Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  The Trojan warrior Hippothoos—the name means “Quickhorse”—tries to get the straps of his shield around the tendons in Patroclus’s ankle so that he can pull him back to the dog-feast in the city, but Ajax shafts him in the head, and Quickhorse’s brain “oozes out from the wound along the socket of the spear, all mingled with blood.” In this horror flensing-yard scene, a Greek dies with a spear under the collarbone, a Trojan with a sword in the guts “so that he claws at the dust with his fingers,” and another Greek with a spear in the liver under the midriff.

  The desperate struggle is for the flesh of Patroclus, simply to possess his physical remains, the grisliest possible tug-of-war, stretching the body in the way people pull and stretch at an ox hide to make usable leather of it,

  with so many pulling, until the bull’s hide is stretched out smooth,

  so the men of both sides in a cramped space tug at the body

  in both directions; and the hearts of the Trojans are hopeful

  to drag him away to Ilion, those of the Achaeans

  to get him back to the hollow ships.

  On different warriors, the blood runs from their hands and feet, “as on some lion who has eaten a bullock.” Menelaus is like a mosquito “who though it is slapped away from a man’s skin, even / so, for the taste of human blood, persists in biting him.” Hector, hanging on to the body of Patroclus like “a tawny lion who cannot be frightened away from a carcass he has in his claws,” is desperate to pull the body back to Troy so that he can “cut the head from the soft neck and set it on sharp stakes.” This is not your elegant, noble, neoclassical Homer. This is rawness itself. Bloodthirsty Arēs, the god of war, the metaphor not yet dead, has become the governing force in a battlefield that wants more than anything else to drink human blood.

  This is the environment into which Achilles now drives, grief-mad from the death of Patroclus. He will not eat, as civilized men sit down and eat, but wants to feast on the body of Hector. Like a man with a rifle at a fairground booth, he pops out death to twenty-three Trojans in a row: a spear in the middle of the head, a spear through the side of the helmet, another in the head, one in the back, one in the back and out through the navel, one in the neck, one in the knees with a spear and then finishing him off with a sword, one with a spear, another with a sword, one with a sword in the liver, a pike in one ear and out the other ear, a sword in the head, a sword in the arm then a spear in the arm, beheading with a sword “and the marrow gushes from the neckbone,” a spear in the belly and a spear in the back, and then seven men whose deaths are remembered only in their names.

  As he wearies momentarily of killing, he takes twelve young men alive, to sacrifice on the pyre of Patroclus.

  These bewildered boys, dazed like fawns, he drags away

  And lashes their hands behind them with well cut straps,

  the very belts they wear around their tunics,

  And gives them to his companions to take to the hollow ships.

  Then straight off in, raging to kill again.

  He is beyond humanity now and has become “an unlooked for evil.” His sweetness and capacity for love have left him. To the pitiable Lycaon he talks with all the reason of a madman.

  Now there is not one who can escape death, if the gods send

  Him against my hand in front of Ilion, not one

  Of all the Trojans and above all the children of Priam.

  So, friend, you die too. Why moan about it?

  Patroclus is dead, who was better by far than you are.

  Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid

  And born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal?

  Everyone has to die, so why don’t you? “Die on, all of you,” he tells the Trojans, “till we come to the sacred city of Ilion, you in flight, and me killing you from behind.”

  Even as the universe of the battlefield becomes a careless and pitiless place, the allure and goodness of the besieged city become ever more precious. This is where the grand spatial geometry of the poem comes to its sharpest point. Achilles is the untrammeled world of the plain. “I will not leave off my killing of the proud Trojans,” he says, “until I have penned them in their city.” He is polarizing the world he controls until they are indeed all running and shuffling toward the high, wide walls Poseidon built for them—all except Hector, their champion, who must remain out on the plain with his killer.

  Homer binds the Trojans to the physical facts of their city. Priam, Hector’s father, the human embodiment of Troy’s virtues, becomes coterminous with the city’s walls and gates.

  The aged Priam takes his place on the god-built bastion,

  And looks out and sees, gigantic Achilles, where before him

  The Trojans run in their hurry and confusion, no war strength

  In them. He groans and descends to the ground from the bastion

  And beside the wall sets to work the glorious guards of the gateway:

  “Hold the gates wide open in your hands, so that our people

  in their flight can get into the city, for here is Achilles

  close by stampeding them.”

  This is the Iliadic confrontation at its sharpest. The city gates must close the Trojans in while Achilles is out in the plain, “fierce with the spear, strong madness in his heart and violent after glory.” Everything in the Iliad comes into pincer-intimacy in these lines. The warriors join their “beloved parents, wives and children” inside the gates, “For they dare wait no longer outside the walls and the city” because on the plain Achilles is running free and dangerous across the open ground. Only Hector, the isolated Trojan, remains outside the walls, “shackled by destiny,” awaiting the climactic meeting with the inhuman violence of the gang-man Achilles.

  Metaphorical geography has the poem in its grip here. This is not the meeting of Achilles and Hector; it is the deathly confrontation of two ways of understanding the world. The key words clang through the poetry: “city,” “battlements,” “walls,” “Ilion,” “gates,” “crowded,” “city,” “wall” and “city” again, all within twenty lines of the beginning of book 22, and all set against that other world, the flatlands, the open plain, the pedion, over which Achilles runs like a prizewinning chariot horse, half-human, gleaming, looking like the Dog Star, a beacon of hate, sheathed in metal, the bronze in which he seems to be made shining brighter than any other star, a being radiant with horror, bringing evil and pain to men.

  Homer never seems more real or more terrible than when Priam stands on his walls and talks pleadingly down to his son Hector standing outside the gates below him. Hector is terrifyingly alone, when the understanding of Trojans is that community is safety. “Come into the walls, my child,” Priam says to him, “so that you might save Trojan men and Trojan women.”

  And then the old king makes a speech of Shakespearean poignancy and power.

  I have looked upon evils

  And seen my sons destroyed and my daughters dragged away captive

  And the chambers of marriage wrecked and the innocent children taken

  And dashed to the ground in the hatefulness of war, and the wives

  Of my sons dragged off by the accursed hands of the Achaians

  And myself last of all, my dogs in front of my doorway

  Will rip me raw, after some man with a blow of the sharp bronze

  Spear, or with spearcast, has torn the life out of my body;

  Those dogs I raised in my halls to be at my table, to guard my

  Gates, who will lap my blood in their savagery and anger

  And then will lie down in my courts. For a young man all is decorous

  When he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies

  Dead, and though dead all that shows about him is beautiful; but when an old man is dead and down, and the dogs mutilate

  The grey head and the grey beard and the parts that are secret,

  This for all sad mortality is the sight most pitiful
.

  The dogs eating his genitals, like blood on the gold-laced hair, is Priam’s vision of the triumph of Achilles, the triumph of the gang over the city, the anarchy of violence over the generations of people and the bonds which tie them. Hector’s mother, Hecabē, from the parapet above, holds out her breasts to him, bared and open. “Sweet branch,” she calls to him, “child of my bearing,” “look upon these and obey. From inside the wall beat off this grim man.”

  Hector’s sense of honor, his debt to his city, will not allow him to go inside “the lovely citadel,” and the fatal race begins. He and Achilles run round and round the walls, Hector in flight, Achilles in pursuit. It is like a dream, Homer says, when your running brings you no closer to your prey, nor takes you farther from your terror-pursuer; and it is a dream hell out on the plain, where there can only ever be one destiny. Sometimes Hector shelters under the walls, but Achilles gets between him and the wall “and forces him to turn back into the plain.”

  With unrelenting consistency, Homer applies his geography: city is goodness and connection, plain is horror and terror; city is Hector’s weakness, plain Achilles’s strength; city is the realm of the Trojan families, their women and children, while the plain belongs to Achilles alone—during this climax of grief the other Greeks have disappeared from view.

  When finally Hector pauses, tricked by Athene, Achilles catches up with him and they talk. Achilles plunges for cannibalism. I want, he says, “to hack your meat away and eat it raw for the things that you have done to me.” There can be no surprise. Achilles spears Hector in the soft part of the neck, just where the armor opens a little white mouth of skin, “and clean out through the tender neck goes the point.” After killing him, he abuses Hector’s body by dragging it fast behind his chariot. Hector’s hair and head are tumbled and wrecked in the dust, and this physical action is the emblem of the gang-man’s triumph, the imposition on the man of the city of the dirt of the plain.

  With Hector’s death the city’s fabric is irreparably torn. Hector’s mother casts aside her “shining veil.” His wife, Andromachē, does not at first hear the news. She is weaving a cloth in the inner room of her high house, a red folding robe with figures embroidered on it, not unlike the cloth Helen had been working so many thousands of lines ago. Andromachē calls out to her handmaidens to prepare a bath for Hector, for when he comes back from the fighting. Then she hears the mourning and wailing of the other women, and the shuttle with which she had been weaving drops from her hand. Running to the ramparts, she sees Hector’s body dragged around the city walls, his head in the dirt, Achilles triumphant. She collapses, “gasping the life breath out of her,” while all the woven things fall from her, the circlets around her head and breast, the cap she is wearing, even as the threads of Troy tighten around her and “her husband’s sisters and the wives of his brothers hold her up among them.” In their house, she then remembers, there are all kinds of clothing, “fine-textured and pleasant, wrought by the hands of women,” ready for Hector. “All of these I will burn up in the fire’s blazing,” Andromachē says. “They are no use to you.” The woven and the severed; the heart of Homer’s meaning.

  * * *

  The Iliad might have ended there, with the victory of the plain over the city, but it doesn’t. Troy is about love, children and home. Its lifeblood is in the virtues of human community, of not claiming the ultimate against your enemy but finding it in you to say that, whatever he has done, humanity is shared. Troy is a desire for wholeness, a desire that wholeness might survive the necessary violence, that there is no “tragedy of necessity.”

  The poem ends before Troy falls, but Homer orchestrates something subtler and richer than the hideousness of any military triumph. After Achilles kills Hector, the whole of the city goes into horrified despair and mourning. The women wail, the men cover themselves with dung scraped up from the streets. This moment of hopelessness is the pit of the poem. Achilles is still threatening to eat Hector’s body raw. It looks as if everything the city enshrines means nothing in the teeth of the Greeks’ triumph. Priam resolves to go to their camp across the plain to find Achilles and beg him for the body of his son.

  The old king slowly prepares and gathers carts full of the best that Troy can offer, including beautiful cloths: robes, mantles, blankets, cloaks and tunics, as if wanting to drown Achilles in the woven. But that is the point. Priam is going to take the city out into the plain. That has been the place where in book after book, death after death, the wrong thing has been done. Priam’s journey is a kind of healing laid across that theater of horror. He travels slowly, at night, with his mule carts; no heroic northern chariots here. He comes at last into the shelter of Achilles’s camp, and without announcement the old king kneels down next to Achilles, clasps his knees and “kisses his hands, the terrible man-slaughtering hands, the hands that have shed so much blood, the blood of his sons.” That old man’s kiss is the moment of arrival. Achilles thinks of his own father in Phthia and comes to understand something beyond the world he has so far inhabited. Both men give way to grief.

  Priam weeps freely

  For man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching

  Before Achilles’s feet as Achilles weeps himself

  Now for his father, now for Patroclus

  And their sobbing rises and falls in the house.

  Food is cooked for them, mutton souvlaki.

  They reach down for the good things that lie at hand

  And when they have put aside desire for food and drink

  Priam gazes at Achilles marvelling now how tall he is,

  And how beautiful

  And Achilles looks at the nobility of the old king

  And listens to his words.

  They gaze at each other in silence, and that exchange of admiring looks is the Iliad’s triumph. Priam has brought the virtues of the city into Achilles’s heart. Hector will now be returned to his father and will be buried with dignity outside the city. In that way, Troy has won the war. Achilles, the man from the plains, has absorbed the beauty of Priam’s wisdom, of his superhuman ability to admire the man who has killed his sons, and from the mutuality and courage of that wisdom, its blending of city and plain, a vision of the future might flower. Achilles will soon be dead, Troy will soon be broken, the Trojan men will soon be slaughtered, Priam among them, horribly murdered by Achilles’s own son, their women abused and enslaved, but here, in poetry, in passing, a better world is momentarily—or in fact everlastingly—seen.

  11 • HOMER’S MIRROR

  It is possible—just—to look at Homer the other way around, and to hear the story of the Greeks arriving in the Mediterranean not as the Greeks told it in Homer but as the inhabitants of the literate, bureaucratic, authoritarian civilizations of the Mediterranean littoral told it themselves.

  Nothing survives that describes Achilles or Odysseus directly, but there is a handful of Egyptian, Hittite and Hebrew texts that deal with people and habits occupying precisely the culture space of Homer’s Greeks: northern Indo-European warriors arriving in a world where they do not belong, where they seem like barbarians, people who don’t quite know how to behave. These unsympathetic versions of the Homeric story are strangely unsettling. Suddenly here is Achilles as his enemies might have seen him; Odysseus described by the smart, rich, complacent city-folk; Greek heroism as gang hooliganism; the Greek habit of woman-theft as nothing but rape; the beautiful volubility of the Homeric warrior looking pompous and absurd. Here, in this new light, are the Homeric tales with “Homer”—the dignity, understanding and tragic beauty of the poems—stripped out of them.

  The Tale of Sinuhe is a short poetic biography of an Egyptian civil servant. It is a miraculous survival, the oldest version preserved on a reused roll of papyrus, buried in the tomb of a government official in the Egyptian city of Thebes on the west bank of the Nile in about 1800 BC. Probably looted from the tomb, it found its way to a London auction room in AD 1843, and versions of it are now preserved on fragme
nts of papyrus in the British Museum and in Berlin. It had been popular in Egypt up to about 1000 BC, but until the Victorian Egyptologists deciphered it, no one had read Sinuhe’s story for three thousand years.

  It is from almost exactly the moment the Greeks were arriving in the Mediterranean, piratical, violent men, hungry for the gold that soon enough would appear on the bodies and in the graves at Mycenae, but comes from a frame of mind perfectly opposed to theirs. This elegant, melancholic verse novel from the richest culture in the ancient world may be the contemporary of the first versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it loves nothing about them.

  Sinuhe’s Egypt is a huge state structure. He is part of the great service industry attending to the god-pharaoh’s well-being, a court official—“a writing-man” is the Egyptian term—and a bureaucrat. It was the best possible job he could have. “Be a scribe,” a contemporary papyrus instructed its young readers. “Your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft. You will go forth in white clothes, honoured, with courtiers saluting you.”

  The Homeric assumption that suffering and conflict lie at the heart of existence, that life is essentially uncomfortable, is simply absent from Sinuhe’s world. His life is framed around repetitiveness, stability, normality, precision and security. Everything is measured and known. His tale begins on “the 7th Day of the 3rd Month of the Nile Flood Season, in the 20th year of the Pharaoh’s reign.” The rough estimates of Homeric time, the wide, veering guesses at the date of the Homeric stories, the generations that pass unrecorded—all that belongs to a different conceptual universe. For Sinuhe—whatever the historical truth—the pharaohs had ruled as far back in time as it was possible to imagine. Peace had prevailed, one pharaoh had succeeded another, cosmically great, unaddressably powerful, each handing the throne to his successor in a single direct linear sequence. The heart of happiness for these Egyptians was submission to that authority. The pharaoh “makes those born with him plentiful,” Sinuhe says. “He is unique, god-given. How joyful this land, since he has ruled. He extends his borders. He is the lord of kindness, great of sweetness. Through love he has conquered. His city loves him more than its own members.” Set that alongside the description of Agamemnon and his gift-giving in the Iliad, and you suddenly see him as a would-be pharaoh, a provincial satrap with ambitions beyond his reach, vulgarly attempting pharaonic status in the face of Achillean integrity.