Reading Homer After 2,800 Years

035

The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed nearly 3,000 years ago, and they are still constantly translated, imitated, dramatized and—above all—read. In a world in which few things stay in fashion for more than a single season, that is indeed a surprising fact. It is also a fact that distinguishes our society from most others of the past: The ancient Greeks, for example, did not possess and read texts nearly so old or remote from their own time.

But that is not all. These ancient poems, which have been read and reread for so many centuries, are in many ways more accessible to us than some of the great classics of English literature. Most people find it far easier to read a translation of the Odyssey than to pore through Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example. Among ancient epics, too, the enduring popularity of Homer’s poems is unparalleled. We have access to many of the great works of Roman literature, including the central work of Latin poetry, Virgil’s Aeneid. But the Aeneid is one of those classics that people tend to respect but leave unread, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which Samuel Johnson said unforgettably, “No man ever wished it longer than it is.”

Taken together, the Iliad and Odyssey form a more or less continuous narrative, though the moods they evoke couldn’t be more different. The Iliad is a heroic poem about war, chronicling brutal battles and agonizing deaths in vivid detail. The opening of the poem finds the federation of Achaean chieftains in the final year of its ten-year-long siege of Troy. We soon learn what started this decade of bloodshed: Handsome Paris of Troy became enchanted with Helen—the beautiful daughter of divine Zeus and wife of Menelaus, the human king of the Achaean city Sparta—and carried her off to Troy to share his bed. Led by Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, the Achaean armies’ supreme commander, and by godlike Achilles, the greatest fighting man, the Achaeans attack and eventually defeat the Trojans, sending Helen back into Menelaus’s arms. But the Iliad is also a poem about anger, about Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon and its disastrous consequences. With great skill the poet makes this anger central to the poem’s outcome. At the end of the Iliad Achilles is still living and Troy is still standing; but we know they are both doomed.

The Odyssey, by contrast, is about going home, though, as the poem reveals, that can be every bit as treacherous as war itself. Odysseus, one of the victorious Achaeans, his ships brimming with loot from Troy, sets off for the island of Ithaca and the wife and son he hasn’t seen in a decade. His journey isn’t easy: Cyclopes and Sirens, 036Lotus-eaters and Lestrygonians—not to mention 12,000 lines of Homeric hexameter—stand in his way. For ten years, Odysseus, faced with supreme obstacles, tries to reach Ithaca. When he finally arrives, penniless as a beggar, his glorious garb reduced to tattered rags, he is not recognized by his wife, Penelope, who has remained chaste for 20 years, awaiting her husband’s return.

Among the works of literature we read, the Homeric poems are unusual in that they were composed in a style suitable for oral performance, using a vast repertoire of preformed phrases and more or less conventional (formulaic) scenes. The Homeric verse line, ranging from 13 to 17 syllables, is complex but necessary: The bards needed a long, flexible line in order to create and re-create their songs on the spot, relying only on memory and imagination to bring to life swift-footed Achilles or the Trojan women with their trailing dresses. Over and over again, we hear variations on stock scenes such as the arming of a hero, the sending and delivering of a message, the preparing of a feast or the dueling of two heroes. But an audience will never find Homer’s poetry monotonous or constrained, neither in language nor action. On the contrary, the poems give an impression of limitless abundance.

The style of Homer is a high style, and the poems are heroic epics: They depict heroes and heroines whose actions are serious and significant. The Iliad presents scenes of horror, destruction and death, but it avoids the gruesome, the weird and the spooky. Homer is not interested, as were the creators of Greek myths, in invulnerable heroes, impenetrable armor or inexplicable magic. Heroes who die, for example, stay dead—that is not blurred or fudged. In contrast to the splendor and beauty of life, the Homeric afterlife lacks both sense and sensation; it consists of nothing but grayness.

Even next to other literary giants—such as Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare and Racine—Homer stands out, for he is, among other things, an inclusive poet. His dignity does not require him to exclude women, animals or babies from his scenes (the description of Hector’s infant son in Book VI of the Iliad is memorably vivid). When the goddess Athena deflects an arrow from a favored hero, she is likened to a mother brushing away a fly from her sleeping child. The pain of a hero wounded in battle is compared to that of a woman giving birth. And when Odysseus tosses and turns, as he plans vengeance on his enemies and his own unfaithful maidservants, he is said to be like a blood pudding seething over a fire. Homer is not worried that such touches from domestic life will compromise the grandeur of his poem. Indeed, by characterizing heroic deeds with metaphors of the mundane, the poet grounds his work in everyday life, inviting the reader or listener to nod his head in wonder or wag it in reproof for the very reason that the heroic act is made so familiar.

When we read Homer we find ourselves in a world—sharply outlined and clearly lit—that contains men and women as well as gods and goddesses. The human characters, like the central characters of the tragedies of Shakespeare, are kings and queens and princes; Homer calls them heroes and heroines. The heroes are descended from the amours of gods, and Odysseus is regularly addressed as “Zeus-born son of Laertes, Odysseus of the many schemes.” Unlike the heroes of the modern cinema, Achilles and Odysseus, the greatest heroes in the two epics, are also the most eloquent speakers; the ancient Greeks held in high esteem orators as well as fighters. Homer’s skill in representing both speech and conversation (in the latter he is very unlike Virgil) is one of the most important and attractive features of the poems.

The heroes are of course splendid, brave and handsome: The Greeks from first to last set an extraordinarily high value on good looks. When, in Book XXII of the Iliad, Achilles swoops down upon Hector to kill him—a moment of the highest pathos, since Hector is a sympathetic character—the poet catches the beauty of the killer’s approach. Homer describes Achilles glittering in his armor of bronze. Achilles’ shield flashes, the horsehair plume of his helmet bobs up and down, and the point of his spear shines like the Evening Star, the loveliest star in the sky, as he looks for a vulnerable spot of Hector’s flesh.

We are to view human suffering and suffer along with it, but at the same moment we are meant to appreciate its interest and even its beauty. That combination, which is typical of Homer, is so unlike the deliberately heartless aestheticism of some modern writing, which is ostentatious in its avoidance of human sympathy. In the Homeric version of the world, suffering is not minimized or sentimentalized but seen and depicted objectively.

The battle scenes of the Iliad contain many accounts of the deaths of heroes, described in a style that is vivid and matter-of-fact, sparing us no detail of the course of the weapon and the wound it makes. The hero’s armor clangs, or darkness covers his eyes, and we are given a glimpse of the loved ones who wait for the hero’s return, but will never see him again. These deaths are entirely real: The hero has family members who love him and depend on him, and for their grief there is no remedy.

It is in harmony with that conception that the poet of the Iliad shows us the wives and children of the Trojans. Troy started it all: Paris carried off Helen, and the Trojans are the guilty party. But we are far from the world of the Old Testament, where the national enemy is the enemy of 037God and where there can be no question of sympathizing with the defeated foe. Similarly, in the classic Western movie or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the villians have no womenfolk and no children; their killing is unproblematic and free of ambiguity or guilt. But no reader of Book VI of the Iliad, with its picture of Hector’s doomed wife and child, could cheer the Achaeans’ triumph without also sympathizing with the Trojans. The last book of the poem shows us Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, weeping together with the aged Trojan king Priam, whose beloved son has been killed by Achilles; together they contemplate the bleakness of the human lot, inflicted on them by the gods, who by contrast live forever at ease. Viewed in that perspective, international hatred becomes irrelevant, but Homer is aware that such moments must pass, and common life must go on. On the 12th day, says the old king, the funeral of my son will be over, and we shall make war again, since we must.

Humanity in Homer is inseparable from the gods. They exist, in large part, as the opposite of mortals. Ageless and deathless, they are defined by their freedom from the two ineluctable evils that oppress humankind. In the Iliad, the gods are forever irresponsible, boisterously quarreling over the course of events as they look upon the earth from their golden seats on Olympus. They drink nectar from golden cups and watch the deadly struggles on the plains of Troy; they take sides; they intervene, with consequences for men that are sometimes fatal but often comical. Zeus’s wife, Hera, the archetype of unruly wives, schemes against him, denounces him to the other gods and, in a marvelous scene, seduces him to keep him out of the way while her ally, the god Poseidon, tilts the battle in favor of Troy.

At such times, the gods can be sublimely frivolous. At others, when humans appeal to their judiciary powers, they must become more serious. Uniquely Homeric, that extraordinary combination of frivolity and seriousness is foreign to our conceptions of the divine, conditioned as we are by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Homer’s Olympus is marvelously enlivening, full of drama and strangely convincing: Our world, we feel as we read, might be a bauble for divine beings, supreme in power and beauty but perhaps not in goodness, who take our doings only half seriously. Sometimes they join in with the heroes, and sometimes they even grieve for them. But other times they turn away their shining eyes or leave the scene altogether to visit the Ethiopians at the end of the earth.

The world of the Odyssey is in this respect rather different. At the very beginning of the poem, Zeus makes his first appearance, complaining that men too often blame the gods, instead of themselves, for their disasters. Heaven is already on the defensive; and sure enough, in the Odyssey, the gods are not shown misbehaving, quarreling among themselves or conspiring against Zeus. Athena manages most things in this poem: She is the patron goddess of the hero Odysseus and also of his son, Telemachus. She stands by the hero in his perils and even helps the son overcome his shyness when the inexperienced young man must for the first time mix with his social equals.

Though 3,000 years separate us from the composition of Homer’s epics, their appeal has hardly diminished because they speak of problems that continue to concern us. All over the world, for example, fighting men, away at war, have wondered uneasily what their wives and sweethearts were doing back home. King Agamemnon, for one, had reason to worry. While the supreme commander of the Greek armies is away, his wife, Clytemnestra, is seduced by one of the men who have stayed at home; when her lord and master returns from his campaign, he is murdered by the guilty pair. When Odysseus is sent to the underworld in Book XI of the Odyssey, he meets Agamemnon, who tells him the plaintive story of his death: “I thought they would all be so pleased to see me; but we were cut down at table like oxen in the shambles, and my bitch of a wife would not even close my eyes when I was dead.”

More faithful is Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. Still true to Odysseus, even ten years after the end of the war (which 039itself lasted ten years), she is wooed by the gilded youth of the neighboring communities, each trying to force her to marry him. The hero, in a story pattern found widely in world literature, returns in the nick of time to rescue his wife and save his property. The Odyssey varies and enlivens this theme by giving the hero a son, whose life is also threatened by Penelope’s unscrupulous suitors. Telemachus gives the poem a strand of added interest. As he comes of age, he must either drive the suitors out of his house or perish at their hands.

The episodes featuring Telemachus, which make up the so-called Telemachiad, tell one of literature’s first coming-of-age stories. The writing of our time is rife with tales of boys struggling to grow into men. We have even devised a special name for this kind of story: the Bildungsroman. Is it any wonder, then, that Telemachus’s doubts and insecurities, his fears of growing up, his search for an identity should interest us still today? They interested the ancient Greeks as well.

Telemachus’s journey into manhood is in many ways a search for the father he has never known. The ancient Greeks linked identity inextricably to paternity. The opening line of the Iliad, for example, tells us of “the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” and we have already seen Odysseus addressed as “Zeus-born son of Laertes.” Even the gods can’t escape this paternal link: Apollo may be “God of the silver bow” but not until he is first identified as “the son of Zeus and Leto.” In Book I, when Athena finds Telemachus, he is a crushed and despairing young man, expressing doubt of his own paternity and anticipating a violent death. The goddess gives him a brisk talking to and arranges for him to visit some of Odysseus’s old friends to learn something of his long-lost father. In this way the young hero can start to grow up, so that he will be fit to stand beside his father in the last fight with the suitors.

In the middle section of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells the story of his adventures on his way home from Troy—involving giants, monsters and an enchantress. We all know that sailors spin yarns! Odysseus leaves Troy as the commander of a contingent of seven ships. But soon, his flotilla reduced to a single ship, he must confront supreme challenges to both his physical and mental fitness. Odysseus’s trials have made up a seemingly bottomless fountain of literary allusions, from which western literature has continually dipped. And no wonder: The Sirens, the Lotus-Eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, the monstrous Polyphemus with his single eye—they echo in the memory and the imagination. Eventually, Odysseus ends up on an island, the increasingly unwilling guest and lover of the beautiful nymph Calypso. Though she is anxious to marry and keep him, as the poet puts it, “the nymph no longer pleased him.” The hero declines her offer of an easy, indolent immortality, preferring to return to the real world of struggle and risk. He is considerate with Calypso, and the whole scene between them is very delicately done, but he insists (tactfully not mentioning his wife Penelope), “I long to see the day of my homecoming,” whatever perils may lie in the way. It is easy to see why Odysseus’s adventures lend themselves to being treated as an allegory of human life, with their dangers and temptations and the hero’s longing for hearth and home.

Once back in Ithaca the hero must kill the suitors and reclaim his inheritance. We see Penelope still glamorous after 20 years but capable of strange and puzzling behavior. When in a dream her suitors, disguised as geese, are destroyed, she weeps for their death. The theories of Freud, however, would suggest that in dreams, our desires and emotions are often reversed. As evidence mounts that her husband’s return is imminent, she hurries along the contest that will award her hand to one of the suitors. But on the last night before the poem’s climax, she and Odysseus, sleeping in different rooms, become strangely aware of each other’s presence. Like a modern novel, with its interest in psychology for its own sake, the poem here takes us beyond the mere world of doing and into the complex realm of thought and feeling.

After the destruction of the suitors comes the climax of the Odyssey—a domestic scene, suitably enough, the reunion of husband and wife. But Homer does not allow us to forget the more troubling aspects of such reunions. Everyone has assumed that when Odysseus has slain the suitors, Penelope will be regained. Even after the suitors are dead, however, she remains unconvinced of Odysseus’s identity; the habit of distrust has become too strong. She declines to fall into his arms in the conventionally romantic way her son expects. Only when she has played a trick on her husband, a trick very much like the deceptions that he himself has played, and startled him out of his confident security will she accept him (see excerpt, opposite). This subtle invention shows us that she really is the right wife for Odysseus, no mere passive prize to be won but his equal in cleverness and self-control.

Above all, the Odyssey is a marvelous read; the Iliad, a deep and engrossing representation of human life. This is why Homer has been central to the imagination of the West. The Athenian dramatists were brought up on Homer. Plato excluded him from his ideal Republic. Virgil exploited him. Milton tried to outdo him. Alexander Pope idolized him. Tennyson was fascinated by him. And James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis were deeply indebted to him for their own modern epics, Ulysses and The Odyssey. The chain goes back 2,800 years; and still it holds.

The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed nearly 3,000 years ago, and they are still constantly translated, imitated, dramatized and—above all—read. In a world in which few things stay in fashion for more than a single season, that is indeed a surprising fact. It is also a fact that distinguishes our society from most others of the past: The ancient Greeks, for example, did not possess and read texts nearly so old or remote from their own time. But that is not all. These ancient poems, which have been read and reread for so many centuries, are in many […]