Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Read online

  Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey

  A Biography

  Alberto Manguel is a world-renowned writer, translator and editor of literary anthologies. His works include A History of Reading, published in 1997 and his novel, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, in 2005.

  Other titles in the Books That Shook the World series:

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  The Bible by Karen Armstrong

  Plato’s Republic by Simon Blackburn

  Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne

  Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens

  The Qur’an by Bruce Lawrence

  On the Wealth of Nations by P. J. O’Rourke

  Carl von Clausewitz’s On War by Hew Strachan

  Marx’s Das Kapital by Francis Wheen

  FORTHCOMING:

  Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Bobbitt

  To Craig, in Ithaca

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2007 by Atlantic Books,

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Alberto Manguel 2007

  The moral right of Alberto Manguel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84354 403 6

  eISBN 978 1 78239 139 5

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  Printed in Great Britain

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Translations and Editions

  Introduction

  1 Summaries of the Books

  2 A Life of Homer?

  3 Among the Philosophers

  4 Virgil

  5 Christian Homer

  6 Other Homers

  7 Homer in Islam

  8 Dante

  9 Homer in Hell

  10 Greek versus Latin

  11 Ancients versus Moderns

  12 Homer as Poetry

  13 Realms of Gold

  14 Homer as Idea

  15 The Eternal Feminine

  16 Homer as Symbol

  17 Homer as History

  18 Madame Homer

  19 Ulysses’ Travels

  20 Homer Through the Looking-Glass

  21 The Never-ending War

  22 Everyman

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Several readers have helped me in my research: Antonio Basanta Reyes, Carmen Criado, Silvia Di Segni Obiols, Lucie Pabel, Gottwalt Pankow, Arturo Ramoneda, Marta Royo, Jean-Christophe Saladin, Guillermo Schavelzon, Takis Théodoropoulos, Mario Claudio Vicario: to them my deepest thanks. Special thanks to Louisa Joyner for her care, patience and enthusiasm, and to Meg Davies for her precise and intelligent indexing. Also, to Toby Mundy of Grove Atlantic for suggesting the book in the first place, and to Bruce Westwood and the staff of WCA, who were the first enthusiastic emissaries.

  A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS

  To simplify the reading, I’ve preferred to use common versions of the Homeric names, ‘Ulysses’ rather than ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Achilles’ rather than ‘Akhilleus’. As Samuel Butler noted, ‘Neither do I think that Hekabe will supersede Hecuba, till “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” is out of date.’1 (Though in our forgetful times, Butler may have to wait less time than he thought…)

  I am aware that I use the term ‘Greek’ incorrectly. The allied forces against Troy were composed of Achaeans, Danaans and Argives, not of homogenous ‘Greeks’, a name that was not invented until the expansion of the Roman Empire. However, in the context of this book, I use ‘Greek’ as a kind of shorthand. Neither does the word ‘Hellenic’ (which I have used once or twice) properly cover the historical and geographical ground of Homer’s stories, only a limited territory in southern Thessaly.

  The numbering of Homer’s lines differs in the various translations. Throughout the book, I have used the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles and published in 1992 and 2004 respectively by Penguin Classics, which, to my taste, are among the best and most graceful. Other translations of foreign works quoted, unless otherwise stated, are my own.

  Concerning the task of a literary critic, A. E. Housman had this to say: ‘Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head.’ I have long had occasion to doubt whether I fulfil either requirement.

  Alberto Manguel

  Mondion

  August 2006

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Every great work of literature is either the Iliad or the Odyssey.’

  Raymond Queneau, Preface to Flaubert’s

  Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1947

  It seems fitting that the two books which, more than any others, have fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia, should have no clear starting-point and no identifiable creator. Homer begins long before Homer. In all probability, the Iliad and the Odyssey drifted into being gradually, indefinably, more like popular myths than formal literary productions, through the untraceable process of ancient ballads sifting and blending until acquiring a coherent narrative shape, ballads sung in tongues that were already archaic when the poet (or poets) whom tradition agreed to call Homer was at work in the eighth century BC. For many centuries, the poor, blind singer begging his way through ancient Greece was generally regarded as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey; in time, he came to be replaced by a kind of inspired spirit, part fable and part allegory, the ghost of Poetry Past. Eventually, so widespread became the notion of an apocryphal Homer, that in the 1850s Gustave Flaubert was able to mock it in his Dictionary of Clichés, a handbook that purported to offer to the bourgeoisie a correct social response for every uttering. ‘HOMER: Never existed’.1

  We don’t know anything about Homer. It is otherwise with Homer’s books. In a very real sense, the Iliad and the Odyssey are familiar to us prior to opening the first page. Even before we begin to follow the changing moods of Achilles or admire the wit and courage of Ulysses, we have learned to expect that somewhere in these stories of war in time and travel in space we will be told the experience of every human struggle and every human displacement. Two of our oldest metaphors tell us that all life is a battle and that all life is a journey; whether the Iliad and the Odyssey drew on this knowledge or whether this knowledge was drawn from the Iliad and the Odyssey is, in the final count, unimportant, since a book and its readers are both mirrors that reflect one another endlessly. Whatever their nebulous origins, most scholars now assume that the poems ascribed to Homer began as scattered compositions of various kinds that eventually coalesced
and became perfectly interwoven to form the two lengthy stories we now know: one describing the tragedy of a single place, Troy, which is fought over by many men; the other telling the homecoming adventures of a single man, Ulysses, who makes his way back through many dangerous places. For Homer’s future readers, Troy came to stand for all cities and Ulysses for every man.

  The biography of a book is not the biography of the man who wrote it. Except that, in the case of Homer and his poems, one goes hand in hand with the other, since it is impossible to know which came first: the blind bard who sang of the destruction of the Trojan city and of the longing of a Greek king for his home, or the stories of the lure of war and the search for peace, which required an author to justify their existence. Writers and their work establish curious relationships in the eyes of their readers. There are books that through inspired wording conjure up a lifelike character who overshadows whoever the author may have really been: Don Quixote and Cervantes, Hamlet and Shakespeare are cases in point. There are writers whose lives, as Oscar Wilde said of himself, are the recipients of their genius, and whose books are only the product of their talent.2 Homer and his works belong to the former category, but there have been times in their long history when readers chose to consign them to the latter.

  No one owns Homer, not even the best of his readers. Each one of our readings is done through layers of previous ones that pile upon the page like seams in a rock until the original text (if there ever was so pure a thing) is hardly visible. So that when we think, upon closing Homer, ‘Ah, now I’ve made the Iliad – or the Odyssey – mine!’ what we mean is that we’ve made ours a story that many others have long annotated, recast, interpreted, adapted, and that, with their testimonies echoing more or less loudly in our ears, we’ve tried to impose our tastes and prejudices upon a cacophony of one-man bands, like Keats first looking into Chapman’s Homer or Joyce hustling Ulysses through the crowded streets of Dublin. In this attempt, strict adherence to official chronologies isn’t useful: readings influence one another back and forth across time, and we mustn’t accuse St Augustine of anachronism for studying Homer under Goethe’s guidance, or Heraclitus for allowing himself to be prejudiced by the commentaries of George Steiner.

  Not only does this palimpsest of readings hide from our eyes the original text (or what most scholars agree is the original text). It is said that an English divine, Richard Whately, waving the King James Bible at a meeting of his diocesan clergy, roared out: ‘This is not the Bible!’ Then, after a long pause: ‘This, gentlemen, is only a translation of the Bible!’3 Except for an increasingly small group of scholars upon whom has been bestowed the grace of knowing ancient Greek, the rest of us read not Homer but a translation of Homer. In this our fortunes vary: some may be lucky enough to fall upon Alexander Pope’s or Robert Fagles’; others may be doomed to T. S. Brandreth’s ‘literal’ version of 1816 or to the pompous 1948 rendition by F. L. Lucas.

  Translation is, in its nature, a questionable craft, and it is very strange how, in certain cases, works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, made out of words and therefore seemingly dependent for their success on how those precise words are used, can dispense with them and come across in languages that had not even been invented when the poems first came into being. ‘Mênin aeide, théa, Peleiadeo Achilleos…’ ‘Sing, O Goddess, the wrath of Peleian Achilles’ is a more or less literal English version of the Iliad’s first line. But what did Homer mean by ‘aeide’, ‘sing’? What by ‘théa’, ‘Goddess’? What by ‘mênin’, ‘wrath’? Virginia Woolf noted that ‘it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition’.4

  Even among modern languages the ‘tremendous breach of tradition’ persists. ‘Wrath’ in English, with its old-fashioned ring that has echoes in Blake’s tigers and Steinbeck’s grapes, is different from the German ‘Zorn’, full of the military sound and fury evident in Emanuel Geibel’s 1848 ballad about the ‘heil’gen Zorn ums Vaterland’, ‘holy anger over the Fatherland’,5 or from the French ‘colère’ which, in existentialist Paris, Simone de Beauvoir defined as a passion ‘born from love to murder love’.6 Under such bewildering circumstances, what is a reader to do? Read, and bear the questions in mind.

  In spite of such uneasy conditions, a good book manages to survive, at times, the most unfaithful of translations. Even when reading ‘many soul-destroying things/In folded tablets’ (as Brandreth self-accusingly has it),7 Achilles’ anger or Ulysses’ longing will somehow succeed in moving us, reminding us of our own endeavours, touching something in us that is not just our own but mysteriously common to humankind. In 1990, the Colombian Ministry of Culture set up a system of itinerant libraries to take books to the inhabitants of distant rural regions. For this purpose, carrier bookbags with capacious pockets were transported on donkeys’ backs up into the jungle and the sierra. Here the books were left for several weeks in the hands of a teacher or village elder who became, de facto, the librarian in charge. Most of the books were technical works, agricultural handbooks, collections of sewing patterns and the like, but a few literary works were also included. According to one librarian, the books were always safely accounted for. ‘I know of a single instance in which a book was not returned,’ she said. ‘We had taken, along with the usual practical titles, a Spanish translation of the Iliad. When the time came to exchange the book, the villagers refused to give it back. We decided to make them a present of it, but asked them why they wished to keep that particular title. They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.’8

  In the final book of the Iliad, Achilles, who has murdered Hector, who in turn has murdered Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved friend, agrees to receive Hector’s father, King Priam, come to ransom his son’s body. It is one of the most moving, most powerful scenes I know. Suddenly, there is no difference between victim and victor, old and young, father and son. Priam’s words stir in Achilles ‘a deep desire/to grieve for his own father’, and with great tenderness he moves away the hand that the old man has stretched out to grasp the hands of his son’s murderer and put them to his lips.

  … And overpowered by memory

  both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely

  for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching

  before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,

  now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

  and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.9

  At length, Achilles tells Priam that they both must ‘put their griefs to rest in their own hearts’.

  So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men

  live on to bear such torments – the gods live free of sorrows.

  There are two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus’s halls

  and hold his gifts, our miseries one, the other blessings.

  When Zeus who loves the lightning mixes gifts for a man,

  now he meets with misfortune, now good times in turn.

  When Zeus dispenses gifts from the jar of sorrows only, he makes a man an outcast.10

  To Achilles, and perhaps to Priam, and perhaps to their readers in the Colombian sierra, this is consolation.

  CHAPTER 1

  Summaries of the Books

  The Iliad

  Before the beginning of the poem, Menelaus’ wife, the beautiful Helen, has been captured by Paris, son of the King of Troy, Priam, and of his wife Hecuba. Among Paris’s siblings are Hector, married to Andromache, and the visionary Cassandra. To rescue Helen, Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon has laid siege to Troy, at the head of a coaliti
on that includes among its famous warriors Ajax, Diomedes, Ulysses, old Nestor, Patroclus and his friend, the greatest warrior of all, Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis. The siege has lasted ten long years and the gods have become involved in the conflict. Their divine favours are divided: on the side of the Trojans are Aphrodite (whose son, Aeneas, is a Trojan), the sun-god Apollo and the war-god Ares; on the side of the Greeks are Thetis, the goddess of wisdom Athena, the sea-god Poseidon, and Zeus’ wife, Hera.

  Book I

  In the tenth year of the Trojan War, the Greek army, led by Agamemnon, is camped on the shore near the city. The priest of Apollo, Chryses, has asked Agamemnon to allow him to ransom his daughter Chryseis whom Agamemnon has claimed as his slave, and has been rudely rejected. Chryses prays to Apollo to help him, and the god sends a plague upon the Greeks. To pacify the god, it is decided at a general assembly that Agamemnon must return his slave girl. Agamemnon agrees, but demands that he be given Achilles’ concubine, Briseis, in exchange. Achilles feels dishonoured and withdraws from the war, taking with him Patroclus and their soldiers. Achilles appeals to his mother for revenge, and the goddess Thetis convinces Zeus to side with the Trojans. Zeus and his wife Hera, who supports the Greeks, have an argument, settled by Hera’s son, the smithy-god Hephaestus.

  Book II

  Agamemnon has a dream which tells him that he will take Troy. He tests the dream by suggesting to his army that they abandon the siege and return home. The plan backfires when the soldiers agree wholeheartedly. The commoner Thersites causes a disruption by rallying against the Greek leaders, but Ulysses restores order. The episode ends with a catalogue of the Greek and Trojan forces.