Homer does not provide any kind of guidance to life if the lessons derived are the usefulness of violence, the lack of regret at killing, the subjection and selling of women, the extinction of all men in a surrendering city or the sense that justice resides in personal revenge. That recipe for gang hell has always been troubling to the civilized. Pope was shocked at the “spirit of cruelty which appears too manifestly in the Iliad.” William Blake blamed Homer for desolating Europe with wars. Joel Barlow, the American friend of Thomas Paine and advocate of Enlightenment virtues, lectured the governing classes of a misguided Europe on how Homer was satisfactory as a poet,
but he has given to military life a charm which few men can resist, a splendor which envelopes the scenes of carnage in a cloud of glory, which dazzles the eyes of every beholder. Alexander is not the only human monster that has been formed after the model of Achilles; nor Persia and Egypt the only countries depopulated for no other reason than the desire of rivalling predecessors in military fame.
What is valuable and essential in these poems is the opposite of that: the ability to regard all aspects of life with clarity, equanimity and sympathy, with a loving heart and an unclouded eye. Homer knows more than the people in the poems can ever know. He knows more than the Greek warriors on the Trojan beach and more than the citizens of Troy. He even knows more than Odysseus and can look down on Odysseus, despite his failings, with paternal love. Homer matters because Homer, in a godlike way, understands what mortals do not. He even understands more than the gods, who emerge from the poems as sometimes terrifying but unreliable, intemperate and eventually ridiculous beings. That is his value, a reservoir of understanding beyond the grief and turbulence of a universe in which there is no final authority.
I am aware of how twenty-first-century this sounds—Homer with no trust in the metaphysical; a multiculturalist, able to empathize with both gang and city; a fusionist, seeing in Odysseus a man who might bring together the virtues of both worlds; even a liberal and feminist, who has a deep understanding of the dignity and beauty of women, their central role in human destiny. Nevertheless, it is a picture of Homer that seems true, and it is not a sentimental vision. The depiction of wrongness is fundamental to it. In a review of the harsh, extremist essays of Simone Weil, Susan Sontag speculated on why these dark Homeric qualities are so necessary.
There are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Homer’s embrace of wrongness, his depiction of a world that stands at a certain angle to virtue, is the heart of why we love him. He does not give us a set of exemplars. These poems are not sermons. We do not want Achilles or even Odysseus to be our model for a man. Nor Penelope or Helen for a woman. Nor do we want to worship at the shrine of Bronze Age thuggery. What we want is Homeric wisdom, his fearless encounter with the dreadful, his love of love and hatred of death, the sheer scale of his embrace, his energy and brightness, his resistance to nostalgia or to what the American philosopher Richard Rorty described as “belatedness.” Most literature and philosophers, Rorty wrote, put value only in the past.
Nietzsche, at his worst, gestured towards some narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake. Carlyle gestured towards some contented peasants working the lands of a kindly medieval abbot. Lots of us occasionally gesture in the direction of the lost world in which our parents or our grandparents told us they grew up.
Homer doesn’t do that. There is no sense that he has come late to life. These epic poems may enshrine the past, but they exist in a radiant present and in that way are hymns to present being. The English poet Alice Oswald has described recently how Homer is infused with this glowing sense of reality. Ancient critics “praised Homer’s enargeia,” she wrote in the foreword to Memorial, her beautiful and stripped-down translation of the Iliad, “which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Enargeia, a noun derived from the Greek word argos, meaning “bright” or “shining,” is “the quality of having brightness in it,” of being vividly there. For Greek rhetoricians enargeia was a necessary aspect of description, or ekphrasis, a word that literally means “a telling out.” And that pair of terms encapsulates the Homeric ideal: Homer’s greatness is in his telling out of the embedded vivid, the core of life made explicit. Homer is not Greek; he is the light shining in the world.
He provides no answers. Do we surrender to authority? Do we abase ourselves? Do we indulge the self? Do we nurture civility? Do we nourish violence? Do we love? Homer says nothing in reply to those questions; he merely dramatizes their reality. The air he breathes is the complexity of life, the bubbling vitality of a boat at sea, the resurgent energy, as he repeatedly says, of the bright wake starting to gleam behind you.