Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  There is an overbrimming technological energy in those lines. It is the sensation you get whenever a boat accelerates at sea—imagine Homer’s delight at a RIB (Rigid Inflatable Boat) with a pair of 200-horsepower Yamahas on the back—its sudden, gut-felt harnessing of liquid power. In the centuries after 2000 BC, the speed of the chariot and the ship were transforming men’s experience of the world. And there are signs in Homer of a real excitement at the idea of machinery. In the Odyssey the ideal king Alcinous has beautiful metal dogs—made by Hephaestus, the smith god—guarding the entrance to his palace, dogs which will live and bark forever. When Hephaestus is making Achilles’s wonderful new armor, he has magical-mechanical robotic golden girls to help him, automata that can carry and talk and think, as well as automatic tripod tables which under their own power wheel in and out of the dining room of the gods.

  The myth of Daedalus and Icarus, dazzling inventors of hubristic, dangerous machines, labyrinth-traps and wings that melt in the heat of the sun, are probably associated with this arrival of the new technology in the Aegean world. This is the first moment of European entrancement with the life-expanding potential of technology, but anxiety over the new machinery surfaces in the Iliad too. In book 5, in the first great battle of the poem, the Greek warrior Meriones pursues a Trojan called Phereclus. He strikes him in the right buttock

  and the spearhead drives straight on

  passing under the pelvis, jabbing at and piercing the bladder.

  He drops, screaming, to his knees, and the death-mist swirls about him.

  This one grievous ending, like all the others at Troy, is due to what Phereclus learned. Without him, Paris would never have been able to go to Greece to steal Helen, nor the Greeks come to claim her from Troy, as Phereclus is the great shipwright

  Who understands how to make with his hand all intricate

  Things, since above all others Pallas Athene loved him.

  He it is who built for Paris the steady, balanced

  Ships, trim launchers of death, freighted with death

  For all of Troy and now for him too.

  The synchronicity is revolutionary: the technology of the new chariots, probably from the north, and the technology of the sailing ship, certainly from the south, seem to have arrived in the Greek world at about the same time, perhaps at around 1800 BC. That is also a likely moment for the Greek arrival in the Mediterranean. High-speed chariots, high-speed sailing ships and a warrior culture from the north all come together in the Aegean at the same moment, which is also the moment the Homeric poems are born. This newly energized world is the meeting of cultures that Homer records.

  There are some intriguing linguistic linkages. A whole range of Indo-European languages have a word for the pole at the front of a wagon or chariot to which the horses are attached (it is a “thill” in English), which becomes the Greek word for the rudder post of a ship. The word for the tiller or the helm of a boat is also at root the same word as the rings on a yoke. The word for the loops attached to the yoke through which the beasts’ heads are put is also the word for the crossbar connecting the double steering-oars at the stern of a ship. The Greek word for rudder can also be applied to reins. At this most fundamental level, the sailing ship is the sea chariot for the Greeks, and the sea is the liquid steppe. And all of them become intimate with heroism.

  There had been sea craft long before in the eastern Mediterranean, of astonishing antiquity. There were people on Crete, which has been separate from the mainland for at least five million years, making hand axes and stone scrapers 130,000 years ago. They can only have arrived by boat or raft, probably from Anatolia. The whole civilization of the Cyclades was created and connected by straight-hulled, low-freeboard, paddled canoes, of which the earliest representation that survives was made in about 2800 BC. No sail appeared in the Mediterranean until about 2500 BC (it had probably been invented in the Indian Ocean), when sailing ships started to travel along the coast between Egypt and the Levant, bringing raw materials into what the archaeologist Cyprian Broodbank called “the colossal vortex of consumption” of the Egyptian state.

  Judging by depictions on Minoan seals from Crete, and also by the increasing spread of luxury Egyptian and Near Eastern objects into Crete and Cyprus, these sailing ships were pushing up toward the Aegean by about 1950 BC. They were quite different from the old paddled canoes, with a deep, curving plank-built hull, a tall mast, held in place with rigging, as well as a sail and a steering oar. They were the most complicated and sophisticated constructions the Aegean world would ever have seen. And above all, they brought speed and power to the sea world. A hand-paddled canoe had been able to cover perhaps ten to twenty miles in a good day. A sailing ship might go a hundred. On a beam reach, the fastest point of sailing for a ship of this kind, the leading edge of its sail hauled far forward, it might achieve seven or eight knots. The sailing ship could carry tons of cargo, where a canoe could have taken little more than the men needed to paddle it. A high-hulled sailing ship could live in the kind of waves that would swamp a canoe. For the first time people could experience storms at sea and survive to tell the tale.

  Nowhere in Homer is this amazement with the ship more overwhelming than when Odysseus finds himself washed up in book 6 of the Odyssey on the shore of Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians. Scheria is the Homeric equivalent of Southern California, or at least the urbanized, enriched, technological world of the Near East, filled with people who are living the enviable life: a city with beautiful harbors, wonderful gardens, orchards surrounding their palaces, no suffering or grief in their lives, playfulness, elegance, riches, the presence of power buried under a coat of luxuries and ease.

  The north meets the south here: Odysseus is never more ragged, never treated more as a wanderer from God-knows-where, and his hosts are never more beautifully organized, more integrated as a single contented orderly world. These are the polarities of the Homeric experience. The Phaeacians are what the Greek wanderers dream of being. Homer introduces a stream of them to Odysseus (whom they consider a pirate and a drifter), and just as the Trojans are alive in their horse names, the Phaeacians can scarcely be distinguished from their ships and the sea. Odysseus stands there encountering (in Robert Fagles’s translations) a stream of muscled young men: Topsail, Riptide, Rowhard, Seaman and Sternman, Surf-at-the-Beach, Stroke-Oar, Breaker and Bowsprit, Racing-the-Wind, Swing-Aboard, Shipwrightson, Seagirt the son of Greatfleet and Broadsea the son of Launcher. The king’s own sons are called Ship-Famous, People-Dominator and simply Sea.

  Could Homer have made it any clearer? Here, in the sea-based city, the delight and riches of an urban life are derived from the magic of the sailing ship. And the heart of the Phaeacian ships’ excellence, to an open-mouthed Greek, hopelessly provincial in these upholstered surroundings, is their ability to sail on thought alone. Alcinous, the king, explains how it works in this floating, gravity-free world.

  Our ships can sail you home.

  They have no rudders as those of other nations do,

  but can understand our thoughts and our desires; they know all the cities and countries of the world,

  and can cross the sea through mist and cloud,

  never any danger of wreck or harm with them.

  The ships are as miraculous as Achilles’s weeping-talking horses. They are “as quick as a bird, as quick as a darting thought.” But perhaps embedded here is a memory of the ignorant northerners’ first encounter with the miracle of the sailing ship. No need to paddle it to make it travel across the sea. Just arrange its parts as they need to be arranged, make a libation to the right goddesses, and on thought alone the ship will sail to the ends of the earth and back.

  These rocket ships, as Cyprian Broodbank has said, “drastically shrunk maritime space.” They were adventure machines. Egypt could be reached from Greece in four days. Sudden arrival and sudden violence were now possibilities. They could sail to windward, or at least within fifty degrees of the wind, in a way paddle
rs would find difficult and exhausting. Life had speeded up. The whole geography of the sea and its surrounding lands had changed. It was as transforming as the invention of the steam engine. And that excitement and amazement at the wonder of the sailing ship and its effects on the dynamics of life soaked deep into the fabric of the Homeric poems. In Homer’s hands, sailing ships became the vehicles of heroes.

  It is never quite said explicitly in Homer, but it is assumed that this sense of boat-perfection has become for the Greeks one of the joys of life. Ships are always fast or well-balanced or well-made. The word usually translated as “well-balanced,” eisos, has a moral and psychological dimension to it and means “equal,” “properly shared like a feast,” or “well-balanced in mind.” The wisdom of Odysseus is described as eisos, his wholeness and beauty as self-sufficiently itself as a well-made ship. The adjectives—“fast,” “well-balanced” and “well-made”—contribute formulas that slip the sea craft into the verse form, but they are also a kind of repetitive admiration for the wonder of ships. Menelaus remembers how fast they were when at last, at the end of the war, the Greeks left Troy for home. It was fast ships that repeatedly brought wine from Greece to the warriors in their foreign camp. Homer recounts the variety and strength of the different bands of men that went to Troy by remembering the numbers of ships in which they traveled. It is the ships, as Ajax reminds them, that are their only guarantee of getting home dryshod. It is the ships they must defend, and around the ships is where the fiercest fighting rages. The sea might be salt and bitter, so wide in places that even seabirds cannot cross it, but the well-benched ships, the hollow ships, the ships whose hulls are black with waterproofing tar, the ships equipped with all the gear that strong-benched ships carry—these are the foundations of their lives in the southern sea.

  So now, each time the wind fills in, and you roll the headsails out and get the main up, and you feel the boat starting to gather way, to pick up its skirts, unable to resist the pull of the wind, you will know something essential of the Homeric world. Here under the bow you can listen, like the Phaeacians carrying Odysseus home, to the water surge and fall, that repeated hoosssh-hoosssh of a hull at speed. And here, as you make your way between the blue islands, the boat heeled far over and the curves of the headsails bellied out to leeward, you can begin to know and sense the power of possibility in the well-balanced, well-benched ship, equipped with all it needs, acquiring the world, stretching the idea of what it means to be alive, leading men to adventure, home or war.

  10 • THE GANG AND THE CITY

  The Greeks are camped on the edge of the beach, a gang of men divided among themselves, with no secure leadership, the atmosphere angry and uncertain, no constancy in their arguments or their dealings with each other, no faith in their purpose, no substance in their loyalties and no women with any significance beyond their sex. They are living in rough sheds built against their ships. The rigging has rotted. They are surrounded by loot but sleep on the skins of wild animals. Dogs eat the dead. Dogs are everywhere on the battlefield. They chew at the genitals of the corpses, and birds clap their wings over the remains. If you walk across that realm of death at night, you must pick your way through “the abandoned weapons and the black blood.” The Greeks confront the realities of life and death with unadorned directness. No family, no safety, no home, no sense that virtue is rewarded or frailty sheltered. No prospect of dignity in old age or security when weak. No meaning beyond the presence of force.

  They have been here too long, and the language vibrates with its own violence. The burningly angry killer-chief Achilles says that Agamemnon, his nominal leader, is dog-eyed, dog-faced, shameless, greedy, a wine drinker, with his heart as flaky as a deer’s. Agamemnon calls Achilles “the most savage man alive, violence itself, beyond all feeling.” Anger and disgust ripple through their “shaggy breasts,” in the roughness of their hearts. In private they are tender about themselves and their girls, but here they overbrim with hate, each longing for the other’s “black blood to come pumping out on to my blade.” They stand nostril to nostril in mutual loathing. This is a gang world, marginal, desperate and tragic, a place of outsiders. Civilization it is not. Like all gangs, they have their meetings and their discussions, their insistence on hierarchy and obedience. And this fight between the leaders feels ugly and unwelcome, deplored by the old men. Nevertheless, it is an organic part of who the Greeks are, one aspect of the anarchy and violence that crouches just beneath the surface of every interaction between them. The Greeks are the barbarians in this story.

  Across the plain, Troy is different. Here are the people of a city, full of conviction, with well-ordered relations, allies who remain true to each other, a king to whom all give respect, brothers, sisters, wives, parents and children all living in a mutually dependent, interlocked system, with institutions that seem permanent. Noble women lead graceful lives. There are arguments within the family, there are hints of luxury and softness, but this is a place where not merely the bodies of slaughtered animals but woven and embroidered cloth, the flexible and intricately constructed thing, is the offering they make to the gods.

  The Trojans are at home, and the web of their connections is wound closely around them. When Hector, their young war leader, midbattle, returns to the gates of the city, “the wives and daughters of Troy come crowding up around him, asking for their sons, brothers, friends and husbands.” (This is the network the Trojans are embedded in.) Hector goes into the city, to the palace of Priam, his father, and enters

  that most beautiful house

  Built with polished colonnades—and deep within its walls

  are fifty chambers of polished stone, built close to one another;

  in them the sons of Priam sleep beside their wedded wives;

  and for his daughters on the other side, inside the court,

  are twelve roofed chambers of polished stone, built close to one another;

  in them the old king’s sons-in-law sleep beside their respected wives.

  It is the geometry of coherence—of repetition and continuity—of people understanding and responding to the virtues of mutual accommodation, the opposite of the shiftless place of the Greeks outside. So this is the confrontation: gang against city, individual violence against domestic order.

  The wind blows unbroken across the plain, and among the Greeks unbridled maleness meets in erect competition or tensed standoff. The sexuality is inescapable. It takes the old Greek war-leader Nestor to say it. When persuading doubters not to return to Greece before Troy falls, he gives them the plain invitation: “Let no man hurry to sail for home, not yet … Not until he has slept with the wife of some Trojan.” Only sex with the enslaved wife of a dead enemy could justify the grief and trouble they have endured over Helen. The symbols at the heart of the city of Troy are those elegant, well-swept corridors of polished stone and the beautiful woven cloth its people give their gods; for the Greek camp it is edge-sharpened bronze and the unsheathed phallus.

  The Iliad is not shut into the Trojan plain; it loves mobility; its gods and goddesses fly across the islanded world of the Aegean with effortless fluency and a wide surveying sense of its geography. The poem often travels away to Olympus, the home of the gods, to Africa and to other mountains where the gods take up temporary residence. Minor deities are sometimes caught between flights, rushed off their feet, in transit from Anatolia to Egypt, or to a dinner party in the house of the west wind. But the poem never goes to Greece. No scene is set in a Greek house. Greek places are referred to with formulaic adjectives—“rocky,” “with-many-ridges,” “sheepy”—but with none of the overwhelming sense of reality that clusters around Troy and its rivers, its woods, springs, washing places and even individual trees and burial mounds. In that poetic sense, at one of the deepest levels of the poem, the Iliad portrays the Greeks as a long way from home.

  It is true that they occasionally refer to the places they come from, but the psychological weight in those references is not
to buildings or cities. The Greeks look back with longing and a sense of loss to their families, their distant fathers and their fathers’ fathers, their wives and children, the brotherhood of their clans, the hearths which are defined by the people who gather around them, not to any palaces. They love their land, which gives them food and sustenance, its wheat-bearing fields and lovely orchards, but not the kind of deeply instituted fixity and built wealth they have come to get their hands on at Troy. What they miss, in a phrase that is repeated again and again, is “the loved earth of their fathers.” But in Greek there is no distinction between “fatherhood” and “fatherland.” The word for them both is patra, and it can apply in Homer to a shared descent, a cousinage, a sense of family or clan. Fatherhood is fatherland, and blood and heart are home.

  Even the loved earth of the fathers is trumped by something else in the Greek mind. When the great owl-eyed goddess Athene, terrifying in her power, carrying her magic aegis, or breastplate, moves through the Greek army, putting a deep hunger for violence in their hearts, allowing them to fight without rest, home itself drops into insignificance.

  And now sweeter to them than any return

  In their hollow ships to the loved earth of their fathers

  Was battle.

  The word Homer uses for the deliciousness of that violence in battle is glukus, “sugary,” even “sickly,” used of nectar and sweet wine, of the people you love. Battle, in many ways, is the Greek home. As the agents of severance, they are themselves severed from home. The most delicious thing they can imagine is a world of unrelenting violence.

  * * *

  “Beware the toils of war,” Sarpedon the Lycian hero says to Hector, “the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.” Buried inside that terrifying image of war trawling for the lives of men, its net stretched from one horizon to the other, ushering the mortals into the cod end, is the Greek word for flax, the thread that the Fates use at the beginning of each of our lives to spin our destinies. And so the metaphor makes an assumption: war is part of destiny. It is not an aberration or a strangeness. It is, for Homer, a theater in which the structure of reality is revealed.