Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  The world of this tiny, famous incident is almost Arthurian: its elevation of honor, its secret lusts in palace corridors, its conscious stepping beyond the ethics of the battlefield. It is, in fact, a deeply traditional folktale, elements of it found all across the preserved literatures of the Near East. But what of the writing, those mysterious and dangerous signs? What does this description of writing say about the Homeric moment?

  The Greek king could have had something written, presumably by a scribe, but Bellerophon could not read what it was. Writing was something that belonged to royal administration, not to members of the court. The text was also inaccessible to the poet telling the tale, and seems mysterious, half magical to him. The king in Lycia could read it or have it read to him, but still it has the quality of a spell, those many dangerous signs crammed into the folding wooden tablet Bellerophon brought him.

  This story is, in other words, an illiterate description of something written, seen more as an object than a message, its means of communication arcane and beyond ordinary understanding. It is a tiny glimpse into the Mycenaean world, profoundly different from both the Greek world after 750 BC, when ordinary wine drinkers could scratch hexameters into wine cups, and from the Greek world between 1200 and 750, when no one could write at all and there were no palaces or archive rooms within them. The Bellerophon tale, in other words, is the mark of the Iliad being at least as old as the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.

  But that is far from the end of it. A Mycenaean palace might have been the world in which the Iliad—or an Iliad—was sung. It is not the world the Iliad describes or in which it began. That world, in which a Greek warband confronts a non-Greek city; in which Greek adventurers find themselves at sea in a world of settlement and order, profoundly unlike their own mobile, predatory, unsettled lives; in which they know about gold and weaponry and fine things but look on palaces and cities as belonging to others—that world can only have been earlier.

  Clues to these ancient ghostly layers are everywhere in Homer. As the great American archaeologist of the Bronze Age world, Emily Vermeule, professor of archaeology at Harvard, said of the Homer she loved, deep tradition “floats all through the songs as dust through air.” About 20 percent of the whole of Homer looks as if it was originally composed in a Greek that was earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets, that is, before 1400 BC. That antiquity can be seen above all in the way what are called preverbs relate to the verbs they modify. In Linear B, as in later classical Greek, a phrase the equivalent of “the situation described earlier” might be written as “the aforementioned case.” In Homer (and in other early languages of the Indo-European family) it often takes the form of “the afore case mentioned.” The preverb floats free of the verb. A “predetermined outcome” can in Homer, but not in later Greek, be a “pre outcome determined.” This small clue makes it clear that Homeric Greek is in many parts earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets.

  It has long been a puzzle to Homeric scholars that some lines in Homer don’t scan properly. But they can be made to scan if you assume that certain words had another letter in them: the digamma or wau, which was pronounced like the English w, and which had mostly disappeared by the time of the Linear B tablets, and is absent from the text of Homer as it has been preserved. Agamemnon is anax andrōn (the lord of men) in the text that has survived; the phrase only scans if you assume that it was originally wanax andrōn. The Greek for wine is oinos, but its original form is more familiar: woinos. These words that only work in their early form include the descriptions of the giant man-encircling shield carried into battle by Ajax. That kind of shield had been replaced by a little round shield as early as the fourteenth century BC, but the Iliadic words that had originally accompanied it survived in epic. Battle equipment, word-form and verse-form all point in the same direction: Homer’s foundations are in prepalatial antiquity, a poem stretching at least as far back as the seventeenth century BC.

  * * *

  That is the evidence in the language, but archaeology feeds into this too, nowhere more spectacularly than in the objects discovered in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Go to the beautiful halls of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens—make it midweek in midwinter, and you will have them entirely to yourself—and what you will find there is an electrifying encounter with the past. The Shaft Grave treasures are from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BC. The dead and their possessions were laid on the floor of a deep shaft, which was then roofed over and a mound built above it. They are from the time before any great fortresses or palaces were built in mainland Greece. The famous gates and ramparts at Mycenae and at Tiryns are all later. The blazingly rich objects in the graves come from a Greek warrior world, where all value was to be found in the glory of the individual body and its accoutrements. This is an essentially mobile world, in love with horses, chariots, ships, weaponry, hunting, adornment, beauty, gold and song. The people in the graves were undoubtedly entranced by the contemporary richness and glamor of the Minoan civilization in Crete and the almost unimaginable wealth of Egypt. Evidence of borrowings—or thefts—from those cultures is everywhere in the grave goods. But the Shaft Grave world was not yet palatial. From all the evidence found by more than a century’s intensive archaeology, it was the bodies of the great, not the city of Mycenae in the sixteenth century BC, that were rich in gold. These kings and queens must have rustled with gold, jangled with it as it hung from their ears and wrists, amazed onlookers with it, standing before them in high, pointed diadems and perfect, imperishable gold foil.

  This body-enriched but monumentless life is strikingly like the world of the Greek warriors in the Iliad. When the German businessman and romantic Heinrich Schliemann first dug into the Mycenae graves in the wet autumn of 1876, he wrote to his friend Max Müller, describing how he was reduced to weighing what he was finding.

  There are in all five tombs, in the smallest of which I found yesterday the bones of a man and woman covered by at least five kilograms of jewels of pure gold, with the most wonderful, impressed ornaments; even the smallest leaf is covered with them. To make only a superficial description of the treasure would require more than a week. Today I emptied the tomb and still gathered there more than 6/10 kilograms of beautifully ornamented gold leafs … I telegraphed today to The Times.

  It is held up as one of Schliemann’s great errors that he identified the warriors he found in those graves with the Homeric heroes. It is still thought to have been the crassest of his anachronisms, since the orthodoxy continues to think, as the classical Greeks did, that the Trojan War was fought in around 1200 BC, and that the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are at least 350 years too early to have had anything to do with that war. But that dating has nothing to secure it beyond the guesses made by the classical Greeks. Evidence of destruction at Troy itself has been found at a series of archaeological horizons from 2200 BC to 1180 BC. Any one of them might have been the war of the Iliad, except for this one reason: Homer in the Iliad describes the Greeks as a prepalatial warrior culture, very like the world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Greeks as seen in the Odyssey, which in these lights can only be the later poem, colored by the great period of Mycenaean palaces, have clearly begun to adopt the habits and structures of the Near Eastern palace culture. Nothing of that, though, appears in the Iliad. There is certainly no better reason to associate Homer with the Troy of about 1200 BC than with a city many centuries earlier.

  And so this book, like Schliemann, has a different suggestion to make: the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are contemporary with, or probably slightly later than, the deepest levels of the Homeric poems. The objects in the graves are their own best evidence of a pre-urban, marginal, heroic world whose inhabitants look very like the people Homer portrayed.

  The faces on which Schliemann stumbled are the faces of men as they are found in the Iliad. The usual image of the most famous mask, with the ears laid out to the side, gives the wrong impression, reduc
ing the severity it intends. As you can see from the creases in the gold, those ears, much of the beard and the upper rim of the mask should be folded away from the face, leaving the features naked and prominent.

  It is a battle face, not a portrait of an individual but the face of the warrior king: brutal, excluding and potent, as intense as any Renaissance inquisitor, nothing more resolute than that wide, closed mouth and the jaw gripped behind it. It is the face-helmet of fixed glory. Stare into its rebarbative blankness, appeal to it, and it will not respond. Its gold shines; it does not care. It can hurt, but you cannot hurt it. Here is Agamemnon in his aristeia, his power-drive toward supremacy, his best moment, his excellence, his moment of prowess. And in that focus of power his strange, coffee-bean eyes can be seen as either closed in self-absorption and self-regard or slitted in concentration. There is vanity here—his mustache tips are just tweaked upward; a little sprig of hair grows just below the lower lip—but at root this face is the pitilessness of dominance.

  Hold that face in mind and read Agamemnon’s demeanor in book 11 of the Iliad as he wades through “the slayers and the slain.” Under his violence, men fall like trees under a woodman’s ax. He drives his spear through a Trojan’s forehead, “and the spear is not stopped by the helmet, heavy with bronze, but passes through it and through the bone, and all the brain is splashed inside.” The next man is speared in the chest “by the nipple,” and the third killed with a sword-cut close to the ear. The next two, brothers, beg Agamemnon not to kill them. They speak to him “weeping, with gentle words,” offering him bronze and gold and iron from their father’s house, but “ungentle is the voice they hear,” ameiliktos, meaning “unsoothed,” the opposite of “darling.” He stabs one of the boys in the chest and slices off the arms and then the head of the other with his sword, the head rolling through the surrounding crowds of warriors like a round stone. Agamemnon is a fire in the forest and a lion in the mountains. His hands are spattered with the filth of blood. The chariots of those he has killed run driverless through the battlefield, the horses “longing for their incomparable charioteers,” but those men are now lying on the earth, “more loved by the vultures than by their wives.”

  Every Trojan warrior stands away from Agamemnon, trembling like a hind that sees a lion devouring her young and can do nothing to protect them. Agamemnon is that lion, eating the inward parts of those he kills. He kills a man, Iphidamas, just married, whose wife would now have “no joy of him,” and then, in a frenzy of repetition, Iphidamas’s brother, whose head Agamemnon cuts from his body with his sword. It has been a fiesta of severance, a destruction of human beings, but more than that, a destruction of human bonds. Agamemnon is edge-honed violence, his victims essentially their ligatures and sinews. It is the meeting of blade and connective tissue.

  Only when wounded in the arm does Agamemnon withdraw from his unforgiving crusade. As his wound begins to dry, pain starts to afflict him: “And just as when the sharp pain strikes a woman in labour, the piercing dart sent by the bitter goddesses of childbirth, so sharp pains break in on the strength of Agamemnon.” Those words are a measure of the grace and wisdom of this beautiful and terrifying poem. The pain suffered by the unforgiving agent of death and termination is like the pain of a woman as she gives birth to new life. What Agamemnon has done is to cut the connections between men and their fathers, men and their brothers, men and their wives, even men and their horses. But as his comparator for that slicing away of meaning, Homer summons the agony of childbirth, the root connectedness of humanity.

  The Shaft Grave Greeks, in this vision, are the people of the blade and the mask, the Trojans of the loom and the embrace. One slices and rejects, the other weaves and holds; but Homer stands beyond and embraces them both. He makes a poem of death that is itself a thing of woven beauty. That is the essential picture of the Iliad, a great history cloth, a tapestry of sorrow, in which the noncity is set against the city, where the marginal and contingent confronts the settled and the secure. The poem is hinged to that difference: the loved against the abused, the creative against the destructive forces of life. And the fact of the poem itself is a kind of superweaving, a weaving of severance and weaving into one shining cloth of understanding.

  You can find that love of complexity in the Mycenaean halls of the Athens museum. Take, for example, the interlaced spirals on one of the beautiful golden cups, almost certainly a hospitality cup for drinking on shared, ritual occasions. Its decoration dramatizes those moments. The spirals are formed into upper and lower bands. Trace individual lines in the patterns, and you will find that the spirals in one set of lines roll from right to left, those in the other from left to right. Each tightens into a knot, meets its opposite there and then spirals out and onto the next encounter. At the same time lines from each band reach out and intertwine with lines from the bands above and below.

  This is a culture entranced with the meeting, engaging, twisting, intertwisting and emerging of different cross-currents. Spirals are everywhere, in the gravestones showing spearmen in chariots hurtling into battle, on pots and on architectural masonry, on the beautifully chiseled platforms for the thrones of Mycenaean kings, on a golden breastplate bubbling with the swirl of life. The spirals might be taken as abstractions of the waves of the sea, but they are more than that: a recognition that this pattern of bind-and-release, alternating connectedness and separateness, is intimate with the nature of existence, of the thinking mind, the experiencing heart, the world that weaves and severs.

  In book 14 of the Iliad, as deep trouble is afflicting the Greeks, Nestor, the old king of Pylos, stands outside his own shelter in the Greek camp and looks dazed at the confusion around him.

  As when the open sea is deeply stirred by the ground-swell

  But stays in one place and awaits the rapid onset of tearing

  Gusts, not rolling its surf onward in either direction

  Until Zeus drives the wind down to decide it:

  So the old man ponders, his mind caught between two courses.

  That is as near as poetry could get to what archaeologists call the “antithetical spirals” that colonize such large areas of Mycenaean decoration and thought: dynamic, self-interlacing, not fixed but entranced by the very concepts of mobility, complexity and dynamism.

  But there is a delicate and fluttering sensibility here too. In Grave III, where Schliemann found the remains of three women and two children, crowned with the most astonishing sun-embossed diadems of gold foil, their dresses scattered like spring meadows with gold roundels and flowers, he also found a set of impossibly flimsy golden scales, the bar from which the two pans hung made of foil so thin that anything more than the weight of a butterfly would have bent it. And on those scales, the Mycenaean craftsmen had impressed into the metal precisely that: fat-bodied butterflies, their wings fitting the scales on which they rested.

  All this makes one thing clear: there is no need to assume that this early, prepalatial Iliad was some kind of brutalist crudity of bloodlust and violence, indifferent to the subtleties of moral atmosphere that are part of the deep weave of the poems. The early Iliad was as alert to irony, tragedy, poignancy and humanity as the Iliad we know. As Emily Vermeule once told a gathering of American classicists:

  Philologists often dislike, and reject, the idea that the early Iliad was good, and so beloved that great poetic effort and training were devoted to conserving it with all its archaisms and outmoded armor. They often prefer a late genius Homer who unified the design and gave new subtlety to the characters. This is because we still like to believe in progress, and that each generation somehow improves over the one before it; so, Homer should be as close to the civilized and lovable Us as we can make him, not some primitive singer of the remotest past … [But] poetically and archaeologically, early is not always the same as primitive.

  Look, for example, at the two most pitiful and most fully realized deaths in the Iliad, those of Achilles’s dear friend Patroclus and of Hector, the champ
ion of Troy. The same lines are given to their moment of dying, and only to them.

  He speaks, and as he speaks the end of death closes in upon him,

  And the soul, fluttering free of his limbs, goes down into Death’s house

  Mourning its destiny, leaving behind its youth and manhood.

  The Greek of those lines is as ancient as any in Homer, and yet they are also among the most poignant. The little soul leaves with nothing but regret. Death is not a release into beautiful immateriality but an expulsion from vivid life. Death is exile from light. The lovely limbs and eyes of Hector and Patroclus are now inert and glazed; the soul is nearly nothing without them.

  Later images on Greek pots sometimes show a tiny, mothlike figure, more wing than body, hovering on the head or shoulders of the heroes who just died. Emily Vermeule, in a connection typical of her bright genius, reported an experiment performed by a doctor in Düsseldorf who had placed the beds of his dying patients on extremely sensitive scales, so that he could measure their weight immediately before and after death. The difference, he found, was twenty-one grams, three-quarters of an ounce, the weight of the soul.

  How can these objects and images not be evidence of a Homeric sensibility in sixteenth-century BC Mycenae? The love-denying mask of Agamemnon; the vision of the mayfly-soul, sadly departing the man in whose body it had found such radiant life; the antithetical interlace of a mind caught between two courses; the presence of tenderness allied in your everyday life to desperate violence.

  Again and again in his similes, Homer knows that life is fragile, love suffers hurt and death comes; and that the moments on a hillside in the springtime, when the flowers are emerging in the turf, the sheep are giving milk and what looks like a mist of new leaves is just breathed into the dark of a winter wood, are more precious than any gathering of metal from slaughtered enemies or the rape of their wives.