the florid red of the wall behind him – the colour of living, not dried blood, the red of life – is the most astonishing part of this image: an enormous, pale bird, the colour of the bard’s robe, the feathers of its wings half-delineated in the red that surrounds it, its eye as bright and open as Homer’s, its body larger than his, its presence in the room huge and buoyant, nothing insubstantial about it, making its way out into the world, leaving Homer’s own static, singing figure behind.
The bird is poetry itself taking wing, so big, so much stronger than little Homer with his hairdo and his fingers on the lyre. It is the bird of eloquence, the ‘winged words’, epea pteroenta, which the Homeric heroes speak to each other, epea having the same root as ‘epic’, pteroenta meaning ‘feathered’: light, mobile, airy, communicative. Meaning and beauty take flight from Homer’s song.
It is one of the most extraordinary visualisations of poetry ever created, its life entirely self-sufficient as it makes its way out across that ragged horizon. There is nothing whimsical or misty about it: it has an undeniable other reality in flight in the room. There is a deep paradox here, one that is central to the whole experience of Homer’s epics. Nothing is more insubstantial than poetry. It has no body, and yet it persists with its subtleties whole and its sense of the reality of the human heart uneroded while the palace of which this fresco was a part lies under the thick layer of ash from its burning in 1200 BC. Nothing with less substance than epic, nothing more lasting. Homer, in a miracle of transmission from one end of human civilisation to the other, continues to be as alive as anything that has ever lived.
Homer is no wild, gothic figure. He is shown supremely controlled, as organised and calmly present as anything in this civilised place, with its great store rooms, its archive centre and its beautifully dressed and fragrant inhabitants. He is civility itself. By the time this fresco was painted, the Greeks had been able to write for about 250 years, running sophisticated palace-based economies, with record-keeping bureaucracies to organise tax and military service, and to administer complex commercial and quasi-imperial relations across the eastern Mediterranean.
If that is the world in which Homer sang, it is not the world he sang about, which was much older, rougher, more elemental. He sang of the past which the occupants of this palace had left behind. That time gap allows one to see the Homeric poems as I think they should be seen: as the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 BC recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 BC, preserved through the Greek Dark Ages, and written down (if not in a final form) in about 700 BC. Homer reeks of long use. His wisdom, his presiding, god-like presence over the tales he tells, is the product of deep retrospect, not immediate reportage. His poetry embodies the air of incorporated time, as rounded as something that for centuries has rolled back and forth on the stony beaches of Greece. But it is also driven by the demands of grief, a clamouring and desperate anxiety about the nature of existence and the pains of mortality. This is the story of beginnings, and that feeling for trouble is the engine at the heart of it.
This book will make its way back towards that fresco, looking for Homer anywhere he might be found, in my own and many others’ reactions to the poems, in life experiences, in archaeology and in the landscapes where the Homeric ghosts can still be heard. It is a passionate pursuit, because these epics are a description, through a particular set of lenses, of what it is like to be alive on earth, its griefs, triumphs, sufferings and glories. These are poems that address life’s moments of revelation. Here you will find ‘the neon edges of the sea’, as Christopher Logue described the waves on the Trojan beach; the horror of existence, where ‘Warm’d in the brain the smoking weapon lies’, as Pope translated one murder in the Iliad; and its transfixing strangeness – the corona-light in the scarcely opened helmet slits of Achilles’s owl-like eyes, which Logue saw burning ‘like furnace doors ajar’.
In all the walking and thinking this book has given me, no moment remains more lasting in my mind than an evening on a small rocky peninsula near Tolo on the south-eastern coast of the Peloponnese. I had been thinking about George Seferis, the Greek poet and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in 1963, and who had come here before the Second World War, when archaeologists were discovering that this little stony protuberance into the Aegean was the acropolis of Asinē, a place entirely forgotten, except that it had survived in the Iliad as a name, one of the cities from which Greek warriors had set out for the siege at Troy.
The sea in the bay that evening was a mild milk-grey. The puttering of the little diesel-driven fans that keep the air moving through the orchards on a frosty night came from the orange groves inland. The sky promised rain. Sitting by the sea squills and the dry grasses blowing in the wind off the Gulf of Argolis, I read what Seferis had said about our relationship to the past. ‘The poem is everywhere,’ he wrote. Our own imaginative life
sometimes travels beside it
Like a dolphin keeping company for a while
With a golden sloop in the sunlight,
then vanishing again.
That glowing, if passing, connection is also what this book is about, the moment when the dolphin is alongside you, unsummoned and as transient, as Seferis also said,
As the wings of the wind moved by the wind.
ONE EVENING TEN YEARS ago I started to read Homer in English. With an old friend, George Fairhurst, I had just sailed from Falmouth to Baltimore in south-west Ireland, 250 miles across the Celtic Sea. We had set off three days earlier in our wooden ketch, the Auk, forty-two feet from stem to stern, a vessel which had felt big enough in Falmouth, not so big out in the Atlantic.
It had been a ruinous journey. A mile or so out from the shelter of Falmouth we realised our instruments were broken, but we had been preparing for too long, were hungry to go, and neither of us felt like turning back. A big storm came through that night, Force 8 gusting 9 to 10, west of Scilly, and we sailed by the stars when it was clear, by the compass in the storm, four hours on, four hours off, for that night, the next day and the following night. The seas at times had been huge, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, solid water coming over the foredeck and driving back towards the wheel, so that the side-decks were like mill-sluices, running with the Atlantic.
After forty hours we arrived. George’s face looked as if he had been in a fight, flushed and bruised, his eyes sunk and hollow in it. We dropped anchor in the middle of Baltimore harbour, its still water reflecting the quayside lights, only our small wake disturbing them, and I slept for sixteen hours straight. Now, the following evening, I was lying in my bunk, the Auk tied up alongside the Irish quay, with the Odyssey, translated by the great American poet-scholar Robert Fagles, in my hand.
I had never understood Homer as a boy. At school it was taught to us in Greek, as if the poems were written in maths. The master drew the symbols on the green blackboard and we ferreted out the sense line by line, picking bones from fish. The archaic nature of Homer’s vocabulary, the pattern of long and short syllables in the verse, the remote and uninteresting nature of the gods, like someone else’s lunchtime account of a dream from the night before: what was that to any of us? Where was the life in it? How could this remoteness compare to the urgent realities of our own lives, our own lusts and anxieties?
The difficulty
