The First Poets Read online

  We can assume that the audience for the Homeric poems knew the stories well, understood the conventions of the verse and accepted that its language belonged not to one dialect or city but was of a more generalised nature, combining archaic elements and dialect from different quarters around the Aegean. This syncretistic language is where the sense of “shared Hellenism” comes from: in the area of culture it overrides local patriotisms and inter-city rivalries.

  Jacob Burckhardt notes that numerous people and places feature in the poems, yet none is singled out for special emphasis. We might instance the deaths in the Iliad, the catalogue of ships and the survey of the Trojan army, which are like lists of dramatis personae.13 When the poems were performed in different cities, the specifics of that city or monarchy might be singled out and expanded, formulas for local courtesies deployed to increase the rhapsode’s purse. The neutrality of the surviving text may be an aspect of a libretto susceptible to local and occasional improvisations and embellishments. Taplin leaves little room in his theories for the possibilities of variation in an oral text. He likes the “Delos model,” where the text’s neutrality is deliberate, politically balanced. “The Homeric poems are in a sense ‘panhellenic.’” They universalise the gatherings and festivals at which (wherever) they are performed. If this is the case, it reflects a highly deliberated aesthetic intent and—unless the decision was taken by the priests of a universalising religion or politicians scheming for unification—might at first itself seem an anachronism.

  Still, “Whatever their enmities,” Taplin insists, the Greek city-states “share the gods, the athletics, the architecture, and the art. And they share poetry. It is here that the non-local amalgam of the ‘dialect’ of hexameter poetry becomes really important. And this is, I would claim, the context for the absence of ‘localisation’ in Homer: the poems do not give prestige and advantage to some participants over others.”14 Given the precise geography of the poems, the claims Taplin makes seem exaggerated. With a curiously Germanic sense of the nature of the “courts” of pre-democratic Greece, Burckhardt says the Iliad “reveals an intimate acquaintance with the whole district about Mount Ida; in the courts there, Homer’s predecessors may have sung their songs …”15 Most modern critics who are attentive to archaeological developments agree with him. New excavations show, for example, that Troy VI/VII was larger than Mycenae and very like the Troy depicted by Homer in his poems.

  There is, however, a problem with the variety of dialect elements and archaisms included, as with the cacophony of chronological elements, namely the abundant cultural anachronisms. Taplin’s sense of audience is geographical, arrested in time between 750 and 650 BC; the persistent historical incongruities are not so seriously considered. Anachronisms make the poems a real playground for archaeologists, though, given the sparsity of archaeological evidence, there can be no final answers or categorical statements about the incongruities. We conveniently divide the past into closed periods, but those periods are closed only if they end in a military or natural cataclysm. All the same, certain things are juxtaposed in the Homeric poems which look historically awkward together, and there are some passages which are, without much doubt, later interpolations.

  Fundamental political and technological changes occurred between the time of the Trojan War, around 1200 BC, and the singers performing the poems, around the ninth century BC. There is an even deeper gulf between this time and Pisistratus’ Athens, when the text may have been written down definitively. Three time-frames need to be considered: the time of the action, its formulation into song, and the stabilisation of the song as text. The phases have distinct historical contexts: first, a Cretan-dominated period; then the rise of Greek political identity in the city-states and the development of trade and colonial expansion, with renewed contact between Greece and Asia Minor; and finally the cultural maturity that continues during the tyranny of Pisistratus, after the archonate of his friend and eventual enemy Solon.

  In Solon’s time there may have been a decree that “at the four-yearly Pantheon the rhapsodes should recite the epics of Homer in order, one taking up where another left off.”16 Perhaps even before Pisistratus an established text of some kind existed. Without writing, each successive generation forgets some of the sense of what has come before, even though the lines continue to be mouthed because the poem is inviolable. The audience loses the meanings of words, lines and images, and either doggedly reiterates the incomprehensible, which becomes a form of mystery and magic, or substitutes new details and adjusts the poem so that it “makes sense.” Once written down, the obscure image or allusion sticks to the poem like a burr. Scholars may debate its sense, but, without some clear metrical or linguistic imperfection, an inconsistency will not be adjusted or excised.

  Here are some of the anachronisms encountered in the poems. Iron, widely used in the eighth and seventh centuries, was probably unknown to the Achaeans. Bronze was their common metal. In the Iliad, Book IV, anachronistic iron plays a key part. Pandarus, tricked by Athena, raises his famous bow of ibex horns and lets an arrow loose at red-headed Menelaus. He breaks the Trojan vow that the war should be settled by single combat between Menelaus, Helen’s wronged husband, and Alexandrus (a.k.a. Paris). Robert Fitzgerald translates the scene with excessive particularity.

  Pinching the grooved butt and the string, he pulled

  evenly till the bent string reached his nipple,

  the arrowhead of iron touched the bow,

  and when the great bow under tension made

  a semi-circular arc, it sprang.

  The arrow makes its way through layers and layers of Menelaean, padding and pricks the skin. He bleeds. Agamemnon declares the truce is at an end. He is afraid Menelaus is worse wounded than he is. Indeed, he thinks he may be dying.

  The shields the poem portrays and the shields the Greeks and Trojans actually used are quite different. Some weapons are Mezzanine, or “archaic,” some earlier, some contemporary with the age of the poems’ inscription. The customs of cremation and inhumation are conflated. The scale and nature of ancient kingship are distorted and the heroes swollen out of all proportion by their identification with later notions of kingship. The structures of households and the wider sense of the material and spiritual organisation of the camps and cities involved are tenuous. The poems omit the Dorians, who were a real presence at the time, but include the Phoenicians as traders and pirates even though they became prominent only two or three centuries after “the events.” Heroes eat roast meat, not fish; yet fishing is a crucial element in the simile structure of the poem.

  Two passages, one in each poem, appear on the evidence of diction and formal incongruity to be later interpolations, literary in conception and intention. In the Iliad, the “Doloneia” (Book X) tells of the ill-favoured, cowardly and treacherous Trojan “volunteer” Dolon, tricked into betrayal by Odysseus and Diomede. The incident is pasted in, not referred to elsewhere in the poem, not integrated into the larger structure. We would not be without it, it is a vivid and arresting vignette, but it cannot be made to belong to the poem. Here Odysseus and Diomede ride horses. At no other point in the poem are horses ridden. Tradition says that the long passage was added by Pisistratus (or on his authority) in the sixth century. The other substantial “spurious” addition occurs at the end of the Odyssey, the last two hundred lines of Book XXIII and Book XXIV. The editors Aristarchus and Aristophanes both think the poem should end at Book XXIII, line 296, when Odysseus and Penelope go to bed. What follows is a reprise, Penelope telling what she did, Odysseus what he did, without much addition or development, a pointless coda. In Book XXIV, where the relatives of the murdered suitors confront Odysseus, the language and technique go out of focus (apart from the quite remarkable simile at the opening of the book).

  Oliver Taplin, despite his initial demurs, finds himself a Homer in the end, one who has become a whole creaturely cat, but he isn’t smiling: perhaps, Taplin reflects, Homer’s health was deteriorating at the
time he was composing those passages. His Homer has acquired a human physiological identity; what is more, he revises his poems. Did Taplin consider the approach of another critic and translator of Homer, Samuel Butler, whose intimacy with the poem leads him to an unexpected conclusion? The Odyssey is not the work of an old man: “They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naive and so lovely.”17 Butler’s reading stimulated Robert Graves to identify Nausicaa as a candidate for authorship and write his beguiling treatment Homer’s Daughter.

  On the analogy of the slow-growing mediaeval cathedral, every new phase extending, distorting and reconfiguring the work of the preceding phase, it is possible that the poem was “modernised” by interpolation; it was never demolished or remodelled. It hardly seems likely that the rhapsodes carrying the poem forward deliberately applied familiar templates to what was unfamiliar: it was more a case of shoring up the sense of actuality with detail which, the history having faded into legend, only the present could supply, whether literally or figuratively. The oral tradition is, as we noted, conservative by design and conserving, accurate, its function being to remember rather than to invent. It does not “make it new,” and in this respect it is remote from the lyric.

  A mix of elements from different histories, a mix of words and forms from different dialects and times: yet the syntheses that occur in the poems do not feel synthetic. We accept, if we recognise, the Peloponnesian, Aeolic, Ionic and Attic elements in the language. We are unlikely to have sufficient archaeology to disbelieve the material world portrayed. It may be a world that never was, quite. Yet it is the core of what we “know” of the ancient Greek world, what the early historians took to be early history. This is the anciency of Greece which we, and they, related to and visualised most comprehensively in later verse, in pottery, painting and sculpture.

  At least five centuries of Greek tradition, much of it stylised in legend, precedes the writing down of “Homer.” Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus and others stand behind him, and eastern traditions stand behind them: there is nothing ex nihilo about the art or the narrative of either the Iliad or the Odyssey even if time has kicked away the ladder of precedents up which they climbed. But how did a composer and indeed a later rhapsode, singing the tales, conceive of the language they were using? Did they have a sense of the individual word? Performers in Balkan oral traditions in the last century, asked what certain clusters of syllables (which we call words) “meant,” could not understand the question they were asked, or separate out from the context of the verse discreet verbal elements for definition. They could not analyse. This is certainly the case with complex synthetic languages such as Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, where the units of meaning consist not of words but of an accumulation of syllables and particles that, taken singly, mean little. It is hard for us to conceive of a literary culture without a sense of “the word.” For the archaic bard it was equally hard to conceive of an analytical language that was built up from, or could be broken down into, word units.

  Early Greek manuscripts run words together, leave no spaces, show no division at all. Up until the classical period scribes wrote in capital letters without spaces between words, without accents or breathings.18 Metrical divisions might be indicated, if at all, by “a coronis or hook placed before the parágraphos.”19 A singer who did not know what a word is might have been equally puzzled by the notion of a line, with a beginning and an end. Again, the indication of lineation in manuscripts comes rather late in the day: a composer, a bard, knew what he was doing, but without being able to externalise or analyse it. “What is time?” asks the child. “I knew until you asked me,” replies the parent. What was the composer’s and the performer’s concept of the unit of sense, and was it congruent with their sense of the melodic unit? Or is it only later, when there is leisure literature, when there is writing, that language was teased out into its constituent parts? Taplin says, “Achilles remains swift however inactive he may be.”20 The sea is wine-dark, dawn rosy-fingered and Odysseus “wily” at the most inappropriate times. In epithets and other formulaic passages the sound values—metre in particular—can be strictly meaningless, which is not to say that they are without poetic effect.

  Writers of blank verse, heroic couplets, ballad quatrains and other traditional forms accept certain limitations when they adopt a convention. Considering a poetry rooted in the oral formulaic tradition, we can begin by establishing the areas in which a singer of tales is not expected to invent, even not allowed to invent. With the epic, the plots, the names of principal and most minor characters, their provenance and fate were “historical” and non-negotiable. The story was given, though there might be flexibility in disposition, sequence, emphasis. Moreover, the metre, various as it can be thanks to the movable caesura, is fundamentally non-negotiable. Syntax and the rules of language are given, too. They too can prescribe diction and word order; and repeated epithets and other verbal constructs and iterations have their formal place.

  For Aristotle, poetry could exercise more freedom than Homer allowed himself, but Aristotle wrote with the benefit of hindsight and was chiefly concerned with the drama. Homer’s is a primary, not a secondary, intelligence: he makes with language a way through shared memory and animates that memory in his present world, and therefore in ours. His use of similes is not decorative: they bring distant facts into imaginative focus, they imply other possibilities of life than warfare, they are, as Frederic Raphael has written, “windows.” Some critics, who follow Aristotle, assume that Homer felt free to invent how his characters moved in a given geography and to make up the stories of their existence. Others, supported by modern archaeology, argue that these elements were given, specifically remembered in the verse of the oral tradition. The poet provided an account of actual events set in the places where they occurred. An oral tradition keeps genealogies, sequences, catalogues in memory in proper order and proportion. The mnemonics are not to aid invention but to inhibit it, to enable memory and recitation. The singer’s task is to evoke as truthfully as memory will permit “a world suitable for heroes.”

  The sense of closure that we impose on historic periods is itself a miasma. The dark age in the Greek world, from 1200 to 800 BC, is unlikely to have been uniformly dark, any more than that the European Dark Ages were, or the Renaissance uniformly renascent. Mezzanine elements, cultural customs and traditions, survived Mycenae. When the Homeric poems were composed, the lines were not all down between the age of Troy and the time in which the bard lived. “Time” moved then, as it does now, at different speeds in different places, even places adjacent to one another.

  The Iliad and Odyssey survive from what scholars believe were comprehensive cycles of poems, their narrative beginning with the wars in heaven. Such cycles, orally transmitted, may have grown up during the dark ages, and Homer or “Homer” may have built on them.21 They grew, says Hugh G. Evelyn-White, who edited the surviving fragments, without preconceived design into “a kind of epic history of the world, as known to the Greeks, down to the death of Odysseus, at which the heroic age, a categorical critic will tell us, came to an end.” Alexandrian editors, Zenodotus in particular, shuffled these poems into a chronology order early in the third century BC. In the Byzantine age, Photius preserved an abridged synopsis of some of the poems which Proclus (second or fifth century AD) had recorded in his vast, largely vanished Chrestomatheia.

  There are allusions to and quotations from the Iliad in the Odyssey and vice versa. Listeners and later readers would have noticed them. Throughout the Odyssey we are reminded, in considering Odysseus’ actions in relation to his wife, of Agamemnon’s disastrous return home, where he was murdered by his wife’s lover. Shrewd Odysseus learned caution from the tale. Parts of the Odyssey are “modelled on an old poem, now lost, of the journey of the Argonauts to Aeetes, rul
er of Aea. Circe’s allusion to this poem (XI, 70) can then be taken as a valuable datum for literary history.”22 Odysseus’ dog in Book XVII, which dies of old age and surprise when Odysseus returns, is called Argos. Other histories and legends are alluded to in the poems, so that we can assume they were familiar. Nestor brings in many elements not strictly related to Troy, from the stories of Thebes for example, another tale of confrontation between large powers, in central Greece and the Argolid. Diomede is a hero but (he is reminded) his father, Tydeus, was greater, one of the Seven Against Thebes. Diomede’s companion Sthenelus’ father, too, was involved in that war, and both are epigoni, enacting at Troy what their forebears failed to fulfil in their war. When Odysseus faces the terrifying trial in “the blue Symplegades,” we are reminded that only the Argo had ever successfully navigated through. Critics looking at the anger of Achilles are inclined to ask whether it is historical, an independent legend, or based on the now almost vanished story of the wrath of Meleager.23

  The power of the Iliad and Odyssey overshadowed the memory of prior traditions of epic history; it also “exercised a paralysing influence over the successors of Homer.”24 In the Poetics (XXIII) Aristotle justifies the superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey over the other poems in the cycle. The heroic poem “should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.” These are the famous dramatic unities, stretched a little, but not too far, beyond the drama for epic. The epic poem “will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. For as the sea-fight at Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily took place at the same time, but did not tend to any one result, so in the sequence of events, one thing sometimes follows another, and yet no single result is thereby produced. Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets.” But not Homer.