by Homer
Second, the end to which oral epic poets worked was the depiction of heroism in action – the winning of glory and fame through warfare and adventure, and the problems this raised. Homer is not unique in this. For example, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh (far older than Homer) bears some striking general and specific resemblances to the Iliad, e.g. Achilles and Gilgamesh are both sons of goddesses; both lose their dearest companions; both are devastated by their loss and take extreme action to try to compensate for it; and so on.19 Again, it is a universal characteristic of such story-telling to be influenced by the subject-matter and story patterns of folklore and myth. Herodotus already pointed out the folklore nature of the Iliad when he argued that no king in real life would ever allow his city to be sacked, his children to be killed and his people to be destroyed because his son had returned home with a foreign female.20
Third, the Homers of the Greek world recreated living stories for contemporary audiences by age-old techniques of oral composition common to all heroic poetry, i.e. by stringing together typical sequences of ‘themes’. For example, the first book of the Iliad contains an introduction, a supplication, a prayer, a divine visitation, summoning and dismissing an assembly, a journey by ship, a sacrifice, meals and entertainment, all entirely common to this type of composition. If one added arming/dressing, various types of battle-scene, messenger-scenes, reception-scenes, omens and sleeping, one would have covered the basic compositional elements of the Iliad.21
As a result of these sorts of considerations, one could conclude that the whole Iliad is invented: the Greeks never did attack Ilium, and there was no tradition of singing about a Trojan War in bronze-age Greece. But even if there is some truth to a Greek attack on Ilium, it is highly likely that four hundred years of oral story-telling obliterated any serious record of it. As for the antique gloss – chariots and bronze armour and so on – poets had an interest in making their poems seem old and authoritative; it may be the gloss was added by the poets themselves. Consequently, many scholars argue that Homer’s Iliad is much more the creation of contemporary and near-contemporary eighth-century BC culture. It was a response to the demands of a Greek audience of Homer’s time who inhabited the region known to Greeks as Ionia, to the south of Troy (see map 3: this is why, of course, there are so few Trojan place-names in that area). For some reason, now irrecoverable, they wanted an epic about Greek dealings with their neighbours to the north. Homer, drawing on all the resources of oral poetry, gave them one.22
Yet this surely cannot be the whole story. Even if the Iliad is essentially fiction, fiction does not preclude history. After all, novels are fictions but they usually try to evoke a real world, and the real world, at least of Homer’s day, looms large throughout the poem. For example, the economic background to the Iliad is agricultural, as it was for the whole of the ancient world (and indeed the modern world till the Industrial Revolution). Like the farmers of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, warriors made their living from the land. Homer does nothing to disguise this world, which constantly emerges even in the heat of battle.23 Pasturing herds is the real work of the day, and a hero may even come across a nymph while out in the fields, as Bucolion did, or some goddesses, as both Paris’ and Aeneas’ father Anchises did; less fortunately, he may meet a rampant Achilles, as Andromache’s brothers did. Diomedes raises horses, Andromache personally feeds Hector’s, Pandarus paints a moving picture of how he looks after his, Priam accuses his sons of being sheep-and cattle-thieves and himself rolls in the dung of the courtyard when he hears of Hector’s death. ‘Shepherd of the people’ is a common epithet for these heroes, values are assessed in worth of oxen and the fighting is constantly being likened to farmers defending their livestock against wild animals. The world of the heroes ‘back home’ is that of the farmer, and it is a proud calling. This is a constant and realistic background to the Iliad’s primarily martial, heroic world.24
Consider, too, the political implications of Homer’s depiction of the Greek army at Troy: at one moment it seems to be one united ‘people’, at another a loose confederation of troops drawn from contingents from all over Greece, whose leaders are in constant conflict with each other to win prestige. If this is a fair description, the army’s situation may well reflect Homer’s contemporary world, in which old-style, landed aristocrats continued to compete among themselves as a more ‘democratic’ city-state world began slowly to emerge.
Homer, then, hardly surprisingly, reflects his own world. If therefore one wishes to contend that he also reflects, in some measure, a past world, even one in which a Graeco-Trojan conflict did actually take place, one would have to argue that it is surely too much of a coincidence that Homer just happened to guess correctly when he described heroes living in walled palaces, carrying bronze weapons, wearing bronze armour and shin-guards, and fighting from chariots, or that Mycenae was rich in gold (7.180,11.46). One could then add to the case with reference to his Greek ‘catalogue of ships’ and list of Trojan contingents at the end of Book 2, which do seem to present a picture of a world bearing some resemblance to the bronze-age period (see maps 3 and 5 defining the areas from which the various contingents listed in the catalogues come).
Finally, one could point out that archaeologists have uncovered a flourishing town in the region Homer calls Troy (and we call the Troad, maps 1, 2). The mound in that area, named Hisarlik in Turkish and excavated by the adventurer and fantasist Heinrich Schliemann from 1870 to 1890,25 was certainly identified by later Greeks and Romans with Homer’s Ilium, as one can tell from the monuments they left there. Archaeology shows this town was subject to attack and siege around 1200 BC and also that it was in contact with bronze-age Greeks; and it is interesting that the fifth-century BC Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides date the Trojan War to round about that same period by counting back generations (some of which are, admittedly, mythical). Nor is Hisarlik too small to have been besieged for ten years, as seemed to be the case till recently. It now appears that Schliemann uncovered merely the citadel. New excavations have been interpreted to mean that the town was ten times larger than first thought: it extended to the south and was defended by a substantial ditch.
All that makes a respectable case for evidence of the deep past in Homer – but again, one has to ask whether it makes a case for a Homeric Trojan war? Opponents of the ‘Trojan war’ scenario would reply that there is no evidence of any sort that any attack on Hisarlik was ever carried out by Greeks. They would agree that the Iliad contains references to the geography of the Troad area, suggesting the poet knew it well (e.g. 9.5, 12.10–33), and that Ilium as Homer describes it may bear some resemblance to Hisarlik, but they would object that this tells us nothing about the historicity of the epic. Homer needed an ancient site for the battle: Hisarlik may have provided a perfect model for his imagination to work on. Nor does Homer provide us with enough evidence to suggest that he had a late bronze-age view of the area round Hisarlik, whose coastline had altered radically by Homer’s time, as core-drilling reveals. Certainly Homer presents a broad mental picture of what he thought the Trojan battlefield looked like, which Andrew Morley has made his best guess at representing (map 1), but that is not evidence for a Trojan War. (It is worth pointing out here that there will always be arguments about where the poet mentally envisaged the Greek camp and ships to be. Some place them to the north, along the shore of the Hellespont; others to the west, along the Aegean shore.)
On the balance of evidence at the moment, then, we may conclude that Homer’s poetry can be linked with a tradition of oral poetry that existed in the Mycenaean age. But the Iliad represents what Homer thought the heroic world should have looked like: in other words, he took what the tradition offered him and shaped it into the Iliad we have today, in accordance with his own cultural assumptions and narrative priorities as an oral epic poet. To that extent, the question whether there really was a Trojan War is irrelevant to Homer’s purposes. If there was one, we must find primary evidence for it outside
the Iliad. Who knows? Such evidence may indeed emerge, at some time in the future.
But whatever conclusions we wish to draw about the extent to which our Iliad might reflect anything that happened around Hisarlik in the thirteenth century BC, we must end by pointing out that Hisarlik itself was an important location at that time in its own right. The core-drilling referred to above has revealed the existence of a bay at that time reaching north from the Dardanelles to Hisarlik (as Morley’s representation shows). Since the entrance to the Dardanelles from the Aegean was hampered especially at this point by adverse currents and winds, Hisarlik would have made the perfect harbour in which to shelter. Hisarlik also traded widely in metalwork and textiles, and bred horses (hence those ‘horse-taming Trojans’). All this accounts for its great wealth, which can be judged from its fine walls and ‘Priam’s treasure’.26 Like Constantinople, it was defensible and could have controlled shipping on a major east-west route. So, in the thirteenth century BC, it was a place of strategic importance and certainly did have links with the Greek world.27
But, unlike Constantinople, it was unable to maintain its position. The rivers Scamander and Simoïs slowly silted it up. By Roman times, because of the presumed Homeric connection, it had largely become a tourist attraction.28
SOME TECHNICALITIES OF ORAL POETRY
In the 1920s, the American Milman Parry demonstrated that Homeric poetry was oral in style. This meant, first, that it was traditional, developed over hundreds of years of story-telling; indeed, it is clear that much of Homer’s language is so ancient that neither he nor we can be certain about the meanings of some of the words he used (see p. lxiv). Second, it meant that it was the sort of poetry that could be composed by professional, trained poets, in performance, without the help of writing. Since the metre in which Homeric poetry was composed is very complex, the training of poets like Homer must have consisted of listening to and learning from other poets fluent in the medium. To put it rather crudely, the fledgling poet must have somehow got at his fingertips thousands of almost pre-packaged but still flexible phrases, sentences and even whole scenes which fitted the metre and which had, over centuries of story-telling, turned out to be indispensable for the on-the-spot construction of long epic poems.
This accounts for all the verbal repetitions in Homer: everything from ‘glorious Hector’ through ‘swift-footed godlike Achilles’ to ‘he thudded to the ground, and his armour clattered about him’. About a fifth of Homer is, in fact, repeated. It also accounts for the patterns of action that recur again and again, the building-blocks of scene construction that are also part of the oral poet’s ‘kit’. Scenes of arrival, for example, are structured as follows: A sets off; A arrives; A finds B; B is doing something; others are doing things too; A speaks.29 Battle-scenes too follow regular patterns, for example (i) A does not kill B, B kills A (B here is always a Greek), (ii) A misses B, B hits but does not penetrate, A kills B (A here is always Greek), (iii) A misses B but kills C.30
Again, an oral poet, working without writing, has to learn how to keep a grip on his story-line, and one way Homer does this is by the device known as ‘ring-composition’. Here Menelaus protects Patroclus’ body:
Warlike Menelaus son of Atreus did not fail to notice that Patroclus had been overcome in battle by the Trojans. He advanced through the front ranks, bronze armour glittering, and stood over Patroclus’ body as a mother-cow stands protectively over the first calf she has brought into the world. So auburn-haired Menelaus stood over Patroclus and guarded the body with his spear and round shield, determined to kill anyone who advanced against him. (17.1–9)
Homer describes Menelaus in terms of a mother-cow protecting her calf. But he begins it by saying Menelaus ‘stood over Patroclus’ body as ...’ and ends it by saying ‘So auburn-haired Menelaus stood over Patroclus ...’. This is ‘ring-composition’ – repeating words or ideas to get the poet back to where he was when he started. Sometimes there are two or three rings, usually repeated in reverse order: in the above example, ‘bronze armour glittering’ might be picked up by ‘with his spear and round shield’. One might even then argue for a third ring, though it does involve a change of person – ‘Menelaus advanced. ..’ being picked up by ‘anyone who advanced against it’. This would give us three rings – a (advance), b (armour), c (stood) -picked up in reverse order by (c) stood, (b) armour, (a) advance.
Very many descriptions and similes (i.e. digressions in general) are structured in this way. So too are speeches.31
HOMER’S NARRATIVE STANCE
Our last sight of Achilles is of him asleep in the arms of Briseis, the woman Agamemnon took from him to start the trouble. It is a poignant farewell to the central figure of the Iliad, but it is typical of Homer that he does no more than describe the moment: ‘But Achilles slept in a corner of his well-made hut; and fair-cheeked Briseis slept beside him’ (24.675–6). Generally speaking, Homer in his role as third-person narrator simply reports. He does not comment, evaluate or tell us how to respond. That is why Homer is sometimes called ‘restrained’ or even ‘objective’, as if (to use a modern analogy) he were nothing but a camera, dispassionately surveying the scene without making any judgement upon it.
In fact, of course, Homer is as subjective as any camera since he carefully selects the scenes he wishes to survey and the angle from which he views them; further, he is free to control in any way he wishes what his characters do and say to each other, and how they react and interact. It is in the speeches especially that moral positions are taken and evaluative language deployed. But that does not alter the main point: that Homer himself does not obviously impose his views on us by using his privileged position as third-person narrator to push us into one response or another. He lets the characters speak for themselves and keeps himself in the background. He rarely puts thoughts into people’s minds or interprets mental states. Homer’s practice can be strongly contrasted with that of the Roman poet Virgil, for example, who is constantly alerting us to the ‘correct’ view of matters (so Dido, in love with Aeneas, ‘gave no thought to appearance or her good name and no longer kept her love a secret in her own heart, but called it marriage, using the word to cover her guilt’32). The modern novelist, too, can rarely resist the temptation to tell us how to interpret a character or scene.
Nevertheless, Homer is not quite as guileless as all that. Here Hector launches his final, fatal attack on Achilles, and Homer decorates the moment with a simile: ‘He gathered himself and swooped like a high-flying eagle that drops to earth through black clouds to pounce on a tender lamb or cowering hare’ (22.308).
Hector, then, is the eagle and Achilles the tender lamb. We are entitled to wonder how the poet can bring himself to develop such an apparently absurd comparison.
‘Focalization’ is the technical term for asking of any literary text, ‘Through whose eyes is the reader supposed to understand these words’?33 Clearly Achilles cannot be described as a ‘tender lamb’ in any objective terms. The simile makes best sense if we ‘see’ it through Hector’s eyes. Hector is preparing himself for the ultimate trial. It is as if he is trying to convince himself that he is an eagle, Achilles a lamb, as he charges. The simile is therefore ‘focalized’ through Hector’s eyes, at that moment in time, giving us a subtle narrator’s insight into how he is thinking.
It is especially important to bear this technique in mind when we read the speeches. Homeric heroes say what is in their interest to say at the time. It may not be the objective truth. For example, when Achilles sees the Greeks in serious trouble after he has rejected the embassy begging him to return, he exclaims to Patroclus: ‘now I think the Greeks will be gathering at my knees in supplication! They are in desperate straits’ (11.609). One might object that in Book 9 the Greeks had already gathered at his knees in supplication, and Achilles had rejected them. But that is not the point. This is a mocking cry of triumph – the situation will show the Greeks how much they need Achilles now.
Again, when Ach
illes rejects that embassy, he informs his audience that he has two life-options:
‘My divine mother, silver-footed Thetis, says that destiny has left two courses open to me on my journey to the grave. If I stay here and fight it out round Ilium, there is no home-coming for me, but there will be eternal glory instead. If I go back to the land of my fathers, my heroic glory will be forfeit, but my life will be long and I shall be spared an early death.’ (9.410–16)
This is news to us. Up till now, we have been told that Achilles was doomed to a short but glorious life.34 But this revelation, designed for the moment, is perfectly judged to convince the embassy that it will not succeed. In both these cases Homer is refocalizing the action through the eyes of a specific hero in a specific situation.
The issue of focalization is an important one because it may cause us to rethink our views about the ‘objectivity’ of Homer’s third-person narrative. Can we be quite certain, for example, that when Homer calls Odysseus ‘resourceful’ or describes war ‘with all its tears’, he is doing nothing but reporting the facts as he sees them? Might there not still be an element of the evaluative about these descriptions?
SPEECH, ACTION AND CHARACTER
One tends to associate heroic epic with action. But in the Iliad there are no fewer than 666 speeches, making up over 40 per cent of the whole work. The most remarkable fact of all is that, though Achilles is absent from more than half the Iliad, his voice is heard far more than anyone else’s.35 Hector and Agamemnon come next, appropriately enough (though a very long way behind) – they are the leaders of their armies and also the main foils for Achilles. ZEUS as king of the gods has the most to say on the divine side, as one would expect.
