Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Out of that turmoil and trouble, enacting the repeated Homeric principle of enlightenment through the arrival of the opposite, comes the delicacy and tailored perfection of the seabird. It is a sign of grace and goodness, never more than when one alights on the deck or boom beside you. I have had swallows do that, far from land, and once, briefly, a tiny dark storm petrel, a speck of life in the middle of death.

  I cannot believe Homeric sailors did not also stand at the taffrails of their beloved ships watching the birds in their wake. Seabirds are too beautifully present in the poems for the sailors not to have seen them like that, godlike in their lightness above the rolling weight of the sea. I have watched them for days, equipped as they are with their own more perfect version of hull and sail, reaching and tacking beside you in the wind, dropping and climbing among the peaks and valleys below them, their primaries sometimes just nicking and flicking the surface of the sea, until without warning they make a decision and turn one wing up into the wind, exposing their belly to it, thrown upward like a cyclist on the steepest part of a banked track, and are pulled away, high and fast, in a rapid downwind run, which they end by curving slowly around to windward again, pure authority, taking up station, living with the fluency and command their liquid world requires.

  Odysseus’s visiting seabird is Leucothea, the white goddess. She was once a mortal girl from Thebes, with, as Homer says, “the most beautiful ankles,” but the gods made her one of their own. She gives Odysseus a holy veil, full of the magic of the woven cloth. He is to tie it around his chest, abandon the raft and swim for shore. With those instructions she leaves him, plunging into the sea “like a diving tern, and the dark wave hid her.” But Odysseus, who already refused the offer of immortality from Calypso, and whose mind is still searchingly alive, does not obey. He trusts his own raft too much to abandon it so far from shore, and with that Poseidon and the storm submit him to the next phase of horror. The earth shaker summons a killer wave, its crest overarching, vaulted, Homer using a word he uses elsewhere to describe caves and dark bowers roofed with trees, so that the wave becomes like a vast dark hall of destruction, which he then lands on Odysseus as a sledgehammer of vengeance.

  The raft is smashed and Odysseus sunk, but he emerges and climbs onto one of the scattered planks, which he then rides in the sea “like a horse.” Because finality dominates the Iliad, that poem introduces men in order to kill them, brought on one after another like the shambling line of an Aztec sacrifice; the many will always end in the same bleak place. But Odysseus meets death time and time again, and each time springs up whole and new, as if resilience were running in his veins; his central understanding, the great evolution from the Iliad to the Odyssey, is that the one needs to be many.

  The storm continues for another two days. The life spirit in Odysseus is squeezed to near empty. His ability to survive has faced its greatest test. But then at last the wind drops, and calm spreads across the sea. Still, though, the groundswell is running, and Odysseus is lifted by one of those long, rolling waves high enough to see the land of Scheria and salvation within touching distance.

  Just like the kind of joy that children feel when their father has been lying ill in bed, dying, taut with pain, wasting away under the grip of some angry, powerful affliction, and at last those pains begin to ebb away and they can feel a warmth and ease come back into the air of the sick room around him, so to Odysseus that land and its trees seem welcome, swimming towards them now, hungry to plant his feet on the earth itself.

  For Odysseus, the missing father, the man whose son knows he is dead and gone, land itself has become fatherly, the embrace of what feels like home reaching out to him. But here, at a moment of arrival and the promise of simplicity, Homer gives the gimbaled world of the Odyssey yet another spin. The poem might long for land but will always remain at sea, and as Odysseus gets as near the shore as a man’s voice will carry, he hears the vast, destructive surf breaking on what he realizes is an iron coast, no harbors, no anchorages, all high headlands, reefs and cliffs. The hexameters, sounding as strange as a Hawaiian war chant, as heavy and hissing as the sea itself, play out what he hears:

  kai dē doupon akouse

  poti spiladessi thalassēs

  and then the boom he heard

  on the slippery reefs of the sea

  rochthei gar mega kuma

  poti xeron ēpeiroio

  for roared the great wave

  on the dry land of the mainland

  deinon ereugomenon

  eiluto de panth’ halos achnē

  terrible the deep belching

  as folded up all things in sea surf

  With the brightness of Athene in his mind he casts off again and finally, thankfully, finds a place where the all-male cliff gives way and a fair-flowing river, the emergent inwardness of the land, allows him entrance and he can rest at last, “Spent to all use, and down he sank to death./The sea had soak’d his heart through.”

  * * *

  Of course he does not die, and from that masterfully orchestrated sequence of island, raft, storm, bird and shore—the realms of impotence, potency, threat, grace and survival—the great central section of the Odyssey floods out: Odysseus’s meeting with the princess Nausicaa, his coming to the deeply Asiatic palace of Alcinous, her father, where he tells his tales to the assembled company. Together they constitute an enormous, cumulative exploration of human consciousness, island by island, point by point, each story exploring another dimension of what it is to be alive. In this world of flux, every island shapes the life that is in it. Arrive at any of them, push your dinghy ashore on the beach, and a different atmosphere obtains: welcome, comfort, strangeness, violence. The vocabulary of beach, rock and wood may be the same, but every island uses it in a different way, to seduce or dismember you, turn you into a pig or promise you immortality, devour your friends or make you forget that anywhere else ever existed.

  The Odyssey is a drama of oscillation, between inner and outer, urbanity and wildness, enclosure and exposure, the memory of home and the rewards of distance, a life that is “heartsick on the open sea” and the mixed, erotic terror-allure of the women Odysseus finds wherever he goes, their welcome, their way with drugs and potions, the caves and grottoes of their inner selves.

  When he arrives at the seductions of Circe’s island—her name means “the encircler”—he finds there the poisoner-witch and the best cook in Homer. She has ever more deliciousness to offer, and with her charms seduces his men and turns them all into pigs. Odysseus knows that this is a dangerous nowhere, out in the middle of the full circle of the sea where they cannot know where the sun sets, nor where it rises, until Hermes, his great ally, the spirit of cleverness and ingenuity, gives him both an antidote to all her potions and the best possible advice: hold your sword to her throat and get her to promise that she will not make a pig of you, as she has to your men.

  Odysseus arms himself with all the sharpness of Hermes, then penetrates deep inside Circe’s world, in through the doors of her palace, into her beautiful rooms and her jeweled chair, only then suddenly to draw his sword “from his thigh,” to dominate her as she kneels terrified before him. She must promise no spells, no enchantment, the freeing of his men, stripping their piggishness away, and with those promises, with his dominance secure, he mounts her in “her surpassingly beautiful bed of love.”

  The erotic vibrates as the underlayer of each encounter, the male fear of enclosure in endless dialogue with the male longing to be enclosed. In Hades, whose name means “the unlit” or “the unseen,” this dance of attachment and detachment takes on its own sad colors. Everything that matters on earth, all love, life, growth and hope, is extinguished here and reduced to a gray, wraithlike half-existence, life without life. Achilles says he is surrounded there not by the dead but by the kata-phthimenoisen, the deader than dead, the dead’s own dead. It is the darkest of all the Odyssey’s inward places. There Odysseus watches the lightless ghosts walk by. There is no glory
in them. They are too thin for that, evaporating as his arms try to close around them.

  He sees his mother first, a longed-for shadow of the woman he knew and held, then a sequence of queens, all mortal and all dead, all of them beautiful and all once lovers of gods, each of them walking past him in somber parade. They are attendants on Persephone, the great queen of Hades itself, her own presence in the gloom of this dark cavern an emblem of all the heartache and the shocks that flesh is heir to: she is a vegetation goddess and she belongs in the bright lit world above, but Hades had abducted her and in that single act had brought winter to the earth.

  These queens are all mothers of heroes, and one by one they remember their moments of intimacy with the gods: Tyro, thinking of when Poseidon in the shape of a giant wave took possession of her at a river’s mouth; Antiopē, remembering Zeus coming to her on the vast plain where their sons would later build the city of Thebes; the mother of Heracles thinking of his conception, then his wife remembering their own moments of love together; the mother of Oedipus, grieving at having slept with her own son; and Iphimedeia, who “lay in the sea-Lord’s loving waves” … and so on, too many for Odysseus to remember or tell, even though “his story held them spellbound down the shadowed halls.”

  Behind them all, not present here but looming over the whole performance, stands the one great figure of the noble and absent queen: Penelope, Odysseus’s own wife, away, not dead, but waiting for him in Ithaca. Every one of these queenly wraiths is an image of the woman he longs for. She is the queen of all queens, filled with intelligence, fortitude and wit, the match for Odysseus in her greatness. Every one of these ghosts is a translation of Penelope into another form. They all speak of the moment when longing was over and intimacy was real, and every one of them now looks across the gulf of death to the time a god made love to them. Desire, longing, separation and greatness all appear in them arrayed before Odysseus like a frieze, every one the ghost of his own lost wife.

  After the monstrous-beautiful Sirens, Odysseus comes to the limb-consuming Scylla and her friend the body-gulping Charybdis. Scylla is a six-headed, rock-bound, man-eating monster, with guts made of dogs’ heads, who plucks you from above; Charybdis a vast-mouthed, in-sucking, whirlwater hell-fiend who will pull you down below. Veer too far from Scylla, and Charybdis will have you. Too far from Charybdis, and Scylla will pick off your sailors. Too far in or too far out, which fate will you choose? Together they are the nightmare of female threat, either picking your life away or drowning you in who they are. Everything Odysseus loved about women in Hades is here thrown into reverse. But Odysseus makes the wise man’s choice: risk Scylla, because where Charybdis will swallow you whole, Scylla may eat a man or two, but the ship will survive. This is Odysseus’s virtue: in the face of life’s impossible choices, he is able to navigate between the whirlpool and the rock.

  His inner self reflects that outer wisdom. More than any other Homeric hero, Odysseus is not at one with himself. His mental world is storm-wrecked, and these outer landscapes are a projection of that broken core. But every arrival carries its lesson. “Many were the people whose places he saw and whose minds he learned,” Homer says at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Odysseus may long “for his return and his woman,” but the heart of the poem is this contingency, the absence of any overriding permanence. It is the first depiction we have of “the fascinating imaginative realm,” as Milan Kundera called the novel, the great descendant of the Odyssey, “where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.” Abstract certainties do not apply here. Anything you might have thought true may well be false. Anything that might have seemed good can seem bad in another light. And of nowhere is that truer than the island that is Odysseus’s destination, the dream of Ithaca, the place Odysseus would like to call home, “the sweetest place any man can imagine,” but which on arrival, exactly halfway through the Odyssey’s twenty-four books, turns out to be its very opposite.

  * * *

  Ithaca is not what the phrase “Greek island” brings to mind. There is nothing of the drought-stripped bareness of the eastern Aegean, nor of the dry Asiatic pelt of the Trojan plain. Ithaca is green and wooded, more Tuscan than Greek. There are some wonderful harbors but little good grass or arable land. It largely consists of mountains dropping to the sea. Wild pear trees blossom beside the spring meadows, but it is “rocky Ithaca,” the kind of island that has always thrived on trading or raiding but would be poor if reliant on its own resources. There are springs in the woodlands, where daisies grow in the stony turf. Magenta anemones spangle the meadows in May, and a little later in the year you can find the churchyards filled with white and purple irises. I have been there at the end of winter, which is when Odysseus arrives, and I have known nights as cold as the one in which he has to borrow a cloak to keep warm. Like him, I have sat late over an olive-wood fire, using the prunings from the vines as kindling, drinking glasses of deep black red Mavrodafni, huddled over the logs in a cold room, so that my face burned and my back froze. There was snow on the mountain paths that year, the wind was turning up the pale underside of the olive leaves and the air was more silver than golden, clarified, a distillate.

  It’s part of the geometry of the poems that Ithaca is like this. It is a northern country, on the northern and western edge of the Greek world, a long way from the cultivated, semi-Asiatic eastern Aegean heartland that Homer knew best. That exaggerated marginality fits Odysseus, the pirate-king of a country that is out on the edge of things. But it is a country he loves. The Phaeacians bring him here across the sea. He is asleep when he arrives, and they carry him ashore still sleeping. He wakes the next day and doesn’t know where he is. He can’t recognize Ithaca. Only at the prompting of Athene does he realize that this is home, and then, on seeing it, he “bends to kiss the life-giving soil.”

  The Odyssey throughout has taunted its listeners with images of palatial comfort and luxury. The Phaeacians are the model of a rich, successful Near Eastern kingdom. Their palaces, gardens and orchards all read like scenes from an Assyrian relief. Egypt has floated just off-stage as the reservoir of gold, the Greek dream of material well-being. The kings and queens of Pylos and Sparta live embedded in authority and sumptuousness. Even Circe seems to live in a beautifully equipped palace.

  Odysseus does not arrive home to find a place like that. His kingdom is in chaos, not the lovely, sweet, green, untroubled oasis he longs for it to be. It is riven with difficulty, and that tension—between the desire and the reality, between Ithaca the beautiful and Ithaca the real—leads to the fierce conclusion of this great poem. It is no easy or sentimental reunion of the loved one and the loved place. Homer says “there is nothing sweeter to a man than his own country.” That is what we want to think is true. But in Ithaca the poem enacts the opposite: nothing is more troubled than a man’s own country, even if that is where the desire for sweetness is strongest.

  Odysseus has repeatedly appeared as the impoverished northern wanderer not entirely at home in the Mediterranean world. Now he comes home as the broken king, the outsider with few allies. The only weapons he has are tricks of deceit and concealment, and Athene makes sure she strips him of any sign of nobility.

  She withers the handsome flesh that is on his supple limbs

  And thins the fair hair on his head.

  She puts the skin of an old, old man over his whole body

  And dims the two eyes that were once so beautiful.

  Now he is at home, he has never been more at sea. But he is not at a loss. He tells lying stories about who he is and where he has come from, gradually working his way toward the confrontation that will bring him victory, slipping into his own palace much as the Trojan Horse that he devised was slipped into the citadel at Troy. Homer shapes Odysseus to be the universal man, dressed in rags, stronger for appearing weaker, but even in that disguise he consistently pretends to come not from the margins of the Homeric world—he is no northern vagabond—but from one of its centers o
f riches and power: Crete, the focus of the great palatial culture which Sir Arthur Evans, the English excavator of the palace complex at Knossos in the early years of the twentieth century, called the Minoan. Odysseus describes his island in the middle of the wine-dark sea as a fair, rich land, surrounded by water, with so many men in it they could not be counted and ninety cities, including “Knossos, where Minos reigned.”

  Odysseus has become the man who knows the world, who has been a great warrior at Troy, a great traveler to dimensions of existence few other men will ever encounter, an absorber of the Cretan civilization, now preparing to perform his great and terrifying act of revenge. He has lost nothing in all his journeying. He has become the agent of a new fused culture, the man who will establish civility in his city by bringing war into it. He looks at Ithaca with eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, the hardened eyes of the returning king. He is the agent of reduction, there to remove the fat, and the irony of Odysseus’s return is that the nearer he gets to his own house, the more uncompromisingly like Achilles he becomes, wanting to strip away the muddle and complexities and return Ithaca to an essential, Iliadic condition.

  Set against this powerful and threatening presence is Penelope, his incomparable queen, the greatest woman in Homer. She does not yet know that her husband has at last returned. Her halls are filled with the suitors. Everything about them reeks of luxury and abuse, but she is withdrawn and self-protective. The epithet Homer uses of her most often is periphrōn, meaning “wise,” or more exactly that she has a mind that encompasses all sides of a question, not exactly wary or circumspect, but “understanding the whole,” filled with an enveloping intelligence. Penelope’s mind is one of the most precious places in Homer, the inner citadel of virtue and value. She is deeply identified with the well-being of her house. When she appears in front of the suitors, she always stands by the columns of the beautiful hall, as if she were one of them herself, “shining among women” just as the upper chambers to which she retires shine within the palace. This is the great woman who, as she descends her stairs, looks like Artemis and Aphrodite, the greatest of the goddesses, the queens of the wildland and of love.