The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

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.