- Homer
(By Oliver Taplin)Preamble
The early Greeks envisaged the world as encircled by the mighty freshwater river of Ocean, and held that
all springs and streams derived from him. Ocean became their image for Homer: all poetry and eloquence
derived from him as he surrounded and encompassed their thought-world. (Among the literary papyri
found in Egypt those of The Poet, as he was known, outnumber all the other authors put together.)
Alexander Pope, Homer's greatest translator into English, found a different image: 'our author's work ... is
like a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind, out of which those
who followed him have but selected some particular plants ...' Like all really great literature, it is fecund
and inexhaustible, generous to all comers, and it may be cultivated in apparently limitless ways.
There is, in my view, no point in searching for 'Homer' by the marshlight of a pocket biography of the
author. Even if this were a good way of approaching literature in general, we simply do not have the
material. The many ancient accounts of his life ('... mother's name ... Chios ... blind ... died, etc.') are
largely, if not entirely, demonstrable fictions: he was given suitable lives, not a true one. The firm
conclusions of modern research are meagre, and even then are disputed. Date-somewhere in the area of
750-650 B.C.; place-the northern-Aegean coast of Asia Minor in the Smyrna area; poetic art learned from
other bards in a tradition of performed poetry. It will not do to try to fit these mighty poems to the little
we know of the poet. Even if 'Homer' is taken less as a person than as a historical context for the poems,
there is little to be gained: we have no firm external evidence of Homer's audience or circumstances of
performance. It is inside out to speculate and build up an external mould or framework called 'Homer' and
then to try to fit the poems to it. The poems themselves are our firm evidence and they contain everything
worth knowing about 'Homer'. The poet and his audience must be reconstructed to fit around them. This
internal approach from within the poems follows the motto of some ancient scholars, Homeron ex
Homerou saphenizein, 'you should elucidate Homer by the light of Homer.'
'Homer' is, then, for our purposes, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And what are they? They are narrative
poems; they 'tell a story'. But the interest lies not in the story, but in the telling, the way it is turned into
literature. Rather than summarize the plot of the Iliad, I shall attempt some account of its thematic shape,
of some of the fundamental concerns beneath the narrative, such as life and death, victory and defeat,
glory and ignominy, war and peace. It is for these that the Iliad has won its fundamental place in
European literature.
A further reason for not attempting to give yet another brief summary of the plots is that both poems are
extremely long-several hundreds of pages of long lines, which would each take about twenty-four hours to
read at conversation speed. Each of them is arranged in twenty-four books. While convenient and
sensitively done, the division does not go back to the poet. (There is one book for each letter of the later
Greek alphabet, and it is unlikely that Homer knew any alphabet, let alone one with twenty-four letters.) It