And he was correct. Languages shade into one another subtly. There are rainbows of dialects, and when one rises to take precedence, when one is called a language and the rest are termed dialects, well, that’s often a political distinction more than a linguistic classification.
On a nameless hill, on a long anonymous plain, stands the broken city of Troy. There’s not much to see, just a few leaning rock walls and a couple of archaeological trenches, but this literally, figuratively, and chronologically is the beginning of the Western world.
I had always wanted to visit Troy. So, with a dog-eared copy of Homer in my backpack, I slipped across the Dardanelles into what is now Turkish territory. The sea today is far away, the land having silted up over the millennia. Gazing across a long plain of grass with an old broken wall slightly angled, just as the mighty walls of Troy had been described in The Iliad, I knew that from these battlements a war had indeed been waged circa twelfth century B.C.
Travelling home from this war was Odysseus. I’ve always considered his exploits, as recounted in Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, to be the first real travel writing. In Latin he is Ulysses because, of course, the Romans later appropriated everything that was great about Greece. Even the name Homer is actually a Latin derivative. The name in Greek is Omeris.
Here, in the ancient tongue of the Greeks, is a whopping good story of love and misfortune, of adventure and endless travel. “Sing to me,” Homer began, “of the man … the wanderer. Under the wide ways of earth, caught in the teeth of the gods.” The translation I have is by Robert Fitzgerald, my favourite, because it rings and strides like William Shakespeare. Read aloud around a flickering campfire, it booms and thunders like a war drum. “Of mortal creatures, all who breathe and crawl … the earth bears none frailer than man.”
I love that stuff. It’s still some of the finest writing I’ve ever come across, except that in reality Homer never wrote it at all. He was illiterate, if indeed there was a man named Homer at all. The fact is that whoever came up with these tales couldn’t actually read a thing. The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral texts — remembered stories with all the colour and tangle of the spoken word.
This then is the borderline between oral and written cultures. We’ve been speaking languages for perhaps a hundred thousand years, but the writing down of them is relatively recent. Starting about five thousand years ago, we made lists of things, and around the time of Homer (sometime in the ninth century B.C.) written words began recounting the great stories.
It’s important to remember that languages, in essence, are merely arbitrary sounds to which we’ve attached meanings. With writing we took everything a step farther. We assigned random marks to these arbitrary sounds. But it all made sense. It was a way of encoding the world. It was a meaning system we had been working on for a very long time.
Scholars are divided about how Homer’s words found their way into print, how they at last became a written reality. Some say Homer, or someone else, dictated The Iliad and The Odyssey to a scribe. Others speculate that the stories were passed down orally with a few changes here and there for many more generations until they finally settled into their accepted texts. By the sixth century B.C., it’s certain The Iliad and The Odyssey had become the central books of ancient Greece — and by extension of our modern world.
Homer’s telling of the tales probably took place over many nights and numerous cups of wine. The storyteller might have accompanied himself on a stringed instrument, tweaking at the hearts of listeners with a swell of chord and melody. But what’s really important here is that somehow, somewhere, someone began to write it all down. The earliest Greek texts had lines that wove down the page. The first line was read left to right, as you’re reading this, but then the line after that would be read right to left, as in Arabic or Hebrew, so that the eye literally zigzagged down the page. And though this at first seems absurd, at least one modern theorist has wondered why this manner of reading and printing never caught on. It really does seem to make much more sense.
At any rate, none of that really matters. What’s important is that someone wrote the stories down. Writing crystallizes language. It catches it, holding it like an insect in a fossilized drop of amber.
And now here I was, almost three thousand years later, taking in something Homer himself had never actually seen. I wondered how a blind man could have been so precise with his descriptions. Scratching my own poor stories onto paper, I’m still humbled and inspired by his eloquence.
For the next four weeks I followed Homer’s sweet trail of words back into Greece. I plunged into his wine-dark seas. I slept on the deck of a half-dozen rusting and anonymous ferries, chugging southward from island to island across the placid Aegean Sea, and whenever I could I read a line in The Odyssey and came upon the very real place being described.
On Crete I hiked up to the ancient ruins of Knossos. Odysseus brushed past here on his way to the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Knossos is a Minoan palace a thousand years older than classical Greek civilization. It has been largely reconstructed by a French archaeological team, and walking around its ruins, I could feel how impressive it must have once been.
Here one of the very earliest writing systems was unearthed. The Linear B script was discovered on a number of broken clay tablets, but it wasn’t until 1953 that it was finally deciphered. The script is a form of archaic Greek dialect and is based mostly on syllabic signs, a fair number of logograms (where a single symbol represents a whole word), and a base ten number system, the forerunner of our own mathematics. Most of the tablets are simply lists, a kind of accounting of tools, animals, and materials, but they provided the basis for the written language to come. The letters would soon relax and blossom into the call of Sirens and Cyclops, and over time would record the tale of Odysseus, shining among the deathless gods, sailing to his one true love on the distant shores of Ithaca.
The south coast of Crete faces Africa. A dusty bus ride gets you there — eventually. Over the backbone of the island I bounced along, heading for a little seaside village named Matala.
In the 1960s, Matala was on the hippie trail. Jimi Hendrix came through here. Cat Stevens stopped by on his way to India. Joni Mitchell lived in one of the caves in the cliffs. Nowadays police sweep through the caves in the evening and eject anybody trying to recapture their youth. The caves are ancient Minoan tombs and stare down over a bright beach, flooded during the day with travellers. I met no one here except for a bedraggled, eccentric old woman. She was from Germany originally, she said, but had lived in Greece for years. The woman cackled, hacked, and told me about the bonfires that used to roar on the beach decades ago. She spoke about the young men with their guitars, about their long hair and their dreams, and the crashing surf that comes in from Africa.
So one dark night, under the starry dome, I went down to sit on the beach. Far off in front of me were the coasts of Egypt and Tunisia. This was the end of the known world for ancient Greek wayfarers. Beyond this was only the strange, the curious mention of elephants, and spices.
I sat on the cool sand and thought about the Rosetta stone, which was used to first decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They hadn’t been read for a couple of thousand years, but when the Rosetta stone was unearthed by a troop of Napoleon’s soldiers in the dunes along the Nile River, it was immediately recognized as the needed missing linguistic link.
The Rosetta stone is just a big flat rock with inscriptions describing the
