Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  But I didn’t. I behaved in the way that the “foolish children” of the Iliad behave, submitting to the knife, too frightened at what that blade might do to my face and body to risk fighting him. Women and children in Homer are always called foolish because they do not risk death by confronting the enemy; they submit and suffer like sheep under a worrying dog. I knelt in the dust as he raped me, a pitiable little doglike action from behind, the point of the knife jiggling in the side of my neck with his frantic movements, my mind observing this from afar and realizing that the moment of greatest danger was not yet over, that after he had done with me, all the possibilities of loathing, resentment and shame, not to speak of the chance that I would report and identify him, might mean he would kill me.

  I prepared for that moment as I felt him coming over my thighs and buttocks. It all seemed entirely prosaic, neither consciously frightening nor dramatic, not anything that would raise my pulse. This was my experience of the ordinariness of death, that everything that had made me what I was up to that moment—my father and my father’s father, my love of home, of the orchards and wheatfields that the Iliadic warriors always remember, and my wife in England—all of that was now perhaps to come to an end, without strangeness or mystery, but as one of the essential facts of being and nonbeing, of my life being bound up with the continued existence of the pulse in my body. I felt entirely animal, as if I and my body were coterminous, everything about me dependent on the blade of that knife not cutting into me and draining my life into the Syrian dust.

  In those few minutes, I moved through the full spectrum of Homeric reactions, from the childlike stupidity of acceptance of violence to the manlike recognition that I should risk killing him in order to be myself. This was when the fight for life would happen; this was my introduction to the world with which the Homeric heroes are so familiar; their life dependent on the death of those who are out to destroy them.

  We stood up, I dressed, he did up his trousers, holding the knife in his hand, and I walked back alongside him, smiling, talking about Palmyra, just out of arm’s reach. We came to his bike, and he picked it up, the knife still in the hand that held the handlebars. I made sure I walked with the bike between me and him. I kept talking to him, looking at him with my eyes, smiling, acting ease and acceptance, waiting for the moment when he would stop again, and come for me, preparing for that, not in anything resembling rage or fear, but a stilled, intent cold-mindedness. As we walked along, I looked for the stones on the track which, when the time came, I would pick up and use to crush the skull bones between his eyes.

  It was getting dark. We passed the point where he had first caught up with me. The farther we got, the safer I knew I was. We reached the edge of the palms and the blue of the open desert. He pointed me to the road I should have taken, and then he turned away to the right, walking with his bike into the shadows of the trees. I went on across the desert toward the town and the hotel, where I stood for longer than I knew in the shower, recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one’s own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love; its mysterious combination of everything and nothing; its lack of beauty or poignancy; the extreme calm that threat can summon; the clarity with which, when threatened with death, you must threaten death in return.

  I knew nothing of Homer then, but I know now that these are all aspects of Homeric understanding. They emerge from a world in which use and imposition are part of the everyday fabric of life. The poems are not the overheated fantasies of palace-based thrill seekers. There’s no ooh-ah here. Homer’s groundedness in the plain facts of killing is one of the guarantees of its truth.

  * * *

  A few years later I went in deeper pursuit of this northern, nonurban, metal warrior world, led first by the hint of a footnote in a book by Adolf Schulten, the German archaeologist who devoted his life to the recovery of antiquity in southern Spain. In 1922, in the first volume of Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae, he suggested that he knew the location of Hades, the underworld, which in the middle of the Odyssey Odysseus and his men visit in order to learn the way home from the old, blind seer Tiresias. It was, I recognize, a quixotic thing to do, to fly there, rent a car, drive through the concrete scurf of the modern Spanish coastline, to find the place where Odysseus, a fictional character in a phantasmagorical story from the Bronze Age, was said to have encountered some of the deepest truths Homer had to offer. It is the sort of behavior you might find in a Tom Stoppard play or a High Victorian memoir, but as things turned out, in my few days of walking around the river valleys and dry cork oak pastures on the high borders of Andalusia and Extremadura—that most marginal imaginable of Odyssean landscapes—I felt as if I were cutting deep trenches into the Homeric world.

  When I first read the Odyssey, no moment was more powerful for me than Odysseus’s visit to the underworld. Inner and outer landscapes were more intimately fused there than in anything I had ever read. The great man’s crew of time- and sea-worn sailors have been on Circe’s island but are now cold and frightened, at the limits of the world. The coast of Hades is desolate, fringed with tall poplars and with willows whose seed falls from the trees before it is ripe. This place is everything the world of heroes is not: dark, colorless, silent and mournful.

  Crowds of the dead surface to confront the crew. The ghosts, the psyches, shuffle toward them; their limbs are “strengthless.” All the varieties of death emerge: the old who have suffered much, the girls with tender hearts, the brides and unwed youths, and “great armies of battle dead, stabbed by bronze spears, men of war still wrapped in bloody armour.” They cannot speak. They do not have the life juices which would allow them to speak.

  For the dead, there is no other choice than Hades. This is not punishment but simply the place where in the end all people, however good and however holy, must go. Hell is the absence of life, the removal from the world of love and warmth which is the defining glory of life on earth. Hell is the house of loss. Only when Odysseus sprinkles in front of him all the good and fruitful things of the world—milk, honey, wine, water, white barley flour—and adds to them the hot blood of newly slaughtered lambs, and only when he allows the ghosts to sip at that lifeblood, does the power of speech, the sense of human communicativeness, return to the spirits.

  One by one they approach him, drink and speak: his friend Elpēnōr; Tiresias; and his mother. Odysseus longs to embrace them all, but as he moves to hold them, they “flutter through his fingers, sifting away like shadows, dissolving like a dream.” They are nothing in his arms. Psyches are merely people from whom the life-defining qualities of people, their physical presence in the world, have been stripped away. Here are people in the gray, fleshless state to which death has reduced them. It is a vision of the beautiful, the regal and the desirable sunk to nothing but rustling, flittering spirit.

  As Odysseus stands there, with the tears running down his cheeks, he sees, coming toward him, the ghost of Achilles, the greatest of all the warriors, the fastest and fiercest among them, worshipped almost as a god by the other Greeks at Troy, and now the greatest among the dead. His face is mournful, and Odysseus tries to console him. Achilles answers coldly and passionately: “Never try to sweeten death for me, glorious Odysseus.” The word Achilles uses for glorious, phaidimos, is used throughout Homer to describe the heroes. But here in hell, it has a particular resonance. Its roots are in the word for shining or brilliance. As the dead Achilles speaks, it is the world of lightlessness addressing the world of light and glimmer, the shining world from which Odysseus comes and from which Achilles is forever excluded.

  This is one of the pivotal moments of the Homeric epics, the dead hero of the Iliad addressing the living hero of the Odyssey, the man of singular and unequaled heroism, who has already suffered his fate, speaking across the borders of hell with the living, slippery, “many-wayed” man, polytropos Odysseus, whose life and destiny still have some glittering way to run. Death is addressing life and envying
it.

  Achilles makes the great central statement of the poems. “If I had a chance of living on earth again,” the ghost says through his tears, “I would rather do that as a slave of another, some landless man with scarcely enough to live on, than lord it here over all the dead that have ever died.” This is the Achilles whose pride had defined him in life, whose honor and sense of his own greatness had driven hundreds of men to their death, who had chosen death and a short life as the foundation of his glory. In the Iliad, Achilles had glowed with destructive beauty; he was a flaming star, a fire burning through a wood. His hands were “like consuming fire, his might like glittering iron.” His eyes burned like a furnace-core. His protective goddess, the gray-eyed Athene, had lit an unwearying fire that burned over his head. At every turn in his life he was quick and unforgiving. He was elemental in his strength, like a river unsusceptible to argument or compromise. But now, for this ghost, this burned-out, ashy wraith, any taste of life, of any kind, however humble, is preferable to the half-lit half-existence of senseless wastedness to which he is condemned. The purity of death holds no attraction for the Homeric Greeks. Their world is one in which the felt, sensed and shared reality, the reality of the human heart, is the only one worth having.

  As a measure of Homer’s skill as a dramatist and topographer of the emotions, he has Achilles address Odysseus again, the two of them still in tears, with the question that burns in the heart of any ghost in hell: “But tell me the story,” Achilles says—the Greek word is mythos, meaning the “word,” the “rumor,” what men say, but also the plot, the pattern of the story—“of the lordly boy.” He is referring to his son Neoptolemos, whose name means New War. Had he followed the Greeks to the wars? Had he fought as a son of Achilles might be expected to fight? Was he a boy a man might be proud of? Odysseus, drenched in love and pity for the dead hero, tells him all he knows of the beauty and courage of Neoptolemos: his calm when waiting with Odysseus in the belly of the Trojan Horse, his unwavering courage and, perhaps more important, how the boy had ended the war unharmed and even unscarred, never stabbed by either spear or sword, but sailing home in his ship with his share of the spoils and “a noble prize.” He does not mention that in other stories of the Trojan War, Neoptolemos was the most savage of all killers at the fall of Troy, murdering Priam at the altar of Zeus and killing Astyanax, Hector’s child, by throwing him from the walls. In one version, Neoptolemos kills Priam by battering him with the dead body of his grandson.

  Achilles does not hear this but nevertheless can say nothing in response to what Odysseus does say. It is too much for any father, even the greatest of heroes. He can only walk away across this beautiful, monochrome hell, which is covered, like all stony wasteland in the Mediterranean, with stands of tall, pale asphodels. It is a moment to describe the desolation of death and the unbridgeable gap between the world of light and the world of dark. Achilles both possesses his son in his memory and knows he can never possess him again. Neoptolemos is not here, and Achilles can be nowhere else. Here, defined by death, is the central grief of experience. Odysseus tells his listeners what Achilles did next.

  So I spoke, and off he went, the ghost of the great runner,

  Loping with long strides across the field of asphodel,

  Speechless in triumph at all that I had told him of his boy.

  Adolf Schulten suggested that this scene occurred at the far western end of the Bronze Age world, in southwest Spain, because that is where the goddess Circe had told Odysseus to go: “Set up your mast, spread the white sail, and sit yourself down; and the breath of the North Wind will bear your ship onwards.” Bronze Age ships, on a broad reach, with the mainsail braced hard to port, could drive west with a north wind, the fastest of all points of sailing. “But when in your ship you have crossed the stream of Oceanus,” Circe continued, “where is a level shore and the groves of Persephone—tall poplars and willows that shed their fruit—there beach your ship by the deep swirling Ocean, but go yourself to the dank house of Hades.”

  These are plain instructions. Odysseus’s ship must sail beyond the gates of the Mediterranean, out through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic Ocean, where the tides swirl and circle in a way unknown to Mediterranean sailors, and there find a beach with strange, cold, oceanic trees whose fertility deserts them under the salt winds. These are the trees of Persephone, the queen of death who is also queen of life, a vegetation goddess taken by Hades, king of the underworld, to be his consort, and in whose kingdom she presides over the sufferings of human souls. Odysseus will know he has arrived when he finds her trees whose seeds would never be ripe.

  But Circe is more explicit still: “There into the ocean flow Pyriphlegethon and Kokytus, which is a branch of the river of Styx; and there is a rock, and the meeting place of the two roaring rivers.” Homer’s geographic imagination understands scale and substance, and these are the giant rivers of hell: Pyriphlegethon means “blazing” or “raging like a fire,” used of cities when men torch them; Kokytus means “howling” or “shrieking”; it is the sound made by Priam and the women of Troy when they hear of the death of Hector; Styx means “hateful” and “loathsome,” the word used again and again for war, death and destiny. In rivers that make their way down to the great surrounding ocean, sorrow and fearsomeness slide out of the huge, dark, hidden continent called Hades.

  Schulten thought he knew where this was. West of the Guadalquivir, and west of the straits of Gibraltar, two rivers flow out into the Atlantic at Huelva: the Rio Tinto—the name means the “red river”—and the Rio Odiel. Where they meet in the estuary at Huelva, a great hoard of Bronze Age weaponry, now in Madrid, was dredged up in 1923. The confluence of those rivers is below a conspicuous rock where the monastery of Santa Maria de la Rábida has stood since the Middle Ages, and where in 1492 Christopher Columbus made his final prayers before sailing west for Cathay.

  It may not be much, but there were undoubtedly Mycenaean connections in southern Spain; Mycenaean ceramics have been found at Montoro on the Guadalquivir, east of Córdoba. If there were connections to the Cornish tin supply, the sea routes came past here. It is possible that the estuary at Huelva is Homer’s gates of hell.

  I was there alone one autumn, the south wind blowing warm and delicious out of Africa. There are beaches where, as it says in the Odyssey, “they stowed their gear and laid the mast in the hollow hulls,” waiting to see what would come to them at the ends of the earth. There is a flat shore, as Circe promised; a rock, or at least a large mound; two rivers, but neither is roaring nor made of fire. The estuary waters are brown and polluted. Slimed stumps of old quays stand up to their shins in the water. Waders teeter on the water’s edge. The trees are no longer the seed-spreading willows but clumps of eucalyptus and palms in rows. Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek and Cornish objects have all been dredged from these shallow waters, but if this is the gate of Hades, the shores of a lightless eternity, you would hardly guess it.

  But go inland, and the landscape starts to change. Both the Rio Tinto and the Rio Odiel push on to the north of Huelva. These river valleys were one of the most important sources of metals in the Bronze Age because the hills on either side are filled with veins and big ore-bodies of copper, tin, gold and silver. Both rivers in their upper reaches are deeply changed by the metal country they run through. The Odyssey, with its man-eating monsters and vicious whirlpools, is a gothic poem, full of the nightmarish and the terrifying, the imagined sufferings of its heroes, but these garishly colored mineral valleys share that atmosphere: the toxic, the metallic, the otherworldly, the lifeless and the threatening all fused into some kind of recipe for hell.

  Stop the car, walk down to one of these riverbeds and you will find the world drenched in strangeness. It is a gaudy and bloody trench, earth transmuting into another planet. The rocks and water are both iron red. Sandbanks in the river look as if they are the hulks of abandoned iron beaches. These are not the neat pleasure-landscapes of an island kingdom but are big,
harsh, continental, inherently violent. Flakes of white quartzite shine through the water between ribs of rock that veer from red to tangerine to ocher and rust to flame-colored, flesh-colored, sick and livid. In between those red rocks are green snakeskin copper-rich boulders, glinting gray-eyed green minerals from within the orange depths.

  The rivers themselves are deeply and naturally poisoned. This is the earth polluting itself. Where it has dried it has left white chemical residues, scurfy scabmarks of receding poison tides. Only one kind of strange, green, long-haired weed can live in it. Apart from that, the water is cloudless, mineral red but entirely clear. This is a place in which almost nothing can live, in which fruit would drop before it was ripe. Those swirling fronds of green hair, seven, eight, nine feet long, are swept downstream around the flakes of rock. Underwater, the whole bed of the stream is coated in a thick dust of iron poison, iron solids precipitated from the water, a fungal metal scum. Where, in a back eddy, the current slows, a crusted porridge of the bloody slurry gathers in the pools, and no fish rise.

  An occasional dragonfly hangs its diamond-blue wings over this hell-water, but never with a mate. No songbirds. High above, some distant hawks. Perfectly white flies lie dead, caught in the mineral slicks. If Homer, in Chios, heard of this, of course he would have put Hades and Persephone here. I have never seen a place more suited to them.

  At the mining town of Rio Tinto itself, there is a museum where the mysteries of this metal world are on display. If you want to rediscover the Bronze Age entrancement with minerals in the raw, this is the place. In neat, old-fashioned glass cabinets you will find some of the strangest things the natural world can offer: fractured blue-silver flakes of galena; silver-gold cubes of iron pyrites; bulbs of calcite, erupting and diseased like glaucous eyeballs. Cinnabar is a stone blood-pudding, its red shot through with purples and blacks, the background for lilac amethysts. Green malachite is here, with azurite its close cousin, a Prussian blue only to be found in Alpine gentians. Sometimes the pyrites coat the skin of a rock in what is called calco pitita, as if a breath of gold had been blown over the stone. But nothing is more like the jewels of a hell palace, or poetry from the depths, than the rainbow stripes of Goethite, the crust of an indigo, lilac and green-gold planet.