Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better? Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are riddled with internal contradictions. No self-respecting poet would allow such clumsiness.

  The great eighteenth-century Cambridge scholar Richard Bentley—the dullest man alive, according to Alexander Pope, “that microscope of Wit,/Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit”—thought that Homer wrote “a sequel of songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made for the men and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not connected together in the form of an epic poem till … about 500 years after.” Homer was no longer a genius; he was the work of an editor-collector, perhaps not entirely unlike Professor Bentley himself.

  Later microscopes of wit thought there was not even one author, but a string of minor folk-poets whose efforts had been brought together by the great Athenian or even Alexandrian editor-scholars. The Prince of Poets had been dethroned. The scholars had won. And so the nineteenth century was animated by the debates between Analysts and Unitarians, those who thought Homer had been many and those who continued to maintain that he was one great genius.

  The argument lasted for over a century, largely because of the sense of vertigo a multiple Homer induced. If Homer was dissolved into a sequence of folk-poets, one of the greatest monuments of Western civilization no longer existed. Nevertheless, these were the preconditions for the great discoveries about Homer made in the early twentieth century by the most brilliant man ever to have loved him.

  Milman Parry is a god of Homer studies. No one else has made Homeric realities quite so disturbingly clear. Photographs show what his contemporaries described, a taut, focused head, a man “quiet in manner, incisive in speech, intense in everything he did.” There was nothing precious or elitist about him, and his life and mind ranged widely. For a year he was a poultry farmer. Along with the technicians at the Sound Specialties Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, he was the first to develop a recording apparatus that didn’t have to be interrupted every four minutes to change the disk. He took his wife and children with him on his great recording adventures in the Balkans and at night sang songs to them that mimicked and drew on the epic poems he had heard in the day. At Harvard, where he became an assistant professor, he took to washing his huge white dogs in the main drinking-water reservoir for the city, stalking about the campus in a large black hat with “an aura of the Latin quarter” about him, regaling his students with the poetry of Laforgue, Apollinaire, Eliot and e.e. cummings. Supremely multilingual, at home in Serbo-Croat, writing his first articles and papers on Homer in French, this was the man who pulled Homer back from its academic desert into life.

  Milman Parry, 1902–1935.

  Parry was born in June 1902 and brought up a Quaker in the sunny sterilities of Oakland, California. From that clean, germ-free youth he plunged off into ancient Greek at Berkeley, and while still there, writing the thesis for his master’s degree, jumped to the idea that Homer was neither a great poet making these poems from nothing nor a collection of minor folktales somehow strung together, but the combination and fusion of those two ideas: a poet working within a great tradition which had deep roots and multiple sources. The poems were composed by a man standing at the top of a human pyramid. He could not have stood there without the pyramid beneath him, and the pyramid consisted not only of the earlier poets in the tradition but of their audiences too, the whole set of assumptions and expectations in which the poems swam. Homer—try thinking of it as a plural noun—were the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture. At different moments in their evolution, the songs would have sounded different, but there is no need to assume that they would have been cruder or worse. At any one moment the singer is standing on the human pyramid beneath him. Hear them as they should be heard, and you will have the sound and meanings of the distant past in your mind and ear.

  Parry was a romantic, who loved the ancientness of the past for itself and for its stark difference from twentieth-century America. The motivations apparent in Keats are in Parry too. For the classical scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, brought up in an elite and aristocratic culture, Homer may have seemed like a contemporary, his words on honor and self-sacrifice to be taken as relevant instructions for the noble life. The only task was to clean Homer up, to make Homer more like them, to classicize him, to rid him of his repetitiveness and his awkward lack of savoir faire, to translate him, as Pope had done, with many delightful felicities overlying the raw Greek.

  For the brilliant young American from Oakland, that could never have been the starting point. Homer for Parry is almost unapproachably strange and distant. Only by recognizing that distance could he be understood. Parry’s guiding light was Ernest Renan, the star of the dinners at the Repas Magny. Renan had insisted on understanding the past on its own terms. “How can we grasp the physiognomy and the originality of an early literature,” he had written,

  if we do not enter the personal and moral life of the people who made it, unless we place ourselves at the very point in humanity which was theirs, so that we see and feel as they saw and felt; unless we watch them live, or better, unless for a moment we live with them?

  This liberal, anthropological understanding of what Homer might be—quoted and requoted by Parry in his papers—was far ahead of anything other Anglo-Saxons were thinking, and the key to that penetration of the past was in the nature of the verses themselves. Parry’s central question was this: what does the nature of the poetry say about the world in which it was composed? He focused on two qualities: the way in which heroes and objects are accompanied by almost unvarying and sometimes inappropriate adjectives and epithets, the building blocks of unvarying “formulas”; and the role of words in Homer which “Homer”—the eighth-century BC scribe who wrote the poems down—almost certainly did not understand.

  In 1922 the classics faculty at Berkeley told Parry that there was no chance he would get a doctorate by following up on his master’s thesis on the formulas in Homer. It was not what an American classicist did. For a year Parry worked with his chickens, but he recognized that his future studies would find most encouragement with the anthropologists in Paris, and when he was twenty-two he went there to do his doctorate at the Sorbonne. What he set out to analyze may seem arcane, but it is in fact a route into the mind of the Bronze Age, an archaeology of the word. First, abandon any idea of the classic poet. The poems are not objects conceived by a single, gifted person, but inherited, shaped and reshaped by a preceding culture, stretching far back in time, something as much formed by tradition as the making of pots or the decoration of their surfaces. Homer is the world of tradition-shaped poetry, not of realism, as unlike reality as opera and profoundly guided by its own conventions. And the governing fact in that epic world is the music of the poetry.

  The Homeric epics are essentially the music of hexameters—the Greek word hexameter means “six measures”—because in each line there are six “feet” for which the words must be chosen to fit the preexisting pattern. This verse is measured language. Within each of the six feet, the language can fall in different ways. Feet made up of a long and two shorts (a phrase like “This is the”) are called dactyls, after the Greek word for a finger, daktylos, a word which both mimics the shape of the human finger—a long bone followed by two short ones—and is a dactyl itself. A foot of two longs (“hemlocks”) is a spondee—spondee is the Greek word for a libation—an offering poured out with certainty and directness for a god, and which is a spondee itself. Most feet can be either dactyls or spondees, but the rules of epic insist that the fifth foot is usually a dactyl (“pines and the”) an
d the final foot always a spondee.

  Here, with those rules in mind, is an English hexameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  Variation is always to hand: the dactylic “murmuring” could be the spondaic “moss-girt.” The pines have to be surrounded by hemlocks because dactylic “rivulets” would not be allowed at the end of the line, but Longfellow could have chosen the spondaic “wood prim-eval,” to make an even weightier line,

  But he may have felt that the breeze was not blowing through that American landscape quite as he wanted. Flexibility within the pattern is at the core of the system. This is not an iron prison but a means of making memorable music, of allowing music to carry a tale.

  Each of the lines has a natural break (marked here by ^ after “primeval”) called a caesura, and the line naturally falls into two halves on either side of it. In reality, there are many variations in Homeric verse, but this is the underlying structure, a combination of variety and rhythmic certainty, governing the way each line develops. It is the sound of epic, entirely unlike the way anyone would ever have spoken, but embodying for the Greeks the heroic world.

  Parry established that an astonishingly high proportion of the poems composed in this rhythmically repetitive form was made up of prefabricated elements that had been evolved to fit the metrical pattern of the hexameter. Anyone telling the story of the Odyssey or the Iliad in verse would have had, ready to hand, words and expressions that could easily be put into this form. Just under a third of all the lines in Homer are like this, either repeated entirely or containing phrases repeated elsewhere. Saying the same thing, or a version of the same thing, over and over again lay at the foundations of the Homeric world.

  If Alexander Pope in eighteenth-century England thought the excellence of poetry lay in “What oft was thought/But ne’er so well express’d,” Homer’s ideal is precisely the opposite: saying the true things in ways that are deeply familiar: what oft was thought and almost always expressed in exactly the same way. Homer, in its genes, was set against newness, turning to the fixed music of the hexameters and the phrases inherited from the past for the validation of its truths. This poetry can be thought of in the same light as weaving patterned cloth or building wooden ships. The past, through endless tests, successes and failures, came up with ways of using and joining materials that work, that are robust, reliable and true, that can cope with seas or storms at night, that have a grace and commodity about them, whose threads can glitter in the candlelight and which are, of their essence, inherited.

  Nowhere is the formulaic method of the verse clearer than in the way Homer uses the name of a hero or god, attached to a descriptive adjective or phrase, to fill in the second half of a hexameter, the space between the midline break, the caesura, and the end of the line. You can represent the gap Homer needed to fill again and again by the phrase “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.” Each of the thirty-seven most important heroes and gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey has a formula attached to his or her name which exactly fills that gap. One after another they queue up to occupy it: polytlas dios Odysseus—much-suffering godlike Odysseus is there thirty-eight times; followed closely by podarkēs dios Achilleus, swift-footed godlike Achilles; boöpis potnia Hera, cow-eyed goddess Hera; thea glaukopis Athene, goddess owl-eyed Athene; anax andrōn Agamemnon, lord of men Agamemnon—and so on through the whole cast. Equally formulaic phrases often fill the other part of the line—“and so in reply he spoke,” “and so she said when smiling”—so that entire lines, and entire sequences of lines, are filled up not with words chosen for their individual strength, poignancy or relevance, but as a means of keeping the music constant, keeping the characters present and alive in the surface of the poem.

  Once you grasp this core repetitive mechanism—often obscured in translations of Homer—these poems become profoundly strange, sinking back away from us in time and mentality, to a point where story and character are visible only though the mask of the formulaic, as unreal as a Noh play, as mysterious as an unheard liturgy. The stories of the warriors at Troy and the wanderings of Odysseus become as alien as a tale told in hieroglyphs or cuneiform. This is the Renan effect, seeing the past for its strangeness, not imposing our own clarity or suppositions on something from the other end of human consciousness.

  “The poetry,” Parry wrote, “was not one in which a poet must use his own words and try [as] best he might to utilize the possibilities of the metre. It was a poetry which for centuries had accumulated all such possibilities—all the turns of language, all the words, phrases, and effects of position, which had pleased the race.”

  So powerful was the need to keep the music whole, that these metrically convenient phrases are often used even when they make no sense. The heavens are “starry” in the middle of the day; linen is “gleaming” when it is about to be washed; Odysseus is called “much-suffering godlike Odysseus” by the shade of a man he recently killed, now in Hades; Aegisthus, the adulterous lover of Clytemnestra and murderer of Agamemnon, is “blameless”; ships are “swift” when they have been turned to stone. But the hexameters roll on, sustained by these formulaic expressions, a music whose sense of its own overarching greatness matters more than any local meaning. By the time of “Homer”—often put in quotes by Parry—the heroic epithets had become virtually meaningless. Achilles was not really “swift-footed” when lurking in his tent for book after book of the Iliad, refusing to fight for the Greeks; Odysseus was not really “suffering much” when performing as only one among many of the Greek commanders at Troy. These words, in Parry’s analysis, had become useful line-fillers because that is what the music of the hexameters, the tradition itself, required. They had nothing to do with what the poem meant.

  This was a radical dismantling of the inherited Homer. Ever since the Alexandrians, Europe had tried to rescue Homer from his own errors. Parry, alive with all the early twentieth century’s fascination with the strange truths to be found in non-Enlightenment cultures, now plunged him back into a deeply preclassic world, taking him apart in the process. Parry was accused of being the “Darwin of Homeric scholarship,” the man who had turned a god into an ape. But he is more like Homer’s Gauguin or Stravinsky, creating a poet for a Jungian world, allowing for the validity of his prerational methods, finding there beauty which the classic tradition was blind to and wished to excise. Parry thought Homer beautiful in the way an African totem or a Polynesian mask might be beautiful. Europeans since the Renaissance might have looked on Homer as one of the furnishings of the gentlemanly life. Parry saw himself as no part of that tradition, and for him distance and inaccessibility stood at the root of Homer’s meaning.

  Parry had summoned a strange and troubling Homer from the depths, a poet entranced by his inheritance, almost blind in front of it, spooling out what the past had given him, “a machine of memory with limited aesthetic scope,” as the Californian critic James I. Porter has described him, “his materials emerging from the deepest lava flows of epic time.” This is Homer as Hawaiian volcano, oozing the past like the juice from the earth’s mantle. Parry even suggested that the poems were full of words, often in old forms of Greek, that may have fitted the music of the hexameters but which “Homer,” the Ionic poet from Chios in the eighth century BC, did not himself understand. There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature. That number goes up to 494 if you include proper names, their roots deep in ancient forms of Greek, many of them spoken in Thessaly in northern Greece, but which in Chios and through the Ionic fringe of Anatolia were no longer used. Many have never been translated—unintelligible to the Greeks of fifth-century Athens or third-century Alexandria, their meaning still only to be guessed at.

  But for Parry, this was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning. The past must be given its due, and one aspect of that past was the unintelligibility of its language. Only then would you understand the
relationship of the singer and his tradition: “The tradition is of course only the sum of such singers. One might symbolize it by the idea of a singer who is at once all singers.” He quoted Aristotle’s Rhetoric on the ideal for an epic poet: “One’s style should be unlike that of ordinary language, for if it has the quality of remoteness, it will cause wonder and wonder is pleasant.” Mystery is power, and the not-entirely-understood seems greater than what is clear. Parry’s vision of Homer is very nearly like the unintelligible ritual of the Latin mass sung to uncomprehending peasants across medieval Europe: words that were meaningful because they could not be understood. Eliot’s passing thought in his 1929 essay on Dante that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” is less radical than this. Parry sees Homer as a culture riding into the future on poetry whose deepest parts are entirely inaccessible.

  His professors at the Sorbonne told him something he hadn’t quite grasped: everything he had been pursuing was a sign that Homer was not originally a written but an oral text. This formulaic composition was the mark of a sung poem, so dependent on preshaped elements that a singer could compose it as he performed it. Such songs were neither monstrous feats of memory nor improvisations, invented from one moment to the next, but tales told with the help of ancient formulas, devised long before, which the singer could rely on as steady metrical elements in his lines. He did not have to learn any poems, but he had to learn what the tradition could teach him, the ability to make poems on the hoof.