Although there was no Greek name for Tiglath Pileser or Sargon or Dur Sarrukin, the great events on the western edge of the Near East in the later eighth century BC did not altogether pass Greeks by. Greeks were living not only on the mainland of what is now Greece: they had settled on the western coast of Asia (now Turkey) at many sites since c. 1100–1000 and they also lived on the islands of the Aegean sea, including Cyprus. Cyprus was only some 40 miles by sea from the Mountain of Box-trees in Syria which Tiglath Pileser climbed before looking west. From the island, ‘seven kings’ sent gifts to his conquering successor King Sargon and went up to his palace, so his inscriptions tell us, to ‘kiss my feet’, at a date we can place between 709 and 707 BC. Cyprus did not become an Assyrian province with a governor, but its allegiance was marked by the erection of a big block of grey-black basalt inscribed with a text by Sargon’s scribes. It was set up at non-Greek Kition, probably in the city’s main sanctuary.1 To the Assyrians, it tells us, Cyprus was Ia′, a ‘district of latnana’. In the seventh century latnana is the Assyrian name for Cyprus only, but here in this early use it is attractive to take it in a wider sense, the ‘land of Ionian Greeks’ of which Cyprus (La′) was classed as only a part.2 Some or all of the ‘seven kings’ were Greeks, but they were not a new discovery: ‘Ionian Greeks’ had already been encountered by Sargon’s troops in another context.
‘In the midst of the sea’, Sargon’s texts had recorded, Sargon had ‘caught the “Ionians” like fish and brought peace for the land of Que (Cilicia) and the city of Tyre’.3 The implication is that these ‘Ionian’ Greeks had been harassing places on the coastline which runs southwards from Cilicia (now southern Turkey) to the Phoenician Levant (including our Lebanon). A fragmentary entry in Sargon’s royal annals puts his victory over these Greeks in 715 BC; it was won by ‘sailing against them’. They had been troubling the coastline, he tells us, up to Que (Cilicia) since ‘far-distant [days]’.4 This detail from the annals connects well with parts of an earlier letter to King Tiglath Pileser which was written c. 730 BC. One of his officials, active near Tyre and Sidon, wrote to report that the ‘Ionians’ had appeared: they had given battle at three towns: he had gone against them with troops, but the ‘ “Ionians” [escaped] on their boats and in the middle of the sea [disappeared]’. They took ‘nothing’ with them.5 This letter’s text is fragmentary, but the official appears to be reporting a known threat: these ‘Ionians’ were not a newly arrived menace. Their conduct fits well with what Sargon’s texts describe: seaborne raiding, it seems, and piratical harassment by Greeks.
The official in question had no idea that he was dictating our first surviving mention of Greeks in an Assyrian text. The implications of this ‘Greek nuisance’ have also been traced in five other Assyrian texts which describe trouble in 712/11 BC. At Ashdod, on the Levantine coast towards Egypt, the Assyrians supported a king, one of two royal brothers, whom people in the city then expelled. Instead, they made a certain Iamani their king, a commoner, the Assyrian texts claimed, with ‘no claim to the throne’. The approach of an Assyrian army caused this Iamani to run away to Egypt where the ruler eventually handed him over.6
Ionian Greeks were sometimes written in cuneiform script as ia-am-na-a: could this usurping Iamani be a Greek?7 This inference, for long accepted, has been challenged recently on several grounds, but it continues to find expert support: one of the texts calls him ‘Iadna’, recalling the root of the word which we have seen being used for Cyprus. Although the word ‘Iamani’ ought to be a personal name, would Assyrian scribes be exact about the name of a lowly rebel? Perhaps he was described to them dismissively as ‘the Greek’. If Iamani was Greek, he is a spectacular case of a non-royal outsider who was made the king of a non-Greek city by local acclaim. This piece of history would also make sense if the main skills of ‘the Greek’ were those of fighting, like those of the other Greek raiders on this coast. Unfortunately he has left no memoirs.
Whatever its local origin, the profiles of this Greek minority were raiding, war and piracy, as seen by Assyrian contemporaries on the coast of Cilicia and the Levant. They are part of the context in which Greek ‘travellers’ came east. To judge from the absence, as yet, of archaeological evidence, they seldom visited Egypt, but it was not completely unknown to them. Centuries later, Baken-renef of the Twenty–Fourth Dynasty was remembered in the Greek tradition as ‘Bocchoris’ and was credited with laws and a just reign. He was a surprising choice, the king who had ruled only briefly in a part of the Nile Delta during the 720s BC. Perhaps some Greeks, unknown to us, had had close dealings with him: from his reign we have scarab-seals bearing his Egyptian name, one of which found its way into a contemporary Greek grave on Ischia up near the Bay of Naples.8
Above all, there was a wider and closer Greek knowledge of Phoenicians in the eighth century, as the Greek name for them implies. It was not only the knowledge of Greeks who had met ‘purple people’ on the Greek mainland or on Cyprus, Crete or other islands. Phoenicians also travelled up the coast of western Asia, putting in at several Greek settlements there and establishing themselves on the metal-rich island of Thasos in the north Aegean.9 In mainland Greece, their physical presence is much more arguable, needing to be inferred from later Greek stories of mythical Phoenician ancestors’ travels or from finds of Phoenician goods. These eastern objects did indeed reach some of the Greek sites: they were most publicly seen when displayed at rich Greeks’ funerals before being placed in their graves or when dedicated at sanctuaries of the gods. It is there that we, too, find them, especially in the important sanctuary of the goddess Hera on Samos where conditions for their survival have been unusually good. The most impressive items have a particular Near Eastern origin, not coastal-Phoenician but north Syrian. Bronze handles and bits of decoration survive from much bigger bronze pieces which were made there, whether cauldrons or military items. There were also finely carved ivories which had been made to be the decoration of furniture. They are wonders of Near Eastern workmanship, but they, too, are not exclusively Phoenician: many of them can be classified as north Syrian by their distinctive style. Greeks and their sanctuaries stood on the edge, and at the end, of the great ‘age of ivory’ (1000–700 BC), exported across the Mediterranean from Near Eastern craftsmen.10
As north Syrians were not seafarers, the north Syrian objects in Greek contexts imply that others had visited their land and brought them over to the Greeks. Might these items have been carried west by Phoenicians who also brought their own luxury objects to the Greeks? The question is not uncontroversial among historians, as we shall see, but another possibility is that some, or all, were simply brought from the Near East by visiting Greeks. Phoenician burials are distinctive, but as yet not a single Phoenician-style burial from the eighth century has been discovered in Greece. The mainland of the Greeks was not rich in metals, the Phoenicians’ main foreign lure.
Our best evidence for a direct contact between a Phoenician and a Greek is rather different: not bronze bowls, but the Greek alphabet, the father of the script which is still in modern Greek use. Our first inscribed examples of it are still dated c. 750 BC, but its invention had evidently occurred earlier, perhaps fifty to seventy years before these survivors.11 For nearly four centuries Greeks had been illiterate, except on Cyprus, where a local syllabic script had persisted. The new alphabet, by contrast, was not syllabic: it was the first ever attempt to represent spoken language. It was developed by a Greek from personal study of the Phoenicians’ contemporary script, although the place of its acquisition remains undecided for lack of evidence. It seems most probable that it originated outside the Greek mainland and, to judge from the particular script of its early examples, it seems most likely to have originated with a particular Greek who had travelled east to the Phoenicians’ sphere. This origin would well explain how it became the most important cultural export by Greeks to lands far from Greece itself. Very quickly it reached some of the Phrygians in northern Anatolia (now Turkey), who devised a similar script, one which was later available to the court of ‘Mita’, King Midas.12 Contact with literate Greek travellers and their script then caused Italy’s Etruscans in the west to adopt an alphabet too.
The raiders in the Levant, the memory of Egyptian ‘Bocchoris’, some or all of the north Syrian bronzes and ivories at Greek sites, some (perhaps most) of the Phoenician exotica there too, the very existence of a Greek alphabet of ‘Phoenician letters’; these items all point to the existence of Greeks who travelled in what we have seen to be a turbulent zone of eighth-century contact between our ‘West’ and ‘East’. The alphabet, however, has left evidence that the context was not only one of raiding and material struggle. Our early examples of Greek writing are not letters or records of traders and transactions. Some of them are inscriptions of individuals’ names on objects to mark their ownership or their personalized dedications to a god. They, and others, include lines of poetry, pointing to a social world of wit and pleasure with texts about sex and love, including sex between males. Writing eventually helped long Greek poems to survive, but it was not for the sake of writing down poetry that the alphabet was first adopted.13 It opened up other possibilities, most of them for people who already knew how to enjoy themselves. It did not cause a dramatic change from an ‘oral’ to a ‘literate’ mentality: most Greek culture continued to be seen and heard, but not read. In the new alphabetic age, therefore, orally transmitted myths remained prominent: such myths, we can infer, had already been a prolific presence among Greeks in their pre-literate communities.
The Greek word muthoi means ‘tales’ and it is only we who call them more grandly ‘myth’, our word for tales about named individuals, distinct from ‘folk tales’, whose elements may contribute nonetheless to a myth’s story.14 One impetus for making and sustaining muthoi about named protagonists is a community’s sense of a distant, more splendid past, a sense which the Greeks undoubtedly had. Unlike the Phoenicians or Israelites of the Near East, by the eighth century BC the Greeks of the mainland had lived through some four hundred years (c. 1180–800 BC) of social dislocation and change since a grand ‘Late Bronze Age’ past (c. 1350–1180 BC). In Greece, this age of palace-based societies is known by us as the ‘Mycenaean age’ after the palace, partly excavated, at Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese. The collapse of the palace-societies then destroyed the syllabic script which their scribes had been using in Greece and in Crete. The following centuries have been traditionally called the Greek Dark Ages, dark to us (in the absence of Greek literacy) but not dark to Greeks at the time. During these centuries Greek folk tales and myths proliferated, partly round the remains and vague memories of the grand, vanished age. We can see this process in parts of the Greek mainland where big grave-mounds had survived the collapse of the Mycenaean era. In the ninth and eighth centuries BC copious new offerings were made at or beside them, although the identity of the dead persons inside the mounds had long been forgotten. To judge from the types of offering, Greeks were honouring the occupants as if they were local heroes, semi-divine figures with the continuing power to influence people’s lives.15 Old conspicuous landmarks thus took on a new significance in a creative, if distorted, view of the past. Stories began to be told to individuate the persons who were now believed to be buried in these old and imposing sites.
Muthoi, or ‘myths’ in the plural, were also spread by hymns or festivals for the gods in the Greek communities. Many Greeks in the eighth century BC were grouped in small ‘city-states’, or poleis, the characteristic social organization of much of the Greek world after the collapse of the ancient palaces and their world of monarchical kings. The ‘origin of the polis’ (the singular of poleis) remains a disputed issue among modern historians, in the absence of decisive evidence, but the extreme view is most unlikely, that it was a new creation of the eighth-century world.16 Probably poleis emerged at different times in different parts of the Greek world in the years between c. 1050 and 750: we should not think of a single, rapid ‘transformation’ which spread quickly wherever Greek-speakers lived. What we can say is that there were Greek communities in the eighth century, whether in a polis or a ‘pre-polis’ grouping of local villages, which had clearly marked calendars of cults and festivals in honour of their gods. They sang hymns to them and told stories about them which defined the gods’ personalities, especially in an age without monumental personalized sculpture. They even received their gods’ words of advice, above all at oracular sites. The most famous such site, Delphi, was a new, post-Mycenaean foundation which may well have begun c. 825–800. Other oracular Greek cults existed already, whether of Zeus at Dodona or Apollo at Claros. The voice of Apollo at Delphi gathered credit from questions increasingly put to it by Greek communities, especially those who set out to found new settlements beyond Greece in the later eighth century.17 In some of their oracles, the gods, too, seemed to speak in mythical terms and tell mythical stories about themselves, with the help, naturally, of their prophets, priests and priestesses.
Above all, we have an unforgettable range of myths in a source unique to the Greeks, which still captivates us and draws us back to this particular era and culture. The Greeks’ eighth century was an unsurpassed age of poetry, the age of epic and (probably) of Homer himself; it was also the age of Hesiod, who is known for two shorter remarkable poems, Theogony and Works and Days, our best insights into aspects of the later eighth century’s culture. Nothing in the Greeks’ material evidence, the pottery, the metalwork or the rudimentary architecture prepares us for this dazzling achievement. The Greeks of the eighth century were distinguished for words rather than things.
Of course, Near Eastern societies had their own poetry too, some of which was vastly older than anything known in Greece.18 A thousand years before any Greek poets at Mycenae, Sumerian poems were being composed and copied in Mesopotamia, c. 2500–2000 BC. Fragments of them have survived on clay tablets, and even in the eighth century, written versions of these old poems were being used by Assyrian scribes and singers. The great ancient poem of Gilgamesh was still known and copied, as was the old Babylonian Epic of Creation. Nothing which was sung in Greece in the eighth century was of a comparable antiquity. New poetry was also being composed at Tiglath Pileser’s Assyrian court, in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and no doubt in north Syria and the Levant. Among the Assyrians, modern scholars classify ‘epic’ poems, but they are only short poems which are less than a hundred lines long; we have fragments of such poems on the military exploits and virtues of the king. In tenth- to eighth-century Israel, meanwhile, the Hebrew Scriptures contain many references to songs, music and singing which show the importance of poetry in this period. Here too the indications are that the Hebrew poems were short hymns and psalms or short tales of battle. In the Levant, scenes carved on Phoenician ivories and metalware show the prominence of musicians, although no Phoenician poetry has survived. Phoenician songs and poems must have resounded on the sea-routes from Tyre to Cadiz and from Carthage to Sardinia. Their harvest-song made such an impression that Greek hearers imitated it and called it the ‘Linus song’. Scenes shown on the fine silver bowls of Phoenician craftsmen seem to allude to narratives now lost to us, about sieges and hunts, battles and the courts of kings.19 Perhaps they too were told as poems.
Among Greeks, heroic poetry had long been current in the complex hexameter metre, wholly unlike the poetic forms in the east. The absence of writing means that no Greek poetry has survived for us to read before the eighth century, but we can infer from Homer’s poems that his metre, his diction and some of his stories had had a long prehistory. His predecessors’ heroic stories were probably told only in short cycles, one episode after another, like the songs which Homer gives to singers in his own epics, poets whom he imagines so touchingly in an earlier heroic world. As far as we know, it was Homer who invented epic, in the sense of a long, structured poem with a single guiding plot; it is most evident in his Odyssey.20 The ancients later gave various dates for Homer’s lifetime because nobody knew the truth of it, but most of these dates are much earlier than those which we now prefer. Most modern scholars place Homer in the eighth century BC, in my view rightly, although a minority now champion a later date, c. 680–660.21 Whereas all the known Near Eastern poems are quite short, the Homeric epics are so long that they need two or three whole days for their performance. Poetry on this grand scale occupied a different place in society to anything known in Near Eastern sources: perhaps it was performed on special days at a festival in honour of the gods, the setting, we know, for many consecutive days of poetic recitals later in Greek city-states.22 The humble swineherd Eumaeus in Homer’s Odyssey pays admirable tribute to it. ‘As when a man gazes on a singer’, the Odyssey makes him tell Odysseus, ‘who sings lovely verses to mortal men, having learned them from the gods, and they long to hear him endlessly, whenever he sings…’23 So, then and now, people longed to hear the ‘endless’ Homeric poems themselves, the Iliad with its pathos and hard irony and the Odyssey with its pathos, too, and courtesy, and its hero’s many reversals during the plot which brings him home to his wife, his son and revenge. In the Odyssey, for the first time, nostalgia confronts us in world literature.
These eighth-century epics may have been orally composed poems which Homer performed without memorization or the aid of a written text.24 If so, they may owe some of their singular style to composition in a long tradition of metrical, orally composed song near the end of Greek poetry’s ‘oral phase’. Alphabetic writing, a recent invention, was perhaps an aid not so much to their composition as to their preservation. As some scholars have suggested, Homer might perhaps have recited his two epics to alphabetic writers. As there was such a profit to be made from them, his family or his close associates would be keen to have a text of their performance, however laborious.
We shall probably never know where Homer performed, whether there was one Homer for the Iliad, and another for the Odyssey (certainly the later of the two epics), whether women were present in his first audience, what exactly was the scope of the poems when first sung. What we do know from his poems is that his hearers were living in a world which teemed with muthoi of the gods and heroes. Sometimes he refers to myths off his main storyline, but they are told in such a condensed manner that he presupposes familiarity with the tale among his hearers: the exploits of Bellerophon, perhaps, or the misconduct of Clytaemnestra or the labours of Heracles. A few, perhaps, of these myths went back, at least in outline, to the Greek-speaking Mycenaean palaces some five hundred years before Homer’s time. Many more were creations of the intervening ‘Dark Ages’, the illiterate era when stories had multiplied, partly around relics or dim memories of the lost palace-age, partly round the gods and cults of each little Greek community, its landmarks, landscapes, water-springs or hills.
Homer could invent muthoi or adapt them anew: his own poems are muthoi themselves and sometimes they make up for gaps in the Greeks’ real world. There were no landscape gardens among the self-styled ‘best’ Greek nobles, nothing to compare with King Sargon’s Garden Mound, but this Mound disappeared without influencing posterity, bold though its scale had been. The most famous and influential garden of the eighth century was to be a Greek one, Homer’s mythical garden for King Alcinous in the legendary land of Phaeacia in the Odyssey. It existed only in Homer’s magical poetry, but poets and orators continued to imitate it.25 Is this garden also a clue to how Homer composed his poem? Remarkably, he describes it in the present tense, although his speaker Odysseus is narrating his former experiences and describing the rest of them in the past. Are the verbs a sign that Homer has moved these particular verses from another context, perhaps from a previous speech to Odysseus in which somebody, perhaps the fair young girl Nausicaa, described the garden to him more appropriately in the present tense? If so, Homer was already working with a written text, his own.26 Such are the ingenuities of modern critics but more plausibly the present tenses are descriptive, making the details immediate to us still. This test-case for Homer’s technique is still a garden, after all. It has an orchard and a vineyard and ‘neat’ beds for vegetables which are wondrously gleaming all the year round. There are fruit-trees, even pomegranates, but conspicuously there are no flowers for ornament’s sake. It is not that Homer and his teachers were insensitive to flowers, to the violets round Calypso’s cave or the carpet of crocus and hyacinth on which the gods Zeus and Hera made heavenly love. But flowers for their own sake were an extravagance which not even the finest imaginary Greek garden contained. Luxuriant flowers and greenery were either the luxury of gods or potentially sinister, implying that danger was imminent.27
Through the hazards of such landscapes, Homer tells of the return of mythical heroes from the ‘great event’ of the sack of Troy. Odysseus’ return is the most detailed tale but even here Homer innovates and tells new muthoi: other poets then followed what Homer had exemplified. As a result, many of the mythical heroes are known to us after Homer’s time at new addresses to which they were supposed to have come during their ‘return’ from Troy, settling on islands and coastlines as far away as Libya or Italy. We know of these placings thanks to later Greek poets and ethnographers, the ever-growing mass of local Greek inscriptions and even the eloquent images on cities’ subsequent coins. Consequently, they have remained at the centre of modern scholarly study, mythical ‘travelling heroes’ who became located at real places which they connected to the prestigious currents of Homeric epic. The problem is to trace the placing of these legendary ‘travelling heroes’ at these faraway sites before the seventh to sixth centuries BC.28
The travelling heroes whom I wish to trace are different: they are particular Greeks from a particular part of Greece in the real world. They are heroic in what they actually did and encountered across much of the Mediterranean despite (no doubt) the low morals with which they sometimes raided and killed. Their travels included journeys eastwards and with them as they travelled went a baggage of specific myths which they already knew. As we shall discover, they encountered myths in foreign lands which they assimilated too. They then believed that they had found specific items in these very same myths as they continued to travel even further across the sea. Particular myths thus became located like a ‘songline’ across the entire span of their travels. Strikingly, their trail of myths contrasts repeatedly with the horizon of Homer’s epics. It connects, unexpectedly, with other eighth-century poetry and a criss-cross pattern of travellers which brings both the myths and the poetry into a new focus.
Their trail also brings a specific gain for our understanding of Homer’s horizons, the nature of that sound which perplexed the ancients too. About three hours into an oral performance of his Iliad, after the middle of our second book, Homer starts to describe the first advance of the Greek army across the dusty plain of Troy. He prepares us with three similes, each of which helps us to envisage an abstract quality, the sight, the multitude, and then the sound of the Greek troops on the move.29 The Greeks’ bronze armour, Homer tells us, gleamed like the glare of a ‘consuming fire’ in a ‘boundless forest’ on the mountain-peaks, the forerunner, therefore, of our modern summer forest fires. Their many peoples poured out like the ‘many tribes of winged birds, geese and cranes and long-necked swans’ which fly to and fro in the ‘Asian meadow round the streams of Cayster’ where they settle with a crash, like the echoing of the ground when struck by the Greek troops’ feet. The troops were teeming in such numbers as the ‘hordes of swarming flies around the herdsman’s farmstead in spring when the pails are wet with milk’.
Forest fires still burn in summer in the Mediterranean, flies swarm in the dairies in spring and we know these plains of the Cayster river which still runs by the city of Ephesus, although the exact ‘Asian meadow’ is disputed and the swans, but not the cranes, have disappeared from the likeliest candidates for the site.30 The Iliad then goes on to give us its lengthy Catalogue of the Greek ships and their heroes, a list which draws on much older traditions. When it ends Homer reverts to the qualities which he has already tried to make visible to us by similes. The advancing Greek troops, he tells us again, sweep onwards as if ‘all the earth were being swept by fire’: once again the ground resounds beneath them. But this time the crash is not one of geese and swans who settle in a meadow. It is like the crash of the earth beneath the ‘anger of Zeus who delights in thunder, whenever he lashes the ground around Typhoeus in Arima, where they say is Typhoeus’ bed…’31
Even the ancients were uncertain. Did Homer mean a place called ‘Arima’ or people known as the ‘Arimoi’? Where was the place or people to be found? What, we might wonder, is the force of ‘they say’ here: did Homer mean ‘so rumour has it’ or ‘so informed observers say’ (although Homer had not seen it himself)? Is the phrase conferring authority or expressing non-committal doubt? Typhoeus was a huge snaky monster, whom we also know as Typhon, but unlike the Cayster river the exact location of Homer’s comparison has never been clear. It seems to depend on the words of others, but we are not told who they are.
The din of the Greeks’ first advance has thus perplexed readers ancient and modern, despite Homer’s customary precision. But we can understand it if we follow my travelling Greeks to specific places and follow, too, their discoveries among the local myths which gathered round them. From their perspective as men ‘who have travelled far and wide’ we can then look afresh at Homer’s simile and hear at last what Homer had in mind, the exact echo of the Greek army’s advance across the Trojan plain. It is a discovery worth an eighth-century journey, because it is one with a resonance which the sound of King Tiglath Pileser’s chariots has never been able to equal.