Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Those burial mounds, or kurgans, are houses for the greater dead, the articulate if silent earth equivalents of epic poetry, the memory capsules of giant lives lived in giant landscapes. They first started to appear on the southern steppelands of Eurasia in about 3800 BC and contain the tutelary objects ancestral to the equipment of the Greek heroes: copper spirals, often in pairs, to hold the braided hair of a single man, the glamor trappings of the decorated body, imported copper beads, almost certainly sewn to clothes that have now disappeared, along with thin sheets of metal like foil armor, and equally thin, insubstantial tubes of copper rolled into cylinders. They had axes with them and copper pendants made in the shape of beautiful freshwater mussel shells. Other shells were carved out of alabaster, and some of the steppeland heroes wore belts of freshwater mussels themselves, each shell carefully perforated where a thread joined it to the others.

  In northern Ukraine, at a place called Karagod a few miles short of the border with Belarus, just in the fringe-zone where the southern steppe merges into the coniferous forest of the taiga, there is a small Bronze Age tumulus. The afternoon I was there, a blanket of silence hung in the sunshine. The sandy soil was rutted and dug up by wild boar into raw scrapes. But they were only minor interruptions. The continuous grasslands stretched away in front of me, just as Tolstoy said, the same on the horizon as they were at my feet, full of small, undemonstrative flowers: creamy white scabious, lady’s bedstraw, mauve-blue campanulas, the dots of brighter paint in the endless, blond, receding grass.

  As I walked through them, green grasshoppers danced up like the bubbles off a newly poured glass of champagne. In the binoculars there was nothing but glow and haze, a slow motility in the distant air, as if the world itself were simmering. I have never been anywhere filled with such languorous, labile beauty. Bugs skittered over the puddles, but everything else slowed in the heat. Cattle grazed in the distance, their legs dipped and narrowing into the pool of haze, while the swallows and sand martins wove in and out of them as if pursuing some hidden, threaded path. A kind of vanilla sweetness wafted from the lime trees, and wild raspberries grew and fruited beneath them. There were patches of lily-of-the-valley in the shade of young oaks. A wide, slow river came sliding out of the north, as unconcerned as a cow at its cud, and by the reedy riverbanks the damselflies performed and danced, pairs of dark wings on electric bodies. The breeze blew up the underside of the willow leaves, silvering them, and in the wind the edges of the water lilies curled up too, lifting one lip away from the water.

  Is there anywhere as seductive, as reflective, as this glow-thick grassland? It seems on these continental afternoons as if this might be the remembered nature of the Homeric world, the place to which Tiresias’s deep memory was returning. On the evening I was at the kurgan near Karagod, a small posse of horses, roans and grays, ten or eleven of them, their manes and tails swinging in the breeze, came down through the willows and alders in front of me. They were not large animals but independent, swaggering, ganglike, uncowed by work, brushing through the reed bed at the fringe of the river and on through the grass, which like their manes and tails was being stirred by the wind from the east.

  They stood half-turned in front of me, a hundred yards away. I don’t know if these were wild horses, but the gap between us was electric, its charge full of suggestion and threat. It reminded me of the moment in Edwin Muir’s famous 1950s post-nuclear-war vision when late in the summer strange horses came into his collapsed world. These animal companions had returned to join the human beings.

  We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

  Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

  By an old command to find our whereabouts

  And that long-lost archaic companionship.

  That remembered paradise appears again and again in Homer, not as part of the present scene of war and trouble, but as the ground against which that grief-ridden existence is compared. War occupies the raging present at Troy, the violence of the sea fills the Odyssey, but peace lies in the back of the mind and constantly breaks through into the surface of the poetry. Sleep sits in a pine tree in the likeness of a singing bird. Hector looks down at his baby son and thinks he is as beautiful as a star. Nature is often violent in these comparisons too, filled with wolves, lions, eagles, hawks and vultures, troubled by ferocious rivers and gales over the sea, but throughout Homer the world of peace consistently resurfaces as a place of reproach and yearning, both memory and possibility.

  In one comparison after another, windows are cut through the war into that calm-drenched past. The chariot horses of Achilles trample the dead like cattle stepping on the threshing floor, crushing the barley. Menelaus and Agamemnon work their way through the Trojan ranks side by side like a pair of oxen struggling hard as they plow a fallow field. Homer is so in love with this idea of nature as a giant reservoir of stability that at one point in the Iliad, midbattle and midcrisis, he describes Hector, just at the point he is charging, armed and shouting, at the Greek enemy, as “a snowy mountain.” Some critics have thought Homer might have meant an avalanche by this, but there is nothing in the Greek to justify that. It can only be that the horror of war summoned, as a kind of longing, an image of nature, vast, still and beautiful, in which violence had no part to play.

  It was an Edenic afternoon as I sat on the kurgan and listened to the corncrakes and the quails. The kurgan itself is on a little rise overlooking its shallow valley, a small act of local domination. It is filled no doubt with a warrior and his few possessions. No one has ever excavated this mound, but if it follows the usual pattern, his relatives and descendants are pushed in at the side, over the generations, not disturbing him, but clustering around him, borrowing his significance, some perhaps placed here as human sacrifice around the great man, just as the twelve Trojan boys are sacrificed by Achilles at the grave of Patroclus.

  Foxes and badgers have made their home in that kurgan now, and beside a small thorn tree its anciently stored earth pours out of the lip of their dusty entrances. Here, or at Troy, or in Epirus in northwest Greece, or on the downs in England, in Denmark, or on the chalk hills above Dover, every tumulus hints at the same story. These tombs are tattoos, or, more, scarifications, permanent marks, intended to make the skin of the planet meaningful. As epic poetry in turf, their aim is to deny time, making something lasting and resonant in a world that otherwise promises only transience. Every tumulus carries within it the memory of the songs sung when it was made. They are mourning mounds. Every one is invested with that moment of grief. Richness is buried there, because richness is what has died with the great person they contain. And if the earth can say nothing, poetry will remember what was said in these places.

  The words for tomb, womb and cave all stem from the same Proto-Indo-European root, and so the tumulus can be seen as a kind of earth home, a womb for a birth into an otherworld, one of the dark places where the barriers are down between this world and the next. To put the body in the earth is to lead it toward that other world, closing it off from the present and the living with stone slabs or balks of timber. It both connects and separates the living and the dead.

  The inside of the tumulus is both homely and strange. The body is laid out on its back, sometimes with its knees raised, sometimes in a crouched or fetal position. Powdered ocher covers the bones. Outlines of men’s feet and other signs are painted in ocher on the tomb floors. Under the body a blanket made of reeds, or woven fabrics, skins or felted wool is laid. This is a bed; death is a little sleep.

  The tumulus cemetery and settlement at Usatovo, near Odessa on the northwest coast of the Black Sea, from the years around 3000 BC, looks as if it might have been made by the deep ancestors of the Greeks. These people were still herders and horseback pastoralists of the coastal steppes but in touch with other worlds in Europe to the west and the Caucasus to the east, perhaps paddling along the Black Sea coast in sailless dugouts or trading and warring with the neighbors on long horseback journeys across
the grasslands. Beads and buttons of Baltic amber accompanied them in death, alongside Anatolian silver and Near Eastern antimony. The great men were buried with axes, adzes and chisels. Others had their copper thrusting-daggers with them, many of the blades with a stiffening central rib to strengthen the weapon as it entered the flesh, that ancestral gesture which lies at the heart of the Iliad. And these are not utilitarian objects; some of the daggers are silver-plated. Already there was glory in violence.

  These tumuli entombing the proto-heroes spread west along the coast of the Black Sea as far as the Danube delta, many of them heaped up over small stone houses for the dead. Those around the river Ingul, in southern Ukraine, northeast of Odessa, some of which are as late as 1900 BC, look increasingly like predecessors of the Greeks.

  In those Ingul tumuli, the dead, like the Greeks at Mycenae, were laid in their tombs wearing masks. Some are full reconstructions of the face, some no more than coverlets for the eyes, all made not of gold, as those of their Mycenaean descendants would be, but of unfired clay, colored with ocher, or with ash or finely powdered bone to whiten the fabric, to make flesh of the clay. From the smooth form of their underside, it is clear that the clay of these masks was put on the flesh of the dead face before it had rotted. Through this colored earth, in the few days after death, the person was made permanent. That must have been the hope or the assumption. Mouths and eyes are modeled in the clay. Some of the heads have skullcaps of tar molded onto the hair.

  If there can be any doubt that this culture was already focused on the individual and his destiny, or that the Homeric agonies over human transience were already present in these ancient steppeland lives, here is undeniable evidence of it. But, just as in Mycenae, this attitude toward death, the person and his preservation was not addressed merely to the warrior himself. There are women and children in these tombs, also masked like their men, treated with respect, considered significant. And so the vision of heroism here is not exclusively male but more broadly genetic. It is the transmission of meaning across the generations that guaranteed value in their world. Women and children were core components of an understanding of life that depended on breeding and inheritance. Perhaps that was only to be expected in people whose wealth was measured in the size and well-being of their herds, but this is the matrix from which one important part of the Homeric worldview emerged: it is a world not of palaces and institutions but of warriors and their families. It is at least possible that in these graves the Russian archaeologists also found the spiritual and mental predecessors of Achilles.

  Poetry itself supports that idea. Across the whole of the Indo-European world, echoes and repetitions of shared attitudes and phrases continually resurface. Scholars have pursued Homeric phrases through an entire continent of poetry and have come up with a set of attributes that seem to stem from those early beginnings.

  Homer’s idea that poetry brings “undying fame” to the hero is not his at all. It appears in exactly that formula in Iranian and northern Indian epics. Heroes with kleos or klutos, the words for fame or glory, built into their names are known in Greek (Herakles means “the fame of Hera,” the goddess of marriage and women) but also in Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Norse, Frankish and Celtic (including Clutorix—whose name, like a wrestler’s, means the “King of Fame”—a fifth-century AD chieftain known only from his tombstone now built into the wall of the church in the little village of Llandissilio in the middle of Pembrokeshire).

  Poetry and war are joined in this; both are fame businesses. The same epithets are attached to these fame-seeking heroes across the whole enormous continent: he was “man-slaying” in Ireland and Iran, and “of the famous spear” in Greece and India. He stood as firm and immovable in battle as a mighty tree in Homer, Russian and Welsh. Like the Greeks, Irish heroes raged like a fire. In Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Vedic and Irish, that rage could emerge as a flame flaring from the hero’s head. Proto-Indo-Europeans saw the great man as a torch. Across the whole of Eurasia his weapons longed for blood, even while this blood-seeking vengeance wreaker was to his own family and clan, wherever they might be, the “herdsman of his people” and their protective enclosure. There were no city walls in this world; the hero himself was their protection and their strength.

  From one end of Eurasia to another, men stand like trees, but enemies are also felled like trees, in the way a carpenter or woodsmen would fell them. When death arrives, a darkness comes on the hero. Life itself for the Proto-Indo-European consciousness is inseparable from light, especially the light of the sun, and that is the energy the heroes share with the universe. For all of them, courage is not something that appears casually in everyday life. Only when battle summons them, and when the noise of battle reaches up to heaven, as it does in all these daughter traditions, does courage appear and the hero find himself “clothed in valor.”

  These phrases, which are shared between Homer and the poets who sang to their man-lords across the widths of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Himalayas, are the creases in the mind of the Proto-Indo-European people from whom we are all descended. They are the oldest of the ancestral thoughts to which we can have access. We are their heirs, just as Homer was their heir, a descendant of the steppelands.

  Memories of this pre-Greek world lingered on for the Greeks, first in the knowledge that they were not one people but an agglomeration of families and their leaders, speaking something like the same language but never unified. Homer thinks of the Greeks as a gang of bees, alive, investigative, aggressive, buzzing with their needs and desires but never one unitary mass. This is not the army of a single nation. They are, as Nestor tells Agamemnon, different tribes and gangs, who must be organized clan by clan, people by people, listening to their leaders, scarcely integrated, resistant to overall kingship. These are in origin the groups of steppeland warriors who have come south to the more tightly organized world of the centrally ordained city.

  More intriguing still is the geographic residue in Homer’s language. The sea has no place in the most ancient layers of Greek. There is no Proto-Indo-European word for the sea, beyond a root that means something like “pond” or “lake.” Thalassa, the Greek word for sea, has no reliable etymology. It may have come from the language spoken in Greece before the Greeks arrived there. The sea was an alien environment, and when Homer speaks of it the only way he can treat it is as a steppeland. The phrase that recurs repeatedly in both Homeric poems, neatly filling the second half of a hexameter, is ep’ eurea nota thalasses, meaning “on the broad backs of the sea” or “on the sea’s broad ridges.” Warriors set out across the sea’s broad ridges for battle or for home. The ships drive like horses across them. Poseidon, the sea god who is also the horse god, finds his own horses stabled in his extraordinary palace deep in the sea, glittering with gold, “imperishable for ever,” unlike the world over which he presides. He drives them across his own wet steppeland.

  He harnessed to the chariot his bronze-shod horses

  Flying footed, with long gold manes streaming behind them,

  and he put on clothing of gold about his own body

  and took up the golden lash, carefully constructed,

  and climbed into his chariot and drove it across the waves

  And about him the sea beasts came up from their deep places

  and played in his path

  And acknowledged their master as the sea stood apart before him rejoicing. The horses flew on with all care

  and the bronze axle beneath was not wetted

  until they carried him fast to the ships of the Achaeans.

  That glorious drive of the sea-horse god, a baroque ceiling waiting to be painted, is a gilded stampede across the sea as if across the endless grasslands of the north. Nota could mean “the backs of men or animals, of boars, of horses and eagles,” but also “the great wide surface of the land.” It is the word for that steppe continuousness, the only model on which the early Greeks could base their understanding of the sea.

  The sea-as-land pene
trates far into the poems. When Aeneas is remembering the time before there was even a city at Troy, he thinks of it as a place where great fortunes were made in the raising of horses. So beautiful were they that the north wind—that essence of mobility from the distant north, gusty, with the cold of the north at the back of it—fell in love with them, disguised himself as a black stallion, coupled with them, and the Trojan mares gave birth to twelve magical young horses. Not only could they run along the top of the ears of the ripened corn, miraculously not breaking the grains from their stems, but then beautifully “They would play across the sea’s wide ridges/Running the edge of the wave where it breaks on the grey salt sea.”

  Land and sea are continuous in this imagery. Blowing ears of corn and the curling break of a swell coming ashore are the same thing. When Nestor gives advice to his son on the driving of chariots, the relationship to the horse and to the ship effortlessly coalesces.

  It is by cunning and craft that the helmsman holds his swift ship

  On its track, though buffeted by winds, over the wine-dark sea.

  By cunning and craft the charioteer beats charioteer …

  And holds his horses steady in his hand, watching the lead horse.

  What the wind does for the ship at sea, the horses do for the chariot on the plain. It is Penelope who says that fast-running ships serve as horses for men on the salt sea.

  And when Odysseus is finally on his way back to Ithaca, not only is the ship taking him there as fast as a chariot at full speed; it mimics one: “Just as in a field four stallions drawing a chariot all break together at the stroke of the whip, and lifting high their feet lightly beat out their path, so the stern of the ship would lift and the creaming wave behind her boiled in the thunderous crash of the sea.”