Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.

  Is there any wonder that this story has lasted as long as Homer? Those forty days of shouting, all the grandeur of bronze, the whole rhetoric of assertive Homeric heroism, is now clogged with the mud filling Goliath’s mouth and nostrils. A painting by the young Caravaggio, now in the Prado, of David after the death of Goliath is, in this way, one of the most beautiful commentaries on Homer that has ever been made. It is Caravaggio’s least violent and most understanding version of that subject. Michelangelo had shown David on the Sistine Chapel ceiling with his sword in midswipe over Goliath’s neck. Titian had painted a butcher’s view of the cut neck itself. Caravaggio himself would later paint ferocious and tragic images of David holding the severed head (a head which bears the painter’s own grieving features), but this first David of his is soaked in calm. The boy looks as if he is about twelve years old. His body is wrapped in a loose white cloth. His lower legs are bare and his feet inelegant, the toes slightly misaligned, with dirt under the nails and a soreness around them. Nothing is idealized. Goliath’s vast dead hand remains clenched on the ground, and blood has dried on his big severed head, around the wound left by David’s slung stone, the puncture through which the heroic balloon has collapsed.

  What survives in the painting is the beauty of the boy, his intentness on the knot as he ties a cord around Goliath’s hair, his simplicity, his seriousness, his lack of bombast. He kneels on the giant Greek chest, from which the head was severed, as if on a workbench, blood just staining his hand, his own face in shadow, a face of humility, the heroism entirely inward. This is the view of Greek heroism given us by the Hebrew scriptures: weak and bombastic compared to the clarity and strength of the pious mind.

  12 • HOMER’S ODYSSEY

  Nothing can be relied on in Odysseus’s world. His stories of impossible monsters—Scylla, Charybdis, the Cyclops, the Sirens—are all told as if true. Others with real places and people—Egypt, Sicily, the Cretans—are clearly Odysseus’s own lying tales. Odysseus is an unblinking fraud who in the passing of a smile will slip from deceit to the defense of honor and back again. At his most soothingly and persuasively elegant, his words “fall like winter snowflakes.” But he is no weakling. His grandfathers were raw and primitive men: Autolycus, whose name means “the wolf himself,” and Arceisius, “Bear Man.” He comes from nature but is a multiple of multiples: polymētis, many-skilled; polymechanos, very ingenious; polytlas, much-enduring; and best of all poikilomētis, dapple-skilled, with so much woven into him that he shimmers and flickers like an embroidered cloth.

  So uncatchable is Odysseus that when the poem describes his state of mind, you can never be certain where to find him. When he is lying in bed, anxious and unable to sleep, Homer says he is “tossing backwards and forwards, like a sausage that a man is turning backwards and forwards above the burning coals, doing it one side, then the other, wanting it to cook quickly. So Odysseus was turning backwards and forwards, thinking what he should do.” Entha kai entha, backwards and forwards, hither and thither, literally “there and there”; Homer repeats the phrase three times in five lines. It must be branded on his hero’s heart. But is Odysseus the cook or the sausage? Is he turning or being turned? Is he the passive victim of his life or its principal actor? Or both?

  It is fitting that at the beginning of the Odyssey, this slippery figure is nowhere to be found. He is away, an absence, the longed-for man-not-there. Twenty years have passed since he left for the war in Troy. The other heroes have returned home. Only Odysseus remains missing. No one has seen him these last ten years. Meanwhile his queen, Penelope, is surviving surrounded by a herd of young men from Ithaca, and the rival kings of nearby islands, all of them clamoring for her hand, her body and her husband’s kingdom. She keeps them at bay, flirtatiously but reservedly, while her son, Telemachus, is humiliated and reduced by these wine-swilling, pork-consuming parasites. The word for them in Greek is mnēstēr, which means “a man with something in mind,” “a man with intentions.”

  With the help of Athene, Telemachus escapes their clutches for a while and goes to ask for news of his father in the great palaces of the Peloponnese, at Pylos and at Sparta, where the old heroes tell him what has happened: his father is a prisoner on the distant island of Ogygia, where the love-nymph Calypso holds him in her sway. Only after four books and 2,222 lines does Odysseus, the hidden man, first appear.

  Calypso’s isle of voluptuousness is the earth’s navel. She promises her captive, as all lovers do, immortality and agelessness, and she presides over him as the goddess of longing. Her hair hangs about her eyes as seductively as it does around the face of the dawn. Her island is hilly and forested, and her delicious cavern, where the scents of sweet-smelling cedar fill the air, where the owls and cormorants sit chattering in the luxuriant growth at its mouth, and the vines hold out bunches of grapes that ripen as you watch—what is this but the entrancingly shaggy cavern of desire? She is Courbet’s Origine du Monde. Fresh streams run down through her meadows starred with violets, thick with beds of what was either parsley or celery, a refuge “at which any immortal god who came there would gaze in wonder, their heart entranced with pleasure.”

  One spring morning, on the southeast coast of Sicily just north of Syracuse, I went somewhere which, for that day anyway, seemed to be filled with Calypso’s overbrimmingly desirable spirit. It is known now as Penisola Magnisi but was called Thapsos by the ancient Greeks. A low, flat island, about a mile long, just off the coast, is joined to the mainland by a narrow sandy neck. North and south of that neck there is shelter and good holding, whatever the wind, the classic early Greek recipe of twin harbors. The rim of the mainland beside it is now a mess of modern oil refineries and tanker-loading bays, but Thapsos remains uninhabited. Walk along the sand of the tombolo toward it, keep your eyes looking out to sea, and you can find yourself in a virtually untouched Odyssean world.

  This little island holds the earliest of all signs of the Greeks in the west. They were here in the sixteenth century BC, as the Shaft Graves were still being dug at Mycenae, moving out into the Mediterranean as they had already come south to the Aegean. Archaeologists have found Mycenaean, Cypriot and Maltese pottery here, mixed in with local Sicilian jars and plates. It was somewhere, I thought, where I could start to come close to Odysseus on one of his distant shores.

  But coming to Thapsos that beautiful morning, with the Mediterranean glittering beside me, it was impossible to think I could be here for the Bronze Age, for Odysseus, or for anything that was not part of the astonishing present, because the island that morning was awash with flowers. The true wild sweet pea, the great-grandfather of all sweet peas grown in the world, was here, its scent mixed with the sugary wafts of the sweet alyssum that was growing in clumps among the limestone, smelling from yards away like plates of honey sandwiches.

  According to the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, Sicily smelled so powerfully of wildflowers that hounds there used to lose the scent of their prey and wander about “at a loss, sniffing the air with half-closed eyes, while the quarry grazed happily several miles off.” But Thapsos looked wonderful too: wine-dark stonecrop on the edges of the limestone flakes, clouds of borage everywhere, a purple-pink haze spangled with blue stars. Spires of viper’s bugloss stood among them like the banners of festival knights, and all of this surrounded by a floor of brilliant pink little Mediterranean campions, Silene colorata, with banks of yellow marigolds and wild tangerine chrysanthemums beyond them.

  * * *

  Odysseus came to hate Calypso’s island. He had been there too long, and by the time the poem finds him there he is weeping on the beach, pining for home, far from floweriness and Calypso’s beguilements. Out on the other side of Thapsos, facing Greece and the sparkle of the sea, is this island’s own version of the landscape of regret and loss. Here on the roc
ky, sea-stripped and flowerless coast is where the first Greeks in Sicily buried their dead. They made small, low, rock-cut tombs, deftly slipped into the limestone, each entrance coming in from the direction of the sea, the hollow of the tomb itself cut out of the depth of the rock. There are about three hundred of them, like the burrows of small rock-dwelling creatures, and two things strike you: they imitate in form the great tholos tombs of Mycenae and Pylos, the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, as Schliemann called them, with their giant ceremonial entrance courts, or dromoi, the towering portals and the huge corbeled vaults of the tombs themselves. That heroic vision of the dead was transported here to the distant west, but no grandeur came with it. These Thapsos tombs are poverty itself, desperate scrapings on a rocky shore, filled with dreams and illusions of home but little else. The walls of the dromoi here are often no more than eighteen inches high, the doorway accessible only if you squirm inside, the vaulted space no taller than a crouching man.

  Into this island of desperate and beautiful changelessness Homer suddenly injects the opposite, the great mobilizing presence of the poem, the god who, alongside Athene, presides over Odysseus’s whole being: the quicksilver dazzle of Hermes himself. He arrives as the messenger of Zeus, bringing a shock of life, “swooping down from Pieria [the home of the Muses], down from the high clear air, plunging to the sea and skimming the swells, like a shearwater who hunts along the deep and deadly ways of the barren salt sea.”

  Hermes does everything Odysseus might think of doing: he is the god of the thief, the shepherd, the craftsman, the herald, the musician, the athlete and the merchant. He is at home with all kinds of cunning and trickery, charms and spells. He is the god who invented music and discovered fire. Dangerous magic and a kind of phallic potency glimmer around him like static. He is at home outside the limits of normality and stability, and so he is the god of boundaries and thresholds, of roads and doors, of transitional and alien places, of mines and miners, of the ability to make and transform the fixities and prearrangements of the world. This is the god who watches over comings and goings. It is Hermes, in disguise, who leads Priam across the Trojan plain to the Greek camp and his world-altering encounter with Achilles. He is the god of politics and diplomacy, the great persuader, the maestro of difference, and all of that makes him the god of Odysseus.

  Hermes delivers transformations, and so the Odyssey flicks to its other mode: the sea and its islands are to be not a prison but a place where movement and change are more possible than anywhere else. Hermes tells Calypso that Odysseus must leave her island and begin his journey home. And to leave, he must build himself a raft from the great trees that surround her. The very forest that made this place into a desire-trap, all that fringing luxuriance, is now seen as timber. Odysseus seeks out the deadest, driest, most juiceless trees he can find, because those are the ones that will “float lightly”—but also surely because those are the most un-Calypso-like—and they fall quickly to his ax.

  Nothing in the Odyssey is described with more love or care than Odysseus making his raft. It comes together in parts, orderly, concrete, precise: ax, adze and augers, pegs and mortises, ribs, decks and gunwales, mast, yard and steering oar, braces, halyards and sheets. Odysseus assembles it just as Homer assembles his song, so that the ship becomes a poem of the sea. If its parts are right, and their relationship right, it will sail. Calypso provisions the raft with delicious drink and food for his journey and summons her warm and generous wind, a following wind, the only one that could take him home. He embarks—you can smell the new-cut wood—his spirits high, gripping the tiller, seated astern, his eye on the sail filling above him.

  Now Odysseus enters his crowning moment. He is the master mariner, the great soul, godlike, commanding his own craft technēentos, a word that blurs the boundaries of “skillfully,” “cunningly” and “magisterially.” He steers by the stars, as Calypso had told him, keeping the Plow and the Great Bear, of which it is a part, on the left hand, to the north. For seventeen nights he sails with the west wind behind him like this. “Sleep never falls on his eyelids as he watches the stars above him,” seeing the Plow wheeling around the North Star and “never bathing in the waters of the ocean,” while the Plow in turn is watching Orion on the other side, the two of them circling each other in eternity, “the axis always fixed.”

  You only have to sail by the stars once or twice for that connection to remain with you for the rest of your life. I can never now look up at Cassiopeia, the five bright stars of her W, and not think of those hours in a driving and stormy night that I kept them in the shrouds of the Auk, as we headed north in a storm off the south of Ireland. Nor Orion without seeing him as he was when we made our way out with the tide one summer night into the Minch, and that most herolike of constellations stood as a warrior high to the right of us, his belt and sword glittering and jeweled, his bow up and arced to the southwest, the arrow aimed high at the heart of the Pleiades.

  This exposure of Odysseus to the stars is the closest I ever feel to him, knowing that the experience of being out there, alone at sea at night, for all the changes in technology that three or four thousand years might have brought, with the sky arrayed above you and the sea and its threats dark and half-hidden, is materially the same for me as it was for him. It is the most cosmic experience of the world I know, when the universe seems not like a background but a reality, and when the scale of earthliness shrinks to nothing much. There is no history here. I am in the Bronze Age, and as Odysseus stays awake, keeping sleep at bay, watching the movements of craft and sea, I do the same, and he and I are momentarily and marvelously intimate.

  But constancy is not the note of the Odyssey, and again Homer flicks the switch. Odysseus is within touching distance of Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians, who will take him home, its mountains “reaching towards him now, over the misty breakers, rising like a shield,” when Poseidon spots the raft and decides to kill him. It is one of Homer’s majestic aerial views, the little raft far below him in the expanse of sea, Poseidon’s eye in the heaven far above, the midgelike fragility of our greatest man surrounded by the vast rolling dark expanse of ocean.

  The storm that then erupts and blows through the next 160 lines is no dignified passage of heroic verse. It is vicious, almost formless, repetitively destructive. Every prop of every storm in every European imagination, from Virgil to Ovid and on through Shakespeare and the great composers, is brought into play here. Poseidon summons every contradictory wind. He stirs and grinds at the surface of the sea, brings clouds to hide the land, so that even the sea itself becomes invisible. Giant waves come bearing down on Odysseus and sweep though his whole being. His knees weaken, his heart melts, his giant and commanding spirit quakes before Poseidon’s chthonic power.

  Poseidon is “dark-maned,” horselike, the enemy of the civility and coherence embodied in Odysseus’s beautiful raft. The verse, which had been making such steady progress on Odysseus’s starlit voyage, now churns with anxiety. Odysseus wishes he had died at Troy. At least then his death would have been heroic, not the pitiable ending now facing him.

  The raft loses direction. Odysseus’s hand slips from the steering oar as Poseidon’s waves tower and break above him, spinning his raft in a circle. The hero is thrown into the sea, where the clothes that Calypso had given him grow heavy with the water and drag him under. Wave after wave drives him down. Only his mind, the great organ of Odyssean existence, stays whole in this frenzy of natural violence, and as he surfaces at last, spewing seawater from his mouth and with the sea streaming from his head like the torrents running from the boss of a fountain, he lunges after the raft, knowing it as his place of safety, the only way he can escape “death’s decision.” But Poseidon does not release him. Here and there, to and fro, entha kai entha, the sea-king drives him, urging on the south wind and the north wind, the east wind and the west wind, as each in their turn try to shake from Odysseus his last rags of coherence.

  He is hanging on to life; th
e tightly bound raft and the woven cloth, the made things of a civilized existence, are part of the longed-for or remembered worlds. They are too fragile to last out here. He is beset with troubles, and death seems near at hand until at last, mysteriously, a seabird, aithuia in Greek, probably not a shearwater, but another fishing bird, maybe a tern or a small delicate-limbed gull like a kittiwake—no one has ever been sure—alights on the wave-swept platform of the raft and speaks to him.

  It is one of the Homeric moments at which the distance between then and now shrinks away. You can imagine the listeners around the poet, fixed in their attention to this overturning crisis, with nothing in their minds but the predicament of Odysseus at sea, taken up with their anxiety for this man so helplessly exposed to Poseidon’s rage, now, quite suddenly, feeling their hearts contract with love and sympathy at the arrival of the speaking bird. Here, maybe, is a moment of hope.

  It is an experience all deep-sea sailors will have had. You are out in a storm, the boat rolls and pitches, thirty degrees one way then the other, the seas coming at you in a pattern you wish would end, the battering and shrieking of the wind unstoppable in your ear. Every surface is broken. The winds cannot leave the sea alone. What has already been plowed and folded is plowed and folded again. No structure in the sea remains whole. Not even a breaking wave is allowed to break, but the wind strips the spume from the wavetop and blows it in a half element, half air, half sea, wildly down and across the wind, as if the air were now clouded with cataracts or a sudden blast of winter. Inconstancy and capriciousness rule. There is no permanence. Nothing in a storm can be inherited from one moment to the next. But if there is one fact that a storm seems to impose—it is not physically or meteorologically true, but this is the experience—it is the sea’s mysterious dominance from below. A storm-driven sea appears to acquire a vitality and viciousness, a desire to do damage, which has nothing to do with the wind but comes from inside its own enraged, destroying body. If you ever have that sensation, it is when you are meeting Poseidon.