The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (7 page)

It is no wonder, then, that Homer remains a mystery. Who was Homer? This so-called Homeric Question has provoked some of the bloodiest professorial battles. Speculation about Homer has itself spawned fantasies of epic proportions. Homer himself became a myth.

The ancient Greeks had no doubt that Homer was a real person. Before the Great Age, until about 450
B.C.
, they put his birthplace on the little island of Chios, off the western coast of Asia Minor, where his epics were being sung by people who called themselves
Homeridae
, descendants of Homer. Herodotus (fifth century
B.C.
), the knowledgeable nephew of a practicing bard, said that Homer had lived four hundred years earlier and named him as the author of the two great epics. By the early fifth century
B.C.
, Homer had already become so myth-heroic that several different towns, including Athens, claimed to be his birthplace. But how did his works reach mainland Greece, and how did they first acquire a fixed literary form like that which survives? No satisfactory answer has been agreed on for any of these questions. Greek patriots like to believe that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were a spontaneous, divinely inspired emanation from the Greek people. If Homer, the perfect poet, was descended from Orpheus, then excrescences and imperfections must be later corruptions.

…

Fixed texts of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
seem to have appeared with the return of writing in the fifth century
B.C.
The rise of a small literate class brought the new pastime of people reading privately to themselves. And this brought a trade in manuscripts as the oral epics were written down. One scholarly tradition credits the first fixed written texts for the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
to the decrees of Solon, who in the sixth century
B.C.
ordered regular recitations of the works of Homer. Most historians claim that it was the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus who decreed a written text for Homer.

The written text provided both an object of idolatry and a convenient target for academic critics. Plato’s attack on the baleful influence of Homer testified to his uninterrupted influence. Aristotle declared that “the structure of the two Homeric poems is as perfect and the action in them is as nearly as possible one action,” as can be, and his authority prevailed. The light of Homer shone undimmed throughout the Christian “almost Greek-less” Middle Ages. Then Homer became the leading figure in the classical revival of the Renaissance. Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Lorenzo Valla all were acolytes. The first printed edition of Homer, in 1488, confirmed his reign as prototype of poetry and epic.

Poets have tested themselves by translating Homer into the idiom of their time. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) opened his admired version of the
Iliad
in 1720:

Which, for Robert Fagles in 1990 became:

The progress of modern Western thought entertains us with a kaleidoscope of opinions, “facts,” and fantasies about Homer. In the running battle between “the Ancients,” and “the Moderns,” Homer was ex officio commander of the Ancient forces. A scholar could make a reputation by a new strategy or slogan. The French Abbe d’Aubignac (1604–1676) berated “illiterate” Homer for bad taste and immorality, then erased him as a person who never existed. The works, he said, were pieced together by some crude editor. In the next century the English scholar Richard Bentley (1662–1742) pitied “poor Homer” as “a primitive provincial who wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer at festivals and other days of merriment; the
Ilias
he made for the men, and the
Odysseis
for the other sex.”

The rising social sciences produced a whole new library of Homeric speculation. Perhaps, after all, there really was nothing supernatural about Homer, and his works were simply a product of his age. The burgeoning ideas of biological evolution that Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles’s versatile grandfather, prophetically expressed in his
Zoonomia
(1794–1796) had a Homeric counterpart. A German professor Friedrich A. Wolf (1759–1824), a friend of Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his
Prolegomena to Homer
(1795) showed how the Homeric epics had emerged from the processes of social evolution. First composed orally about 950
B.C.
, in an age without writing, he explained that they were repeated and modified by four centuries of bards. After being written, they continued to evolve in response to changing ideas. Although there probably was a Homer, the unity of the epics emerged only over the centuries. Wolf gives a hint of the fashionable new optimism before the products of evolution as he dissolved Homer into the elusive processes of history.

After Wolf, the Homeric mystery was compounded and illuminated by comparative literature, philology, sociology, archaeology, and anthropology. Had the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
been pieced together, like the German
Nibelungenlied
, or the Finnish national epic, the
Kalevala
, from many separate original “lays”? If this was how it had happened, then their glowing epic unity was more miraculous than ever. Or did the
élan vital
that Henri Bergson saw in biological evolution also create new artistic species?

Still some faithful remained. Heinrich Schliemann, inspired by Homer, believed that the
Iliad
was literal history. Digging at Hissarlik, Homer’s Troy, he used the facts of archaeology and the relics that he unearthed to prove that myth and history were somehow one. Were the Homeric myths themselves a kind of history?

The new halo with which Schliemann crowned Homer invited academic fury. The leading German classicist, Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), found the author of the
Odyssey
“a not very gifted
patch-worker” (
ein gering begabter Flickpoet
). But oddly enough, the new science of comparative religion restored Homer’s epics to the canon of sacred documents. Combining Wolf’s evolutionary arguments with the “higher criticism” of recent biblical scholars, the English master translator Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), showed that, like the Old Testament, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
accreted by tradition. Of course Murray did not solve the Homeric riddle, but he put Homer’s works securely among the highest mysteries of Creation. Were the gods jealous of this Homeric mystery? Was there a curse like that on violators of the pharaoh’s tombs? The two bold scholars who did most to tear the veil of mystery from Homer, Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Michael Ventris (1922–1956), both came to an early, untimely end.

Homer’s world of gods and goddesses bypassed the perplexing questions of the first Creation of the earth and of man. In the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
we see man and the gods fully matured. If Homer ever was troubled about how or why the world came into being, he does not share his concern with us. The full-grown gods’ loves and hates provide the motive power, the sources of defeat or victory, success or catastrophe in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Achilles, whose wrath is the theme of the
Iliad
, is the son of Peleus, who is the grandson of Zeus, and of the Nereid Thetis whom the gods had given in marriage to Peleus. Never are the gods absent from the story as we watch Aphrodite, protectress of Helen, and Apollo, the protector of all Troy, struggle vainly against “the plan of Zeus.” The
Odyssey
, too, glows with the divine, the miraculous, and the preternatural. Under the watchful eyes of Zeus, we see Odysseus’ seduction by the goddess Calypso, his encounter with the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclopes, Circe, and finally his voyage to Hades. The Greeks every day saw men and women aided or frustrated by the whims or purposes of the gods. This they found more urgent and more interesting than speculation over how and why it all began.

So, too, by showing their gods and goddesses as immortal men and women with all the human passions, fears, and hopes, they made men and women the more godlike. The hybrid nature of man would remain a dominant theme in Judaism and Christianity. The Greeks shaped their gods in man’s image. They made man their point of departure, and for them the problems of Creation were only afterthoughts. But Judaism and Christianity would turn the question around, and start from God. By making man in God’s image, they committed themselves to facing the Mystery of Creation, with endless consequences.

The Greeks replaced cosmology with genealogy, leaving us an ample and explicit account of the births and families of the gods. It was Hesiod (c.750–675
B.C.
), another epic bard, whose
Theogony
(Birth of the Gods)
became the canon. We can follow Hesiod in the lively translations by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Less shadowy than Homer, Hesiod was a most un-Homeric gloomy figure. His father emigrated from Asia Minor to Boeotia in central Greece. One day, he recalled, there appeared to him the Helikonian Muses:

As the Muses commanded, Hesiod produced a poetic genealogy of the gods.

Hesiod also produced mundane poems of moralism and everyday life. His lazy brother Perses, with lies and bribes, had tried to steal Hesiod’s share of their father’s estate. One happy result of this family quarrel was Hesiod’s
Works and Days
. In this long poem (828 hexameters) Hesiod lectures his brother (and his whole corrupt age), with reminders of how Prometheus was punished for his theft of fire. Incidentally, Hesiod provided some of our earliest details of the rigors, pleasures, and temptations of archaic Greece, its peasant ways and the perils of its seafaring. And he sings of the decline of humankind from the earliest Golden Generation who “lived as if they were gods, their hearts free from all sorrow, by themselves, and without hard work or pain; no miserable old age came their way.… All goods were theirs.” Then the foolish Silver Age, followed by the Bronze Age of strength and strife.

In his
Theogony
, Hesiod, going back to the very beginning, provides a gory and sexually explicit chronicle of the births of the gods. Every act of
Creation was an episode of divine loves and hates. “It was Homer and Hesiod,” Herodotus writes, “who composed a ‘theogony’ for the Greeks, and who first gave the gods distinctive titles, and defined their forms and functions.” Hesiod did not invent the gods but he gave them genealogical respectability. Unlike what we read in Genesis, Hesiod shows us not the Act of Creation but countless acts of procreation.

As the gods multiply, their lives become more violent and their glory more complicated. The first generation of Titans were the Cyclopes with their “single round eye that leered from their foreheads, and inventive skill and strength and power” and other “brazen sons,” each with “a hundred invincible arms” and fifty heads. One of these Titans, Kronos, castrated his father Ouranos as he lay with his mother, Gaia. From the flowing blood of Ouranos came the Furies, the Giants, and the Nymphs of the Ash Trees. Out of Ouranos’ genitals cast in the water arose the beautiful Aphrodite. All these were the beginnings of new procreations in unending generations. When Kronos coupled with his sister Rheis, also a child of Ouranos and Gaia, the greatest of their offspring was Zeus, who ever thereafter ruled gods and men from Olympus. The rest of
Theogony
is a saga of Zeus, who uses the thunder and lightning that the Cyclopes gave him and enlists the hundred-handed, fifty-headed monsters to defeat the rebellious Titans.