Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

Throughout the Odyssey he is the man of many parts, inventive, ingenious, with many skills and many gifts, but here is merely polytlas, the man who dares many things, suffers many things and endures many things. Only when a goddess-bird and then Athene herself come to his aid can he finally drag himself to the shore.

  Here in a virtually literal translation is what Homer says as Odysseus emerges from the surf.

  he then bends both knees

  and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea has killed his heart.

  Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozes much

  up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless

  lies scarcely-capable, terrible weariness comes to him.

  The Greek word Chapman translated in “The sea had soak’d his heart through”—the phrase which Keats loved so much—is dedmēto, which means “overpowered” or “tamed.” It comes from a verb, damazo, of immensely ancient lineage, its roots spoken in the steppelands of Eurasia at least six thousand years ago, used to describe the breaking-in of animals and later the bending of metal to your desires and needs. It is essentially the same word as “tame” in English, or domo in Latin, the word for reduction, to kill in a fight, to domesticate and dominate. But in the Iliad it also appears as a word for seduction, or more likely the rape of girls. Young girls, enemies, heifers and wives are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea defeated him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.

  Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge.

  his knees no more

  Perform’d their office, or his weight upheld:

  His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell’d:

  From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;

  And lost in lassitude lay all the man.

  On a sofa? you might ask.

  Others have tried and failed: “For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,” wrote Professor A. T. Murray in 1919; “Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,” was E. V. Rieu’s prose version, in the bestseller published by Penguin in 1946; “his very heart was sick with salt water,” wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; “The sea had beaten down his striving heart,” Lattimore’s successor, Robert Fagles, in 1996.

  Keats was right. None approaches “The sea had soak’d his heart through” perhaps because Chapman’s English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus’s heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinated corpse, blanched and shriveled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedmēto: Odysseus’s sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.

  Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings—his “beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings”—with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o’clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.

  On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer

  Much have I travell’d 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.

  Keats’s draft of his Homer Sonnet, written in October 1816.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

  Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:

  Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

  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 wond’ring 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—

  It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman’s Homer; it’s about first looking into Chapman’s Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging onto what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.

  Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortés, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his night of revelation, it had been

  Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

  which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with

  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  which is politer and not entirely concordant with what the rest of the poem aims to mean. More than that, he had borrowed the verb and the key adjectival noun from Pope’s Iliad.

  The troops exulting sat in order round,

  And beaming fires illumined all the ground.

  As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

  O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,

  When not a breath disturbs the deep serene …

  Keats, on the verge of his twenty-first birthday, even as this sonnet was announcing his new discovery of Homeric depth and presence, had not shrugged off that eighteenth-century inheritance.

  For all that, coursing through the sonnet is a sense of arrival in the world of riches, a sudden shift in Keats’s cosmic geometry, moving beyond the drabness and tawdriness by which he felt besieged. Keats had become everybody in the sonnet’s fourteen lines: the astronomer, himself, Chapman, Homer, Cortés and “all his Men.” All coexist in the heightened and expanded moment of revelation. Pope had found fire in Homer; Keats discovered scale. And scale is what then entered his poetry, as a kind of private and tender sublime, the often agonized heroics of the heart, in which, just as in Homer, love and death engage in an inseparable dance.

  Homer, or at least the idea of Homer, pools into Keats’s poetry. Hostile Tory reviewers in Blackwood’s Magazine started to call him “the cockney Homer,” but in Endymion, the long poem he had been contemplating when he wrote the Chapman sonnet, and which he began the following spring, his experience of that night with Cowden Clarke shapes the core phrases. People remember the poem’s beginnings.

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

  Its loveliness increases; it will never

  Pass into nothingness; b
ut still will keep

  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

  That is poetry as balm, even, as Andrew Motion has said, as medicine, the discipline which Keats was now abandoning for life as a poet. Keats went on to describe the ways in which beauty manifests itself in the world, the consolations it provides in “Trees old and young,” “daffodils/With the green world they live in,” streams and shady woods, “rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms.” But then, at the center of this first part of the poem, drenched in memories of Shakespeare’s sweetest lyrics, comes this, the bass note of a Homeric presence, a sudden manliness, a scale of imagined beauty that encompasses the depths of the past: “And such too is the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead.”

  Homer is the foundation of truth and beauty, and Keats was happy to say that “we” had imagined his poetry. Homer will enlarge your life. Homer is on a scale that stretches across human time and the full width of the human heart. Homer is alive in anyone who is prepared to attend. Homerity is humanity. Richmond Lattimore, making his great version of the Iliad in the late 1940s, when asked “Why do another translation of Homer?” replied, “That question has no answer for those who do not know the answer already.” Why another book about Homer? Why go for a walk? Why set sail? Why dance? Why exist?

  3 • LOVING HOMER

  Homer-love can feel like a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every nook of your consciousness. What would Homer have had for breakfast? (Oil, honey, yogurt and delicious bread. One of the things that is wrong with the Cyclopes is that they don’t eat bread.) Or a picnic? (Grapes, figs, plums, beans.) How did he feed his heroes? (Grilled meat and thoroughly cooked sausages.) What did he think of parties? (He loved them; no moment was happier for a man than sitting down to a table loaded with wine and surrounded by his friends.)

  These were questions the Greeks asked. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates was impressed by Homer’s decision, for example, that no hero should ever eat iced cakes: “all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind.” Protein—well salted, not boiled—was the stuff for heroes. And it had to be red meat; fish was the last resort, and chickens had yet to arrive from the Far East: they reached the Aegean in about 500 BC, known to the Greeks as “the Persian Bird.”

  I have a way now of finding Homer wherever I look for him. No encounter, no landscape is without its Homeric dimension. In a way, Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom. There must be a name for this colonization of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past. Possession, maybe? Mindjack? In one of his Socratic dialogues, Plato has a wonderful image for the secret and powerful hold that Homer has on his listeners. Socrates is talking to Ion, a mildly ridiculous rhapsode, a man who made his living by reciting and speaking about Homer. “I am conscious in my own self,” Ion tells Socrates in phrases which even two and a half millennia later have a whiff of the stage, “and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.” If Greeks had mustaches, Ion would be twirling his.

  The Socratic eyebrow rises a little, but he then tells Ion the truth, a little slyly, the Socratic wisdom masquerading as flattery. “The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer,” Socrates says,

  is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.

  The poet, Socrates tells him, is “a light and winged and holy thing”—Homer not as great bearded mage, but like the bird Blegen found, or a mosquito, a flitting bug—of no substance, swept here and there on the winds of poetry. “There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.”

  Plato affects to despise poetry, for the way it interferes with the rational mind, but it is clear that he was in love with it, moved by it as much as Ion could ever hope to be. And he identified the mechanism: there is no act of will in loving Homer. You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you. And so, like Ion, you hang as a curtain ring from him, who hangs from the Muse, who hangs from her father Greatness and her mother Memory.

  I cannot go for a walk in the English chalklands without imagining the cold damp Iliads that must have been sung there. Every burial in an English Bronze Age round barrow must have had a version of these heroic songs sung at its making. But Homer is also in the Hebrides and off the coast of Ireland. Traditions of heroic song have endured there. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief, for which he had to pay “1 panegyrick poem every year.” That is Homeric rent. Wild unadorned landscapes or places of great antiquity summon his archetypes and their stories. Pope thought that for Virgil, Homer and nature were indistinguishable, and for me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.

  No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in book 3 of the Odyssey, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso’s island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, colored by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very center of the Odyssey, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.

  In the Iliad, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a seashore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon’s terror.

  The way they take is along the strand of the deep sea,

  Where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,

  Uttering many prayers to the holder and shaker of earth

  That they might persuade the proud heart of great Achilles.

  It is also the place of grief, where later in the Iliad, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night

  To wander in anguish, aimless along the surf,

  where one morning after another,

  Flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.

  As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawn-lit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf; no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.

  As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer tha
n the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The setup for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These scenes contain the oldest form of Greek and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.

  And so today a friend—Martin Thomas—stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying, not shouting, the good-bye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulas, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.

  So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudderstock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?

  Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind, and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.

  But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound, where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.