Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Her heart is of iron, and like her husband she has “a well-balanced mind.” Like him, she can deceive and manipulate her enemies, but also like him, she is passionate in her love for her lost spouse and weeps bitterly over him. Like him, she lies awake at night and her troubles crowd around her throbbing heart. In one of Homer’s most beautiful similes, she says that just as

  the nightingale of the greenwood sings so sweetly when the spring is newly come, sitting perched in the thick and leafy trees, pouring out her rich voice in quavering and bubbling notes,

  even so my heart is stirred to and fro in doubt.

  Odysseus’s great phrase, entha kai entha, to and fro, there and there, is hers too; but have midnight thoughts and the anxieties of a troubled mind in the dark ever been so beautifully described?

  Like all the great women in Homer, she weaves, no cloth more famous than the one she is making as a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, weaving it every day, unweaving it every night, not only to keep the suitors at arm’s length but as an emblem of her command in her world. She is a queen regnant, her fame reaching heaven for the way she rules over men, upholds justice, sees that the fertile earth brings forth wheat and barley, that her orchards are heavy with fruit and her flocks with young. All this, Homer says, comes from her “good command”—one word: euēgesia—while her people “grow in goodness under her.”

  This is Homer’s architecture of crisis: a great woman, her husband in disguise, a gang of young men who do not realize that the beggar is their king, witnessing their abuse and their vulgarity, eating his food, drinking his drink and sleeping with his serving-women. The tension builds over four long books of the poem, an unavoidable sexual metaphor at work: the king wolf has been away, the she-wolf is under siege, the promise of blood is in the air.

  Odysseus is troubled. He knows that he must bring war into his own house, but when he longs to do violence to those servant-women who have betrayed him, anxiety reverberates within him.

  Just as a bitch stands over her young puppies,

  growling at a man she does not know,

  thinking she would attack him,

  so Odysseus’s heart growls inside him.

  He has to punch his own chest to keep it in order. But is Odysseus the growling heart? Or the man who keeps his heart down? Is he one of the puppies that needs protection? Or the bitch doing the protecting? Or even the man who is threatening the puppies? There is no primitive simplicity here: as Homer portrays it, complexity ripples through every contour of the human heart.

  When the terrifying reprise of the Iliad erupts into the poem, it brings with it an almost orgasmic release of destructive energy, a balloon of mesmeric violence in which Odysseus slaughters all 108 of the young men. It is a frenzy of killing, an orgy of revenge that leaves the floors of the palace swimming in blood. The most horrible moment of the Iliad, when Odysseus and Diomedes kill Dolōn even as he is begging for his life, and his head is still speaking as it lands in the dust—those same actions and words are repeated here with one of the more pathetic of the victims. Odysseus ends slobbered with their guts, his thighs shiny with their blood, filthy with it, “like a lion that comes from feeding on an ox at the farmstead, and all his chest and cheeks on either side are stained with blood and he is terrible to look at; even so was Odysseus dirty with their blood and filth, his feet red, his hands and arms red with it.”

  Any idea that this is a tale of diverting fantasy is buried under the horror. Odysseus emerges from the tumult and goes through his house, looking for any sign of life from the suitors, any stirring of a limb, so that none might escape.

  He finds them one and all, mired in blood and dust, all of them like fishes that the fishermen have drawn in their meshed nets from the grey sea on to the curved beach. And all the fishes, longing for the waves of the sea, lie upon the sand. And the sun shines forth and takes from them their life.

  Their glazed stupidity is nothing more than the measure of Odysseus’s triumph. It is a moment of ecstatic slaughter, a huge gratification, filled with delight that he has destroyed his enemies. He has won and reclaimed his woman, his house and land and life. There is no euphemism here. Melanthius had been Odysseus’s goatherd but had betrayed him with the suitors.

  They lead him out through the doorway and the court

  And cut off his nose and his ears with the pitiless bronze

  And tear out his genitals for the dogs to eat raw

  And cut off his hands and his feet in the anger of their hearts.

  I have read these lines on Ithaca, listening one summer night to the nightingales in a thicket nearby, rocked back by this arrival of war in the house; no political solution sought, no compensatory agreement arrived at, feeling horrified that for all Odysseus’s subtlety and fineness, he has ended up as a cannibal-minded cur. Nothing in Homer is more troubling. You might have thought you knew this poem and its hero, but these scenes push far out into strange territory. Is this, in the end, for all our ships and palaces, our poetry, our beautiful cloths and veils, how we are, predatory carnivores snarling our dominance over mounds of filth-spattered corpses?

  Odysseus has the place cleaned. He gets the serving-women of the house to purify it, fumigating it, using a hoe to scrape up the horror, behaving as the sanitizing angel, instructing the women to carry out the dead bodies of the men they have been sleeping with. After the work is done, he identifies the twelve women he considers guilty of that sexual crime, finds “the cable of a dark-prowed ship,” a piece of marine equipment, and ties it high up outside the house, around a pillar and some rafters, just high enough so that if someone was attached to it, their feet would not quite reach the ground.

  Just as when in the evening long-winged thrushes or doves, trying to reach their roosting place for the night,

  fall into a snare set in a thicket,

  finding the bed that greets them filled with hate,

  even so the women hold their heads out in a row,

  and nooses are placed around their necks,

  so that they can die most pitiably.

  They writhe a little with their feet but not for very long.

  It is, in Odysseus and Telemachus, a moment of pure pitilessness and, in Homer, of pure pity. Homer loves birds. Athene has been there, just a moment before, as a swallow up in the rafters of the palace. The word Homer uses for the pitiability of the girls’ death, oiktista, is always used to describe the mournful notes of the song of the nightingale, Penelope’s own heart-bird. There can be no doubt where Homer’s sympathies lie. The suffering of those poor hanged girls, strung up with their feet quivering and kicking under the noose, their toes an inch or so from the ground beneath them, summons all the ghosts of Beslan, Srebrenica and Aleppo. An air of trouble thickens around this crime, and any identity you might have felt with Odysseus is threatened by it. An unbridgeable distance seems to open between us. It is a step too far, an ancientness too far. But Homer remains on our side of the divide, and it is clear that if Odysseus thinks he can solve life’s problems by the ferocious imposition of moral authority, Homer, the poem, knows you cannot.

  * * *

  All that remains is for Odysseus to be at one again with Penelope. She tests him, famously, with the suggestion that they should move their bed from “the well-built bridal chamber,” where it had been ever since he left for Troy. She knows, and he knows, but she does not yet know that the man in front of her knows, that the bed can never be moved, because Odysseus had built it around a living, long-leafed olive tree that had been growing in the courtyard for more years than anyone could remember. Their marriage bed is no temporary construction, but built for continuity and fixity, not afloat on the world but rooted in it. Odysseus, the great storyteller, had made it from living, inherited materials, had cut it and trimmed it and had beautified it with gold, silver and ivory inlays. The bed, in other words, like the raft he made, is another version of the great epic poem, made and remade, the reshaping of an inheritance to a new and ever
more beautiful purpose.

  When Penelope sees that Odysseus knows what she knows, that theirs is a marriage of true minds, and that their companionship is in the knowledge of the world they share, “her knees are loosened where she sits, and her heart melts … and in tears she throws her arms around his neck and kisses his face.”

  This is what, in the most literal translation that makes sense in English, Homer says:

  As when the land appears welcome to those who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas, and only a few escape the grey water by swimming to the land, with a thick scurf of salt coated on them, and happily they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; so welcome is her husband to her as she looks at him, and she cannot let him go from the embrace of her white arms.

  These verses dance around the edges of tenderness. Odysseus has returned from the sea, but Penelope recognizes him as her homeland, the shore on which she can at last set foot after too long adrift on the chaos of her life. Understanding comes in seeing things from the other side. The language is clotted with formulas, the stock phrases used in every part of the poem: the strong-built ship, the gray water, the description of the sea merely as evil, her white arms. These are the words of antiquity, a frame of inherited sobriety and seriousness for the emotion that can scarcely be contained within them. What is painfully and marvelously real lies within the embrace of what is profoundly shared and ancient.

  CONCLUSION: THE BRIGHT WAKE

  Homer does not provide any kind of guidance to life if the lessons derived are the usefulness of violence, the lack of regret at killing, the subjection and selling of women, the extinction of all men in a surrendering city or the sense that justice resides in personal revenge. That recipe for gang hell has always been troubling to the civilized. Pope was shocked at the “spirit of cruelty which appears too manifestly in the Iliad.” William Blake blamed Homer for desolating Europe with wars. Joel Barlow, the American friend of Thomas Paine and advocate of Enlightenment virtues, lectured the governing classes of a misguided Europe on how Homer was satisfactory as a poet,

  but he has given to military life a charm which few men can resist, a splendor which envelopes the scenes of carnage in a cloud of glory, which dazzles the eyes of every beholder. Alexander is not the only human monster that has been formed after the model of Achilles; nor Persia and Egypt the only countries depopulated for no other reason than the desire of rivalling predecessors in military fame.

  What is valuable and essential in these poems is the opposite of that: the ability to regard all aspects of life with clarity, equanimity and sympathy, with a loving heart and an unclouded eye. Homer knows more than the people in the poems can ever know. He knows more than the Greek warriors on the Trojan beach and more than the citizens of Troy. He even knows more than Odysseus and can look down on Odysseus, despite his failings, with paternal love. Homer matters because Homer, in a godlike way, understands what mortals do not. He even understands more than the gods, who emerge from the poems as sometimes terrifying but unreliable, intemperate and eventually ridiculous beings. That is his value, a reservoir of understanding beyond the grief and turbulence of a universe in which there is no final authority.

  I am aware of how twenty-first-century this sounds—Homer with no trust in the metaphysical; a multiculturalist, able to empathize with both gang and city; a fusionist, seeing in Odysseus a man who might bring together the virtues of both worlds; even a liberal and feminist, who has a deep understanding of the dignity and beauty of women, their central role in human destiny. Nevertheless, it is a picture of Homer that seems true, and it is not a sentimental vision. The depiction of wrongness is fundamental to it. In a review of the harsh, extremist essays of Simone Weil, Susan Sontag speculated on why these dark Homeric qualities are so necessary.

  There are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

  Homer’s embrace of wrongness, his depiction of a world that stands at a certain angle to virtue, is the heart of why we love him. He does not give us a set of exemplars. These poems are not sermons. We do not want Achilles or even Odysseus to be our model for a man. Nor Penelope or Helen for a woman. Nor do we want to worship at the shrine of Bronze Age thuggery. What we want is Homeric wisdom, his fearless encounter with the dreadful, his love of love and hatred of death, the sheer scale of his embrace, his energy and brightness, his resistance to nostalgia or to what the American philosopher Richard Rorty described as “belatedness.” Most literature and philosophers, Rorty wrote, put value only in the past.

  Nietzsche, at his worst, gestured towards some narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake. Carlyle gestured towards some contented peasants working the lands of a kindly medieval abbot. Lots of us occasionally gesture in the direction of the lost world in which our parents or our grandparents told us they grew up.

  Homer doesn’t do that. There is no sense that he has come late to life. These epic poems may enshrine the past, but they exist in a radiant present and in that way are hymns to present being. The English poet Alice Oswald has described recently how Homer is infused with this glowing sense of reality. Ancient critics “praised Homer’s enargeia,” she wrote in the foreword to Memorial, her beautiful and stripped-down translation of the Iliad, “which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Enargeia, a noun derived from the Greek word argos, meaning “bright” or “shining,” is “the quality of having brightness in it,” of being vividly there. For Greek rhetoricians enargeia was a necessary aspect of description, or ekphrasis, a word that literally means “a telling out.” And that pair of terms encapsulates the Homeric ideal: Homer’s greatness is in his telling out of the embedded vivid, the core of life made explicit. Homer is not Greek; he is the light shining in the world.

  He provides no answers. Do we surrender to authority? Do we abase ourselves? Do we indulge the self? Do we nurture civility? Do we nourish violence? Do we love? Homer says nothing in reply to those questions; he merely dramatizes their reality. The air he breathes is the complexity of life, the bubbling vitality of a boat at sea, the resurgent energy, as he repeatedly says, of the bright wake starting to gleam behind you.

  NOTES

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  FOREWORD

  poet of a boom: For most of the early twentieth century, in the wake of the discoveries at Troy and Mycenae made by the romantic German businessman/archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, Homer was thought to describe the palatial Mycenaean world of ca. 1450 to ca. 1200 BC. Sir Moses Finley, in The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking, 1954), demolished that idea and considered Homer a product of the ninth or tenth century BC. For a clear and comprehensive discussion of the current orthodoxy that considers Homer an eighth-century poet and his use as “an archaeological artifact,” see Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,” Classical Antiquity 5, no. 1 (Apr. 1986), 81–138. Gregory Nagy, in Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), argued that the poems did not reach their definitive form until the sixth century BC, but the archaeologist Susan Sherratt’s “Archaeological Contexts,” in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 119–42, insists on the syncretism of early Mediterranean cultures. Their core characteristic was the fusion of stories and ideolog
ies. The Homer poems, she says, are the clearest example of “the ideological bricolage” of different cultures spread across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and over a time period that stretches from at least 1800 to 800 BC (p. 139). In the Mediterranean everything was borrowed and shared, and that meeting of cultures is both Homer’s subject and his method. Sherratt’s point is that no picture of Homer can be pinned to a particular moment in that long millennium, nor could it be complete without looking for a deep prehistory to the epics, back to the beginning of the second millennium BC or farther. In the “social fluidity and instability” of that deep past were stories and questions that would have appealed to the audiences of the equally troubled ninth and eighth centuries BC more than the steady bureaucratic calm of the intervening palatial period of the late Bronze Age (p. 138).

  Epic’s purpose: See the many essays in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

  a revelatory fresco: This is the watercolor reconstruction made for Blegen by the Anglo-Dutch artist and architect Piet de Jong, first published in Carl W. Blegen, “The Palace of Nestor Excavations of 1955,” American Journal of Archaeology 60, no. 2 (Apr. 1956), 95–101, plate 41 (b&w). Mabel L. Lang, in The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, Vol. 2, The Frescoes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), after a decade of heroic work with burned and intransigent materials, reconstructed the fragments differently and separated the bard from the bird. But there is no certainty here. Emily Vermeule, in her review of that book in The Art Bulletin 52, no. 4 (Dec. 1970), 428–30, was skeptical about Mabel Lang’s reconstruction.