Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Grief and triumph; a sense of irony and even tragedy; an overwhelming and dominant masculinity, thick with competitive violence; a small but hierarchical society, strung between a seminomadic way of life and one that was settled in small wooden houses; a vivid background in the natural world; a valuing of cattle and meat; in love with horses; no understanding of the city or of any relationship to the sea—all of that is implicit in the shape of this reconstructed language, and all of it looks very like the background to the world of the Greeks in their camp on the Trojan shore.

  But where and when can this world be located? That question is still far from being answered. There is plenty of evidence, but none of it adds up. Language cannot be attached to preliterate archaeological remains, and modern genetic evidence is still too confused for any clear outline to be derived from it.

  Nevertheless, it seems clear from the memories embedded in the daughter languages that the Proto-Indo-Europeans came from a place where they could grow crops (or at least harvest wild ones) and maintain herds of grazing animals on extensive pastures. They could not have been desert, mountain or forest people. They did not live in the arid south or the frozen north. There is a word in the original language that might mean beech tree, birch tree or oak tree. And another that might mean salmon, or maybe sea trout, or maybe trout. This looks like a temperate, river-valley existence. But the grazing animals would have required expansive grasslands too. These people have a word for bee, but there are no bees east of the Urals, so they can only have been on the western, European side of those mountains. The presence of many farming words means that they must have been farming before about 2500 BC, which is thought to be the last possible moment before the original group broke up and scattered across Europe and north Asia.

  These clues scarcely pinpoint a region, and people’s idea of the ancient homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their Urheimat, has wandered all over Eurasia. Originally it was thought to be in Afghanistan, but it has migrated from Bactria to the Baltic, to the Pripiat marshes in Poland, to Hungary and the Carpathians in general. The Nazis, identifying their race-vision with this linguistic category, and preferring the term “Aryan” (the name of an Indo-European people in Iran) to “Indo-European,” located the homeland in Germany. Some still favor Armenia in northwest Anatolia, but a modern consensus has for the time being settled on the steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas.

  For the purposes of understanding the roots of the Homeric vision, it doesn’t much matter where this notional homeland was. The elements of a river-valley-plus-grazing landscape extend across the whole of the western steppe, from the Danube to the Caucasus and beyond. And fascinatingly, there, in the remains of settlements, and in the burial mounds, or kurgans as they are called in Russia, which decorate the landscape, archaeologists have discovered many objects and signs of life that look distinctly as if Achilles had passed that way.

  * * *

  Of all the steppe-Homer linkages, the most powerful is the horse. It was probably domesticated on the steppe in about 4200 BC, first as food and then to be ridden. A man on foot in the modern Eurasian steppe can shepherd no more than two hundred sheep; one on a horse can manage a flock of five hundred. It was a revolutionary difference. This early riding was not yet the militarized pastoral nomadism associated with the Scythians or the Mongols. Nothing of that kind would emerge until after 800 BC, but the speed of the horse, the invention of the bit and the bridle, the control they gave to a rider, the ability to accumulate great reservoirs of meat, to raid and withdraw from pedestrian settlements—all of it changed people’s lives and would change history.

  The great grasslands of the steppe were now available to a mobile, horse-mounted people in a way no one could have attempted before. Giant flocks were grazed on the giant grasslands. The men who could control them became leaders and chieftains. Mobility and glamor had arrived, and the horse was a version of power that the great men tamed and dominated (both descended from the same Proto-Indo-European root, demha). The careful husbandry of the Neolithic farmers was now overlaid with the rush and glamor of horse-based life. The human steppe cultures began to revere the power of the horse, fusing their visions of human power with equine beauty. The word at the root of “equine” means “quick” in Indo-European languages, and the horse and its speed, the ripple and sheen of horse muscle, became central to these people’s idea of greatness.

  The disconnected limbs of the horses that appear all over later prehistoric Europe, on coins or in hill figures, are the horses seen in this magic, dematerialized way. They are more spirit than body, often with huge, disproportionately alert eyes, their whole being prancing, all curve in their haunches, all muscle in their neck and back, the tension in them not unlike the tension in a ship under sail at sea. Tautness, urgency and stretch are their governing qualities. Here the horse is something like the wind, not dominated by man but coexisting with him, an extension of the possibilities of life.

  A first-century BC gold coin or “stater” of the Celtic Parisii tribe, near Paris.

  Some clues to this world of the horse can be found at a timber town, not that large, about 150 yards across, at a place called Sintashta, on the banks of the wide, gravelly Sintashta River, sweeping down through the grasslands east of the Urals and on the borders of Kazakhstan. A timber-reinforced wall with gates and towers surrounded the buildings, with a V-shaped ditch outside it. Inside there were about fifty houses (some have since been eroded away by the river), and in all of them people had been making bronze and copper swords, knives and axes.

  It was clearly a violent, warrior society, with the need for weaponry and a defensive enclosure. In the nearby cemetery, more than half of all the people were buried with weapons, including nearly all the men, but some were also buried alongside something else, quite new: war chariots with light, spoked wheels. They are the oldest chariots to have been discovered, dating from about 2100–1800 BC, precisely the same moment as this book has been arguing for the genesis of the Iliad. The Sintashta people cannot be the ancestors of the Greeks—who must already have been far to the southwest of there—but to archaeologists it looks as if they might have been the ancestors of those Indo-European-speaking people who were making their way east of the Urals and on to northern India.

  The Bronze Age White Horse at Uffington, Oxfordshire, England.

  Sintashta—and some twenty equivalent settlements have now been found—is a cousin to the Homeric world. Here, as in Patroclus’s tomb in the Iliad, whole horses were sacrificed at the burials. Drivers were buried with bone, disk-shaped cheekpieces, critical elements in the kind of bridle needed for tight control of chariot horses. There are some flint blades in the graves, which are thought to have been made for javelins—those light spears that can be thrown by a warrior on the ground or from a chariot. The chariots themselves are clearly fast, light war machines, quite different from the heavy transport wagons that had been around on the steppe for a thousand years. These have spoked not solid wheels about three feet in diameter and are designed to be driven at a gallop. The chariot itself would have been skeletal, consisting of little more than a few struts. In the Iliad it is possible for one man to pick up a chariot to move it out of the way.

  This combination of things is deeply Homeric; chariot races fill the penultimate book of the Iliad, at the funeral games Achilles stages for Patroclus, where skill in driving, in turning corners, could only have been achieved with the new cheekpiece bridles. At the same time, it is clear from the funerals of both Hector and Patroclus that these were giant communal events, great crowds of people attending the funerary rites of the heroes. Here too at Sintashta, one burial has the bones of six horses, four cows and two rams killed for the death of the great man. Archaeologists calculated that those animals would have provided two pounds of meat for each of three thousand participants. It so happens that the giant kurgan near this animal feast would have taken, it is thought, three thousand man-days to build, just as in Homer the people of Tr
oy and the men of the Greek camp build for many days the funeral pyres for their fallen heroes. Horses, chariots, bronze weaponry, multiple animal sacrifices, massive meat feasts, chiefdoms, wall-defended camps, huge funeral rituals, spectacular communal displays—the Iliad and Sintashta belong to one culture world, and that world is the Indo-European steppe.

  One last intriguing element appeared at Sintashta: some great men were clearly celebrated in death and their fame consolidated by a great communal outpouring of love and grief. Glory gathers around these funerals. But in life there is no such distinction visible in the wooden houses at Sintashta, no palaces, no apparent grandeur, no hierarchy in the buildings. Here, then, in Sintashta, were warrior chiefs who loved speed, who loved horses, who loved fame but who were not focused on the riches or comfort of the places in which they lived. They were, in other words, not Agamemnon but Achilles, the choosers of glory in battle, not men who were greedy for possessions. Here in Sintashta were not only the cousins of the Greeks but the world from which Achilles came.

  Horses mattered to the Homeric Greeks: both Poseidon and Athene were horse gods, drawing on the power of unpredictability, the horse’s muscled body, the possibility they always seem to harbor of violence and suddenness, the fire in the eye. This deep Indo-European horse-experience explains its prominence in Homer. It is an inheritance from the steppelands, which can otherwise seem a little mysterious. No fighting happens on horseback in Homer. It is ships, not horses, that have brought the Greeks to Troy. Chariots are used in battle as little more than taxis. The Trojans are city people on the shores of a strategic waterway from the Aegean to the Black Sea; horse mobility is not at the practical heart of their lives. And yet horses rule in Homer.

  Achilles, Nestor and even Odysseus are deeply connected with them. Achilles has a herd with him at Troy. His horses speak and weep. He is at times, in the speed of his running, compared to “a prize-winning horse” himself. And it is one of his own horses, Xanthos, who tells him of his death to come. But it is the Trojans and their allies whose lives are drenched in the image and potency of the horse. The Trojans were Indo-Europeans too, having arrived in Anatolia earlier than the Greeks, and despite their city existence they continued to practice some of the habits of the steppe world from which they had come. They are, as fellow descendants of the steppe, the great horse people of Homer. The finest horses of all belong to the Trojan allies from Thrace, a region which for Homer stretches north from the Aegean with no boundary. Those horses are in effect the spirit of the north, whiter than snow, as fast as the wind, terrible, shining like the sun.

  “Breaker of horses” is one of the Trojan epithets. Hector, in one of the most beautiful of all warrior similes in the Iliad, is

  like a horse that has fed his fill at the manger, who breaks his halter and runs over the plain, wanting to bathe in the fair-flowing river, and feels exultation in his limbs, holding his head high while his mane floats streaming around his shoulders and he glories in his own splendor as he runs to the pastures and the dwelling places of the mares.

  The horse is what the hero might dream of being. Aeneas has horses that come from a line bred by Zeus, the great sky god of the north. The Trojans sacrifice live horses in the river Scamander that flows past their walls. And the horse dominates the names of Trojan warriors. Quick Horse, Raid Horse, War Horse, Black Horse and Good Horse all go out to battle for Troy, sounding like a band of Comanches.

  This is the shared horse-matrix out of the north that allowed the Greeks to imagine the best thing they could give the Trojans, the one irresistible gift which that city could not refuse. The Trojans would surely see it as a gift from Poseidon Hippios, their great horse-god protector, the wall maker: a wooden horse that looked like a fortress itself. It took one to know one; the great unifying and shared belief of these two cultures was the giant creature they both feared and revered. It does not appear in the Iliad; Homer’s great war poem stops short of that moment. Only in the Odyssey, in retrospect, is the tale told, twice, each time slightly different, each immersed in tenderness and sorrow.

  First Menelaus, the husband of Helen, the aggrieved man from whom Paris stole his wife and thus began the war, tells Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, what happened. It was a trick, a hollow ambush, a mark of Odysseus’s cleverness, the product of his “dear, steadfast heart.” But as Menelaus tells the tale, he remembers only his wife’s enigmatic and mysteriously intimate behavior. The Trojans have hauled the horse into the city, and at night Helen walks around it. It is a thickly sexualized moment; she is close up to the body of the horse, touching it with the tips of her fingers, murmuring gently through the timbers to what she guesses must be the Greeks inside, speaking to each of them in the voice of the wives they have left behind, like a sorceress becoming one by one their loved and longed-for women away in Greece. What multiple treachery is this? The Greeks are there to cheat the Trojans. Only for Menelaus is the voice truly of his wife, but she is the wife who betrayed him. Is this intimacy now an attempt to betray them all again?

  Nor is Helen alone. She is accompanied by a Trojan, Deïphobus. He is the brother of Hector and Paris, and is now Helen’s latest husband, with whom she sleeps reluctantly and whom she is now also longing to betray. Violence and desire, treachery and strangeness, the threatening closeness of the horse, one of the gods of trouble, fills this scene like an acid fog.

  The second time we hear the story, Odysseus is with the Phaeacians, who are the epitome of civilization and wholeness, at a dinner lit with braziers, where a bard is ready to tell any tale the stranger wants to hear. Odysseus asks him to tell the story of the building of the Trojan Horse. The bard obliges but goes on to describe the horror of the sacking of Troy, when Odysseus, accompanied by Menelaus, goes looking for Deïphobus. When they find him they cut him horribly, as Virgil described it in the Aeneid: “his whole body mutilated, his face brutally torn, his face and hands, the ears ripped from his ruined head, his nostrils sheared by a hideous wound.”

  Odysseus cannot bear the tale he now hears. As he listens, “he melt[s],” Homer says, in a word used for snow in heat, sugar in water, a cloud giving up its rain, flesh falling from a long-dead body, or of a creature that pines away for a companion it has lost. Homer does not stint in describing the depth of Odysseus’s grief.

  As a woman weeps, lying on the body

  Of her dear husband, who died fighting for his city and his people,

  As he tried to beat off the day of pitilessness,

  And as she sees him lying and gasping for breath

  And winding her body around him

  She cries high and piercing while the men behind her

  hit her with the butts of their spears

  and lead her away to captivity to work and sorrow

  and her cheeks are hollow with her grief.

  Such are the tears that Odysseus lets fall from his eyes.

  Nowhere in Homer is the harrowing of war seen more entirely. The horse has summoned the deepest of encounters with the nature of reality. Odysseus is the sacker of cities, the mutilating criminal himself, over whose crimes he now weeps like the victims whose life he has destroyed. Every person here—the bard, the king, the warrior, the weeping widow, the traveler—is understood.

  Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means “popular with the people”—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: “The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter.” The song, this poem, this story, is the divine purpose of the war. The war happened so that the poem could happen.

  It is the deepest Homeric wink. The Phaeacians are enjoying this, it says, and you are enjoying it too, aren’t you? Despite yourself, you love this account of grief, and that pleasure in tragedy is the purpose of the Homeric poems. The poems recognize the dreadfulness of the events they describe; they also understand the pleasure to be derived from hearing of those events. Nothing
is theorized, nor is that contradiction resolved, but from these words we understand that the beauty of the poems depends on the horror of what they say.

  This is the flagstaff statement in the very first paragraph of Simone Weil’s great 1939 essay on the Iliad, “The Poem of Force”:

  Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, belonged only to the past, have been able to see in the Iliad a historical document; those who know how to see force, today as yesterday, at the centre of all human history, can find there the most beautiful, the purest of mirrors.

  “Le plus beau, le plus pur des miroirs” is what the Phaeacian bard was saying. There is no hiding in the Iliad, no deceit, no flinching from the view of horror, no reluctance to record the bitter jokes in the face of blood, no sweetening of dismemberment, no pretense that, when the stomach wall is cut, innards do not lurch out onto knees and laps, no forgetting that brains spatter from a spear-mangled head, nor the way wounded, dying men scratch and jerk their life out as they scrabble uselessly at their killers’ feet—the word Homer uses means “to clutch at,” “to gather like men picking up the harvested grains”—no screen to shield you from the fire, no euphemism to pretend this isn’t the way that men behave, no glaze to cloud “the purest and most beautiful of mirrors.” It is clarity, summoned here by the great horse, that makes the words of the Iliad the most disturbing ever written.

  * * *

  Achilles inherited his life from the steppe. Inflation, scale, ambition had come with the horse and its breaking. It was the archaic companionship on which the steppe cultures were built. Equipped with horses and with their carts and heavy wagons, the steppe people could move. They were perhaps driven west by an increasing aridity on the steppe, which reached a peak of dryness in about 2000 BC, perhaps drawn by the richness of European soils. Wherever they went, they made their burial mounds, which are now to be found all over the steppe and beyond, at Marathon and Troy, on Salisbury Plain and in Denmark, all over Germany, and in Greece, and were probably once above the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, which were flattened only late in antiquity.