivious inebriation under the tutelage of laughing Aphrodite—or, more simply, how about a little fun, huh? Of the many prehistoric influences on the shaping of Greek culture, none is more catalytic than the Semitic, giving Greece its alphabet and, perhaps simultaneously, its appreciation of the liberating value of public discussion. But the Greeks took these extraordinary gifts as if they were nature’s own bounty and, marinating them in characteristically Aegean seasonings and omitting the lard of Semitic seriousness, prepared a dish that was both lighter and more piquant than what they had been offered.

  Many cultural commentators have theorized that oral society—that is, society in which writing is unknown—is far more communal and visionary than society in which human thought is objectified by writing and that written language encourages t
he reader in his separateness to individualism (uncommunity) and by its sequential format to sequential, rational analysis (unvision). Though there is probably much truth in such theories, it may also be true that the type of literacy a given society enshrines may work greater wonders than the fact of literacy itself. A type of literacy that can be grasped easily by almost anyone will tend to spread some kind of proto-democratic consciousness far and wide, even if this is accomplished only in small steps over a very long period of time. (In contrast, if our laws had been written in cuneiform instead of the alphabet, isn’t it almost inevitable that slavery would still be legal?) A type of literacy that demystifies the act of reading, erasing for all time the aura of an unapproachable Sacred Brotherhood of scribes, wisemen, and potentates, will by its very nature tend to demystify additional realms of human experience.

  AMONG SCHOLARS it is an open question whether Homer was literate or not. But the best evidence—that is, the texts themselves—leads us to posit that the Iliad and the Odyssey are hybrids: literate works that are profoundly influenced by many previous generations of oral transmission. Let us suppose that both works began as stories of real people at the end of the Mycenaean Age. These stories—of Achilles and the Trojan War, of the Greek captain Odysseus’s almost superhuman attempts to return to his island home of Ithaca after the war was over—were told and retold, molded and remolded, over many generations by wandering bards till one of them, a man known to us by his name but by no other solid biographical facts, gave them at last a highly selective and definitive treatment in two epic renderings in the very period that alphabetical writing was spreading across the Greek world.