The First Poets Read online

  His “transcendent excellence” is paradoxically manifest in his setting himself limits. When, centuries later, a lesser poet, Apollonius, revives the story of the Argonauts’ expedition, he doggedly follows their itinerary. Homer does not set out to tell the whole story of Troy, though it had a beginning and an end. He chooses to pursue one part of the war, and while at every stage remembering the wider context, the larger narrative, he frames his tale in time. There are intrusions from outside the time-frame: the catalogue of ships, for example. But they are functional, adding to the context without dissipating the narrative. Other poets writing within the cycle focus on more than one hero, one period or action. For this reason the Iliad and the Odyssey each furnish the subject of one tragedy, or, at most, two. The Cypria supplies several plots, and the Little Iliad up to eight.25

  There is another take on the epic cycles which better fits the hypothetical chronology of composition: that the Iliad and Odyssey were so central to Greek culture and identity, so important and celebrated, that other epics by lesser composers were built around them, the poets hitching their wagons to Homer’s star and effacing themselves out of exalted respect.

  The cycle would have begun with the Titanomachia (“War of the Titans”), composed perhaps by Eumelus (“sweet melody”) of Corinth or Arctinus of Miletus, about whom we know nothing.26 After the gods have settled their affairs, the human poems begin with the Oidipodeia (“The Story of Oedipus”) “by Cinaethon in six thousand six hundred verses,” which was to serve Sophocles as a source-book for his plays. In The Contest Between Hesiod and Homer, the Thebaid and the Epigoni are attributed to Homer and constitute a Theban cycle or sub-cycle. Then comes the Kypria, of which a full synopsis survives from Proclus’ Chrestomatheia. The author may have been Hegesias (not the third-century rhetorician from Magnesia, but an earlier Hegesias) or Stasinus. Some say Homer gave it to Stasinus as a dowry, along with some cash. Here the full story of the Judgement of Paris is told succinctly. Alexandrus (Paris) chose Aphrodite not because she was the most beautiful but because she bribed him with the promise of Helen. Zeus plotted the Trojan War in part to depopulate the world: “the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth.” Among the fragments is some Stalinist wisdom: “He is a simple man who kills the father and lets the children live.”27 After the Kypria comes the Iliad itself.

  Proclus’ Chrestomatheia summarises the sequel to the Iliad in the cycle the Aithiopis. It was in five books, written by Arctinus of Miletus. It recounted the arrival at Troy of Memnon the Ethiopian, of the mighty Amazon Penthiseleia and her death at Achilles’ hand, followed by the death of Achilles himself and the angry contest of Odysseus and Ajax for Achilles’ armour. The sequel, the action-packed Ilias Mikra (“Little Iliad”), is said to have been by Lesches of Mitylene. It begins by settling the issue of Achilles’ arms. Athena contrives that they go to Odysseus. Ajax, driven to madness, destroys the Achaean herd and slays himself. Philoctetes is brought back from Lemnos, cured of his festering snake-bite by Machaon, and kills Paris with an arrow from the bow of Heracles, which he happens to possess. Menelaus defiles Paris’ body, but the Trojans recover and bury it. Odysseus, having given Neoptolemus his father, Achilles’, arms, disguises himself and sneaks into Troy. He is recognised by Helen and they plot the city’s overthrow. The Trojan Horse is built, the city falls. Neoptolemus captures Andromache and hurls her child Astyanax from a tower. Judging from the surviving summary, many of the images we have of the fall of Troy derive from this poem. It is followed by Iliou Persis (“The Sack of Ilium”), supposed again to have been by Arctinus of Miletus. Here more details of the Trojan Horse were given, with variations on other tales. Odysseus kills the child Astyanax, Ajax carries off Cassandra and damages Athena’s statue, so that the Greeks want to stone him to death.

  The Trojan War concluded, the Greeks go home and the Nostoi (“The Returns”), attributed to Agias of Troezen, delivers them all to their different fates. After the Nostoi comes the Odyssey, and then, to conclude things with a heartless symmetry, came the two books of the Telegonia by Eugammon of Cyrene. Here we find the tales of Odysseus’ later life, culminating in his death at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe, who then marries Penelope while, in a double ceremony, Telemachus marries Circe, his father’s divine ex-mistress. Odysseus may have had a second son with Penelope, called Acusilaus.

  Odysseus was the last of the heroes and the cycle ends with his death. It may also have included a full account of the voyage of the Argonauts (later retold in Apollonius’ Argonautica), the hunting of the Calydonian boar and much else. Some of that poetry was already lost by the time the great library at Alexandria was flourishing. Judging from Aristotle’s Poetics, the vanished poetry was diverse and diffuse: the Iliad and Odyssey are marked by formal concentration and, through variety of incident, singleness of purpose.

  The stories that the cycles told, whether they are contemporary in composition with the Iliad and Odyssey or were conceived as sequels and prequels to them, with some (unsubtle for the most part) cross-referencing, were widely known. One ancient potter shows, for example, Priam and Achilles, Priam and Penthesileia the Amazon queen, and then Penthesileia and Achilles. Clearly this artist accepted a link between the Iliad and the Aethiopis. Prior to about 600 BC, not a single confirmable allusion or reference to Homer appears in any surviving work; there are references to epic tales, epic values and narratives, but none specifically to Homer.28 In the other arts nothing specifically Homeric is found. In the mid–seventh century there are some Cyclops paintings which may be allusions to the Odyssey but could draw on another, or a shared, source. Taplin affirms that in his view the first “clearly Homer-inspired visual art” is a plate, probably from Rhodes around 600 BC, which portrays Iliad XVII, 106ff.

  There is an eastern Greek pitcher29 from around 670–50 which shows two enraged lions, tails up, mouths wide open, frightening a little mountain goat. He stands between them and does his best to make an ugly face. His horns, with their slightly wavy contour at the top, look as if he is wrinkling them in anger. When Ajax has slain the rich-armoured Imbrios (Iliad XIII, 198ff.), there is a struggle for his armour; in the midst of this and other hectic struggles comes the metaphor: “As two lions snatch a goat from the hounds that have it in their fangs, and bear it through thick brushwood high above the ground in their jaws, thus did the Ajaxes bear aloft the body of Imbrios, and strip it of its armour.” It is a handsome pitcher, tawny with pale black painting, with decorations scattered in patterns, four rhombuses, giving the impression of the air around the animals shivering with tension or fear. This seems to indicate (assuming the images on the pitcher have been properly read) that the Iliad, at the deep level of metaphor, was sufficiently known for so specific an allusion to make sense to the original artist and to his ancient customer.

  It always strikes me as puzzling that poems as different as the Iliad and the Odyssey are spoken of in the same breath, as though they are unarguably by a single author and are written in a single style. The critic Marghanita Laski used to insist that Flaubert was the bourgeois Homer, and that Madame Bo-vary and the Odyssey were for young readers, A Sentimental Education and the Iliad for grown-ups. The first two are agons, Emma’s and Odysseus’, while the others create a more complex and politically intense world. The first two are about forms of love, the others about conflict and its consequences. In the ancient world, the Iliad was the more valued, if we believe the evidence of bibliography: more than 188 manuscripts of the Iliad survive, less than half that many of the Odyssey.

  Parallels and contrasts can be multiplied; a few, however, do illuminate the very different nature of the two poems and help us decide whether both poems emerge from a single stable.

  The governing fact of the Iliad, what makes the action happen as it does and finally resolves the poem, is the wrath of Achilles. Odysseus’ homing desire is less intense, and the time-span of the two poems is consequently very different
. The poem with the longer time-span is about 12,000 lines, while the poem with the shorter time-span is considerably longer, about 15,000 lines. For recitation, the Iliad might have been divided at the end of Book IX, then XVIII, taking three nights or about twenty hours to perform. The Odyssey would have taken two nights. Despite the differences in focus and extent, the Odyssey seems longer. Constantine A. Trypanis quotes an early critic who compares the poet of the Odyssey to a setting sun “whose greatness remains without violence,” whereas his earlier manifestations were noonlike, full of vigour and urgent engagement. Achilles knows who he is and why he acts. Odysseus’ long home-coming, on the other hand, is a reassertion of his role and identity. Trypanis cannot believe that both poems were composed by one man (as though Shakespeare could not have written The Comedy of Errors and Othello). Butler rejects sunset arguments on artistic grounds: the Odyssey is cruder, more romantic, more diverse, evidence of a poet learning rather than relaxing his craft.

  One basic difference between the two poems is the amount of liberty they give the reader to engage and to “make sense.” The Iliad, not least because of the tight time-span and the close focus of the narrative, is a more “complete” poem, a finished artefact. It is in the nature of such works that they seek “to limit the possibilities of interpretation.” There is not much we can do with the information beyond what the poem has done with it: the resonances are contained and powerful for that reason. Any ten people reading the Iliad closely, or hearing it recited, will have a more or less common sense of what the poem is saying and doing. The Odyssey is different, more “open” and susceptible to different readings, at literal, psychological, political, allegorical and other levels. It is a poem that “disrupts its own structural patterns or the conventions of its genre, thereby making room for—even requiring—more interpretative activity.”30

  This certainly does not make it a better poem. Plato in the Hippias declares that the Iliad excels the Odyssey as much as Achilles excels Odysseus.31 This has something to do with the form the poem takes, something to do with the protagonists. Achilles is willing to die; Odysseus is willing to live, and to live at whatever cost. Achilles dies young, a hero whose fate is woven early; Odysseus is the hero who survives and suffers. Two types of man, then, and two models of action. Already in the Iliad Odysseus has his three epithets: “much-subtle,” “much-enduring,” “much-devising” (polymetis, polytlas, polymechanos).32 To him are entrusted those missions which involve tact and politic action. Achilles is too much himself to dissemble. Odysseus is the anti-type of “fleet-footed Achilles.” Thetis tells her almost-divine child that he can have long life (and obscurity) or early death (and glory). In Book XVIII, line 98, Achilles replies, “then let me die soon.” In this he is less Greek than Odysseus.

  The poems are, as a result of their subject matter and their themes, typo-logically distinct. The Iliad concentrates its action in two primary settings: Troy, the Greek camp and the Trojan plain on the one hand, and Olympus on the other. The Odyssey focuses largely on two men, Telemachus and his father, Odysseus. The Iliad builds towards death and destruction, the Odyssey towards the re-establishment of local harmony in the wake of the universal disruption of that war. Whereas in the Iliad things generally keep their shape and the world of cause and effect is brutal but credible, in the Odyssey we are in the realm of metamorphoses, of unstable identities. Aristotle in the Poetics says simplicity is the keynote of the Iliad’s structure, complexity of the Odyssey’s. “Again, Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or ‘ethical,’ or ‘pathetic.’ The parts also, with the exception of song and spectacle, are the same; for epic requires Reversals of the Situation, Recognitions, and Scenes of Suffering. Moreover, the thoughts and the diction must be artistic. In all these respects Homer is our earliest and sufficient model. Indeed each of his poems has a twofold character. The Iliad is at once simple and ‘pathetic,’ and the Odyssey complex (for recognition scenes run through it), and at the same time ‘ethical.’”

  The “unitarian” critics believe that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are “whole” conceptions, marred perhaps by later interpolations but their artistic integrity largely inviolate.33 This is the line taken by Jacqueline de Romilly, who insists that both poems are wholes with “unity of action.”34 Albin Lesky contrasts the structures of the poems, but he does not suggest that they are unintentional in structure or incomplete.35 The Iliad’s structure, centred insistently upon the wrath of Achilles, brings every element together in a species of continuous integration. The Odyssey is, at its weakest structurally (and narratively most compelling), a sequence of episodes, a gallery of framed stories, and, he concludes, we can be surer in the Odyssey than in the Iliad that there were earlier treatments of the same material.

  Those of the analytical persuasion see the poems as assemblages of shorter “runs” of narrative, anthologies built out of prefabricated chunks of (oral) verse. They make more of the inconsistencies and discontinuities in the narrative than the unitarians do, insisting that each rough join proves that the poems were “put together.” “Odysseus’ request to the Phaeacians (VII, 215) to be allowed to have his dinner is very odd, since he had already had it (V, 177). Patroclus kills Palaemenes in Iliad V, 576 who then, Lazarus like, revives to mourn his son in XIII, 658. Zeus predicts that Hector will attack Achilles’ ship; in fact he attacks Protesilaus.”36 There are portions of detached, unfunctional plot, for instance the suggestion of Aeneas’ hostility to Priam (XIII, 460), probably a fossilised piece of information, since Aeneas was ruler of the Dardanians (in Mount Ida’s foothills, above Troy) and of parallel ancestry to Hector.

  Is it possible that one of the poems, the Iliad, is “unitary” and the other a rich amalgam of stories assembled around a continually interrupted narrative core? Certainly the sense of difference in kind between the poems runs deep in any reader who holds both of them in mind at the same time. Indeed, the more closely they are observed the more it comes to seem that what makes them seem similar is in fact the way in which the Alexandrian textual critics applied the same template to both, an arbitrary act.

  There are twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet. There are twenty-four books in each of the poems, and in the oldest manuscripts each book is chapter-headed with a Greek letter. This division into books was done much later than “Homer’s” day, probably as late as the Alexandrian period. Lesky tells us Zenodotus, who put the “cycles” in chronological order and edited Hesiod’s Theogony, was responsible for dividing the poems. He may have set out to make them handle more easily in terms of book rolls, or to make commentary and cross-referencing easier. There could have been a numerological or mystical motive. The division for the most part makes a kind of sense, corresponding with breaks in the action, changes of perspective or setting. Lesky assumes the breaks may have coincided with the natural breaks in the rhapsodes’ recitation, but the extents in the Iliad vary from 424 lines (XIX) to 909 (V), and it is unlikely that the audience would have accepted a half portion one night, or (if 424 lines is a natural attention span) a double portion another. It is the larger divisions in the action (the Telemachiad, which is the story of Telemachus’ adventures in pursuit of his father; Odysseus’ adventures; and the “return to Troy” in the Odyssey, for example) that are the organic and aesthetic “sections” of the poem, not the mechanical breaks usefully imposed by the first of Homer’s “scientific” editors.

  We have unitarians and analysts. We also have the so-called chorizontes, whom some regard as early Homeric heretics. They claim that the two poems are sufficiently different, despite shared epithets and some repeated passages, to have been composed by two different poets, that the distinctive styles, dictions, thematics and morality of each poem prove that the works are of distinct authorship, perhaps even from different periods. To believe in two poets is first to believe there might be one; or as few as two. The chorizontes are unitarians when it comes to each poem, but analysts of the tradition of si
ngle authorship. They started long before the “oral tradition” critics but are their remote forebears.

  If we are tempted to become chorizontes, we might begin by examining Homeric similes and considering whether they are used differently in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Anyone who reads the Odyssey immediately after finishing the Iliad experiences a sense of poverty: after the metaphorical abundance of the Iliad, the Odyssey is relatively poor. The Iliad has, Taplin tells us, four times as many similes as the Odyssey.

  The first significant extended simile in the Odyssey occurs in Book IV, lines 332ff. Telemachus tells Menelaus about the suitors, their threats, and the reason for his journey. In his response, the Trojan hero uses a simile that instantly transports us into the language-world of the Iliad. Butler translates the passage: “Menelaus on hearing this was very much shocked. ‘So,’ he exclaimed, ‘these cowards would usurp a brave man’s bed? A hind might as well lay her new born young in the lair of a lion, and then go off to feed in the forest or in some grassy dell: the lion when he comes back to his lair will make short work with the pair of them—and so will Ulysses with these suitors.’” The next major simile also occurs in Book IV. The scene cuts back to Ithaca, where Penelope is anxious about Telemachus. Butler again: “But Penelope lay in her own room upstairs,” in the marriage bed Menelaus imagined, leading into his simile, “unable to eat or drink, and wondering whether her brave son would escape, or be overpowered by the wicked suitors. Like a lioness caught in the toils with huntsmen hemming her in on every side she thought and thought till she sank into a slumber, and lay on her bed bereft of thought and motion.” Here is the lioness, after the lion; here is the figure of the huntress at bay. The similes work together, complementarily. The reader or listener registers them because they are emphatic and reinforce one another. Since similes are sparser here than in the Iliad, they tend to have a more calculated, even a “literary,” impact. They are not always effective, however. In Book XVI of the Odyssey Athena urges Odysseus to tell Telemachus who he is so that they can start planning the campaign against the suitors. She re-creates him, he ceases to be an old beggar man and speaks in his own person to his son. Odysseus has to persuade him, and when Telemachus accepts who he is, deep and complex emotions are elicited. The poem employs a curious simile: “As he spoke he sat down, and Telemachus threw his arms about his father and wept. They were both so much moved that they cried aloud like eagles or vultures with crooked talons that have been robbed of their half fledged young by peasants. Thus piteously did they weep …” The simile is powerful but dubiously appropriate at this stage in the poem, a point of restoration. Eagles and vultures elsewhere in the poem (like the lion in the Iliad) are violent, destructive or masterful.