Copyright

William Collins

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Published by William Collins in 2014

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2014

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Source ISBN: 9780007335527

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007335541

Version: 2016-04-15

Dedication

For

Sarah Raven

Thomas Nicolson

William Nicolson

Ben Nicolson

Rosie Nicolson

&

Molly Nicolson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Maps:

The World of the Ancient Greeks

The Bronze Age World

Preface

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

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes

Bibliography

Text Permissions

Index

Acknowledgements

By the same author

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

COLOUR PLATES

1 ‘The Mask of Agamemnon’. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

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

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

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

5 Engraving depicting an octopus on a gold cup from Tholos of Dendra, near Midea, sixteenth century BC. (National Archaeological Museum of Athens. DeAgostini/Getty Images)

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

7 Attic terracotta lekythos (oil flask), attributed to the Achilles Painter, c.440 BC. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art. akg-images)

8 Mycenaean gold elliptical funeral diadem, from the ‘Grave of the Women’, sixteenth century BC. (National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

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

10 Damascened daggers made of gold, silver, bronze and niello, from Mycenae and Pylos. (DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

11 Writing tablet from the Ulu Burun wreck, c.1325 BC. (© Institute of Nautical Archaeology)

12 The tower of the Acropolis in Tiryns. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

13 Nestor’s cup. (Museum of Ischia, Italy. © Maria Grazia Casella/Alamy)

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

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

16 Stabbed Bronze Age phalera (horse harness ornament). (Wiltshire Museum. Photo by Adam Nicolson)

17 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)

18 The Rio Odiel. (Photo by Adam Nicolson)

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

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

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

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

23 David and Goliath by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), oil on canvas. (Museo del Prado. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

24 Mycenaean bronze dagger with an integral hilt and pommel, c.1300–1100 BC (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

25 Wild pear tree, Ithaca. (Photo by Adam Nicolson)

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

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

TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Terracotta plate depicting a poet on his death bed, musing on the past with his lyre above him, c.595–570 BC. (© The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence)

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

3 Odysseus tied to the mast listening to the songs of the Sirens. (Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

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

5 Draft of Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’, October 1816. (Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

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

7 Detail from the Hawara Homer manuscript (24–28. Bodleian Libr., Gr. Class. A.1 (P)). Homer, Iliad I, 506–10, Iliad II, 1–877, with many lacunae. Courtesy of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents; the Cairo Museum; the Association Internationale de Papyrologues and Dr Adam Bülow-Jacobsen)

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

9 The megaron at Emporio, Chios. (Courtesy of John Boardman)

10 Ischian cratēr from ‘Pithekoussai’ by G. Buckner, Expedition Vol. 8, No. 4, summer 1966.

11 Nestor’s cup, eighth century BC. (Dbachmann)

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

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

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

15 Winnowing a harvest of wheat. (Getty Images)

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

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

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

Preface

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 civilisation 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 towards the formation of city-states: every one of these aspects of a renewed civilisation 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 civilisation crystallised 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?

The idea I have pursued is that the Homeric poems are legends shaped around the arrival of a people – the people who through this very process would grow to be the Greeks – in what became their Mediterranean homeland. The poems are the myths of the origin of Greek consciousness, not as a perfect but as a complex, uneasy thing. As a civilisation, what emerged in Greece was distinct from both the northern steppelands of the Bronze Age and the autocratic bureaucracies of the Near East, and fused qualities of both. Homer is a foundation myth, not of man nor of the natural world, but of the way of thinking by which the Greeks defined themselves, the frame of mind which made them who they were, one which, in many ways, we have inherited. The troubled world described by Homer remains strangely familiar.

This is also a book about epic poetry, and the value of epic in our lives. Epic is not an act of memory, not merely the account of what people are able to recall, since human memory only lasts three generations: we know something of our grandparents, but almost nothing, emotionally, viscerally, of what happened in the generations before them. Nor is it a kind of history, an objective laying out of what occurred in a past to which we have little or no access. Epic, which was invented after memory and before history, occupies a third space in the human desire to connect the present to the past: it is the attempt to extend the qualities of memory over the reach of time embraced by history. Epic’s purpose is to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now.

A wonderful depiction of epic itself survives from Mycenaean Greece. In the summer of 1939, the University of Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen, along with a Greek team, began excavating the Mycenaean palace of Pylos, in the south-western Peloponnese. In the great columned room at the centre of the palace, Blegen discovered, in pieces on the floor, where it had been dumped by the fire which brought the Mycenaean world to an end around 1200 BC, a revelatory fresco.

Against a ragged background, perhaps a rough, mountainous horizon, a poet – call him Homer – sits on a luminous, polychromed rock, a nightclub idea of a rock, dressed in a long striped robe with the sleeves of his overshirt coming almost halfway down his bare brown arms. His hair is braided, tendrils of it running down his neck and on to his back. He looks washed. Everything about him is alert, his eye bright and open, his body poised and taut, upright, ready. In his arms he holds a large five-stringed lyre, the fingers of his right hand plucking at those strings, which bend to his touch.

Against the florid red of the wall behind him – the colour of living, not dried blood, the red of life – is the most astonishing part of this image: an enormous, pale bird, the colour of the bard’s robe, the feathers of its wings half-delineated in the red that surrounds it, its eye as bright and open as Homer’s, its body larger than his, its presence in the room huge and buoyant, nothing insubstantial about it, making its way out into the world, leaving Homer’s own static, singing figure behind.

The bird is poetry itself taking wing, so big, so much stronger than little Homer with his hairdo and his fingers on the lyre. It is the bird of eloquence, the ‘winged words’, epea pteroenta, which the Homeric heroes speak to each other, epea having the same root as ‘epic’, pteroenta meaning ‘feathered’: light, mobile, airy, communicative. Meaning and beauty take flight from Homer’s song.

It is one of the most extraordinary visualisations of poetry ever created, its life entirely self-sufficient as it makes its way out across that ragged horizon. There is nothing whimsical or misty about it: it has an undeniable other reality in flight in the room. There is a deep paradox here, one that is central to the whole experience of Homer’s epics. Nothing is more insubstantial than poetry. It has no body, and yet it persists with its subtleties whole and its sense of the reality of the human heart uneroded while the palace of which this fresco was a part lies under the thick layer of ash from its burning in 1200 BC. Nothing with less substance than epic, nothing more lasting. Homer, in a miracle of transmission from one end of human civilisation to the other, continues to be as alive as anything that has ever lived.

Homer is no wild, gothic figure. He is shown supremely controlled, as organised and calmly present as anything in this civilised place, with its great store rooms, its archive centre and its beautifully dressed and fragrant inhabitants. He is civility itself. By the time this fresco was painted, the Greeks had been able to write for about 250 years, running sophisticated palace-based economies, with record-keeping bureaucracies to organise tax and military service, and to administer complex commercial and quasi-imperial relations across the eastern Mediterranean.

If that is the world in which Homer sang, it is not the world he sang about, which was much older, rougher, more elemental. He sang of the past which the occupants of this palace had left behind. That time gap allows one to see the Homeric poems as I think they should be seen: as the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 BC recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 BC, preserved through the Greek Dark Ages, and written down (if not in a final form) in about 700 BC. Homer reeks of long use. His wisdom, his presiding, god-like presence over the tales he tells, is the product of deep retrospect, not immediate reportage. His poetry embodies the air of incorporated time, as rounded as something that for centuries has rolled back and forth on the stony beaches of Greece. But it is also driven by the demands of grief, a clamouring and desperate anxiety about the nature of existence and the pains of mortality. This is the story of beginnings, and that feeling for trouble is the engine at the heart of it.

This book will make its way back towards that fresco, looking for Homer anywhere he might be found, in my own and many others’ reactions to the poems, in life experiences, in archaeology and in the landscapes where the Homeric ghosts can still be heard. It is a passionate pursuit, because these epics are a description, through a particular set of lenses, of what it is like to be alive on earth, its griefs, triumphs, sufferings and glories. These are poems that address life’s moments of revelation. Here you will find ‘the neon edges of the sea’, as Christopher Logue described the waves on the Trojan beach; the horror of existence, where ‘Warm’d in the brain the smoking weapon lies’, as Pope translated one murder in the Iliad; and its transfixing strangeness – the corona-light in the scarcely opened helmet slits of Achilles’s owl-like eyes, which Logue saw burning ‘like furnace doors ajar’.

In all the walking and thinking this book has given me, no moment remains more lasting in my mind than an evening on a small rocky peninsula near Tolo on the south-eastern coast of the Peloponnese. I had been thinking about George Seferis, the Greek poet and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in 1963, and who had come here before the Second World War, when archaeologists were discovering that this little stony protuberance into the Aegean was the acropolis of Asinē, a place entirely forgotten, except that it had survived in the Iliad as a name, one of the cities from which Greek warriors had set out for the siege at Troy.

The sea in the bay that evening was a mild milk-grey. The puttering of the little diesel-driven fans that keep the air moving through the orchards on a frosty night came from the orange groves inland. The sky promised rain. Sitting by the sea squills and the dry grasses blowing in the wind off the Gulf of Argolis, I read what Seferis had said about our relationship to the past. ‘The poem is everywhere,’ he wrote. Our own imaginative life

sometimes travels beside it

Like a dolphin keeping company for a while

With a golden sloop in the sunlight,

then vanishing again.

That glowing, if passing, connection is also what this book is about, the moment when the dolphin is alongside you, unsummoned and as transient, as Seferis also said,

As the wings of the wind moved by the wind.

ONE
Meeting Homer

ONE EVENING TEN YEARS ago I started to read Homer in English. With an old friend, George Fairhurst, I had just sailed from Falmouth to Baltimore in south-west Ireland, 250 miles across the Celtic Sea. We had set off three days earlier in our wooden ketch, the Auk, forty-two feet from stem to stern, a vessel which had felt big enough in Falmouth, not so big out in the Atlantic.

It had been a ruinous journey. A mile or so out from the shelter of Falmouth we realised our instruments were broken, but we had been preparing for too long, were hungry to go, and neither of us felt like turning back. A big storm came through that night, Force 8 gusting 9 to 10, west of Scilly, and we sailed by the stars when it was clear, by the compass in the storm, four hours on, four hours off, for that night, the next day and the following night. The seas at times had been huge, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, solid water coming over the foredeck and driving back towards the wheel, so that the side-decks were like mill-sluices, running with the Atlantic.

After forty hours we arrived. George’s face looked as if he had been in a fight, flushed and bruised, his eyes sunk and hollow in it. We dropped anchor in the middle of Baltimore harbour, its still water reflecting the quayside lights, only our small wake disturbing them, and I slept for sixteen hours straight. Now, the following evening, I was lying in my bunk, the Auk tied up alongside the Irish quay, with the Odyssey, translated by the great American poet-scholar Robert Fagles, in my hand.

I had never understood Homer as a boy. At school it was taught to us in Greek, as if the poems were written in maths. The master drew the symbols on the green blackboard and we ferreted out the sense line by line, picking bones from fish. The archaic nature of Homer’s vocabulary, the pattern of long and short syllables in the verse, the remote and uninteresting nature of the gods, like someone else’s lunchtime account of a dream from the night before: what was that to any of us? Where was the life in it? How could this remoteness compare to the urgent realities of our own lives, our own lusts and anxieties?

The difficulty and strangeness of the Greek was little more than a prison of obscurity to me, happily abandoned once the exam was done. Homer stayed irrelevant.

Now I had Fagles’s words in front of me. Half idly, I had brought his translation of the Odyssey with me on the Auk, as something I thought I might look at on my own sailing journey in the North Atlantic. But as I read, a man in the middle of his life, I suddenly saw that this was not a poem about then and there, but now and here. The poem describes the inner geography of those who hear it. Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man’s life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls.

I read Fagles that evening, and on again as we sailed up the west coast of Ireland. I began to see Homer as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture. The sea in the Odyssey was out to kill you – at one point Hermes, the presiding genius of Odysseus’s life, says, ‘Who would want to cross the unspeakable vastness of the sea? There are not even any cities there’ – but hidden within it were all kinds of delicious islands, filled with undreamt-of delights, lovely girls and beautiful fruits, beautiful landscapes where you didn’t have to work, dream lands, each in their different way seducing and threatening the man who chanced on them. But every one was bad for him. Calypso, a goddess, unbelievably beautiful, makes him sleep with her night after night, for seven years; Circe feeds him delicious dinners for a whole year, until finally one of his men asks him what he thinks he is doing. If he goes on like this, none of them will ever see their homes again. And is that what he wants?

In part I saw the Odyssey as the story of a man who was sailing through his own death: the sea is deathly, the islands are deathly, he visits Hades at the very centre of the poem and he is thought dead by the people who love him at home, a pile of white bones rotting on some distant shore. He longs for life and yet he cannot find it. When he hears stories told of his own past, he cannot bear it, wraps his head in his ‘sea-blue’ cloak and weeps for everything he has lost.

It was Odysseus I really fell in love with that summer as we sailed north to the Hebrides, Orkney and the Faroes: the many-wayed, flickering, crafty man, ‘the man of twists and turns’ as Fagles calls him, translating the Greek word polytropos, the man driven off course, the man who suffered many pains, the man who was heartsick on the open sea. His life itself was a twisting, and maybe, I thought, that was his destiny: he could never emerge into the plain calm of a resolution. The islands in his journey were his own failings. Home, Ithaca, was the longed-for moment when his own failings would at last be overcome. Odysseus’s muddle was his beauty.

He is no victim. He suffers but he does not buckle. His virtue is his elasticity, his rubber vigour. If he is pushed, he bends, but he bends back, and that half-giving strength was to me a beautiful model for a man. He was all navigation, subtlety, invention, dodging the rocks, story-telling, cheating and survival. He can be resolute, fierce and destructive when need be, and clever, funny and loving when need be. There is no need to choose between these qualities; Odysseus makes them all available.

Like Shakespeare and the Bible, we all know his stories in advance, but there was one in particular which struck me that summer sailing on the Auk. We had left the Arans late the evening before, and George had taken her all night up the dark of the Galway coast. We changed at dawn, and in that early morning, with a cup of tea in my hand at the wheel, and the sun rising over the Irish mainland, I took her on north, heading for the Inishkeas and the corner of County Mayo, before turning there and making for Scotland.

The wind was a big easterly, coming in gusts over the Mayo hills, the sun white and heatless. George, and my son Ben who had joined us, were asleep below. There were shearwaters cruising the swells beside us, black, liquid, effortless birds, like the sea turned aerial, and a fulmar now and then hung in the slot between the headsail and the main, flying with us on the current of air. The Auk surged on the wind that morning, heeling out into the Atlantic, churning her way north, horse-like in her strength. I don’t know when I have felt so happy.

Steering across the swells, holding the wheel against them as they came through, releasing it as they fell away, I propped the great Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey against the compass binnacle, tying it open with a bungee cord in the wind, and absorbed his words. That morning I read the story of the Sirens. Just as we do, Odysseus knew he would be exposed to the songs which the strange, birdlike creatures sang to mariners and with which they lured passing ships on to the shore, wrecking them there and then leaving the men to linger until they died.fn1 The only way Odysseus could get past the Sirens was to cut up a round cake of beeswax, knead it in his hands, softening the wax in the heat of the sun, and then press plugs of it into the ears of the sailors. Once they were deafened, he had himself lashed to the mainmast, so that any desire he might have to steer towards the delicious honeyed voices could have no effect on his men. Only if he were powerless could he listen to them singing from their meadow, as Robert Fagles translated it, ‘starred with flowers’.

That meadow of death is the most desirable place any man could imagine. It is yet another island into which a man might long to sink and die. A dead calm falls on the sea. The men brail up the sail and then sit to their oars. The Sirens, just within shouting distance of the ship, taunt Odysseus as he passes. They can give him wisdom if he will come to them and listen. If he will let them, they will make him understand. They press on him the comfort and beauty of what they have to offer. They sing to him and Odysseus longs for them, his heart throbbing for them, as Fagles says, and with his eyebrows gestures to the crew to set him free. But the crew won’t respond. Deaf to all persuasion, they bind him tighter and row the ship through and past.

Odysseus, bound to the mast of his ship, its mainsail brailed up, resists the seduction of the Sirens’ song. From a stamnos, or storage jar, made in Athens in about 480 BC but exported to the Etruscan city of Vulci, on the Mediterranean shore sixty miles north of Rome, where it was excavated in the nineteenth century. It is now in the British Museum, which bought it in 1848 from its collector, one of Napoleon’s daughters-in-law.

Never is Homer more rapid. Like Odysseus’s ‘sea-swift’ ship, the whole scene sweeps past in forty lines. Rarely can something so brief have spread its ripples so wide. But the point is this: the song the Sirens sing is not any old crooning seduction tune. It is the story of the Iliad itself.

We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured

On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so –

All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all.

The Sirens sing the song of the heroic past. That is the meadow of death. They want to draw Odysseus in with tempting stories of what he once was. And Odysseus, after his years of suffering and journeying, of frustration in the beautiful arms of Calypso, whose name means ‘the hidden one’, the goddess of oblivion, longs to return to the active world, the world of simplicity and straightforwardness he had known at Troy. The Sirens are wise to that: they know the longing in his heart. The prospect of clear-cut heroism summons him and he struggles to escape his bindings. But his men, like the poem itself, know better, and they tie him tighter to his ship. They won’t be wrecked on the illusions of nostalgia, on the longing for that heroised, antique world, because, as the Odyssey knows, to live well in the world, nostalgia must be resisted: you must stay with your ship, stay tied to the present, remain mobile, keep adjusting the rig, work with the swells, watch for a wind-shift, watch as the boom swings over, engage, in other words, with the muddle and duplicity and difficulty of life. Don’t be tempted into the lovely simplicities that the heroic past seems to offer. That is what Homer, and the Sirens and Robert Fagles all said to me that day.

I can still see the sunlight coming sheening off the backs of the swells that morning, as they made their way past and under me, combed and slicked with the sea-froth running down them, every swell the memory of storms in the Atlantic far to the west, steepening to the east and then ruining themselves ashore. The Auk sailed north with the shearwaters and the morning became unforgettable. It was when this book began.

I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, ‘Why has no one told me about this before?’

The more I looked at the poems in different translations, and the more I tried to piece bits of them together in the Greek with a dictionary, the more I felt Homer was a guidebook to life. Here was a form of consciousness that understood fallibility and self-indulgence and vanity, and despite that knowledge didn’t surrender hope of nobility and integrity and doing the right thing. Before I read Pope’s Preface to the Iliad, or Matthew Arnold’s famous lectures on translating Homer, I knew that this was the human spirit on fire, rapidity itself, running, going and endlessly able to throw off little sidelights like the sparks thrown off by the wheels of an engine hammering through the night. Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every spark with humanity in it.

TWO
Grasping Homer

PARIS, 11 MAY 1863, Le Repas Magny, a small restaurant up a cobbled street on the Left Bank in the Sixième. Brilliant, literary, sceptical Paris had gathered, as usual, for its fortnightly dinner. The stars were there: the critic and historian Charles Sainte-Beuve; the multi-talented and widely admired playwright and novelist Théophile Gautier; the unconscionably fat Breton philosopher, the most brilliant cultural analyst of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan; the idealistic and rather intense Comte de Saint-Victor, a minor poet and upholder of traditional values; and observing them all the supremely waspish Jules de Goncourt, with his brother Edmond.

Magny’s restaurant stood at the head of the rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine on the Left Bank in Paris.

The Magny dinners, every other Monday, were ten francs a head, the food ‘mediocre’ apparently, everyone shouting their heads off, smoking for France, coming and going as they felt like it, the only place in Paris, it was said, where there was freedom to speak and think. Jules de Goncourt transcribed it all.

‘Beauty is always simple,’ the Comte de Saint-Victor said as the waiters brought in the wine. He had a way, when saying something he thought important, of putting his face in the air like an ostrich laying an egg. ‘There is nothing more beautiful than the feelings of Homer’s characters. They are still fresh and youthful. Their beauty is their simplicity.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Edmond groaned, looking over at his brother. ‘Must we? Homer, again?’

Saint-Victor paused a moment, went white and then very deep red like some kind of mechanical toy. ‘Are you feeling well?’ Goncourt said to him across the table. ‘It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.’

‘How can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so bottomless!’ Everyone laughed.

‘Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,’ Gautier said calmly. ‘They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.’

‘Any modern novel,’ Edmond said, ‘is more moving than Homer.’

‘What?’ Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.

‘Yes, Adolphe, that lovely sentimental love story by Benjamin Constant, the sweet way they all behave to each other, his charming little obsession with her, the way she doesn’t admit she wants to go bed with him, the lust boiling away between her thighs, all of that is more moving than Homer, actually more interesting than anything in Homer.’

‘Dear God alive,’ Saint-Victor shrieked. ‘It’s enough to make a man want to throw himself out of the window.’ His eyes were standing out of his head like a pair of toffee-apples.

‘That would be original,’ Edmond said. ‘I can see it now: “Poet skewers himself on street-lamp because someone said something horrid about Homer.” Do go on. It would be more diverting than anything that has happened for weeks.’

Chairs were shoved back from the table, somebody knocked over a bottle of wine, the waiter was standing ghoul-faced at the door, Saint-Victor was stamping and roaring like a baby bull in his own toy bullring, as red in the face as if somebody had said his father was a butcher and his mother a tart. Everyone was bellowing.

‘I wouldn’t care if all the Greeks were dead!’

‘If only they were!’

‘But Homer is divine.’

‘He has got nothing to teach us!’

‘He’s just a novelist who never learned how to write a novel.’

‘He says the same thing over and over again.’

‘But isn’t it deeply moving,’ Saint-Victor said imploringly, ‘when Odysseus’s dog wags the last sad final wag of his tail?’

‘You can always tell a bully,’ Edmond said quietly to his brother. ‘He loves dogs more than their owners.’

‘Homer, Homer,’ Sainte-Beuve was murmuring through the uproar.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ Jules said to Renan afterwards. ‘You can argue about the Pope, say that God doesn’t exist, question anything, attack heaven, the Church, the Holy Sacrament, anything except Homer.’

‘Yes,’ Renan said. ‘Literary religions are where you find the real fanatics.’

Homer loomed up again at another Magny dinner the following October. They were talking about God, whether God was definable or even knowable. Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, in all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. Uniquely itself, beautifully self-sufficient, not entirely to be understood, mysteriously attractive, mysteriously unattractive, wholly wonderful: what was not Godlike about the oyster? Rolling laughter swept up and down the table.

That was when Homer emerged. To the Goncourts’ horror, these modern, sceptical destroyers of faith, the most fearless critics of God that France had ever known, burst into a song of Homeric praise which made the brothers retch. The diners at le Repas Magny might have been partisans of progress, but all agreed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.

‘The long-tailed birds!’ [Hippolyte] Taine, [the philosopher and historian] cried out enthusiastically.

‘The unharvestable sea!’ exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. ‘A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?’

‘Unharvestable sea?’ What on earth did that mean? Renan thought some Germans had discovered a hidden significance in it. ‘And what is that?’ asked Sainte-Beuve.

‘I can’t remember,’ Renan replied, ‘but it’s wonderful.’

The Goncourt brothers sat back, regarding this mass expression of Homer-love with their habitual, jaundiced eye.

‘Well, what do you have to say, you over there,’ Taine called out, addressing them, ‘you who wrote that antiquity was created to be the daily bread of schoolmasters?’

So far the brothers had said nothing, and had let the Homer-hosannas go swirling around the dining room without comment, but now Jules said: ‘Oh, you know, we think [Victor] Hugo has more talent than Homer.’

It was blasphemy. Saint-Victor sat as upright as a fence-post and then went wild with rage, shouting like a madman and shrieking in his tinny voice, saying that remarks like that were impossible to stomach, they were too much, insulting the religion of all intelligent people, that everybody admired Homer and that without him Hugo would not even exist. Hugo greater than Homer! What did the Goncourts know? What idiot novels had they been producing recently? He shouted and screamed, dancing up and down the room like an electrified marionette. The Goncourts shouted back, increasingly loudly, raging at the little supercilious poet, who for some reason thought he was more in touch with the meaning of things than they ever could be, sneering at them down his peaky red nose, while they could feel nothing but contempt for the man they would think of forever after as the nasty stuck-up little self-congratulatory Homer-lover.

* * *

These conversations seem as distant as the Bronze Age. Where now is our violence on behalf of a poet? Who feels this much about Homer? The Goncourts, with their scepticism and their modernism, their contempt for antiquity, have won the day. Their prediction has come more than true: the ancient world is now the daily bread not of schoolmasters but of academics. Everyone has heard of Homer, probably of the two poems, and many have read some passages; but no one today ends up shouting at dinner about him. Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote, or the phrases that recur in them.

Why should they? The place of Homer in our culture has largely withered away. I can only say that, for me, the growing experience of knowing Homer, of living with him in my life, has provided a kind of ballast. He is like a beautiful stone, monumentally present, a paternal foundation, large, slightly ill-defined, male and reliable. He is not a friend, a lover or a wife; far more of an underlayer than that, a form of reassurance that in the end there is some kind of understanding in the world. Goethe thought that if only Europe had considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better.

That quality does not exist in some floating metaphysical outer sphere. It is precisely in the words he uses, and it is on that level that something like ‘the unharvestable sea’ is a beautiful expression. It is the twin and opposite of another of Homer’s repeated, metrically convenient, perfect and formulaic phrases, ‘the grain-giving earth’. And why is it beautiful? Because it encapsulates the sensation of standing on a beach and looking out at the breaking surf, and seeing in it the unforgiving brutality of the salt desert before you. Everything you are not stares back at what you are. It is a phrase which knows that, as you are looking out at that hostility, behind you, at your back, are all the riches that the earth might give, the olive and the grape, the security of home, the smell of cut hay, the barn filled with the harvested wheat and barley, the threshed grains, the sacks tight with them in the granaries, the ground flour, the bread at breakfast, the honey and oil. ‘The unharvestable sea’ – two words in Greek, pontos atrygetos – is a form of concentrated wisdom about the condition of life on earth. It states the obvious, but also provides a kind of access to reality, both painful and revelatory. All Homer is in the phrase.

Those words occur many times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, often poignantly. Almost at the beginning of the Odyssey Odysseus’s son Telemachus, at the end of twenty years’ waiting for his father to return, first from the war against Troy and then from his vastly extended and troubled journey home across the sea, has decided to go in search of him, to ask in the mainland of Greece, in Pylos and Sparta, if there is any news of the man most people now consider dead.

Homer, over the course of thirty-five lines, prepares the ground for the climactic words. Telemachus needs to get ready for his journey, and to do so he goes down into his father’s treasure chamber in the palace in Ithaca, his thalamos. Upstairs, all is anarchy and chaos. The young men who are living in the palace, clamouring to marry Telemachus’s mother Penelope, are eating up the goods of the household. But down here, like a treasury of the past, of how things were before Odysseus left for the wars half a lifetime ago, all is order and richness. Clothes, gold and bronze are piled in the chamber, but also sweet-smelling oils, wine, which is also old and sweet, all lined up in order against the walls. All the accumulated goodness of the land is in there. Telemachus, whose name means ‘far from battle’,fn1 meets an old woman, Eurycleia, down here. She was his nurse as a child, feeding and raising him. Now that he is a man, she tends and protects these precious fruits of the earth. He asks her for the best wine to be poured out for him into small travelling jars, and for milled barley to be put into leather sacks. He must take the earth’s goods out on to the sea.

But Eurycleia – and the name of this private nurse, this tender of things, means ‘wide-fame’ – dreads Telemachus going where his father has gone to die. A wail of grief breaks from her when he tells her his plans, and she suddenly addresses him as she had years before:

Ah dear child, how has this thought come into your mind?

Where do you intend to go over the wide earth,

you who are an only son and so deeply loved?

Odysseus is dead, has died far from home in a strange land.

No, stay here, in charge of what is yours.

You have no need to suffer pain

or go wandering on the unharvestable sea.

Nothing could be clearer: the unharvestable sea is not to be visited. It is the realm of death. When Odysseus does finally come home (and Eurycleia plays a key role in that return), Homer has a one-word synonym for the sea: evil. The word she uses here for ‘wandering’ is also dense with implication: alaomai is used of seamen, but also of beggars and the unhomed dead. The unharvestable sea is where life and goodness will never be found. Everything Eurycleia has devoted her life to, the nurturing and cherishing of the goodness of home, has been the harvest of an unwandering life. The man standing in front of her is one of those fruits. The unharvestable sea is a kind of hell, and in that phrase the drama of his life, her life, Odysseus’s life, the life and death of those Ithacans who have not returned from Troy, of Penelope weaving and unweaving the cloth that will not be woven until Odysseus returns: all of it is bound up in pontos atrygetos.

For all the Goncourts’ wit and scepticism, I am on the side of Renan, and Hippolyte Taine, and Sainte-Beuve, and even the ludicrous Comte de Saint-Victor. Homer, the most miraculous and ancient of survivals in our culture, comes from a time of unadorned encounter with the realities of existence. It is absurd now to call the sea ‘unharvestable’, but it is also beautiful and moving. For all of Saint-Victor’s despised sententiousness, he was right in this. Homer’s simplicity, his undeniably straight look, is a form of revelation. Its nakedness is its poetry. There is nothing here of ornamentation or prettiness, and that is its value. ‘Each time I put down the Iliad,’ the American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote towards the end of his life,

after reading it again in some new translation, or after reading once more the somber splendor of the Greek, I am convinced, as one is convinced by the experiences of a lifetime, that somehow, in a way beyond the visions of artistry, I have been face to face with the meaning of existence. Other works of literature give this insight, but none so powerfully, so uncontaminated by evasion or subterfuge.

This book is driven by a desire to find the source of that directness and that understanding.

* * *

In the early autumn of 1816, John Keats was not yet twenty-one. He had been writing poetry for two years, living with other medical students in ‘a jumbled heap of murky buildings’ just off the southern end of London Bridge, working as a ‘dresser’ – a surgeon’s assistant – in Guy’s Hospital. He was miserable, good at his job but hating it, out of sorts with ‘the barbarous age’ in which he lived, filled with a hunger for life on a greater scale and of a deeper intensity than the ordinariness surrounding him could provide.

At school in Enfield, his headmaster’s son Charles Cowden Clarke, who had ambitions himself as a poet and littérateur, had introduced him to history and poetry, immersing him in Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. Clarke gave him the first volume of the great Elizabethan English epic, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and, as Clarke remembered later in life, Keats took to it

as a young horse would through a spring meadow – ramping! Like a true poet, too – a poet ‘born, not manufactured’, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, ‘what an image that is – “sea-shouldering whales”!’

When Keats at this age saw the wind blowing across a field of barley still in the green, he jumped on a stile and shouted down at Clarke, ‘The tide! The tide!’ Here was a boy, born the son of a London ostler, hungry for depth, for a kind of surging reality, for largeness and otherness which only epic poetry could provide. Poetry for him, as Andrew Motion has said, was ‘both a lovely escape from the world and a form of engagement with it’. It was not about prettiness, elegance or decoration but, in Motion’s phrase, ‘a parallel universe’, whose reality was truer and deeper than anything in the world more immediately to hand. Poetry gave access to a kind of Platonic grandeur, an underlying reality which everyday material life obscured and concealed. It is as if Keats’s sensibility was ready for Homer to enter it, a womb prepared for conception. All that was needed was for Homer to flood into him.

Perhaps at Clarke’s suggestion, he had already looked into the great translation of Homer made by the young Alexander Pope between about 1713 and 1726, the medium through which most eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Englishmen encountered Homer. But it was a translation that came to be despised by the Romantics as embodying everything that was wrong in the culture of the preceding age: interested more in style than in substance, ridiculously pretty when the Homeric medium was truth, a kind of drawing-room Homer which had left the battlefield and the storm at sea too far behind.

Where, for example, Homer had said simply ‘the shepherd’s heart is glad’, Pope had written

The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight

Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.

From the point of view of the 1780s, Pope’s Homer was about as Homeric as a Meissen shepherdess with a lamb in her lap.

This wasn’t entirely fair to Pope. His preface to the Iliad, published in 1715, is one of the most plangent descriptions ever written in English of the power of the Homeric poems. Northern European culture had been dominated for too long by the processed and stable maturity of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Latin epic par excellence, written in about 20 BC. Homer represented an earlier stage in human civilisation, a greater closeness to nature, to the potency of the sublime, a form of poetry which was not to be admired from afar but which would bind up its reader or listener in a kind of overwhelming absorption in its world. ‘No man of true Poetical Spirit,’ the young Pope had written, ‘is Master of himself while he reads him; so forcible is the poet’s Fire and Rapture.’ Translation was not a calm carrying over of the meaning in Greek into the meaning in English, but a vision of the processes of the mind as a flaming crucible in which the sensibilities of translator and translated were fused into a new, radiant alloy.

Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanked a roll-call of the eighteenth-century British great – Addison, Steele, Swift, Congreve, a string of dukes, earls, lords and other politicians – but for all that, his entrancement with Homeric power is not in doubt. Homer was like nature itself. He was a kind of wildness, ‘a wild paradise’ in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he described came into being.

What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action … The Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,

They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it.

This inseparability of Homer and his world is what excited Pope. It seemed to him like a voice from the condition of mankind when it was still simple, quite different from ‘the luxury of succeeding ages’. Poetic fire was the essential ingredient. ‘In Homer, and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.’

Pope grasped the essential point: unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a pre-classic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.

Virgil bestows with a careful Magnificence: Homer scatters with a generous Profusion. Virgil is like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream: Homer like the Nile, pours out his Riches with a sudden Overflow.

In this preface to the Iliad, Pope can lay claim to being the greatest critic of Homer in English. But what of his translation? Was he able to bear out this deep understanding of Homer’s ‘unaffected and equal Majesty’ in the translation he made? Perhaps not. Take for example a moment of passionate horror towards the end of the Iliad. For most of the poem Achilles has been in his tent, nursing his grievance and loathing against Agamemnon, but now that Patroclus, the man he loved, has been killed by Hector, Achilles is out to exact revenge. He is on his blood-run, gut-driven, pitiless, the force of destiny. Among his enemies on the field, he encounters a young Trojan and looks down on him with the vacancy of fate. The young warrior stares back up:

In vain his youth, in vain his beauty pleads:

In vain he begs thee, with a suppliant’s moan

To spare a form and age so like thy own!

Unhappy boy! no prayer, no moving art

E’er bent that fierce inexorable heart!

While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,

The ruthless falchion [a single-edged sword] oped his tender side;

The panting liver pours a flood of gore,

That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.

‘It is not to be doubted,’ Pope had written in his own preface, ‘that the Fire of the Poem is what a Translator should principally regard, as it is most likely to expire in his managing.’ But that is what has happened here. Apart from what Leigh Hunt, the great liberal editor of the Examiner, called Pope’s trivialising, ‘cuckoo-song’ regularity, he has lost something else: Homer’s neck-gripping physical urgency. In the Greek everything is about the body. The boy crawls towards Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles’s ears that are deaf to him, his heart and his mind that remain unapproachably fierce. The boy puts his hands on Achilles’s knees to make his prayer, and then the sword goes into the liver, the liver slipping out of the slit wound, the black blood drenching the boy’s lap and ‘the darkness of death clouding his eyes’. Nothing mediates the physical reality. Homer’s nakedness is his power, but Pope has dressed it. ‘The panting liver … pants no more’: that is so neat it is almost disgusting, as if Pope were adjusting his cuffs while observing an atrocity. Dr Johnson called the translation ‘a treasure of poetical elegances’. That was the problem.

Keats had undoubtedly read Homer in Pope’s translation; there are echoes of Pope’s words in what Keats would write himself. But he was ready for something else. His life was constrained in the crowded and meagre streets of south London, filled with the ‘money-mongering pitiable brood’ of other Londoners. He had been to Margate with his brothers and had seen ‘the ocean’ there in the pale shallows of the North Sea, but nowhere further. In early October 1816 he went for the evening to see his old friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who was living with his brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. Cowden Clarke had been lent a beautiful big early folio edition of the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey made by the poet and playwright George Chapman.

The two men began to look through its seventeenth-century pages. Clarke’s friend Leigh Hunt, the heroic editor of the Examiner, in which he had just published the first of Shelley’s poems to be printed, had already praised Chapman in the August issue, for bottling ‘the fine rough old wine’ of the original. In the next few days Keats was about to meet Hunt himself, with the possibility in the air that he too might swim out into the world of published poetry and fame. The evening was pregnant with the hope of enlargement, of a dignifying difference from the mundane conditions of his everyday life. To meet Homer through Chapman might be an encounter with the source.

It is touching to imagine the hunger with which Keats must have approached this book, searching its two-hundred-year-old pages for something undeniable, the juice of antiquity. The two of them sat side by side in Clarke’s house, ‘turning to some of the “famousest” passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope’s version’. Chapman had produced his translations – almost certainly not from the Greek but with the help of Latin and French versions – between 1598 and 1616. It is a repeated experience with Homer that he seems to haunt the present, and Chapman himself had met him one day in Hertfordshire, not far from Hitchin where Chapman had been born, Homer masquerading as ‘a sweet gale’ as Chapman walked on the hills outside the town. It was a moment of revelation and life-purpose for him, so that later he could say: ‘There did shine,/A beam of Homer’s freer soul in mine.’ The eighteenth century had not admired it. Pope had called it ‘loose and rambling’, and Chapman himself ‘an Enthusiast’ with a ‘daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ before he arriv’d to Years of Discretion’. Dr Johnson had dismissed it as ‘now totally neglected’. But Coleridge had rediscovered it. In 1808 he sent a copy of Chapman’s Homer to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, the woman he loved. ‘Chapman writes & feels as a Poet,’ he wrote, ‘– as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth … In the main it is an English Heroic Poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek – …’

Chapman’s distance, his rough-cut unaffectedness, stood beyond the refinements of the Enlightenment, as if he were the last part of the old world that Homer had also inhabited, before politeness had polluted it. Here the Romantics found Achilles as the ‘fear-master’, and horses after battle which liked to ‘cool their hooves’. Cowden Clarke and Keats were hunched together over pages that were drenched in antiquity. Ghosts must have come seeping out of them.

Something that had seemed quaint to the eighteenth century now seemed true to the two young men. They pored over Chapman together. ‘One scene I could not fail to introduce to him,’ Cowden Clarke wrote later,

the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the ‘Odysseis’ [Chapman’s transliteration of the Greek word for Odyssey], and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:

Then forth he came, his both knees falt’ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak’d his heart through.

It is the most famous meeting between Homer and an English poet. Keats had read and stared in delight, shocked into a moment of recognition, of what the Greeks called anagnōrisis, when a clogging surface is stripped away and the essence for which you have been hungering is revealed.

At this stage Odysseus has been at sea for twenty days. For nearly two hundred lines he is churned through the pain Poseidon has wished on him.

Just as when, in the autumn, the North Wind drives the thistle tufts over the plain and they cling close to each other, so did the gales drive the raft this way and that across the sea.

The sea is never more vengeful in these poems, never more maniacally driven by violence and rage. The raft is overturned and broken, the giant surf hammers on flesh-shredding rock. It is one of Odysseus’s great tests. His name itself in Greek embeds the word odysato, meaning ‘to be hated’, and that adjective appears twice in this storm. He is the hated man on the hateful sea. This is his moment of suffering, and the sea he sails on is loathing itself.

Throughout the Odyssey he is the man of many parts, inventive, ingenious, with many skills and many gifts, but here is merely polytlas, the man who dares many things, suffers many things and endures many things. Only when a goddess-bird and then Athene herself come to his aid can he finally drag himself to the shore.

Here in a virtually literal translation is what Homer says as Odysseus emerges from the surf:

he then bent both knees

and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea had killed his heart.

Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozed much

up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless

lay scarcely-capable, terrible weariness came to him.

The Greek word Chapman translated in The sea had soak’d his heart through – the phrase which Keats loved so much – is dedmēto, which means overpowered or tamed. It comes from a verb, damazo, of immensely ancient lineage, its roots spoken in the steppelands of Eurasia at least six thousand years ago, used to describe the breaking-in of animals and later the bending of metal to your desires and needs. It is essentially the same word as ‘tame’ in English, or domo in Latin, the word for reduction, to kill in a fight, to domesticate and dominate. But in the Iliad it also appears as a word for seduction, or more likely the rape of girls. Young girls, enemies, heifers and wives are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea has done for him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.

Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge:

his knees no more

Perform’d their office, or his weight upheld:

His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell’d:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;

And lost in lassitude lay all the man.

On a sofa? you might ask.

Others have tried and failed: ‘For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,’ wrote Professor A.T. Murray in 1919; ‘Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,’ was E.V. Rieu’s Penguin post-war bestseller prose version in 1946; ‘his very heart was sick with salt water’, wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; ‘The sea had beaten down his striving heart,’ his successor Robert Fagles in 1996.

Keats was right. None approaches ‘The sea had soak’d his heart through,’ perhaps because Chapman’s English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus’s heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinaded corpse, blanched and shrivelled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedmēto: Odysseus’s sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.

Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings – his ‘beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings’ – with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o’clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.

On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the Realms of Gold

And many goodly States and Kingdoms seen;

Round many Western islands have I been,

Which Bards in Fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:

Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud, and bold.

Then felt I like some Watcher of the Skies

When a new Planet swims into his Ken,

Or like stout Cortez, when with wond’ring eyes

He star’d at the Pacific, and all his Men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent upon a Peak in Darien –

It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman’s Homer; it’s about first looking into Chapman’s Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging on to what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.

Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortez, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his night of revelation, it had been

Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

which is politer and not entirely concordant with what the rest of the poem aims to mean. Further than that, he had borrowed the verb and the key adjectival noun from Pope’s Iliad:

The troops exulting sat in order round,

And beaming fires illumined all the ground.

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,

When not a breath disturbs the deep serene …

Keats, on the verge of his twenty-first birthday, even as this sonnet was announcing his new discovery of Homeric depth and presence, had not shrugged off that eighteenth-century inheritance.

For all that, coursing through the sonnet is a sense of arrival in the world of riches, a sudden shift in Keats’s cosmic geometry, moving beyond the drabness and tawdriness by which he felt besieged. Keats had become everybody in the sonnet’s fourteen lines: the astronomer, himself, Chapman, Homer, Cortez and ‘all his Men’. All coexist in the heightened and expanded moment of revelation. Pope had found fire in Homer; Keats discovered scale. And scale is what then entered his poetry, as a kind of private and tender sublime, the often agonised heroics of the heart, in which, just as in Homer, love and death engage in an inseparable dance.

Homer, or at least the idea of Homer, pools into Keats’s poetry. Hostile Tory reviewers in Blackwood’s Magazine started to call him ‘the cockney Homer’, but in Endymion, the long poem he had been contemplating when he wrote the Chapman sonnet, and which he began the following spring, his experience of that night with Cowden Clarke shapes the core phrases. People remember the poem’s beginnings:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

That is poetry as balm, even, as Andrew Motion has said, as medicine, the discipline which Keats was now abandoning for life as a poet. Keats went on to describe the ways in which beauty manifests itself in the world, the consolations it provides in ‘Trees old and young’, ‘daffodils/With the green world they live in’, streams and shady woods, ‘rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms’. But then, at the centre of this first part of the poem, drenched in memories of Shakespeare’s sweetest lyrics, comes this, the bass note of a Homeric presence, a sudden manliness, a scale of imagined beauty that encompasses the depths of the past:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead.

Homer is the foundation of truth and beauty, and Keats was happy to say that ‘we’ had imagined his poetry. Homer will enlarge your life. Homer is on a scale that stretches across human time and the full width of the human heart. Homer is alive in anyone who is prepared to attend. Homerity is humanity. Richmond Lattimore, making his great version of the Iliad in the late 1940s, when asked ‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ replied: ‘That question has no answer for those who do not know the answer already.’ Why another book about Homer? Why go for a walk? Why set sail? Why dance? Why exist?

THREE
Loving Homer

HOMER-LOVE CAN FEEL LIKE a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every nook of your consciousness. What would Homer have had for breakfast? (Oil, honey, yoghurt and delicious bread. One of the things that is wrong with the Cyclopes is that they don’t eat bread.) Or a picnic? (Grapes, figs, plums, beans.) How did he feed his heroes? (Grilled meat and thoroughly cooked sausages.) What did he think of parties? (He loved them: no moment was happier for a man than sitting down to a table loaded with wine and surrounded by his friends.)

These were questions the Greeks asked. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates was impressed by Homer’s decision, for example, that no hero should ever eat iced cakes: ‘all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind’. Protein – well salted, not boiled – was the stuff for heroes. And it had to be red meat; fish was the last resort,fn1 and chickens had yet to arrive from the Far East: they reached the Aegean in about 500 BC, known to the Greeks as ‘the Persian Bird’.

I have a way now of finding Homer wherever I look for him. No encounter, no landscape is without its Homeric dimension. In a way, Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half-discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom. There must be a name for this colonisation of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past. Possession, maybe? Mindjack? In one of his Socratic dialogues, Plato has a wonderful image for the secret and powerful hold that Homer has on his listeners. Socrates is talking to Ion, a mildly ridiculous rhapsode, a man who made his living by reciting and speaking about Homer. ‘I am conscious in my own self,’ Ion tells Socrates in phrases which even two and a half millennia later have a whiff of the stage, ‘and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.’ If Greeks had moustaches, Ion would be twirling his.

The Socratic eyebrow rises a little, but he then tells Ion the truth, a little slyly, the Socratic wisdom masquerading as flattery. ‘The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer,’ Socrates says,

is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.

The poet, Socrates tells him, is ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ – Homer not as great bearded mage, but like the bird Blegen found, or a mosquito, a flitting bug – of no substance, swept here and there on the winds of poetry. ‘There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.’

Plato affects to despise poetry, for the way it interferes with the rational mind, but it is clear that he was in love with it, moved by it as much as Ion could ever hope to be. And he identified the mechanism: there is no act of will in loving Homer. You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you. And so, like Ion, you hang as a curtain ring from him, who hangs from the Muse, who hangs from her father Greatness and her mother Memory.

I cannot go for a walk in the English chalklands without imagining the cold damp Iliads that must have been sung there. Every burial in an English Bronze Age round barrow must have had a version of these heroic songs sung at its making. But Homer is also in the Hebrides and off the coast of Ireland. Traditions of heroic song have endured there. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate on Harris by his Macleod chief, for which he had to pay ‘1 panegyrick poem every year’. That is Homeric rent. Wild unadorned landscapes or places of great antiquity summon his archetypes and their stories. Pope thought that for Virgil, Homer and nature were indistinguishable, and for me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.

No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in Book 3 of the Odyssey, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in Book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso’s island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in Book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, coloured by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very centre of the Odyssey, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.

In the Iliad, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in Book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a sea shore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon’s terror:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once,

where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,

praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth

that they might bring the proud heart of great Achilles

round with speed and ease.

It is also the place of grief, where later in the Iliad, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night to

wander in anguish, aimless along the surf, and dawn on dawn

flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.

As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawnlit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf: no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.

As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer than the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The set-up for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These are the scenes which have the oldest form of Greek in them, and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.

And so today a friend – Martin Thomas – stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying not shouting the goodbye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulae, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment, and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.

So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudder-stock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?

Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So, today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.

But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice, and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.

Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is ‘rosy-fingered’, but she also sometimes sits ‘on her golden throne’ as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear ‘her veil the colour of saffron’, krokopeplos, the crocus-cloth, the warmest colour in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of wellbeing and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the colour is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and ‘strike the sea with their oars’.

That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can’t help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke – a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping on to the perfect skin of the sea – I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.

But you long for wind. You imagine wind before it comes. You look for it on the water. None of this is far from praying for wind, or even sacrificing for it. Part of the Homeric ritual is to make a libation to the goddess as you leave. And the goddess whom you choose summons her own kind of wind. So Athene, never moderate, owl-eyed, all-seeing, sharp beyond all human understanding, sends a fierce wind for Telemachus as he heads out from Ithaca to find his father, a wind from the west ‘that bellowed roaring over the wine-coloured sea’. His voyage is anxious, uncertain, driven by that demanding mentor.

At the same time, somewhere else in the realms of fantasy and loss, his father is being given a wind by the amorous goddess Calypso who has imprisoned him on her island of deliciousness for the last seven years. He has been sitting weeping on the shore, longing for home. Now at last she will release him, and her wind is like her, all-embracing, warm and seductive, a sleep-with-me wind sending him on his way. He spreads his sail gladly to it, a bosom of wind, wafting him away from her comforts to the world of truth and reality.

As the wind comes, they hoist ‘the white sail’, the sail fills, ‘and the wind and the helmsman guide the ship together’. It is an act of cooperation between man and the world, a folding in of human intention with what the world can offer. The ship is a beautifully made thing, as closely fitted as a poem, as much a mark of civilisation as any woven cloth, and the wind in the Odyssey, when it is a kind wind, is a ‘shipmate’, another member of the crew. It is not the element in which you sail but a ‘companion’ on board. The human and divine dimensions of reality meet in it.

And now, when I am out in the sound, and the right wind comes, I think of it like that, as something else to be welcomed aboard. That coming of the wind is a moment when you can’t help but smile, when the world turns in your favour. It is also a moment of extraordinary potency in Homer, never more than when in the Iliad the Trojans find themselves in a terrifying and difficult phase of the battle and things are against them, until they see Hector and his brother Paris coming out of the gates of the city, armed, ready to help. It is, the poem says, like that moment when the crew has been struggling for too long with the oars, and their arms are weary, and they have been praying for wind, and then, as a blessing, the wind seems to come and the weariness drops from their bodies and they can rest in its strength and power: ‘So these two appeared to the Trojans, who had longed for them.’

Matching that instant of relief and triumph is another, almost at the other end of the Iliad, when the winds become the indispensable companions of the heroes. Achilles has made the great funeral pyre on the beach for Patroclus. Timber has been cut and carried, and the pyre is now a hundred feet in each direction. Animals have been slaughtered and the fat laid on the pyre. But it will not light, and Achilles realises he has failed to do one thing: he must pray to the two winds, the west wind and the north wind. And they come, sweeping in from their distant dwelling places, driving the clouds before them. A vast, inhuman blaze erupts in the pyre, and under the winds’ fierce encouragement, one shrieking blast after another, it burns all night long, incinerating everything but the bones. Only then do the winds retire

Back towards home again, over the Thracian sea,

And it heaved with a long, groaning swell as they crossed it.

The wind never comes unsummoned, or in a solid block. All you feel at first is a finger or two, the faint chilling of the skin on the cheek, or stroking the nape of your neck. But then it builds a little, one finger becomes five, the canvas stirs, like a dog in a bed, begins to acquire a form, and the boat gains a sense of purpose, a coherence it had lacked as it slopped in the chop or swell. The wake slowly starts to bubble behind you, ‘the gleaming wake’ that runs behind Homeric ships as a sign of life and excellence, the cockpit drains gurgle with the air sucked through them, and with tiller and sheet in hand you sit up and pick your course across the sea. That is the Odyssean moment: everything liquid but directed, everything mobile but related: the sea itself, your boat in it, the air and its winds, all the possibilities. The ritual is done, the routines have been followed, and your chances are now set fair.

Of all Homeric departures, none is more poignant than when Odysseus and his men, right in the centre of the Odyssey, set off for Hades, to hear from the blind seer Tiresias the way home to Ithaca. Circe, ‘the trim-coifed goddess’, as Ezra Pound described her, has set them on their way. They have no choice. Only Tiresias can tell them the way home. They have made all their tackle secure and provided themselves with food and drink. The wind has joined the crew and is now there alongside the helmsman, guiding ‘the black ship in the bright sea’ as their companion. But neither Odysseus nor any of his men are making this voyage with any hint of delight. This is a journey down and under the world, into the dark places, into themselves as much as to the edge of the physical universe. As the wind holds fair for them, they sit on their benches and grieve. Big, heart-wrenching tears fall on the pale timbers of the deck. The wind is taking them towards a terrifying destination, the place of death which Odysseus has so far exercised all his wit and skill to avoid. The wind knows nothing of that and propels their ship onwards, its red-painted bows plunging and rising with each oncoming sea, the swells breaking and surging around the stempost, while above that foam of life the wind never falters or wavers:

The wind caught the sail, bellying it out, and the blue-shadowed waves resounded under the fore-foot of the running ship as she lay over on her course and raced out to sea.

Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

Sun to his slumber, shadows over ocean.

FOUR
Seeking Homer

ALL MODERN VERSIONS OF Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison. In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad which seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the ‘germana et sincera lectio’, the real and uncorrupted reading.

Villoison thought he had discovered the essence of a work by a single poet called Homer. But he had sown the seeds of his own demise. The idea was already in the air in the eighteenth century that Homer was not one poet but many, and that the poems were the product of a whole culture, not an individual genius. Villoison’s discovery turned out to be the Copernican moment. The mass of alternative readings rejected by the Alexandrian scholars itself threw doubt on the idea of a single great original text. They had chosen to make a single Homer, but looking further back in time it seemed as if there were multiple Homers to choose from. William Cowper, the English lover and translator of Homer, read Villoison and stood aghast at the fragmentation of his hero. As he wrote to his friend the Rev. Walter Bagot in the winter of 1790:

I will send you some pretty stories from [Villoison] which will make your hair stand on end, as mine has stood on end already, they so horribly affect, in point of authenticity, the credit of the works of the immortal Homer …

Homer now was not one but many, and most of them obscure. In 1795 Villoison was challenged by the young, highly analytical German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. How could Villoison tell if the decisions made by the Alexandrian editors were the right ones? Surely what Villoison had published was evidence that the Iliad, as they all knew it, was a set of late, corrupt and unreliable texts, brought together in one poem but with their origins in bardic songs which had been radically altered by every hand they had passed through. The originals were unrecoverable. Homer, whoever that was, could never now be known.

The scene was set for the long struggle over the so-called ‘Homeric Question’ raised by Wolf which has lasted ever since. ‘Some say, “There never was such a person as Homer,”’ the English essayist Thomas de Quincey joked in 1841. ‘“No such person as Homer! On the contrary,” say others, “there were scores.”’ Nevertheless, the text of the Iliad over which the battles were fought between the lumpers and splitters, the one-Homer advocates and the scores-of-Homer advocates, the Homerophiles and Homerophobes, continued to be almost precisely the one published by Villoison in 1788.

He was not the first in the field. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, who had come to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Soon other copies were being printed in Milan, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Paris and London. And behind those first printed books stands a long manuscript history. Many of the medieval manuscripts of Homer migrated late to the European libraries, because in the early Middle Ages Homer was unread in Europe. Dante had Virgil call him the ‘sovereign poet’, but Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek, and even though the great fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch owned a copy of the Iliad – he was the man who used to kiss it in reverence – he could not understand a word it said. However, he wrote, ‘was dumb to me and I am deaf to it’.

Nevertheless, Homer continued to lurk in the European mind: pervasively there but rarely seen. Medieval Odysseys are scattered through scholarly Europe, in Cambridge and London, Milan and Munich, Naples and Moscow, in Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Vienna. There are Iliads in the Bodleian in Oxford (from the twelfth century), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (a copy which probably came from Mount Athos), in the Escorial and in Florence. Through these few precious manuscript books, Homer survived in medieval Christendom.

All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the Doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.

From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans travelling in Egypt took Homer further back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer them for sale. Pieces found their way into gentlemen’s libraries across Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Egyptologists began a more systematic search for these ancient documents, none more assiduous than the thoroughly unkempt, restlessly energetic and no-sock-wearing Englishman William Flinders Petrie. He was a man who since boyhood had understood that the careful unravelling of historic deposits layer by layer, an exfoliation of the past, was the only way to approach them. In the winter of 1887 he began to dig in the large necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayum depression to the west of the valley of the Nile.

Almost every mummy was accompanied by an image of the person, their unwavering gaze, their necklaces and earrings and carefully braided, gathered hair. With them were other artifacts, beads and vials, mirrors and, tucked in by the dead children, rag dolls with carved heads and real hair. The dolls had changes of clothes, dresses, little tables and wooden bedsteads with which the girls played. Their coffins were made of a kind of papyrus-based papier-mâché, and Flinders Petrie found within their fabric the remains of many ancient texts.

To help with those documents he had with him his old friend, an Oxford Assyriologist, the Reverend Professor Archibald Sayce. ‘The floating sand of the desert,’ Sayce wrote the next year,

was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters … They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.

It’s an image from Shelley, the world after Ozymandias: ancient texts blowing in shreds and fragments across the Egyptian desert. But then Flinders Petrie came across the greatest of all his treasures. On the morning of 21 February 1888, under the head of a woman who was not named on her coffin and was buried in an otherwise unmarked stretch of the necropolis, he found a large roll of papyrus, a papyrus pillow. This was no chance leftover. ‘The roll had belonged to a lady with whom it had been buried in death,’ Sayce wrote. ‘The skull of the mummy showed that its possessor had been young and attractive-looking, with features at once small, intellectual, and finely chiselled, and belonging distinctively to the Greek type.’

The papyrus had been damaged in its outer leaves, but Petrie began to unfold it, as if he were looking into the innards of a wasp’s nest, and peering beyond the outer covering found himself reading the Greek numbers twelve and eighty, and the names ‘Agamemnon’, ‘Achaeans’, ‘Corinth’. The roll with which the young woman had been buried was the first two books of the Iliad and, here from Book 2, Flinders Petrie, with the sand of the Sahara blowing around him, was reading lines from the Catalogue of Ships, Homer’s enumeration of the Greeks who sailed to Troy.

This Hawara Homer, written on papyrus in about AD 150, is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, its lines numbered by Flinders Petrie in August 1888. It is one of the most time-vertigo-inducing objects I know. In columns ranged left, the clear Greek capitals are spooled out across the reedy, vegetal surface of the papyrus sheets. There are no gaps between the words, but they are entirely legible, the relaxed and masterful calligraphy rolling on for line after line like a wave that will not break. This is a text to travel to the next world with, the strokes in each letter just curved away from straightness, so that in its combination of open ‘o’s and ‘u’s and the ‘w’s of its omegas, and the slight flexing in the pen strokes of its ‘k’s and ‘n’s and ‘t’s, this is one of the greatest images of the generous and beautiful word ever made. Other contemporary manuscripts found by Flinders Petrie are far more sketchy and scratchy, less steady in their progress across the page; but this is Homer as monument, as scripture, as ‘the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead’.

The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. By the time the unnamed woman was buried with this precious pillow in the Hawara necropolis, Homer had already become the Homer we now have.

The key phase in this creation of the Homer which Roman, Byzantine, late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe all thought of as the undeniable text was in the halls of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Between the third and second centuries BC, a sequence of great Alexandrian editor-scholars, enormously funded by the wealth of the Ptolemies, the rulers of Egypt, created the monumental Homer that is visible in the Hawara grave, in the Byzantine codex Venetus A and in the minds of Alexander Pope and John Keats. That Alexandrian era is the narrow neck through which an earlier and rather different Homer passed.

The famous library of Alexandria was not just a gathering of texts, but far more energetic and dynamic than that, a massive multi-disciplinary research institute, an engine for establishing Alexandria as the centre of the civilised world. By royal edict from the Graeco-Egyptian dynasty of pharaohs, no ship could call at the port of Alexandria without being searched for the books it carried. Every one would be copied with unforgiving exactness and marked in the catalogue as ‘from the ships’. Occasionally the librarians held on to the original and returned the copy.

The Alexandrian library was the repository for Greek culture, the place in which the plays of the Athenian tragedians and the works of Plato and Aristotle were preserved, but it was devised and run on a Near-Eastern model. For thousands of years it had been the practice of great Near-Eastern kings to establish libraries and archives on a scale which individual Greek city-states had never come anywhere near. Alexandria fused Babylon and Nineveh with Athens and Sparta.

With thirty to fifty state-funded scholars at work in the library, the head librarian also the royal tutor, and the agents of the Ptolemies scouring the Mediterranean for copies of all books – magic, music, metaphysics, zoology, geography, cosmology, Babylonian, Jewish, Greek and Egyptian thought – the Alexandrian library was a grand central knowledge machine. It was an exercise in cultural dominance, tyranny through control of the word. By the first century BC, it was thought that the library contained 700,000 papyrus rolls, 120,000 of them poetry and prose, all stored and labelled and catalogued in their own tailored linen or leather jackets.

This industrial-scale exercise in cultural imperialism left its impress on Homer, and the key to the Alexandrian changes is in the large number of marginal notes in Venetus A. The Byzantine scholar in about 950 copied out the text the Alexandrians had bequeathed to him. In his wide margins, he wrote down many of the remarks they had made, not only about Homer but about previous commentators on him. It is Homer as a millefeuille: one leaf of scholarship laid on top of another for centuries. Other medieval manuscripts have their own additional notes, or scholia, and some of the papyrus fragments, including the Hawara Iliad, also have marginal notes from these editors.

It is difficult to escape the idea that the Alexandrian editors, who seem to have limited themselves to commentary rather than cuts, wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurise him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city, to make of him precisely the dignified monument which the family of the young woman in Hawara had placed beneath her head in death. There was a long tradition of treating Homer like this.

In Plato’s Republic, written in about 370 BC, Socrates maintained that Homer would be catastrophic for most young men in the ideal city. Poetry itself was suspect, and dangerous if it disturbed the equilibrium of the citizen, but in some passages Homer stepped way beyond the mark. He quotes the beginning of Book 9 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is about to sit down to dinner in the beautiful palace of the king of the Phaeacians.

Nothing, Odysseus says, is more marvellous in life than sitting down to a delicious dinner with your friends, the table noisy and the waiter filling the glasses. ‘To my mind,’ Odysseus says cheerfully, looking round him at his new friends who have saved him from the unharvestable sea, ‘this is the best that life can offer.’ Not for Socrates or his pupil Plato:

Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.

That frame of mind undoubtedly governed the editing process in Alexandria, and its presumptions appear at every turn. Towards the end of Book 8 of the Iliad, Hector is making a speech to the Trojans. It has been a long and terrible day on both sides. Among the many dead, Priam’s son Gorgythion had been hit hard in the chest with an arrow.

Just as a poppy in a garden, heavy

with its ripening seeds, bends to one side

with the weight of spring rain;

so his head went slack to one side,

weighed down by the weight of his helmet.

Night is now falling, and Hector is encouraging the Trojans to prepare themselves for the following day. He has been like a hound in the battle, pursuing the Greeks as if they were wild boar, slashing and strimming at their legs in front of him, his eyes glittering in the slaughter like the god of battle. The corpses had piled up on the field like the swathes of a hay meadow newly mown and yet to be gathered. There is scarcely room for a body of men to stand together. Now, though, Hector has summoned the Trojans ‘to a place that was clear of the dead’, and speaks to them of the state they are in. They should feed their horses, light fires, roast the meat of sheep and oxen, drink ‘honey-hearted wine’ and eat their bread. In Troy itself, the old men and the young boys should stand on the walls and the women light great fires in their houses, all to keep a watch so that the Greeks should not ‘ambush’ them. The word he uses is lochos, the same as will be used in the Odyssey to describe the Greeks hiding in the Trojan Horse, and which has as its root lechomai, meaning ‘to lie down’. The implications are clear: the Trojans stand to fight; the Greeks do so cheatingly, creepingly. The ambush, the covert attack, is the kind of violence the Greeks would do. This is Hector speaking as the man of the city, defending it against the treachery of its assailants, a man who in almost every line is the voice of his community.

The Alexandrian editors accepted these noble statements without demur. In these passages Hector fitted the idea of restrained nobility which the Hellenistic Greeks required of Homer. But Hector then moves up a gear and goes on to speak of the next day and of himself. The Greeks are no better than ‘dogs, carried by the fates on their black ships’. Hector will go for Diomedes in the morning, and Diomedes will lie there, ‘torn open by a spear, with all his comrades dead around him’. And Hector himself will be triumphant:

If only

I were as sure of immortality, ageless all my days –

And I were prized as they prize Athene and Apollo.

A peppering of special marks in the margin, hooks and dots, all carefully transcribed by the Byzantine scholars, signals the Alexandrian editors’ anxiety at the vulgarity of these lines.

This apparent self-promotion and self-assertion: can that really be what Homer intended for him? In the third century BC, Zenodotus, the first librarian at Alexandria appointed by the Ptolemies, rejected the line about the fates and their black ships. Aristarchus, his great second-century successor, agreed with him. And when Hector went on to claim immortality, Aristarchus thought his words ‘excessively boastful’, not the done thing, and highly suspect. In Aristarchus’s mind, although not entirely clearly, these lines were probably not Homeric.

It is as if these editors were trying to make Homer into Virgil, to turn Hector into Aeneas, to transform the Greek epics into tales of irreproachable moral instruction, and in doing so to reduce their emotional and psychological range. But Homer was greater than his editors, rougher, less consistent and less polite, a poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilisation and its raging opposite.

Compare Hector’s words with the speech made by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins in the Kuwaiti desert about twenty miles south of the Iraqi border on 19 March 2003, the eve of the allied invasion of Iraq. Collins had found a place where he could address the men of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment. In his Ray-Bans, with his cigar in his hand and a certain swagger, speaking off the cuff to about eight hundred men standing around him in the middle of a dusty courtyard, he spoke as Homer had Hector speak.

‘We go to liberate, not to conquer,’ Collins began, half-remembering echoes of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Yeats, all mingling with the modern everyday in his ear.

We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.

Alongside that restraint and magnanimity towards the enemy, and the sense that he is speaking as the representative of a great civilisation himself, is something else. ‘I expect you,’ he said, addressing his young soldiers, most of them from poor Catholic Northern Irish backgrounds,

to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose … The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction … As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity … If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.

Hector wants his men to rock the Greeks’ world. There is an element of pretension and self-aggrandisement in both of them, but the modern British officer and the Bronze Age poet both know more than the scholar-editors in their Alexandrian halls. Homer’s subject is not elegance but truth, however terrible.

The Alexandrians were keen on more than a moralised Homer. Their huge and careful gathering of texts from across the ancient world and from any passing ship was a complex inheritance, a braided stream they tried to purify and make singular, to make one Homer where previously there had been many.

They did their job with scholarly decorum, sometimes deleting lines from the text they bequeathed to the future, usually in their commentaries doing no more than casting doubt on what Homer was meant to have said, marking the text with a skewer, an obelos, in the margin, as if to pin the error to the spot. If Homer got things wrong – killing off a warrior who then reappeared in the battle a few lines later; if he repeated a line or group of lines with no variation; if it seemed as if something had been pushed into the poem at a later date; or if Homer’s ancient words simply didn’t make sense to Hellenistic editors – these were all grounds for severe judgement in Alexandria. Homer had to be kept up to his own standards.

Before that Alexandrian edit, Homer was not a single monumental presence in the ancient world, but a voluble, chattering crowd of multiple voices. Ancient authors quote lines from Homer which do not appear in the post-Alexandrian text. Occasionally a piece of papyrus will have an odd or variant equivalent for a well-known line. Different Greek cities had their own different Homers. Crete had its own, as did Cyprus, Delos, Chios and Athens. Alexandrian scholars knew versions from Argos in the Peloponnese, Sinope on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey, and from the great Greek colony of Massalia far to the west, beneath what is now Marseilles. There were more epics than merely the Iliad and the Odyssey, filling in the gaps of the story which the poems we know only hint at. Homer was said to have written them all. Aristotle had a different version of Homer from Plato’s, and prepared another for his pupil Alexander the Great, to take with him on his world adventures into Asia. Homer ripples around the ancient Mediterranean, and even further afield, taking on local colour, not a man or a poem but flickering, octopus-like, varying, adopting the colours of the country he found himself in. None of these local versions survives as more than references in ancient scholarly notes, but they hint at a reality which would have made William Cowper’s or Alexander Pope’s hair stand rigid. Homer, before Alexandria, was multiplicity itself.

It’s as if in that Alexandrian moment Homer’s radiant, ragged beard and hair were trimmed and neatened for a proto-Roman world of propriety and correctness.

Roughness characterises the world before the great pruning. In this way Homer is unlike any historical writer. The usual idea – that copying makes a text increasingly corrupt through time – must be abandoned and the opposite assumption made. As Homer travelled on through time, passing in particular through the rigorous barbers’ salon of the Alexandrian scholars, the more regular he became. In the words of Casey Dué, Professor of Classics at Houston and editor of the Harvard Homer multitext project: ‘The further back in time we go, the more multiform – the more “wild” – our text of Homer becomes.’ Homer is not orderly. Hope to trace him back to his essence, to the tap root, and you find yourself lost among the tangle of his branches. Homer’s identity was in his multiplicity, his essence was in his lack of it, and he soon sinks back into the world from which he came.

Homer is never there. He is the great absentee, always slipping between the fingers, a blob of mercury on a bed of wax. Nothing reliable can be said about him: his birthplace, his parents, his life story, his dates, even his existence. Was he one poet or two? Or many? Were the Homers women? Samuel Butler, a great Victorian translator of the Odyssey, thought that its poet must have been a girl from Trapani in Sicily, ‘young, headstrong and unmarried’, partly because she was ‘so exquisitely right’ in her descriptions of ‘every single one of [her] women’, partly because she made such girlish mistakes. Would a man ever have thought, for example, that a ship should have a rudder at both ends? Homer does, twice, in the Odyssey, Book 9, lines 483 and 540.fn1

This Homeric unpindownability has inspired eccentrics. Craziness abounds. Medieval Italians, who could not read Greek, used to keep copies of the Iliad and kiss them for good luck. Lawrence of Arabia thought he was qualified as a translator of the Odyssey because, among other attributes, he, unlike most Greek professors, had ‘killed many men’. No point in trying to read Homer unless you had blood on your hands. One scholarly work in Italian has revealed that Homer was Swedish and what he describes as the Mediterranean was in fact the Baltic. Another has recently shown that the Iliad is an ancient guidebook to the stars. A careful and immensely detailed study has been written by a Dutchman to show that Homer was from Cambridgeshire, the Trojan War happened on the Gog Magog hills near Cherry Hinton, ‘Sparta’ was in Spain and ‘Lesbos’ was the Isle of Wight. Henriette Mertz, a Chicago patent attorney, has shown that Calypso lived in the Azores and Scylla and Charybdis was Homer’s description of tidal movements in the Bay of Fundy, Newfoundland. Nausicaa and her father lived in the Caribbean.

None of this is new. Plutarch (AD c.46–120) thought Calypso’s island was five days’ sail from Britain out in the North Atlantic, perhaps in the Faroes. Earlier still, many lives of Homer were written in the ancient world, some now preserved in precious early medieval manuscripts that are stored in some of the great repositories of Europe. They are rich in creative detail, but, like so much else to do with Homer, all of them were made up. In the library of the Medicis in Florence you will find a fourteenth-century manuscript which describes the way in which Homer lived and worked and sang his poems on Chios, the desiccated rusk of an island off the Aegean coast of Turkey. According to a ninth-century manuscript now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, he was born in Smyrna, on what is now the Turkish mainland. Others say in Ithaca, as the grandson of Odysseus, or so the Pythia in Delphi told the Emperor Hadrian when he enquired; or the Argolid, where Agamemnon had ruled in Mycenae; in Thessaly, in the harsh and half-civilised north of Greece, the northern zone on the edge of civility from where Achilles came; or, as a manuscript now in Rome claims, in Egypt, because his heroes had the habit of kissing each other and that was an Egyptian practice. Even, in time, the Romans themselves claimed him as one of theirs. An eleventh-century manuscript now in the royal library in the Escorial outside Madrid adds Athens to the list. Many claim he was born, or died, or at least lived for a while, on the island of Ios in the Cyclades. In other words, he came from everywhere and nowhere.

The life of Homer lurks in this way in the subconscious of the European imagination. He is present in the archives but mysteriously absent. And hanging over all the suggestions in these ancient lives, which are thought to draw on ideas of Homer that emerged in about the sixth century BC, is a deep air of doubt. Did Homer really come from any of these places? Homer, even in the tradition of the ancient lives, seems to exist as a kind of miasma, a suggestion of himself, more an idea than a man, a huge and potent non-being.

But from these muddled, uncertain texts one or two beautiful suggestions do emerge. In the ninth-century life of Homer now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, the author – himself anonymous – compiled the verdicts he could glean from the past, and quoted Aristotle from a book called On Poets which is otherwise now lost. ‘The people of Ios, Aristotle said, record that Homer was born from a spirit, a daimon, who danced along with the Muses.’ His mother, a girl from Ios, had got pregnant with the daimon. So it was as simple as that: like Jesus and Achilles, Homer was half human. And his flesh was infused not with mere godliness but with the spirit of poetry. Just as Aesop never existed but was a name around which traditional fables gathered, Homer was the name given to the poems they composed.

The word Aristotle used for this moment of fusion carries some wonderful implications. The Greek for ‘dance with’ is synchoreuo, meaning ‘to join in the chorus with’. The choreia of which the Muses and Homer’s daimon father formed a part was a singing dance – words, music and movement together. The same word meant both the tune they danced to and, by extension, any orderly circle or circling motion. Even the islands of the Cyclades, of which Ios is one, arranged as they are in a wide circle on the horizon around the sacred island of Delos, were thought to be a choreia. It was, in essence, any beautiful turning in motion together, especially of the stars. Buried in this half-mystical genealogy is the understanding that Homer’s poems are the music of the universe.

Another life, said to have been written by Plutarch, the Greek historian of the first century AD, and perhaps genuinely drawing on Plutarch’s lost books, says straightforwardly that Homer’s fatherland was nowhere on earth; his ancestors came from ‘great heaven’ itself: ‘For you were born of no mortal mother, but of Calliope.’ Calliope was the Muse of epic poetry. Her name means ‘beautiful voice’ and she was the daughter of Zeus, the all-powerful king of the gods, and of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. This is not the language we now use. It is even a little off-putting, too high, too reminiscent of murky paintings on ignorable ceilings, but it says what seems to be the truth. There was no human being called Homer: his words are the descendants of memory and power, the offspring of the Muse who had a beautiful voice. The myth itself identifies something that biography and geography can only grasp at. Homer is his poetry. No man called Homer was ever known, and it doesn’t help to think of Homer as a man. Easier and better is to see him abstractly, as the collective and inherited vision of great acts done long ago. The poems acknowledge that. In the first lines of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, they call on the Muse as their own divine mother, the source of authority and power, to tell the tales the teller is about to begin.

The name Homer – which is pronounced in Greek with a short ‘o’ and a long ‘e’, Homeeros, making it stranger than you had imagined, from a more distant world – may mean ‘blind’, at least in the dialect of Greek spoken on Lesbos. From the name came the tradition that Homer was blind, although that too was fiercely disputed by the ancient authors.

Or it may mean something stranger still: a ‘connector’, or even ‘bond’. Homer, perhaps, was the man who joined together, in the way of the poet, things which might otherwise have lived apart: different elements of the inherited stories; or those stories and the audiences who listened to his telling of them.

There is another tradition, related to that one, which runs through all his ancient biographies. Homer was not his original name, perhaps only given him when he went blind or became a hostage (another possible etymology). His original name in this version was Melesigenes, perhaps because he was born by the river Meles, which runs through Smyrna, now Izmir, or more intriguingly because the name can mean ‘caring for his clan’. This Homer is to be seen as the man who cared for his people, his inheritance, his race descent, the way he came into being, his origins. Homer is what looked after the source, what found, remembered and transmitted truth from the distant past. In that meaning of his name, his essence is not his smart newness, his ability to connect, but the antiquity of the tales he tells. He is the embodiment of retrospect.

All poetry is memorial. Much of it is elegy. The earliest to have been found was dug up by Victorian archaeologists in Sumer, in what is now Iraq, on a tablet marked with wedge-shaped cuneiform symbols pressed into the wet clay before it dried. The fragmentary poems in the clay were written in about 2600 BC, perhaps two thousand years before the Homeric epics were first written on papyrus. But that first written Sumerian poetry is not about the springtime of the world. Poetry begins by looking back to the beautiful past, a song about Ashnan, the goddess of grain, and her seven sons, opening with these chantable, formulaic repetitive lines:

U re u re na-nam

Gi re gi re na-nam

Mu re mu re na-nam.

In those days, now it was in those days,

In those nights, now it was in those nights,

In those years, now it was in those years.

As far back as you can reach, poets have been looking back, their poetry living in the gap that opens between now and then. Another song, from Ur in Iraq, written down at about the same time, instructs the singer to

attend to what is old, and not allow it to be neglected.

Let nothing be neglected in practice,

Let him apply himself to the art of singing

Let the scribe stand by and catch the songs in his handwriting

Let the singer stand by and speak to the scribe from the songs

So that they will be made to last in the scribal college

So that none of my praise-song should perish

So that none of my words should be dropped from the tradition.

This song is what Melesigenes, Homer’s hidden name, actually means. You might think of Homer as the skilled reteller of his people’s stories. But he is more than that; the poems are the passed baton itself, ancient meaning enshrined in the remembered word.

There is one more story, often repeated in the fictional biographies of him that were written throughout antiquity, which hints at Homer’s unfittedness for the ordinary world. It exists in many versions, but the most articulate has survived in a manuscript transcribed in the eleventh century AD and now in the great royal library in the Escorial outside Madrid.

Homer is at the end of his life, sitting on the beach on the Cycladean island of Ios, after a life of travelling and singing his poems in many places in the Greek world. This is not his home. As he sits there, alone and blind, he hears some fishermen coming up the beach towards him. They have been at sea, and Homer calls out to them: ‘Fishermen from Arcadia [it is unexplained why it should be Arcadia in the Peloponnese when he is in the Cyclades], have we caught anything?’ There is something charming, or perhaps self-ingratiating, in that ‘we’. But they reply unkindly. ‘All that we caught we have left behind and all that we missed we carry.’ By which they mean that their fishing had been useless, but as they sat out at sea with nothing to do, they searched each other’s bodies for lice. Those lice they had caught, they killed and threw into the sea; those they missed were still on them in their clothes.

It was a joke, a riddle, a tease for a blind old man, but he didn’t understand it, and, crushed by the loneliness and depression that came in the wake of that failure to comprehend, he died on Ios, where he was buried under an epitaph he had written himself:

Here the earth conceals that sacred head,

The setter-in-beautiful-order [kosmētora] of heroic men,

the godly Homer.

According to that much-repeated story, it was the triviality of the joke, a ridiculing of incapacity, even a lack of nobility in others, that finally killed him. This is Homer as the Great Outsider, blind, from beyond our ken, the figure who does not belong in the world where everyone knows everyone else, the man who has yet to enter the restaurant or the drawing room. He is outside our normality, scarcely even aware of the merry din within, with an austerity about him, a grandeur and an urgent, other reality.

Homer – allied to his neighbour and contemporary, Isaiah, another great speaker of wisdom, whose dates and identity also stretch across many generations from at least 1500 to 600 BC – is the archetype from which every great seer is descended: he is Lear on the heath, Rousseau in a reverie on his island in the Lac de Bienne, the Ancient Mariner who waylays the wedding guest at the bridegroom’s door, but who will never enter that feast. Homer exists in his other world, almost unknowably separate from us in time and space, a realm whose distance allows ideas of transcendence to develop around him. His distance from us is itself an imaginative space which his own greatness expands to fill.

This is no modern effect: it was the effect Homer had on the ancient Greeks, as a voice from the distant past, even a voice from the silence, the voice of greatness untrammelled by any connection with our present mundanities. Homer doesn’t describe the world of heroes: he is the world of heroes. As his epitaph said, he made their kosmos, a word which in Greek can mean order, world, beauty and honour. It is used in the Iliad when the commanders set their men in order for battle. It is used to describe the order in which a poet sets the elements of his tale. Those qualities are all different dimensions of one thing. Everything one might associate with the heroic – nobility, directness, vitality, scale, unflinching regard for truth, courage, adventurousness, coherence, truth – is an aspect of the cosmic and all of it is what ‘Homer’ means.

FIVE
Finding Homer

IT SEEMS CLEAR, FROM the kind of Greek in which the Homeric poems are written, that the main text preserved by the Alexandrians came from Athens, where Homer could be heard almost daily, in recitals by rhapsodes, professional artists who strung together choice passages from the epics, learning by heart parts of the inherited text and, in a way not entirely approved of by the traditionalists, selling their services for dinner parties or entertainments. Homer was also used as a manual in school, the poems treated as tales of great men and women, of nobility in crisis, and of the choices people must make when faced with the deepest challenges of their lives. Homer for classical Athens was an encyclopaedia of moral choice.

It was also performed with enormous elaboration at the four-yearly festival of the Panathenaia, where, at least according to Eustathius, a twelfth-century Byzantine bishop of Thessalonica, the reciters of the Odyssey wore sea-purple and of the Iliad earth-red costumes, ‘the purple on account of Odysseus’s wanderings at sea, the red on account of the slaughter and bloodshed at Troy’. If the Odyssey men were soaked in the royal purple dye of the Phoenicians and those of the Iliad in the blood of the heroes, nothing could be clearer about the role Homer played in classical Athens’s idea of itself. At their most holy and self-conscious moment, the Athenians gathered for total immersion in the Homeric stories, drinking up the tales from which most of the great tragedies drew their plots and characters, thinking of Homer as the source of what they were.

A clan of reciters from Chios on the eastern side of the Aegean, calling themselves the Homeridae, claimed to be Homer’s descendants and to have his precious poems in manuscript handed down to them by the great man their ancestor. There is no telling if there is any truth in that, but, under the Athenian surface, the main constituent of the Greek in which the epics are written is Ionic, which was spoken in Chios and other parts of western Anatolia. And there is an early piece of evidence for Chios in the so-called Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, written in Homeric hexameters, when the singer himself says:

Remember me in after time whenever any one of the men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: ‘Who do you think, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?’ Then answer, each and all of you, with one voice: ‘He is a blind man, and lives in rocky Chios: his songs are forever supreme.’ As for me, I will carry your fame as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true.

The Iliad also knows that country, not only the shape of the land around Troy, but the habits of the wind, the form of islands and the nature of the sea there. If Homer needs to turn for a comparison to a specific place, the choice he usually makes is there too.

Chios lies only seven miles off the Turkish coast. Its dry limestone gorges push deep into its mountains and, on the bench of flat arable land beside the sea, acre after acre is covered in olive groves, vineyards and the dark, irregular mastic bushes, the source of a clear chewable gum, much valued in antiquity.

The huge harbour at Chios town is almost empty of shipping now – a few yachts, a ferry, one or two container ships – but is still surrounded by the cafés on the port side, the banging of dominos on tables, the bales of stuff awaiting collection. Behind them are the crumbling neo-classical villas of the Chiote merchant class who in the nineteenth century made their fortunes trading around the Mediterranean. Chios is what it always has been: a commercial island, outward-looking – there are still some powerful ship-owning families here – and with its foundations resting on the products of the earth, the red wine, loved by Virgil, famous across the whole Mediterranean for its blackness, and the pungent, peppery green island oil.

Far to the south of Chios town, a rare and extraordinary ghost of the Homeric world can be recovered. A narrow road curls its way down the length of the island. Drought is all around you, a blazing sky and burningly bright rocks. In among the rocks are the cisterns, the beautiful dark and buried places of cool and conservation, an eye of water at their heart, roofed in stone, protected from the sun. In a landscape of such exposure and harshness, the cistern seems like the guarantee of continuity.

All this defines a dry world. It doesn’t rain in Chios from the beginning of June until the end of October. What rain has fallen in the winter sinks into the ground and emerges from the rock reservoirs as springs. There the soil gathers and the fertility builds in a landscape which is otherwise bones. The result is a kind of sharpness, super-definition, a world polarised between the inhabited and the bare, the habitable and the desolate.

In places like this, the growing of human sustenance can only be governed by the presence of water. Where the springs emerge, vryses in modern Greek, is where the vegetable gardens are. ‘I am going to the springs’ means ‘I am going to the gardens.’ The roots of that word stretch far back into ancient Greek, from bruein, which when it describes water means ‘to gush out’, ‘to bubble up’, ‘to spring’. But further than that bruein means ‘to be full to bursting’, to swell, to abound, to be luxuriant, to teem with produce. It is the verb of emergent life.

Beyond the gardens full of grapes and figs, pomegranates, plums and blackberries, those miraculous concentrations of sugar and juice in the damp corners of the island, often away from houses, the dry country stretches, the world of drought in which everything that grows infiltrates its roots between the rocks and is defended against the grazing and browsing teeth of the animals that would devour it. The leaves that survive are either bitter or armoured in thorns. Even the thorns are branched, thorns with thorns on them. Settlement here cannot choose to dispose itself carelessly as it can in a temperate or wooded country. Life must be concentrated: the city, the village, the gathered place is a necessary response to a landscape in which life is thin on the ground.

Almost at the southern tip of the island, Emporio is little more than a scatter of one or two buildings and a taverna, a stub of a quay at which the fishing boats are tied up, a looped horseshoe of a harbour, a grey beach on which the Aegean laps. Its name means ‘the trading centre’, the emporium, which may also have been the name of this small settlement in antiquity. Here, in June 1952, came two of the great men of Homeric studies in the second half of the twentieth century: a young English archaeologist, John Boardman, then Deputy Director of the British School at Athens, with the young architect Michael Ventris, the man who would soon decipher Linear B, the written language of Mycenaean Greece.

They walked up from the harbour – ‘a well-girt man carrying nothing in his hands can today reach the acropolis from the harbour side in twenty minutes without serious loss of breath’ – and high above the valley, on top of a dry, conical hill overlooking the little harbour, they found an ancient settlement, a rocky citadel, heavily walled against raiding pirates, the workmanship of the masonry, Boardman reported, ‘wretched throughout’.

It was no great city, but a rather poor and abandoned village, probably built in about 800 BC, with outside the acropolis walls some small, stepped and paved, walkable streets between one- or two-roomed houses. There are stables and granaries beside them. The scale is domestic, and because nothing was built here later, everything is clear on the ground, looking much as it did when abandoned in 600 BC. The tall white spires of the asphodels glow on the stony, lizardy hillsides. Inside the acropolis walls there is a small temple to Athene (Boardman and Ventris found little votive shields in there, given by fighting men to the warlike goddess) and a megaron, a large columned room about sixty feet long and twenty wide, a gathering hall, with the stone bases of three wooden columns down its centre. Perhaps eighty people could have met here. It is not unlike a Saxon or Viking mead-hall, in which the sagas or Beowulf would have been heard or sung. It is the great house of the settlement, the only one inside the acropolis walls, and with a commanding view from its columned porch down across the hill to the harbour below. Boardman found little inside, a few pieces of pottery with a ‘heavy cream slip’, the handle of a wine jug, but stand in here now and you can start to feel your way towards the Homeric world of the eighth century.

The megaron at Emporio, Chios.

Beyond the lee of the island, the Aegean sparkles under the north wind. On the far shore, grey mountains step back into the Asian mainland – a promise of scale and richness outside the constraints of island life. The eighth-century sea is full of threat, and even in the sunshine, as cigarette smoke disappears in the brilliance of the light, Emporio feels carefully held back, marginal, defensive. It is cleverly designed so that the harbour can be seen from the acropolis, but the acropolis is almost invisible from the harbour. You can watch the people down there in the taverna, where the fish are smoking on the griddles, and they will not know.

Boardman thought that about five hundred people might have lived here, in about fifty houses spread over ten acres. Their lord and master would have occupied the megaron, and there the heroic songs would have been sung. There is no grandeur. It is a rough, overt power structure. The plain below the acropolis may be covered in olives and mastic bushes, and its harbour is there so that these people can reach out to lands beyond those horizons, but this miniature city is up here for protection. Emporio is both closed and open, a place to withdraw into and one to venture out from. It is a place belonging to robber-traders, at least half-piratical, needing to rely on imported grain for its sustenance, perhaps from Egypt, perhaps from the Black Sea, and to export its wine and oil and gum for its currency, but inseparable from violence. Here it is possible to feel that Homer is the product of an essentially marginal world, away from the great civilisations, the lords of Emporio fascinated by the great but not able to count themselves among them.

If Homer was an ancient inheritance in the eighth century BC, as I believe it was, already a thousand years old, this is the sort of place in which that memory would have been treasured and nurtured, where the Keatsian sense of enlargement and the surge of greatness would have been experienced by the young men hearing the stories, no doubt inspiring their own visions of love and violence. Just as much as Athens or Alexandria, places like this would have been links in the chain.

Only the phlomis and the thorns grow on the eastern shore of Chios; the only colours are the sand-washed blue of the sea and the rust stains in the limestone of the cliffs. Here and there the cushion tufts of a low thistle show purple in its nest of thorns. On a stony path just above the sea, with a swell breaking on the shore, I found a young kid, perhaps born that spring and now laid out on a rock, dead and as dry as a parchment. It had been preserved by the drought. Its leather collar and bell was still around its neck, its yellow plastic ear-tags pinned into its ears, its hooves tucked up under its chest, where its ribs like flat, blanched pencils just protruded from the coat. The teeth were made prominent by the shrinking of the lips, but otherwise it was almost perfect, as if in the drought one day it had simply lain down and died. Touchingly, its head was turned as if it were trying to lick its own flank. The eyes were gone, and you could look through their sockets into the skull. It was the Homeric world: brutal, perfect, without euphemism, but somehow enshrining a longing for something better, softer, more forgiving.

The Homeric poems, or at least versions of them, were written down somewhere very like this, perhaps in about 725 BC, or maybe as much as a century later. Precision is almost certainly irrelevant; there can be no ruler-drawn horizon at which the written Homer begins.

If Homer is from this moment, then the poems are the product of a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness. The Iliad is soaked in retrospect. The Odyssey the twin and pair of it, filled with heroic adventurism and the sense of possibility, as if it were an American poem and the Iliad its European counterpart.

There is no doubt that the poet of the Odyssey knew the Iliad. The Odyssey, with extraordinary care, is shaped around the pre-existence of the Iliad. It fills in details that are absent from the earlier poem – the Trojan Horse, the death of Achilles – but never mentions anything that is described there. That discretion and mutuality is present on a deeper level too. So, where the Iliad is a poem about fate and the demands that fate puts on individual lives, the inescapability of death and of the past, of each of us being locked inside a set of destinies, the Odyssey, for all its need to return home, consistently toys with the offer of a new place and a new life, a chance to revise what you have been given, for the individual – or at least the great individual – to stand out against fate.

The two poems talk across that divide. The Iliad is rooted in the pain of Troy the singular place and the sense of entrapment that brings to everyone involved. The Odyssey is constantly free and constantly inventive. That difference is reflected in the two heroes. Achilles is fixed into rage, into need to fulfil his fate, fixed into having to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

These are the two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path. That is the great question the poems pose. Which will you be? Achilles or Odysseus, the monument of obstinacy and pride or the slippery trickster in whom nothing is certain and from whom nothing can be trusted? The singular hero or the ingenious man?

The Iliad embraces an earlier, rawer, more heroic and more tragic past. The Odyssey looks forward, takes modern dealing and adventuring and casts a magic spell over it so that it becomes a strange and idealised version of the trading and colonising life. The Iliad is a picture of what we think we once were and maybe long to be; and the Odyssey a version of what we are and what we might yet be. There is no need to put a date on those perspectives: their prospect and retrospect are everlasting dimensions of the human condition. In any age, the present is no more than the saddle of level ground at the pass, an instant of revelation in front of you and abandonment behind. Like all great art, Homer is essentially transitional, emergent, hung between what is lost and what does not yet exist.

In a way that remains permanently and inevitably uncertain, the Phoenician alphabet arrived in the Greek world, probably in the ninth century BC, from the trading ports of the Near East. Powerful currents were running between the Near East and the Aegean. Craftsmen, foods, spices, herbs, precious metals, ways of working that metal, myths, metaphysical ideas, poetry, stories – all were flooding in from the east, and the alphabet came with them. Unlike the earlier complex scripts, the simple Phoenician alphabet wasn’t confined to high-class scribes, and the Greeks soon adapted it to their own use, adapting Phoenician letters for vowels and for ‘ph-’, ‘ch-’ and ‘ps-’, which do not occur in Phoenician. Like the songs of Homer themselves, the Greek scripts they developed varied from place to place, but of all the scraps and fragments of early Greek text that have survived from the eighth century none is more suddenly illuminating than a small reconstructed object from the island of Ischia, at the far, western end of the Greek-speaking world, guarding the northern entrance to the bay of Naples.

Ischia now is a dream of wellbeing, a sharply dressed salad of an island, rising to a high volcanic peak in Mount Epomeo, rimmed in lidos and those in search of rheumatic cures, but with a lush greenness which must have seemed to any Aegean sailor like an oasis of welcome. It is a version of Calypso’s island, balmy, seductive, inviting, somehow suspended from mundane realities. The sun comes up over the shoulder of Vesuvius on the mainland and lights the lemon trees and the figs. Mounds of bougainvillea and ipomoea clump and tumble down the hillsides. A milky haze hangs all morning over an almost motionless sea. Bees hum in the rosemary flowers and crickets tick over in the grass.

Ischia offered the early Iron Age Greeks more than exquisite comfort. When the first settlers came here in about 770 BC from the Aegean island of Euboea, they set up the earliest, most northern and most distant of all Greek colonies in Italy. They chose it because the northern tip of the island provides the perfect recipe for a defensible trading post: a high, sheer-walled acropolis, Monte Vico, with sheltered bays on each side, one protected from all except northerlies, the other open only to the east. Between the two a shallow saddle is rich in deep volcanic soils where a few vine and fruit trees still grow among the pine-umbrellaed villas and the swimming pools. Here, beginning in the early 1950s, the archaeologist Giorgio Buchner excavated about five hundred eighth- and seventh-century BC graves which reveal the lives of people for whom the Homeric poems were an everyday reality.

This little Greek stone town was called Pithekoussai, Ape-island, perhaps from the monkeys they found here on arrival, or more interestingly as a name suitable for people who were seen from the mainland as vulgar and adventurous traders, laden with cash, irreverent and with uncertain morals, enriching themselves on the edge of the known world (pithekizo meant ‘to monkey about’). It was an astonishing and wonderful melting pot, four thousand people living here by 700 BC, nothing half-hearted about it, nor apparently militaristic. People from mainland Italy, speaking a kind of Italic, were living here, with Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon, Byblos and Carthage, Aramaeans from modern Syria and Greeks. The archaeologists found no ethnic zoning in the cemetery. All were living together and dying together, buried side by side. There was little apparent in the way of ethnic gap between these people. It was a deeply mixed world. Iron with the chemical signatures of Elba and mainland Tuscany was worked here in the blacksmiths’ quarter and sold on to clients in the Near East. Trade linked the island with Apulia, Calabria, Sardinia, Etruria and Latium as well as the opposite Campania shore. No other Greek site in Italy has objects from such a vast stretch of the Iron Age Mediterranean.

Buchner found no hint in any of the graves of a warrior aristocracy. The only blades were a few iron knives, awls and chisels. The leading members of the Pithekoussai world were from a commercial middle class, some with small workshops for iron and bronze, many with slaves of their own. The style of burial marks the difference between those classes: the slaves hunched foetally in small and shallow hollows, no possessions beside them; their masters, mistresses and their children laid out supine, in plain and dignified style, accompanied by simple but beautiful grave goods.

Much of their pottery came from Corinth and Rhodes, and what they didn’t import, they copied. Small Egyptian scarabs were often worn as amulets by the children and went to their graves with them, along with stone seals from northern Syria and one or two Egyptian faience beads. There are some fine red pots made in the Phoenician city of Carthage on the North African coast, and silver pins and rings from Egypt. A tomb of a young woman buried in about 700 BC was found with her body surrounded by little dishes from Corinth and small ointment jars, seventeen of them, around her, a dressing-table-full. Men also had little fat-bellied oil jars with them, some no more than an inch high and an inch across, pocket offerings, maybe used in the funeral rites. A fisherman was buried with his line and net; only the bronze fish hook and the folded-over lead weights of the net have survived. These men were all buried in the way of Homeric heroes, their bodies cremated on wooden pyres, and then interred with the charred wood and their possessions beneath small tumuli.

Nothing is coarse or gross. Big-eyed sea snakes and fluent, freely-drawn fish decorate the grey-and-ochre pottery. There are flat-footed wine jugs, suitable for a shipboard table. There is one big dish decorated with a chariot wheel, perhaps another faint heroic memory. Some pots are decorated with griffins from patterns that had their distant origins in Mesopotamia, others with swastikas that probably originated just as long ago in the Proto-Indo-European cultures of the Caspian steppe.

Fusion and mixture, a kind of mental mobility, is the identifying mark of this little city. It was not a luxury civilisation, but as you spend a morning walking around the empty, cool marble halls of the Pithekoussai Museum in the Villa Arbusto, peering in at the pots, you can feel the stirring of life in this distant and adventurous place 2,700 years ago. It doesn’t take much to see the wine being mixed in these bowls, poured from these jugs or drunk from these cups, nor the glittering fish hauled up in these nets or the goods loaded on distant quays and beaches and sold from here to curious buyers on the mainland of Italy.

And the museum holds its surprises. One late-eighth-century cratēr originally made in Attica, a bowl for mixing wine and water, depicts this world in trouble.

On its grey and rapidly painted body, a ship floats all wrong in the sea, turned over in a gale, its curved hull now awash, its prow and stern pointing down to the seabed. Everything has fallen out. Wide-shouldered and huge-haunched men are adrift in the ocean beneath, their hair ragged, their arms flailing for shore and safety. Striped and cross-hatched fish, some as big as the men, others looking on, swim effortlessly in the chaos. A scattering of little swastikas does little to sanctify this fear-filled waterworld. One man’s head is disappearing into the mouth of the biggest fish of all. It is a disaster, fuelled by the fear the Greeks had of the creatures of the sea, alien animals which, as Achilles taunts one of his victims, ‘will lick the blood from your wounds and nibble at your gleaming fat’. The scene is no new invention; it is painted with all the rapidity and ease of having been painted many times before.

There is no need to attach the name of Odysseus to this; nor of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet swallowed by a fish, his story exactly contemporary with this pot. It is merely the story of life on the Iron Age seas, the reality of shipwreck, the terror of the sea as a closing-over element filled with voracious monsters. In a later, Western picture, the large-scale catastrophe of the ship itself would have been the focus. Here it is pushed to the outer margin and made almost irrelevant; the central characters are the men, their hair and limbs out of order, the experience of human suffering uppermost. In that way, this is a picture from the Homeric mind.

Then, in a room hidden deep in the museum, you find the other transforming dimension of Pithekoussai: these people wrote. Shards from the eighth century BC are marked or painted with tiny fragments of Greek. One has the name ‘Teison’, perhaps the cup’s owner. A second, on a little fragment of a cup, says ‘eupoteros’ – meaning ‘better to drink from’. A third, also in Greek, written like the others with the letters reading from right to left as they are in Phoenician, and with no gaps between the words, says, fragmentarily, ‘… m’ epoies[e]’. The verb poieo has the same root as ‘poetry’, and the inscription means ‘someone whose name ended in -inos made me’ – Kallinos, Krokinos, Minos, Phalinos, Pratinos? This is no scratched graffito, but painted as part of the Geometric design. It is another first: the oldest artist’s signature in Europe.

By 750 BC at the latest, writing had seeped into all parts of this expanding, connecting, commercial, polyglot world. Pithekoussai is not unique. Eighth-century inscriptions, many of them chatty, everyday remarks, with no claim to special or revered significance, have survived from all over the Aegean and Ionian Seas. These aren’t officious palace directives, but witty remarks, sallies to be thrown into conversation.

And, as a wonderful object on Ischia reveals, Homer played his part. It was found in the tomb of a young boy, perhaps fourteen years old, who died in about 725 BC. He was Greek, and unlike most of the children was cremated, an honour paid to his adulthood and maturity. In his grave his father placed many precious things: a pair of Euboean wine-mixing bowls from the famous potters of their home island, jugs, other bowls, and lots of little oil pots for ornaments.

The greatest treasure looks insignificant at first: a broken and mended wine cup from Rhodes, about seven inches across, grey-brown with black decoration and sturdy handles. Scratched into its lower surface on one side, and not at first visible but dug away a little roughly with a burin, are three lines of Greek, the second and third of which are perfect Homeric hexameters. This is not only the oldest surviving example of written Greek poetry, contemporary with the moment Homer is first thought to have been written down, it is also the first joke about a Homeric hero.

In the Iliad, during a passage of brutal bloodletting and crisis for the Greeks, the beautiful Hecamede, a deeply desirable Trojan slave-woman, captured by Achilles and now belonging to Nestor, mixes a medicinal drink for the wounded warriors as they come in from battle: strong red wine, barley meal and, perhaps a little surprisingly, grated goat’s cheese, with an onion and honey on the side. Hecamede did the mixing in a giant golden, dove-decorated cup belonging to Nestor, which a little pretentiously he had brought from home: ‘Another man could barely move that cup from the table when it was full, but old Nestor would lift it easily.’

There are Near-Eastern stories of giant unliftable cups belonging to heroes from the far distant past. And tombs of warriors have been found on Euboea from the ninth century BC which contain, along with their arms and armour, some big bronze cheese-graters, now thought to be part of the warrior’s usual field kit, perhaps for making medicines, perhaps for snacks.

So this little situation – the Nestor story, the unliftable cup, the Euboean inheritance, and the presence at a drinking party of wonderfully desirable women – has deep roots. Remarkably, they come together in the joke and invitation scratched on the Ischian cup. ‘I am the cup of Nestor,’ it says,

good for drinking

Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully

crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.

The Pithekoussaian trader was turning the Homeric scriptures upside down. This little cup was obviously not like Nestor’s cup, the very opposite in fact: all too liftable. Its wine was not to cure wounds received in battle. It was to get drunk at a party. And drinking it would not lead on to an old man’s interminable reminiscing over his heroic past. No, the cup and the delicious wine it contained would lead on to the far more congenial activity of which Aphrodite was queen: sex. This elegant little wine cup, treasured far from home amid all the burgeoning riches, gold and silver brooches, success and delight of Pithekoussai, a place supplied with beautiful slave-girls taken from the Italian mainland, was for the drinking of alcoholic aphrodisiacs. The inscription was an eighth-century invitation to happiness.

The distant past might often seem like the realm of seriousness, but the Ischian cup re-orientates that. The first written reference to Homer is so familiar with him, and so at ease with writing, that in mock Homeric hexameters it can deny all the seriousness Homer has to offer. Homer and his stories were so deeply soaked into the fabric of mid- to late-eighth-century BC Greek culture that dad-style jokes could be made about him. And that makes one thing clear: here, in 725 BC, is nowhere near the beginning of this story. The original Homer is way beyond reach, signalling casually from far out to sea.

There is only one aspect of grief associated with the sophisticated optimism and gaiety of this story, and it is inadvertent. The father offered this cup to his fourteen-year-old son in the flames of the funeral pyre, where it broke into the pieces which the archaeologists have now painstakingly gathered and restored. Death denied the boy the adult pleasures to which these toy-verses were inviting him. And that is another capsule of the Homeric condition: the Odysseyan promise of delight enclosed within the Iliadic certainty of death.

SIX
Homer the Strange

THE PITHEKOUSSAI WINE CUP marks the limits of the written Homer. It is the edge of a time-cliff: step beyond it, further back in time, and the ground falls away. In that disturbingly airy and insubstantial world out beyond the cliff face, before the eighth century BC, Homer is unwritten, existing only in the minds of those who knew him.

It is a disorientating condition for our modern culture: how can something of such importance and richness have had no material form? How can the Greeks have trusted so completely to their minds? At home in Scotland, I sometimes go up to the edge of the sea-cliff above the house, looking down to the fulmars circling in the four hundred feet of air below me. Again and again, the birds cut their effortless discs in that space, turning in perfect, repetitive circles, in and out of the sunlight, scarcely adjusting a feather to the eddies, but calm and self-possessed in all the mutability around them; and I have thought that in that fulmar-flight there may be a model of the Homeric frame of mind. You don’t need to fix something to know it. You know it by doing it again and again, never quite the same, never quite differently. You may even find, in that tiller-tweaking mobility – a slight adjustment here, another there – that you know things which the rigid and the fixed could never hope to know. The flight is alive in the flying, not in any record of it. And perhaps we, not Homer, are the aberration. Of about three thousand languages spoken today, seventy-eight have a written literature. The rest exist in the mind and the mouth. Language – man – is essentially oral.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better? Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are riddled with internal contradictions. No self-respecting poet would allow such clumsiness.

The great eighteenth-century Cambridge scholar Richard Bentley – the dullest man alive, according to Alexander Pope, ‘that microscope of Wit,/Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit’ – thought that Homer 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. These loose songs were not connected together in the form of an epic poem till … about 500 years after.

Homer was no longer a genius; he was the work of an editor-collector, perhaps not entirely unlike Professor Bentley himself. Later microscopes of wit thought there was not even one author, but a string of minor folk poets whose efforts had been brought together by the great Athenian or even Alexandrian editor-scholars. The Prince of Poets had been dethroned. The scholars had won. And so the nineteenth century was animated by the debates between Analysts and Unitarians, those who thought Homer had been many and those who continued to maintain that he was one great genius.

The argument lasted for over a century, largely because of the sense of vertigo a multiple Homer induced. If Homer was dissolved into a sequence of folk-poets, one of the greatest monuments of Western civilisation no longer existed. Nevertheless, these were the preconditions for the great discoveries about Homer made in the early twentieth century by the most brilliant man ever to have loved him.

Milman Parry is a god of Homer studies. No one else has made Homeric realities quite so disturbingly clear. Photographs show what his contemporaries described, a taut, focused head, a man ‘quiet in manner, incisive in speech, intense in everything he did’. There was nothing precious or elitist about him, and his life and mind ranged widely. For a year he was a poultry farmer. Along with the technicians at the Sound Specialties Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, he was the first to develop recording apparatus which didn’t have to be interrupted every four minutes to change the disc. He took his wife and children with him on his great recording adventures in the Balkans, and at night sang songs to them which mimicked and drew on the epic poems he had heard in the day. At Harvard, where he became an assistant professor, he took to washing his huge white dogs in the main drinking-water reservoir for the city, stalking about the campus in a large black hat with ‘an aura of the Latin quarter’ about him, regaling his students with the poetry of Laforgue, Apollinaire, Eliot and e.e. cummings. Supremely multilingual, at home in Serbo-Croat, writing his first articles and papers on Homer in French, this was the man who pulled Homer back from its academic desert into life.

Milman Parry, 1902-35

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