Homer Inc
Edward
Luttwak
· The Iliad by Homer translated by
Stephen Mitchell Weidenfeld, 463 pp, £25.00,
October 2011
·
At the
beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I
looked for a translation of the Iliad –
not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D.
Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in
paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond
Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;[*] and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell
translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several
endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier,
author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’
·
There was
also one translation of the Odyssey,
by Fagles again. It was ever thus: for all its well-remembered adventures and
faster pace, the Odyssey has
always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at
the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad.
The ready explanation – that ancient schoolmasters preferred the Iliad because
the other Homer is just too much fun – is no doubt true but doesn’t explain why
the Iliad has
been preferred outside the schoolroom as well, from antiquity and the Byzantine
millennium to the Terminal 2 bookshop.
·
Why are
our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s
Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat? Publishers certainly view it as a
paying proposition: at least twenty new English-language translations have been
published since 1950, not counting ones from private presses. In Greece, as in
Italy for students of the liceo classico, it is a compulsory school text (several modern Greek versions also
serve as cribs), but why are the passengers at Terminal 2 in San Francisco
buying the English versions? Uniformed and desert-booted soldiers are a common
sight in US airports – the uniform secures lounge access and early boarding –
and it is a fair surmise that warriors and would-be warriors, these days more
often college-educated, are war-book buyers, of which the Iliad is
the echt and ur. Some of course – nasty fellows – would widen the explanation
by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book addicts, hence Iliad buyers.
That’s lame to begin with, for there are countless ways of getting that fix
much more easily than by reading 15,693 lines of hieratic verse bound to offend
military history buffs, because of both the extreme, pervasive emotionalism –
all the weeping wives of other war books are outdone by the floods of tears of
Homer’s greatest warriors – and the frequent confusion of the battle tactics of
two different eras. As against the precise description of each killing, which
if anything spoils the fun, there is the impossible coexistence of archaic
chariots with the hoplite phalanx, of single combat with walls and trenches.
·
In any
case, the nasty explanation collapses because the old firm is doing very well
in new markets far from America. The only Chinese Homer used to be Donghua Fu’s
1929 version of the Odyssey (Ao-de-sai) published in Changsha in 1929, but that renegade engineer and
pioneering Chinese grammarian translated an English text. To translate Homer
once is inevitable treason, but twice? Things are far better now that the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the study of ancient Greek and
Latin at its Institute of Foreign Literature. Luo Niansheng, once its most
distinguished classicist, who studied in the United States and at the American
School of Classical Studies in Athens before the Second World War, died in 1990
while translating the Iliad.
His version was completed by Wilson Wong, who learned his Greek at Moscow State
University in the 1960s, and who went on to translate the Odyssey as
well, in verse form. Until then, China’s only translation from the Greek had
been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his wife, Gladys Taylor,
translated many Chinese classics into English as he lived through the hellish
vicissitudes of China from 1940 till his death in 2009, including his and his
wife’s separate imprisonment. Wong and Niansheng, who also translated
Aeschylus’ tragedies, propelled the first Chinese-Ancient Greek dictionary,
published in 2004. By then, another member of the Institute, Zhong Mei Chen,
who studied Homeric Greek at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University after a spell
at Brigham Young University in Utah, had published poetical new translations of
both the Iliad and
the Odyssey.
·
The Luo
Niansheng/Wilson Wong Iliad is
on sale online, with a handsome Zeus on the cover, for just 19.60 yuan, or
$3.10 at the skewed exchange rate. By contrast, writing in Al-Ahram’s
English edition in 2004, Youssef Rakha complained that Ahmed Etman’s new prose
translation of the Iliad into
Arabic was ‘unaffordably priced at LE250’ or $41.44, although he acknowledged
that Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture was publishing a presumably much
cheaper paperback edition of Suleyman al-Boustani’s pioneering 1904 verse
translation of both Homers. Etman – a professor of classics at Cairo University
and chairman of the Egyptian Society of Graeco-Roman Studies, as well as a
talented playwright – was quoted in the article explaining why Homer was not
translated into Arabic until 1904, and then by the Maronite Catholic
al-Boustani, even though his writings were ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking
lands that came under Arab rule in the seventh century: ‘Homer is all
mythology,’ Etman says, ‘his numerous divinities alone would have been all too
obviously incompatible with the Muslim creed. Early Arab authors were too
concerned with religion to consider promoting such mythology, however familiar
they might have been with Homer and however much they might have admired him.’
·
One hopes
that recent changes will not exclude Homer again, as historical studies of
early Islam already have been. If they do, Etman is apt to resist valiantly:
·
The Iliad and
the Odyssey are
the two greatest epics to appear in the history of humanity, and they gave
Greek authors and thinkers all their cues. Without Homer there could have been
no such thing as ancient Greek culture, and without the Greeks there could have
been neither Romans nor subsequent generations of European literature. So when
you have a thing of such immense value and such eternal beauty, it seems
pointless to ask about its relevance to the present.
·
But for
its succinct eloquence, this evokes countless Letters to the Editor defending
the teaching of the classics, whose authors might not perhaps imagine a
Professor Etman in Cairo. It does not, moreover, explain the goings on at
Terminal 2: it is implausible that passengers are buying the Iliad to
uphold Western civilisation, so why are they buying it?
·
In Japan,
Homer is so familiar that Japanese have been known to describe their own
lengthy Heike epic on the (fully historical) downfall of the Taira clan as a
JapaneseIliad. It is a truly national epic: I have yet to meet a Japanese who
couldn’t recite its opening line – ‘Gionshōja no kane no koe. Shōgyomujō no
hibiki ari’, ‘The bell of Gion Temple recalls the impermanence of all things’ –
which echoes, though in Buddhist resignation, Homer’s bitter evocation of human
mortality at the very start of the Iliad.
Like the Iliad, The Tale of the Heike was sung, by blind itinerant monks strumming the
four-string biwa,
colleagues of the rhapsodes who strummed the often four-stringedphorminx lyre
while singing Homeric compositions (and of the cantastorie who recited tales of Federico Secondo Hohenstaufen in
the Palermo of my childhood with the aid of highly coloured storyboards; and
the Serbian singers of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar recorded by Milman Parry and
Albert Lord in 1934-35). Yet another similarity is in the parallel fates of the
infant Astyanax, son of Hector, destined successor of King Priam, and that of
the child emperor Antoku, the former thrown from the walls of Troy during its
sack according to the post-Iliadic Ilias mikra, or ‘Little Iliad’, the latter drowned by his own grandmother, who
threw herself into the sea with him after the Taira were defeated in 1185 off
Shimonoseki. His mother survived in perpetual sorrow at the appropriately
melancholy Jakkō-in nunnery at Ohara just above Kyoto, which no tourist should
miss, especially in the rainy mists of June.
·
Indeed,
Japanese familiarity with Homer can be excessive: I once saw a manga in which
the central focus of the Trojan War was a voluptuous nymphomaniac Helen, while
the central object of the great quarrel was a sadistically ravaged Briseïs,
even though in the Iliad Agamemnon
swears ‘by the greatest of oaths’ that he never went into her bed or slept with
her (no Clintonesque reservations here, please), while Achilles calls Briseïs
his darling wife, adding: ‘I loved her with all my heart though I had captured
her with my spear.’ This sort of soft porn abuse would not be allowed if Homer
Inc had the revocation powers that McDonald’s Corporation exercises from Oak
Brook, Illinois over its franchisees in 119 countries – nor would the new
Stephen Mitchell translation be allowed.
·
It’s not
that I would hazard to challenge the merits of Mitchell’s translation. On
matters of taste there is no disputing, and some may even find it inspiring
that his ‘poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music’: this is a
misrepresentation in any case, since except for rare vulgarities such as a ‘son
of a bitch’ Agamemnon, and a profusion of added adjectives (‘naked flesh’), it
is a far more conventional translation than, say, the Graves mixed-form
version. In any case, I am scarcely an authority in translating anything from
any language, and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because
my favourite English Iliad is
William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version,
because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format
well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for
its literal yet stylish accuracy – in that order.
·
Nor would
I presume to impugn Mitchell’s qualifications as a translator of the peculiar
Homeric mixture of archaic Ionic with some Aeolic (Sappho’s dialect), bits of
more recent Attic no doubt derived from its written stage, and even some faint
remnants of the Mycenaean Greek of the previous millennium, roughly
contemporaneous with the famous boar’s tusk helmet of Book 10. In my own
ignorance I do not impugn his mastery of Homeric Greek, the never spoken
language that did not exist outside the two epics apart from in a profusion of
later imitations, even though I learn from the dust jacket that Mitchell has
also translated the Epic of Gilgamesh (from the Old, or the Standard Babylonian version?),
the Tao Te Ching (now Dao De Jing), less well known than its supposed author Lao Tzu (now Laozi), Rainer
Maria Rilke (from German, French, or both?) and the Book of Job, Sefer Iiov, which I happen to know quite well but would never dare translate. In
any case, Mitchell persuasively describes himself translating the text by
looking up the Greek words he didn’t know, and proffers thanks to M.L. West for
unstinting help and advice. As the author of the indispensable if not
uncontroverted Making of the ‘Iliad’ as well as the editor of the newest TeubnerianIliad,
and of the new Loeb volumes on the Homeric hymns and the Epic Cycle (a
wonderful achievement in itself), West is the current Zeus of the Homeric world
– with his divine afflatus Mitchell could translate anything.
·
My
objection is another: that Mitchell took it on himself to produce and circulate
anIliad that is improperly abridged, indeed mutilated. His
text is bereft of the formulaic epithets and set phrases that characterise
Homer, which were not only indispensable memory aids for improvisational oral
re-compositions by unlettered performers, as Parry and Lord famously
demonstrated (a function now admittedly obsolete), but which can serve as
ironical foils. Alongside dispensable ‘flashing-helmet’ Hectors, ‘bronze-clad’
Trojans and ‘single-hoofed’ horses, there is ‘fleet-footed Achilles’, even as
he sits sulking in his tent; ‘fleet-footed glorious Achilles’, even as he
refuses to fight while his fellows are being massacred by Hector; ‘wide-ruling’
Agamemnon, as he is being humiliated by the powerless seer Calchas; and ‘most
glorious son of Atreus’, even while he is being reviled as dog-faced and the
most covetous of men.
·
Such and
more warrants keeping what Mitchell has chosen to leave out, for its ironical
undertone is by far the most subtle of all the virtues of the many-virtued Iliad.
To deny the irony is impossible, for it starts at the very beginning. The
opening words, ‘Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos,’ ‘Sing
goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles,’ are immediately followed by the
bloody consequences: the sending down to Hades of many valiant warrior souls,
whose bodies are left as spoils for dogs and birds – ‘and thus the will of Zeus
reached its fulfilment.’ The listener is squarely told who is to blame for all
the evil in the world: the supreme deity himself, the most unfatherly ‘father
Zeus’. He is most literally satirised in a passage in Book 14, which Mitchell
does not omit. To give Poseidon freedom of action to help the Achaeans, Hera
decides she must bed Zeus. She first equips herself with Aphrodite’s seduction
gear, duly inflames him, and then cunningly announces that she is embarking on
a trip.
·
‘Darling Hera,’ said Zeus, ‘surely
another day will do as well? Let us make love at once! Never in my entire life
have I felt such intense longing for goddess or nymph as I feel for you this
afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise
Peirithous, was nothing by comparison; and this also applies to Danaë, daughter
of Acrisius, the girl with the beautiful ankles, on whom I begot the hero
Perseus … Why, I would venture to say, dearest wife, that I have never yet
conceived so delirious a passion even for you yourself!’
·
The text
would make Zeus an insensitive oaf even if stiffly translated, but the above is
the Graves version, which particularly brings out the irony. This sort of thing
provoked the very first critic of the Iliad known
to us, the sixth-century Xenophanes of Lydian Colophon, who objected that
‘Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all things which are disreputable and
worthy of blame when done by men.’
·
Mitchell’s
excisions of detail are too frequent, but his much greater offence is an
outright mutilation: he omits the entirety of Book 10, a ‘baroque and nasty
episode’ which, he writes, ‘has been recognised as an interpolation since
ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously: it has major
inconsistencies with the rest of theIliad,
its style is different, and it can be excised without leaving a trace.’ Each
contention has some merit, yet the exclusion of Book 10 still amounts to an
extreme case of chutzbris – chutzpah for effrontery, hubris for arrogance.
Mostly, the omission is a very major loss for the reader.
·
I begin
with the arrogance. Mitchell justly praises West’s text, which was published in
Germany as Homeri Ilias in two volumes in 1998 and 2000. He even adds, most
misleadingly, that ‘20th-century translators of the Iliad worked
from a Greek text (the old Oxford Classical Texts edition, first published in
1902) that is far inferior’ to the new West Iliad. This
ignores not only the successive revisions of the Oxford text but also the great
advance of Helmut van Thiel’s 1996 edition, which added many readings from
papyri. A fine new translation by Anthony Verity that I much prefer to
Mitchell’s relies on van Thiel’s text, though not uncritically.[†] The largest difference between the van Thiel and the
West Homeri Ilias is that the former is decidedly more inclusive, adding
extra material of varying value from late antique sources, though in square
brackets, while West is much more severe in rejecting what he views as
interpolations, again by placing them in square brackets. Neither would dream
of simply deleting parts of the received text, let alone an entire book.
·
As for the
negative opinions in ‘ancient times’ that Mitchell cites, the ones that count
are the opinions of the Hellenistic trio most responsible for the redaction of
the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey as
we now have them: Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian of the Museum of
Alexandria, fl. 280 BCE; Aristophanes of Byzantium, its fourth librarian; and
the sixth librarian and most important Homeric scholar of the three,
Aristarchus of Samothrace. Surviving bits of Homer on earlier papyri as well as
Homer citations by earlier authors show that there were large variations in
different copies of both Homeric texts. But that all ended with the Alexandrian
trio’s culminating achievement, the Iliad and Odyssey editions
of Aristarchus. Evidently, master copies were made available to scribes from
near and far, or perhaps scribes were employed to produce copies in numbers for
sale, which thus became the only editions. Hence post-Alexandrian variations in
the text are much smaller than before, the result of scribal errors, omissions
and interpolations as papyrus rolls and then codices were copied again and
again down the centuries, rather than different textual origins. The most
important Iliad witness
we have, Venetus A, the tenth-century manuscript now in the Biblioteca Marciana
in Venice that came from Byzantium via Cardinal Bessarion’s Roman collection,
is essentially the Iliad of
Aristarchus, with his own marginal notes (scholia),
further lexical and a few exegetical notes by others, and precious excerpts
from the lost Chrestomathy of Proclus, our major source for the Epic Cycle on the
Trojan War, which describes how it started and ended, on either side of the Iliad’s
account of a few weeks in the ninth year of the war.
·
The
textual supremacy established by Zenodotus, Aristophanes and Aristarchus was
very hard won. Zenodotus had to start by compiling glossaries of Homeric Greek,
because by then the received songs were at least half a millennium from their
terminal composition, while even written renditions had been circulating for
three centuries, so that many words had changed their meaning. Each had to be
understood in order to redact the text, but there was no translation into
contemporary literary (Attic) Greek – even then, Homer was a revered ancient
whose archaic language was not to be profaned. Grammatical studies followed,
and the alphabet too had to be repaired in many texts before editing could
begin, because Athens was a major source of variant Homers, and till 403 BCE
Athenians had used an older alphabet in which epsilon made good for
epsilon-iota and eta as well, the omicron enclosed omicron-upsilon and omega,
while xi and psi were absent. Aristophanes of Byzantium is reputed to have
added punctuation and accents, editorial signs were invented by all three, the
present division of both the Iliad and Odyssey into
24 books was set, and only then could the actual editing begin, to compare
variant writings and correct them, to obtain the most authentic, most coherent
and no doubt most attractive text possible at each remove. That required the
condemnation of spurious, confusing and displeasing words and phrases, and
Aristarchus became so famous for his severity that Horace, in his bit inArs Poetica about good friends not allowing friends to drive to
town with bad verse that would embarrass them, invited them to become
Aristarchs.
·
Inevitably,
well-salaried establishment intellectuals were a stuffy lot, so Zenodotus,
Aristophanes and Aristarchus also questioned text they accepted as authentic
because it was too prurient (as with Agamemnon’s wanting Chryseis to serve him
in bed till she grew old) or disrespectful of the gods, or lacking in the
nobility expected of Homeric heroes, a definite problem with Book 10, in which
Odysseus and Diomedes set out on a night scouting raid to find out what the
victorious Trojans will do next – fit duty for first-class heroes – but then
infiltrate the camp of their Thracian allies purely for the sake of loot: the
magnificent white horses that pull the gold and silver chariot of Rhesus, their
chief. They know of the horses from their hapless captive Dolon, a weakling who
tells all (including relevant intel on Hector) in a desperate plea to be
spared. He is reassured by Odysseus in warm and friendly tones, but is then
abruptly decapitated by Diomedes, thus adding cruelty to treachery and greed.
·
Unlike
Mitchell, the Alexandrian trio did not suppress what they doubted or disliked,
or found improper, but only what they were sure was post-Homeric pastiche.
Otherwise they suggested, not deleted. We know that of 413 alterations proposed
by Zenodotus, 240 remained without effect in extant manuscripts and only six
changed readings appeared in all of them; of 83 known emendations by
Aristophanes only seven appear in most manuscripts that have reached us, while
Aristarchus offered 874 suggestions we know of, of which only eighty are in the
text of all our manuscripts. One of these suggestions was that Book 10 was
added to the Iliad at
a later stage than the other parts, though still before written versions, and
long before its first official recitation in the Panathenaic Games that started
in 566 BCE (that would have been 24 hours of non-stop declamation, or longer if
sung, or three days if more mercifully recited).
·
Aristarchus
did not delete Book 10 – had he done so, we might well have lost it altogether.
Instead, he merely noted his opinion of certain lines, agreeing for example
with Aristophanes in rejecting ll. 51-53 as interpolations, rejecting l. 84 on
his own, agreeing with Zenodotus in rejecting l. 240 and so on. They would not
have bothered with this had they thought the entire book was spurious. Nor
would the delayed insertion of an originally separate account of the night raid
signify anything, given the fluidity of the epic at that unwritten stage.
Almost two thousand years before Parry/Lord uncovered the mechanics of
composition in detail, Josephus described its essence in Against Apion, and because he was certainly well educated but not uniquely accomplished,
this must have been a common opinion among literate contemporaries: Homer,
‘they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory,
the scattered songs were not united until later; to which circumstance the
numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable.’ (These lines by
Josephus, incidentally, started Friedrich August Wolf on his 1795
deconstruction of Homer, whose nonexistence now coexists with the sensational
Hittite evidence of a Trojan War.)
·
Mitchell,
moreover, is entirely wrong when he claims that Book 10 can be removed without
loss. On the contrary, without it, Book 11 cannot be reconciled with Book 9,
judged the finest of them all by many, including the master philologist and
literary appreciator Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (in Die Ilias und Homer, 1916; he was forever cited by my father as a real scholar,
and among the very greatest after only his father-in-law, Theodor Mommsen). The
context of Book 9, which contains the celebrated protest of Achilles against
the heroic code, by which competing translations are often judged, is his
continuing refusal to fight even as the Trojans are winning and defeat seems
imminent. With many of his famous men killed and more demoralised, a weeping
Agamemnon first proposes to abandon the war and sail away, then humiliates
himself by offering all manner of rewards to induce Achilles to rejoin the
fight, including marriage with whichever of his daughters he prefers.
Obviously, the situation is desperate. Yet at the very start of Book 11, after
the supposedly useless Book 10, the minor female deity of war Eris (Enyo
elsewhere in Homer) easily rouses the Achaeans to fight rather than flee, a
striding Agamemnon shouts aloud to command his eager men to array themselves
for battle, and off they go to attack the Trojans in full force and high
spirits. What happened to raise morale so much was Book 10’s successful night
raid. Take it away, and we are left with an incomprehensible non sequitur. Some
things in war really are eternal and universal: if a great fight is expected
next morning, launch a night raid to raise morale on your side and demoralise
the enemy – or at least ruin his sleep.
·
The issue
of style isn’t as simple as Mitchell seems to think either: other books of theIliad also
contain ‘later’ wording and frequent dialectical apposition. It is true that
there is rather more of it in Book 10 than elsewhere in the Iliad –
but by ‘later’ what is meant is the language of the Odyssey,
not of some post-Homeric age. That again suggests that Book 10 was added after
the other books were formed, in place of an earlier, shorter transition between
the defeated gloom of Book 9 and the high-morale attack of Book 11.
·
There is
thus an excess of compelling reasons not to deviate from the Iliad that
we have had for the last 23 centuries, but even if none were valid, Book 10
would still be most precious because it contains the description of the boar’s
tusk helmet – a single object that illuminates the entire Homeric question.
Odysseus is kitting out for the night raid with a bow, quiver, a sword and a
helmet made of hide, better suited for fast movement than the much heavier
bronze helmet with ridge and horsehair crest. But this isn’t a simple skullcap:
‘With many a tight-stretched thong was it made stiff within, while on the
outside the white teeth of a boar of gleaming tusks were set thick this way and
that, well and skilfully’ – i.e. running in alternate directions – ‘and on the
inside was fixed a lining of felt.’
·
The poet
and his audience would have known that this was an outlandishly antique helmet
whose arrival on Odysseus’ head needed explanation. It is duly supplied:
Autolycus stole the helmet from Amyntor (as a son of the god Hermes, thievery
was in his blood), gave it to Amphidamas, who gave it to Molus as a ‘guest
gift’, who gave it to his son Meriones, who gave it to Odysseus. Actually, it
must have had a much longer history, because parts of exactly that kind of
helmet have been found in Mycenaean shaft graves dating back to the second
millennium.
·
It might
seem obvious that the earliest stage of the Iliad’s
composition would be Mycenaean, as obvious as the clear parallels between the
material evidence of the Mycenaean sites and the artefacts described in the
text, from the bronze swords of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on
pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John
Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the
(un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean
settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must
come after that, not earlier than the start of the first millennium. It had to
be post-Mycenaean because its language was post-Mycenaean, i.e. Greek. The
Linear B decipherment overthrew this presumption: its starting point was
Ventris’s bold theory that the words were in Greek (‘Evidence for Greek Dialect
in the Mycenaean Archives’ was the suitably restrained title of the sensational
1953 announcement in the Journal of Hellenic Studies). That would allow the oral composition of the Iliad to
start at a much earlier date, say around 1500 BCE, give or take a century, and
the boar’s tusk helmet of Book 10 is hard evidence that it did, because there
is no possibility whatever that it, or its memory, could have survived for half
a millennium. It is mentioned nowhere else in the Iliad,
and nor for that matter is horse-riding, another unique feature of Book 10 (the
horses were ridden off by Odysseus and Diomedes, leaving Rhesus’ chariot
behind) and another reason to keep it.
·
The
earlier date, moreover, opens the door for the evidence extracted from
deciphered Hittite cuneiform tablets, irrelevant to a ninth-century bce or
later Iliad,
because the last remnant of that empire had been extinguished by then, but
contemporary with Mycenaean Greek life over the previous thousand years. Much
fuller use of new archaeological evidence is being incorporated in the
monumental (one volume per Homeric book) and wonderful Basler Homer-Kommentar by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz, but for the rest of
us a mere catalogue of names is already quite illuminating. To begin with the
identity of the tablet-writers, they were the second millennium Indo-European
conquerors of the more ancient Hatti, whose prestigious name they took over,
and whose imperial capital was Hattusa. Our form ‘Hittite’ from the Hebrew
‘Hitti’ is the biblical version. They are often mentioned, from Genesis 15.9
onwards, but the clincher is 2 Kings 7.6, which identifies the Hittim as a
mighty empire that fights with war chariots – no mere Canaanite tribe they
(with a coincidentally similar name). Those war chariots, incidentally, linger
in the Iliad as
mere golf carts because all the fighting is done on foot. One set of tablets
preserves the text of an elaborate treaty of friendship in the form of a letter
from ‘His Majesty Muwattalli [the second], Great King, of the land of Hattusa
to Alaksandu ruler of Wilusa’, which is identified as being near Arzawa.
Muwattalli II’s regal dates fit, roughly 1295-1272 BCE, and so do the names:
Alaksandu cannot be other than Alexander, which happens to be the other name of
Paris, he who stole away the wife and treasure of Menelaus, but it is certainly
the name of a decidedly Greek ruler. Wilusa is most definitely Troy. The book we
know as Iliad is
the adjective for the city of Ilios – in our present text of the Iliad the
place is called Troié less often (53 times) than it is Ilios (106 times). Ilios
sounds much closer to Wilusa than Troié but their identity need not rely on a
similarity that could be coincidental, because it can be shown quite
conclusively that the city’s original name was ‘Wilios’: the W sound, in both
spoken and written East Ionic Greek, was used till 1200 BCE and became
increasingly silent thereafter: the Iliad was
really the ‘Wiliad’. As to the location of Wilusa, it is certainly in western
Anatolia, the Roman province of Asia, because the Arzawa mentioned in
Muwattalli’s letter is definitely there (indeed the Roman and modern ‘Asia’ is
most likely derived from ‘Arzawa’). Beyond that, other deciphered cuneiform
evidence more precisely correlates Wilios with the present Truva, the new
Turkish name (there is a large wooden horse too) for the ancient city long
rumoured to be Troy, which was first excavated in 1865 by the underpaid
consular Brit Frank Calvert, and then on a much larger scale by the wealthy
German adventurer, genius and fabulist Heinrich Schliemann.
·
More
evidence, the so-called Tawagalawa letter, from an unnamed Hatti ruler to an
unnamed ruler of the Ahhiyawa, refers to a past conflict that has been resolved
amicably: ‘Now as we have come to an agreement on Wilusa over which we went to
war.’ Even though the date is uncertain because the author has variously been
identified as Hattusili III (1265-1235 BCE, the earlier Muwattalli II
(1295-1272 BCE) or even his revered ancestor Mursili II (1322-1295 BCE), there
is no doubt whatever that the war over Wilusa had been fought with the
Ahhiyawa, i.e. the Achaeans, by far the most common name in the Iliad for
Agamemnon’s people alongside the less frequent Danaans and Argives. There is
much more to this body of evidence, including a vastly intriguing to-do over
the dangerous and obviously Achaean raider Piyama-Radu, who acts rather like
Achilles did just before the Iliad starts
(that’s how he got the girl), and whose extradition is politely requested under
assurances of safe conduct (!) – what did the Hatti ruler want to chat about
with him?
·
What is
certain is that while poor Homer has been kicked out of history, the Iliad can
now be treated as a historical source, if only because of its many and
surprisingly precise geographical references – none more so than in the bit
about Poseidon looking at the plain before Troy from a mountaintop on the
island of Samothrace (Samothraki) notwithstanding the island of Imbros and the
horizon in between: no need to be a god, because the plain is indeed visible
from the peak of Mount Fengari, 1611 metres high.
·
None of
this offers even a start to the question of why people keep buying and
presumably reading an interminably long, frequently repetitive and
intermittently gruesome Iron Age rendition of Bronze Age combat. One reason,
obviously, is that had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf,
and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star
pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and
techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of
them: the Iliad begins
in media res with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the
first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered
flashbacks; it starts, moreover, with a quarrel on the Achaean side that is a
fast way of introducing its two principal protagonists, Agamemnon and Achilles,
each acting out at maximum volume to reveal his character immediately; the
indispensable enlistment of emotions to make us care for the characters’ fates
is fully accomplished, on both sides, most strongly perhaps for Hector as he
parts from his infant son and desolate wife for a day of combat, but also for
the teenage fighter who grasps Achilles’ leg in a futile plea for mercy in Book
22, and many others; the build-up of tension leading to a great climax is
relentless, and achieved not once but twice, first in the long delayed return
of Achilles to combat, preceded by dramatic renditions of the bloody losses his
absence had caused, and then in the duel between Achilles and Hector, all the
more dramatic because of the final loss of nerve of Priam’s most valiant son.
On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots
of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the
gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles,
who had fouled the river with bleeding dead bodies (he would have drowned in a
thunderous flood had not the gods intervened); the gorgeous Cecil B. DeMille
battle scenes written as if seen from above, sex scenes all the more erotically
charged because they are inserted between dramatic peaks and, throughout, the
reciprocal balancing of the inevitable human tragedy of mortality with the
tragicomedies of the cavorting gods.
·
It is
those gods who supply an excellent reason for the millennial success of the Iliad:
the fact that it offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very
rare indeed over much of human history. None of the characters is piously
god-fearing, even if all fear the harm that the frivolous and often malevolent
gods can and do inflict, usually to punish the merest slights. These are gods
who have only power and no moral authority – when they have their own battle in
Book 21 they are not awesome but ridiculous. Such gods can only evoke grudging
compliance rather than sincere devotion – nobody would voluntarily renounce any
pleasure for them, let alone die for them.
·
Undiminished
by gods, human dignity is not diminished by secular authority either. Agamemnon
commands many more troops than Achilles: he has a hundred ships in Book 2’s
catalogue and his brother Menelaus has sixty more, as against fifty. Achilles
is therefore forced to give up his prize captive, but he is not forced to be
deferential, and roundly insults Agamemnon to his face. It wasn’t necessary to
be the issue of Zeus and a great hero to be free from deference, or indeed to
insult a king: Thersites, the nearest thing to a bolshie private in the Iliad,
loudly insults Agamemnon as well, for which he is not executed for lèse majesté
but merely beaten up by Odysseus in another of his ugly roles, as a bully boy.
·
That is
the supremely enhancing vision that has always been offered by the Iliad:
human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or
kings. In recent centuries, the Iliad could
also offer another kind of freedom, from the collective obligations levied on
individual freedom by patriotism, and from the more intense compulsions of
nationalism, both all the more destructive of freedom when entirely voluntary.
Achilles is angry and therefore refuses to fight, and nobody tells him that it
is his duty to fight for the Achaean/ Danaan/Argive cause because he is
Achaean/ Danaan/Argive, nobody calls him a deserter because there is no
presumption of any obligation to serve.
·
Another
reason for reading the Iliad is
the fighting, although the battles do not even start until Book 4. Necessarily
composed for audiences of fighters, because all able-bodied free men, rhapsodes
included, were called to arms in the Greece of independent cities, the Iliad describes
fighting with an exactitude that is perhaps entirely meaningful only for those
who have themselves fought as individuals with individual weapons, for whom all
of life and death can turn on the very smallest details of terrain, equipment
and circumstance. Of these, only equipment can be controlled at all, and so one
checks and rechecks one’s weapons and kit, after having cleaned, assembled,
even repaired whatever is at hand; having never fought in a cold climate, I
never had to worry about clothing, but I certainly fussed over the rest, and
can now bore any victim by arguing the very, very detailed pros and cons of
every weapon I ever handled. In the Iliad likewise,
each account of combat begins with a precise account of the arming:
·
he uncovered his polished bow of the
horn of a wild ibex … of 16 palms; these the worker in horn had worked and
fitted together, and smoothed the whole with care … This bow he set firmly
against the ground, bent it, and strung it … Then he opened the lid of his
quiver, and took out an arrow, a feathered arrow that had never been shot,
loaded with dark pains and immediately he fitted the bitter arrow to the string
… And he drew the bow, clutching at once the notched arrow and the string of
ox’s sinew; the string he brought to his chest and to the bow the iron
arrowhead. But when he had drawn the great bow into a curve, the bow twanged
and the string sang aloud, and the sharp arrow leaped.
·
The bowman
is Pandarus, son of Lycaon, the target is Menelaus, within easy range under a
truce, Athena having induced the treacherous attack to ensure that there will
be no peace settlement. The listener would have immediately recognised the
weapon, not a simple wooden reflex bow but one of horn or with a horn belly to
add compression energy. Only the weapon with which Odysseus kills the suitors
in the other epic was a more powerful compound bow, with layers of dried horse
tendon on the back to add tension to compression, but that weapon, a very rare
import from the far steppe, could not be strung by bending against the ground
because it is so powerful that it reverses itself when unstrung (Odysseus
evidently knew how to pull in the horns with bastard strings, because he strung
it while sitting down). But in the Iliad all
bowmen are despised because they can attack from a distance, and treacherously
too, as Pandarus did.
·
‘Arrow-fighter’
is an insult, in spite of Apollo’s godly archery: ‘Argives, you arrow-fighters,
have you no shame?’; ‘you archer, foul fighter’; ‘the bow is the weapon of a
useless man, no fighter’; and most contemptuously when the mighty hero Diomedes
addresses Paris, who has pierced his foot with an arrow:
·
Bowman and braggart, with your pretty
lovelocks and your glad eye for girls; if you faced me man to man with real
weapons, you would find your bow … a poor defence … All you have done is to
scratch the sole of my foot … a shot from a coward and a milksop does no harm.
But my weapons [heavy throwing spears] have a better edge. One touch of them and a man
is dead.
·
The Iliad is
an epic – the point is not to win but to gain honour by fighting not
efficiently but heroically. Yet for all that, with an audience of soldiers,
precision about kit is present throughout: when Agamemnon, at his best at the
start of Book 11, neither arrogant nor greedy but valiant, sets out to fight,
first there is the preparation:
·
the greaves first he set about his legs
… next he put on about his chest the corselet [thorikos, ‘breastplate’] … and
about his shoulders he flung his sword [a secondary weapon for the Iliad’s fighters, who were
spearmen first and bowmen last] … and he took up his richly inlaid, valorous
shield, that sheltered a man on both sides [i.e. a hoplite’s large shield] …
and on his head he set his helmet with two ridges and with bosses four, with horsehair
crest, and terribly did the plume nod from above.
·
One such
helmet terrifies the infant Astyanax when Hector leans down to give him a
parting kiss.
·
When the
fighting begins, the relentless bloodletting is intermittently accompanied by
technical asides. Agamemnon first kills the chief Bienor (‘shepherd of men’)
and then his charioteer Oïleus, whom he strikes on the forehead with his spear,
which goes right through the heavy bronze helmet to reach the bone ‘and all his
brain was spattered about inside.’ Next he goes after two sons of Priam, Isus
and Antiphus, who are in the same chariot; ‘he struck Isus on the chest above
the nipple with a cast of his spear, and Antiphus he struck close to the ear
with his sword, and cast him from the chariot.’ Next he kills Peisander and
Hippolochus after rejecting their plea to be taken alive for ransom. He ‘thrust
Peisander from his chariot to the ground, striking him with his spear in the
chest, and backward he was hurled on the earth … Hippolochus he slew on the ground,
and shearing off his arms with the sword, and striking off his head, sent him
rolling like a rounded stone.’ Next he does his killing in bulk as he chases
the fleeing Trojans: ‘And many fell from their chariots on their faces or on
their backs … as he raged with his spear.’ He is then confronted by Iphidamas
(who lives on as Jupiter’s asteroid 4791), ‘a powerful man and tall’; his spear
cast having missed Iphidamas, Agamemnon stabs him with his spear beneath the
breastplate, putting his weight in the thrust, but can’t pierce the belt as his
spearhead is bent ‘like lead’. Agamemnon seizes the spear, and pulls it from
the hand of Iphidamas, before striking him on the neck with his sword.
·
Spears cut
through temples, foreheads, navels, chests both below and above the nipple.
Even despised bows kill, and heavy stones appear as weapons. Joyful victors
strip their victims of their armour and gain extra delight from imagining their
weeping mothers and wives. Yet the Iliad is
a million miles away from the pornography of violence offered by many lesser
war books, battle paintings, martial sculptures and most obviously films, in
which the enemy bad guys are triumphantly trampled or gleefully mown down,
because the humanity of the victims, their terror and their atrocious pain, are
fully expressed. The powerful affirmation of the warrior’s creed – we are all
mortal anyway so let us fight valiantly – coexists with the unfailingly
negative depiction of war as horrible carnage.
[†] Oxford, 470 pp., £16.99, September
2011, 978 0 19 923584 3.
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