Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  The life of the Egyptian poor was miserable. They could expect to die when they were thirty-five, thousands lived in workhouses, obliged to sweat out their days in forced labor camps for the pharaonic regime and its monumental ambitions. But above them a bureaucratic middle class, Sinuhe’s class—perhaps 1 percent of the population was literate—managed the culture of continuity. In their linen-dressed elegance, the sense of overwhelming crisis and disruption that colors the deepest levels of the Homeric world was not even considered. Life was continuity. There was no need to be heroic, nor did the Greek hunger for honor play any part. For the ancient Egyptians, goodness consisted of service to pharaonic authority. As there was no distinction between that authority and the government of the universe, this life could be considered a kind of anteroom to heaven. The more silent and stable it could be made, the better.

  Sinuhe loves the white linen he wears every day, and all the order in the Residence where he works. He is no self-sufficient hero. No existential crisis or anxiety about his individual identity or destiny ever pursues him. Sinuhe is a “Follower” and “True Acquaintance” of the pharaoh. His life is defined by the authority he serves. One of his tasks is to look after the pharaoh’s children, but at the moment his story begins, this steady, beautifully organized life is destroyed by a flash of panic. He hears something, a report of the old pharaoh’s murder in the palace. He thinks he should not have heard it, and worried in this totalitarian state that he might somehow be caught up in the repercussions, or even held responsible, he runs for his life, away from Egypt, north to the borders of Syria, and on across them, traveling at night, hiding at the edges of fields until at last he comes to a part of the world called Upper Retjenu.

  It is the Egyptian name for Lebanon and maybe for the places beyond it. But Retjenu as a word is not a Semitic form; it does not belong in the Near East. It is Indo-European, probably from the language spoken by the Lycians, warrior inhabitants of southwest Anatolia, known to Homer as allies of the Trojans. Sinuhe, in other words, has found himself far out in the wilds surrounded by the warrior culture of the north. He has arrived in the land described by Homer. It is not the sort of world he is used to. It is a good country, he says, with figs and grapes, more wine than water, honey and oil, with all kinds of fruit on its trees. Barley is there, and emmer-wheat, and “numberless are its cattle of all kinds.” It is called Iaa, the “rushy place,” damp, fertile, rich in pastures, a million miles from the Egypt into which he was born.

  The experience is horrifying at first. “This is the taste of death,” Sinuhe says, panicking at the disorder around him. All the calm of Egypt was gone. But then Sinuhe falls in with a chieftain, a warrior prince, a Diomedes or Sarpedon, and the chieftain does what heroes do in these circumstances: gives him plenty of cooked meat and wine, and delicious roast birds. They go hunting together, and from the great herds of cattle without which the Indo-European chieftains felt naked he gives Sinuhe “milk in every cooked dish.” The mark of Homeric civilization: beef in white sauce.

  And so Sinuhe goes native. He abandons his white linen for armor. He turns warrior. His children become heroes, “each man subjugating his tribe.” Battle, which was absent from the life of an Egyptian bureaucrat, something that happened out here in the rawness of life on the frontiers, away from the deep calm of the central Egyptian state, now becomes the norm. He plunders cattle and carries off men and women as slaves. He kills again and again, as the Indo-European hero must do, and he attains “high regard” in the heart of his lord and chieftain, who loves him, knowing his valor.

  Then the crisis: the naturally fissive atmosphere of the Indo-European warrior band breaks into the open, and a situation not unlike the opening scenes of the Iliad suddenly erupts. As Sinuhe latter recalls:

  A hero of Retjenu came to provoke me in my tent;

  he was an unmatched champion who had conquered all the land.

  He said he would fight me, he planned to rob me, and had a mind to plunder my cattle, on the advice of his tribe.

  Honor, rivalry, dignity, the brutally assertive self, the demands of violence, the contempt for communality—suddenly you are in the world of the Greeks outside Troy, but portrayed in an Egyptian tale. It doesn’t take much to imagine the shudder of anxiety in listeners at a party in Thebes one balmy evening in 1850 BC, just as the sun was setting over the western desert and the shadows were lengthening over the Nile. Did people out there really behave like this?

  Sinuhe accepts the challenge, triumphs over the nameless hero, shooting him in the neck with an arrow and then killing him with his own ax, shouting his own vaunting war cry over the fallen hero’s back. But he is still an Egyptian, asking, in one of the most resonant questions for this moment in human history: “What can establish the papyrus on the mountain?” That is also the great Homeric question. What place can civilization have in a world dominated by the brute geological facts of violence and dominance? How fragile are the fibers of papyrus when set against the great rock-thrusts of the heroic world? Could these two ways of being ever be compatible?

  Sinuhe is so successful as an Indo-European warrior that he ends up with more cows than he knows what to do with. Even so, an everlasting longing for Egypt lingers in his heart. “What matters more than my being buried in the land where I was born?” he asks. Somehow, the new pharaoh hears of Sinuhe’s longing, and soon enough an invitation arrives from him for Sinuhe to return to Egypt, where he will be honored and forgiven. Sinuhe gives his property in Retjenu to his eldest son and returns to Egypt, where he “touches the ground between the sphinxes” and comes face to face with the god-king he reveres.

  “Act against yourself no more,” the pharaoh tells him, and as he hears the words, Sinuhe feels himself reabsorbed into the fabric of Egyptian society. The king says “he shall not fear,” and Sinuhe is re-created as a courtier. He abandons himself to the happiness of the king’s grace, prostrating himself before the pharaoh. Here in “the enduring security of the state” is the beauty of order to which he is at last allowed to return. He is rewarded with the things he has been dreaming of all the years he was away in the Homeric world.

  I was appointed to the house of a prince

  And costly things in it, with a bathroom in it,

  And mirrors,

  Clothes of royal linen

  Myrrh and kingly fine oil

  With officials whom the king loved in every room

  And every serving man at his duty.

  The years were made to pass from my limbs

  I became clean shaven and my hair was combed

  I was clad in fine linen

  I was anointed with fine oil

  I slept in a bed.

  It is his majesty who has caused this to be done.

  There is no other lowly man for whom the like was done.

  I was in the favours of the king’s giving

  Until the day of landing came.

  The “day of landing” was the Egyptian phrase for the moment of death, the time when a human being at last achieves the goal of a perfect life, and Sinuhe’s return to Egypt is like a return to heaven. For all his adventuring, Egypt had originally made him what he was. Only there could he be himself again, and only by submitting to the Egyptian powers could his day of landing be good.

  Our Odyssean frame of mind looks on that scene of Sinuhe’s reabsorption into his native world as a moment not of triumph but of diminution, a surrender of the vital if agonized self to the emasculated certainties of a beautifully bathed, shaved, linen-coated “Follower.” Was it really worth exchanging his florid Indo-European hair and beard, that fullness of self-assertion, for the bland comfort-soup of a happy “landing”? Or are we, as Homer’s heirs, merely addicted to crisis? Why not accept with Sinuhe, and the profoundly impressive longevity of Egyptian civilization, that the world of white linen and pharaonic tyranny is a better place than the discomforts of Retjenu and the threatening behavior of “heroes”? Are those heroes not in the end exactly as
the Egyptians saw them, little better than human hyenas, repetitively needing to establish their sexual, genetic dominance of the pack? Surely human life has more to it than the Homeric tragedy of necessity? Or to put it in a more Sinuhesque way: is that necessity really necessary? Why not accept the virtues of modesty and the realities of power?

  No Homeric character could ever have behaved like Sinuhe or have thought that his destiny was so bound up with the blessing the pharaoh and his court could bestow on him. Sinuhe ends up with a single answer: it is better to be at home, to submit, to recognize that power is god. Across the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey, there is nothing singular like this. The Homeric view of the world is essentially traumatic and multiple. All is in contention; power is something to be fought for, not accepted; the gods themselves are at each other’s throats; nature may stand there as a beautiful background, but it too is drenched in conflict and pain. The claims of individual triumph can never be reconciled with the claims of communal love and society. We live in the great and eternal war between those principles, Timē and Aretē, honor and virtue, self and other. Achilles sees that war as the source of human tragedy, Odysseus as the opportunity for self-advancement. And beyond them both stands Homer, the great voice of understanding, regarding us all, refusing to decide.

  The Tale of Sinuhe is a mirror image of Homer, exploring the polarities of city and warrior-world from the opposite direction. But there are also parallels between them. Sinuhe could be seen as the Egyptian Odysseus, the hero thrust out into the wilds, gaining wisdom there, doing well even in his exile, finally returning, full of apprehension, to the place he longs to call home. And in one marvelous detail, they are clearly part of the same thought-world. Both, on reaching home, become themselves again by having a bath.

  The bath for Homer is always a gesture of welcome, the physical metaphor for the domestic embrace. Perhaps the most famous bath in Greek antiquity is the one in which Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae after the war. But that is not a Homeric story; it is the bleak invention of Aeschylus in the Oresteia. For Homer, whether it is the bathing of Odysseus after battle, or Telemachus on his visit to Nestor at Pylos, the bath is always beautiful and integrative, a moment of absorption.

  Intriguingly, there is nothing uniquely Greek about this. The Homeric word for a bath, asaminthos, like hyacinth and labyrinth, comes from an unknown, non-Indo-European language spoken in the Mediterranean before the Greeks arrived there. It may have been the language of Minoan Crete. The unwashed Greeks coming down from the north borrowed the word as they borrowed the thing and the habit. The story of the hero returning home to the deliciousness of a bath is distributed all across the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. It is a shared symbol of homeliness and well-being. Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Uruk in south Iraq, who had also been journeying in the wilderness, in search of wisdom, cleansed its filth from his body as he came home to the city,

  washing his long hair clean as snow in water … throwing off his furs and letting the sea carry them away, so that his fair body could be seen. Let the band around his head be replaced with a new one. Let him be clad with a garment, as clothing for his nakedness. When he gets to his city, when he finishes his journey, may his clothes show no sign of age, but still be quite new.

  When Jacob returns in Genesis to Canaan, he tells his household first to “wash yourselves and change your clothes,” because in this shared Near Eastern culture, the thought-world to which the Homeric Greeks were so anxious to belong, no homecoming could be complete without the cleanness and sense of renewal that a bath can give you. Sinuhe, Gilgamesh, Jacob and Odysseus all soaked themselves in the same delicious soapiness.

  You can still find beautiful baths in the palaces on Crete and at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns on the mainland. Some are adorned with fish and the wavy lines of comforting water. Among the austere stoniness of those excavated sites, the baths become emblems of the longing to which the Homeric mind was prey. Nothing could be more inviting, more soaked in the desire for peace and civilization in a troubled world. The bath stands in opposition to Odysseus’s sufferings on the open sea. Here the water will merely lap at his limbs; the giant sea bream on the walls of the bath are his cohabitants in their shared springwater pool, the painted sea-waves no more than the memory of grief.

  And so when Odysseus has at last made the frightening witch Circe submit to his will, he can allow her maidservants, the “daughters of the springs and the woods and the sacred rivers which run down to the sea,” to prepare him a bath. One of these girls, he recalls,

  brought in the water and lit a blazing fire under the big cauldron so that the water grew hot. When the bright copper was boiling, she eased me into the bath and washed me with water from the great cauldron, hot and cold mixed as I desired, allowing it to run over my head and shoulders, washing the pain and weariness from my heart and limbs. When she had washed me and rubbed me with oil, she dressed me in a warm fleece and a shirt around my shoulders and led me to the hall, where she had me sit on a silver-studded chair with a stool to rest my feet.

  But there is this difference: lying in their baths, Sinuhe, Gilgamesh and Jacob could all know they were returning to a home they could trust. Singularity and obviousness cluster around their bathrooms. But Homer is subtler than the Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Hebrew storytellers, because complexity and multiplicity, the fusion and stirring of meanings, is central to his purpose. Odysseus, when slipping into the delicious, erotic balm of Circe’s bath, is still years and miles from home, his “mind wandering, far away, lost in grim forebodings.” Circe is only the illusion of home and love, the wish-fulfillment version to which the traveler will always succumb. Her bath is a taunt and a punishment. Odysseus—and his listeners—must wait for the real thing.

  * * *

  A sidelight equivalent to Sinuhe’s is thrown on the Homeric Greeks in the astonishing archive of 30,000 cuneiform clay tablets recovered from the capital of the Hittites at Hattusa, near Bogaskale in central Anatolia. Contrasts and parallels abound here too. The Hittites were another Indo-European people who came south into Anatolia during the centuries after 2000 BC, infiltrating and then taking over the territory of the non-Indo-European Hatti, finally pushing on their southern frontier against the fringes of the great Mesopotamian powers and even the Egyptian empire.

  Such close contacts with the ancient civilizations to the south meant that the Hittites adopted the literate, urbanizing habits of the Near East far earlier than the Greeks. By the time of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the Hittites were already running an enormous, bureaucratically organized empire, with a network of military roads strung across it, stretching from Lebanon to the shores of the Aegean.

  They kept their records in both Hittite and Akkadian, the Babylonian language that had become the lingua franca of diplomacy and government across the whole region from central Anatolia to the Tigris and the mouths of the Nile. The clay cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa are the file copies retained by the Hittite foreign office after the original treaties, usually on bronze or occasionally silver or iron tablets, had been sent to the other parties.

  They give glimpses of an embracing power-world which carries echoes of life in the palaces at Troy, the fifty sons and sons-in-law gathered around Priam, the overwhelming nature of inheritance and the sense of greatness rippling down from its kingly source. The quasi-medieval atmosphere at these gatherings could not be farther from the high-risk anarchy barely an inch below the surface at any meeting of the Greek chieftains. One Hittite treaty, as its tablet records, was concluded in a great and ceremonial meeting

  in the city of Urikina in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili; Prince Tashmi-Sharumma; Prince Hannutti; Prince Huzziya; Ini-Teshshup, king of the land of Carchemish; Ari-Sharumma, king of the land of Isuwa; Amar-Mushen, uriyanni; Halpa-ziti, commander of the troops of the right; Prince Heshni; Prince Tattamaru; Prince Uppara-muwa, overseer of the golden grooms; Prince Uhha-ziti; Sahurunuwa, chief of the
wooden-tablet scribes; Hattusa-Kurunta, general; Prince Tarhunta-piya; Lugal dLamaa, commander of the troops of the left; Ali-ziti, chief of the palace servants; Tuttu, chief of the storehouse; Palla, lord of the city of Hurma; Walwa-ziti, chief of the scribes; Alalimi, chief of the cupbearers; Kammaliya, chief of the cooks; and Mahhuzzi, chief of the offering officials.

  Whether it is Victorian India, Tenochtitlan, medieval Bohemia, shogun Japan, the world of The Leopard or Bronze Age Anatolia, this is the air breathed in any court, dense with rank, title, glamor, precedence and surely a hint, here and there, of what is called, even now in palaces, Red Carpet Fever: excitement at being connected with the royal.

  That self-importance surfaces in Homer in the overbrimming superciliousness of the Phaeacians, condescendingly welcoming the shipwrecked seafarer Odysseus to Alcinous’s regal halls. The Phaeacians “never suffer strangers gladly.” They don’t like him much, nor he them. Even here, as he is accepting their hospitality, Homer gives him the traditional epithet he shares with Achilles and Arēs, the god of war: ptoliporthos Odysseus (city-ravaging Odysseus).