Repas Magny might have been partisans of progress, but all agreed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.
‘The long-tailed birds!’ [Hippolyte] Taine, [the philosopher and historian] cried out enthusiastically.
‘The unharvestable sea!’ exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. ‘A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?’
‘Unharvestable sea?’ What on earth did that mean? Renan thought some Germans had discovered a hidden significance in it. ‘And what is that?’ asked Sainte-Beuve.
‘I can’t remember,’ Renan replied, ‘but it’s wonderful.’
The Goncourt brothers sat back, regarding this mass expression of Homer-love with their habitual, jaundiced eye.
‘Well, what do you have to say, you over there,’ Taine called out, addressing them, ‘you who wrote that antiquity was created to be the daily bread of schoolmasters?’
So far the brothers had said nothing, and had let the Homer-hosannas go swirling around the dining room without comment, but now Jules said: ‘Oh, you know, we think [Victor] Hugo has more talent than Homer.’
It was blasphemy. Saint-Victor sat as upright as a fence-post and then went wild with rage, shouting like a madman and shrieking in his tinny voice, saying that remarks like that were impossible to stomach, they were too much, insulting the religion of all intelligent people, that everybody admired Homer and that without him Hugo would not even exist. Hugo greater than Homer! What did the Goncourts know? What idiot novels had they been producing recently? He shouted and screamed, dancing up and down the room like an electrified marionette. The Goncourts shouted back, increasingly loudly, raging at the little supercilious poet, who for some reason thought he was more in touch with the meaning of things than they ever could be, sneering at them down his peaky red nose, while they could feel nothing but contempt for the man they would think of forever after as the nasty stuck-up little self-congratulatory Homer-lover.
* * *
These conversations seem as distant as the Bronze Age. Where now is our violence on behalf of a poet? Who feels this much about Homer? The Goncourts, with their scepticism and their modernism, their contempt for antiquity, have won the day. Their prediction has come more than true: the ancient world is now the daily bread not of schoolmasters but of academics. Everyone has heard of Homer, probably of the two poems, and many have read some passages; but no one today ends up shouting at dinner about him. Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote, or the phrases that recur in them.
Why should they? The place of Homer in our culture has largely withered away. I can only say that, for me, the growing experience of knowing Homer, of living with him in my life, has provided a kind of ballast. He is like a beautiful stone, monumentally present, a paternal foundation, large, slightly ill-defined, male and reliable. He is not a friend, a lover or a wife; far more of an underlayer than that, a form of reassurance that in the end there is some kind of understanding in the world. Goethe thought that if only Europe had considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better.
That quality does not exist in some floating metaphysical outer sphere. It is precisely in the words he uses, and it is on that level that something like ‘the unharvestable sea’ is a beautiful expression. It is the twin and opposite of another of Homer’s repeated, metrically convenient, perfect and formulaic phrases, ‘the grain-giving earth’. And why is it beautiful? Because it encapsulates the sensation of standing on a beach and looking out at the breaking surf, and seeing in it the unforgiving brutality of the salt desert before you. Everything you are not stares back at what you are. It is a phrase which knows that, as you are looking out at that hostility, behind you, at your back, are all the riches that the earth might give, the olive and the grape, the security of home, the smell of cut hay, the barn filled with the harvested wheat and barley, the threshed grains, the sacks tight with them in the granaries, the ground flour, the bread at breakfast, the honey and oil. ‘The unharvestable sea’ – two words in Greek, pontos atrygetos – is a form of concentrated wisdom about the condition of life on earth. It states the obvious, but also provides a kind of access to reality, both painful and revelatory. All Homer is in the phrase.
Those words occur many times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, often poignantly. Almost at the beginning of the Odyssey Odysseus’s son Telemachus, at the end of twenty years’ waiting for his father to return, first from the war against Troy and then from his vastly extended and troubled journey home across the sea, has decided to go in search of him, to ask in the mainland of Greece, in Pylos and Sparta, if there is any news of the man most people now consider dead.
Homer, over the course of thirty-five lines, prepares the ground for the climactic words. Telemachus needs to get ready for his journey, and to do so he goes down into his father’s treasure chamber in the palace in Ithaca, his thalamos. Upstairs, all is anarchy and chaos. The young men who are living in the palace, clamouring to marry Telemachus’s mother Penelope, are eating up the goods of the household. But down here, like a treasury of the past, of how things were before Odysseus left for the wars half a lifetime ago, all is order and richness. Clothes, gold and bronze are piled in the chamber, but also sweet-smelling oils, wine, which is also old and sweet, all lined up in order against the walls. All the accumulated goodness of the land is in there. Telemachus, whose name means ‘far from battle’,fn1 meets an old woman, Eurycleia, down here. She was his nurse as a child, feeding and raising him. Now that he is a man, she tends and protects these precious fruits of the earth. He asks her for the best wine to be poured out for him into small travelling jars, and for milled barley to be put into leather sacks. He must take the earth’s goods out on to the sea.
But Eurycleia – and the name of this private nurse, this tender of things, means ‘wide-fame’ – dreads Telemachus going where his father has gone to die. A wail of grief breaks from her when he tells her his plans, and she suddenly addresses him as she had years before:
Ah dear child, how has this thought come into your mind?
Where do you intend to go over the wide earth,
you who are an only son and so deeply loved?
Odysseus is dead, has died far from home in a strange land.
No, stay here, in charge of what is yours.
You have no need to suffer pain
or go wandering on the unharvestable sea.
Nothing could be clearer: the unharvestable sea is not to be visited. It is the realm of death. When Odysseus does finally come home (and Eurycleia plays a key role in that return), Homer has a one-word synonym for the sea: evil. The word she uses here for ‘wandering’ is also dense with implication: alaomai is used of seamen, but also of beggars and the unhomed dead. The unharvestable sea is where life and goodness will never be found. Everything Eurycleia has devoted her life to, the nurturing and cherishing of the goodness of home, has been the harvest of an unwandering life. The man standing in front of her is one of those fruits. The unharvestable sea is a kind of hell, and in that phrase the drama of his life, her life, Odysseus’s life, the life and death of those Ithacans who have not returned from Troy, of Penelope weaving and unweaving the cloth that will not be woven until Odysseus returns: all of it is bound up in pontos atrygetos.
For
