Why Homer Matters (43 page)

“The verses and the themes”:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, 449.

They asked one singer:
John Miles Foley,
Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 43–44.

“What is, let's say”:
Ibid., 44.

“Plato thought nature”:
W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” VI. 1–2,
The Tower
(London: Macmillan, 1928).

“The more I understand”:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, 451 (written in Jan. 1934), quoted in Richard Janko, “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,”
Classical Quarterly
, new ser., 48, no. 1 (1998), 1–13.

written much later:
Lord,
The Singer of Tales.

“It was the wet spring”:
A conversation I reported before, in
Sea Room
(London: HarperCollins, 2001), 292.

everything in his songs:
Foley,
Traditional Oral Epic
, 44; Parry, Conversation 6598 (same conversation as the words/phrases).

“making the wince”:
http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_NOTOPOULOS1.html
; G. N. Antonakopoulos, “Mia Agnosti Seira Diskon Ellinikis Mousikis” (in
Laïko Tragoudi
, no. [2005], 16–19); see
turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/arion_odysseus.doc
.

He found Sfakia:
James A. Notopoulos, “The Genesis of an Oral Heroic Poem,”
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
3 (1960), 135–44.

the opposite conclusion:
Maartje Draak, “Duncan MacDonald of South Uist,”
Fabula
1 (1957), 47–58; William Lamb, “The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man: Hidden Influences from Printed Sources in the Gaelic Tales of Duncan and Neil MacDonald,”
Oral Tradition
27, no. 1 (2012), 109–60.

heir to the great traditions:
See the Calum Maclean Project, Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh,
http://www.calum-maclean-project.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/home/
; Lamb, “The Storyteller, the Scribe, and a Missing Man.”

“polished, shapely”:
http://calumimaclean.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html
.

On analysis:
Draak, “Duncan Macdonald of South Uist.”

ethnographers have discovered:
Douglas Young, “Never Blotted a Line? Formula and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod,”
Arion
6, no. 3 (Fall 1967), 279–324.

“had in his head”:
Ibid.

7: HOMER THE REAL

“the terrible noise”: Iliad
VI.105.

“As the generation”:
From E. R. Lowry Jr., “Glaucus, the Leaves
,
and the Heroic Boast of
Iliad
VI.146–211,” in
The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to E. Townsend Vermeule
, ed. J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris (1995; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 193; combined with Fagles,
Iliad
VI.171–75.

“as many as the leaves”: Iliad
II.468.

“Near the city”:
Ibid., II.811–14 (Murray/Wyatt, slightly adapted).

Epic poetry serves us:
Jonas Grethlein, “Memory and Material Objects in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
128 (2008), 27–51.

“such as will remain”: Iliad
III.287.

the Muse provides: Odyssey
VIII.479–81.

in the same class: Iliad
IX.364.

Achilles's iron heart:
Ibid., XX.372. This is a translation of the phrase
aith
ō
ni sid
ē
r
ō
, which might also mean more prosaically “shining iron.”

a profoundly ancient world:
See Susan Sherratt, “Archaeological Contexts,” in
A Companion to Ancient Epic
, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 119–42.

his team had found six hundred:
C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson,
The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia
, vol. 1,
The Buildings and Their Contents
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 6, 95–100; C. W. Blegen and K. Kourouniotis, “Excavations of Pylos, 1939,”
American Journal of Archaeology
43 (1939), 569.

No one could guess:
Ione Mylonas Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World? A Tale of Seven Bronze Hinges,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
118 (1998), 187–89.

A piece of firewood:
Christoph Bachhuber, “Aegean Interest on the Uluburun Ship,”
American Journal of Archaeology
110, no. 3 (July 2006), 345–63.

a moment from the
Iliad
: Iliad
VI.119–236.

“he quickly sent”:
Ibid., VI.168–70.

What does this description:
T. R. Bryce, “The Nature of Mycenaean Involvement in Western Anatolia,”
Historia
38 (1989), 13–14; Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon's Tablet,”
Classical Journal
84 (1989), 289–307; Shear, “Bellerophon Tablets from the Mycenaean World?”; Byron Harries, “‘Strange Meeting': Diomedes and Glaucus in
Iliad
6,”
Greece and Rome
40 (1993), 133–47; T. R. Bryce, “Anatolian Scribes in Mycenaean Greece,”
Historia
48 (1999), 257–64.

It is a tiny:
Not everyone agrees with this view of Homer's Greeks—or in this distinction between Greek and Trojan. From the
Odyssey
comes all kinds of evidence that the Greeks were at home in palaces: Nestor and Menelaus live with elaborate and comfortable set-ups at Pylos and Sparta, full of warmth and ritualized hospitality. Even Odysseus's home on Ithaca, while clearly not a major citadel, has
megara skioenta
, “shadowed halls,” like the rich Near Eastern palace of Alcinous in Scheria. These hints and suggestions can be taken as a sign that the
Odyssey
was deeply colored by its transmission through the palace centuries of the Mycenaean period, where the cultural expectations of a great man's equipment had come to include a palace establishment.

It is not the world:
The
Iliad
, perhaps because the circumstances of war did not encourage it, remained more resistant to these later influences. It is true that even in the
Iliad
Mycenae is described as
euktimenon ptoliethron
, “a well-founded citadel” (
Iliad
2.569–70),
polychrysos
, “rich in gold” (
Iliad
11.46) and, like Troy,
euruaguia
, “with broad streets” (
Iliad
4.52). But these are no more than marginal suggestions. The poetic weight of warriorhood in the poem remains firmly on the Greek side, and the poetic weight of civility and urbanness firmly on the Trojan. Hector is undoubtedly a ferocious warrior, but he is nearly alone as such among the Trojans, who do not entirely admire him for it. Paris and Priam, on the other hand, represent two contrasting dimensions of urban civility—wise government and a tendency to foppishness—and they appear as they do not because of the circumstances in which they find themselves but because of their essential natures. The same is true of Achilles: he will be the unaccommodated man in whatever circumstances he finds himself. For all the surrounding realism and nuance, these are the polarities the
Iliad
dramatizes.

“floats all through”:
Emily Townsend Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
137, no. 4, 250th anniversary issue (Dec. 1993), 689–703.

in many parts earlier:
M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
108 (1988), 151–72.

but the Iliadic words:
Ibid.

“There are in all”:
Quoted in Ernst Meyer, “Schliemann's Letters to Max Müller in Oxford,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
82 (1962), 24, 92.

he identified the warriors:
Schliemann claimed in a telegram to a Greek newspaper that on exposing one of the jewel-encrusted kings he felt that “this corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon” (Cathy Gere,
The Tomb of Agamemnon: Mycenae and the Search for a Hero
[London: Profile, 2006], 76). He never said, as is usually reported, that he had “gazed on the face of Agamemnon,” nor was he referring to the wonderful gold face mask now universally referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon. That handsome, mustachioed boulevardier king, the most famous face of the Bronze Age, belonged to another grave. Immediately before sending his telegram, Schliemann had looked at a dead body “whose round face, with all its flesh had been wonderfully preserved,” eyes and teeth all there. That face had also been covered in a gold mask, but it is a strange thing, clean-shaven, as round as a football, fat-cheeked and pig-eyed, an image of regality that has never been explained. (See Gere,
The Tomb of Agamemnon
, 79, for an illustration of the gold mask from Shaft Grave IV of Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 1550–1500
BC
.)

very like the world
: Homer does not describe burials of the kind that are found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. The Homeric hero is always cremated on a pyre and his remains put in a container that is then buried within a large tumulus. That form of interment is found all over the Indo-European world but not in Greece, at least until the eighth century
BC
(see H. L. Lorimer, “Pulvis et Umbra,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
53 [1933], 161–80). Different Indo-European peoples at different times both cremated and buried their dead. So this is a conundrum: are the burial practices in Homer evidence of their being very late poems, no earlier than the eighth century
BC
? Or is this evidence of some deep memory of early Indo-European traditions which also gave rise to cremation for heroes in Scandinavia, and to people in India and Iran? See J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, eds.,
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture
(Oxford: Routledge, 1997), 151.

“the slayers and the slain”: Iliad
XI.83–162.

“ungentle is”:
Ibid., XI.137:
ameiliktos d'op akousan.

“more loved by the vultures”:
Ibid., XI.162.

“And just as when”:
Ibid., XI.269–72 (Murray/Wyatt, adapted).

“As when the open sea”:
Ibid., XIV.16–20 (Lattimore, adapted).

“Philologists often dislike”:
Vermeule, “Jefferson and Homer.”

“He speaks”: Iliad
XVI.856–57, XXII.362–63.

The difference:
Emily Vermeule,
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry
(Oakland: University of California Press, 1979), 9, 10. “Now a doctor in Düsseldorf has succeeded in quantifying the soul by placing the beds of his terminal patients on extremely sensitive scales. ‘As they died and the souls left their bodies, the needles dropped twenty-one grams.'” She was quoting Dr. Nils-Olof Jacobson, “Life After Death,”
Boston Globe
, December 19, 1972. The claim that the weight of the soul is twenty-one grams was first made in 1901 by a group of American doctors, most prominently Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts, who carried out experiments reported in the
New York Times
in March 1907.

8: THE METAL HERO

Parys Mountain:
For a full account of Parys Mountain, see Bryan D. Hope,
A Curious Place: The Industrial History of Amlwch (1550–1950
) (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 1994).

In about 8000
BC
:
B. W. Roberts, C. P. Thornton and V. C. Piggott, “Development of Metallurgy in Eurasia,”
Antiquity
83 (2009), 1012–22.

Only then did someone:
Evgenii N. Chernykh,
Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age
, trans. Sarah Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It became a world:
Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson,
The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 108–9, 114, 123–24.

“The broad picture”:
Richard J. Harrison,
Symbols and Warriors
:
Images of the European Bronze Age
(Bristol: Western Academic and Specialist Press, 2004).

patterns that recur:
See Kristiansen and Larsson,
The Rise of Bronze Age Society
, passim.

Were these movements:
Ibid., 142–250.

The teeth of an early Bronze Age man:
A. P. Fitzpatrick,
The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen
(Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology, 2011).

Chemical analysis:
See online report at
www.wessexarch.co.uk/projects/kent/ramsgate
.

It seems inescapable:
Stephen Oppenheimer, “A Reanalysis of Multiple Prehistoric Immigrations to Britain and Ireland Aimed at Identifying Celtic Contributions,” in
Celtic from the West
, ed. B. Cunliffe and J. T. Koch (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 142.

A different, nonurban:
Philip L. Kohl,
The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia
(Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126ff.