Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Wolf’s theory was immediately taken up and expanded by scholars known as Analysts, who combed through the two epics, confidently identifying traces of many poems by many poets. One advantage of this approach was that it explained the many inconsistencies and oddities of the texts, some historical (the poems refer to elements of both Bronze and Iron Age technology) and some linguistic. A notorious example of the latter is the “Embassy” in Book 9, in which the three Greeks supplicate Achilles to return to battle. The problem is that verbs and pronouns used in the scene are of a special type called the “dual,” which can be employed only for pairs of things (eyes, legs, oxen, etc.). The presence of the dual was clearly a remnant of an earlier version of the scene, in which only two Greeks were sent to Achilles’ tent. The grammatically impossible dual stayed in the text, uncorrected, because there was, really, no author—no one poet overseeing the whole affair. There it remains, like a fossilized inclusion in a slab of polished stone.

  The Analysts held sway throughout the nineteenth century. But early in the twentieth an American scholar named Milman Parry had a game-changing insight into one of the most striking features of the Homeric epics: the repeated use of rigidly formulaic epithets—“swift-footed Achilles,” say, or “rosy-fingered Dawn.” Like everyone else who’d read the poems in Greek, Parry knew that these epithets always fill the same position in whichever line they appear—that they were ready-made metrical placeholders. But, unlike everyone else, Parry had studied the techniques of living epic poets. (He observed and recorded Yugoslav bards in the 1930s.) What he suddenly grasped was that, while the epithets can seem wearyingly repetitive and add nothing substantive to the action of the poems, they do serve the needs of a poet who’s composing while he recites. If you’re improvising and know in advance how a line of verse is going to end—“swift-footed Achilles,” say—you can devote your attention to the middle, the part you’re actually inventing. (Think about rap, with its insistent, carrying beat and its predictable, if often approximate, end rhymes.)

  The “oral theory” about the use of formulas (which could be linked together to create clusters of lines or entire prefabricated scenes) suggested not only how poems of such length were created but also how they might have been transmitted over centuries without being written down. And it also explained away the inconsistencies and repetitions that had troubled the Analysts: each successive bard used whatever traditional material suited him, even as he added and shaped and refined.

  This is the orthodoxy that M. L. West has challenged, using the old techniques of the Analysts to demonstrate that hundreds of lines of the canonical text weren’t original. But original to what? For the oralists, “original” is a red herring. West’s controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer (although West calls him “P,” for poet) and that this poet actually wrote down a “primal text” of the Iliad, revising it over many years. This apparently regressive heresy, set forth in articles, books, and a two-volume edition of the Greek text, has led to bitter exchanges in the pages of scholarly journals, filled with abstruse proofs that, to the uninitiated, might seem like the dialogue in a Star Trek episode (“Movable nu was already being used in this early period for the sake of preventing hiatus caused by the loss of digamma”).

  However academic the debate may appear, a lot depends on who’s right. For one thing, an Iliad without the Doloneia is a very different poem from an Iliad with one. But what’s really at stake is how we think about the whole of the classical tradition. Say West is right, and the Doloneia is a later interpolation by another poet: the fact is that Book 10 has been part of the Iliad since antiquity, commented on and interpreted for two and a half millennia, and even furnishing the material for a Greek tragedy (the Rhesus, attributed to Euripides). In one obvious sense, the Iliad is simply the poem that we have possessed all this while.

  An imperfect but perhaps helpful analogy is Wikipedia. For the oralists, the text of the Iliad is like a wiki: it’s the thing as a whole that matters, not only the kernel of text that someone first put up but also the additions, corrections, and deletions made by others over time. You could say that, for these people, “Homer” is the process itself. For West, it’s the original kernel that counts—a text that he thinks he has been able to identify because, like someone turning on the edit function in Wikipedia, he can go in and view the accretions, where they are and who made them, and when.

  West’s proposed emendations to the texts are couched in the meticulous language of classical scholarship, and take the form of suggestions and proposals; perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West’s vision in stone. His new translation not only deletes passages that West merely brackets or questions but omits even some passages that West thinks were “expansions” by P himself. For this reason, his Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before (and, in the end, destined to be a specialty act).

  Most of the time, the elisions are small, and they do eliminate some hiccups. For instance, West brackets a line in Book 13 in which Hector springs down from his chariot, on the not unreasonable grounds that Hector hasn’t been riding in a chariot. Sometimes they are larger and will alter your sense of a passage. Here, too, it’s not necessarily for the worse. Toward the end of that beautifully intimate moment between Hector and Andromache in Book 6, the wife makes her famous appeal for caution on the part of her husband, whom she memorably describes as being “everything” to her—“my father, my mother, my brother”: in the standard text, this poignant address is followed by seven lines in which this Trojan matron suddenly gives her husband advice on the deployment of his troops. Aristarchus thought there was something fishy about these verses, although West suggests that they were an expansion by P: Mitchell omits them.

  Mitchell’s stripping away takes other, subtler forms. In a translator’s note, he cites the now canonical judgment of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who, in an 1861 essay called “On Translating Homer,” enumerated what he saw as the four cardinal qualities of Homeric verse: rapidity, plainness of syntax and diction, plainness of thought, and nobility. Homer’s Greek is capacious enough that he can achieve all four, but English translators have generally had to choose one or two at the expense of the others. (The sole exception is probably Alexander Pope, whose Iliad, set in rhyming couplets and published between 1715 and 1720, is among the greatest translations of any work in any language.) Richmond Lattimore’s craggy 1951 translation, which imitates Homer’s expansive six-beat line and sticks faithfully to his archaisms (“Odysseus … laid a harsh word upon him”), has nobility but not rapidity; classicists tend to favor it. The Fagles has a gratifying plainness—my students have always preferred it—but doesn’t get the grandeur. Other interpreters go their own way. The stark War Music of Christopher Logue is more an adaptation than a translation; Stanley Lombardo’s 1997 version goes for a tight-lipped, soldierly toughness—a post-Vietnam Iliad.

  Mitchell certainly gets the rapidity: this Iliad is by far the most swift-footed in recent memory, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls (long-short-short) of Homer’s lines. This is especially useful in those many passages in which characters speak with heated emotion—“with wingèd words,” to use the famous formulaic epithet. (An astonishing 45 percent of the poem is direct speech.) In Book 1, for instance, Achilles, at the climax of his argument with Agamemnon, rounds on his commander in chief and insults him openly. Here is Lattimore:

  “You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people for battle.”

  Mitchell’s rendering, in a lurching trochaic rhythm, is far more vivid:

  “Drunkard, dog-face, quivering deer-hearted coward, you have never dared to arm with your soldiers for battle.”

  Among other things, Mitchell doesn’t make the mistake of weakening the first line by carrying it over to the next—an enjamb
ment that isn’t in the Greek.

  But too often Mitchell’s insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Precisely because Homer’s Greek is an old inheritance—an amalgam of many styles and periods and dialects going back many centuries (no one ever spoke the Greek you read in Homer)—it has a distinctively archaic quality that, paradoxically, never gets in the way of speed. It likely sounded to Greek ears the way the King James Bible does to ours: old-fashioned but so much a part of the language that it never registers as stuffy. Not the least of the tools in Homer’s belt are those famous epithets, but for Mitchell, these can obscure what he calls the “meaning”: “ ‘Flashing-helmeted Hector,’ ” he writes, “means no more than ‘Hector.’ ” But “meaning” isn’t the point. Part of the way in which the epic legitimatizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms.

  All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. (Mitchell’s translation, which he has said took him only two years, is marked by a certain hastiness: he misses many opportunities to render Homer’s rich linguistic effects.) It’s as if the translator, like the scholar who inspired him, were trying to get at some purer Iliad. In this, both men are indulging in a very old habit. In an article called “Homer: The History of an Idea,” the American classicist James I. Porter suggests that the very idea that there is a Homer whom we can somehow get back to, if only we work diligently enough, is a cultural fantasy of purity that dates back to ancient times: Homer, he writes, “is, and probably always was … an idea of something that remains permanently lost to culture.” But the Iliad isn’t pure, at least not in that superficial way; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great.

  The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized because the question it raises is a modern—indeed, existentialist—one: How do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22, 2011 issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan that summer. What she said about him might shock some people but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:

  He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a choice to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.

  Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.

  —The New Yorker, November 7, 2011

  IN SEARCH OF SAPPHO

  ACCORDING TO A fragment of a Hellenistic elegy called “Loves, or the Beautiful Boys,” by a certain Phanocles, after the legendary poet Orpheus was torn to pieces by the women of Thrace, his head and his lyre—the instrument from which lyric poetry derives its name—were borne by the waves to the island of Lesbos, where they were subsequently buried. This geography was hardly casual. By the time Phanocles was writing, in the later 300s BC (the time of Alexander the Great), Lesbos had long been associated with exceptional achievement in the lyric arts. The reputation of a poet called Terpander, for instance, who came from the Lesbian city of Antissa and is listed on an extant monument as the winner of a song competition that occurred in the 670s BC, was such that he was credited—apocryphally, undoubtedly—with having invented the seven-stringed lyre. Two generations later, Arion, another Lesbian poet, served as a kind of artist in residence at the court of the ruler of Corinth, where he was responsible for raising the genre known as dithyramb to new expressive heights. This same Arion, as Herodotus relates, is said to have been rescued by a dolphin after being mugged and thrown overboard by hooligans during a voyage home from Syracuse.

  But no Lesbian poets were more famous or influential in antiquity than two who, of Arion’s contemporaries, were most renowned for their lyric songs: Alcaeus and Sappho. Both came from the hothouse social milieu of the Lesbian aristocracy, which was known as much for its political intrigues as for its love of pleasure and beauty—a love that in the classical Greek imagination was associated with the slightly decadent cultures that flourished in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, just across a narrow strip of water from Lesbos. The two poets, not surprisingly, seem to have known each other. (There is a fragment of Sappho, quoted by Aristotle, that has often been taken to be a playful dialogue between the two.)

  And yet the surviving fragments of their poems bespeak wildly divergent interests. Those of Alcaeus suggest a person, or at least a poetic persona, along the lines of an Elizabethan rake: there are drinking songs, war songs, and quite a few verses, often bitter ones, about the tumultuous political situation in Mytilene, Lesbos’s largest city and the two poets’ hometown. The first-century-BC scholar and critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who taught Greek to Romans, dryly noted that without the meter, certain of Alcaeus’ poems read like political speeches. The poems of Sappho, on the other hand, are famously and almost exclusively preoccupied by erotic yearning for young women. The poetess’s extraordinary gifts—her reputation a scant century after her death was such that Plato could refer to her as “the Tenth Muse”—may bring to mind the rich lyric tradition of her homeland (and thus suggest why Phanocles had Orpheus end up there), but it is her subject matter that explains why the place-name “Lesbos” has come to have connotations for us that are somewhat different from those it had for Phanocles and his readers.

  If the fanciful tale told in “Loves, or the Beautiful Boys” inevitably calls to mind the traditional association of Lesbos with erotic poetry—for Phanocles’ poem, as its name suggests, was a catalog of the loves of various gods and heroes for beautiful young boys—its story of the severed head also introduces another element that becomes crucial in any consideration of Sappho’s verse: fragments.

  The library at Alexandria possessed nine volumes—which is to say, rolled papyrus scrolls—of Sappho’s verses; the first book alone contained 1,320 lines. These books were arranged primarily by meter. (The first was a collection of poems composed in the distinctive four-line stanza known as the Sapphic strophe, a complicated and exacting meter later brilliantly adapted by Catullus into Latin; the second featured verses in something called Aeolic dactylic pentameter, composed in two-line stanzas; and so forth.) It is likely that the ninth book was a collection of poems known as epithalamia, songs to be sung during various stages of the wedding ritual; to this book belongs the fragment made famous as the title of J. D. Salinger’s book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters—the poem written, perhaps, on the occasion of a girl’s wedding to a rather tall man. (“The humour,” as Sappho’s greatest twentieth-century editor, Denys Page, grumpily noted in his definitive 1955 edition of the poems, “not for the last time in the history of weddings, is heavy and flat.”) Even if we grant that not every one of the nine books contained as many verses as did the first, the foregoing catalog should suffice to provide an idea of the extent of the original Sapphic corpus.

  Of that extensive output, we possess precisely one complete poem. (A second, nearly whole lyric, about the heartache of old age, emerged only in 2004, when two scholars realized that lines from a papyrus in Cologne completed a fragmentary poem that had been published in the 1920s.) Generally referred to as “Fragment 1” in the standard editions of Sappho’s works, this seven-stanza lyric, composed in Sapphic strophes, is a self-deprecatingly humorous request for assistance by the lovelorn Sappho to Aphrodite, goddess of love. (“Come to me now … be my ally.”) The reason it has survived, however, has nothing to do with love: the poem was quoted in full by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in an essay on literary composition because he admired its polish and intensity.

  It is, indeed, odd to contemporary readers, who are likely to value Sappho for those traits of emo
tional intensity, self-reflection, and subjective expressiveness that we see as fundamental to lyric poetry, that this most famous of all the ancient lyricists has survived primarily because of what seem to us today to be the dry preoccupations of long-dead pedants. One lovely fragment (“I would not think it right to touch the sky with my two arms”) comes to us because it contained a spelling of the Greek word for “sky” that interested the second-century-AD grammarian Herodian in his treatise “On Anomalous Words.” (Lest you conclude too hastily that Herodian’s interests were overly narrow, it should be noted that his other works included a study of the accentuation of the Iliad and Odyssey.) Some of the most emotionally stark snippets (“you’ve forgotten me / or you love some man more than me”) or the most tantalizing (“as long as you are willing …”) occur in a treatise by Herodian’s equally learned father, Apollonius Dyscolus, a book that even in antiquity was unlikely to have been a page-turner: On Pronouns.

  It’s probably safe to say that none of these fragments would arouse a great deal of excitement were it not for two facts: first, that Sappho was a woman, and second—even more, you suspect—that she wrote about desire. The first is a fascinating anomaly, given what we know of the often oppressive grip of Greek patriarchy, even in the comparatively relaxed milieu of the Lesbian elite. (Aristotle remarks that Sappho was honored “even though she was a woman.”) The second dovetails with certain ideas we have that are central not only to our understanding of lyric poetry but, indeed, to our conception of the self in general—desire and sexuality being so crucial to our contemporary understanding of personality. With a directness seemingly unmediated by vast stretches of time, Sappho seems to speak to us quite clearly today, no matter what the form our desire takes. “No one who has been in love,” the poet and classics scholar Anne Carson wrote at the beginning of Eros the Bittersweet, her brilliant and idiosyncratic 1986 study of Greek erotic poetry, “disputes her”—that is, argues with Sappho’s definition of eros as “bittersweet,” a word that Sappho in fact coined. (The Greek is glukupikron, which literally means “sweetbitter”; the significance of sweetbitter, as opposed to bittersweet, is just one of the many objects of Carson’s shimmering investigation.)