The First Poets Read online

  What is admirable about the Homeric hero is not that he is allowed latitude but that, knowing his fate, he still behaves with courage and honour.

  Hector in Iliad XX, 304, is terrifyingly human. Sometimes a god is required to tap an enemy on the shoulder in order to distract him, to deflect the fatal course of an arrow or a spear. But the heroes go into battle and seek to win glory, areté is proved by kleos. That is their nature, that is what the Iliad in particular is about. This human ideal is most clearly explored in the characters of kings, princes, noble warriors. The common soldiers in some way belong to and are extensions of the great warriors. What makes the killing so vivid and painful is the way the poem humanises each victim; they are often better than their victors, only they are less powerful, or less favoured by a god.

  The Trojans share a collective take on the war: it started for them when the Greek ships arrived; it will end when they depart or the city is destroyed. The Greeks are more diverse in perspective, each with an individual point and motive of departure, each desiring to return for a different reason, and every one individually motivated in battle, though taking booty seems to be a common pursuit. The objective was to kill a well-heeled warrior, strip him then and there of his fine armour and have a runner carry the clobber back to the ships. Amongst the Trojans and their allies there was much rich armour to be captured, and some of the finest horses in the world, though none so fine as Achilles’ Xanthus, which “white-armed Juno had endowed with human speech.” He bows his head so low the mane touches the earth and foretells his master’s death. “We two can fly as swiftly as Zephyrus who they say is fleetest of all winds; nevertheless it is your doom to fall by the hand of a man and of a god.”

  Achilles in Book IX famously speaks of his freedom to leave Troy, and more famously, in Book I, defines his particular objectives in joining the war: “I came not warring here for any ill the Trojans had done me. I have no quarrel with them. They have not raided my cattle nor my horses, nor cut down my harvests on the rich plains of Phthia; for between me and them there is a great space, both mountain and sounding sea. We have followed you, Sir Insolence [Agamemnon]! for your pleasure, not ours—to gain satisfaction from the Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the sons of the Achaeans have given me.” The candour in speech that we encounter in both poems is remarkable in an age of indirection and irony such as ours: it is no wonder that Odysseus is the most modern-seeming Homeric character: he is the most devious, the most ironic and calculating, and many younger readers find his poem far more comprehensible than Hector’s and Achilles’, which strike them as too predictable and burdened with detail.

  In the world of peace, so vividly evoked in the shield which Thetis has Hephaestus make for Achilles (Iliad XVIII), the responsibilities and duties of men are different from those of wartime. In war or in peace, the human scenes generally have a formal, ritualised movement which should be borne in mind when appraising “characters.” These protagonists cannot be read as we would read novel characters: the bourgeois world has not happened to them, their identities have not been made subjective. Like Greek dramatic figures, they wear a kind of mask before their human faces and it is the mask upon which we focus. Even when it slips, there is likely to be another mask behind it, as when Achilles is left alone with the corpse of Patroclus. Major characters are imbued with ethos. Lesky45 identifies three such characters in the Iliad: Achilles, Hector and Patroclus. Each suffers (knowingly) a failure of restraint, a kind of forerunner of the tragic hubris Aristotle speaks of, and including tragic anagnorisis, or recognition.

  Hospitality, like grief, can be ceremonial, a social given, rather than an expression of individual nature. Odysseus is moved on rapidly when he asks too much and violates conventions of hospitality in his protracted journey home. In Book XXII of the Odyssey, hospitality, after such a long violation of its rules, is inverted: the battle takes place in the very site of hospitality and the first two victims, Antinous and Eurylachus, die into their food, as it were, blood mingling with viands. Positive exceptions to the formalism of custom occur as well, for example when Priam addresses Helen in the Iliad, Book II, or in Book XXIV when Achilles and Priam meet in the most harrowing and powerful engagement in the poem, a battle without weapons where both protagonists prove their heroic stature in an act of mutual self-effacement. Achilles himself lifts the corpse of Hector onto Priam’s wagon, an amazing moment and full of tears. These passages are susceptible to “modern” readings, but it is best not to inflict too much psychology on them.

  As modern readers, however, we cannot help entering our own judgements on some of the characters. The most awkward in the Iliad is Agamemnon, the great king. From the first moment he speaks he is aggressive, assertive, shrill, unbrave; he needs to be calmed by venerable Nestor, he is a hot-head without qualities who alienates his chief warrior and puts the whole campaign, in its ninth year, in jeopardy all for the sake of a woman. Achilles makes it clear that Agamemnon is a coward and never leads his men but stays in the centre; he is a heavy drinker and has an insatiable sexual appetite. The poem tries to redeem him by comparing him with the gods. Zeus is the first point of comparison, and Agamemnon is within his army what Zeus is within his palace. Zeus the wife-beater … We have just seen him threatening his wife with violence and her child Hephaistus begging her to obey the brute because it hurts him to see her hurt by him. Agamemnon is beneath respect, contemptible in his appetites and lack of empathy. Thersites attacks him, but because Thersites is such a repulsive and unpopular figure, his (true) accusations rebound upon his own head.

  We get to know Agamemnon and most of the other leading characters not through description but by means of their own language. They speak, indeed they talk so much that Plato, in Book III of the Republic, reckons that epic poetry is halfway between narrative and the drama.46 In an oral tradition, the medium of speech in which the rhapsode works is also the privileged medium within the narrative, through which the heroes make themselves known. Characters are differentiated by their diction, the length of their syntactical periods, their tones in relation to their peers and their inferiors. When in Iliad IX the three ambassadors, visiting Achilles in his tent, urge him to change his mind, they are carefully individualised; the middle one is fullest and clearest. In the rhetorical world of threes, it is the second that is always fullest (a rhetorical “fact”), Lesky reminds us.47 In Book II of the Odyssey the suitors, especially Antinous, make fun of Telemachus and bait him: the sarcasm of the dialogue borders on dramatic form. Greek laughter often relates to mockery. It can be as cruel as the laughter in the Old Testament.

  Especially in debate we hear voices, coloured by the prejudice or the wisdom that pertains to them. In the Odyssey speech gives us a sense of intimacy with the characters while, at the same time, keeping us at our distance: we hear the suitors, Telemachus, Menelaus, Helen, Nestor, Odysseus, the gods and many others. Speech is more immediate than reported speech, even when formalised and delivered in a ceremonious way.

  We get closest to the characters of the Iliad in Book VI, when we are taken within the walls of Troy and allowed to see, by contrast with the Greek camp in all its functional and insistently male order, another world. At the high tower Andromache and Astyanax meet Hector. She begs her husband not to fight on, recalling the terrible place of Achilles in her own past. He slew her father and seven brothers. But Hector will not rest, though he knows Troy’s eventual doom and what it will mean for her and their son. His helmet frightens the baby, both parents laugh, he removes the helmet and kisses the child. He prays. It is a wonderful moment of human laughter, the more powerful because it is the only point of intimate warmth in the poem, unless we regard the rather strained exchanges between Achilles and Patroclus as warm. Then Hector goes, Andromache returns among her women. Hector meets Paris and they prepare, after this interlude, to return to battle.

  The Odyssey is warmer i
n this respect, with intimate exchanges between many characters. But since the world through which Telemachus moves, outside Ithaca, is at peace, and since Odysseus converses when he returns home with people who love and respect him, the formality which is so pronounced in the Iliad becomes less insistent and we have a sense of actions on a smaller scale, with a more focussed intensity and purpose.

  The Iliad, Lesky declares, “does not merely fulfil the demands of epic poetry; it goes far beyond them to the realm of tragedy. Instead of uniform flow and unhurried narration of events, we find an artistic scheme of interconnection and cross-reference, happenings sometimes briefly sketched, sometimes elaborately worked out …” With Aristotle he speaks of the poem’s contrasting styles, one “flowing,” the other “periodic,” more fo-cussed, holding attention on a single incident or scene. The stylistic distinction can be applied to the structure itself, an interplay between speeds and depths of realisation, what the German writer Friedrich Schiller called the “naive and the sentimentive.”

  Serious structural problems mar the Iliad, making interpretation hard. For example, in a single day the Greeks build a mighty rampart between the ships and the Trojan plain. Oddnesses and actual faults in the narrative are seized upon by critics to support compositional theories. Analyticals and the unitarians have predetermined responses which are as much to do with their theories as with the poem itself. Of all the theories, the “gradual accretion” theory seems the most commonsensical, which does not mean that it is correct. Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848) proposed it. The “lays” theory suggests the Iliad is sixteen poems joined into one. The compilation theory takes it a step further: they were not lays but epic episodes linked together (this grew out of studies of the Odyssey but was eventually applied to the Iliad as well). As an extension of the compilation theory came the accretion theory. After the First World War there was a reversion to a sense of the general unity of the Iliad. Unitarians who had defended the unity of plot now began to defend the structure in greater detail.

  Lesky argues that centuries of epic poetry came before Homer (the un-writing dark ages). Oral elements survived in the written text, especially formulae and epithets and the verbatim repetition of commands and speeches. If we bear in mind the legend of Homer’s blindness and consider how complex in thematic and textural conception Paradise Lost is, and how it was orally delivered to Milton’s long-suffering daughters, we might not think recitation and even dictation quite so remarkable. Literary in source, original in prosody and concept, Paradise Lost was orally (because it could not have been literarily) conceived, structured and recorded. Lesky is persuaded that the Homeric poet could and did write. As evidence he mentions the wide cross-referencing and self-quotation, at points distant from one another in the text. Lesky is also keen to insist that the poems are not all derivation; there is invention and originality, not least in the formal organisation of the Iliad. “The scene in which Priam and Achilles, after all the pangs of battle, all the grief and cruelty of unmeasured vengeance, learn to understand and respect each other as men, is at once the culmination of the Iliad and the starting-point of the western conception of humanity.”48

  The title of the Iliad (The Poem of Ilium or Troy) could have been the Achil-lead, since his inaction, and then his action, are the mainsprings of the plot. The poem focuses on the few days in the decade of the Trojan War when Troy briefly got the upper hand, the point at which the scales of fate seemed as though they might tip contrary to expectation. They were not necessarily the most dramatic or the most decisive days, though the death of Hector accelerated the end of the war. Three weeks pass in the opening scenes, another three weeks in the closing scenes. Most of what occurs from Book II to Book XXIII, Taplin reminds us, takes place during four days and two nights.49 Seven and a half books are devoted to a single day. Time is going fast in the opening books; it slows down and we focus on the intense action, and then at the end there is an acceleration. The opening books provide crucial information, the closing parts of the poem foreshadow Troy’s fate. In terms of theme, the first two lines mention Achilles, the last two Hector, their epithets intact. The poem begins with the attempted ransoming of a child—Chryses and Chryseis—and ends with Priam’s ransoming of his child Hector’s corpse.

  Achilles is a powerful man of selective commitments and affinities, far from home, Patroclus’ intimate. Hector, the mainstay of his city, fights before the eyes of his family and his people. He believes it is equal combat until the end, and then (XXII, 304–5) he displays a true heroism which transcends mere strength, endurance and skill: that resignation which keeps him resolute and brave though he knows he is imminently doomed. “Immortal fame” is the wages of the kind of life he lives—and the death he must die.

  The Italian writer Italo Calvino seems, in a modern spirit, to prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad on formal grounds. His essay entitled “The Odysseys within the Odyssey”50 reflects on the number of odysseys the poem describes, how many ends are known before a traveller reaches home. In Book IV Menelaus recalls how he was caught in the doldrums off Egypt. The local goddess of Pharos urged him to beard Proteus in his den, wrestle with him and squeeze an explanation and a prophecy from him. Within the story, Menelaus tells a story in which he compels the sea god to tell a story.

  The danger of forgetting is real all along: Odysseus might lose track of who he is, or forget the urgency of his calling home. There are the lotus eaters, Circe’s drugs, the Sirens’ song and much else to distract him. The danger is less that he will forget the past, more that he will forget his purpose, his identity and future. Where Odysseus has come from is clear and chronicled; he must constantly bear in mind where he is going, like Aeneas en route to Italy. Odysseus loses everything more than once on the way home: his booty, the gifts he is given, all his men, and almost his name when he visits the Cyclops. He finally declares his name, at King Alcinous’ behest (IX, 19–28), in a powerful passage where he regathers his energy in the act of memory. Calvino makes Odysseus’ trial universal, without reducing it to an allegory. His reading touches with a lively accuracy what many scholars overlook in considering the poem’s themes.

  In Book XXII the suitors are slain and compared to a harvest of fish, poured out by fishermen onto the sand, twitching still. When the female servants who consorted with the suitors are hanged by Telemachus, their dangling feet are seen to twitch as well. Then at the opening of Book XXIV, which some regard as apocryphal, the suitors’ ghosts are led to Hades by Cyllenian Hermes with his golden, sleep-dispensing wand. Here we encounter one of the most apposite and precise similes in the Odyssey, a simile which makes visible the flight of souls. Butler translates it, “As bats fly squealing in the hollow of some great cave, when one of them has fallen out of the cluster in which they hang, even so did the ghosts whine and squeal as Hermes the healer of sorrow led them down into the dark abode of death.” Other translators make the “cluster” into a “chain” or “cone.” Be that as it may, when one bat is disturbed they all erupt and flock erratically out of the cave mouth. As a simile it corresponds at every point to the elements it helps us to visualise. It suggests, too, a certain kind of geography.

  The Odyssey, J. V. Luce points out, has two quite different narrative tones, that of Odysseus’ fantastic travels on the one hand, and that of the Telemachiad and Odysseus’ return to Ithaca on the other. Luce is of course fascinated by the geography of Ithaca and prefers the rocks and paths and caves that he can visit; he likes it when the “fantastic gives way to the realistic.”51 Certainly the “realistic,” as he calls it, has elements of implausibility metamorphosis, magic, just as the fantastic has very particularised and credible details, however unbelievable the Cyclops, Circe, the Laestrygonians, the Sirens and the other challenges are.

  What kinds of detail make the complex narrative of the Odyssey credible and deep in “orchestration,” touching different strings of the story all at once and making those harmonies that affect us on each re-reading? Penelope’s wea
ving is one such detail. She weaves not just anything, a table-cloth or antimacassar or bed-cover: she is weaving not some mystical cloth like the Lady of Shalott, but in fact a shroud for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. It is a sacred charge laid upon her; hence she cannot be seriously interrupted by the suitors until the task is complete. In Book V, Hermes like a seagull makes his way from Olympus with Zeus’ command to Calypso (whose name means “concealed” or “concealer”). She must release Odysseus from her spells so he can go home. What is Calypso doing? Weaving, which seems to be what women with servants do to pass the time. Certainly at Alcinous’ court all the women are at it.

  Odysseus has an awful journey. His foe Poseidon (Poseidon lay with a sea nymph and Polyphemus was the issue) spots him in the little craft he has made, churns up the seas and tries to drown him. The hero swims for two days, lands on rocks which tear his hands, is sucked out to sea again on the undertow, and at last is washed ashore exhausted. He hides in the woods, making a bed among the fallen leaves. Here again is a perfectly chosen simile: “so he laid himself down and heaped the leaves all round him. Then, as one who lives alone in the country, far from any neighbour, hides a brand as fire-seed in the ashes to save himself from having to get a light elsewhere, even so did Odysseus cover himself up with leaves …”

  It takes him ten years to return from the ten-year war. His long relationship with Calypso issued in staleness and, for the hero, that saudade that the Portuguese navigators felt, far from home, a deep almost despairing sadness. The poem concentrates on the last leg of his journey and the restoration of his fortunes at home. The time-frame is just under six weeks, and Books XVI to XXIV take only three days. Not only does the Odyssey cover a lot of ground and sea, the whole Aegean and then some; it also evokes every class of person, from mendicants and beggars to kings. Odysseus himself crosses back and forth between classes, now a beggar, now a king. In conversation with Telemachus, Helen remembers how dressed in rags he entered Troy as if a slave to gather information, how she recognised him but kept his counsel and he returned, slaying Trojans as he went.