In a Platonic dialogue, Socrates describes Homer as “the best and most divine of the poets.” Not a bad blurb, if taken at face value. Such an exalted position, however, could not remain unchallenged. Homer’s excellence, not to mention his very existence, has been frequently called into question over the millennia.
Paradoxically, it was a humble folk instrument from the Balkans—the gusle—that 80 years ago dealt Homer’s lyre a nearly mortal blow. A hand-carved, one-stringed wooden box covered with animal skin, the gusle is held upright in the lap and played with a bow, like a mutant violin. As Adam Nicolson writes in his imaginative and emotional Why Homer Matters, “Nothing about the sound of the gusle is charming.” But charming or not, this musical instrument has helped reduce Homer, at least for classical scholars, to a mythical being, a mere name imposed on a poetic corpus that evolved organically over time.
In the early 1930s, a Harvard professor named Milman Parry traveled to Yugoslavia to make recordings of the Serbo-Croatian guslars, illiterate singers of traditional ballads who performed at festivals and in coffee houses. According to Nicolson, the guslars “always sang their long epic songs of battle and disaster with a kind of hard energy, loud, at a high pitch, the singer’s whole frame gripped with the effort. This was no smooth crooning but a passionate engagement of mind and body.” Each performance was different because the bard composed as he sang, with the help of a fixed syllabic pattern and word units that fit the meter.
The best way to imagine this mode of composition is to think of jazz improvisation, which may begin with the germ of a melody and is elaborated on the spot, while adhering to a traditional set of rules or chord progressions that give it structure.
The paradigm-changing claim of Milman Parry and his followers was that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the products of a centuries-old, preliterate tradition of oral composition similar to that of the guslars. The idea of the epics as designed for oral performance is not farfetched, since the Homeric epics themselves depict bards singing epic tales. (This is art taking a selfie, so to speak, roughly 2,800 years ago.)
What was new about Parry’s work, however, was his claim that the performance was the moment of composition. His chief evidence was Homeric epithets such as “wine-dark sea,” “swift-footed Achilles,” and “rosy-fingered dawn,” which sometimes seem inapposite where they appear, but each of which has a unique rhythmic shape. He argued that the epithets were not chosen to be particularly meaningful, but rather served as compositional aids to the singer, inserted on the fly into slots of the dactylic hexameter where needed. At some later date, the fluid process of extemporaneous composition was replaced by memorized performances of the poems. Finally, perhaps around 750 b.c.e., the epics were written down and became the texts we have today.
Milman Parry died in 1935 at the age of 33, when, according to Nicolson, “a revolver mixed in with his clothes in a suitcase” went off “accidentally.” His papers were published posthumously by his Yale classicist son Adam, who was also fated to die young, along with his classicist wife Anne, in a motorcycle accident in France in 1971.
The influence of Milman Parry’s ideas, fitting so perfectly with the zeitgeist, and magnified no doubt by the drama of the three untimely Parry deaths, was so domineering that any hapless classics graduate student in the 1970s or thereafter who ventured to utter the noun “Homer” followed by the verb “wrote” could expect to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of the seminar room on a rail. As a result, in the view of most classicists today, there was never a person called “Homer,” any more than there was a Theseus or a Heracles. The name Homer is just shorthand for the process of centuries-long oral composition that resulted in the two epics attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The oral-composition theory of Milman Parry has become as accepted in the academic world as Darwinian theory. This is what makes Peter Ahrensdorf’s Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue such a bold statement. In its most radical version, the oral-composition theory presents a major challenge: To what extent can we find meaning in a text that has no author and that simply evolved over time into a masterpiece? To Ahrensdorf—whose introduction also addresses the analyst critical school, the unitarians, and the historicist critics, whose discrediting of Homer began with Bacon and Vico—the answer is clear. “In his two epic poems,” he writes, “Homer offers a systematic critique of both the tragic warrior heroism represented, for example, by Achilles and Hector, and the seemingly rational heroism represented by Odysseus.” Homer was a philosopher-poet who deliberately shaped his two epics to reflect on each other and, thereby, on the meaning of heroism and mortality.
Ahrensdorf’s first chapter, on the theology of Homer, questions whether the Homeric gods actually care about justice on earth. The gods are frivolous, inept, and self-absorbed. They capriciously inflict misery on humans. Because they are immortal, they can’t love as deeply as do humans, nor do they attain the wisdom humans gain through suffering.
As Achilles’ meeting with King Priam at the end of the Iliad shows, compassion is a human quality, not a divine one. Through a detailed look at the text, Ahrensdorf demonstrates that while Homer seems to portray the gods as supporting justice at the beginning and end of the epic, in other places the poet leads the careful reader to question conventional piety. Humans, not the gods, are the ultimate source of virtue. And Homer, not “the Muse,” is the source of wisdom.
Because of Homer’s challenge to piety, in Ahrensdorf’s view, two distinctive features of Greek civilization can be traced to his influence: the celebration of “the beauty of the human animal, body and soul” and a “singularly questioning posture toward the divine.” As a later Greek philosopher was to say, “Man is the measure of all things.” Ahrensdorf argues, convincingly but against expectations, that Achilles is the most philosophic hero, not Hector, with his unquestioning loyalty to his city and selfish desire for glory, and not the more shallow “man of many wiles,” Odysseus, who ends his epic in a cascade of wrathful violence. It is Achilles who withdraws from battle and takes on a Homeric role, “delighting his mind with his lyre . . . singing of the glories of men,” and questioning the justice of the gods as well as the entire heroic enterprise.
This is not an antiwar poet, but “on virtually every page of the Iliad, Homer presents with sorrow and with pity the horrors and the ugliness of war.” Among Homer’s many famous interruptions of his own narrative is this quiet reminder of the routines of daily life that war destroys, a short digression in the midst of the furious pursuit of Hector by Achilles:
By contrast, Adam Nicolson’s rambling and enjoyable study has a completely different feel from the organized argumentation of Ahrensdorf. It is partly autobiographical, and it ventures off on odd tangents, including a curiously unemotional reminiscence of being raped at the age of 25 in the Syrian desert, along with discussions about the Indo-Europeans, John Keats, the 1944 kidnapping of a German general on Crete, the Egyptians and the Hittites, the Spanish Extremadura, and the steppes. He quotes his own delightful poem about taking the night train to Scotland, remembered from the days when he invented bedtime poems for his children. It is a poem filled with repetitions and no subordinate clauses, much like the Homeric epics: Dark was the train and wonderfully shiny / the light from the station shining on its flanks / and the lights in the cabins glowing inside.
These two authors, although so different, come to similar conclusions. Nicolson, like Ahrensdorf, gives us striking insights into the epics and highlights Homer’s humanity, the poet’s distancing himself from his gods and heroes even as he depicts their shocking deeds. Just as Ahrensdorf quotes the passage about the springs outside the walls that the women could no longer visit because of the war, Nicolson quotes the famous simile from the Odyssey when the hero weeps at hearing a bard sing his own story, the story of the sacking of Troy:
Of her dear husband, who died fighting for his city and his people,
As he tried to beat off the day of
pitilessness,
And as she sees him lying and gasping for breath
And winding her body around him
She cries high and piercing while the men behind her
hit her with the butts of their spears
and lead her away to captivity to work and sorrow
and her cheeks are hollow with her grief.
Such are the tears that Odysseus lets fall from his eyes.
Nicolson sees in Homer “the ability to regard all aspects of life with clarity, equanimity and sympathy, with a loving heart and an unclouded eye. . . . That is his value, a reservoir of understanding beyond the grief and turbulence of a universe in which there is no final authority.”
Both of these books provide a path for the reader into a deeper appreciation of the first, and best, literature we have. One can never go wrong by treating a great book as though it were, indeed, a great book, composed by a great mind—and seeing where that assumption will lead. In the case of Homer, beginning from that premise leads to an understanding of the richness of Homer’s achievement, one that repays any amount of reading and rereading.
Susan Kristol has a doctorate in classical philology.
