Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed

Ahuvia Kahane

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441173065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the Runciman Award 2013 Homer's poetry is widely recognized as the beginning of the literary tradition of the West and among its most influential canonical texts. Outlining a series of key themes, ideas, and values associated with Homer and Homeric poetry, Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed explores the question of the formation of the Iliad and the Odyssey - the so-called 'Homeric Problem'. Among the main Homeric themes which the book considers are origin and form, orality and composition, heroic values, social structure, and social bias, gender roles and gendered interpretation, ethnicity, representations of religion, mortality, and the divine, memory, poetry, and poetics, and canonicity and tradition, and the history of Homeric receptions.
Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of scholarship on Homer and early epic, Ahuvia Kahane explores contemporary critical and philosophical questions relating to Homer and the Homeric tradition, and examines his wider cultural impact, contexts and significance. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential poet, providing readers with some basic suggestions for further pursuing their interests in Homer.

CHAPTER ONE

The figures of Homeric poetry

A beginning for all time

The Iliad and Odyssey are among the best known poems in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world, and they are widely acknowledged as the beginning of the Western literary canon. They are good stories, well-loved and deceptively easy to read. The Iliad is a tale of war; the Odyssey is a tale of the return from war. The two Homeric poems are very different from each other, but their narratives, contents, characters, style and traditions are closely entwined. Together they tell at some length – conventionally, 27,803 lines – a plot which is the West’s oldest and most famous point of literary departure. The beginning, we might say, of a very long line.

The first poem, the Iliad, deals with a conflict that occupies a central position in the collective memory of the ancient Classical world – the Trojan War. It is a story of countless woes, of spears and shields, chariots and horses, fear and pity, fury and grief, blood and dust. The first word of the very first line of the Iliad is mênis, ‘wrath’. It is the theme of the poem and also ‘the first word of European Literature’. It offers a harsh forewarning of things to come. The poem makes a rapid start – as one might expect from the ‘first’ poem – launching into extended narratives of violence and conflict. By the time we have traversed the poem’s 24 books and reached the last words, the tone has changed to one of mourning, pity and lament – reflections on wrath as a destructive force, on death and the past. The last line of the poem rounds off the burial of a hero, Hector, ‘Tamer-of-Horses’, who was a husband, a son, a friend and the emblem of the city’s defence. Without him, the high citadel of Troy will fall.

And indeed, beyond the horizon of the Iliad’s last verse lie the inevitable flames of destruction. Western literature here takes its first, dark, measured steps. ‘Measured’ not only because Homeric poetry is composed in formal, repetitive (and technically complex) metrical verse (each line has the same basic rhythm and involves intricate ‘formulae’ or set groups of words), but no less because of Homer’s meticulously crafted thought and poetics, his studied descriptions of physical violence and extreme emotion and because of the claims made by the poems themselves, not merely to tell a story, but to preserve the ‘fame’ (kleos) of fleeting mortal events. ‘Dark’, not simply because death lurks everywhere in the poems’ past, present and future, but because the Iliad is a poem that, above all, acknowledges mortality, tragedy and loss. Modern culture and especially modern popular culture (Hollywood film, for example) sometimes ends its stories with a victory for the ‘right side’ and the rightful defeat of others, or with a sense of wrong when the ‘right side’ is defeated. Loss in Homer runs deeper. In the background to the Iliad lies the abduction of Helen – a basic act of transgression by a guest (Paris) against a host (Menelaus). It is the cause of the Greek expedition against Troy, the war, and Troy’s eventual fall. Yet the poem has no right side, and ultimately, despite many victories and defeats, has within it more pity and grief than triumph. The Iliad has many battles and duels in which men kill and are killed. Violence is meted out and revenge is exacted. The poem sings of valour, prowess and martial excellence. Heroes sometimes revel in their strength. Yet the Iliad recognizes the inevitable price of violence and its irreparable consequences. It looks death, ineluctable and tragic, straight in the eye, although Homer’s piercing gaze is neither morbid, on the one hand, nor ‘objective’ or detached, on the other. This fateful, finely wrought, meditation on mortality seems well-suited to the burden of the Iliad’s place in literary history. The end of life, reflections on the end of life, are often the beginnings of a life in words (what the Greeks called a bios and the Romans a vita), a history, a narrative. This ‘end’ that is the Iliad, a permanent figure of fragility, is, we might almost say, a natural beginning to a life of the mind.

Homer’s second poem, the Odyssey, deals with the aftermath of the war. The surface of its tale is more varied and colourful. It follows the homeward path of Odysseus, one of the great heroes of the Trojan War and the wanderer-figure par excellence in the literary tradition of the West. During the 10 years of the war, and 10 more years which the journey takes him, tensions mount back in his palace on the island of Ithaca. His wife is besieged by suitors. His young son is coming of age but is still helpless on his own. The Odyssey describes both distant journeys and a painful situation at home. It is a poem of adventure, of monsters, ghosts and far-away peoples and lands, of seduction and intrigue, of recklessness and fidelity, of youth and old age, of memory and elaborate tales, of lies and truth, and, finally, of a homecoming and a reunion.

Compared to the Iliad, the first word of the Odyssey, andra (man) presents an elusive, almost enigmatic theme. As if the poem is asking ‘what is a man?’ The name of the poem is Odysseia, ‘the tale of Odysseus’, and yet, unlike the Iliad, the hero is un-named in the first line, which simply speaks of ‘the man of many ways’, andra . . . polytropon (1.1). The hero’s name is later revealed (obliquely, in 1.21), but we do not actually meet Odysseus until book 5 of the poem. If one of the Odyssey’s themes is the absence of the hero from his home, it is also a theme enacted literally in the hero’s absence from the first, substantial part of the poem. Significantly, even when Odysseus has come back to occupy the narrative stage, his name and identity are repeatedly withheld from various characters. The question of naming and identity is central to this work. Not only the Odyssey’s first word, but also the poem as a whole, asks ‘who is this man, Odysseus?’ and ‘what is a man?’ In typical Homeric fashion, the poem celebrates the multiplicity of possible answers.

The hero of the Odyssey is indeed polytropos, a man of many ‘ways’ or ‘tropes’. Later in the poem, he is also described as polymêtis, ‘of many schemes’ (2.173, etc.), polyphrôn, ‘of many minds’ (1.83, etc.), polymêchanos, ‘of many devices’ (5.203, etc.), polyainos, ‘much sung’ (12.184), and more. He is a compulsive traveller and teller of tales. He assumes many false identities and invents histories – a means of survival for him, and perhaps for the poem at large as it unfolds its story – and he boasts about his skills of deception. ‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who is known to all for his wiles’, he says (9.19. See Pucci 1987). The Odyssey’s narrative, like its hero, follows many winding paths and it carries us to the far corners of Homer’s world. The plot takes place on the seas, at the edges of the world, on faraway islands, in Sparta, Ithaca and more. It leaps backwards and forwards in time. We may well ask who exactly is this ‘man of many ways’ who has been everywhere and seen so much, and what exactly is his story? The answer is often in the plural. In fact, as the poem itself tells us, other journeys await the hero in the future, after he will have arrived in Ithaca, when his journey and his homecoming are fulfilled and the poem itself has ended (see the words of the ghost of the seer Teiresias to Odysseus in the underworld in the Odyssey 11.111–37). This future which lies beyond Odysseus’ homecoming and beyond the end of the poem, like the future of Troy which lies beyond the end of the Iliad, is not an oversight. It does not indicate the premature ending of the narrative. The ‘untold’ events are not missing pieces of the poem nor loose strands trailing around the plots. Rather, they are essential reflections of the way the Homeric poems relate to the worlds they describe, the way the poems continue to resonate after the narrative has reached the last line.

Many Homers

The Iliad and the Odyssey, then, are the beginning of a history and a literary timeline. They have been with the West ‘since birth’ and are (with some periods away from the limelight, in part, for example, from the middle ages to the Renaissance) a recurrent feature at the centre of its literary scene. Translations and adaptations abound – Homeric poetry is part of the literary furnishings of our world. The texts bear the marks of our histories, and are, despite the vast distance that separates them and us and their distinct character, always familiar somehow. There is, even in today’s rapidly evolving world, a certain comfortable fit between the Iliad and Odyssey and many of our sensibilities and historical perceptions. This fit characterizes some of the ways in which the tradition of the West and today’s increasingly wider traditions couch their understanding of song and narrative, as well as of conflict, gender, subjectivity, ethnicity, ‘self’ and ‘other’, mortality, heroes, knowledge, survival and the relation of the present to the past. Homer seems to remain a figure of significance, sometimes a point of reference, even as these traditions evolve (in a world of changing values and balances of power, global telecommunications, social networking and more), recreate and even more forcefully resist old categories, binary oppositions, monumental historical narratives and metaphysical completeness and/or coherence. Yet the ease with which we often accept Homer also contains deep-seated complexities. When we look at Homer more closely, we find perplexing features and a multiform essence.

Homer’s elusive character can be found in both broad and pointed aspects of the poems. Almost every word in the Iliad and Odyssey marks it. Thus, to give a brief preliminary example, one of the best known and most common expressions in Homer is epea pteroenta which, literally translated, means ‘winged words’. This expression first appears at the beginning of the Iliad, when Achilles, the hero of the poem, is about to respond to the insulting behaviour of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek armies, with impulsive, violent emotion. The goddess Athena intervenes, grabbing Achilles by the hair. The hero is amazed, but he instantly recognizes the goddess and her flashing eyes. Then, we are told (Iliad 1.201–3),

he uttered winged words [epea pteroenta] and addressed her

‘Why have you come again, daughter of Zeus of the Aegis?

Is it so that you should see the outrageous arrogance (hybris) of the son of Atreus?’

The flutter of these ‘winged words’ and the image they inspire seems to anticipate Achilles’ following speech and the wrath which is the theme and immediate cause of events in the poem (1.1: ‘Of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, sing, Muse’). This strange and distinctive expression, ‘winged words’, has been haunting readers and scholars for millennia. It ‘haunts’ the text, too, since it is repeated no less than 114 times throughout the poems, in a wide range of contexts, by speakers who display a wide range of emotions and thoughts. Are ‘winged words’ just rapid words? Are we dealing with one state of mind or with many? Is the essence of these simple words, epea pteroenta, a visual image of movement that cannot be grasped? Does Achilles’ verbal response and the flutter of wings have anything to do with this scene’s rare and unexpected epiphany – the appearance of a god before a mortal? Epea, in Greek, means simply ‘words’. But it is also the plural of epos, which in other contexts can mean ‘epic’. Achilles’ pointed, situated yet fluttering and elusive response may thus also hint at a general quality of ‘epic’ poetry, which is itself a response by mortals to visions of death and eternity and of things that are beyond mortality. Homer’s poetry itself, we might say, is a kind of ‘winged words’ whose resonance is always immediate but difficult to grasp, always something more than its literal meaning and presence. The poet Matthew Arnold in his essay ‘On Translating Homer’ (1861) famously attributed to Homer the qualities of being eminently rapid, plain, direct and noble. Such qualities may indeed have been achieved in Homer’s poetry, yet they are achieved by perplexing and elusive means.

In antiquity, Homer’s reputation and legacy thrived unmatched. He was celebrated in key canonical works that looked back to the Iliad and Odyssey in awe and often also with manifest anxiety. These works included epic poems, for example, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (third century BCE), Virgil’s Aeneid (first century BCE), Lucan’s Pharsalia (first century AD) and many others. They also included major works in almost every other literary genre including lyric poetry, tragedy, oratory and rhetoric, history and philosophy. Homer’s poetry continues to resonate throughout the literary history of the West, not least in contemporary settings, in key modern works such as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott’s long poem Omeros (1990), in widely acclaimed films like the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Mike Leigh’s Naked (1994), Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2001), Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and more (see Hardwick 2003, Hardwick and Gillespie 2008, Graziosi and Greenwood 2007, Hall 2008, also entries on ‘reception’ in Finkelberg 2010). Yet the continuity of Homer’s legacy and his enduring attraction today, as in the past, sees no end to change. There are no rules or set boundaries to Homer’s resonance. In the third century BCE, in the Hellenistic age, the epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes took Homer’s model and transposed it onto a narrative about an unfaithful hero (Jason) who is marked surprisingly by ‘helplessness’ (in Greek, amêchaniê) and about a woman’s (Medea’s) vengeance. Hellenistic culture’s sense of self-identity embraced both the poetic values and practices of earlier Greek eras and sought to break away from them. In Rome, Virgil took Homer’s poems of fighting (the Iliad) and far-ranging journeys (the Odyssey) and turned their order upside down. In the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas and his fellow Trojan survivors first journey to a new home (sailing away from the Greek lands rather than, like Odysseus and the Greeks, making their way home towards Greece), then fight (founding a future city rather than razing one to the ground, as in the Iliad). In fifth century BCE Athens, the dramatist Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy the Oresteia picks up and retells the narratives of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes. Orestes’ story is retold many times in Homer’s Odyssey, where it is presented as a model for later action. Aeschylus embraces this ‘Homeric’ model and places it on the stage. Yet he recreates the tales in the image of his own times, giving it a distinctly Athenian civic twist instead of the original aristocratic, heroic colouring. In first century AD Rome, Petronius, ‘Arbiter of Elegance’ to the emperor Nero, turned Odyssean epic verse and its tales of wandering, heroic adventure, homecoming and fidelity into a novel, mostly in prose, which follows the reckless sexual escapades of a hero named Encolpius, ‘In-Crotch’ (a roundabout way of saying ‘Penis’), in the settings of imperial decadence. Homer’s lofty Greek epic verse here plays its part within the pages of a racy Roman novel’s prose.

Change is no less part of the later Homeric tradition since the Renaissance, right down to our own times. James Joyce transported the scene of the Odyssey from Ithaca and antiquity to early twentieth-century Dublin and canonized Homer within Western modernism: the hero of Joyce’s Ulysse...