Most people figure that when Homer finished writing The Iliad, publishing houses were breaking down his door to get first crack at it. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Homer put the finishing touches on his opus magnum, he was just another blind Greek poet who had to go out and market his work like everybody else.
This was no piece of cake, given that the major publishing houses were all located in downtown Athens, hundreds of miles away from Homer’s home, located somewhere in West Minoa. But what posed an even bigger problem was the unwieldy nature of the work itself. The Iliad, it will be remembered, was basically a performance piece, meant to be recited aloud, but existing in no written form. Publishers hated that kind of stuff. It seemed a bit fussy and elitist on the part of the author to operate like this. But it also meant that before Homer could begin lining up buyers for his word-of-mouth epic, he first had to hire someone to sit down and memorize The Iliad as it was being recited, and then go to Athens to repeat sample chapters to prospective publishers.
Which he did. Six months later, the man carrying Homer’s manuscript around inside his head returned with a gag in his mouth and a graphite shard wrapped around his neck, reading: Unsolicited oral histories will be returned un-listened to.
Undeterred, Homer visited a highly respected local oracle to obtain a list of publishing houses that would accept oral submissions from unknown writers. Then he sent out his mouthpiece again. But the results were uniformly discouraging:
There was also the additional problem of lost manuscripts. One of the part-time oral delivery boys Homer sent out drowned in the Aegean following a series of disrespectful comments about Poseidon that his cousin Bacchus happened to overhear when they were visiting the same tavern in Ephesus. A second had a concussion and forgot most of the important passages. Still another fell in with duplicitous satyrs, who sold him into bondage. And then there was the curious case of the messenger who disappeared for three years, then turned up at the local watering hole one afternoon with this message attached to his soiled loincloth:
Realizing that he was getting nowhere fast, Homer finally took the advice of other poets and went out looking for an agent. But agents were hard to come by and didn’t come cheap:
Infuriated by the suggestion that he should pay to have his work read, Homer began sending out sample chapters of The Iliad to small presses, employing one person to memorize each section. This led to hard feelings when he decided to rewrite the whole thing, cutting out chapters 7, 9, and 23, which now seemed turgid and flabby. He also nixed the long section about Ajax and Patroclus cavorting with the sultry Nubian goatherd, a subplot that never really worked.
“One man’s turgidity is another man’s grubstake,” said the man who had worked as Chapter 23 for nine years, wandering all over the Hellenistic world, rattling off his chunk of The Iliad to anyone who would listen: “Fact is, pal, this is the only thing I’m qualified to do. You cut me off at the knees now and I’ll never find another job. You’ll have blood on your hands if this thing goes south on me.”
Homer knew that this was true. In a society consisting of shepherds, vintners, hoplites, seers, phalanx designers, tyrants, philosophers, and the aforementioned goatherds, it was pretty hard to break into the workforce if the only thing you could put on your résumé was: “Have spent the last nine years working as a sample chapter from an unpublished word-of-mouth epic. Motivated self-starter, willing to start at the bottom.”
Nevertheless, money was tight, and Homer had no choice but to lay off the three chapters in question, promising to rehire them when things picked up. Two nights later, coming from a centaur’s bachelor party, the blind poet was set upon by a pack of thugs and beaten so badly that he went deaf, too. Though the assailants were never charged, everyone knew it was the three axed chapters that did it, and a few years later, when Homer finally got a few obols ahead of the game, he hired a pack of renegade demigods to feed his ex-employees to Circe’s giant swine.
Eventually, Homer did find a publisher for The Iliad, with The Odyssey appearing shortly thereafter. Fame and fortune followed. Yet many people through the ages have wondered why the great poet didn’t write more books, why he decided to throw in the towel after only his second masterpiece.
The truth is, Homer did not stop writing, but spent the last 30 years of his life preparing what he conceived of as his definitive statement on the human condition. A trilogy it was, consisting of The Hoi Ploy, a thriller about a Greek plot to assassinate Zeus and replace him with the more fun-loving Apollo; The Hoarse Trojan, the heartrending saga of Paris’s twin brother Marseille, a night watchman who came down with laryngitis the night the Greeks burned the topless towers of Ilium and therefore could not be heard screaming, “Here come the Greeks! Here come the Greeks!” And finally, the musical Aunty Tigone!
Once again, Homer used the word-of-mouth technique (less paper), hiring 65 traveling minstrels to memorize the 65 chapters in the trilogy. When he finally had all 65 chapters ready to go, he threw a huge party for the entire staff, many of whom had never met each other. At some point during the memorable blowout, Chapter 18 (who was Chapter 6’s ex-husband) had words with Chapter 6’s new boyfriend (who didn’t even work in oral fiction but had a job in a shipyard), and a fight broke out. Chapter 14, an innocent bystander, was killed. The police came over, rounded up a dozen suspects, and detained eight of them.
When Homer was a bit slow dipping into his pocket for the bail money, the detainees flew off the handle, announcing that they’d had it up to here (there) with the lame, anachronistic Mycenean oral tradition, and were pulling out of the literature racket for good. Several went so far as to cut out their tongues. Whereupon, Homer, now completely fed up with humanity, told the remaining chapters to forget about going to Athens, girded his loins, and quietly retired.
Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of One for the Books.
