ROBIN LANE FOX HOMER AND HIS ILIAD
‘Rich, imaginative, perceptive and gorgeously written’ literary review
Homer and His Iliad
‘This book is the expression of the professor’s lifelong love for the poem he believes to be the greatest in the world. Brilliant teacher that he is, he conveys that passion to readers . . Contained within the 15,000 plus lines of this 2,600-year-old poem, as Robin Lane Fox explains so vividly in his excellent new book, is life and death in all its pathos, pity and contradictions’ Bronwen Riley, Country Life
‘This book is the result of a lifetime spent teaching the Iliad The approach is scholarly, but also entertainingly idiosyncratic, with much use of the personal voice . . . a fine personal account of the impact of the poem as a profound meditation on our human condition in what remains a dangerous world’
Richard Janko, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
‘ “Homer’s Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem,” writes the peerless classicist Robin Lane Fox . . Lane Fox has had a sixty-year relationship with the poem . . . he teases out from infinite small details hidden in the Iliad ’s 15,000 lines something of the antique mindset’ Michael Prodger, New Statesman
‘Robin Lane Fox – ancient historian, travelling enthusiast, gardening correspondent for the Financial Times and cavalry commander in Oliver Stone’s Alexander – is the latest to turn his hand to this form of philological necromancy. The Iliad is a poem he has known and loved since his schooldays at Eton, and it shows: there is barely a page without some personal insight or hypothesis, often accompanied by laudatory adjectives . . . He knows the poem in enviable detail and has a lover’s eye both for the poem’s sublime beauty and for anything out of place . . . his confidence and deep learning can be thrilling’ Tim Whitmarsh, Literary Review
‘The Iliad made a huge impression on me as a schoolboy, so when I learnt one of my favourite ancient historians had written about both it and Homer it’s no exaggeration to say I was excited. Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox does not disappoint – he seeks to answer the great questions that scholars have wrestled with: who was Homer and where, how and when was he writing? Yes, Robin Lane Fox is confident it was one man. The chapter on his favourite ten passages is lots of fun and it’s written with wit and verve – and much pathos’ Oliver Webb-Carter, Aspects of History, Books of the Year
‘Robin Lane Fox has been teaching the epics for fifty years and studying them for many more. His lifelong fascination with the texts has bred a sort of feverish passion that makes him declare Homeric poetry to be without equal anywhere in the world . . a bold reassessment . . . the book feels less like a wilful provocation than a throwing down of the gauntlet’ Daisy Dunn, Spectator
‘Valuable . . [an] earnest appreciation’ Wall Street Journal
‘Will surely stand as one of the most significant contributions to Homeric studies written for a general readership in recent years. Combining a close study of the text, analyses of similes and characters, discussion of morality and ethics, gods, women and nature, comparisons with epic poems from other cultures, and an understanding that only a lifetime of study can produce, it is a paean to perhaps the greatest poem ever written. For those still to read it, it is an exhilarating introduction; for those who know it well, an often-provocative challenge to long-held certainties. For all his flamboyance, Schliemann discovered Troy, and in this book, Lane Fox may just have discovered Homer . . . his masterly survey of the Iliad , its majesty, its pathos and its unparalleled progression from wrath to pity, make it a compelling companion to the poem that inspired it – a worthy Patroclus to the Iliad ’s Achilles’
David Stuttard, History Today
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Lane Fox is Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford, and taught Ancient History at Oxford University from 1977 to 2014. He is the author of Pagans and Christians (1986), The Unauthorized Version (1992) and many books on classical history, all of which have been widely translated, including Alexander the Great (1973), The Classical World (2005), Travelling Heroes (2008) and Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (2015), which won the Wolfson Prize for History. He has been the gardening correspondent of the Financial Times since 1970.
Homer and His Iliad
Robin Lane Fox
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For H.J.R.
When a small casket was brought to him, which seemed to those who were taking over the possessions and baggage of Darius to be more precious than anything else, he kept asking his friends which of the things worthy of high esteem seemed most fit to be deposed in it, and when many of them made many suggestions, he said that he would depose the Iliad there and keep it safe.
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 26.1, on Alexander’s decision after winning the battle of Issus in November 333 bc
We worked in rotating shifts, two men, three men, swinging the corpses like a haul of fish from the sea . . . No person should ever have to witness so much death . . . It’d been like a dream through which I’d walked unharmed, grateful, of course, but numb and puzzled by it all. It reminded me of passages in Homer of gods and goddesses coming down from mount Olympus to the bloody battlefields at Troy to help their favourites, wrapping a mist or cloak around them and winging them to safety.
Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light (2020), p. 43, on a night battle on Vietnam’s border with Cambodia, 1–2 January 1968.
Preface
Like its heroes, the Iliad has earned immortal glory. I first met part of it in Greek more than sixty years ago and soon went on to read it all. It is its own best advertisement, but great questions remain, how, when and where it was composed and what accounts for its extraordinary power. This book gives answers to those questions. It is based on long familiarity and love.
I have not presupposed knowledge of the poem. Throughout I have aimed to give sufficient context for this book to be readily intelligible to readers who, as yet, know little or nothing of the Iliad’s text. My hope is that they will end by wanting to engage with it, perhaps eventually in Greek. Much has been written on it, and more will be, so that no general view of it can be entirely original, but in most of my chapters I have things to say which even its experts may find unfamiliar.
I believe most of the Odyssey to be by Homer, poet of most of the Iliad, but I have referred to it only sparingly. As it was composed after the Iliad and in awareness of it, I have imagined my readers to be in the position of the Iliad’s first audiences, bowled over by what they had heard and wondering, for several years, what its great poet would compose and perform next.
I have applied two differing methods. The first three parts of the book present hypotheses and support them with evidence, inference and analogy. The fourth and fifth parts are appreciations of Homer’s poem. Selection and emphasis make them more than just a summary for readers who are intrigued by the poem’s fame but know little or nothing of its contents.
I have many debts over many years. I never forget that like many hundreds of Etonians before me, I was fortunate to be taken through the Iliad and Odyssey by Richard Martineau. His fl uent,
Preface
improvised translation while we followed the text in Greek imprinted the poems for ever after in our hearts and minds. I never imagined I would then teach them myself, but they have marked the beginning and end of my teaching in Oxford, framing it as if in a ring-composition. I began teaching the Iliad in 1973, an exciting time to start on it as Jasper Griffin was beginning to give his transformative lectures on Homer, his mind and art. After nearly forty years of teaching ancient history, I returned to teach it again in 2016, having learned so much meanwhile from the fine teachers of Homer who had been my colleagues in New College, Bryan Hainsworth, Denis Feeney, Peter Wilson and Jane Lightfoot, whose expert grasp of the poem guided my return and continues to inspire her many pupils.
The translations in this book are my own, made in prose while respecting wherever possible the sequence of Homer’s verses. I am grateful to Anthony Cheetham, who first urged me to write a short book on how Homer’s poems came about. This one is its descendant, longer, however, and different. I am also grateful to my publishers, Stuart Proffitt and Lara Heimert, for their close reading and penetrating comments, and to Alice Skinner for detailed observations too.
Bernardo Ballesteros, Armand D’Angour, David Elmer, Alan Johnston and Irad Malkin kindly read and improved chapters on which they have particular expertise. Jonathan Keates and my colleague Stephen Anderson read a version of the entire book and commented on it most helpfully. Clara Robins and Jan Preiss assisted with notes and bibliography. Claudia Wagner has helped me find pictures. Mark Handsley has been an admirable copy-editor throughout.
From the Arctic to central Asia, Los Angeles to the plains of Kenya, the Iliad has been the constant companion of my travels, often adding to what I have encountered. Since 1977, my centre of gravity has been New College in Oxford, where I am the heir to two previous authors of books on Homer. One is David Margoliouth, a masterly scholar of Greek and especially Arabic, whose book on Homer and Aristotle, published in 1923, claimed to decipher the first seven lines of the Iliad and reveal eight lines of iambic verse
xii
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concealed in them in which Homer declared himself to be from the island of Ios. This virtuoso undertaking has persuaded nobody. The other is Gilbert Murray, whose Rise of the Greek Epic, published in 1907, accepted that ‘It seems on the whole safest to regard Homēros as the name of an imaginary ancestor worshipped by the schools of bards called Homeridai’. This book takes the opposite view.
When I began, I feared that writing a book on the Iliad might temper my love of it. It has done the opposite, alerting me to ever more details, artistry and interconnections on each rereading. With his typical passion and clarity Gilbert Murray concluded his Preface by stating that it was ‘only an attempt to puzzle out a little more of the meaning of a certain remote age of the world, whose beauty and whose power of inspiration seem to shine the more wonderful the more resolutely we set ourselves to understand it’. I agree. He wrote those words in a September in New College, as I write these, in a library he never knew beside a garden whose contents he never knew, either. They, too, are part of my life’s work.
Robin Lane Fox, 14 September 2022
Prologue Enigmatic Homer
Homer’s Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem. In my view it is the world’s greatest poem, despite the existence of the Odyssey. In antiquity, most people agreed. Verses from the Iliad survive on about three times as many ancient papyri as those with verses from the Odyssey, a sign of its pre-eminence.1 Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles during the Greeks’ siege of Troy and its harrowing consequences for the battles, loves, su ering and losses of the heroes while they ght in the active presence of their gods. The city of Troy was a ruin in Homer’s lifetime and the intense action of his poem was only a brief part of a siege which was said to have lasted for ten years. Homer made it speak to us all. ‘Everyone, from the beginning,’ the philosopher Xenophanes already remarked c. 500–475 bc , ‘has learned from Homer’.2
‘Everyone’ cannot be taken too literally: many women and members of poor families would not have known Homer’s poems, especially if they were slaves, persons to us, but objects for those who bought and sold them. ‘Everyone with leisure or education’ was a more plausible claim. The Iliad rapidly became known across the not-so-small Greek world: it was admired in south Italy long before the 230s bc when the ruler of Sicily, Hieron, owned a preposterously large ship with a sequence of oor mosaics depicting the entire story of the poem. By then, the Iliad also had admirers in the nearby Latin-speaking world. In the 20s bc it shaped the second half of Virgil’s great Latin epic, the Aeneid. Episodes from it continued to be represented in mosaic, sculpture, painting and many minor arts throughout the Roman empire. The most recent example is the big mosaic oor of a villa in Roman Britain, laid out in c. ad 370–400
Prologue and uncovered in Rutland in 2021. Three of its panels show Achilles’ battle with Hector and its aftermath, one of which displays him dragging dead Hector behind his chariot, a scene derived from the poem’s nal books.3
The Iliad then became translated into every major European language, including English from the 1580s onwards. In 1829 Nikolai Gnedich nished its rst translation into Russian and even imitated Homer’s complex metre. In 1902 his Iliad was the one book that Trotsky had with him when he escaped from exile in Siberia. A year later, for his rst published article, he used Homer’s phrase ‘untouchable hands’ to describe what revolutionaries would one day turn on the ruling czar. Lenin made him take it out.4
In the next year, 1904, the entire Iliad was translated into Arabic verse by Sulaiman al-Bustānī, a Lebanese Catholic in Cairo. In 2004 Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture celebrated this version’s centenary, reissued it despite its abstruse style and supported yet another translation, by ‘Ahmad Etmān.5 A translation of the Iliad into Japanese appeared in 1940 and one into Chinese began in the 1940s too. Full-scale imitations are rarer, but in the 1970s Moufad Zakaria composed an admired Iliad of Algiers, eventually 1001 Arabic lines long, evoking his country’s history and its resistance to foreign domination. Homer’s name and fame still in uence popular poetry as far a eld as Peru. In Colombia in 1990, the Ministry of Culture arranged for books to be distributed by donkey to rural villages, but a Spanish translation of the Iliad was the one book never given back. Villagers felt it related powerfully to their experience of ghting wars in which ‘mad gods’, one of them explained, ‘mix with men and women who never know exactly what the ghting is about, or when they will be happy or why they will be killed’.6
In Europe, meanwhile, modern poets and novelists have preferred to exploit parts of the poem’s back-story or its minor characters, whether king Priam’s groom or its Greek and Trojan women. The most powerful transposition of the poem’s plot is Michael Hughes’s Country, published in 2018, which sets it in Northern Ireland during the recent troubles.
Prologue
As these indirect tributes recognize, the Iliad itself is something we could not possibly now compose. It is at least 2600 years old, but it is beyond our ability. It remains overwhelming. It makes us marvel, sometimes smile and often cry. Whenever I read it, it reduces me to tears. When I leave it and return to everyday life, it changes the way in which I look on the world. My book sets out to explain why the Iliad is beyond us, yet why it is still so profoundly moving.
I will start by considering the poem’s beginning, in order to give a sense of what Homer could contrive. It sets the context for what I will then pursue, the questions of where, how and when such a poem is likely to have been composed. They might seem easy to answer, given the poem’s fame, but they already challenged the ancients. Their dates for the Iliad varied between what our numbered chronology would call c. 1050 bc and c. 680.7 Modern scholars’ dates range widely too, from c. 800 bc , still often regarded as a Dark Age in the Greek world, to c. 640 bc during its archaic period. Another view is that the II iad continued to evolve until as late as c. 550 bc as performances of it spread ever further among Greek listeners.
Even the rst surviving mention of Homer by name is uncertain. In his Guide to Greece, composed in the 130s ad, the learned Greek author Pausanias ascribed a mention of Homer to someone transmitted in later manuscripts of his text as ‘Calainos’, otherwise unknown.8 The name is generally, but in my view uncertainly, assumed to be a copyist’s mistake for Callinos, a well-known poet who was active in Ephesus c. 650–640 bc. If so, his would be the earliest known mention of Homer by name. However, ‘Calainos’ is said to have credited Homer with an epic poem about Thebes when he ‘came to make mention of’ verses from it. Such a mention, which its author ‘came to’ in a sequence of others, would be rather odd in a poem, but if Callinos really was the author of it, it would date Homer well before c. 650 bc.9 The Theban epic poem was not in fact by Homer, and if Callinos thought it was, his mistake implies that Homer was not his contemporary, but someone further back in the past.
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In the face of such early uncertainty, some modern scholars have wondered if the name Homēros was invented and bestowed later in antiquity, enabling several poems of unknown authorship to be bundled under one ctitious name. This view was rst expressed by a French clergyman, François Hédelin, in 1664, but already in antiquity the meaning of the name had been discussed: was it based on a Greek word in the Aeolic dialect meaning ‘hostage’ and if so was it a clue to a turbulent event in Homer’s own life? Did it mean ‘blind’? Modern guesses have gone further: was it based on words meaning ‘ tting [words] together’ or ‘assembly’, or, even more wildly, was it derived from a non-Greek word, the west Semitic ’omēr, meaning a speaker?10 None of these ingenuities is necessary or convincing. The Greek name Homēros is not unique to the poet and in need of special explanation for that reason. Other people bore it in antiquity, though no other Homēros happens to be attested in our surviving evidence before c. 250 bc . 11
In 1730, in Naples, the profound thinker Giambattista Vico gave a new twist to the notion that Homer was a ction. He was so struck by the di erence between the ‘re ned’ customs of the Odyssey and the ‘wild and savage’ customs of the Iliad that he inferred that they went back to two di erent poets, up to four centuries apart, who had been composing in di erent parts of the Greek world. He concluded that the Homer of the surviving epics never existed, but that he was an idea or invention of poets of the individual songs which constituted them: ‘the Greek peoples were themselves Homer’, Vico maintained, developing his contention that early poetry was the repository of the thought and past of early peoples.12 His views, expressed in Italian, were ignored in German and in English.
Since Vico, illiterate poets in oral poetic cultures elsewhere in the world have indeed been found to look back to a named master poet whom they believe to have lived several generations before their own, a singer with unique talents and an impressive style of life, whether Choibang in inner Mongolia or Blind Huso in southern Yugoslavia. These forbears are credited with very long lives and grandiose talents, but on one modern view, they have been
Prologue
invented by their followers: might Homer have been invented likewise in a Greek poetic culture which was still essentially oral? In fact, these past singers were real people, as was Homer. Eventually he was honoured as a god in many parts of the Greek world: ‘Homer a god, not a mortal’ was such a cliché that someone wrote it on a potsherd while learning to write in Karanis in Egypt c. ad 250.13 Homer was the name of a master poet, details of whose life had been forgotten. They were then supplemented, like Choibang’s, with legends.
Surely his birthplace, at least, would have been remembered, places being easier to retain than dates before numbered systems of chronology existed in the Greek world? However, it, too, was controversial. The earliest known claimants to it are all east Greek places, in the east Aegean or on the west coast of what is now Turkey. The Iliad never mentions any of them, but the silence is not signi cant, because its plot was set during the Trojan war and it was anachronistic for the poet to refer to Ionian cities which had been settled by Greeks long after that war supposedly ended. The bigger problem is that their claims to Homer only become known to us long after his lifetime. By c. 480 bc one such claimant was Smyrna, modern İzmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey.14 Another famous one was Chios, the island just o Smyrna’s coast. In the 520s bc a Greek poet tried to pass o his own poem, a hymn to Apollo, as one by Homer: to do so, he presented Homer obliquely as a blind man from Chios.15 By then, Chios’s claim to him was evidently very familiar.
As for blindness, it can indeed be an attribute of a skilled oral performer: in the rst decades of the twentieth century, Blind Lemon Je erson and Blind George Blake were guitar-playing geniuses in the American South who also worked with orally transmitted songs. However, there were other grounds for ascribing blindness to Homer. In antiquity Greeks sometimes thought that the gods gave special insight and talent to people whose sight they took away. There seemed to be a clue in the Odyssey. One of the oral poets presented in the poem is described as blind:
Prologue
The Muse loved him greatly and gave him both good and bad: She took away his eyesight, but gave him sweet song.16
These verses encouraged a belief that Homer had been blind too. In due course people wondered when he had lost his sight: was it before or after he composed his poems? It was not a trivial question: if he had been blind early on, he could not have written down the Iliad when he was composing it. Here too opinions divided, because the truth was unknown.
In the absence of evidence from Homer’s lifetime, all we know is that as time passed, ever more cities competed for the distinction of being his rst home. Around 100 bc , three short poems about the claimants were inscribed on the base of a marble statue of him, put up in Pergamon, two of which alluded to Smyrna, Chios, Colophon and Kyme, all sites along the Aegean coastline of modern Turkey, as competitors for the honour and compared them to dogs ghting over a bone, whereas Zeus alone knew the answer. At a similar date seven claimants were arranged in a neat line of hexameter verse, the metre of Homer’s poems: one version of it listed ‘Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Ios, Argos, Athenai [Athens]’.17
The tiny Aegean island of Ios is a surprising candidate but in the mid fourth century bc it had already asserted its claim by issuing bronze coinage struck with an imagined portrait of Homer. It is the earliest portrayal of an individual Greek on a Greek coin, but it was modelled on portraits of the god Zeus and had no knowledge of Homer’s real features.18 Even Aristotle, c. 330 bc , gave space to the claim that Homer had been conceived on little Ios and had returned to die there. Aristotle studied Homer very carefully and wrote a book on Homeric Problems, and if he himself supported Ios’s claim, he dated Homer’s conception there to what we would calculate as c. 1050 bc. 19 That date related him to stories of the rst Greek migrants who went to settle in Asia after the Trojan war, but it was not based on sound historical evidence. It was far too early, but in Ios’s calendar one of the months came to be named Homēreon. Homer’s supposed tomb was shown on the north-west of the island,
Prologue
as it still is near modern Plakōtos, where a festival in his honour is held each year on 15 May.20
When Homer composed, nobody was yet writing literary texts in Greek prose, let alone biographies of contemporaries. History writing had not been invented. As a result the questions of this book’s rst three parts, where, how and when the poem was composed, have remained di cult to answer conclusively. The question of how it was composed is best addressed by looking outwards, beyond the text, to poems composed far in time and space from Homer’s. They suggest possibilities which desk-bound scholars never fully realized. The dating of Homer’s poem also requires an outward turn, to evidence found in other contexts by archaeologists and the many problems of interpretation which it poses.
In the book’s fourth and fth parts I will address a separate question, why the Iliad still has such power. Here, my question has all the evidence needed to answer it: the poem itself. Even so, answers are not easy to pin down in words. I will address it through what I consider to be the poem’s hallmarks, rst, those of its heroes, then, the hallmarks of worlds parallel to theirs. Engagement with them does not require a knowledge of ancient Greek. Most of my readers will have little or none, but if they go on to read a translation of the Iliad, they will nd that prior awareness of these hallmarks will deepen their sense of what underlies it. I hope they will proceed to such a reading or even to learning Homeric Greek: it becomes possible within two years to read long stretches of the I liad in Greek and catch its force and ow.
In my fourth part, I will begin by presenting a hallmark which is central to the heroes’ values. Using it as a thread, I will select my top ten of the poem’s twenty-four books and give a nuanced appreciation of what they contain. As readers will then have more of a grasp of the Iliad, I will bring out yet more of the heroes’ hallmarks by ranging through it as a whole: they include other values which pervade their male world and even the place of those heroic staples, horses, within it. Together they help to characterize the poem’s supreme hero, Achilles.
Prologue
In my fth part I will address three parallel worlds which Homer sets beside the main action on the battle eld: the world of the gods and goddesses, the world of women and what, to us, is the natural world. Outsiders, new to the poem, may expect it to be directly about the fall of Troy. They may also have heard that it is full of men who are ghting and killing and even that it is a story in which women are never given their own say. Before I proceed, these claims need to be re ned.
The Iliad is aware that Troy will fall, but its plot does not extend to tell of it. Indeed, Homer’s heroes are at war and their ghting leads to merciless killing, but no death in battle occurs until the fourth of its twenty-four books, about 2400 verses into the poem: only one death, the poignant death of Hector, occurs in its last three. His young wife Andromache has been preparing his bath in their house in Troy. She hears a shout go up from the battlements and without anyone bringing her news, she realizes that her beloved husband is dead.
Homer’s women, when captured in war, are enslaved, a standard practice in the Greek world, but until then, they make choices. One has been the cause of the entire war, Helen’s elopement with the Trojan prince Paris. At risk to enslavement, women also contribute to the choices men make. Out of shame, partly before Troy’s women, Hector chooses to return to battle. If he fails there, those women, he knows, will su er and be reduced to slavery.
Away from the war, Homer’s eye lights on women in quite other settings: he presents them in some of his long similes, or extended comparisons. One of them presents a mother who is caring for her child by brushing away a y from him while he sleeps; another presents women who go out into the street, angry in a ‘consuming quarrel’, and denounce one another with insults, ‘many true, many not’. Another compares a tautly balanced phase in the ghting to the balance which a woman attains on a pair of scales while weighing wool for her spinning: she is earning ‘a pitiable reward for her children’, a touching detail which conveys her lowly status.21 In a dazzling description of the shield which is being made for
Prologue
Achilles, Homer tells how the god Hephaestus, its maker, contrived a scene in which women stand and watch, ‘each in her porch’, while brides leave their parents’ homes and are escorted through the city by the blazing light of torches. The wedding song has been struck up; young men whirl in a dance as pipes and lyres play; the onlooking women marvel, surely also at the brides, younger than their married selves.22
These anonymous women show Homer’s sharp awareness of everyday life: it extends to children too. In one of his similes, boys beat a stubborn donkey which has strayed into a corn eld. In another, they bait wasps whose nests they stir up ‘foolishly’ by the side of a road. In the poem’s main plot, sons face the starkest future if they lose their fathers.23 In heart-rending bleakness Hector’s wife Andromache imagines what awaits her orphaned little boy after her husband’s death. She envisages him begging food and drink from his father’s former friends while they dine together. ‘Go away, just as you are: no father of yours is dining with us’, another little boy, she presumes, will tell him, one whose parents, she adds, are still alive: he will hit her son and shove him away.24 This scene of callous boyhood was composed some fty lifetimes before our own, yet like the y-swatting mother or the street-quarrelling women it is still immediate.
Although women and children are presented in Homer’s long similes, they never inspire one themselves. Even so, there is an interplay between the poem’s scenes of male heroism and the worlds of women, children and, to us, nature. Much of it relates the heroes’ world to the contemporary world of the Iliad’s audience, but it also contributes to a particular quality, one which is far more than pervasive sadness. It is the very essence of the Iliad, not matched in other poems which have heroes as protagonists, not even the Odyssey. It is not just a poetic trick: it rests on an entire view of the human predicament. It is the hallmark with which I will conclude.
Part I
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
‘When rst they quarrelled . . .’
The Iliad is more than 15,000 lines long. It is much longer than nearcontemporary Greek narrative poems, most of which stopped with 3000–5000 lines and none of which reached more than 7000, but it is not unique among poems about heroic deeds composed in other cultures. In south-west India one such poem, the poem of Siri, is still performed orally by specialized performers in the Tulu language: it is almost exactly as long as the Iliad and has women as its protagonists. In central Asia various heroic poems survive, versions of which extend to half a million verses or more. The Iliad is distinctive for other reasons, prominent among which are the concentrated direction of its plot and the compression of its action’s timespan. I will begin by tracing these features through its rst 611 verses. They are what texts now de ne as the Iliad’s rst book, identi ed by the Greek letter ‘alpha’ and followed by twenty-three more, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet, from alpha to omega. The origin of this division is disputed. In the 520s bc , teams of reciters began to perform the poem in Athens and, on one view, a division into twenty- four parts might have been devised then in order to help them as they recited in sequence, one team taking over from another as each de ned part ended. It is not problematic that the name ‘Ilias’ for the poem is not attested until the historian Herodotus, writing c. 450–425 bc : too little earlier evidence survives for this silence to be signi cant. It is more telling that he and other authors in the fth and fourth centuries bc show no knowledge of alphabetic divisions when they quote from it. The likelier view is that the divisions were introduced by scholars of the text in the third or second century bc . 1 Like every modern reader I will continue to use book numbers
Homer and His Iliad: Where? when referring to verses or episodes: they are a convenience, but not part of Homer’s own plan.
‘Sing, o goddess,’ Homer begins, ‘of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles’. He is invoking a Muse, a goddess, and he repeats the invocation in several other places, usually when the action is about to take a critical turn and he needs to give detailed information. He is not in an ecstatic state, and it is quite wrong to infer that he regards himself as being transported back to envisage the past he is describing.2 The Muses, he says elsewhere, ‘are present’ at events both present and past. They witnessed, therefore, what happened long ago at Troy, and they still know it. One of them sings, whereas Homer himself would have had to rely on human hearsay or guesswork. Accordingly, he tells his story uently in the past tense, narrating what once occurred in heaven and on earth: Achilles ‘spoke, and threw to the ground the sceptre studded with gold nails . . .’ or on Mount Olympus ‘the whitearmed goddess Hera smiled and smiling took the cup in her hand from her son . . .’
He starts straight into his story without any introduction of the Trojan war and its nine preceding years. It is the boldest of beginnings, as radical as young Orson Welles’s decision to begin his lm Citizen Kane at the end of its story. By specifying Achilles’ wrath, Homer states that his subject is to be an emotion, not just a sequence of actions or a family’s deeds across several generations. The wrath, he goes on, was oulomenē, a word which stands at the start of his next verse. It is usually translated ‘accursed’, but no god or man curses it and I prefer to render it as ‘damnable’ or even ‘ruinous’: it is a word of strong disapproval and is placed where Homer, performing, could emphasize it.
These rst verses cleverly set up what will follow. This wrath laid ‘countless pains on the Achaeans’: su ering and tragedy, we realize, will be prominent in what is to come. The wrath ‘sent many mighty heroes on down to Hades’, god of the underworld, and ‘made them prey for dogs and all the birds’. A death without burial was dreadful for a Greek, especially if birds and animals devoured the corpse: the wrath, then, had consequences of extreme horror. ‘And the plan of
‘When rst they quarrelled . . .’ Zeus was being ful lled’: importantly, Homer uses the imperfect tense here, meaning ‘was being/continued to be’. For the moment Zeus’ plan is left unde ned. It will unfold with the action, but it is already linked to countless su erings.
Zeus’ plan began from the time, Homer tells us, ‘when the two of them rst parted in strife, the son of Atreus king of men [Agamemnon] and noble Achilles’. Which of the gods, then, Homer asks, ‘brought the two of them to ght in strife?’ He replies, ‘the son of Zeus and Leto’. After reading on, most of us would give greater weight to Agamemnon’s high-handed role in prompting the rift, but Homer goes further back, to the anger of the god Apollo: it was the cue for the events which led to a debate in the Greek camp and thus to the quarrel itself. Homer’s answer to his very rst question assumes that divine intervention lies behind what happened on earth: it will be a hallmark of the entire poem.
In these opening verses Homer has condensed so much with marvellous skill. Whereas Virgil or even Milton would take tens of lines before engaging fully with their subjects, Homer uses only nine to set the tone and the divine dimension behind what is to follow. He then tells us in the past tense what happened. The next 600 verses, the rest of the rst book, use a contrast between past and present tenses and deploy artful changes of pace and place. They, too, bring out the exceptional skill of their composition, so I will survey them before considering how Homer attained it.
Elderly Chryses came to the Greek camp near Troy to o er a ransom for his daughter Chryseis, a girl whom king Agamemnon had been awarded as his slave-concubine when he and the Greeks captured her elsewhere. Chryses was a priest of Apollo and spoke deferentially, but Agamemnon brutally rejected his plea. Chryses departed in fear and ‘went in silence by the shore of the booming sea’, a superb verse whose concluding words, polu¯ phloisboio tha ˇ lassēs, echo the noise of the sea’s breakers. Showing no sympathy with his plight, they boom on regardless, contrasting with his silence and heightening his isolation.3 Aged fathers are recurring subjects of pathos in the Iliad.
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
By the sea, Chryses prayed to Apollo, asking him to make the Danaans [Greeks] pay for his tears with his shafts. In reply Apollo came down ‘like the night’, a terrifying reversal of a god usually linked with light, and sent a plague by shooting his invisible arrows into the Greek camp. First, the mules and swift dogs fell sick, and then the humans. Homer had no idea of infection or viral transmission: each case, he thought, was due to one of Apollo’s invisible shafts. ‘The res of the dead were burning densely’, he concludes. It is a ne example of his gift for saying much by saying little.
As often in the poem, Apollo was acting apart from the other gods. On the tenth day the Greek army gathered in the meeting place to discuss why he was so angry and how best to appease him. It was Achilles who had called them there, but, again, a divinity guided the action: Hera put the idea into his mind, ‘for she cared for the Danaans [Greeks] because she was seeing them die’.4 At Achilles’ suggestion, the prophet Calchas spoke, a seer who knew, thanks to Apollo, ‘what is, what will be and what was before’: he too owed his role and talent to a god.5 With cautious tact, he elicited a promise from Achilles that he would protect him, and only then did he cite Agamemnon’s rejection of Chryses, Apollo’s priest, as the reason for Apollo’s anger. A stormy argument began between Agamemnon and Achilles, whose alternating speeches become ever longer: they escalate brilliantly, one taunt leading to another, but important facts underlie them.
When Agamemnon accepted that he must give up his prize Chryseis, he insisted that he must immediately be given another to replace her. Achilles pointed out that there was no store of prizes set aside and that he must wait until another city was captured, whereupon Agamemnon angrily announced he would take somebody else’s prize immediately. He then narrowed his choice to Achilles’ prize, fair-cheeked Briseis, nobly born but enslaved when her family’s city was captured. When a city fell, Homer reveals, a distribution took place, a dasmos. Agamemnon did not just take or distribute prizes as he pleased: Achilles and then Nestor refer to the ‘sons of the Achaeans’ giving prizes, ‘dividing them well among
‘When rst they quarrelled . . .’ themselves’ and ‘taking out’ Chryseis for the son of Atreus, Agamemnon. By threatening to take Achilles’ prize, Agamemnon was not revoking what he himself had bestowed. He was overturning a decision made publicly by others.6
There is an important point here about royal authority. Homeric kings have sometimes been interpreted as chieftains, whose preeminence was linked to their redistribution of highly valued goods to their followers.7 In the Trojan war, Agamemnon was no such person. He could not always give booty to whomever he chose. If the army, the sons of the Achaeans, had fought to capture it, it was they who distributed it. They did so with due deference to their superiors, the greatest individual warriors and the pre-eminent king, but the decisions were theirs.
From the start, speakers in the Iliad emphasize Agamemnon’s kingship, but there was a di erence between his rule over his home kingdom of Argos and his relations with the whole Greek army which had assembled as allies for the Trojan war: the distribution of booty was something over which they, as a community, had control. Nor did Agamemnon have a monopoly on physical strength: others had it too, especially Achilles, who had more of it. As old Nestor states, Achilles was the stronger warrior (karteros ) and the son of a goddess, but Agamemnon was mightier (pherteros ) because he ruled over more people. It is a crucial point: their quarrel was not a political one about whether to have kings or not. It was rooted in a con ict which occurs often in joint enterprises: like many team captains since, the king who ruled most people was not the best performer.
In anger at the threat to his prize, Achilles began to draw his sword to kill Agamemnon but again divinities intervened. Hera sent Athena to dissuade him, ‘because she cared for both of them in her heart’: here too Hera is said to care for Greeks, and again Homer does not say why.8 Visible only to Achilles, Athena told him that if he desisted and withdrew from the battle eld, one day he would receive three times as many gifts because of what these insults had brought about. Achilles agreed, ‘as it is better so’, and returned to maintain the quarrel. After Athena’s assurances, he intensi ed it just
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
as she had proposed: he combined insults with a solemn oath that henceforward he would indeed withdraw from the war.
Appearances of a god or goddess are another hallmark of the poem. In antiquity, most of its listeners lived with a sense of the gods’ presence, but unlike Homer’s heroes they did not confront them personally face to face.9 The elderly hero Nestor had not been aware of Athena’s presence, so he tried to calm the two quarrellers, recalling great warriors, ‘better men even than you’, whom he had once accompanied and advised. He then told Agamemnon:
‘Noble though you are, do not take away the girl from this man, But leave her, as the sons of the Achaeans rst gave her to him as his prize.’
As for Achilles:
‘Do not wish to strive with a king, son of Peleus, Force against force, for never has a sceptred king, to whom Zeus gave glory, Been allotted honour equal to others.’
Agamemnon states that Nestor’s advice is wise, but he and Achilles continue to protest about each other.10
On one point Agamemnon had to relent: he surrendered Chryseis and enabled her return to her father. He cited Apollo as the reason why he was giving her back, not anything said by Achilles, whose anger related to a separate matter, the threat about taking Briseis away. Achilles returned to his encampment, but after arranging for a ship to take Chryseis home, Agamemnon sent two heralds to go and remove Achilles’ prize. They went reluctantly on their mission, but when they arrived Achilles showed them courtesy and let them take her away: Briseis, still a slave, returned ‘unwillingly’.11 As yet, Homer leaves her reluctance unexplained: he does not always ll in the background to what he tells.
Bemoaning his loss, Achilles wept on the seashore, stretching out his hands in prayer to his mother, the goddess Thetis, who resides
‘When rst they quarrelled . . .’ below the waves. His prayer emphasizes that she had borne him to live only a short while: it is Homer’s rst mention of this important fact.12 Perhaps he assumed that his hearers knew it already from previous tales, but his placing of it in Achilles’ prayer, not in his own narrative, is masterly: he lets it emerge where it is relevant, rather than in an introduction where it would have slowed the action. Thetis came up from the sea ‘like the mist’, a beautiful comparison, and in response to her request Achilles recaps in nearly thirty verses what has happened, although, he begins, ‘You know: why should I tell these things to you who knows everything?’13
He then tells her to protect him, her son, ‘if you can’, and to go to Zeus in heaven and entreat him, reminding him of what she had once done to save him. Three of the Olympian gods had been wanting to tie Zeus up, but Thetis had summoned a hundred-handed monster from the underworld to sit beside him, whereupon the gods desisted in fright. Achilles knew of this exploit because, he says, he had often heard her boasting about it in his father Peleus’ house: she must remind Zeus of it, he tells her, and take him by the knees, an intense act of supplication, in the hope that he might help the Trojans and allow the Greeks to be penned up and killed beside their ships,
‘So that they will pro t from their king, And the son of Atreus, far-ruling Agamemnon, may know His own destructive folly, in that he honoured the best of the Greeks not at all.’
Importantly, this wish is Achilles’ own, rst expressed by him, not Thetis.14 It is crucial to the plot. Thetis says she must wait twelve days before visiting Mount Olympus, because Zeus and the gods are far away, feasting with the ‘blameless Ethiopians’. They are people with burnt faces, darkskinned therefore, but they are not the Ethiopians of modern repute: the Odyssey divides them between the eastern and western edges of the world.15 Being blameless, they are able to entertain the gods to a banquet face to face: for Homer indeed, dark lives matter.
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
Meanwhile a Greek delegation took Chryseis by ship to her father, Chryses the priest. Odysseus, their leader, ‘took her to the altar’, Apollo’s, and ‘placed her in the arms of her dear father’ and he ‘rejoicing received his dear daughter’: again Homer says so much by saying little, that each was dear to the other.16 As requested, Chryses prayed to Apollo, who duly stopped the plague while the Greeks burnt sacri ces, poured wine and sang hymns in his honour. They then returned in their dark ship, but back in the camp
He was enraged sitting by the swift-travelling ships
The noble son of Peleus, swift-footed Achilles, And never would he go to the meeting place which wins glory for men
Nor ever to war, but he would waste away his dear heart, Remaining there, and yet he was longing for the battle cry and ghting.
In this book the action on earth ends with these dramatic verses on Achilles’ anger and yearning.17 He will remain away from the battleeld for another eighteen books.
At dawn, after twelve days, Thetis went up from the sea to Mount Olympus. Zeus was sitting apart from the other gods on the highest ridge there, so she sat before him and begged him as an abject suppliant, just as Achilles had told her, one hand on his knees, the other on his chin. Among Greeks this position was one adopted by mortal suppliants: holding tightly on to Zeus, Thetis entreated him to help her ‘if ever I helped you among the immortals by word or deed’.18 She gave no details, though Achilles had urged her to do so. So far from being inconsistent here, Homer is beautifully subtle, as Aristotle, a close reader of the poem, well realized many centuries later. ‘A great-hearted man’, he wrote in one of his works on ethics, ‘will happily remember bene ts he has conferred, but not those he has received’, as at the time they made him inferior to the giver: ‘he hears the one with pleasure, the other not, and that is why Thetis does not tell her past good services to Zeus’.19 It is proof in the Iliad’s very rst
‘When rst they quarrelled . . .’ book that Homer, by clever variation and omission, knows how to imply much more than he states.
Zeus was far superior to Thetis and would not wish to be reminded in detail of a time when he was not. Instead she alluded in a general way to her past bene ts to him, with the implication that they should be reciprocated. Here, Homer projects onto the gods a pattern of prayer that mortals use when addressing a god: if we ever did this or that for you, so may you do this now for us. Thetis even aimed to in uence Zeus by reminding him that her son was destined to be the ‘swiftest of all other men to die’.20
Her request was brutally precise, that Zeus should honour him and put might into the Trojans until the Greeks, hard-pressed, would enhance him with honour and persuade him to rejoin the battle. Zeus ‘sat for a long while in silence’, and so Thetis repeated the request. It is a pivotal moment in the story. Fourteen books later, Homer in his own person will call Thetis’ prayer exaisios, or immoderate, a crucial insight into the poem’s rights and wrongs.21
When she repeats her request, wryly she tells Zeus to refuse if he so wishes, ‘so that I may know how far I am the least honoured, a-timotatē, among all the gods’. Honour is her ultimate claim to favour. Zeus then marked his assent by nodding with his dark eyebrows, ‘and the ambrosial locks streamed forward from the king’s immortal head and Olympus shook mightily’.22 Supplicated like an aristocrat, he is nonetheless the god who can send elemental storms and tremors through the world by a simple movement of his brow. I imagine Homer lingering over these superb verses in performance, doing justice to the stateliness of their diction and their importance for the plot. Zeus does not reveal that his promise will lead to a fatal sequel, one which Homer surely already had in mind.
The two of them parted, Thetis springing down into the sea, Zeus going to his palace on Olympus, where the other gods rose to their feet in deference to him, their father. However, as Zeus had feared, a quarrel began between himself and his wife Hera. She suspected, correctly, that he had privately agreed to a request by Achilles’ divine mother and that he had indicated with his head that
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
he would honour her son and cause many of the Greeks to die by their ships: her care for the Greeks has already been stated twice in the narrative. Zeus told her to be silent and obey him or else he would turn his ‘untouchable hands’ against her.
Hera sat down in fear and the other Olympians were troubled too. Thereupon, her son Hephaestus, the god of crafts, tried to calm her. He began by telling her that it would be intolerable if she and Zeus were to quarrel in this way for the sake of mere mortals. He did not want to see her being battered, he said, and he reminded her how he had tried to protect her once before, but had been thrown by Zeus out of heaven. On earth, Agamemnon, speaking in public, had just compared his absent wife Clytaemnestra’s looks and abilities unfavourably to those of his slave-concubine Chryseis.23 In heaven, Zeus then threatened his wife with the violence he had used on her in the past. As on earth, so yet again in heaven: the rst husbands in the poem are not exactly sensitive about their wives’ feelings and persons.
Hera smiled at her son, surely for his past and present attempts to intervene on her behalf, whereupon Hephaestus, lame though he was, busied himself as a butler to the gods, serving them in orderly fashion from left to right and diverting them into unquenchable laughter. For the remains of the day, feasting prevailed, that social uni er, while Apollo played his beauteous lyre and the Muses sang antiphonally with their fair voices. Eventually,
When the bright light of the sun went down, They went each to their own house to lie down, Where the famed god Hephaestus, lame in both legs, had made a home for each of them, And Zeus, lord of lightning, went to his own bed, Where before, he used to take his rest when sweet sleep came to him. There, he went up and slept, and beside him, Hera of the golden throne.
The quarrel in heaven had been patched up, but the quarrel on earth remained unreconciled.
Doing Things with Words
This marvellous beginning is rich in implications for what will follow in the poem. It gives a sense of the art and intricacy with which Homer composed. Details like Briseis departing unwillingly or Thetis alluding only in general terms to her past favours were not the work of a poet who was being guided in a traditional direction by nothing but traditional phrases. Nonetheless, he presents individuals and items with recurring phrases or adjectives, ‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘white-armed Hera’ or the ‘wine-dark sea’. This blend of recurrent phrasing and individual art will be a valuable clue to his method of composition.
Important points about the poet and his listeners follow from it. Evidently, Homer knew he was addressing people who were familiar with general tales of Troy and their heroes: he introduces Agamemnon by calling him only the ‘son of Atreus’ and refers to Achilles’ beloved Patroclus only as the ‘son of Menoitios’ when he is rst mentioned.1 His narrative never even mentions Troy or the Trojans, taking them for granted. They are mentioned, rather, in speeches. No less than 60 per cent of this rst book is presented as direct speech, a remarkably high proportion. Chryses the priest, ve of the Greek heroes and ve of the divinities speak, but Chryseis and Briseis remain silent, not because Homer belittles women but because they are enslaved girls and have no agency in what happens. The clear line of the action would be delayed if they spoke while unable to in uence it. Three goddesses, by contrast, deliver speeches, because their words can, and do, shape the plot.
Why does this opening have such vitality and beautifully controlled vividness? Major reasons are the even ow of its metre and
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
poetic language, aspects which require a good knowledge of Homeric Greek. Others are accessible even in translation. One is that emotion runs high in many of the speakers, as the narrative states, emphasizing their fear or anger, distress or wrath. Weeping too is explicitly presented. It is not a shameful or unmanly response: when Achilles loses lovely Briseis, he does not lose heroic status when he sits by the wine-dark sea and sheds tears.2
Another reason is that speeches implicitly reveal their speakers’ character, whether the haughty inconsiderateness of Agamemnon, causing the sending of a plague and then the quarrel, or Achilles’ swift temper, becoming violently enraged, or Nestor, dwelling on his past with the habitual discursiveness of an old man. Speakers also characterize one another, using the word ‘always’ to enlarge our sense of them beyond the moment. Strife and battles, Agamemnon says, are ‘always’ dear to Achilles. Hera, Zeus says, is ‘always’ thinking what he is planning secretly and Zeus, Hera says, is ‘always’ glad to make secret decisions apart from her.3 We know more of them as a result.
In this rst book there are no long similes, though they are hallmarks of the next book and beyond. There is, however, a brilliant use of words in action. Homer narrates events in the past tense, but makes his speakers give speeches in the present, a variation which brings the speeches to life and makes the poem’s world, though far in the past, immediate for his listeners. Speaking in the present, his speakers allude to the past, ‘if ever’, and to the future, ‘some day’, widening the scope of the poem’s timescale.
Words, when spoken, announce what will come to pass, as a neat exchange between Achilles and his mother Thetis shows. ‘I will speak out’, Achilles tells her, ‘and I think this will be ful lled’, that Agamemnon ‘may soon lose his life through his insolences’. In reply Athena tells him, ‘So I will speak out and it will be ful lled for sure’, that one day he will receive three times as many glorious gifts because of this insolence. She does not enact the future by what she says here: as a goddess she predicts it with emphatic certainty. Unlike Achilles, she does not ‘think’: she knows, and so Achilles
Doing Things with Words promptly speaks to Agamemnon in accordance with what she has said.4 ‘Insult him with words’, Athena has told him, ‘as to what will come to ful lment’, and so he insults Agamemnon with renewed vigour, using compound adjectives which never recur in the poem. Knowing what will happen, he also issues threats, stating what he will do.5
Simply by being spoken, words bring threats and insults into being. Words also enact oaths: they are sworn by being uttered, nothing else. Achilles takes up a sceptre, studded with gold nails, and swears by it, adding solemnity to his oath, but what makes his oath exist are the words he speaks. The same is true of hymns and prayers. By being uttered, words from elderly Chryses constitute prayers, just as words from the Greek delegates or from the Muses constitute hymns by being sung. Words also engender promises, like Zeus’ words to Thetis when he tells her that she must go away but ‘these things will be my care, how I shall bring them about’. He then says he will nod with his head, the greatest sign, and that ‘my [word] is not revocable, deceitful nor unful lled, whatever I nod to with my head’. His words constitute a promise, which is con rmed by his movement.6
To an extent which has not been recognized, the rst book of the Iliad teems with instances of how to do things with words. The subject is much studied by modern philosophers, but they have not turned to the Iliad for examples. In its beginning Homer deploys a wide range of what they call speech-acts, making it exceptionally vivid and fast moving. He also attends to how words are received, specifying their e ects on their recipients. What is done with words adds force to its opposite: silence. Old Chryses is silent, walking by the sea, and so too are the heralds when they come unwillingly to reclaim Briseis from Achilles. The supreme silence is Zeus’, as he thinks through the implications of Thetis’ request.
Signi cant speech and signi cant silence are not the only contrast which this book deploys. Throughout, it has brilliant variations of pace. Homer uses brief speeches to help him present the back-story which leads to the quarrel. The speeches that express it then increase
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
in length and strike o one another as they escalate. Old Nestor then slows the pace with fteen verses in which he recalls ‘better men than you’, past heroes who fought the centaurs, with whom ‘mortal men now on earth would never ght’.7 His speech aims to settle the quarrel, but fails, whereupon a urry of angry words resumes and the story regains pace.
Speeches are preceded by movement, as each speaker takes up a place and only then begins to speak. The entire book is alive with it, yet the actions that accompany it proceed at times in a prolonged sequence. Agamemnon launches a ship; he chooses twenty rowers; he puts animals on board to be sacri ced to Apollo; he brings faircheeked Chryseis and sets her on board too; many-wiled Odysseus embarks as leader. They ‘sail over the watery ways’, while Agamemnon orders the Greeks back in the camp to purify themselves; they throw the washed-o lth into the sea; they sacri ce many bulls and goats on the shore to Apollo: ‘the savour went up to heaven coiling in the smoke’. In only ten verses Homer narrates so much on two fronts, but never with breathless haste. The metre of his verse moves smoothly and swiftly, helped by the adjectives which repeatedly attach to particular nouns and persons, ‘fair-cheeked Briseis’, ‘resourceful Odysseus’, ‘watery ways’, ‘the unharvested sea’. As so often, it is worth visualizing the range of what he presents, even if listeners could not pause and dwell on it in that way. In the time taken to recite these ten verses, not even a lm could show so much in a sequence of shots. Homer’s words convey more, more swiftly, than pictures.
Actions then unfold more steadily. Twenty verses, nine of them spoken by Achilles, present the heralds’ unwilling visit to take away Briseis. Thirty verses, also from Achilles, recap events in answer to Thetis, followed by twelve days of delay while the gods are feasting with the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, the ship carrying Chryseis comes to its anchorage and the details of its mooring are given one by one. Prayers and o erings are paid to Apollo, each detail being given here too, rst the roasting of meat, then the pouring of libations of
Doing Things with Words wine, then the singing to appease the god. Night falls, but when rosy- ngered dawn appears, the ship returns to the Greeks’ camp and Homer lingers on details of its billowing sail and again on details of its mooring when it arrives.
In his ne appraisal of the Iliad the poet Matthew Arnold singled out rapidity as one of its essential qualities.8 However, it also has sequences of action slowed across several verses, especially rituals or recurring actions like preparing and eating food. These slowed episodes were not Homer’s devices to give himself time to remember or recover while he was performing: he was capable of hundreds of verses without using them. Rather, they are there for his listeners, allowing them to keep up with his performance.9 After about 240 verses of wonderfully condensed narrative and fast-moving speech, they are well-judged changes of pace. They run throughout the poem and are relevant to the question of how he composed.
So is Homer’s use of space. Most of the action on earth is in the Greeks’ camp, while actions among the gods are on Mount Olympus. In the rest of the poem, the ghting occurs in one small area, between the camp of the Greeks, whose ships are made of wood, the river Scamander, which divides the battle-plain, and the city of Troy, whose high walls and towers are made of solid stone. Most of the action is not a siege of Troy. The main assault on a forti ed site is conducted by the Trojans on the Greeks’ wall around their ships into which they break at the end of book 12. Otherwise the action is a battle waged in open space. When Homer refers to the right and the left of it, a close reading has shown that he presents it consistently as if from the centre of the Greeks’ camp looking out onto the Trojan plain.10 It is as if he has a precise mental setting for the action, one with consequences, again, for how he composed. There are scenes of debate, prayer and lamentation inside Troy itself and there are two brief visits to forests on the mountain of Ida, but otherwise only the gods move elsewhere from time to time.
Despite this concentrated setting, the Iliad’s scope extends far further, because Homer persistently evokes a wider Greek world. When he refers to religious cult, he names shrines which are very far
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
from Troy, particularly in his protagonists’ prayers. When he presents lesser-known people on or o the battle eld, he animates them with details of their families and homelands, widening his poem’s range. He never refers to Hellenes, whom we, adapting their Latin name, graeci, call Greeks. He refers only to Argives, Danaans or Achaeans, names, however, with a long prehistory. Occasionally he refers to Pan-achaeans, but only to mean ‘all the Achaean army’, not all Achaeans everywhere.11 In two of the poem’s books he mentions Hellas, the name used by Greeks for their land, but for him Hellas is only a small part of Thessaly adjoining Achilles’ homeland.12 Like every modern commentator, I have already referred to ‘the Greek camp’ and ‘the Greeks’, departing from Homer’s wording. This usage is not anachronistic as Homer’s near contemporary, the poet Hesiod, refers to the big army which the Achaeans gathered from ‘holy Hellas’ to go against Troy, using Hellas in a wider sense, what we would call Greece.13
The range of cult-places in the poem is exempli ed at a vital moment, when Achilles sends Patroclus out to ght in book 16. He prays solemnly to ‘lord Zeus of Dodona’, far away in north-west Greece, site of the famous oracle in Epirus near modern Ioannina.14 ‘Pelasgian, dwelling far o ’, Achilles continues, ‘ruling over Dodona with its harsh winters: around, dwell the Selloi, your interpreters, with unwashed feet, sleeping on the ground.’ This precise invocation of Zeus at distant Dodona is not fantasy, although its details continued to puzzle the ancients, just as they still puzzle us.
When gods y to and from Troy, their travels, too, widen the poem’s horizons. In book 14, as Hera ies across to Mount Ida in the Troad, Homer refers to her passing lovely Emathia, the plain just to the north of Mount Olympus which later became the Greek kingdom of Macedon.15 In book 21, he refers to Achilles’ duel with a warrior from non-Greek Paeonia whose back-story names two major Paeonian rivers in the land which adjoined Emathia to the north-east.16 In book 15 he refers in a similar back-story to the island of Cythera just o the southern coast of the Peloponnese, the very tip of Greece. In book 9 he has already made Agamemnon refer to
Doing Things with Words seven settlements around that coast, all locatable round the Gulf of Messenia, including Kardamyle, still famous in the Mani.17 He was o ering to give them to Achilles.
In the poem’s rst book the place names are much more limited. The gods are located on Mount Olympus, debating, quarrelling, dining and sleeping there: Homer felt no need to specify its location in, to us, northern Greece. It was known as a seat of the gods long before he referred to it, but perhaps he had not seen it because he says once in the Odyssey that its peaks are not covered in snow.18 On earth the main heroes are also linked to particular homes, Agamemnon to Argos, Achilles to Thessaly, old Nestor to Pylos, but these locations too were embedded in tradition. They were not Homer’s inventions. In his two prayers to Apollo, old Chryses refers to Tenedos, holy Cilla and Chryse, each of which is a place particularly linked to the god.19 They are the rst examples in the Iliad of a wider horizon evoked through religious worship: they have an exactness which readers often miss.
Tenedos is an island just o the coast of the Troad in north-west Asia. Cilla is not otherwise mentioned in the poem, but it was surely in or near the Troad too, perhaps already on its southern coast, where later Greek authors placed it.20 Homer might have learned from previous poets that these two places were not very far from Troy, but his presentation of the third one, Chryse, is more speci c. When Chryses was rebu ed by Agamemnon, he walked back along the seashore: he was returning to Chryse, we can infer, and was going south from Troy along the coast of the Aegean, the sea, therefore, whose breakers boomed beside him.21 He would have passed the island of Tenedos, just out at sea to the right of him, and then at Chryse reached the shrine of Apollo at which he was a priest.
The place Chryse was the origin of his name and also the name of his daughter Chryseis. These people are quite likely to be Homer’s inventions: did he invent the place Chryse too? Later Greek sources site a real Chryse to the south of Tenedos and close to the south-west tip of the Troad, on a rocky height above the sea. It has been located at Göz Tepe, a promontory on which pottery and tiles
Homer and His Iliad: Where?
dating to c. 100 bc have been discovered: an inscription of similar date, found nearby, refers to a garrison at Chryse, an apt use of this site.22 If it was Chryse in Homer’s time, it ts very well with old Chryses’ walk home down the coast. It also ts well with the day’s journey of the ship which brought his daughter back from the Greek camp. This ship was big enough to carry cattle for sacri ce as well as twenty Greek rowers, who brought it, Homer tells us, to Chryse and moored it in a harbour bay with ‘much depth’. Just north of Chryse’s promontory is a bay which served as a harbour for yet another settlement nearby: Homer’s ‘much depth’ is a poetic ourish, but this bay is otherwise apt for the mooring he describes.
After landing, the envoys took dear Chryseis to that altar, evidently one for Apollo, and put her in her dear father’s arms. Near the start of the poem Chryses had used the name Smintheus when praying to Apollo, a name which the ancients later explained as meaning ‘mouse god’: they accounted for it by various stories, including one of the god’s intervention in a plague of mice, indeed a locally plausible event.23 By the village of Gülpınar, less than two miles south-east of the bay, marble fragments of a temple were found in 1853 by Commander T. A. B. Spratt, a shrewd researcher, who identi ed it as the temple of Apollo Smintheus. In autumn 1866, it was partly excavated by Richard Pullan with the backing of the patrician Dilettanti Society in London. Since 1980, the temple has been more fully excavated by Turkish archaeologists and found to be datable to c. 150 bc .
Its identity as a Smintheion, or temple of Apollo Smintheus, is supported by coins struck in the second century bc at the nearby settlement above the bay: they were engraved with images of Apollo’s statue and inscribed with his name, Smintheus. Fragmentary inscriptions of a similar date were found nearby and also refer to the name Smintheus.24 No evidence of a temple from Homer’s time has yet been found, but in his prayer to Apollo old Chryses refers to roo ng over a pleasing temple for him, surely at Chryse, where he
Doing Things with Words
served as priest. If this temple was of wood, perhaps thatched, it would have disappeared without trace.
Modern criticism of the Iliad often prefers to explain its names for places and items around Troy as inventions by Homer or as a legacy to him from earlier poems: if later texts x them to particular places, that xing, some believe, is the work of admirers of his Iliad, wanting to claim possession of places named in it. Chryse became a site of particular interest in the cultural and political landscape of the third and second centuries bc , but I do not believe it was xed to Homer’s poem only then. The temple of Apollo Smintheus has not yet produced evidence from Homer’s time, but its surrounds have yet to be excavated and archaic and prehistoric items have already been identi ed there. Chryse’s site on a promontory, the bay just to the north of it, the temple as currently known all interrelate on the ground. They were not imaginary locations, oating freely in Homer’s verse. He or an informant had seen them, enhancing a hallmark of the poem, its vividness, what ancient critics labelled enargeia.
Homer is widely considered to be entirely elusive as a person. If he merely inherited traditional material or even, as some have thought, short poems which he or his followers then stitched together, their place names and landmarks are unlikely to be evidence of his own travels and observations. Chryse and the Smintheion imply the opposite, that place names may say something about Homer himself.