Homer's Worth

By Dan Wilson

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

—Marcel Proust

There is music in blood pouring forth from ruptured bodies, pooling on the floor. There is delight in driving a massive stake into the eye of a giant and seeing it burst and crackle and hiss. There is glory in violence. There is peace among heaps of corpses. There is dignity in deceit. We find in Homer all these lessons, distasteful and pagan to our Christian sensibility; but there are other facets of his poem which afford the reader great comfort and entertainment, for The Odyssey is not about epic battle, rather it focuses on characters and their relationships—father and son, husband and wife, host and guest, servant and master. And it is in the characters that we find the ultimate value of the bard’s work.

Homer presents an entire mythical world, complete with its sparse rules, capricious gods, strident youths, and strange dangers. He offers glimpses into the households of forlorn heroes and scheming nymphs, into clamorous dining halls where the tables brim with fresh-killed meat and heady wine. He lets us hear the restless murmurings of the sea, the hypnotic lyrics of a bard singing after a feast, the shrieks and moans and whimpers of men run through with spears and pierced by arrows, the fearsome command in the voices of the Olympians. Homer gives us ungrudgingly a taste of the vicissitudes of sorrow and joy that plague men whom Fate tosses about as fickly as Odysseus and his crew. His tale ranges over immense distances and numerous years, times of adventure and despair and grim perseverance, through “arching caverns” and across the “wine-dark sea,” past seductive songs reaching out over the water like an inescapable web, and man-eating tribes, and a people dear to the gods, at last landing on the shore of Ithaca, which ever after is synonymous with “home.” But even “home” harbors trouble, and is perhaps more treacherous than the innumerable trials undergone in distant lands. Establishing order in a house plagued by the chaos of unwelcome and treacherous guests, avenging wrongs and finally finding peace in the old ways of life is the greatest end to be attained by the returning king, and for Homer no feeling could compare with that of a husband and wife rediscovering each other after nearly a generation apart.

What would we miss having never read The Odyssey? The answer to that question is some 12,000 lines long, but a few points of particular brilliance shine bold enough to rise above the general din of the poem’s action.

We would miss the thrill of the invocation, its clear sense of “launching out” like a great warship of ancient times, its hinting at the incredible scope of the story about to commence, and its power and its grandeur, both of an intensity that matches the enormous expectations of the reader at the opening of such an epic.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy….
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too. (1.1-12)

Robert Fagles’ translation is direct, economical and poetic, with an easy grace and an immediate momentum that drive it, naturally and without excessive inversions or other poetic conventions that seem many times to hinder the effectiveness of the verse.

We would miss the energy and exuberance with which Homer infuses his action scenes. The grotesque detail, the morbid pleasure he takes in using similes to relate exactly how the sharp object was driven into the living flesh, the enthusiasm apparent whenever someone dies or is injured: these are what we would never experience, and perhaps we would never understand how people of long ago took such pleasure in battle without reading of it in such a manner. The episode in the Cyclops’ cave is a vivid instance:

So we seized our stake with its fiery tip
and bored it round and round in the giant’s eye
till blood came boiling up around that smoking shaft
and the hot blast singed his brow and eyelids round the core
and the broiling eyeball burst—its crackling roots blazed
and hissed—as a blacksmith plunges a glowing ax or adze
in an ice-cold bath and the metal screeches steam
and its temper hardens—that’s the iron’s strength—
so the eye of the Cyclops sizzled round that stake! (9.433-41)

Here Homer is most alive, where his words literally “hiss” and “sizzle.” The imagery is brutal and nauseating, but it brings the verse to its fieriest pinnacle of expression, as poetry glorifies violence. The death-scenes are no different, and Odysseus’ zealous slaughter of the suitors exemplifies the vivacity of description employed in all the death-scenes:

But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat
and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—
and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp
as the shaft sank home, and the man’s life-blood came spurting
from his nostrils—thick red jets—a sudden thrust of his foot—
he kicked away the table—food showered across the floor,
the bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth. (22.15-21)

We would miss things as insignificant and lovely as “…rippling out of the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea…” (2.462), and also those rare passages of simple, elegant lyricism which enthrall the audience, such as this one describing a joyous night after Telemachus sails off in search of his father:

they set up bowls and brimmed them high with wine
and poured libations out to the everlasting gods
who never die—to Athena first of all,
the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-gray eyes—
and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn. (2.430-4)

But there are also the times when Homer speaks boldly through a character, usually a seer, and pours all his immense ability into a monologue of terrifying portent:

“Night shrouds your heads, your faces, down to your knees—
cries of mourning are bursting into fire—cheeks rivering tears—
the walls and the handsome crossbeams dripping dank with blood!
Ghosts, look, thronging the entrance, thronging the court,
go trooping down to the world of death and darkness!
The sun is blotted out of the sky—look there—
a lethal mist spreads all across the earth!” (20.392-8)

Theoclymenus’ horror-movie-like vision displays all the bard’s strengths as a narrative poet—the intense drama, the vivid foreshadowing, the peerless evocation of living texture, the repeated incantation of approaching doom. The clanging of heavy, evil bells on a chilly night, tolling out judgment upon the heads of wicked men, are what we hear faintly in these lines. None but the Greeks took prophecies so gravely.

We would miss Homer’s unmatched sentimentality. His song is ultimately of peace and most ardently of love. All the numerous recognition scenes in which Odysseus reveals himself are quite emotional, but the reunion of the long gone hero and his wife Penelope ranks as one of the most climactic, impassioned moments in literature:

Penelope felt her knees go slack, her heart surrender,
recognizing the strong clear signs Odysseus offered.
She dissolved in tears, rushed to Odysseus, flung her arms
around his neck and kissed his head and cried out,
“Odysseus—don’t flare up at me now, not you,
always the most understanding man alive!…
you’ve conquered my heart, my hard heart, at last!”
The more she spoke, the more a deep desire for tears
welled up inside his breast—he wept as he held the wife
he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last….
Yet now Odysseus, seasoned veteran, said to his wife…
“But come, let’s go to bed, dear woman—at long last
delight in sleep, delight in each other, come!”
…Rejoicing in each other, they returned to their bed,
the old familiar place they loved so well. (23.231-338)

So “the man of twists and turns” (also the man of around a thousand epithets) returns to set his house aright and take his wife to bed in one of the longest-awaited scenes ever. Wily Odysseus, the ideal man, possessed of both a cunning brain and great physical prowess, overcomes human and superhuman adversity, and can at last settle into tending his island, Ithaca, the proverbial “home.” He establishes peace and will live quietly, though he is still promised future adventures—but these are to give way to an easy death far from the things that wrought such heartache upon him his long years. The slow fall from action into eternal rest in these lines once more affirms Homer’s versatility and narrative skill:

“The prophet said
that I must rove through towns on towns of men,
that I must carry a well-planed oar until
I come to a people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly. And here is my sign,
he told me clear, so clear I cannot miss it,
and I will share it with you now…
When another traveler falls in with me and calls
that weight across my shoulder a fan to winnow grain,
then, he told me, I must plant my oar in the earth
and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,
Poseidon—a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar—
then journey home and render noble offerings up
to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,
to all the gods in order.
And at last my own death will steal upon me…
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take me down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all my people here in blessed peace around me.
All this, the prophet said, will come to pass.” (23.304-25)

What we realize upon reflection is that The Odyssey’s value is as a gigantic portrait of a time and place utterly removed from our own, one bursting with figures of mythic stature, figures in which we recognize all the traits found in men and women of the present day. The bard created a world of things and people who live and die on a seemingly grander stage, but who nonetheless succumb to grief, loneliness, rage, and lust, just as we do. Homer, then, is solace, a soothing balm on the wound that is our own collective solitude. Without Homer, of course we would not know of “the man of twists and turns” or the “wine-dark sea,” and we could not admire the weaving of a tapestry so finely detailed as The Odyssey, but more importantly we would not have the opportunity to journey through a strange, unruly universe governed by foreign codes of obligation and conduct, and stumble upon characters with whom we deeply sympathize, who connect us to some larger invisible chain of humanity. The poet stands unquestioned in his ability to lead us through broad tracts of time and across vast spaces, conjuring palaces and storms and men and gods to our childlike delight, like some cosmic magician—all the while spinning a tale of heartbreak, endurance, adventure, and overawing love, allowing us to see the beauty of life, no matter which transient rules guide those living it. And we take comfort from the bard, when he assures us that Odysseus, after his constant struggle, found reprieve at last, because then there is hope that we too will find requiem.

and that was the last he told her, just as sleep
overcame him…sleep loosing his limbs,
slipping the toils of anguish from his mind. (23.387-9)