Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  “wretched throughout”: Ibid., pp. iii–xiv, 4.

  If Homer was an ancient inheritance: It may feel a little awkward referring to Homer as “it,” but that awkwardness reflects the question at the heart of this book. Is Homer to be thought of as an author or a cultural phenomenon? A man or a society? Or a sequence of societies? The discomfort we feel is the point. If he is an ancient inheritance, then “he” must be an “it.”

  “For masterpieces are not single or solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”—Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

  Giorgio Buchner: Giorgio Buchner, “Recent Work at Pithekoussai (Ischia), 1965–71,” Archaeological Reports 17 (1970–1971), 63–67; D. Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); G. Buchner and D. Ridgway, Pithekoussai, La necropoli: Tombe 1–723. Scavate dal 1952 al 1961 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1993).

  “to monkey about”: Catherine Connors, “Monkey Business: Imitation, Authenticity, and Identity from Pithekoussai to Plautus,” Classical Antiquity 23, no. 2 (Oct. 2004), 179–207.

  Much of their pottery: For images and information on the exhibits in the Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae in the Villa Arbusto on Ischia, see http://www.pithecusae.it/colonia1.htm.

  “will lick the blood”: Iliad XXI.122–27.

  voracious monsters: In 1934, part of the scapula of a young fin whale (average adult length sixty feet) was found in a well in the area that would later become the Agora in Athens. The pottery alongside it was slightly earlier than the Attic cratēr found in Ischia. Terrifyingly vast fish undoubtedly swam in the Odyssean world. This shoulder blade was probably used as a cutting surface, perhaps by a butcher or fishmonger. John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo, “A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World,” American Journal of Archaeology 106, no. 2 (Apr. 2002), 187–227.

  “someone whose name”: From Kate Monk, Onomastikon (1997). http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/Ancient-World/Greece/Male.html.

  Eighth-century inscriptions: Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon’s Tablet,” Classical Journal 84, no. 4 (Apr.–May 1989), 293.

  but witty remarks: Ibid., 299.

  the first joke: Another scratched inscription on a mid-eighth-century wine jug unearthed in Athens may be slightly older. It was probably given as a prize in a dancing competition and carries the beautiful verse “hos nun orcheston panton atalotata paizēi,” “whoever of all these dancers now plays most delicately” would, the implication is, receive this jug as a prize. This Greek Renaissance writing begins with dance and delight and competition. B. Powell, “The Dipylon Oinochoe Inscription and the Spread of Literacy in 8th Century Athens,” Kadmos 27 (1988), 65–86.

  during a passage: Iliad XI.632–37.

  giant unliftable cups: M. L. West, “Grated Cheese Fit for Heroes,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998), 190–91.

  bronze cheese graters: D. Ridgway, “Nestor’s Cup and the Etruscans,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16 (1997), 325–44.

  the joke and invitation: Not everyone agrees it was a joke. See Christopher A. Faraone, “Taking the ‘Nestor’s Cup Inscription’ Seriously: Erotic Magic and Conditional Curses in the Earliest Inscribed Hexameters,” Classical Antiquity 15, no. 1 (Apr. 1996), 77–112.

  6: HOMER THE STRANGE

  essentially oral: M. S. Edmondson, Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 323.

  “a sequel of songs”: R. Bentley, Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking (London, 1713).

  “quiet in manner”: William C. Greene, “Milman Parry (1902–1935),” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 71, no. 10 (Mar. 1937), 535–36.

  the first to develop: Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), vol. 1, p. x.

  “an aura of the Latin Quarter”: Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,” Classical Journal 32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.

  “How can we grasp”: Renan’s essay on L’Avenir de Science (Paris, 1892), 292, quoted in Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2, 409.

  Here … is an English hexameter: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), line 1.

  Just under a third: There are 9,253 repetitive lines out of a total of 27,803.

  and so on through the whole cast: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 39.

  “The poetry … was not one”: Ibid., 425.

  “Darwin of Homeric scholarship”: Ibid., xxvi.

  “a machine of memory”: James I. Porter, “Homer: The Very Idea,” Arion, 3rd ser., 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002), 57–86.

  up to 494: Steve Reece, “Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory,” Classical World 93, no. 2, Homer (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 185–99; M. M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim: 1984), 206; M. W. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 5, p. 55.

  But for Parry: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 21.

  “The tradition is”: Ibid., 450.

  “One’s style should”: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1404 b 10.

  “genuine poetry”: T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber, 1999), 238.

  not originally a written: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, xxiii–xxiv.

  You have your formulas: Ibid., 448.

  the overused recourse: Ibid.

  almost exactly a ton: http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html.

  “a tall, lean”: From the draft of a text intended for a popular audience written in 1937 by Parry’s youthful assistant Albert Lord. http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/about/intro.html.

  “Finally Avdo came”: Ibid.

  “It takes the full strength”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 457.

  Each singer sang: Ibid., 458, 460.

  In June 1935: Halil Bajgoric, “The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey,” Parry, no. 6699. www.oraltradition.org/static/zbm/zbm.pdf.

  “The moment he cherished”: Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,” Classical Journal 32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.

  “But why did you”: From Parry, Conversation 6698, in An eEdition of “The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey,” as performed by Halil Bajgorić, ed. and trans. John Miles Foley, on www.oraltradition.org.

  “The verses and the themes”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 449.

  They asked one singer: John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 43–44.

  “What is, let’s say”: Ibid., 44.

  “Plato thought nature”: W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” VI. 1–2, The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928).

  “The more I understand”: Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 451 (written in Jan. 1934), quoted in Richard Janko, “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,” Classical Quarterly, new ser., 48, no. 1 (1998), 1–13.

  written much later: Lord, The Singer of Tales.

  “It was the wet spring”: A conversation I reported before, in Sea Room (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 292.

  everything in his songs: Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 44; Parry, Conversation 6598 (same conversation as the words/phrases).

  “making the wince”: http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_NOTOPOULOS1.html; G. N. Antonakopoulos, “Mia Agnosti Seira Diskon Ellinikis Mousikis” (in Laïko Tragoudi, no. [2005], 16–19); see turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/arion_odysseus.doc.

  He found Sfakia: James A. Notopoulos, “The Genesis of an Oral Heroic Poem,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 3 (1960), 135–44.

  the opposite conclusion: Maartje Draak, “Duncan MacDonald of South Uist,” Fabula 1 (1
957), 47–58; William Lamb, “The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man: Hidden Influences from Printed Sources in the Gaelic Tales of Duncan and Neil MacDonald,” Oral Tradition 27, no. 1 (2012), 109–60.

  heir to the great traditions: See the Calum Maclean Project, Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, http://www.calum-maclean-project.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/home/; Lamb, “The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man.”

  “polished, shapely”: http://calumimaclean.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html.

  On analysis: Draak, “Duncan Macdonald of South Uist.”

  ethnographers have discovered: Douglas Young, “Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod,” Arion 6, no. 3 (Fall 1967), 279–324.

  “had in his head”: Ibid.

  7: HOMER THE REAL

  “the terrible noise”: Iliad VI.105.

  “As the generation”: From E. R. Lowry Jr., “Glaucus, the Leaves, and the Heroic Boast of Iliad VI.146–211,” in The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule, ed. J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris (1995; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 193; combined with Fagles, Iliad VI.171–75.

  “as many as the leaves”: Iliad II.468.

  “Near the city”: Ibid., II.811–14 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted).

  Epic poetry serves us: Jonas Grethlein, “Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 128 (2008), 27–51.

  “such as will remain”: Iliad III.287.

  the Muse provides: Odyssey VIII.479–81.

  in the same class: Iliad IX.364.

  Achilles’s iron heart: Ibid., XX.372. This is a translation of the phrase aithōni sidērō, which might also mean more prosaically “shining iron.”

  a profoundly ancient world: See Susan Sherratt, “Archaeological Contexts,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 119–42.

  his team had found six hundred: C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. 1, The Buildings and Their Contents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 6, 95–100; C. W. Blegen and K. Kourouniotis, “Excavations of Pylos, 1939,” American Journal of Archaeology 43 (1939), 569.

  No one could guess: Ione Mylonas Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World? A Tale of Seven Bronze Hinges,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998), 187–89.

  A piece of firewood: Christoph Bachhuber, “Aegean Interest on the Uluburun Ship,” American Journal of Archaeology 110, no. 3 (July 2006), 345–63.

  a moment from the Iliad: Iliad VI.119–236.

  “he quickly sent”: Ibid., VI.168–70.

  What does this description: T. R. Bryce, “The Nature of Mycenaean Involvement in Western Anatolia,” Historia 38 (1989), 13–14; Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon’s Tablet,” Classical Journal 84 (1989), 289–307; Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World?”; Byron Harries, “‘Strange Meeting’: Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad 6,” Greece and Rome 40 (1993), 133–47; T. R. Bryce, “Anatolian Scribes in Mycenaean Greece,” Historia 48 (1999), 257–64.

  It is a tiny: Not everyone agrees with this view of Homer’s Greeks—or in this distinction between Greek and Trojan. From the Odyssey comes all kinds of evidence that the Greeks were at home in palaces: Nestor and Menelaus live with elaborate and comfortable set-ups at Pylos and Sparta, full of warmth and ritualized hospitality. Even Odysseus’s home on Ithaca, while clearly not a major citadel, has megara skioenta, “shadowed halls,” like the rich Near Eastern palace of Alcinous in Scheria. These hints and suggestions can be taken as a sign that the Odyssey was deeply colored by its transmission through the palace centuries of the Mycenaean period, where the cultural expectations of a great man’s equipment had come to include a palace establishment.

  It is not the world: The Iliad, perhaps because the circumstances of war did not encourage it, remained more resistant to these later influences. It is true that even in the Iliad Mycenae is described as euktimenon ptoliethron, “a well-founded citadel” (Iliad 2.569–70), polychrysos, “rich in gold” (Iliad 11.46) and, like Troy, euruaguia, “with broad streets” (Iliad 4.52). But these are no more than marginal suggestions. The poetic weight of warriorhood in the poem remains firmly on the Greek side, and the poetic weight of civility and urbanness firmly on the Trojan. Hector is undoubtedly a ferocious warrior, but he is nearly alone as such among the Trojans, who do not entirely admire him for it. Paris and Priam, on the other hand, represent two contrasting dimensions of urban civility—wise government and a tendency to foppishness—and they appear as they do not because of the circumstances in which they find themselves but because of their essential natures. The same is true of Achilles: he will be the unaccommodated man in whatever circumstances he finds himself. For all the surrounding realism and nuance, these are the polarities the Iliad dramatizes.

  “floats all through”: Emily Townsend Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 4, 250th anniversary issue (Dec. 1993), 689–703.

  in many parts earlier: M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988), 151–72.

  but the Iliadic words: Ibid.

  “There are in all”: Quoted in Ernst Meyer, “Schliemann’s Letters to Max Müller in Oxford,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 82 (1962), 24, 92.

  he identified the warriors: Schliemann claimed in a telegram to a Greek newspaper that on exposing one of the jewel-encrusted kings he felt that “this corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon” (Cathy Gere, The Tomb of Agamemnon: Mycenae and the Search for a Hero [London: Profile, 2006], 76). He never said, as is usually reported, that he had “gazed on the face of Agamemnon,” nor was he referring to the wonderful gold face mask now universally referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon. That handsome, mustachioed boulevardier king, the most famous face of the Bronze Age, belonged to another grave. Immediately before sending his telegram, Schliemann had looked at a dead body “whose round face, with all its flesh had been wonderfully preserved,” eyes and teeth all there. That face had also been covered in a gold mask, but it is a strange thing, clean-shaven, as round as a football, fat-cheeked and pig-eyed, an image of regality that has never been explained. (See Gere, The Tomb of Agamemnon, 79, for an illustration of the gold mask from Shaft Grave IV of Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 1550–1500 BC.)

  very like the world: Homer does not describe burials of the kind that are found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Homeric hero is always cremated on a pyre and his remains put in a container that is then buried within a large tumulus. That form of interment is found all over the Indo-European world but not in Greece, at least until the eighth century BC (see H. L. Lorimer, “Pulvis et Umbra,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 53 [1933], 161–80). Different Indo-European peoples at different times both cremated and buried their dead. So this is a conundrum: are the burial practices in Homer evidence of their being very late poems, no earlier than the eighth century BC? Or is this evidence of some deep memory of early Indo-European traditions which also gave rise to cremation for heroes in Scandinavia, and to people in India and Iran? See J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, eds., Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1997), 151.

  “the slayers and the slain”: Iliad XI.83–162.

  “ungentle is”: Ibid., XI.137: ameiliktos d’op akousan.

  “more loved by the vultures”: Ibid., XI.162.

  “And just as when”: Ibid., XI.269–72 (Murray/Wyatt, adapted).

  “As when the open sea”: Ibid., XIV.16–20 (Lattimore, adapted).

  “Philologists often dislike”: Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer.”

  “He speaks”: Iliad XVI.856–57, XXII.362–63.

  The difference: Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Oakland: University of California Press, 1979), 9, 10. “Now a doctor in Düsseldorf has succ
eeded in quantifying the soul by placing the beds of his terminal patients on extremely sensitive scales. ‘As they died and the souls left their bodies, the needles dropped twenty-one grams.’” She was quoting Dr. Nils-Olof Jacobson, “Life After Death,” Boston Globe, December 19, 1972. The claim that the weight of the soul is twenty-one grams was first made in 1901 by a group of American doctors, most prominently Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts, who carried out experiments reported in the New York Times in March 1907.

  8: THE METAL HERO

  Parys Mountain: For a full account of Parys Mountain, see Bryan D. Hope, A Curious Place: The Industrial History of Amlwch (1550–1950) (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 1994).

  In about 8000 BC: B. W. Roberts, C. P. Thornton and V. C. Piggott, “Development of Metallurgy in Eurasia,” Antiquity 83 (2009), 1012–22.

  Only then did someone: Evgenii N. Chernykh, Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age, trans. Sarah Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  It became a world: Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 108–9, 114, 123–24.

  “The broad picture”: Richard J. Harrison, Symbols and Warriors: Images of the European Bronze Age (Bristol: Western Academic and Specialist Press, 2004).

  patterns that recur: See Kristiansen and Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society, passim.

  Were these movements: Ibid., 142–250.

  The teeth of an early Bronze Age man: A. P. Fitzpatrick, The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen (Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology, 2011).

  Chemical analysis: See online report at www.wessexarch.co.uk/projects/kent/ramsgate.

  It seems inescapable: Stephen Oppenheimer, “A Reanalysis of Multiple Prehistoric Immigrations to Britain and Ireland Aimed at Identifying Celtic Contributions,” in Celtic from the West, ed. B. Cunliffe and J. T. Koch (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 142.

  A different, nonurban: Philip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126ff.