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FIVE
Finding Homer

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 of their lives. Homer for classical Athens was an encyclopaedia of moral choice.

It was also performed with enormous elaboration at the four-yearly festival of the Panathenaia, where, at least according to Eustathius, a twelfth-century Byzantine bishop of Thessalonica, the reciters of the Odyssey wore sea-purple and of the Iliad earth-red costumes, ‘the purple on account of Odysseus’s wanderings at sea, the red on account of the slaughter and bloodshed at Troy’. If the Odyssey men were soaked in the royal purple dye of the Phoenicians and those of the Iliad in the blood of the heroes, nothing could be clearer about the role Homer played in classical Athens’s idea of itself. At their most holy and self-conscious moment, the Athenians gathered for total immersion in the Homeric stories, drinking up the tales from which most of the great tragedies drew their plots and characters, thinking of Homer as the source of what they were.

A clan of reciters from Chios on the eastern side of the Aegean, calling themselves the Homeridae, claimed to be Homer’s descendants and to have his precious poems in manuscript handed down to them by the great man their ancestor. There is no telling if there is any truth in that, but, under the Athenian surface, the main constituent of the Greek in which the epics are written is Ionic, which was spoken in Chios and other parts of western Anatolia. And there is an early piece of evidence for Chios in the so-called Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, written in Homeric hexameters, when the singer himself says:

Remember me in after time whenever any one of the men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: ‘Who do you think, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?’ Then answer, each and all of you, with one voice: ‘He is a blind man, and lives in rocky Chios: his songs are forever supreme.’ As for me, I will carry your fame as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true.

The Iliad also knows that country, not only the shape of the land around Troy, but the habits of the wind, the form of islands and the nature of the sea there. If Homer needs to turn for a comparison to a specific place, the choice he usually makes is there too.

Chios lies only seven miles off the Turkish coast. Its dry limestone gorges push deep into its mountains and, on the bench of flat arable land beside the sea, acre after acre is covered in olive groves, vineyards and the dark, irregular mastic bushes, the source of a clear chewable gum, much valued in antiquity.

The huge harbour at Chios town is almost empty of shipping now – a few yachts, a ferry, one or two container ships – but is still surrounded by the cafés on the port side, the banging of dominos on tables, the bales of stuff awaiting collection. Behind them are the crumbling neo-classical villas of the Chiote merchant class who in the nineteenth century made their fortunes trading around the Mediterranean. Chios is what it always has been: a commercial island, outward-looking – there are still some powerful ship-owning families here – and with its foundations resting on the products of the earth, the red wine, loved by Virgil, famous across the whole Mediterranean for its blackness, and the pungent, peppery green island oil.

Far to the south of Chios town, a rare and extraordinary ghost of the Homeric world can be recovered. A narrow road curls its way down the length of the island. Drought is all around you, a blazing sky and burningly bright rocks. In among the rocks are the cisterns, the beautiful dark and buried places of cool and conservation, an eye of water at their heart, roofed in stone, protected from the sun. In a landscape of such exposure and harshness, the cistern seems like the guarantee of continuity.

All this defines a dry world. It doesn’t rain in Chios from the beginning of June until the end of October. What rain has fallen in the winter sinks into the ground and emerges from the rock reservoirs as springs. There the soil gathers and the fertility builds in a landscape which is otherwise bones. The result is a kind of sharpness, super-definition, a world polarised between the inhabited and the bare, the habitable and the desolate.

In places like this, the growing of human sustenance can only be governed by the presence of water. Where the springs emerge, vryses in modern Greek, is where the vegetable gardens are. ‘I am going to the springs’ means ‘I am going to the gardens.’ The roots of that word stretch far back into ancient Greek, from bruein, which when it describes water means ‘to gush out’, ‘to bubble up’, ‘to spring’. But further than that bruein means ‘to be full to bursting’, to swell, to abound, to be luxuriant, to teem with produce. It is the verb of emergent life.

Beyond the gardens full of grapes and figs, pomegranates, plums and blackberries, those miraculous concentrations of sugar and juice in the damp corners of the island, often away from houses, the dry country stretches, the world of drought in which everything that grows infiltrates its roots between the rocks and is defended against the grazing and browsing teeth of the animals that would devour it. The leaves that survive are either bitter or armoured in thorns. Even the thorns are branched, thorns with thorns on them. Settlement here cannot choose to dispose itself carelessly as it can in a temperate or wooded country. Life must be concentrated: the city, the village, the gathered place is a necessary response to a landscape in which life is thin on the ground.

Almost at the southern tip of the island, Emporio is little more than a scatter of one or two buildings and a taverna, a stub of a quay at which the fishing boats are tied up, a looped horseshoe of a harbour, a grey beach on which the Aegean laps. Its name means ‘the trading centre’, the emporium, which may also have been the name of this small settlement in antiquity. Here, in June 1952, came two of the great men of Homeric studies in the second half of the twentieth century: a young English archaeologist, John Boardman, then Deputy Director of the British School at Athens, with the young architect Michael Ventris, the man who would soon decipher Linear B, the written language of Mycenaean Greece.

They walked up from the harbour – ‘a well-girt man carrying nothing in his hands can today reach the acropolis from the harbour side in twenty minutes without serious loss of breath’ – and high above the valley, on top of a dry, conical hill overlooking the little harbour, they found an ancient settlement, a rocky citadel, heavily walled against raiding pirates, the workmanship of the masonry, Boardman reported, ‘wretched throughout’.

It was no great city, but a rather poor and abandoned village, probably built in about 800 BC, with outside the acropolis walls some small, stepped and paved, walkable streets between one- or two-roomed houses. There are stables and granaries beside them. The scale is domestic, and because nothing was built here later, everything is clear on the ground, looking much as it did when abandoned in 600 BC. The tall white spires of the asphodels glow on the stony, lizardy hillsides. Inside the acropolis walls there is a small temple to Athene (Boardman and Ventris found little votive shields in there, given by fighting men to the warlike goddess) and a megaron, a large columned room about sixty feet long and twenty wide, a gathering hall, with the stone bases of three wooden columns down its centre. Perhaps eighty people could have met here. It is not unlike a Saxon or Viking mead-hall, in which the sagas or Beowulf would have been heard or sung. It is the great house of the settlement, the only one inside the acropolis walls, and with a commanding view from its columned porch down across the hill to the harbour below. Boardman found little inside, a few pieces of pottery with a ‘heavy cream slip’, the handle of a wine jug, but stand in here now and you can start to feel your way towards the Homeric world of the eighth century.

The megaron at Emporio, Chios.

Beyond the lee of the island, the Aegean sparkles under the north wind. On the far shore, grey mountains step back into the Asian mainland – a promise of scale and richness outside the constraints of island life. The eighth-century sea is full of threat, and even in the sunshine, as cigarette smoke disappears in the brilliance of the light, Emporio feels carefully held back, marginal, defensive. It is cleverly designed so that the harbour can be seen from the acropolis, but the acropolis is almost invisible from the harbour. You can watch the people down there in the taverna, where the fish are smoking on the griddles, and they will not know.

Boardman thought that about five hundred people might have lived here, in about fifty houses spread over ten acres. Their lord and master would have occupied the megaron, and there the heroic songs would have been sung. There is no grandeur. It is a rough, overt power structure. The plain below the acropolis may be covered in olives and mastic bushes, and its harbour is there so that these people can reach out to lands beyond those horizons, but this miniature city is up here for protection. Emporio is both closed and open, a place to withdraw into and one to venture out from. It is a place belonging to robber-traders, at least half-piratical, needing to rely on imported grain for its sustenance, perhaps from Egypt, perhaps from the Black Sea, and to export its wine and oil and gum for its currency, but inseparable from violence. Here it is possible to feel that Homer is the product of an essentially marginal world, away from the great civilisations, the lords of Emporio fascinated by the great but not able to count themselves among them.

If Homer was an ancient inheritance in the eighth century BC, as I believe it was, already a thousand years old, this is the sort of place in which that memory would have been treasured and nurtured, where the Keatsian sense of enlargement and the surge of greatness would have been experienced by the young men hearing the stories, no doubt inspiring their own visions of love and violence. Just as much as Athens or Alexandria, places like this would have been links in the chain.

Only the phlomis and the thorns grow on the eastern shore of Chios; the only colours are the sand-washed blue of the sea and the rust stains in the limestone of the cliffs. Here and there the cushion tufts of a low thistle show purple in its nest of thorns. On a stony path just above the sea, with a swell breaking on the shore, I found a young kid, perhaps born that spring and now laid out on a rock, dead and as dry as a parchment. It had been preserved by the drought. Its leather collar and bell was still around its neck, its yellow plastic ear-tags pinned into its ears, its hooves tucked up under its chest, where its ribs like flat, blanched pencils just protruded from the coat. The teeth were made prominent by the shrinking of the lips, but otherwise it was almost perfect, as if in the drought one day it had simply lain down and died. Touchingly, its head was turned as if it were trying to lick its own flank. The eyes were gone, and you could look through their sockets into the skull. It was the Homeric world: brutal, perfect, without euphemism, but somehow enshrining a longing for something better, softer, more forgiving.

The Homeric poems, or at least versions of them, were written down somewhere very like this, perhaps in about 725 BC, or maybe as much as a century later. Precision is almost certainly irrelevant; there can be no ruler-drawn horizon at which the written Homer begins.

If Homer is from this moment, then the poems are the product of a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness. The Iliad is soaked in retrospect. The Odyssey the twin and pair of it, filled with heroic adventurism and the sense of possibility, as if it were an American poem and the Iliad its European counterpart.

There is no doubt that the poet of the Odyssey knew the Iliad. The Odyssey, with extraordinary care, is shaped around the pre-existence of the Iliad. It fills in details that are absent from the earlier poem – the Trojan Horse, the death of Achilles – but never mentions anything that is described there. That discretion and mutuality is present on a deeper level too. So, where the Iliad is a poem about fate and the demands that fate puts on individual lives, the inescapability of death and of the past, of each of us being locked inside a set of destinies, the Odyssey, for all its need to return home, consistently toys with the offer of a new place and a new life, a chance to revise what you have been given, for the individual – or at least the great individual – to stand out against fate.

The two poems talk across that divide. The Iliad is rooted in the pain of Troy the singular place and the sense of entrapment that brings to everyone involved. The Odyssey is constantly free and constantly inventive. That difference is reflected in the two heroes. Achilles is fixed into rage, into need to fulfil his fate, fixed into having to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

These are the two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path. That is the great question the poems pose. Which will you be? Achilles or Odysseus, the monument of obstinacy and pride or the slippery trickster in whom nothing is certain and from whom nothing can be trusted? The singular hero or the ingenious man?

The Iliad embraces an earlier, rawer, more heroic and more tragic past. The Odyssey looks forward, takes modern dealing and adventuring and casts a magic spell over it so that it becomes a strange and idealised version of the trading and colonising life. The Iliad is a picture of what we think we once were and maybe long to be; and the Odyssey a version of what we are and what we might yet be. There is no need to put a date on those perspectives: their prospect and retrospect are everlasting dimensions of the human condition. In any age, the present is no more than the saddle of level ground at the pass, an instant of revelation in front of you and abandonment behind. Like all great art, Homer is essentially transitional, emergent, hung between what is lost and what does not yet exist.

In a way that remains permanently and inevitably uncertain, the Phoenician alphabet arrived in the Greek world, probably in the ninth century BC, from the trading ports of the Near East. Powerful currents were running between the Near East and the Aegean. Craftsmen, foods, spices, herbs, precious metals, ways of working that metal, myths, metaphysical ideas, poetry, stories – all were flooding in from the east, and the alphabet came with them. Unlike the earlier complex scripts, the simple Phoenician alphabet wasn’t confined to high-class scribes, and the Greeks soon adapted it to their own use, adapting Phoenician letters for vowels and for ‘ph-’, ‘ch-’ and ‘ps-’, which do not occur in Phoenician. Like the songs of Homer themselves, the Greek scripts they developed varied from place to place, but of all the scraps and fragments of early Greek text that have survived from the eighth century none is more suddenly illuminating than a small reconstructed object from the island of Ischia, at the far, western end of the Greek-speaking world, guarding the northern entrance to the bay of Naples.

Ischia now is a dream of wellbeing, a sharply dressed salad of an island, rising to a high volcanic peak in Mount Epomeo, rimmed in lidos and those in search of rheumatic cures, but with a lush greenness which must have seemed to any Aegean sailor like an oasis of welcome. It is a version of Calypso’s island, balmy, seductive, inviting, somehow suspended from mundane realities. The sun comes up over the shoulder of Vesuvius on the mainland and lights the lemon trees and the figs. Mounds of bougainvillea and ipomoea clump and tumble down the hillsides. A milky haze hangs all morning over an almost motionless sea. Bees hum in the rosemary flowers and crickets tick over in the grass.

Ischia offered the early Iron Age Greeks more than exquisite comfort. When the first settlers came here in about 770 BC from the Aegean island of Euboea, they set up the earliest, most northern and most distant of all Greek colonies in Italy. They chose it because the northern tip of the island provides the perfect recipe for a defensible trading post: a high, sheer-walled acropolis, Monte Vico, with sheltered bays on each side, one protected from all except northerlies, the other open only to the east. Between the two a shallow saddle is rich in deep volcanic soils where a few vine and fruit trees still grow among the pine-umbrellaed villas and the swimming pools. Here, beginning in the early 1950s, the archaeologist Giorgio Buchner excavated about five hundred eighth- and seventh-century BC graves which reveal the lives of people for whom the Homeric poems were an everyday reality.

This little Greek stone town was called Pithekoussai, Ape-island, perhaps from the monkeys they found here on arrival, or more interestingly as a name suitable for people who were seen from the mainland as vulgar and adventurous traders, laden with cash, irreverent and with uncertain morals, enriching themselves on the edge of the known world (pithekizo meant ‘to monkey about’). It was an astonishing and wonderful melting pot, four thousand people living here by 700 BC, nothing half-hearted about it, nor apparently militaristic. People from mainland Italy, speaking a kind of Italic, were living here, with Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon, Byblos and Carthage, Aramaeans from modern Syria and Greeks. The archaeologists found no ethnic zoning in the cemetery. All were living together and dying together, buried side by side. There was little apparent in the way of ethnic gap between these people. It was a deeply mixed world. Iron with the chemical signatures of Elba and mainland Tuscany was worked here in the blacksmiths’ quarter and sold on to clients in the Near East. Trade linked the island with Apulia, Calabria, Sardinia, Etruria and Latium as well as the opposite Campania shore. No other Greek site in Italy has objects from such a vast stretch of the Iron Age Mediterranean.

Buchner found no hint in any of the graves of a warrior aristocracy. The only blades were a few iron knives, awls and chisels. The leading members of the Pithekoussai world were from a commercial middle class, some with small workshops for iron and bronze, many with slaves of their own. The style of burial marks the difference between those classes: the slaves hunched foetally in small and shallow hollows, no possessions beside them; their masters, mistresses and their children laid out supine, in plain and dignified style, accompanied by simple but beautiful grave goods.

Much of their pottery came from Corinth and Rhodes, and what they didn’t import, they copied. Small Egyptian scarabs were often worn as amulets by the children and went to their graves with them, along with stone seals from northern Syria and one or two Egyptian faience beads. There are some fine red pots made in the Phoenician city of Carthage on the North African coast, and silver pins and rings from Egypt. A tomb of a young woman buried in about 700 BC was found with her body surrounded by little dishes from Corinth and small ointment jars, seventeen of them, around her, a dressing-table-full. Men also had little fat-bellied oil jars with them, some no more than an inch high and an inch across, pocket offerings, maybe used in the funeral rites. A fisherman was buried with his line and net; only the bronze fish hook and the folded-over lead weights of the net have survived. These men were all buried in the way of Homeric heroes, their bodies cremated on wooden pyres, and then interred with the charred wood and their possessions beneath small tumuli.

Nothing is coarse or gross. Big-eyed sea snakes and fluent, freely-drawn fish decorate the grey-and-ochre pottery. There are flat-footed wine jugs, suitable for a shipboard table. There is one big dish decorated with a chariot wheel, perhaps another faint heroic memory. Some pots are decorated with griffins from patterns that had their distant origins in Mesopotamia, others with swastikas that probably originated just as long ago in the Proto-Indo-European cultures of the Caspian steppe.

Fusion and mixture, a kind of mental mobility, is the identifying mark of this little city. It was not a luxury civilisation, but as you spend a morning walking around the empty, cool marble halls of the Pithekoussai Museum in the Villa Arbusto, peering in at the pots, you can feel the stirring of life in this distant and adventurous place 2,700 years ago. It doesn’t take much to see the wine being mixed in these bowls, poured from these jugs or drunk from these cups, nor the glittering fish hauled up in these nets or the goods loaded on distant quays and beaches and sold from here to curious buyers on the mainland of Italy.

And the museum holds its surprises. One late-eighth-century cratēr originally made in Attica, a bowl for mixing wine and water, depicts this world in trouble.

On its grey and rapidly painted body, a ship floats all wrong in the sea, turned over in a gale, its curved hull now awash, its prow and stern pointing down to the seabed. Everything has fallen out. Wide-shouldered and huge-haunched men are adrift in the ocean beneath, their hair ragged, their arms flailing for shore and safety. Striped and cross-hatched fish, some as big as the men, others looking on, swim effortlessly in the chaos. A scattering of little swastikas does little to sanctify this fear-filled waterworld. One man’s head is disappearing into the mouth of the biggest fish of all. It is a disaster, fuelled by the fear the Greeks had of the creatures of the sea, alien animals which, as Achilles taunts one of his victims, ‘will lick the blood from your wounds and nibble at your gleaming fat’. The scene is no new invention; it is painted with all the rapidity and ease of having been painted many times before.

There is no need to attach the name of Odysseus to this; nor of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet swallowed by a fish, his story exactly contemporary with this pot. It is merely the story of life on the Iron Age seas, the reality of shipwreck, the terror of the sea as a closing-over element filled with voracious monsters. In a later, Western picture, the large-scale catastrophe of the ship itself would have been the focus. Here it is pushed to the outer margin and made almost irrelevant; the central characters are the men, their hair and limbs out of order, the experience of human suffering uppermost. In that way, this is a picture from the Homeric mind.

Then, in a room hidden deep in the museum, you find the other transforming dimension of Pithekoussai: these people wrote. Shards from the eighth century BC are marked or painted with tiny fragments of Greek. One has the name ‘Teison’, perhaps the cup’s owner. A second, on a little fragment of a cup, says ‘eupoteros’ – meaning ‘better to drink from’. A third, also in Greek, written like the others with the letters reading from right to left as they are in Phoenician, and with no gaps between the words, says, fragmentarily, ‘… m’ epoies[e]’. The verb poieo has the same root as ‘poetry’, and the inscription means ‘someone whose name ended in -inos made me’ – Kallinos, Krokinos, Minos, Phalinos, Pratinos? This is no scratched graffito, but painted as part of the Geometric design. It is another first: the oldest artist’s signature in Europe.

By 750 BC at the latest, writing had seeped into all parts of this expanding, connecting, commercial, polyglot world. Pithekoussai is not unique. Eighth-century inscriptions, many of them chatty, everyday remarks, with no claim to special or revered significance, have survived from all over the Aegean and Ionian Seas. These aren’t officious palace directives, but witty remarks, sallies to be thrown into conversation.

And, as a wonderful object on Ischia reveals, Homer played his part. It was found in the tomb of a young boy, perhaps fourteen years old, who died in about 725 BC. He was Greek, and unlike most of the children was cremated, an honour paid to his adulthood and maturity. In his grave his father placed many precious things: a pair of Euboean wine-mixing bowls from the famous potters of their home island, jugs, other bowls, and lots of little oil pots for ornaments.

The greatest treasure looks insignificant at first: a broken and mended wine cup from Rhodes, about seven inches across, grey-brown with black decoration and sturdy handles. Scratched into its lower surface on one side, and not at first visible but dug away a little roughly with a burin, are three lines of Greek, the second and third of which are perfect Homeric hexameters. This is not only the oldest surviving example of written Greek poetry, contemporary with the moment Homer is first thought to have been written down, it is also the first joke about a Homeric hero.

In the Iliad, during a passage of brutal bloodletting and crisis for the Greeks, the beautiful Hecamede, a deeply desirable Trojan slave-woman, captured by Achilles and now belonging to Nestor, mixes a medicinal drink for the wounded warriors as they come in from battle: strong red wine, barley meal and, perhaps a little surprisingly, grated goat’s cheese, with an onion and honey on the side. Hecamede did the mixing in a giant golden, dove-decorated cup belonging to Nestor, which a little pretentiously he had brought from home: ‘Another man could barely move that cup from the table when it was full, but old Nestor would lift it easily.’

There are Near-Eastern stories of giant unliftable cups belonging to heroes from the far distant past. And tombs of warriors have been found on Euboea from the ninth century BC which contain, along with their arms and armour, some big bronze cheese-graters, now thought to be part of the warrior’s usual field kit, perhaps for making medicines, perhaps for snacks.

So this little situation – the Nestor story, the unliftable cup, the Euboean inheritance, and the presence at a drinking party of wonderfully desirable women – has deep roots. Remarkably, they come together in the joke and invitation scratched on the Ischian cup. ‘I am the cup of Nestor,’ it says,

good for drinking

Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully

crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.

The Pithekoussaian trader was turning the Homeric scriptures upside down. This little cup was obviously not like Nestor’s cup, the very opposite in fact: all too liftable. Its wine was not to cure wounds received in battle. It was to get drunk at a party. And drinking it would not lead on to an old man’s interminable reminiscing over his heroic past. No, the cup and the delicious wine it contained would lead on to the far more congenial activity of which Aphrodite was queen: sex. This elegant little wine cup, treasured far from home amid all the burgeoning riches, gold and silver brooches, success and delight of Pithekoussai, a place supplied with beautiful slave-girls taken from the Italian mainland, was for the drinking of alcoholic aphrodisiacs. The inscription was an eighth-century invitation to happiness.

The distant past might often seem like the realm of seriousness, but the Ischian cup re-orientates that. The first written reference to Homer is so familiar with him, and so at ease with writing, that in mock Homeric hexameters it can deny all the seriousness Homer has to offer. Homer and his stories were so deeply soaked into the fabric of mid- to late-eighth-century BC Greek culture that dad-style jokes could be made about him. And that makes one thing clear: here, in 725 BC, is nowhere near the beginning of this story. The original Homer is way beyond reach, signalling casually from far out to sea.

There is only one aspect of grief associated with the sophisticated optimism and gaiety of this story, and it is inadvertent. The father offered this cup to his fourteen-year-old son in the flames of the funeral pyre, where it broke into the pieces which the archaeologists have now painstakingly gathered and restored. Death denied the boy the adult pleasures to which these toy-verses were inviting him. And that is another capsule of the Homeric condition: the Odysseyan promise of delight enclosed within the Iliadic certainty of death.