The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson
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All of them derive in the end, but through routes that are now forever hidden, from the tradition of scholarship that was maintained far to the east in Greek-speaking Byzantium. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, held as one of the greatest of treasures in those beautiful, treasure-rich halls. But slightly earlier than that, and the earliest complete manuscript of Homer anywhere, is the Iliad which Villoison thrillingly rediscovered in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It is an extraordinary and beautiful manuscript, 654 large goatskin vellum pages, decorated with Byzantine imaginings of the great heroes and notes enclosed within giant lyres. This manuscript, known as Venetus A, was written out in the middle of the tenth century AD in Constantinople, by a scribe who took immense pains with the work, adding in the wide margins a mass of notes and references from earlier scholars there in Byzantium, in Rome and Alexandria. It had been brought to Italy in the first years of the fifteenth century, and in 1468 deposited in the Doge’s palace, until it was transferred to Sansovino’s library in 1554. There are other still earlier manuscripts from the same Greek tradition surviving in the Vatican and in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, but none of them can match the completeness of Venetus A.
From the time Villoison discovered it, that manuscript takes Homer back a thousand years to the scholarly libraries of Byzantium. A series of beautiful discoveries made in the nineteenth century by Europeans travelling in Egypt took Homer further back still. In the early years of the century, Egyptians who had dug rolls of papyrus out of ancient tombs began to offer them for sale. Pieces found their way into gentlemen’s libraries across Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Egyptologists began a more systematic search for these ancient documents, none more assiduous than the thoroughly unkempt, restlessly energetic and no-sock-wearing Englishman William Flinders Petrie. He was a man who since boyhood had understood that the careful unravelling of historic deposits layer by layer, an exfoliation of the past, was the only way to approach them. In the winter of 1887 he began to dig in the large necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayum depression to the west of the valley of the Nile.
Almost every mummy was accompanied by an image of the person, their unwavering gaze, their necklaces and earrings and carefully braided, gathered hair. With them were other artifacts, beads and vials, mirrors and, tucked in by the dead children, rag dolls with carved heads and real hair. The dolls had changes of clothes, dresses, little tables and wooden bedsteads with which the girls played. Their coffins were made of a kind of papyrus-based papier-mâché, and Flinders Petrie found within their fabric the remains of many ancient texts.
To help with those documents he had with him his old friend, an Oxford Assyriologist, the Reverend Professor Archibald Sayce. ‘The floating sand of the desert,’ Sayce wrote the next year,
was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters … They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.
It’s an image from Shelley, the world after Ozymandias: ancient texts blowing in shreds and fragments across the Egyptian desert. But then Flinders Petrie came across the greatest of all his treasures. On the morning of 21 February 1888, under the head of a woman who was not named on her coffin and was buried in an otherwise unmarked stretch of the necropolis, he found a large roll of papyrus, a papyrus pillow. This was no chance leftover. ‘The roll had belonged to a lady with whom it had been buried in death,’ Sayce wrote. ‘The skull of the mummy showed that its possessor had been young and attractive-looking, with features at once small, intellectual, and finely chiselled, and belonging distinctively to the Greek type.’
The papyrus had been damaged in its outer leaves, but Petrie began to unfold it, as if he were looking into the innards of a wasp’s nest, and peering beyond the outer covering found himself reading the Greek numbers twelve and eighty, and the names ‘Agamemnon’, ‘Achaeans’, ‘Corinth’. The roll with which the young woman had been buried was the first two books of the Iliad and, here from Book 2, Flinders Petrie, with the sand of the Sahara blowing around him, was reading lines from the Catalogue of Ships, Homer’s enumeration of the Greeks who sailed to Troy.
This Hawara Homer, written on papyrus in about AD 150, is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, its lines numbered by Flinders Petrie in August 1888. It is one of the most time-vertigo-inducing objects I know. In columns ranged left, the clear Greek capitals are spooled out across the reedy, vegetal surface of the papyrus sheets. There are no gaps between the words, but they are entirely legible, the relaxed and masterful calligraphy rolling on for line after line like a wave that will not break. This is a text to travel to the next world with, the strokes in each letter just curved away from straightness, so that in its combination of open ‘o’s and ‘u’s and the ‘w’s of its omegas, and the slight flexing in the pen strokes of its ‘k’s and ‘n’s and ‘t’s, this is one of the greatest images of the generous and beautiful word ever made. Other contemporary manuscripts found by Flinders Petrie are far more sketchy and scratchy, less steady in their progress across the page; but this is Homer as monument, as scripture, as ‘the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead’.
The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. By the time the unnamed woman was buried with this precious pillow in the Hawara necropolis, Homer had already become the Homer we now have.
The key phase in this creation of the Homer which Roman, Byzantine, late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe all thought of as the undeniable text was in the halls of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Between the third and second centuries BC, a sequence of great Alexandrian editor-scholars, enormously funded by the wealth of the Ptolemies, the rulers of Egypt, created the monumental Homer that is visible in the Hawara grave, in the Byzantine codex Venetus A and in the minds of Alexander Pope and John Keats. That Alexandrian era is the narrow neck through which an earlier and rather different Homer passed.
The famous library of Alexandria was not just a gathering of texts, but far more energetic and dynamic than that, a massive multi-disciplinary research institute, an engine for establishing Alexandria as the centre of the civilised world. By royal edict from the Graeco-Egyptian dynasty of pharaohs, no ship could call at the port of Alexandria without being searched for the books it carried. Every one would be copied with unforgiving exactness and marked in the catalogue as ‘from the ships’. Occasionally the librarians held on to the original and returned the copy.
The Alexandrian library was the repository for Greek culture, the place in which the plays of the Athenian tragedians and the works of Plato and Aristotle were preserved, but it was devised and run on a Near-Eastern model. For thousands of years it had been the practice of great Near-Eastern kings to establish libraries and archives on a scale which individual Greek city-states had never come anywhere near. Alexandria fused Babylon and Nineveh with Athens and Sparta.
With thirty to fifty state-funded scholars at work in the library, the head librarian also the royal tutor, and the agents of the Ptolemies scouring the Mediterranean for copies of all books – magic, music, metaphysics, zoology, geography, cosmology, Babylonian, Jewish, Greek and Egyptian thought – the Alexandrian library was a grand central knowledge machine. It was an exercise in cultural dominance, tyranny through control of the word. By the first century BC, it was thought that the library contained 700,000 papyrus rolls, 120,000 of them poetry and prose, all stored and labelled and catalogued in their own tailored linen or leather jackets.
This industrial-scale exercise in cultural imperialism left its impress on Homer, and the key to the Alexandrian changes is in the large number of marginal notes in Venetus A. The Byzantine scholar in about 950 copied out the text the Alexandrians had bequeathed to him. In his wide margins, he wrote down many of the remarks they had made, not only about Homer but about previous commentators on him. It is Homer as a millefeuille: one leaf of scholarship laid on top of another for centuries. Other medieval manuscripts