Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is “rosy-fingered”—not rayed with her outspread fingers, but touching the tips of trees and rocks with her fingers. She also sometimes sits “on her golden throne” as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear “her veil the colour of saffron,” krokopeplos, the crocus-cloth, the warmest color in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of well-being and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the color is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and “strike the sea with their oars.”

  That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house, and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can’t help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke—a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping onto the perfect skin of the sea—I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.

  But you long for wind. You imagine wind before it comes. You look for it on the water. None of this is far from praying for wind or even sacrificing for it. Part of the Homeric ritual is to make a libation to the goddess as you leave. And the goddess you choose summons her own kind of wind. So Athene, never moderate, owl-eyed, all-seeing, sharp beyond all human understanding, sends a fierce wind for Telemachus as he heads out from Ithaca to find his father, a wind from the west “that bellows roaring over the wine-coloured sea.” His voyage is anxious, uncertain, driven by that demanding mentor.

  At the same time, somewhere else in the realms of fantasy and loss, his father is being given a wind by the amorous goddess Calypso, who has imprisoned him on her island of deliciousness for the last seven years. He has been sitting weeping on the shore, longing for home. Now at last she will release him, and her wind is like her, all-embracing, warm and seductive, a sleep-with-me wind sending him on his way. He spreads his sail gladly to it, a bosom of wind, wafting him away from her comforts to the world of truth and reality.

  As the wind comes, they hoist “the white sail,” the sail fills “and the wind and the helmsman guide the ship together.” It is an act of cooperation between man and the world, a folding in of human intention with what the world can offer. The ship is a beautifully made thing, as closely fitted as a poem, as much a mark of civilization as any woven cloth, and the wind in the Odyssey, when it is a kind wind, is a “shipmate,” another member of the crew. It is not the element in which you sail but a “companion” on board. The human and divine dimensions of reality meet in it.

  And now, when I am out in the sound, and the right wind comes, I think of it like that, as something else to be welcomed aboard. That coming of the wind is a moment when you can’t help but smile, when the world turns in your favor. It is also a moment of extraordinary potency in Homer, never more than when in the Iliad the Trojans find themselves in a terrifying and difficult phase of the battle and things are against them, until they see Hector and his brother Paris coming out of the gates of the city, armed, ready to help. It is, the poem says, like that moment when the crew has been struggling for too long with the oars, and their arms are weary, and they have been praying for wind, and then, as a blessing, the wind seems to come and the weariness drops from their bodies and they can rest in its strength and power: “So these two appear to the Trojans, who have longed for them.”

  Matching that instant of relief and triumph is another, almost at the other end of the Iliad, when the winds become the indispensable companions of the heroes. Achilles has made the great funeral pyre on the beach for Patroclus. Timber has been cut and carried, and the pyre is now a hundred feet in each direction. Animals have been slaughtered and the fat laid on the pyre. But it will not light, and Achilles realizes he has failed to do one thing: he must pray to the two winds, the west wind and the north wind. And they come, sweeping in from their distant dwelling places, driving the clouds before them. A vast, inhuman blaze erupts in the pyre, and under the winds’ fierce encouragement, one shrieking blast after another, it burns all night long, incinerating everything but the bones. Only then do the winds retire “Back towards home again, over the Thracian sea, And it heaves with a long, groaning swell as they cross it.”

  The wind never comes unsummoned, or in a solid block. All you feel at first is a finger or two, the faint chilling of the skin on the cheek, or stroking the nape of your neck. But then it builds a little, one finger becomes five, the canvas stirs, like a dog in a bed, begins to acquire a form, and the boat gains a sense of purpose, a coherence it had lacked as it slopped in the chop or swell. The wake slowly starts to bubble behind you, “the gleaming wake” that runs behind Homeric ships as a sign of life and excellence, the cockpit drains gurgle with the air sucked through them, and with tiller and sheet in hand you sit up and pick your course across the sea. That is the Odyssean moment; everything liquid but directed, everything mobile but related: the sea itself, your boat in it, the air and its winds, all the possibilities. The ritual is done, the routines have been followed and your chances are now set fair.

  Of all Homeric departures, none is more poignant than when Odysseus and his men, right in the center of the Odyssey, set off for Hades, to hear from the blind seer Tiresias the way home to Ithaca. Circe, “the trim-coifed goddess,” as Ezra Pound described her, set them on their way. They have no choice. Only Tiresias can tell them the way home. They have made all their tackle secure and provided themselves with food and drink. The wind has joined the crew and is now there alongside the helmsman, guiding “the black ship in the bright sea” as their companion. But neither Odysseus nor any of his men is making this voyage with any hint of delight. This is a journey down and under the world, into the dark places, into themselves as much as to the edge of the physical universe. As the wind holds fair for them, they sit on their benches and grieve. Big, heart-wrenching tears fall on the pale timbers of the deck. The wind is taking them toward a terrifying destination, the place of death which Odysseus has so far exercised all his wit and skill to avoid. The wind knows nothing of that and propels their ship onward, its red-painted bows plunging and rising with each oncoming sea, the swells breaking and surging around the stempost, while above that foam of life the wind never falters or wavers.

  The wind catches the sail, bellying it out, and the blue-shadowed waves resound under the fore-foot of the running ship as she lies over on her course and races out to sea.

  Thus with stretched sail, we go over sea till day’s end.

  Sun to his slumber, shadows over ocean.

  4 • SEEKING HOMER

  All modern versions of Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison. In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St. Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad that seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text
from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the “germana et sincera lectio,” the real and uncorrupted reading.

  Villoison thought he had discovered the essence of a work by a single poet called Homer. But he had sown the seeds of his own demise. The idea was already in the air in the eighteenth century that Homer was not one poet but many, and that the poems were the product of a whole culture, not an individual genius. Villoison’s discovery turned out to be the Copernican moment. The mass of alternative readings rejected by the Alexandrian scholars itself threw doubt on the idea of a single great original text. They had chosen to make a single Homer, but farther back in time it seemed as if there were multiple Homers to choose from. William Cowper, the English lover and translator of Homer, read Villoison and stood aghast at the fragmentation of his hero. As he wrote to his friend the Reverend Walter Bagot in the winter of 1790, “I will send you some pretty stories from [Villoison] which will make your hair stand on end, as mine has stood on end already, they so horribly affect, in point of authenticity, the credit of the works of the immortal Homer.”

  The title page of the 1788 Iliad edited by Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison.

  Homer now was not one but many, and most of them were obscure. In 1795 Villoison was challenged by the young, highly analytical German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. How could Villoison tell if the decisions made by the Alexandrian editors were the right ones? Surely what Villoison had published was evidence that the Iliad, as they all knew it, was a set of late, corrupt and unreliable texts, brought together in one poem but with their origins in bardic songs which had been radically altered by every hand they had passed through. The originals were unrecoverable. Homer, whoever that was, could never now be known.

  The scene was set for the long struggle over the so-called Homeric Question raised by Wolf which has lasted ever since. “Some say, ‘There never was such a person as Homer,’” the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841. “‘No such person as Homer! On the contrary,’ say others, ‘there were scores.’” Nevertheless, the text of the Iliad over which the battles were fought between the lumpers and splitters, the one-Homer advocates and the scores-of-Homer advocates, the Homerophiles and Homerophobes, continued to be almost precisely the one published by Villoison in 1788.

  He was not the first in the field. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, who had come to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Soon other copies were being printed in Milan, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Paris and London. And behind those first printed books stands a long manuscript history. Many of the medieval manuscripts of Homer migrated late to the European libraries, because in the early Middle Ages Homer was unread in Europe. Dante had Virgil call him the “sovereign poet,” but Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek, and even though the great fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch was said to have owned a copy of the Iliad—he was used to kiss it in reverence—he could not understand a word it said. Homer, he wrote, “was dumb to me and I am deaf to it.”

  Nevertheless, Homer continued to lurk in the European mind; pervasively there but rarely seen. Medieval Odysseys are scattered through scholarly Europe, in Cambridge and London, Milan and Munich, Naples and Moscow, in Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Vienna. There are Iliads in the Bodleian in Oxford (from the twelfth century), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (a copy which probably came from Mount Athos), in the Escorial and in Florence. Through these few precious manuscript books, Homer survived in medieval Christendom.

  All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.

  From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans traveling in Egypt took Homer farther back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer them for sale. Pieces found their way into gentlemen’s libraries across Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Egyptologists began a more systematic search for these ancient documents, none more assiduous than the thoroughly unkempt, restlessly energetic and no-sock-wearing Englishman William Flinders Petrie. He was a man who since boyhood had understood that the careful unraveling of historic deposits layer by layer, an exfoliation of the past, was the only way to approach them. In the winter of 1887 he began to dig in the large necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayum Depression to the west of the valley of the Nile.

  Almost every mummy was accompanied by an image of the person, their unwavering gaze, their necklaces and earrings and carefully braided, gathered hair. With them were other artifacts, beads and vials, mirrors and, tucked in by the dead children, rag dolls with carved heads and real hair. The dolls had changes of clothes, dresses, little tables and wooden bedsteads with which the girls played. Their coffins were made of a kind of papyrus-based papier-mâché, and Flinders Petrie found within their fabric the remains of many ancient texts.

  William Flinders Petrie in Abydos, Egypt, 1922.

  To help with those documents he had with him his old friend, an Oxford Assyriologist, the Reverend Professor Archibald Sayce. “The floating sand of the desert,” Sayce wrote the next year, “was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters … They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.” It’s an image from Shelley, the world after Ozymandias: ancient texts blowing in tatters and fragments across the Egyptian desert.

  But then Flinders Petrie came across the greatest of all his treasures. On the morning of 21 February 1888, under the head of a woman who was not named on her coffin and was buried in an otherwise unmarked stretch of the necropolis, he found a large roll of papyrus, a papyrus pillow. This was no chance leftover. “The roll had belonged to a lady with whom it had been buried in death,” Sayce wrote. “The skull of the mummy showed that its possessor had been young and attractive-looking, with features at once small, intellectual, and finely chiselled, and belonging distinctively to the Greek type.”

  The papyrus had been damaged in its outer leaves, but Petrie began to unfold it, as if he were looking into the innards of a wasp’s nest, and peering beyond the outer covering found himself reading the Greek numbers twelve and eighty, and the names Agamemnon, Achaeans, Corinth. The roll with which the young woman had been buried was the first two books of the Iliad and, here from book 2, Flinders Petrie, with the sand of the Sahara blowing around him, was reading lines from the Catalogue of Ships, Homer’s enumeration of the Greeks who sailed to Troy.

&
nbsp; This Hawara Homer, written on papyrus in about AD 150, is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, its lines numbered by Flinders Petrie in August 1888. It is one of the most time-vertigo-inducing objects I know. In columns aligned left, the clear Greek capitals are spooled out across the reedy, vegetal surface of the papyrus sheets. There are no gaps between the words, but they are entirely legible, the relaxed and masterful calligraphy rolling on for line after line like a wave that will not break. This is a text to travel to the next world with, the strokes in each letter just curved away from straightness, so that in its combination of open o’s and u’s and the w’s of its omegas, and the slight flexing in the pen strokes of its k’s and n’s and t’s, this is one of the greatest images of the generous and beautiful word ever made. Other contemporary manuscripts found by Flinders Petrie are far more sketchy and scratchy, less steady in their progress across the page; but this is Homer as monument, as scripture, as “the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead.”

  The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. By the time the unnamed woman was buried with this precious pillow in the Hawara necropolis, Homer had already become the Homer we now have.

  The key phase in this creation of the Homer that Roman, Byzantine, late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe all thought of as the undeniable text was in the halls of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Between the third and second centuries BC, a sequence of great Alexandrian editor-scholars, enormously funded by the wealth of the Ptolemies, the rulers of Egypt, created the monumental Homer that is visible in the Hawara grave, the Byzantine codex Venetus A and in the minds of Alexander Pope and John Keats. That Alexandrian era is the narrow neck through which an earlier and rather different Homer passed.