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A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
That is poetry as balm, even, as Andrew Motion has said, as medicine, the discipline which Keats was now abandoning for life as a poet. Keats went on to describe the ways in which beauty manifests itself in the world, the consolations it provides in ‘Trees old and young’, ‘daffodils/With the green world they live in’, streams and shady woods, ‘rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms’. But then, at the centre of this first part of the poem, drenched in memories of Shakespeare’s sweetest lyrics, comes this, the bass note of a Homeric presence, a sudden manliness, a scale of imagined beauty that encompasses the depths of the past:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead.
Homer is the foundation of truth and beauty, and Keats was happy to say that ‘we’ had imagined his poetry. Homer will enlarge your life. Homer is on a scale that stretches across human time and the full width of the human heart. Homer is alive in anyone who is prepared to attend. Homerity is humanity. Richmond Lattimore, making his great version of the Iliad in the late 1940s, when asked ‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ replied: ‘That question has no answer for those who do not know the answer already.’ Why another book about Homer? Why go for a walk? Why set sail? Why dance? Why exist?
THREE (#ulink_ac5f1c8e-95b4-547f-9e78-4f0267f84c61)
Loving Homer (#ulink_ac5f1c8e-95b4-547f-9e78-4f0267f84c61)
HOMER-LOVE CAN FEEL LIKE a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every nook of your consciousness. What would Homer have had for breakfast? (Oil, honey, yoghurt and delicious bread. One of the things that is wrong with the Cyclopes is that they don’t eat bread.) Or a picnic? (Grapes, figs, plums, beans.) How did he feed his heroes? (Grilled meat and thoroughly cooked sausages.) What did he think of parties? (He loved them: no moment was happier for a man than sitting down to a table loaded with wine and surrounded by his friends.)
These were questions the Greeks asked. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates was impressed by Homer’s decision, for example, that no hero should ever eat iced cakes: ‘all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind’. Protein – well salted, not boiled – was the stuff for heroes. And it had to be red meat; fish was the last resort,
and chickens had yet to arrive from the Far East: they reached the Aegean in about 500 BC, known to the Greeks as ‘the Persian Bird’.
I have a way now of finding Homer wherever I look for him. No encounter, no landscape is without its Homeric dimension. In a way, Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half-discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom. There must be a name for this colonisation of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past. Possession, maybe? Mindjack? In one of his Socratic dialogues, Plato has a wonderful image for the secret and powerful hold that Homer has on his listeners. Socrates is talking to Ion, a mildly ridiculous rhapsode, a man who made his living by reciting and speaking about Homer. ‘I am conscious in my own self,’ Ion tells Socrates in phrases which even two and a half millennia later have a whiff of the stage, ‘and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.’ If Greeks had moustaches, Ion would be twirling his.
The Socratic eyebrow rises a little, but he then tells Ion the truth, a little slyly, the Socratic wisdom masquerading as flattery. ‘The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer,’ Socrates says,
is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.
The poet, Socrates tells him, is ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ – Homer not as great bearded mage, but like the bird Blegen found, or a mosquito, a flitting bug – of no substance, swept here and there on the winds of poetry. ‘There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.’
Plato affects to despise poetry, for the way it interferes with the rational mind, but it is clear that he was in love with it, moved by it as much as Ion could ever hope to be. And he identified the mechanism: there is no act of will in loving Homer. You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you. And so, like Ion, you hang as a curtain ring from him, who hangs from the Muse, who hangs from her father Greatness and her mother Memory.
I cannot go for a walk in the English chalklands without imagining the cold damp Iliads that must have been sung there. Every burial in an English Bronze Age round barrow must have had a version of these heroic songs sung at its making. But Homer is also in the Hebrides and off the coast of Ireland. Traditions of heroic song have endured there. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate on Harris by his Macleod chief, for which he had to pay ‘1 panegyrick poem every year’. That is Homeric rent. Wild unadorned landscapes or places of great antiquity summon his archetypes and their stories. Pope thought that for Virgil, Homer and nature were indistinguishable, and for me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.
No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in Book 3 of the Odyssey, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in Book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso’s island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in Book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, coloured by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very centre of the Odyssey, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.
In the Iliad, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in Book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a sea shore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon’s terror:
So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once,
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of great Achilles
round with speed and ease.
It is also the place of grief, where later in the Iliad, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night to
wander in anguish, aimless along the surf, and dawn on dawn
flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.
As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawnlit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf: no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.
As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer than the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The set-up for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These are the scenes which have the oldest form of Greek in them, and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.
And so today a friend – Martin Thomas – stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying not shouting the goodbye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulae, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment, and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.
So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudder-stock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?
Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So, today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.
But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice, and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.
Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is ‘rosy-fingered’, but she also sometimes sits ‘on her golden throne’ as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear ‘her veil the colour of saffron’, krokopeplos, the crocus-cloth, the warmest colour in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of wellbeing and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the colour is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and ‘strike the sea with their oars’.
That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can’t help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke – a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping on to the perfect skin of the sea – I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.
But you long for wind. You imagine wind before it comes. You look for it on the water. None of this is far from praying for wind, or even sacrificing for it. Part of the Homeric ritual is to make a libation to the goddess as you leave. And the goddess whom you choose summons her own kind of wind. So Athene, never moderate, owl-eyed, all-seeing, sharp beyond all human understanding, sends a fierce wind for Telemachus as he heads out from Ithaca to find his father, a wind from the west ‘that bellowed roaring over the wine-coloured sea’. His voyage is anxious, uncertain, driven by that demanding mentor.
At the same time, somewhere else in the realms of fantasy and loss, his father is being given a wind by the amorous goddess Calypso who has imprisoned him on her island of deliciousness for the last seven years. He has been sitting weeping on the shore, longing for home. Now at last she will release him, and her wind is like her, all-embracing, warm and seductive, a sleep-with-me wind sending him on his way. He spreads his sail gladly to it, a bosom of wind, wafting him away from her comforts to the world of truth and reality.
As the wind comes, they hoist ‘the white sail’, the sail fills, ‘and the wind and the helmsman guide the ship together’. It is an act of cooperation between man and the world, a folding in of human intention with what the world can offer. The ship is a beautifully made thing, as closely fitted as a poem, as much a mark of civilisation as any woven cloth, and the wind in the Odyssey, when it is a kind wind, is a ‘shipmate’, another member of the crew. It is not the element in which you sail but a ‘companion’ on board. The human and divine dimensions of reality meet in it.
And now, when I am out in the sound, and the right wind comes, I think of it like that, as something else to be welcomed aboard. That coming of the wind is a moment when you can’t help but smile, when the world turns in your favour. It is also a moment of extraordinary potency in Homer, never more than when in the Iliad the Trojans find themselves in a terrifying and difficult phase of the battle and things are against them, until they see Hector and his brother Paris coming out of the gates of the city, armed, ready to help. It is, the poem says, like that moment when the crew has been struggling for too long with the oars, and their arms are weary, and they have been praying for wind, and then, as a blessing, the wind seems to come and the weariness drops from their bodies and they can rest in its strength and power: ‘So these two appeared to the Trojans, who had longed for them.’
Matching that instant of relief and triumph is another, almost at the other end of the Iliad, when the winds become the indispensable companions of the heroes. Achilles has made the great funeral pyre on the beach for Patroclus. Timber has been cut and carried, and the pyre is now a hundred feet in each direction. Animals have been slaughtered and the fat laid on the pyre. But it will not light, and Achilles realises he has failed to do one thing: he must pray to the two winds, the west wind and the north wind. And they come, sweeping in from their distant dwelling places, driving the clouds before them. A vast, inhuman blaze erupts in the pyre, and under the winds’ fierce encouragement, one shrieking blast after another, it burns all night long, incinerating everything but the bones. Only then do the winds retire
Back towards home again, over the Thracian sea,
And it heaved with a long, groaning swell as they crossed it.
The wind never comes unsummoned, or in a solid block. All you feel at first is a finger or two, the faint chilling of the skin on the cheek, or stroking the nape of your neck. But then it builds a little, one finger becomes five, the canvas stirs, like a dog in a bed, begins to acquire a form, and the boat gains a sense of purpose, a coherence it had lacked as it slopped in the chop or swell. The wake slowly starts to bubble behind you, ‘the gleaming wake’ that runs behind Homeric ships as a sign of life and excellence, the cockpit drains gurgle with the air sucked through them, and with tiller and sheet in hand you sit up and pick your course across the sea. That is the Odyssean moment: everything liquid but directed, everything mobile but related: the sea itself, your boat in it, the air and its winds, all the possibilities. The ritual is done, the routines have been followed, and your chances are now set fair.
Of all Homeric departures, none is more poignant than when Odysseus and his men, right in the centre of the Odyssey, set off for Hades, to hear from the blind seer Tiresias the way home to Ithaca. Circe, ‘the trim-coifed goddess’, as Ezra Pound described her, has set them on their way. They have no choice. Only Tiresias can tell them the way home. They have made all their tackle secure and provided themselves with food and drink. The wind has joined the crew and is now there alongside the helmsman, guiding ‘the black ship in the bright sea’ as their companion. But neither Odysseus nor any of his men are making this voyage with any hint of delight. This is a journey down and under the world, into the dark places, into themselves as much as to the edge of the physical universe. As the wind holds fair for them, they sit on their benches and grieve. Big, heart-wrenching tears fall on the pale timbers of the deck. The wind is taking them towards a terrifying destination, the place of death which Odysseus has so far exercised all his wit and skill to avoid. The wind knows nothing of that and propels their ship onwards, its red-painted bows plunging and rising with each oncoming sea, the swells breaking and surging around the stempost, while above that foam of life the wind never falters or wavers:
The wind caught the sail, bellying it out, and the blue-shadowed waves resounded under the fore-foot of the running ship as she lay over on her course and raced out to sea.
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows over ocean.
FOUR (#ulink_7bc41ac1-3c9a-591d-9916-1ec30b29ddfb)
Seeking Homer (#ulink_7bc41ac1-3c9a-591d-9916-1ec30b29ddfb)
ALL MODERN VERSIONS OF Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison. In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad which seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the ‘germana et sinceralectio’, the real and uncorrupted reading.
Villoison thought he had discovered the essence of a work by a single poet called Homer. But he had sown the seeds of his own demise. The idea was already in the air in the eighteenth century that Homer was not one poet but many, and that the poems were the product of a whole culture, not an individual genius. Villoison’s discovery turned out to be the Copernican moment. The mass of alternative readings rejected by the Alexandrian scholars itself threw doubt on the idea of a single great original text. They had chosen to make a single Homer, but looking further back in time it seemed as if there were multiple Homers to choose from. William Cowper, the English lover and translator of Homer, read Villoison and stood aghast at the fragmentation of his hero. As he wrote to his friend the Rev. Walter Bagot in the winter of 1790:
I will send you some pretty stories from [Villoison] which will make your hair stand on end, as mine has stood on end already, they so horribly affect, in point of authenticity, the credit of the works of the immortal Homer …
Homer now was not one but many, and most of them obscure. In 1795 Villoison was challenged by the young, highly analytical German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. How could Villoison tell if the decisions made by the Alexandrian editors were the right ones? Surely what Villoison had published was evidence that the Iliad, as they all knew it, was a set of late, corrupt and unreliable texts, brought together in one poem but with their origins in bardic songs which had been radically altered by every hand they had passed through. The originals were unrecoverable. Homer, whoever that was, could never now be known.
The scene was set for the long struggle over the so-called ‘Homeric Question’ raised by Wolf which has lasted ever since. ‘Some say, “There never was such a person as Homer,”’ the English essayist Thomas de Quincey joked in 1841. ‘“No such person as Homer! On the contrary,” say others, “there were scores.”’ Nevertheless, the text of the Iliad over which the battles were fought between the lumpers and splitters, the one-Homer advocates and the scores-of-Homer advocates, the Homerophiles and Homerophobes, continued to be almost precisely the one published by Villoison in 1788.
He was not the first in the field. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, who had come to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Soon other copies were being printed in Milan, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Paris and London. And behind those first printed books stands a long manuscript history. Many of the medieval manuscripts of Homer migrated late to the European libraries, because in the early Middle Ages Homer was unread in Europe. Dante had Virgil call him the ‘sovereign poet’, but Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek, and even though the great fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch owned a copy of the Iliad – he was the man who used to kiss it in reverence – he could not understand a word it said. However, he wrote, ‘was dumb to me and I am deaf to it’.
Nevertheless, Homer continued to lurk in the European mind: pervasively there but rarely seen. Medieval Odysseys are scattered through scholarly Europe, in Cambridge and London, Milan and Munich, Naples and Moscow, in Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Vienna. There are Iliads in the Bodleian in Oxford (from the twelfth century), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (a copy which probably came from Mount Athos), in the Escorial and in Florence. Through these few precious manuscript books, Homer survived in medieval Christendom.
All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the Doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.
From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans travelling in Egypt took Homer further back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer them for sale. Pieces found their way into gentlemen’s libraries across Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Egyptologists began a more systematic search for these ancient documents, none more assiduous than the thoroughly unkempt, restlessly energetic and no-sock-wearing Englishman William Flinders Petrie. He was a man who since boyhood had understood that the careful unravelling of historic deposits layer by layer, an exfoliation of the past, was the only way to approach them. In the winter of 1887 he began to dig in the large necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayum depression to the west of the valley of the Nile.
Almost every mummy was accompanied by an image of the person, their unwavering gaze, their necklaces and earrings and carefully braided, gathered hair. With them were other artifacts, beads and vials, mirrors and, tucked in by the dead children, rag dolls with carved heads and real hair. The dolls had changes of clothes, dresses, little tables and wooden bedsteads with which the girls played. Their coffins were made of a kind of papyrus-based papier-mâché, and Flinders Petrie found within their fabric the remains of many ancient texts.
To help with those documents he had with him his old friend, an Oxford Assyriologist, the Reverend Professor Archibald Sayce. ‘The floating sand of the desert,’ Sayce wrote the next year,
was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters … They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.
It’s an image from Shelley, the world after Ozymandias: ancient texts blowing in shreds and fragments across the Egyptian desert. But then Flinders Petrie came across the greatest of all his treasures. On the morning of 21 February 1888, under the head of a woman who was not named on her coffin and was buried in an otherwise unmarked stretch of the necropolis, he found a large roll of papyrus, a papyrus pillow. This was no chance leftover. ‘The roll had belonged to a lady with whom it had been buried in death,’ Sayce wrote. ‘The skull of the mummy showed that its possessor had been young and attractive-looking, with features at once small, intellectual, and finely chiselled, and belonging distinctively to the Greek type.’
The papyrus had been damaged in its outer leaves, but Petrie began to unfold it, as if he were looking into the innards of a wasp’s nest, and peering beyond the outer covering found himself reading the Greek numbers twelve and eighty, and the names ‘Agamemnon’, ‘Achaeans’, ‘Corinth’. The roll with which the young woman had been buried was the first two books of the Iliad and, here from Book 2, Flinders Petrie, with the sand of the Sahara blowing around him, was reading lines from the Catalogue of Ships, Homer’s enumeration of the Greeks who sailed to Troy.
This Hawara Homer, written on papyrus in about AD 150, is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, its lines numbered by Flinders Petrie in August 1888. It is one of the most time-vertigo-inducing objects I know. In columns ranged left, the clear Greek capitals are spooled out across the reedy, vegetal surface of the papyrus sheets. There are no gaps between the words, but they are entirely legible, the relaxed and masterful calligraphy rolling on for line after line like a wave that will not break. This is a text to travel to the next world with, the strokes in each letter just curved away from straightness, so that in its combination of open ‘o’s and ‘u’s and the ‘w’s of its omegas, and the slight flexing in the pen strokes of its ‘k’s and ‘n’s and ‘t’s, this is one of the greatest images of the generous and beautiful word ever made. Other contemporary manuscripts found by Flinders Petrie are far more sketchy and scratchy, less steady in their progress across the page; but this is Homer as monument, as scripture, as ‘the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead’.
The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. By the time the unnamed woman was buried with this precious pillow in the Hawara necropolis, Homer had already become the Homer we now have.
The key phase in this creation of the Homer which Roman, Byzantine, late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe all thought of as the undeniable text was in the halls of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Between the third and second centuries BC, a sequence of great Alexandrian editor-scholars, enormously funded by the wealth of the Ptolemies, the rulers of Egypt, created the monumental Homer that is visible in the Hawara grave, in the Byzantine codex Venetus A and in the minds of Alexander Pope and John Keats. That Alexandrian era is the narrow neck through which an earlier and rather different Homer passed.
The famous library of Alexandria was not just a gathering of texts, but far more energetic and dynamic than that, a massive multi-disciplinary research institute, an engine for establishing Alexandria as the centre of the civilised world. By royal edict from the Graeco-Egyptian dynasty of pharaohs, no ship could call at the port of Alexandria without being searched for the books it carried. Every one would be copied with unforgiving exactness and marked in the catalogue as ‘from the ships’. Occasionally the librarians held on to the original and returned the copy.
The Alexandrian library was the repository for Greek culture, the place in which the plays of the Athenian tragedians and the works of Plato and Aristotle were preserved, but it was devised and run on a Near-Eastern model. For thousands of years it had been the practice of great Near-Eastern kings to establish libraries and archives on a scale which individual Greek city-states had never come anywhere near. Alexandria fused Babylon and Nineveh with Athens and Sparta.
With thirty to fifty state-funded scholars at work in the library, the head librarian also the royal tutor, and the agents of the Ptolemies scouring the Mediterranean for copies of all books – magic, music, metaphysics, zoology, geography, cosmology, Babylonian, Jewish, Greek and Egyptian thought – the Alexandrian library was a grand central knowledge machine. It was an exercise in cultural dominance, tyranny through control of the word. By the first century BC, it was thought that the library contained 700,000 papyrus rolls, 120,000 of them poetry and prose, all stored and labelled and catalogued in their own tailored linen or leather jackets.
This industrial-scale exercise in cultural imperialism left its impress on Homer, and the key to the Alexandrian changes is in the large number of marginal notes in Venetus A. The Byzantine scholar in about 950 copied out the text the Alexandrians had bequeathed to him. In his wide margins, he wrote down many of the remarks they had made, not only about Homer but about previous commentators on him. It is Homer as a millefeuille: one leaf of scholarship laid on top of another for centuries. Other medieval manuscripts have their own additional notes, or scholia, and some of the papyrus fragments, including the Hawara Iliad, also have marginal notes from these editors.
It is difficult to escape the idea that the Alexandrian editors, who seem to have limited themselves to commentary rather than cuts, wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurise him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city, to make of him precisely the dignified monument which the family of the young woman in Hawara had placed beneath her head in death. There was a long tradition of treating Homer like this.
In Plato’s Republic, written in about 370 BC, Socrates maintained that Homer would be catastrophic for most young men in the ideal city. Poetry itself was suspect, and dangerous if it disturbed the equilibrium of the citizen, but in some passages Homer stepped way beyond the mark. He quotes the beginning of Book 9 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is about to sit down to dinner in the beautiful palace of the king of the Phaeacians.
Nothing, Odysseus says, is more marvellous in life than sitting down to a delicious dinner with your friends, the table noisy and the waiter filling the glasses. ‘To my mind,’ Odysseus says cheerfully, looking round him at his new friends who have saved him from the unharvestable sea, ‘this is the best that life can offer.’ Not for Socrates or his pupil Plato:
Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.
That frame of mind undoubtedly governed the editing process in Alexandria, and its presumptions appear at every turn. Towards the end of Book 8 of the Iliad, Hector is making a speech to the Trojans. It has been a long and terrible day on both sides. Among the many dead, Priam’s son Gorgythion had been hit hard in the chest with an arrow.
Just as a poppy in a garden, heavy
with its ripening seeds, bends to one side
with the weight of spring rain;
so his head went slack to one side,
weighed down by the weight of his helmet.
Night is now falling, and Hector is encouraging the Trojans to prepare themselves for the following day. He has been like a hound in the battle, pursuing the Greeks as if they were wild boar, slashing and strimming at their legs in front of him, his eyes glittering in the slaughter like the god of battle. The corpses had piled up on the field like the swathes of a hay meadow newly mown and yet to be gathered. There is scarcely room for a body of men to stand together. Now, though, Hector has summoned the Trojans ‘to a place that was clear of the dead’, and speaks to them of the state they are in. They should feed their horses, light fires, roast the meat of sheep and oxen, drink ‘honey-hearted wine’ and eat their bread. In Troy itself, the old men and the young boys should stand on the walls and the women light great fires in their houses, all to keep a watch so that the Greeks should not ‘ambush’ them. The word he uses is lochos, the same as will be used in the Odyssey to describe the Greeks hiding in the Trojan Horse, and which has as its root lechomai, meaning ‘to lie down’. The implications are clear: the Trojans stand to fight; the Greeks do so cheatingly, creepingly. The ambush, the covert attack, is the kind of violence the Greeks would do. This is Hector speaking as the man of the city, defending it against the treachery of its assailants, a man who in almost every line is the voice of his community.
The Alexandrian editors accepted these noble statements without demur. In these passages Hector fitted the idea of restrained nobility which the Hellenistic Greeks required of Homer. But Hector then moves up a gear and goes on to speak of the next day and of himself. The Greeks are no better than ‘dogs, carried by the fates on their black ships’. Hector will go for Diomedes in the morning, and Diomedes will lie there, ‘torn open by a spear, with all his comrades dead around him’. And Hector himself will be triumphant:
If only
I were as sure of immortality, ageless all my days –
And I were prized as they prize Athene and Apollo.
A peppering of special marks in the margin, hooks and dots, all carefully transcribed by the Byzantine scholars, signals the Alexandrian editors’ anxiety at the vulgarity of these lines.
This apparent self-promotion and self-assertion: can that really be what Homer intended for him? In the third century BC, Zenodotus, the first librarian at Alexandria appointed by the Ptolemies, rejected the line about the fates and their black ships. Aristarchus, his great second-century successor, agreed with him. And when Hector went on to claim immortality, Aristarchus thought his words ‘excessively boastful’, not the done thing, and highly suspect. In Aristarchus’s mind, although not entirely clearly, these lines were probably not Homeric.
It is as if these editors were trying to make Homer into Virgil, to turn Hector into Aeneas, to transform the Greek epics into tales of irreproachable moral instruction, and in doing so to reduce their emotional and psychological range. But Homer was greater than his editors, rougher, less consistent and less polite, a poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilisation and its raging opposite.
Compare Hector’s words with the speech made by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins in the Kuwaiti desert about twenty miles south of the Iraqi border on 19 March 2003, the eve of the allied invasion of Iraq. Collins had found a place where he could address the men of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment. In his Ray-Bans, with his cigar in his hand and a certain swagger, speaking off the cuff to about eight hundred men standing around him in the middle of a dusty courtyard, he spoke as Homer had Hector speak.
‘We go to liberate, not to conquer,’ Collins began, half-remembering echoes of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Yeats, all mingling with the modern everyday in his ear.
We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
Alongside that restraint and magnanimity towards the enemy, and the sense that he is speaking as the representative of a great civilisation himself, is something else. ‘I expect you,’ he said, addressing his young soldiers, most of them from poor Catholic Northern Irish backgrounds,
to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose … The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction … As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity … If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.
Hector wants his men to rock the Greeks’ world. There is an element of pretension and self-aggrandisement in both of them, but the modern British officer and the Bronze Age poet both know more than the scholar-editors in their Alexandrian halls. Homer’s subject is not elegance but truth, however terrible.
The Alexandrians were keen on more than a moralised Homer. Their huge and careful gathering of texts from across the ancient world and from any passing ship was a complex inheritance, a braided stream they tried to purify and make singular, to make one Homer where previously there had been many.
They did their job with scholarly decorum, sometimes deleting lines from the text they bequeathed to the future, usually in their commentaries doing no more than casting doubt on what Homer was meant to have said, marking the text with a skewer, an obelos, in the margin, as if to pin the error to the spot. If Homer got things wrong – killing off a warrior who then reappeared in the battle a few lines later; if he repeated a line or group of lines with no variation; if it seemed as if something had been pushed into the poem at a later date; or if Homer’s ancient words simply didn’t make sense to Hellenistic editors – these were all grounds for severe judgement in Alexandria. Homer had to be kept up to his own standards.
Before that Alexandrian edit, Homer was not a single monumental presence in the ancient world, but a voluble, chattering crowd of multiple voices. Ancient authors quote lines from Homer which do not appear in the post-Alexandrian text. Occasionally a piece of papyrus will have an odd or variant equivalent for a well-known line. Different Greek cities had their own different Homers. Crete had its own, as did Cyprus, Delos, Chios and Athens. Alexandrian scholars knew versions from Argos in the Peloponnese, Sinope on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey, and from the great Greek colony of Massalia far to the west, beneath what is now Marseilles. There were more epics than merely the Iliad and the Odyssey, filling in the gaps of the story which the poems we know only hint at. Homer was said to have written them all. Aristotle had a different version of Homer from Plato’s, and prepared another for his pupil Alexander the Great, to take with him on his world adventures into Asia. Homer ripples around the ancient Mediterranean, and even further afield, taking on local colour, not a man or a poem but flickering, octopus-like, varying, adopting the colours of the country he found himself in. None of these local versions survives as more than references in ancient scholarly notes, but they hint at a reality which would have made William Cowper’s or Alexander Pope’s hair stand rigid. Homer, before Alexandria, was multiplicity itself.
