The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson
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they call on the Muse as their own divine mother, the source of authority and power, to tell the tales the teller is about to begin.
The name Homer – which is pronounced in Greek with a short ‘o’ and a long ‘e’, Homeeros, making it stranger than you had imagined, from a more distant world – may mean ‘blind’, at least in the dialect of Greek spoken on Lesbos. From the name came the tradition that Homer was blind, although that too was fiercely disputed by the ancient authors.
Or it may mean something stranger still: a ‘connector’, or even ‘bond’. Homer, perhaps, was the man who joined together, in the way of the poet, things which might otherwise have lived apart: different elements of the inherited stories; or those stories and the audiences who listened to his telling of them.
There is another tradition, related to that one, which runs through all his ancient biographies. Homer was not his original name, perhaps only given him when he went blind or became a hostage (another possible etymology). His original name in this version was Melesigenes, perhaps because he was born by the river Meles, which runs through Smyrna, now Izmir, or more intriguingly because the name can mean ‘caring for his clan’. This Homer is to be seen as the man who cared for his people, his inheritance, his race descent, the way he came into being, his origins. Homer is what looked after the source, what found, remembered and transmitted truth from the distant past. In that meaning of his name, his essence is not his smart newness, his ability to connect, but the antiquity of the tales he tells. He is the embodiment of retrospect.
All poetry is memorial. Much of it is elegy. The earliest to have been found was dug up by Victorian archaeologists in Sumer, in what is now Iraq, on a tablet marked with wedge-shaped cuneiform symbols pressed into the wet clay before it dried. The fragmentary poems in the clay were written in about 2600 BC, perhaps two thousand years before the Homeric epics were first written on papyrus. But that first written Sumerian poetry is not about the springtime of the world. Poetry begins by looking back to the beautiful past, a song about Ashnan, the goddess of grain, and her seven sons, opening with these chantable, formulaic repetitive lines:
U re u re na-nam
Gi re gi re na-nam
Mu re mu re na-nam.
In those days, now it was in those days,
In those nights, now it was in those nights,
In those years, now it was in those years.
As far back as you can reach, poets have been looking back, their poetry living in the gap that opens between now and then. Another song, from Ur in Iraq, written down at about the same time, instructs the singer to
attend to what is old, and not allow it to be neglected.
Let nothing be neglected in practice,
Let him apply himself to the art of singing
Let the scribe stand by and catch the songs in his handwriting
Let the singer stand by and speak to the scribe from the songs
So that they will be made to last in the scribal college
So that none of my praise-song should perish
So that none of my words should be dropped from the tradition.
This song is what Melesigenes, Homer’s hidden name, actually means. You might think of Homer as the skilled reteller of his people’s stories. But he is more than that; the poems are the passed baton itself, ancient meaning enshrined in the remembered word.
There is one more story, often repeated in the fictional biographies of him that were written throughout antiquity, which hints at Homer’s unfittedness for the ordinary world. It exists in many versions, but the most articulate has survived in a manuscript transcribed in the eleventh century AD and now in the great royal library in the Escorial outside Madrid.
Homer is at the end of his life, sitting on the beach on the Cycladean island of Ios, after a life of travelling and singing his poems in many places in the Greek world. This is not his home. As he sits there, alone and blind, he hears some fishermen coming up the beach towards him. They have been at sea, and Homer calls out to them: ‘Fishermen from Arcadia [it is unexplained why it should be Arcadia in the Peloponnese when he is in the Cyclades], have we caught anything?’ There is something charming, or perhaps self-ingratiating, in that ‘we’. But they reply unkindly. ‘All that we caught we have left behind and all that we missed we carry.’ By which they mean that their fishing had been useless, but as they sat out at sea with nothing to do, they searched each other’s bodies for lice. Those lice they had caught, they killed and threw into the sea; those they missed were still on them in their clothes.
It was a joke, a riddle, a tease for a blind old man, but he didn’t understand it, and, crushed by the loneliness and depression that came in the wake of that failure to comprehend, he died on Ios, where he was buried under an epitaph he had written himself:
Here the earth conceals that sacred head,
The setter-in-beautiful-order [kosmētora] of heroic men,
the godly Homer.
According to that much-repeated story, it was the triviality of the joke, a ridiculing of incapacity, even a lack of nobility in others, that finally killed him. This is Homer as the Great Outsider, blind, from beyond our ken, the figure who does not belong in the world where everyone knows everyone else, the man who has yet to enter the restaurant or the drawing room. He is outside our normality, scarcely even aware of the merry din within, with an austerity about him, a grandeur and an urgent, other reality.
Homer – allied to his neighbour and contemporary, Isaiah, another great speaker of wisdom, whose dates and identity also stretch across many generations from at least 1500 to 600 BC – is the archetype from which every great seer is descended: he is Lear on the heath, Rousseau in a reverie on his island in the Lac de Bienne, the Ancient Mariner who waylays the wedding guest at the bridegroom’s door, but who will never enter that feast. Homer exists in his other world, almost unknowably separate from us in time and space, a realm whose distance allows ideas of transcendence to develop around him. His distance from us is itself an imaginative space which his own greatness expands to fill.
This is no modern effect: it was the effect Homer had on the ancient Greeks, as a voice from the distant past, even a voice from the silence, the voice of greatness untrammelled by any connection with our present mundanities. Homer doesn’t describe the world of heroes: he is the world of heroes. As his epitaph said, he made their kosmos, a word which in Greek can mean order, world, beauty and honour. It is used in the Iliad when the commanders set their men in order for battle. It is used to describe the order in which a poet sets the elements of his tale. Those qualities are all different dimensions of one thing. Everything one might associate with the heroic – nobility, directness, vitality, scale, unflinching regard for truth, courage, adventurousness, coherence, truth – is an aspect of the cosmic and all of it is what ‘Homer’ means.
IT SEEMS CLEAR, FROM the kind of Greek in which the Homeric poems are written, that the main text preserved by the Alexandrians came from Athens, where Homer could be heard almost daily, in recitals by rhapsodes, professional artists who strung together choice passages from the epics, learning by heart parts of the inherited text and, in a way not entirely approved of by the traditionalists, selling their services for dinner parties or entertainments. Homer was also used as a manual in school, the poems treated as tales of great men and women, of nobility in crisis, and of the choices people must make when faced with the deepest challenges