Why Homer Matters

 

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For
Sarah Raven
Molly Nicolson
Rosie Nicolson
Ben Nicolson
William Nicolson
Thomas Nicolson

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Illustrations

Map

Foreword

  
1
•
Meeting Homer

  
2
•
Grasping Homer

  
3
•
Loving Homer

  
4
•
Seeking Homer

  
5
•
Finding Homer

  
6
•
Homer the Strange

  
7
•
Homer the Real

  
8
•
The Metal Hero

  
9
•
Homer on the Steppes

10
•
The Gang and the City

11
•
Homer's Mirror

12
•
Homer's Odyssey

Conclusion: The Bright Wake

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Photos

Also by Adam Nicolson

About the Author

Copyright Acknowledgments

Copyright

 

ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOR PLATES

“The Mask of Agamemnon.”
(Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Stamnos (vase) depicting Odysseus tied to the mast listening to the songs of the Sirens, ca. 480
BC
, Athens.
(Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Mycenaean funerary stele with relief chariot scene, ca. 1600
BC
.
(Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Mycenaean gold cup, sixteenth century
BC
.
(National Archaeological Museum of Athens. DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Mycenaean gold butterfly scales from the Shaft Graves, sixteenth century
BC
.
(National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Attic terra-cotta Lekythos (oil flask), attributed to the Achilles Painter, ca. 440
BC
.
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art. akg-images)

A gold death suit for a Mycenaean child, sixteenth century
BC
.
(National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Kantharos (drinking cup) depicting Odysseus and Nausicaa.
(© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

Extremaduran warrior with shield, sword and mirror.
(Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Badajoz. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Extremaduran warriors with bow, spear, shield, swords, a bubble-handled mirror, what may be a musical instrument and large, man-slaughtering hands.
(Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Badajoz. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Silver gilt Cypriot bowl, ca.725–675
BC
.
(© The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence)

Gold libation bowl, ca. 625
BC
, found at Olympia, 1916.
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Minoan Kamares eggshell ware cup.
(Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Leemage/UIG via Getty Images)

Ivory cosmetics case in the form of a duck.
(© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

Minoan bath, mid-fourteenth century
BC
.
(© Carlos Collection of Ancient Art, Emory University)

Dionysus on a boat, surrounded by dolphins, 530
BC
.
(Staatliche Antikensammlung, Munich. Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

Mural from Palace of Nestor at Pylos.
(Courtesy of the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati)

Rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, ca. 1866, by Charles Marville.
(Courtesy of Philippe Mellot)

Draft of Keats's sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer,” October 1816.
(Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

The title page of the 1788
Iliad
edited by Villoison.
(Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Detail from p. 111 of the Venetus A scholia.
(Center for Hellenic Studies. © 2007, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Italy)

Milman Parry.
(Courtesy of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, Harvard University)

Bégan Lyútsa Nikshitch, photographed by Milman Parry.
(Courtesy of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, Harvard University)

Bronze spearheads.
(Museo Archeologico Paolo Orsi, Syracuse. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

The Uffington White Horse commands the site of a first-century
BC
Celtic fort, Uffington, Oxfordshire, England.
(James P. Blair/National Geographic/Getty Images)

Back of a first-century
BC
gold Celtic stater of the Parisii or Quarisii (Paris region).
(Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Sophia Schliemann, bedecked with diadem from Troy found by Heinrich Schliemann.
(Time Life Pictures/Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

 

FOREWORD

There is a pair of linked questions at the heart of this book: Where does Homer come from? And why does Homer matter? These ancient poems can be daunting and difficult, but I have no doubt that their account of war and suffering can still speak to us of the role of destiny in life, of cruelty, humanity, its frailty and the pains of existence. That they do is a mystery. Why is it that something conceived in the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age, maybe four thousand years ago, as foreign as the Dayak, as distant as Vanuatu, can still exert its grip on us? How can we be so intimate with something so far away?

Perhaps it is a mistake to give the answer before the questions are properly asked, but this is complicated country, and an idea of the destination is worth having. Besides, it is a Homeric technique to tell the story before it begins. And so, if you ask why and how the Homeric poems emerged when they did, and why and how Homer can mean so much now, the answer to both questions is the same: because Homer tells us how we became who we are.

That is not the usual modern answer. The current orthodoxy is that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are both products of the eighth century
BC
, or thereabouts, early Iron Age Greece, a time that has been called the Greek Renaissance. In the preceding half millennium, Greek civilization had largely sunk into isolated pockets of poverty. Many of the islands in the Aegean were deserted. One or two had remained rich and kept up links with the Near East, but the great palaces of an earlier Greece had fallen into ruin. But for reasons that have yet to be explained, the eighth century saw a widespread revival. The population of Greece and the islands began to grow. The tempo of life quickened. The art of making bronze, dependent on imported tin, was revived for the first time in four centuries. Colonies, trade, improved ships, gymnasiums, coinage, temples, cities, pan-Hellenic competitions at Olympia (the first, traditionally, in 776
BC
), the art of writing, of depicting the human figure on pottery and in the round, the first written law codes, the dating of history, the first tentative moves toward the formation of city-states—every one of these aspects of a renewed civilization quite suddenly appeared all over the eighth-century Aegean. Homer, in this view, was the product of a new, dynamic, politically inventive and culturally burgeoning moment in Greek history. Homer was the poet of a boom.

I see it differently: my Homer is a thousand years older. His power and poetry derive not from the situation of a few emergent states in the eighth-century Aegean, but from a far bigger and more fundamental historic moment, in the centuries around 2000
BC
, when early Greek civilization crystallized from the fusion of two very different worlds: the semi-nomadic, hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes to the north and west of the Black Sea, and the sophisticated, authoritarian and literate cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean. Greekness—and eventually Europeanness—emerged from the meeting and melding of those worlds. Homer is the trace of that encounter—in war, despair and eventual reconciliation at Troy in the
Iliad
, in flexibility and mutual absorption in the
Odyssey
. Homer's urgency comes from the pain associated with that clash of worlds and his immediacy from the eternal principles at stake: what matters more, the individual or the community, the city or the hero? What is life, something of everlasting value or a transient and hopeless irrelevance?