Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  leaving Homer’s own: See Casey Dué, “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, edited by Casey Dué (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 19–30.

  “the neon edges”: Christopher Logue, War Music (London: Faber, 2001), 54.

  “Warm’d in the brain”: Alexander Pope, Iliad XX.551.

  “like furnace doors”: Logue, War Music, 193.

  “sometimes travels beside”: George Seferis, “Memory II,” lines 5–9, from Logbook 3, in Complete Poems, trans. and ed. by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard (1995; reprint, Greenwich: Anvil Press, 2009), 188. Seferis may have been thinking of the cosmic power of Apollo himself, the god of truth and poetry, becoming a magical dolphin in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo: “In the open sea Apollo sprang upon their swift ship, like a dolphin in shape, and lay there, a great and awesome monster, and none of the crew gave heed so as to understand; but they sought to cast the dolphin overboard. But he kept shaking the black ship every way and made the timbers quiver. So they sat silent in their craft for fear, and did not ease the sheets throughout the black, hollow ship, nor lowered the sail of their dark-prowed vessel, but as they had set it first of all with oxhide ropes, so they kept sailing on; for a rushing south wind hurried on the swift ship from behind.” Eventually, the god-driven ship grounded on the beach at Crisa, not far from Delphi, and “like a star at noonday, the lord, far-working Apollō, leaped from the ship: flashes of fire flew from him thick and their brightness reached to heaven.” As translated by H. G. Evelyn-White in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica (Cambridge, Mass: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, p. 395ff.

  “as the wings”: Seferis, “Memory II,” line 10, p. 188.

  1: MEETING HOMER

  Robert Fagles: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Penguin, 1996).

  “Who would want”: Odyssey V.100–101.

  what he thinks: Ibid., X.472–74.

  “sea-blue”: Ibid., VIII.84.

  “the man of twists”: Ibid., I.1.

  “starred with flowers”: Ibid., XII.173. The Greek adjective anthemoenta means strictly no more than “flowery,” and it is Robert Fagles who has poeticized this phrase. But if Homer is, in the end, neither a pair of poems, nor the single author of them, but a living tradition, then that kind of enrichment of the inherited text seems entirely legitimate.

  “We know all”: Ibid., XII.189–91, Fagles XII.205–7.

  That is what: Carol Dougherty, in The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71–73, has a wonderful discussion of Odysseus’s “metapoetic ship” as a vehicle for the heroic life.

  Matthew Arnold’s famous lectures: Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at http://www.victorianprose.org/.

  2: GRASPING HOMER

  “Beauty is always”: The following scenes are based on but expanded and adapted from The Goncourt Journals by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (1962; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 83–85, 118–19.

  “I can’t remember”: The point that Renan failed to remember may have been that the word usually translated as “unharvestable” was said by the second-century AD Graeco-Roman grammarian Herodian, in a marginal comment on Homer’s text, to mean “never worn out,” or “unresting,” and so in several nineteenth-century translations the phrase became “the restless sea.” Most modern translations prefer “barren” or “unharvestable,” perhaps on the grounds that Homer doesn’t do cliché.

  Almost at the beginning: Odyssey II.337–70.

  “far from battle”: It can also mean “fighting at a distance,” like an archer, and so it was an appropriate name because archery was one of Odysseus’s skills and he might have wanted to pass it on to his son.

  “Ah dear child”: Odyssey II.363–70 (with parallel translation by A. T. Murphy, revised by G. E. Dimock [Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb / Harvard University Press, 1999]).

  “Each time I”: Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited (New York: New Directions, 1968), 7.

  “a jumbled heap”: John Keats, sonnet, “O Solitude,” lines 2–3.

  “the barbarous age”: Quoted in Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber, 1997), 10.

  Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Spenser, Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 12, line 204; Motion, Keats, 52.

  “The tide!”: Motion, Keats, 93.

  “both a lovely”: Ibid., 63.

  “a parallel universe”: Ibid., 41.

  “The conscious swains”: Pope’s translation of the Iliad, VIII.559.

  the 1780s: This point is brutally addressed by Matthew Arnold in On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at http://www.victorianprose.org/.

  “No man of true”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1824), 4. For an illuminating modern discussion of translation as a kind of alchemical process, see Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  “What he writes”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 4.

  “In Homer”: Ibid.

  “Virgil bestows”: Ibid., 12.

  “unaffected and equal”: Ibid., 18.

  “In vain his youth”: Iliad XX.537–46.

  “It is not to be doubted”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 17.

  “a treasure of poetical elegances”: Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope” (1779), in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London: J. Johnson, 1810), vol. 12, p. 112.

  “money-mongering”: Sonnet to Haydon, quoted in Motion, Keats, 119.

  “the ocean”: Keats, “Sonnet I. To My Brother George,” Aug. 1816, from Margate.

  “the fine rough”: Motion, Keats, 109.

  “turning to some”: Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollections of Keats” (1861), in Recollections of Writers (London: 1878), 120–57.

  “There did shine”: Quoted in Andrew Laing, The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (London, 1880), vol. 1, p. 510.

  “loose and rambling”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq, 17.

  “now totally neglected”: Johnson, “Life of Pope,” 112.

  “Chapman writes & feels”: S. T. Coleridge, “Notes on Chapman’s Homer,” in Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists: With Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge (London: Pickering, 1849), vol. 2, p. 231.

  “cool their hooves”: A phrase later borrowed by Christopher Logue for the moment when the two armies sit down to watch the duel between Paris and Menelaus.

  Now dark, now bright, now watch—

  As aircrews watch tsunamis send

  Ripples across the Iwo Jima Deep,

  Or, as a schoolgirl makes her velveteen

  Go dark, go bright—

  The armies as they strip, and lay their bronze

  And let their horses cool their hooves

  Along the opposing slopes.

  “One scene I could not fail”: Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollection of Keats” (1861) in Recollections of Writers (London, 1878), 130.

  “Just as when”: Odyssey V.328–30.

  “he then bends both knees”: Ibid., V.453–57.

  As a hero: See J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford Linguistics) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.

  “his knees no more”: Pope, Odyssey V.606–10.

  “For the heart”: Ibid., V.454 (Murray/Dimock, parallel text).

  “Odysseus bent his knees”: Homer, The Odyssey, tra
ns. E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu (1946; reprint, London: Penguin, 1991), 83.

  “his very heart”: Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), V.454.

  “The sea had beaten”: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1996), V.502.

  “beastly place”: Quoted in Motion, Keats, 74.

  “On the first looking”: This early draft, differing from the published version, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Keats 2.4 A.MS.

  “The troops exulting”: Pope’s Iliad VIII.553–65.

  “the cockney Homer”: J. G. Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. V,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Apr. 1819, 97.

  “A thing of beauty”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 1–5.

  Andrew Motion: Motion, Keats, 162.

  “And such too”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 20–21.

  “That question has no answer”: Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, foreword, 7.

  3: LOVING HOMER

  they don’t eat bread: Odyssey IX.191.

  Grilled meat: Ibid., XX.25–28.

  no moment was happier: Ibid., IX.10.

  “all professional athletes”: Plato, The Republic, book 3.

  fish was: The classical Greeks were baffled by Homer’s dislike of fish; they thought fish the ultimate delicacy and couldn’t understand why Homer’s heroes ate beef when they were so often sitting next to a prime fishing spot. This contempt for fish was perhaps a steppeland inheritance, from the time when a large herd of meaty animals was one of the identifying marks of a king or hero.

  Mindjack: “Mindjacking” is a term invented by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson.

  “I am conscious”: Plato, Ion, 380 BC, trans. Benjamin Jowett; see also Penelope Murray and T. Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2000), 1.

  “The gift which you possess”: Plato, Ion; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, 5.

  “There is no invention”: Plato, Ion; see also Murray and Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism, 5.

  “1 panegyrick poem”: See Macaulay’s History (London: Penguin, 1989), vol. 2, p. 32, describing the Homeric world of the late-seventeenth-century Highlands and islands: “Within the four seas and less than six hundred miles of London were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by an hereditary orator, by an hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties.” Also see David Stevenson, Highland Warrior: Alasdair Maccolla and the Civil Wars (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980), for the reemergence of a warrior society in the power vacuum created by the failure of the Scottish crown. The warrior world emerges not at a moment in history but at repeated phases of human social and political arrangements, when there is no overarching authority in control.

  the people of Pylos: Odyssey III.5–6.

  Odysseus weeps: Ibid., V.151.

  he finds Nausicaa: Ibid., VI.1ff.

  draw up their ships: Ibid., XI.20.

  Odysseus lands: Ibid., XIII.195ff.

  “The way they take”: Lattimore, Iliad IX.182, Fagles IX.217–20; a mixture of the two.

  “To wander in anguish”: Adapted from Fagles, Iliad XXIV.14–15.

  “on her golden throne”: Odyssey X.541.

  “her veil the colour”: Iliad XXIII.227.

  “that bellows”: Odyssey II.421.

  He spreads his sail: Ibid., V.268.

  “and the wind”: Ibid., XI.10.

  “So these two”: Lattimore, Iliad VIII.1–8.

  “Back towards home”: Ibid., XXIII.229–30.

  “the black ship”: Odyssey XI.1–14.

  red-painted bows: Lattimore, Iliad II.637.

  “The wind catches”: T. E. Shaw, The Odyssey (1932), quoted in Rodelle Weintraub and Stanley Weintraub, “Chapman’s Homer,” Classical World 67, no. 1 (Sept.–Oct. 1973), 16–24.

  “Thus with stretched sail”: Ezra Pound, “Canto 1,” 9–10.

  4: SEEKING HOMER

  “germana et sincera”: Joh. Baptista Caspar d’Ansse de Villoison, Homeri Ilias ad Veteris Codicis Veneti Fidem Recensita (Paris, 1788), xxxiv.

  “I will send”: Robert Southey, ed., The Works of William Cowper (London, 1836), vol. 6, p. 266.

  Friedrich August Wolf: Wolf, a highly irritable man, claimed never to have had a dream in his life. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 265.

  “No such person”: Thomas De Quincey, “Homer and the Homeridae,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Oct. 1841, 411–27.

  “sovereign poet”: Dante, Inferno IV.88.

  “was dumb to me and I am deaf to it”: E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 136.

  Medieval Odysseys: For the most illuminating account of the early texts of Homer, see M. L. West, ed. and trans., Lives of Homer, in Homeric Hymns etc. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 2003), 296ff.

  brought to Italy: L. Labowsky, Bessarion’s Library and the Biblioteca Marciana—Six Early Inventories (Rome: Sussidi Eruditi, 1979).

  Flinders Petrie found: William M. Flinders Petrie, Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe (London, 1889). Plate xix shows many of these objects.

  “The floating sand”: Ibid., chapter 5, on the papyri, written by Archibald Sayce, p. 39.

  “The roll had belonged”: Ibid., p. 35.

  This Hawara Homer: P. Hawara 24–28 (Bodleian Libr., Gr. Class. A.1 (P)). Iliad I.506–10, II.1–877, with many lacunae. http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk/Hawara-bw/72dpi/Hawara_Homer%28viii%29.jpg.

  “the grandeur of the dooms”: Keats, Endymion, book 1, 20–21.

  Phaeacians: A mythical people, not to be confused with the Phoenicians, an ancient civilization with its origins on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in modern Lebanon and Syria. Odyssey IX.8–10.

  “Homer is the greatest”: Plato, The Republic, 607 a 2–5.

  “Just as a poppy”: Iliad VIII.306–8.

  “to a place”: Ibid., VIII.491.

  In Troy itself: The Venetus A scholia on this passage are analyzed by Graeme Bird in “Critical Signs—Drawing Attention to ‘Special’ Lines of Homer’s Iliad in the Manuscript Venetus A,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, ed. Casey Dué (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 112–14.

  “dogs, carried by the fates”: Iliad VIII.526–40; combination of Murray/Dimock and Fagles VIII.617–28.

  “We go to liberate”: BBC News, 20 March 2003: “UK Troops Told: Be Just and Strong,” originally from a pooled report by Sarah Oliver, Mail on Sunday.

  Alexandrian scholars: See Richard P. Martin, “Cretan Homers: Tradition, Politics, Fieldwork,” Classics@ 3 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012).

  “The further back”: Casey Dué, “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, 25.

  “young, headstrong”: S. Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1922), 142.

  Would a man: Ibid., 9, referring to Odyssey IX.483, 540. But see the footnote on pp. 350–51 of The Odyssey, Murray/Dimock (1999), which justifies Homer’s apparent mistake by explaining that between the two mentions of the rudder on Odysseus’s ship, the Greeks had turned the ship around. The ship of course only had a rudder, or steering oar, at the stern, but within the course of the story, the ship was facing in two different directions.

  “killed many men”: David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), letter no. 431, January 31, 1931, pp. 709–10.

  in fact the Baltic: Felice Vinci, Omero nel Baltico, with introductions by R. Calzecchi Onesti and F. Cuomo (Rome: Palombi Editori, 1998).

  guidebook to the stars: Florence Wood and Kenneth Wood, Homer’s Secret Iliad: The Epic of t
he Night Skies Decoded (London: John Murray, 1999).

  Homer was from Cambridgeshire: Iman Wilkens, Where Troy Once Stood, 2nd ed. (London: Rider, 2009; a theory first developed by Théophile Cailleux, a Belgian lawyer, in Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère. Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amérique (Paris, 1878) and Théorie nouvelle sur les origines humaines. Homère en Occident. Troie en Angleterre (Brussels, 1883).

  Henriette Mertz: Henriette Mertz, The Wine Dark Sea: Homer’s Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic (Chicago: self-published, 1964).

  everywhere and nowhere: M. L. West, ed. and trans., Lives of Homer, 433.

  “The people of Ios”: Ibid., 435.

  “For you were born”: Ibid., 413. Pseudo-Plutarch is quoting the epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica, writing ca. 20 BC.

  He is the embodiment: See, for example, ibid., 429.

  “U re u re na-nam”: Quoted in M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61.

  “attend to what”: J. Black, “Some Structural Features of Sumerian Narrative Poetry,” in Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?, ed. M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 71–101.

  One more story: See West, Lives of Homer, 399, 411, 421–23, 437–39, 441–43, 447–49, for versions of this story.

  “Here the earth”: Ibid., 448.

  5: FINDING HOMER

  “the purple on account”: Eustathius VI.8, quoted in M. L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75; impossibly expensive editions of Eustathius commentaries are M. van der Valk, ed., Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes ad Fidem Codicis Laurentiani Editi, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971–1987).

  “Remember me”: H. G. Evelyn-White, trans., Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, pp. 165ff.

  “a well-girt man”: John Boardman, Excavations in Chios, 1952–1955: Greek Emporio (London: British School at Athens, 1967), supplementary vols., no. 6, pp. iii–xiv, 5.