The Greek love of beauty and Homer’s style
For the modern world the Hellenic spirit has come to be particularly associated with
Athens, and if the word Athenian is synonymous with the cultured and cultivated, it
is because the Athenians yielded to the spirit of Homer more completely than other
Greeks, like the Spartans, who turned their backs upon it. ‘For we are lovers of beauty
without extravagance and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.’ These famous
words, put into the mouth of the Athenian leader Pericles by the historian
Thucydides (2, 40), have been regarded as defining the Athenian spirit in its highest
manifestation. The Greek love of beauty is memorably expressed in the reactions of
the old men of Troy as they catch sight of Helen coming to the tower: ‘Who on
earth,’ they asked one another, ‘could blame the Trojans and Achaean men-at-arms
for suffering so long for such a woman’s sake? Indeed she is the very image of an
immortal goddess’ (Iliad 3, 156–158). After they have eaten, Priam expresses his
wonder at the stature and beauty of Achilles, who is the very image of a god (Iliad,
24, 629–633). The perfect beauty of the anthropomorphic gods is constantly implied
in the use of recurring epithets like ‘golden Aphrodite’. The value set upon beauty is
apparent in the fate of the godlike Ganymede, a mortal who grew to be the most
beautiful youth in the world and because of his good looks was stolen by the gods
to be the cup-bearer of Zeus (20, 232–235). The famous fifth-century sculptor
Pheidias is said to have been inspired by Homer’s majestic description of the dark
eyebrows and ambrosial locks of Zeus (Iliad 1, 528–529) when he made his famous
statue of Zeus at Olympia. The description of the messenger of the gods, Hermes,
with his golden sandals and wand, ‘looking like a princely youth at the most graceful
time when the beard first begins to grow’ (Iliad24, 339–348), fits exactly his
representation in the statues of later time.
Homer celebrates the beauty of the persons, places and material objects that
he describes in his poems, but a poet’s feeling for beauty is chiefly reflected in his
own use of language and style. And here the first remarks must be reserved for the
graceful beauty of Homer’s verse and its almost magical metrical harmony. One of
his Greek admirers writing in the last decades of the first century, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, cites (in the third chapter of his treatise On Literary Composition), the
opening lines of Book Sixteen of the Odyssey, which describes the scene in
Eumaeus’ hut and the reaction of his dogs at the moment when Telemachus returns,
as an instance of Homer’s ability to make enchanting poetry out of the simplest and
most commonplace incidents of everyday life. Dionysius points out that all the
words that Homer uses here are quite ordinary, such as might be used by a farmer,
a sailor or anyone who is not concerned with elegant speech. Neither is the
language in the least figurative. When the lines are broken up, the language is utterly
undistinguished.
30 THE GREEKS