When a small boy, I was confronted with one of those questionnaires inquiring what personages of history I should most like to have met. I answered Homer, Christ, and Shakespeare. Not out of any precocious sublimity, but because I was resolved to discover from each whether he had, in fact, existed and whether he had spoken the marvelous words attributed to him. Unaware, I had chanced on the triple theme of what the nineteenth century called the higher criticism.
On these deep waters scholarship had launched its grand armadas. The discovery of the nature of Homeric composition, the analytic study of the Gospels and of the historical Jesus, and the quest for the identity of Shakespeare were the three classic mysteries toward which scholarship directed its modern weapons: archaeology, linguistics, bibliographic recension. But in the wake of the great galleons of erudition there has always swarmed a motley host of amateurs, mystics, and inspired cranks. The Homeric question, scriptural exegesis, and the problem of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays have always been regarded by the layman as fair game. Here everyman has his persuasion, and no decade passes without its new theory. Of late, we have been assured that the Odyssey was written by a young woman, that Christ survived Calvary and lies buried in Northern India, and that the manuscripts of Shakespeare are to be found in Marlowe’s tomb.
Professional scholars react to such beliefs with bitter scorn. But they are haunted by a curious fact: in each of these three pre-eminent riddles of literary and historical criticism, it is the outsider who has made some of the most brilliant and decisive discoveries. An obsessed amateur dug up Troy, and a young architect with a passion for cryptography broke the secret of the Minoan script. A literary critic—admittedly, an Edmund Wilson—was among the first to realize the implications of the Dead Sea scrolls. An eighteenth-century civil servant, Maurice Morgann, was the first to bring to bear on a Shakespearean text modern psychological and historical insights.
Homeric scholars, Semitic philologists, and professional students of Shakespeare, moreover, are themselves creatures of passion and fanatic conviction. No areas of humane learning solicit more ferocious controversy. There is something in philology that appeals to the worst in man. A. E. Housman’s reviews were founded on the axiom that a false emendation is a far worse crime than murder. But behind the brutality and pontifications in high academic places, we hear a whistling in the dark. No one would deny the extraordinary accomplishments of historians, comparative linguists, and archaeologists. Yet the stubborn truth remains: today the Homeric question is not much nearer solution than it was in 1795, when Wolf published his Prolegomena ad Homerum. The historical person of Christ and the composition of the Gospels are matters for conjecture no less than when Renan wrote the Vie de Jésus (1863). And there are numerous puzzles regarding Shakespeare’s plays and the range of reference in them baffling enough to convert sane men to Baconianism even now.
But, though the problems remain, our methods of approach to them change. And the fascinating aspect is this: in each case-Homer, Christ, Shakespeare—the currents of scholarship and judgment follow the same pattern.
In the late nineteenth century, dismemberment was all the rage. Wilamowitz, a titan among Homeric scholars, declared that the Iliad was at some points “wretched patchwork.” In a single chapter of Luke, Germanic analysis revealed five distinct levels of authorship and interpolation. The plays attributed to that illiterate actor Shakespeare appeared to have been compiled by a committee which included Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Marlowe, recusant Catholics, and printers’ devils of extraordinary ingenuity. This fine fury of decomposition lasted well into the 1930s. As late as 1934, Gilbert Murray could discover no reputable scholar ready to defend the view that a single poet had written either or both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Today, the wheel has come to a full turn. In Homeric, Biblical, and Shakespearean scholarship, unitarianism is the dominant trend. To Professor Whitman of Harvard, the central personal vision and “ineradicable unity” of the Iliad are beyond doubt.
There are material and psychological reasons for this reversal of judgment. We have grown increasingly respectful of the tenacity of the written word. The higher criticism assumed that if a text was very ancient or had been often reproduced, it would necessarily be corrupt. We are no longer so sure. Comparisons between the Dead Sea scrolls and the canonic version of the Bible suggest that ancient literature, where it was regarded in a sacred light, was handed down with great fidelity. In reverence, later scribes or scholiasts even reproduced errors or archaic words which they no longer understood.
What is still more important, a post-Freudian age regards the act of literary composition as one of extreme complexity. Where the nineteenth-century editor saw a lacuna or interpolation, we tend to see the indirections or special logic of the poetic imagination. Our entire image of the mind has altered. The higher critics, Wilamowitz or Wellhausen, were anatomists; to get at the heart of a thing they took it to pieces. We, like the men of the sixteenth century, incline to regard mental processes as organic and integral. A modern art historian has written of la vie des formes, the implication being that in the life of art, as in that of organic matter, there are complications of design and autonomous energies which cannot be dissected. Whenever possible, we prefer to leave a thing whole.
Moreover, we no longer expect from genius a constant performance. We know that great painters on occasion produce bad pictures. The fact that Titus Andronicus is full of shoddy violence is no proof whatever that Shakespeare did not write it; or, more precisely, it is no proof that he wrote only the good lines. This change in perspective is vital with reference to the Iliad and Odyssey. A hundred years ago, a passage which struck an editor as inferior was confidently bracketed as an interpolation or textual corruption. Today, we simply invoke the fact that poets are not always at their best. Homer can nod.
Finally, there has occurred a deep change in our understanding of myth. We have come to realize that myths are among the subtlest and most direct languages of experience. They re-enact moments of signal truth or crisis in the human condition. But mythology is more than history made memorable; the mythographer—the poet—is the historian of the unconscious. This gives to the great myths their haunting universality. Not since the chiliastic panics of the late tenth century, when men believed that the Second Coming was at hand, moreover, has there been an age more nightmare-ridden by mythical imaginings than our own. Men who have placed the figure of Oedipus at the heart of their psychology, or who have fought for political survival against the myth of the superman and the thousand-year Reich, know that fables are deadly serious. More than our predecessors, therefore, we approach Homer on his own terms.
At the core of the Homeric poems lies the remembrance of one of the greatest disasters that can befall man: the destruction of a city. A city is the outward sum of man’s nobility; in it, his condition is most thoroughly humanized. When a city is destroyed, man is compelled to wander the earth or dwell in the open fields in partial return to the manner of a beast. That is the central realization of the Iliad. Resounding through the epic, now in stifled allusion, now in strident lament, is the dread fact that an ancient and splendid city has perished by the edge of the sea.
Homer does not narrate the fiery death of Troy. Perhaps there is in this reticence an element of poetic tact (Dante’s blindness at the climax of vision); perhaps a shrewd hunch that if the Iliad had shown Troy burning, the feelings of the audience would have shifted wholly to the Trojan side. Cunningly, Homer suggests the final catastrophe by depicting it on a miniature scale; we are shown Hector assailing the ramparts of the Greek encampment and threatening to fire the ships.
Lacking the close of the story, we do not know over precisely which city the wooden horse cast its murderous shadow. The topography of the Iliad would fit what archaeologists designate as Troy VI. But signs of violent ruin are strongest in that level of the mound designated as Troy VII A. Some scholars have even argued that the setting of the poem should be transposed from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, where a fierce, protracted siege appears to have taken place in the early Mycenaean age.
Most probably, the Iliad reflects not only a single episode but a great catalogue of ruin. The fabled Knossos fell circa 1400 B.C. The cause of its overthrow is not known, but legendary recollections of the event reappear in the Greek imagination for centuries thereafter. The next two hundred years are a period of extreme obscurity. Part of the problem lies in the identification of the mysterious Peoples of the Sea, whose attacks seem to have carried as far as Egypt. One thing is certain: on both sides of the Aegean, the Mycenaean world, with its great palaces and complex dynastic and commercial relations, met with violent disaster. The citadels of Pylos and Iolkos were burned around 1200, and golden Mycenae itself was destroyed within the century. It was during this dark, confused period, circa 1180, that Troy VII A was sacked.
The remembrance of these ancient terrors, of city gates broken and towers burned, beats loud in the Iliad. The Odyssey speaks of the aftermath. It is the epic of the displaced person. The cities are down, and survivors wander the face of the earth as pirates or beggars. This, in fact, is what seems to have taken place during the period from 1100 to 900. The Dorian invasions drove before them groups of Helladic refugees. These fugitives carried with them shattered yet rich fragments of their own culture. The main stream of migration seems to have passed through Attica between the early eleventh and late ninth centuries. Shortly after the year 1000 B.C., the uprooted peoples began colonizing Asia Minor and the islands. Some appear to have settled in and around Athens.
But even if we assume a continuity of civilization on the Greek mainland, a most difficult question arises. In the form in which we know them, the Iliad and the Odyssey were set down between circa 750 and 700 B.C. The siege of Troy, however, falls in the early part of the twelfth century, in the closing phase of the Mycenaean age. The manner of life dramatized in the Iliad is strongly Mycenaean; nearly all of the fighting embodies the weapons and tactics of the Bronze Age. The world of Agamemnon, as Sir John L. Myres said, is one of which later Greeks “knew little and understood less.” How, then, were memories and traditions out of the archaic past transmitted over a gap of at least four hundred years?
The discovery made in 1952 by Michael Ventris (again an amateur of genius, an outsider), gives a lead toward a possible answer. He showed that the inscriptions on tablets found at various Mycenaean sites are written in a very ancient but recognizable form of Greek. A bridge of language spans the Dark Ages. But, despite the enthusiasm of certain scholars, such as Professor Webster of London, it is a tenuous bridge. The Greek in Linear B is half a millennium older than anything to compare it with. The tablets yield inventories of goods and weapons, lists of names, some of which reappear in Homer, and fragmentary invocations to the gods. There is no evidence, so far, of Mycenaean literature in any real sense. The script is ill suited to the writing of poetry, and the next written Greek, which belongs to the second half of the eighth century, is, of course, in our own kind of alphabet (as derived from the Phoenicians). What came between is still a mystery. A Mycenaean Iliad may have existed in some linear script, and the art of writing did survive in Cyprus. But what little evidence we have suggests that the Mycenaean inheritance of the Iliad came down to the eighth century by word of mouth. What we now know is that the word was Greek.
Does this mean that the Iliad and Odyssey—as distinct from the archaic material in them—were composed orally? Since the great work of Milman Parry, it is an established fact that much of Homeric verse is formulaic. It consists of set phrases which fill the natural metrical units of the lines. Thus, for example, there are forty-six noun epithets to describe Achilles. Each has a different metrical value, and the poet chooses the one most appropriate to the prosody of the line. He creates his epic as he chants it, using a vast stock of traditional motifs and formulas to sustain his invention or his variations on a given epic theme. Such heroic recitation still exists, notably in Yugoslavia and among the Berbers of North Africa. Narrations of the fall of Troy and the wanderings of Odysseus must have been recited on numerous occasions, each time in a different version. In this light, Homer emerges as one of many itinerant singers improvising on traditional motifs for an illiterate audience: “fortunately, some master of the new art of writing had the wit to set down on papyrus this outstanding singer’s renderings of a couple of themes from the repertoire.” This, in essence, is the thesis argued most recently by Albert B. Lord in The Singer of Tales.
No doubt the Homeric epics contain much that is of an archaic and mnemonic character. And it is true that Yugoslav shepherds, sitting in front of tape recorders, have improvised lays of prodigious length. But what does this tell us of the composition of the Iliad? Next to nothing. The work of Homer, as we know it, is art of dazzling and intricate unity. Its design is tight and deliberate. Set it beside the finest of recorded folk poetry, and the difference leaps to the eye. We are dealing in the Iliad with a commanding vision of man, articulate in every detail, not with a tale of adventure automatically or discursively carried forward. The entrance into action via the oblique theme of Achilles’ anger is art of high sophistication. The entire design, with its inner echoes and alternance of stress and repose, follows on the particular drama of the opening. Only Book X seems to stand apart as an intrusion or late addition.
It is the merit of Professor Whitman’s Homer and the Heroic Tradition to have insisted on this essential truth. He contends that the Iliad is a counterpart, in language, of the famous geometric symmetry distinctive of Greek vases in the period 850 to 700. He argues that “the poem as a whole forms one large concentric pattern.” Whitman’s scheme is too neat, and it overlooks the fact that the division of the poem into twenty-four books is a late editorial convenience. But the main point is surely valid: the Iliad is a design of extreme complexity and formal control. That there should be embedded in it large fragments of traditional, oral poetry is certain; but that the epic as a whole should have been composed and preserved without writing is most unlikely.
But in what writing? This, again, is an intricate problem on which scholars disagree. The Ionic script, in which the Iliad and Odyssey were handed down, came into official use only in the fifth century B.C. We know scarcely anything of its previous history. This leads Whitman to conclude that the Homeric epics were initially set down in what is known as the Old Attic alphabet and later transliterated (this could account for certain oddities in our present text). The first manuscript might date from the second half of the eighth century, “from the time, if not the hand, of Homer himself.” Only thirty years ago, such a theory would have made scholars howl with derision!
We have no evidence to show that a written text of such length and elaboration could have been produced at so early a date. But the alphabet was available, and trade with Phoenicia could have provided the necessary papyrus. Moreover, if such a manuscript did not exist, how could we explain the startling fact that the Iliad and Odyssey have in them no material, either linguistic or narrative, that can be dated as later than 700 B.C.? The theory that the two epics were memorized and transmitted perfectly by word of mouth until they could be written down in the fifth century simply won’t hold.
Let me speculate here, not as a qualified classicist but as a reader seeking to apprehend the genius of the poem. I venture to guess that Homer was the first great poet in Western literature because he was the first to have understood the infinite resources of the written word. In the zest of the Homeric narrative, in its superb intricacy, flashes the delight of a mind which has discovered that it need not deliver its creation into the fragile trust of memory. The harsh gaiety of the Iliad and its constant equivocation between shortness of life and eternity of fame mirror the poet’s new and proud sense of his own survival. In the beginning of poetry is the word, but very near the beginning of poetry on the scale of the Iliad is writing.
It is entirely possible that the original “Homer manuscript” was something unique and that it was kept in the jealous possession of a bardic guild (the Homeridae). The newly established Panhellenic festivals of the eighth century created an audience for the “sons of Homer.” These singers may well have preserved the Iliad and Odyssey in a small number of canonic texts until their wider publication in sixth-century Athens (what scholars call the Pisistratean Recension).
Nor need we assume that Homer himself was literate. He may have dictated to a scribe. Indeed, I would guess that the ancient and persistent tradition of his blindness is connected to this very point. Wishing to conceal from a later, more critical age the fact of the master’s technical illiteracy, the Homeridae described him as blind. Above all else, the Iliad and Odyssey proclaim that men’s lives go to forgotten dust unless they are given immortality by the song of a poet. Is not that the faith of a supreme artist who, for the first time in Western literature, had at his command, if not within his own resource, the full glory of the written word?
By far the greater part of recent Homeric scholarship deals with the Iliad. Excavation and decipherment seem to lead to Troy rather than to Ithaca. The Odyssey accords neither with the search for a Mycenaean tradition nor with the theory of a geometric style. This is revealing. It points to a conviction which many readers have held from the start. The two epics are profoundly different; different in tone, in formal structure, and, most important, in their vision of life. The Homeric question, therefore, goes beyond problems of authorship and text. It must deal with the literary and psychological relations between the Iliad and the Odyssey. What happens when we read the Iliad through the eyes of Odysseus?
Archaeologists differ on the way in which the world image of the Iliad was put together. Some assert that the narratives of battle are realistic and that efforts have been made to bring archaic details up to date (the classic instance being Homer’s awkward treatment of Ajax’s body shield, a piece of equipment which went out of use in the tenth century). Others regard the world of Homeric Troy as a “visionary structure” in which elements ranging from the Bronze Age to the eighth century are woven together by the set formulas and conventions of the heroic style. But one thing is clear: the Iliad expresses a specific view of the human condition. In no other work of world literature, with the possible exception of War and Peace, do we find the same image of man. And certainly not in the Odyssey.
The poet of the Iliad looks on life with those blank, unswerving eyes which stare out of the helmet slits on early Greek vases. His vision is terrifying in its sobriety, cold as the winter sun:
“So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?
Patroklus also is dead, who was better by far than you are.
Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid
and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal?
Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny,
and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime
when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.”
So he spoke, and in the other the knees and the inward
heart went slack. He let go of the spear and sat back, spreading
wide both hands; but Achilleus drawing his sharp sword struck him
beside the neck at the collar-bone, and the double-edged sword
plunged full length inside. He dropped to the ground face downward,
and lay at length, and the black blood flowed, and the ground was soaked with it.
—Iliad, XXI; Richmond Lattimore’s translation
The narration proceeds with inhuman calm. The sharp directness of the poet’s vision is never sacrificed to the demands of pathos. In the Iliad the truth of life, however harsh or ironic, prevails over the occasions of feeling. This is strikingly illustrated in the crowning moment of the epic: the night encounter of Priam and Achilles. There is a stillness in the midst of hell. Looking upon each other, the bereft king and the slayer of men give voice to their great griefs. Their sorrows are immeasurable. Yet, when they have spoken they feel hungry and sit down to an ample meal. For as Achilles says of Niobe, “She remembered to eat when she was worn out with weeping.” No other poet, not even Shakespeare, would have run the risk of so humble a truth at such an instant of tragic solemnity.
But this magnificent clearheadedness derives not from bitter resignation. The Iliad is no lament over man’s estate. There is joy in it, the joy that burns in the “ancient glittering eyes” of the sages in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” The poet revels in the gusto of physical action and in the stylish ferocity of personal combat. He sees life lit by the fires of some central, ineradicable energy. The air seems to vibrate around the heroic personages, and the force of their being electrifies nature. Achilles’ horses weep at his impending fall. Even insensate objects are kindled by this excess of life. Nestor’s drinking bowl is so palpably real that archaeologists claim to have dug it up three thousand years after the event.
Pure energy of being pervades the Iliad like the surge of the wine-dark sea, and Homer rejoices at it. Even in the midst of carnage, life is in full tide and beats forward with a wild gaiety. Homer knows and proclaims that there is that in men which loves war, which is less afraid of the terrors of combat than of the long boredom of the hearth.
In the sphere of Agamemnon, Hector, and Achilles, war is the measure of man. It is the only pursuit he has been trained for (in the shadow of death, Hector worries who will teach his son how to throw a spear). Beyond the shadow, moreover, gleams the light of returning dawn. Around the ashes of Patroclus, the Greek chieftains wrestle, race, and throw the javelin in celebration of their strength and aliveness. Achilles knows he is foredoomed, but “bright-cheeked” Briseis lies with him each night. War and mortality cry havoc, yet the center holds. That center is the affirmation that actions of body and heroic spirit are in themselves a thing of beauty, that renown shall outweigh the passing terrors of death, and that no catastrophe, not even the fall of Troy, is final. For beyond the charred towers and brute chaos of battle rolls the tranquil sea. Elsewhere dolphins leap and shepherds drowse in the peace of the mountains. Homer’s famous similes, in which he compares some moment of battle to an episode from pastoral or domestic life, act as an assurance of ultimate stability. They tell us that the waves will race to the shore when the location of Troy is a disputed memory.
It is a specific and unique portrayal of man. Truer, says John Cowper Powys, than that given by any other poet: “it is more like what has happened, is happening, and will happen to us all, from the very beginning, in our history in this world until the end of human life upon this earth.” This may well be; but the truth of the Iliad is not that of the Odyssey.
To the “ancient glittering eyes” of the Iliad, Odysseus opposes a roving and ironic glance. The war epic is hewn of great solid blocks; the story of the long voyage home is a cunning weave. Like the sea water which laps its every page, the vision of the poem is swift, changing, exploratory, prone to odd shallows and sudden depths. “This novel,” said T. E. Lawrence. A marvel of design and variousness, but difficult to get into focus. The old fires of the heroic are banked, and the muscular simplicity of life around Troy has yielded to all manner of irony and complication. The work was revered by its ancient readers, but it put them ill at ease. Papyrus fragments of the Iliad far outnumber those of the Odyssey.
The geography of the tale is a riddle. It appears to include Greece and Ionia, Crete, Lycia, Western Sicily, Egypt, and even a hint of Mesopotamia. At times, it is clearly a geography of the imagination, bristling like medieval maps with fabled beasts and wind daemons blowing out of every quarter. Certain elements in the Odyssey correspond to the period of the decline of Mycenaean feudalism (the fact that the societies shown are illiterate, the vague status of kingship in Ithaca, the queer economics of Penelope’s marriage settlement). But other aspects of the poem seem to reflect the values of the new city-states as they began to emerge in the very late eighth century. What there is in the Odyssey of Mycenaean culture, moreover, appears to derive from those outposts and colonies of Mycenae which long survived in Asia Minor. For what is inescapable in the Odyssey is a sense of the Oriental.
That the poet knew the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic is probable. That very ancient Asiatic and African myths are echoed in the Wanderer’s saga is almost certain. Consider one of the most haunting touches in the entire Odyssey. Speaking out of death, Tiresias prophesies to Odysseus that another voyage awaits him beyond Ithaca:
go forth under your shapely oar till you come to a people who know not the sea and eat their victuals unsavoured with its salt: a people ignorant of purple-prowed ships and of the smoothed and shaven oars which are the wings of a ship’s flying. I give you this token of them, a sign so plain that you cannot miss it: you have arrived when another wayfarer shall cross you and say that on your doughty shoulder you bear the scatterer of haulms, a winnowingfan.
—Odyssey, XI; T. E. Lawrence’s translation
Where is that saltless land, and what does the confusion between oar and winnowing-fan signify? We do not know. But in his remarkable study Genèse de l’Odyssée, the French anthropologist Gabriel Germain has shown that the tenor of the myth is profoundly un-Greek. To find the motif of a landlocked kingdom in which men know neither salt nor ships, we must look to the legend world of pre-Islamic North Africa.
Dante learned of Tiresias’ prophecy through Seneca (he had no direct knowledge of the Homeric Odyssey). He gave it a grim Christian reading. Making of Odysseus a Faustian man, too grasping of life and hidden science, he launched him on a last fatal voyage past Gibraltar (Inferno, XXVI). The mariner’s ghost, however, would not stay put. It rose from damnation to assume countless shapes in Western art and literature. Most of these shapes—even those given it in our time by Joyce and Kazantzakis—are already implicit in the first Odysseus. The characters of the Iliad are of a rich simplicity and move in a clear light. The hero of the Odyssey is elusive as fire. He has enjoyed an afterlife even more various and fascinating than that accorded to an Achilles or a Hector precisely because his initial adventures comprise areas of thought and experience undreamed of by the bronze warriors before Troy.
Twice, at least, the winds that drive Odysseus blow out of Araby. He seems to come to Nausicaä straight from A Thousand and One Nights. The entire episode is an Oriental fairy tale. The afflicted beggar is washed up by the sea. Invisible powers guide him to the royal palace, and there he reveals his true splendor. He departs laden with riches and falls into a magic sleep. Woven into this romance of beggar and caliph is the theme of a young girl’s nascent love for a much older man. Again, there is in the thing a flavor which has little in common with the classic Greek sensibility. It foreshadows the romances of Alexandrine Hellenism.
Or take the only fully explored relationship in the Odyssey, the friendship of Athene and Odysseus. The goddess and the Wanderer delight in virtuosities of deception. They lie to each other in a gay rivalry of falsehood. They bargain like street merchants of Damascus, seeking to outwit one another with affectionate larceny. More than two thousand years before Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, Homer knew that there can be between men and women affairs of the brain as well as of the heart. At one point, the goddess nearly admits herself beaten. Her loving mockery could come straight out of Shaw:
Any man, or even any God, who could keep pace with your all-round craftiness must needs be a canny dealer and sharp-practised. O plausible, various, cozening wretch, can you not even in your native place let be these crooked and shifty words which so delight the recesses of your mind? Enough of such speaking in character between us two past-masters of these tricks of trade—you, the cunningest mortal to wheedle or blandish, and me, famed above other Gods for knavish wiles.
—Odyssey, XIII
Once more, we are at a great distance from the tone and vision of the Iliad. The quarrels and lusts of the Olympians are, at times, satirized in the Iliad. But more often, the deities are seen as random and malignant forces destroying or favoring men at their caprice. Nowhere do we find the crafty, amused, deeply feminine amity which binds Athene to Odysseus. The flavor is Oriental.
The thought that the Odyssey is somehow anchored in the world of the Eastern Mediterranean is not new. In 1658 an Oxford scholar, Zachary Bogan, published a book entitled Homerus Hebraizon, and somewhat later another Greek scholar declared that both epics were written by King Solomon. Modern erudition is more cautious; but Victor Bérard has argued for a Phoenician Odyssey, and Joyce, with a characteristic leap of insight, made of his Ulysses a Jew.
But if the Iliad and Odyssey differ so notably in tone and in their view of human conduct, what is the relation between them?
Whitman contends that the “vast and obvious” change occurring between the composition of the two epics corresponds to a change in the style of Greek ceramics. In contrast to the geometric, the proto-Attic style is “breezy, open and slightly orientalizing.” The proto-Attic vase painter handles his subjects as a series of fluid episodes, as does the Odyssey. We are no longer in the rigid, concentric world of the Iliad. Many scholars have rejected Whitman’s entire thesis, arguing that poetry and ceramics cannot be compared. But Whitman has made one arresting observation. The physical appearance of personages in the Iliad is stylized. The descriptive epithet is a stock formula; thus, women are almost invariably “white-armed.” In the Odyssey, flesh tones appear; Odysseus is darkly tanned and Penelope’s skin is like cut ivory. The same change occurs in vase painting.
The two works may not only have been written at different times but in different places. Professor Denys Page insists that their vocabularies are so different that one cannot assign them to the same locality. The Iliad might have been composed in Attica; the Odyssey in Ionia, or even Sicily (as Robert Graves argues). This thesis has come under fire. Critics point out that an epic which deals with land warfare must necessarily use a different vocabulary from one mainly concerned with navigation. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the same ground was native to both. The Homer of the Odyssey seems to have verified with his own eyes certain settings and activities which the poet of the Iliad had only imagined.
Readers of Homer who are themselves writers or men of war nearly always reject the idea of a single authorship. Samuel Butler and Robert Graves discern in the Odyssey a woman’s hand unraveling the ancient web of heroic action. John Cowper Powys states that the two poems “had different authors or originals” and that there is “an historic gap of three or four hundred years between them.” T. E. Lawrence characterized the poet of the Odyssey as a “great if uncritical reader of the Iliad” and guessed that he was not much of a practical soldier. We seem to be dealing with contrasting qualities of mind.
Consider the image we get of the Iliad when looking at it through the Odyssey. It is exceedingly complex. We get nearest to it in Book VIII, when Demodocus, the minstrel, sings of the fall of Priam’s towers in the hidden presence of Odysseus. This is one of the great moments of divided focus in all literature (it reminds one of the performance of an air from The Marriage of Figaro in the last scene of Don Giovanni). To the audience of the blind singer, the quarrels of Agamemnon and Achilles are remote. They have the muted radiance of legend. To Odysseus they are unbearably close. He draws his purple cloak around him and weeps. His position is ambiguous, for he is both within and outside the saga of Troy. Hearing himself sung about, he knows that he has entered the realm of the legendary dead. But he is also a living man seeking return to Ithaca. Thus, he looks upon the Trojan War both in tragic remembrance and refutation. This is the crucial point. There is in the Odyssey a critique of the archaic values of the Iliad in the light of new energies and perceptions.
This critique is made dramatically explicit in the brief dialogue between Odysseus and the shade of Achilles:
“How I envy your lot, Achilles, happiest of men who have been or will be! In your day all we Argives adored you with a God’s honours: and now here I find you a Prince among the dead. To you, Achilles, death can be no grief at all.” He took me up and said, “Do not make light of Death before me, O shining Odysseus. Would that I were on earth a menial, bound to some insubstantial man who must pinch and scrape to keep alive! Life so were better than King of Kings among these dead who have had their day and died.
—Odyssey, XI
The Achilles of the Iliad would not have said quite this, even in death. He has his moods of harsh gloom, and carps at the predestined imminence of his fall. But he never rejects the excellence or necessity of the heroic ideal. Had he done so, there would have been peace before Troy. That Achilles should prefer to be alive as a poor man’s slave rather than king of the immortal dead is to query the very impulse of the Iliad.
Though it is conceivable, it seems unlikely that the same poet should have articulated both conceptions of life. I find no other example in literature of a writer producing two masterpieces that look to each other with that mixture of awe and ironic doubt which the Odyssey displays toward the Iliad. And yet, time and again, a single voice seems to resound through the differences of narrative technique and world view. Certain glories of the Iliad are fully visible only in the mirror of the Odyssey. When Achilles laments over Patroclus, he is compared to a father mourning the death of his newly married son. The exact converse of this simile expresses Odysseus’ joy at seeing land after the destruction of his raft. Both similes, in turn, are hinted at in Penelope’s recognition of the Wanderer. Subtle but tenacious strands relate the two poems. How can we reconcile the sense of contrast to that of unity?
I believe that the Homer whom we know, the poet who continues to shape many of the principal forms of the Western imagination, was the compiler of the Iliad and the inventor of the Odyssey. He assembled and ordered the fragmentary battle sagas of the Mycenaean tradition. He had the insight to group them around the dramatic and unifying motif of the rage of Achilles. He treated the ancient material and folk legends with profound respect. At times, he misunderstood the language and technical circumstances of the remote action. But he chose to retain what was obscure rather than improve upon it. He grasped the austere symmetries inherent in the archaic mode of narrative and saw life through the harsh, glittering eyes of battle. To the brief intensities of oral poetry, he made available the new amplitude and elaboration of the written form. The compiler of the Iliad, like the men who wove together the sagas of the Pentateuch, was an editor of genius; but the gold and the bronze lay ready in the crucible.
I imagine that he completed his task in the first powers of maturity. The Iliad has the ruthlessness of the young. But as he richened in experience and sensibility, the vision of the Iliad may have struck Homer as incomplete. One can readily conceive of him as a constant and observant voyager. “He had sailed upon and watched the seas,” says T. E. Lawrence. In particular, I would suppose that he grew familiar with the complex, Orientalized civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. The part of the Orient in the Iliad has the stiffness of ancient legend. It is traditional material dating back to the commerce of the Bronze Age. The Orient of the Odyssey is more modern, more immediately observed.
In the afternoon of his life, this much-traveled man may have turned back to the world of the Iliad in order to compare its vision of human conduct with that of his own experience. From that comparison, with its delicate poise of reverence and criticism, grew the Odyssey. With marvelous acumen, Homer chose for his protagonist the one figure out of the Trojan saga nearest to the “modern” spirit. Already in the Iliad, Odysseus marks a transition from the simplicities of the heroic to a life of the mind more skeptical, more nervous, more wary of conviction. Like Odysseus, Homer himself abandoned the stark, rudimentary values inherent in the world of Achilles. When composing the Odyssey, he looked back to the Iliad across a wide distance of the soul—with nostalgia and smiling doubt.
This view of Homer does, at least, match the few facts available to us. The Odyssey is younger than the Iliad, but not, I think, by very much. The one poem is intensely alive in the other. The two epics express judgments of man’s condition which differ considerably. But a related craftsmanship is at work in both. Behind each lie remote, partially misunderstood legacies from the Mycenaean past; in the Iliad they are more obtrusive. In the Odyssey, on the other hand, gleam the first dawn lights of the Socratic future. The bridge between Troy and Ithaca could be the personal life of an incomparable editor and poet.
We shall never really know. But the Iliad and the Odyssey remain as the unassailable fact. And although there are many books by which men have ordered their lives, I wonder whether any can do more than the Homeric poems to make us understand the relationship of man to time and to the necessary outrage of the death we carry within us.