HOMER IS HAUNTED BY the threat of transience, by the way memory fails and meanings drift in the face of time. That slide into insignificance summons his tenderest and most lyrical moments. So in Book 6 of the Iliad, when the battle is well under way and all is in a roar, ‘the terrible noise’ of it stoked by the commanders on both sides, a brazen, brutal shouting, something else emerges. The Greek warrior Diomedes, second only to Achilles as a man with an appetite for killing, is pumped with rage and the need for death. He is conducting his drive, his aristeia, through the Trojan ranks. Death awaits anyone he meets.
Quivering with battle-lust, he comes across a young warrior from Lycia, an ally of the Trojans. This is Glaucus, whose name means ‘the gleaming one’, a word used by Homer to describe both the sea and the eyes of the wisdom goddess Athene. Here, surely, is Diomedes’s next victim. But instead of surrender or any display of weakness, Glaucus appears to him, like other heroes, ‘shining’ and ‘glorious’. Diomedes guesses he might be a god, and as such intensely dangerous. He isn’t, he is mortal, and so Diomedes asks him about his ancestry, who his father and grandfather might have been.
It is a traditional conversation, important for a hero, as his own self-esteem is bound up with the knowledge that his victims are themselves of good lineage, but also a kind of time mark: two warriors meeting in battle are not merely themselves; they are the vehicles for their own pasts. A man is his ancestry, and just as this poem is the poem which the tradition is now singing, these men are the future which their fathers and grandfathers dreamed of.
Nevertheless, Glaucus resists the expectations. ‘Why ask about my birth?’ he asks Diomedes in return, and a pause, a slowness, pools out into the flow of violence and grief. The noise of war rolls on in the background, but immediately, here, in the present, with you the listener looking on, a scene unfolds that exists in its own bubble of quiet, delivering a kind of precious and individualised oasis amid all the horror. In some of the most famous lines in the Iliad, Glaucus reflects on the meaning of life and death:
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
For Glaucus, all life goes back into the earth and returns again. Earth’s abundance and earth’s indifference are the same thing. But this resolved simplicity in the face of death, a philosophical calm and a knowledge that the armies of men gathered on the Trojan plain are ‘as many as the leaves and flowers that appear in the spring’, – that is not the usual Homeric attitude. Glaucus may think of himself as one leaf in the centuries of leaves, a transient phenomenon, an irrelevant individuality, but that acceptance of transience is not what most of the poem thinks, or most of the heroes in it. For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life’s central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.
It is also what the poem itself is intended to cure. In scene after scene, Homer quietly shows its listeners that it knows more and remembers more than men usually know or are able to bring to mind. The whole of the Iliad is a hymn to the scale of remembering of which epic is capable. The world forgets, but the poem remembers, and that knowledge is the source of Homer’s repeated sad-eyed, bloodhound irony on the nature of life. Only the gods can know as much as the poem knows.
Almost at the beginning of the Iliad, the first time the Trojans move out of the city and on to the plain to confront their enemies, to face either death or the possibility of renown and glory, Homer describes the landscape beyond the gates. Out on the open plain there is a tomb, a high burial mound or tumulus, of the kind which can be found across the whole of Bronze Age Eurasia, from Bahrain to Sweden and from Sussex to the deserts of Kazakhstan. It is the tomb of Myrine, a great mythological Amazon warrior queen, who conquered Anatolia and died in battle. The poet knows that, but the Trojans have entirely forgotten it. She has sunk out of their minds, and instead they think the hill is merely ‘Thicket Hill’, as its name batieia can be translated. The great mound has sunk away from memory into landscape. Only Homer and the gods know that a great woman is buried there.
Near the city but far out in the plain, there is a steep hill with clear space around it so you can pass on either side; this men call Batieia, but the immortals call it the grave mound of Myrine.
Homer knows something else, a delicate and transient fact about Myrine. She was polyskarthmos, a dancer, ‘much-skipping’ as the word means literally, even ‘very frisky’, as it is a phrase used of calves and lambs playing on the springtime grass. That is what this miniature interlude means to say: epic poetry is beautiful and valuable because it redeems from the unavailably distant past such a fragile and transient thing as the gaiety and dance-steps of a long-dead warrior queen.
Human memory lasts only three generations at best, but the poem is more godlike than that. A poem is not an act of memory but of memorialisation, fixing into everlasting song what would otherwise be forgotten. Agamemnon may lust after the possessions which victory will give him, objects ‘such as will remain in the minds of men who are yet to be’. But he is wrong about that. We have no idea what those looted goods were; we only know what the poem has preserved.
Epic is different from life. The present moment might be seen as a kind of blade, cutting the past from the present, severing now from then, but poetry binds the wounds that time inflicts. As Odysseus says, the Muse provides ‘her own way’ for poets and story-tellers, a path of song on which events from the past will continue to live in a present reality. It is inconceivable that the epics, for all the pressures of composition-in-performance, did not attend to inherited realities, beyond the moment in about 700 BC or soon after when Homer was first written down. The poems are littered with hints and suggestions of the ancient. Iron, which by the time of Emporio and Pithekoussai was the material out of which farm instruments were made, is often treated in Homer as the most precious and rare of metals, to be carried home as booty in the same class as gold and bronze, the stuff of strange dark jewellery and, as Hector says of Achilles’s iron heart, capable when heated of a mysteriously powerful reddened glow. That is exactly the position of iron in the Bronze Age before 1200 BC. Homeric warriors carry ‘silver-riveted swords’, which are found in the graves at Mycenae from the sixteenth century BC but scarcely later. Shields either in the form of large figures-of-eight or huge towering constructions behind which a man can hide as if behind a city wall – these are both Homeric pieces of equipment which are never found by archaeologists later than the fourteenth century BC. Helmets made of boars’ tusks sewn to a leather backing, each helmet requiring the tusks from at least forty boars, are found in Mycenaean graves and in Homer, but never in contexts nearer the Iron Age. This is the equipment of a profoundly ancient world.
In the Odyssey, Homeric bards sing to gatherings of elegant aristocrats and their followers, attentive around the formal hearth, in complex, many-roomed and multi-floored palaces, in which kings and their queens happily ordain a well-ordered life, the like of which are not found in archaeology after the cataclysms of 1200 BC, but are the baseline of the Mycenaean civilisation before it. Much of that poem addresses the agony of rootlessness, the lack of civility in an ill-governed house, the failure of Greeks to be civilised; but the rest of it portrays what looks like a Mycenaean world, a world in which the war is over and the Greeks have come to rest. These poems must at least have passed through a palatial phase for them to be so familiar with the workings and architecture of that life. And in the Iliad there is one element in particular of that palace environment which seems to guarantee that at least in part Homer belonged to the palatial phase of Greek Bronze Age civilisation.
In the late nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, the greatest of all Aegean archaeologists – Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans and Carl Blegen – working at Mycenae, at Knossos in Crete and at Pylos in the Peloponnese (with others following on at Chania, Thebes and Tiryns), found a series of clay tablets in which some kind of writing had been scratched before they dried. Small, grey, slightly roughly made things, these tablets were clearly not public objects. They are clay notes and records for private reference, not public display.
At Pylos, they came from within a few yards of where Carl Blegen found the fragments of the wonderful fresco showing the poet with his lyre and the bird of poetry taking wing in front of him. For decades no one could interpret the scratched signs, but in the early 1950s, through a combination of American and English analysis (feeding off the cryptography techniques developed in World War II), it became clear that the language they were written in was a form of Greek that was in use between about 1400 and 1200 BC. These Linear B tablets (Linear A was a similar, earlier, Cretan script, yet to be deciphered), once they had been understood, turned out to be the checklists and store-room accounts of clerks working in the administrative offices of these early Greek palaces. They were everyday files, dealing with employees, religious functionaries, chariots and other military equipment, food stores, domestic animals, regional officials and palace servants.
Judging from impressions on the clay, they had either been kept tied together in bundles or in baskets on shelves, which had collapsed in heaps on the floor during the final conflagrations of these palaces, the heat by chance baking and preserving the clay. Nothing on any of them even faintly resembled non-bureaucratic life, let alone the energised emotional realities to be found in Homer. It was a filing system, which like the workings of most bureaucracies remained hidden from the mass of the population: an essential part of the way the world works, entirely obscure to the mass of people inhabiting that world.
In what became known as the Archive Room at Pylos, Carl Blegen, on the very first morning of his dig in 1939, began to uncover the cache of Linear B tablets. By the end of that first season, his team had found six hundred. In the southern corner of the same room, traces of burned wood and seven small and very badly corroded hinges were found. Other similar hinges had been found at Knossos by Evans in 1900. Both sets of hinges and the little nails attached to them were too small to have belonged to a box of any size. They could not have been the remains of hinged containers for the tablets, because few such tablets could have fitted inside them. No one could guess what lids or doors they were for.
Only when another discovery was made in 1982 did the significance of these tiny clues become clear. Off the coast of Lycia, at Ulu Burun, about six miles south-east of Kaş in south-western Turkey, the wreck of a Bronze Age ship was stumbled on by a local sponge diver. A piece of firewood on board, freshly cut, was dated to 1306 BC.
The objects the wreck contained provided the most time-shrinking set of insights into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth century BC. The ship had been sailing west towards the Aegean from the Near East, heavily laden with ten tons of large copper ingots from Cyprus and a ton of tin ingots, perhaps brought to the Mediterranean coast from the great tin mines in Afghanistan. The standard copper to tin ratio for making bronze is 10:1. The metals in the Ulu Burun cargo could make enough bronze weapons to equip an army.
Together with those bulk goods was an extraordinary collection of riches: glass ingots, logs of Egyptian blackwood – a kind of ebony – ostrich eggshells, perhaps to make cups, inlaid seashell rings, elephant tusks, more than a dozen hippopotamus teeth and the shells of tortoises which the excavators think were the soundboxes for musical instruments. Little pots contained coriander and nigella seeds, rose-scented oils, olive and almond oil. There was gold jewellery from Canaan and Egypt, and precious mugs and cups made from tin. The ship carried equipment for building, fishing and war, presumably for sale, or perhaps to be distributed as gifts to those in power, and also the personal possessions of the people on board. Most of them seem to have been either Cypriot or Canaanite, traders coming west with the luxury goods of the east, but there were three men on board who had different origins. One wore a sword of which the nearest equivalents have been found in Sicily and Albania, as well as a bronze pin, and had some spears and a stone mace, of which the nearest parallels have been found in Romania and Bulgaria, on the western shores of the Black Sea. This was a man from the shadowy north, travelling in the Mediterranean, also now making his way back west, perhaps to Greece, perhaps to his homeland.
Alongside him were two men from Mycenaean Greece, their possessions appearing in pairs, carrying with them the kind of bowls and plates they were used to at home, as well as their razors, their bronze knives, and the engraved stones, their seals, with which they signed off documents and packages by pressing the engraved surface into clay balls attached to the binding strings. From mainland Greece, many seals and sealings survive. Perhaps these two men were accompanying some of these precious goods back from the Near East to the court of their king in Greece. In Egyptian and Hittite royal documents, such ambassadorial figures, overseeing the exchange of valuable goods between brother-kings, are a constant element in Bronze Age diplomacy.
The late-fourteenth-century BC realities of the Ulu Burun wreck – all now to be seen in the beautiful, cool, darkened rooms of the museum in Bodrum – were accompanied by one other extraordinary and revelatory object: a writing tablet made out of two boxwood leaves, with ivory hinges at one side, and hollowed-out panels on the inside of each leaf into which wax could be poured to make the writing surface. The bed of each panel is roughly cross-hatched to make a good, binding key for the wax. The closed tablet could be held shut with fixings on its outer edge, and that is probably how it was when the merchant ship went down: the outer surface of the tablet is far more worn than the inside. The wax itself has entirely disappeared in the thirty-three centuries the tablet spent in the sea. Nor was any stylus found with the Ulu Burun tablet, perhaps because it was made of wood or horn, but metal ones have been discovered in Anatolia, with a writing point at one end (the Greek word graphein, later meaning to write, originally meant to draw with a point or to scratch), and at the other a flat spatula for revision, smearing out marks in the wax.
The mysterious hinges at Pylos and Knossos were, it now seems, the only parts of portable writing tablets that survived the fires which brought the life of those palaces to an end. But the situation those objects describe – writing as the reserve of a specialist minority in royal households; folding tablets in which written messages, unintelligible to the majority of people, could be carried abroad to foreign courts; the tablets stored for keeping in the writing offices of the palace administration – finds a vivid echo in a moment from the Iliad.
It is the story told to Diomedes by the Lycian warrior Glaucus when they meet in battle and Diomedes asks him who his ancestors were. Glaucus’s grandfather, he says, was a beautiful young hero called Bellerophon. He was living in Corinth, at the court, when the queen of Corinth fell in love with him. She was originally from Lycia, in western Anatolia, where her father was king. At the sight of Bellerophon she became crazed with lust, but he held her at bay. Her frustration mounted, and she came to the point where if she could not sleep with him she wanted him killed. She went to her husband and told him that Bellerophon had tried to seduce her, to sleep with her against her will. If the king had any dignity at all, he would have him murdered. The king balked at the idea of performing the killing himself, but instead
He quickly sent him off to Lycia, gave him some fatal tokens, scratching many deadly soul-tormenting signs in a folding wooden tablet, and ordered him to show them to the queen’s father, who was king of Lycia, so that he might die.
Bellerophon, without being able to read it himself, was carrying his own death warrant with him into exile. When he reached Lycia he showed the mysterious signs to the king, who was able to read them, and then subjected him to a series of murderous tests. But Bellerophon behaved so heroically, overcoming every challenge, that he emerged triumphant and came to father three children, one of whom was Glaucus’s own father.
The world of this tiny, famous incident is almost Arthurian: its elevation of honour, its secret lusts in palace corridors, its conscious stepping beyond the ethics of the battlefield. It is, in fact, a deeply traditional folktale, elements of it found all across the preserved literatures of the Near East. But what of the writing, those mysterious and dangerous signs? What does this description of writing say about the Homeric moment?
The Greek king could have something written, presumably by a scribe, but Bellerophon could not read what it was. Writing was something that belonged to royal administration, not to members of the court. The text was also inaccessible to the poet telling the tale, and seems mysterious, half-magical to him. The king in Lycia could read it, or have it read to him, but still it has the quality of a spell, those many dangerous signs crammed into the folding wooden tablet Bellerophon has brought him.
This story is, in other words, an illiterate description of something written, seen more as an object than a message, its means of communication arcane and beyond ordinary understanding. It is a tiny glimpse into the Mycenaean world, profoundly different from both the Greek world after 750 BC, when ordinary wine-drinkers could scratch hexameters into wine cups, and from the Greek world between 1200 and 750, when no one could write at all and there were no palaces, or archive rooms within them. The Bellerophon tale, in other words, is the mark of the Iliad being at least as old as the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.
But that is far from the end of it. A Mycenaean palace might have been the world in which the Iliad – or an Iliad – was sung. It is not the world the Iliad describes, or in which it began. That world, in which a Greek warband confronts a non-Greek city; in which Greek adventurers find themselves at sea in a world of settlement and order, profoundly unlike their own mobile, predatory, unsettled lives; in which they know about gold and weaponry and fine things, but look on palaces and cities as belonging to others – that world can only have been much earlier.
Clues to these ancient ghostly layers are everywhere in Homer. As the great American archaeologist of the Bronze Age world, Emily Vermeule, Professor of Archaeology at Harvard, said of the Homer she loved, deep tradition ‘floats all through the songs as dust through air’. About 20 per cent of the whole of Homer looks as if it was originally composed in a Greek that was earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets, i.e. before 1400 BC. That antiquity can be seen above all in the way what are called pre-verbs relate to the verbs they modify. In Linear B, as in later classical Greek, a phrase the equivalent of ‘the situation described earlier’ might be written as ‘the aforementioned case’. In Homer (and in other early languages of the Indo-European family) it often takes the form of ‘the afore case mentioned’. The pre-verb floats free of the verb. A ‘predetermined outcome’ can in Homer, but not in later Greek, be a ‘pre outcome determined’. This small clue makes it clear that Homeric Greek is in many parts earlier than the Greek of the Linear B tablets.
It has long been a puzzle to Homeric scholars that some lines in Homer don’t scan properly. But they can be made to scan if you assume that certain words had another letter in them – the digamma or wau, which was pronounced like the English ‘w’, which had mostly disappeared by the time of the Linear B tablets, and is absent from the text of Homer as it has been preserved. Agamemnon is anax andron – the lord of men – in the text that has survived; the phrase only scans if you assume that it was originally wanax andron. The Greek for wine is oinos, but its original form is more familiar: woinos. These words that only work in their early form include the descriptions of the giant man-encircling shield carried into battle by Ajax. That kind of shield had been replaced by a little round shield as early as the fourteenth century BC, but the Iliadic words that had originally accompanied it survived in epic. Battle equipment, word-form and verse-form all point in the same direction: Homer’s foundations are in pre-palatial antiquity, a poem stretching at least as far back as the seventeenth century BC.
That is the evidence in the language, but archaeology feeds into this too, nowhere more spectacularly than in the objects discovered in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Go to the beautiful halls of the National Museum in Athens – make it midweek in midwinter and you will have them entirely to yourself – and what you will find there is an electrifying encounter with the past. The Shaft Grave treasures are from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BC. The dead and their possessions were laid on the floor of a deep shaft, which was then roofed over and a mound built above it. They are from the time before any great fortresses or palaces were built in mainland Greece. The famous gates and ramparts at Mycenae and at Tiryns are all later. The blazingly rich objects in the graves come from a Greek warrior world where all value was to be found in the glory of the individual body and its accoutrements. This is an essentially mobile world, in love with horses, chariots, ships, weaponry, hunting, adornment, beauty, gold and song. The people in the graves were undoubtedly entranced by the contemporary richness and glamour of the Minoan civilisation in Crete and the almost unimaginable wealth of Egypt. Evidence of borrowings – or thefts – from those cultures are everywhere in the grave goods. But the Shaft Grave world was not yet palatial. From all the evidence found by more than a century’s intensive archaeology, it was the bodies of the great, not the city of Mycenae in the sixteenth century BC, that was rich in gold. These kings and queens must have rustled with gold, jangled with it as it hung from their ears and wrists, amazed onlookers with it, standing before them in high, pointed diadems and perfect, imperishable gold foil.
This body-enriched but monumentless life is strikingly like the world of the Greek warriors in the Iliad. When the German businessman and romantic Heinrich Schliemann first dug into the Mycenae graves in the wet autumn of 1876, he wrote to his friend Max Müller, describing how he was reduced to weighing what he was finding:
There are in all five tombs, in the smallest of which I found yesterday the bones of a man and woman covered by at least five kilograms of jewels of pure gold, with the most wonderful, impressed ornaments; even the smallest leaf is covered with them. To make only a superficial description of the treasure would require more than a week. Today I emptied the tomb and still gathered there more than 6/10 kilograms of beautifully ornamented gold leafs … I telegraphed today to The Times.
It is held up as one of Schliemann’s great errors that he identified the warriors he found in those graves with the Homeric heroes. It is still thought to have been the crassest of his anachronisms, since the orthodoxy continues to think, as the classical Greeks did, that the Trojan War was fought in around 1200 BC, and that the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are at least 350 years too early to have had anything to do with that war. But that dating has nothing to secure it beyond the guesses made by the classical Greeks. Evidence of destruction at Troy itself has been found at a series of archaeological horizons from 2200 BC to 1180 BC. Any one of them might have been the war of the Iliad, except for this one reason: Homer in the Iliad describes the Greeks as a pre-palatial warrior culture, very like the world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Greeks as seen in the Odyssey, which in these lights can only be the later poem, coloured by the great period of Mycenaean palaces, have clearly begun to adopt the habits and structures of the Near Eastern palace culture. Nothing of that, though, appears in the Iliad. There is certainly no better reason to associate Homer with the Troy of about 1200 BC than with a city many centuries earlier.
And so this book, like Schliemann, has a different suggestion to make: the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are contemporary with, or probably slightly later than, the deepest levels of the Homeric poems. The objects in the graves are their own best evidence of a pre-urban, marginal, heroic world whose inhabitants look very like the people Homer portrayed.
The faces on which Schliemann stumbled are the faces of men as they are found in the Iliad. The usual image of the most famous mask, with the ears laid out to the side, gives the wrong impression, reducing the severity it intends. As you can see from the creases in the gold, those ears, much of the beard and the upper rim of the mask should be folded away from the face, leaving the features naked and prominent.
It is a battle face, not a portrait of an individual but the face of the warrior king: brutal, excluding and potent, as intense as any Renaissance inquisitor, nothing more resolute than that wide, closed mouth and the jaw gripped behind it. It is the face-helmet of fixed glory. Stare into its rebarbative blankness, appeal to it and it will not respond. Its gold shines; it does not care. It can hurt but you cannot hurt it. Here is Agamemnon in his aristeia, his power-drive towards supremacy, his best moment, as that word means, his excellence, his moment of prowess. And in that focus of power his strange, coffee-bean eyes can be seen as either closed in self-absorption and self-regard, or slitted in concentration. There is vanity here – his moustache tips are just tweaked upwards; a little sprig of hair grows just below the lower lip – but at root this face is the pitilessness of dominance.
Hold that face in mind and read Agamemnon’s demeanour in Book 11 of the Iliad as he wades through ‘the slayers and the slain’. Under his violence, men fall like trees under a woodman’s axe. He drives his spear through a Trojan’s forehead ‘and the spear was not stopped by the helmet, heavy with bronze, but passed through it and through the bone, and all the brain was splashed inside’. The next man is speared in the chest ‘by the nipple’, and the third killed with a sword-cut close to the ear. The next two, brothers, beg Agamemnon not to kill them. They speak to him ‘weeping, with gentle words’, offering him bronze and gold and iron from their father’s house, but ‘ungentle was the voice they heard’, ameiliktos, meaning unsoftened, the opposite of ‘darling’. He stabs one of the boys in the chest, and slices off the arms and then the head of the other with his sword, the head rolling through the surrounding crowds of warriors like a round stone. Agamemnon is a fire in the forest and a lion in the mountains. His hands are spattered with the filth of blood. The chariots of those he has killed run driverless through the battlefield, the horses ‘longing for their incomparable charioteers’, but those men are now lying on the earth, ‘more loved by the vultures than by their wives’.
Every Trojan warrior stands away from Agamemnon, trembling like a hind that sees a lion devouring her young and can do nothing to protect them. Agamemnon is that lion, eating the inward parts of those he kills. He kills a man, Iphidamas, just married, whose wife would now have ‘no joy of him’, and then, in a frenzy of repetition, Iphidamas’s brother, whose head Agamemnon cuts from his body with his sword. It has been a fiesta of severance, a destruction of human beings, but more than that, a destruction of human bonds. Agamemnon is edge-honed violence, his victims essentially their ligatures and sinews. It is the meeting of blade and connective tissue.
Only when wounded in the arm does Agamemnon withdraw from his unforgiving crusade. As his wound begins to dry, pain starts to afflict him.
And just as when the sharp pain strikes a woman in labour, the piercing dart sent by the bitter goddesses of childbirth, so sharp pains broke in on the strength of Agamemnon.
Those words are a measure of the grace and wisdom of this beautiful and terrifying poem. The pain suffered by the unforgiving agent of death and termination is like the pain of a woman as she gives birth to new life. What Agamemnon has done is to cut the connections between men and their fathers, men and their brothers, men and their wives, even men and their horses. But as his comparator for that slicing away of meaning, Homer summons the agony of childbirth, the root connectedness of humanity.
The Shaft-Grave Greeks, in this vision, are the people of the blade and the mask, the Trojans of the loom and the embrace. One slices and rejects, the other weaves and holds; but Homer stands beyond and embraces them both. He makes a poem of death that is itself a thing of woven beauty. That is the essential picture of the Iliad, a great history cloth, a tapestry of sorrow, in which the non-city is set against the city, where the marginal and contingent confronts the settled and the secure. The poem is hinged to that difference: the loved against the abused, the creative against the destructive forces of life. And the fact of the poem itself is a kind of super-weaving, a weaving of severance and weaving into one shining cloth of incomparable understanding.
You can find that love of complexity in the Mycenaean halls of the Athens museum. Take for example the interlaced spirals on one of the beautiful golden cups, almost certainly a hospitality cup for drinking on shared, ritual occasions. Its decoration dramatises those moments. The spirals are formed into upper and lower bands. Trace individual lines in the patterns and you will find that the spirals in one set of lines roll from right to left, those in the other from left to right. Each tightens into a knot, meets its opposite there, and then spirals out and on to the next encounter. At the same time lines from each band reach out and intertwine with lines from the bands above and below.
This is a culture entranced with the meeting, engaging, twisting, intertwisting and emerging of different cross-currents. Spirals are everywhere, in the gravestones showing spearmen in chariots hurtling into battle, on pots and on architectural masonry, on the beautifully chiselled platforms for the thrones of Mycenaean kings, on a golden breastplate bubbling with the swirl of life. The spirals might be taken as abstractions of the waves of the sea, but they are more than that: a recognition that this pattern of bind-and-release, alternating connectedness and separateness, is intimate with the nature of existence, of the thinking mind, the experiencing heart, the world which weaves and severs.
In Book 14 of the Iliad, as deep trouble is afflicting the Greeks, Nestor, the old king of Pylos, stands outside his own shelter in the Greek camp and looks dazed at the confusion around him:
As when the open sea is deeply stirred by the ground-swell
But stays in one place and awaits the rapid onset of tearing
Gusts, not rolling its surf onward in either direction
Until Zeus drives the wind down to decide it:
So the old man pondered, his mind caught between two courses.
That is as near as poetry could get to what archaeologists have called the ‘antithetical spirals’ which colonise such large areas of Mycenaean decoration and thought: dynamic, self-interlacing, not fixed but entranced by the very concepts of mobility, complexity and dynamism.
But there is a delicate and fluttering sensibility here too. In Grave III, where Schliemann found the remains of three women and two children, crowned with the most astonishing sun-embossed diadems of gold foil, their dresses scattered like spring meadows with gold roundels and flowers, he also found a set of impossibly flimsy golden scales, the bar from which the two pans hung made of foil so thin that anything more than the weight of a butterfly would have bent it. And on those scales, the Mycenaean craftsmen had impressed into the metal precisely that: fat-bodied butterflies, their wings fitting the scales on which they rested.
All this makes one thing clear: there is no need to assume that this early, pre-palatial Iliad was some kind of brutalist crudity of bloodlust and violence, indifferent to the subtleties of moral atmosphere which are part of the deep weave of the poems. The early Iliad was as alert to irony, tragedy, poignancy and humanity as the Iliad we know. As Emily Vermeule once told a gathering of American classicists:
Philologists often dislike, and reject, the idea that the early Iliad was good, and so beloved that great poetic effort and training were devoted to conserving it with all its archaisms and outmoded armor. They often prefer a late genius Homer who unified the design and gave new subtlety to the characters. This is because we still like to believe in progress, and that each generation somehow improves over the one before it; so, Homer should be as close to the civilized and lovable Us as we can make him, not some primitive singer of the remotest past … [But] poetically and archaeologically, early is not always the same as primitive.
Look for example at the two most pitiful and most fully realised deaths in the Iliad, those of Achilles’s dear friend Patroclus and of Hector, the champion of Troy. The same lines are given to their moment of dying, and only to them:
He spoke, and as he spoke the end of death closed in upon him,
And the soul, fluttering free of his limbs, went down into Death’s house
Mourning its destiny, leaving behind its youth and manhood.
The Greek of those lines is as ancient as any in Homer, and yet they are also among the most poignant. The little soul leaves with nothing but regret. Death is not a release into beautiful immateriality, but an expulsion from vivid life. Death is exile from light. The lovely limbs and eyes of Hector and Patroclus are now inert and glazed; the soul is nearly nothing without them.
Later images on Greek pots sometimes show a tiny, moth-like figure, more wing than body, hovering on the shoulders of the heroes who have just died. Emily Vermeule, in a connection typical of her bright genius, reported an experiment performed by a doctor in Düsseldorf who had placed the beds of his dying patients on extremely sensitive scales, so that he could measure their weight immediately before and after death. The difference, he found, was twenty-one grams, three-quarters of an ounce, the weight of the soul.
How can these objects and images not be evidence of a Homeric sensibility in sixteenth-century BC Mycenae? The love-denying mask of Agamemnon; the vision of the mayfly-soul, sadly departing the man in whose body she had found such radiant life; the antithetical interlace of a mind caught between two courses; the presence of tenderness allied in your everyday life to desperate violence.
Again and again in his similes, Homer knows that life is fragile, love suffers hurt and death comes; and that the moments on a hillside in the springtime, when the flowers are emerging in the turf, the sheep are giving milk and what looks like a mist of new leaves just breathed into the dark of a winter wood are more precious than any gathering of metal from slaughtered enemies or the rape of their wives.
There is no need to patronise the past, or to assume that we somehow have a fineness of moral vision to which the warrior culture of Homer and the Shaft Graves had no access. But can one push on beyond this moment of the early Greeks in Greece? Does Homer have his roots in anything earlier than what can be found at Mycenae? He does. But here the path bifurcates: from Greece and the Aegean, the undoubted setting of the Homeric poems, one road leads north and west into Europe and the borders of Europe and Asia; the other goes south and east towards the great palace civilisations of Crete, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the eastern shores of Mediterranean. Homer exists at the confluence of those two giant streams; in many ways his subject is what happens when those two streams meet and mingle. Homer, often seen as the template from which many later encounters of west and east are drawn, is better understood as the great meeting of north and south, what happens to northern adventurers in a southern world. That is the meeting which lies at the roots of Greek civilisation, and from which the later history of Europe stems.