"Homer and his Iliad" by Robin Lane Fox

This is a book about the Iliad written by an expert in his field. I have previously read RLF's Alexander the Great, which I found slightly heavy going, and Travelling Heroes in which he attempts to show that colonists from the island of Euboea were instrumental in many of the early advances of the classical Greek world. Like Travelling Heroes, Homer and his Iliad is full of ideas and simply stuffed with scholarship but rather incoherently present. I never found it difficult to understand but as an intelligent non-specialist, I rather lost the wood for the trees. He was trying to establish some facts about Homer but often the evidence seemed to amount to little more than his opinion and is distributed about the book is such a way that I found it difficult in my head to assemble all the little snippets to decide whether he had adequately supported his main thesis.

For example, he works hard to establish that Homer was a single author who wrote the entire Iliad, except for the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 and the 10th Book, which, he claims, were interpolations by later authors. But his supposition that the Iliad was created as a spoken or recited poem (evidenced by features such as repetition and ring composition which he says are typical of oral poetry) militates against the single author theory: other epic poems in the oral tradition are reinterpreted each time a new poet recites them. So RLF maintains that Homer must have dictated the poem, thereby fixing its form (and dating the composition to after the introduction of alphabetic literacy in Greece). But then he cites other passages which suggest a later date for composition than he now maintains and he can only explain these away by assuming that they are interpolations by those subsequent to Homer. Indeed, as I discovered in Hidden Hands, it was common for scribes when copying a manuscript to make additions or amendments. But surely this undermines his argument against the 'patchwork' theory: that the Iliad was created by a number of authors. He states “In general terms it is a fallacy to assume that unity of design entails a single author, but the rest of the Iliad’s plot is so pervasively signposted that a single author is evidently guiding its course.” (Ch 6) which seems to underline the feeling that RLF has started with a theory and isn't prepared to let inconvenient facts spoil it.

Furthermore, the arguments for dating the composition of the Iliad seem to be scattered over several chapters and presented in no particular order. I found this confusing. It would have been clearer if RLF had concentrated on a few key dates. For example, even though his stories are set firmly in the Bronze Age there is a mention of iron-tipped arrows ploughshares and this therefore dates (at least that passage which may, of course, be a later interpolation) to after this technology was introduced which puts an earliest composition date at c1020 BC. On the other hand, Homer never mentions coinage and, since this was introduced into that area of the world in about 650 BC it might be inferred that the Iliad was written after that date. Simple arguments such as this, especially if presented on a timeline would have made the dating of the poem clearer.

One feature that I desperately needed was the addition of a map. RLF repeatedly refers to places such as the Troad and I for one wasn't sure where they were. (He also repeatedly refers to the land-mass known to the Romans as Asia Minor and nowadays as Turkey as 'Asia' which is surely bound to lead to confusion!). He even gives geographical arguments, such as Chryse walking down the shore to a temple. My understanding of these arguments would have been massively enhanced with a few simple maps.

There were times when his obvious partiality for the Iliad (and for a couple of other epic poems that he had studied) seemed to lead him to make instant judgements. For example, after establishing how careful Homer was with his geographical references in the Iliad (saying that “throughout antiquity, Greek poetry and cult shows a strong connection to particular sites and landscapes in the real world.” Ch 3), he then dismisses generations of scholars who have tried to use geographical references in the Odyssey to trace the path of Odysseus (for example Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford) by calling it "a journey into neverland" (Ch 3) without, so far as I can see, a single shred of evidence to back this statement up. This isn't the only time when RLF appears to want to have his cake and eat it.

Don't get me wrong, there were many interesting things in this book, just as there were with Travelling Heroes. But the incoherence confused me and the apparent cherry-picking of facts left me unconvinced. Map and a timeline too, please.

Selected quotes:
“When Helen and Paris re-meet in his bedroom in book 3, how much of the day has passed? They make love, but are they having prime-time sex, in the afternoon?” (Ch 5)
“Close encounters with Homeric gods or goddesses follow a general pattern. They appear, concealing their identity. They talk and intervene, and usually only when they are departing does their identity become clear. Intimacy provokes awe and fear, but the god reassures. This pattern ... also occurs, independently, in parts of the Bible, in the visits paid by angels.” (Ch 28)
“In societies where social relations are highly unequal and stratified, those relations of power are projected onto gods” (Ch 28)
“There is no cosmic justice. ... Homer’s listeners were aware that gods had anger and spite and [it] might lie behind disease or the destruction of a city. It might cause earthquakes or famine.” (Ch 280)
“The explanation of misfortune is a crucial function of religion.” (Ch 28)
“Sex with a god always makes a girl pregnant. If he has sex with her twice in one encounter, she has twins.” (Ch 29)

December 2023; 398 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A biography" by Alberto Manguel

I look for two things in a non-fiction book. First, that I should learn something from it. This shouldn't be a high hurdle since I tend to read to expand my knowledge. However, I learn more from some books that others. My second criterion is that it should be readable by which I mean that I should keep wanting to turn the pages,

This book passed both these tests although perhaps not quite as spectacularly on either criterion as The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson which I found both addictive and fascinating.

Most of the book is not about Homer's Iliad and Odyssey but about the effect of these works on subsequent centuries. Thus Manguel discusses Virgil, Dante, Alexander Pope (who despite not knowing Greek produced a best-selling translation by reading other translations; Gibbon said his version had ‘every merit except that of likeness to the original'; C12), Joyce, and folklore:

• “Virgil ‘did not understand the fundamental principle in Homer’s world, that poetry belongs to the defeated and the dead.” (C4)
• “The model for Dante’s Commedia is a composite of many sources, from Homer ( via Virtgil) to Arabic accounts of Muhammad's journey to the other world, the Mi’raj; one version of the latter was translated into Castilian by order of Alfonso X, and then into Latin, French and Italian, the last of which Dante probably read.” (C8)
• Icelandic saga “Story of Egill One-Hand” influenced by Ulysses and Polyphemus and later became Jack and the Beanstalk. (C7)

He also recounts how a village in war-torn Colombia wanted to retain their library copy of the Iliad. “They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.” (Introduction)

But he also spends some time talking about the originals. He supports the idea that Homer may have come from Chios: “The language of the poems is mainly Ionic, spoken by the early Greeks who settled on the west coast of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, including Chios; although it may have been the conventional language of epic poetry.” (C2) But he also supports the idea that the Odyssey may have had a Semitic origin: “Homer calls Circe’s island both Nesos Kirkes and Aiaia. Aiaia means nothing in Greek but in Hebrew it means ‘Island of the She-Hawk’, which in Greek translates as Nesos Kirkes.” (C19) He also tells us that there were once believed to be six other epic poems written about the Trojan war from which only a few quotations now survive: Cypria: prequel: Judgement of Paris; Aithopis: death of Hector to death of Achilles; Little Iliad: from here to up to the Wooden Horse; Ilion Persis: the sack of Troy; Nostoi: the Returns of Menelaus, Agamemnon, Ajax and Neoptolemos; Telegony: the further adventures of Odysseus (C6). Furthermore there were two (forged) eyewitness accounts, one from the Greek side by Dictys of Crete of which a fragment was “discovered in 1899 on at the back of an income tax return for the year 206 AD.” (C6) and another by the Trojan Dares the Phrygian which, after extensive rewriting by Benoit de Saint-Maure in 1165 led to the tale of Troilus and Cressida covered by Chaucer, Caxton and Shakespeare (C6).

Manguel in particular focuses on the Homeric account of the Underworld. His suggestion that it was a sort of retirement home was shockingly brilliant:

• “Homer had described a place without graded categories, an Underworld in which souls wonder about, incorporeal and listless, like the inmates of a retirement home, some still suffering from regret for what they have done or left undone on earth ... Homer’s dead are never pleased to be where they are. ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!’ says the ghost of Achilles when he sees him. ‘By God, I’d rather slave on earth for another man ... than rule down here over all the breathless dead’.”
• “Homer’s ghastly picture of the dead as a confused mingling of sexes and ages, occupations and social classes, extends across many hundreds of future years and will eventually take on its most recognizable shape towards the middle of the fourteenth century in the danse macabre.”

Other insights in this fascinating book:

• “Two of our oldest metaphors tell us that all life is a battle and that all life is a journey” (Introduction)
• “The invention of lower case cursive allowed scribes to produce more copies at a lower cost, since fewer pages were needed to hold a given text.” (C6)
• “Translation of foreign literature into Arabic can be said to have begun in the mid-eighth century during the rule of the celebrated Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.” (C7)
• “Several of Ulysses’ adventures surface in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor.” (C7)
• “Petrarch kept, with devotional care, a Greek manuscript of Homer which he didn't know how to read.” (C8)
• “To the opposition's argument that God had punished humankind with a plurality of tongues after Babel ... Schade answered with the notion that God is a polyglot ... and the angels and saints, being our intercessors, are also polyglots by necessity.” (C10)
• In Spain ignorance of Greek meant that Spaniards had to learn Homer through Latin translations: “When Miguel de Unamuno was given the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca in 1891, it was pointed out that the celebrated intellectual had no Greek. Juan Valera, chairman of the committee that selected him, explained: ‘’None of the other candidates knows Greek, so we selected the one most like to know it’.” (C10)
• “It was Aristotle, according to Plutarch, prepared the edition of the Iliad that Alexander [the Great] kept ‘with his dagger under his pillow’.” (C12)
• “Many poets work in this way: constructing a poem from prose jottings of ideas and observations.” (C12)
• “Pope is not aiming for verisimilitude; rather a natural artificiality punctuated by cadenced rhymes, composing verses with a repetitive beat not unlike today's rap.” (C12)
• “‘The concept of a definitive text,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, ‘belongs either to religion or weariness’.” (C12)
• “Unlike an ordinary metaphor that catches qualities in one object which it ascribes to another, thereby creating a new literary space in which what is said and what is implied intermingle and increase, the epic simile places side by side two different actions that don't blend but remain visually separate, one colouring or qualifying the other.” (C13)
• “Philosophers in Vico’s age offered two conflicting theories of knowledge: the first was based on evidence and argument ... while the second centred on introspection and thought ... Vico offered a third possibility: the imagination, and independent power of the mind that he called fantasia.” (C 14)
• In Book 2 Iliad Homer “stops his narrative and invokes the Muses. Partly this is a literary device that became codified in the Middle Ages as excusatio propter infirmitatem (‘an apology for one's own shortcomings’); partly, it is a way of lending verisimilitude to the telling by shifting responsibility: ‘It is not I who says this, but something greater than I, and therefore it must be true’.” (C14)
• “In the Iliad, Achilles defines the battle as ‘fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes’.” (C15)
• “At the core of ancient Greek culture, is a living tension between, on the one hand, a tendency towards order and individual fulfilment (which Nietzsche called ‘ Apollonian’) and, on the other, violence and destructive rapture (‘Dionysian’).” (C16)
• “In the Underworld, the soothsayer Tiresias announces not what will be but what may be: the possibilities of the foreseeable future are always more than one and the outcome depends on the hero's choice.” (C19)
• “We see ourselves as better than our ancestors, savages of the Bronze Age who, though they wrought fine cups and bangles and sang beautiful songs, massacred each other in horrible wars, possessed slaves and raped women, ate without forks and conceived gods who threw thunderbolts.” (C22)

So Manguel definitely passed the first test: I learned loads. I reasd it in two days flat which means he passed the second test as well.

March 2019; 237 pages

"Ulysses Found" by Ernle Bradford

Based on a lifetime of sailing the Mediterranean in a small boat, this book locates the places in Homer's Odyssey. Homer often gives precise sailing instructions and detailed descriptions of harbours (the exception is the clearly mythical voyage to the land of the dead) and Bradford uses these to trace the voyage. Sometimes Bradford agrees with classical sources (almost everyone locates Scylla and Charybdis in the Messina strait between Sicily and Italy) and sometimes he disagrees but in every case he has excellent reasons for his identification. Of course, this all assumes that Homer was working with a sailor or sailors or at least with their log books, even when, as Bradford admits, citing the lack of any encounters with other voyagers in the Odyssey, the Greeks of Homer's time never adventured into the Western Mediterranean.

This is a brilliant, fascinating, well argued and convincing book and the meat of the argument is perfectly spiced with anecdotes about the author's own adventures.

The route that Bradford suggests makes sense both in terms of directions, times and likely speeds, and the descriptions of land. In short, Bradford suggests Ulysses travelled north from Troy to raid the Thracian coast near Mount Ismaro. He was then driven by a storm to the Island of Djerba off the Libyan coast, the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He then travelled north to the land of the Cyclopes in SE Sicily, north to Ustica (the Island of Aeoleus) and again north to Bonifacio on southern Corsica, the Land of the Laestrygonians. He then travelled east to Circe's island (actually a headland) on the Italian coast north of Naples. After Circe he travelled west through the r (to the Land of the Dead) and then back to Circe. Leaving her again he went via the Isles of the Sirens (just south of the Sorrento peninsula) through the Messian straits (Scylla and Charybdis) to Taormina in Sicily where grazed the Cattle of the Sun. He spent years on Calypsos island (Malta) before finally travelling home via Corfu (the Land of the Phaeacians).

I've created a series of maps for this which can be found here


Fascinating bits:

• Odysseus means ‘son of wrath’. But Ulysses derives from Olysseus which comes from O Lukos, ‘the wolf’
• When young U is wounded in the thigh by a boar in a hunting accident. “This wounding in the thigh seems to equate him with a number of eastern gods, Tammuz, Adonis, and Cretan Zeus, all of whom were wounded and killed by a boar. These stories all stem from a Phoenician source.” 
• “The rudder, as we know it today, was a north European invention, and probably originated in the Baltic. This axled, hinged rudder was still considered something of a modern invention when used in the caravels of Henry the Navigator in the early 15th century. It was unknown in the classical world.”
• Odyssey ca C12 BC: “ the Cretan, or Minoan, seapower had collapsed before invaders from the north ... the Phoenicians had not yet founded their colonies on the North African coast.”
• Polyphemus has ‘eyebrows’ in the Odyssey: “It is not till later times that he becomes monophthalmic.”
• “Garlic itself has long been associated with magical properties ... s late as the 14th century ... we find that garlic was reputed to neutralize the lodestone, thus putting the magnetic compass out of action.”
• “Comparatively few rivers of any size flow into the Mediterranean, and it loses by evaporation two-thirds more than it receives from its rivers. This steady loss is made good by an inflow of water from the Atlantic.” This will allow U to drift back to the Med after visiting the ‘land of the dead’.
• “The two mountains which face each other across the Strait were called ‘The Pillars of Melkarth’ by the Phoenicians. They took their name from the twin pillars of the great temple of Melkarth in the city of Tyre. ... Melkarth was not only a sea god in Phoenician mythology, he was also Lord of the Underworld, and it was between the pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar that he was believed to dwell.” which is why C sent U to Gibraltar to go into the Underworld.
• “Baltic Amber was being imported overland into prehistoric Greece centuries before the Homeric period.”
• “It was the Phoenicians who first gave the island its name, Maleth or Malet - the Shelter, Haven, or Hiding Place ... the word ‘Calypso’ in Greek means ‘hidden’ or ‘hider’, and the Homeric words for Calypso’s isle, Neesos Kalupsous, can best be translated in English as ‘The Island of the Hiding Place’.”
• “The Maltese archipelago was inhabited many centuries before the basin of the Mediterranean was flooded.”

Great quotes

• “I do not think that anything is lost by attempting to find a skeleton - however magnificent the cupboard that hides it.”
• “Ulysses was the shopkeeper with his thumb on the scales, and an eye for the girls, handy with a knife in a dark alley, and at the same time in some strange fashion or other, capable of honesty - or was it of great consistency? - over most of the major issues.” 
• “When men return from war it is their record as fighting men which usually determines their immediate position in society. Inevitably within a short time the standards of judgement change, so that often the war hero turns out to be a peace-time failure.”
• “In Trapani I have felt history as heavy as a plush curtain. ... One's own life is seen as no more than a minute drop of resin oozing from the trunk of some giant tree.”
• “Places are little in themselves, you must earn them by your voyage.”

A wonderful voyage.

November 2018; 221 pages

"The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes

Jayners wrote this book in 1976 when he was professor of psychology at Princeton University and so, on the face of it, not a nutter. His thesis is, on the face of it, nutty. He believes that consciousness evolved in human minds somewhere between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey when all around the world people began to mourn that they had lost their gods, the voices they had heard commanding them to do things in their heads. These voices were the voices of gods. In other words, “before the second Millennium BC, everyone was schizophrenic.” (p 405)

The bicameral mind itself evolved: Archaeological evidence suggest early human tribe size like gorillas of about 30. "And it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve." (p 129) Social control was effected by individuals hallucinating the voices of gods and kings. "The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language." (p 126)

What was that like? He presumes that the Iliad describes humans well: "the gods were organizations of the central nervous system ... The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact the gods never step outside of natural laws. ... The Greek god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be." (p 74)

But then a further evolution took place. Language had ushered in bicamerality, now writing ushered it out again.  The world (middle east) became anarchic and a socially useful control that ran small city states was no longer an evolutionary asset; consciousness had to evolve. The change factors were:

• writing weakens auditory brain
• control using hallucinations is inherently fragile
• The massive social upheaval throughout the ancient world consequent on the eruption of Thera making it more difficult for social control to be via hallucinated gods
• Social mixing causing people to observe differences in others and thus to hypothesise internality
• epic poetry introducing narrative
• deceit becoming socially useful
• natural selection

The major gods became invisible. "We have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the banished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human ..." (p 230). The epic of Gilgamesh has later interpolations: a "barmaid" (late interpolation, c650 BC) in Gilgamesh story speaks to her heart. (p 252) Gilgamesh has sadness in his heart (p 253). "God Utnapishtim, the Distant ... is looking into the distance and speaking words to his heart, asking it questions and coming to his own conclusions." (p 253) "The literature on the loss of gods is an unquestionable change in the history of Mesopotamia, unlike anything that preceded it. It is indeed the birth of modern religious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the very psalm-like yearnings for religious certainty" (p 253) 

He notes the change in the character of God within the Old Testament: “He walks in his garden at the cool of the day, talking to his recent creation.Adam. He is present and visible at the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah's Ark with his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sechem, Bethel, and Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.” (p 301) “There is no question of virtue or of justice. So He-Who-Is prefers Abel to Cain, slays Er, the first-born of Judah, having taken a dislike to him, first tells Abraham to beget a son, and then later orders him to kill the son even as criminal psychotics might be directed today.” (p 304)

He notes that words that are key in the Iliad change as we move to the Odyssey:

• thumos: activity, movement, agitation (perhaps caused by adrenaline) (p 262)
• phrenes: lungs, breathing (p 263)
• kradie: later kardia, cardiac, heart (p 265); "originally, I suggest, it simply meant quivering, coming from the verb kroteo, to beat." (p 266)
• etor: belly, guts (p 267)
• ker: trembling, perhaps from kradie, perhaps from cheir, hand (p 268)
• noos: "from noeo = to see, is perception itself" (p 269) "The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind". (p 269)
• mermerizo: divided into two parts, in two minds (p 259)
• psyche: from "psychein = to breathe", life

From Iliad to Odyssey these terms increase except for thumos which decreases. (p 274) "The Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of time ... there is also an increased ratio of abstract terms to concrete" (p 276)

And oracles which were once everyday now become specialized. He sees six stages in the development of oracles: (pp 329 - 330)

• Place
• Prophet
• Trained prophet
• Possessed prophet
• Interpreted possessed prophet
• Erratic

Nowadays he sees the vestiges of bicamerality in those with Tourette's syndrome, in schizophrenics and in religious group ceremonies like Voodoo and the glossolalia experienced in certain charismatic churches.

• “Hallucinations are dependent on the teachings and expectations of childhood” (p 410)
• The memoirs of Schreiber a German suffering from schizophrenia mention that “as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct hissing.” (p 416)
• “The patient in trying to keep some control over his behaviour repeats over and over to himself ‘I am’ or ‘I am the one present in everything’ ... another patient may use only single words like ‘strength’ or ‘life’ to try to anchor himself against the dissolution of his consciousness.” (p 420)

I didn't find it convincing. Clearly there were profound social and cultural changes at these times and the nature of godness changed (and has changed again more recently) but these are surely much easier to explain as cultural changes. We all (?) hear voices in our heads and some interpret this as voices from outside their heads. Perhaps that interpretation was more common among pre-literate people. Perhaps, also, hallucinations were more common in ancient times: the ancient Greeks were always watering their strong wines, perhaps before modern methods of food production it was quite common to ingest psychoactive substances with your bread and your beer. It just seems a step too far to postulate that bicamerality evolved into human brain architecture and then evolved out again in favour of consciousness.

One of the troubles with this thesis is his use of language. For example: "The function of meter in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener." (p 73) The use of "most certainly" suggest to my bullshit detection faculty that he is using rhetoric to bolster a weak argument. If the argument is strong enough, don't add superfluous qualifiers.

He also makes claims that are just plain wrong. "The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history." (p 76) But of course it is imaginative creative literature. It is historical fiction. It is like saying the Shakespeare's Richard III is not drama but biography. Furthermore, the analysis of words used in the Iliad which Jaynes undertakes later is a type of literary criticism. 

But a fascinating read and there were lots of side snippets some of which I have recorded below.

By products:

• If you continually mistype 'the' as 'hte' you should practise typing 'hte': "the mistake drops away - a phenomenon called negative practice" (p 34)
• "Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds." (p 256)
• Time is “spread out in a spatial succession ... The before and after of time on metaphored into a spatial succession.” (p 280)
• “When I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway in order not to be trampled on. Everything is flying away from me. In the doorway I can gather together the pieces of my body.” (p 425 )
• The word psyche originally meant life and only later came to mean soul. (p 291) “So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. ... So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins it's huge haunted career through history.” (p 291)
• “The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.” (p 294)
• "You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness." (p 60)
• "the most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors". (p 48) He gives huge numbers of examples that use the human body such as the head of the household, the face of a clock, the brow of a hill, the teeth of a comb, the lip of a crater, the arm of a chair, the leg of a table ... (p 49) 
• All the tablets from Hammurabi "are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand" (p 198): H himself?

Cuneiform poetry: (p 225)

One who has no god, as he walks along the street,
Headache envelops him like a garment

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

September 2017; 446 pages

"The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters" by Adam Nicolson

This book was loaned to me by my mate Fred who also loaned me 'A Time of Gifts' (see below). He's got good taste! I thought this was a brilliant book. Adam Nicolson writes beautifully and the content of what he writes is unbelievably interesting. It is that rare thing: a book which is better than the reviews quoted by the publisher.

Perhaps it is the scope of the book that is most astonishing. I thought it was about Homer. It is about chickens (which reached the Aegean from the Far East in about 500 BC, after Socrates, and were known as the 'Persian Bird' ;p 27) and language (the Greek word dedmeto comes from the Indo European damazo from which we get tame, domesticate and dominate; Homer also uses it for seduction (probably a euphemism for rape) and uses it in connection with "young girls, enemies, heifers and wives"; p 21); it even recounts the author's experience of homosexual rape (having lost his way in a Syrian desert a man held a knife to his throat: "He made me undress, holding the knife into the side of my neck as he did so ... I knelt in the dust as he raped me, a pitiable  little dog-like action from behind, the point of his knife jiggling in the side of my neck with his frantic movements ... I felt him coming over my thighs and buttocks. It all seemed entirely prosaic ... not anything that would raise my pulse ... I stood for longer than I knew in the shower"; pp 122 - 123).

He explores how the great Homeric epics were composed as oral poetry. They are in hexameters; "the fifth foot is usually a dactyl ... and the final foot is always a spondee"; there is a caesura somewhere in the line. In order to recite so many lines in such a relatively strict form, Homer made use of stock phrases (such as swift ships even when the ships are not swift at all). In a tour de force of analogy, Nicolson recounts an epic recited on the spot by a modern poet in Crete which tells of the kidnap of a Nazi general by Patrick Leigh Fermor (author of A Time of Gifts, another beautifully written book) during the Second World War: Tambakis (a real Cretan hero who had nothing to do with this particular operation) "goes to Herakleion and finds a beautiful girl there (he didn't). She is the secretary to the German general (he didn't have one) ... the German general ... whispering across the pillow, tells her hius plans (Of course he didn't).  ... The ambush is laid ... The Cretans stop Kaiseri's car, strip him naked (they didn't) , he begs for mercy for the sake of his children (he didn't, but this is a motif that usually appears at these moments in Cretan poetry) ... They arrive in Sfakia (they didn't) where the people try to kill Kaiseri (they didn't) before a submarine (it was a launch) sweeps him off to Egypt. Hitler is in despair (he probably was in June 1944, if for other reasons)." (p 92) In other words, everything is true except for the facts.

Nicolson attempts to find a historical context for Homer through a variety of routes. For example, he notes that Homer speaks of silver-riveted swords and helmets made from the tusks of boars; these are found in Mycenaean graces up to the sixteenth century BC. He notes that Homeric language stems, as do so many, from Proto Indo European and that this language has "no shared words for laurel, cypress or olive; this cannot have been a Mediterranean place. But cattle and sheep are both there. This is a milky, yoghurty existence" (p 153)  from which. with other evidence, he decides that the original Achaeans were cattle and sheep owning horse-riding nomads from the steppes between the Black and the Caspian Seas who were only lately arrived at the sea. (Presumably this is why Poseidon is God both of sea and horses; essentially he was the Olympian Secretary of State for Transport.) Homer is, of course, very keen on describing his heroes in terms of horses: Achilles is as fast as a horse and is told of his death by one of his horses. The Trojans sacrifice horses in the river Scamander. Aeneas has horses bred from some that Zeus owned. And the Trojans are defeated by a wooden horse. Even more excitingly (perhaps this just demonstrates the weird things that get me excited) the PIE word for the pole at the front of a chariot to which the horses are attached became the Greek word for the rudder of a ship, which can also be applied to the reins.

Nicolson makes the point that in these epics the Trojans are the civilized people living in the city and weaving cloth on their looms. The Greeks are the gangsters, the pirates, the barbarians at the gates. "The symbols at the heart of the city of Troy are those elegant, well-swept corridors of polished stone and the beautiful woven cloth its people give their gods; for the Greek camp it is edge-sharpened bronze and the unsheathed phallus." (p 181) Nicolson compares the Greeks to the urban gangsters of St Louis, Missouri: "Revenge is at the heart of their moral world, a repeated, angry and violent answer to injustice, to being treated in a way that does not respect them as people. ... Authority resides in the men themselves and their ability to dominate others. ... Crime itself on these streets becomes moral, and revenge a form of justice.  Like the Greeks, these gangsters are 'urban nomads' ... rootless, dependent on themselves, displaying their glory on their bodies, in their handsomeness, their jewellery and in the sexiness of the women on their arms and in their beds." (p 187) Disrepect makes them suddenly extremely violent. And the violence makes them feel good, one of them comparing breaking a man's legs to the feeling of ejaculating inside a woman. (p 189) Disrespect, personal affronts, minor slights, attack their core identity. This is what is behind the concepts of honour and glory in the Iliad, and the idea of fate, and the idea of undying fame, because when violence is your way of life those lives are necessarily brutish and short so it is important that you are remembered. "Gangs ... have their epics" (p 190). "The gangs treasure kleos aphthiton, deathless glory, because in their vulnerability and their transience, the way in which there is nothing beyond their bodies and the memory of their actions, they need it more than anyone who is lucky enough to live in the law-shaped, law-embraced, wall-girdled city" (p 191) And of course, behind the glory is sexuality. Homer "buries and dignifies" the connection between sex and violence in which the US gang members glory and delight, but the Iliad is after all the tale of greedy Agamemnon stealing from Achilles the slave girl Briseis and the murderous consequences that ensued. But although violence is in the foreground of Homer: war in the Iliad and the raging sea in the Odyssey "but throughout Homer the world of peace consistently resurfaces as a place of reproach and yearning, both memory and possibility." (p 167)

"The Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be. Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world? Do you, like Odysseus, manipulate it? Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that? Or do you, like Achilles, believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honour, as the only things that matter in the face of death?" (p 152) "Homer's subject is not elegance but truth, however terrible." (p 45)

Betrayal is a theme of the Odyssey. As the tale of the great trick, the Trojan Horse, is told Menelaus also remembers how Helen, the wife who had already betrayed him, called to the warriors hidden inside in the voices of the wives they had missed for ten years: "Is this intimacy now an attempt to betray them again?" (p 162)

Nicolson shows how the Odyssey is written as a complement to the Iliad; not only in that it fills out the back story to the Iliad but also in the sense that it describes wanderings while the Iliad is restricted in time and location and Achilles is a hero quite different from Ulysses. (p 60)

• The Iliad is set on the plain before Troy but it often moves location to Olympus and the Gods fly across the Aegean. "But the poem never goes to Greece." (p 181)
• "This is Odysseus's virtue: in the face of life's impossible choices, he is able to navigate between the whirlpool and the rock." (p 240)
• "We are all vagabonds on earth, nothing belongs to us, out lives have no consequence and our possessions are dross. We are wanderers, place-shifters, the cosmic homeless" (p 152)
• "Nothing in a storm can be inherited from one moment to the next." (p 235)

But the scope of Nicolson's book is far beyond just Homer; like Odysseus himself he ranges all over the known world:

• "People are pitiably weak in the face of ruin, pathetically hoping that their prayers for happiness might prevail. That is why the goddesses of prayer in the Homeric universe are broken, tragic figures." (p 183)
• Baths were important across the ancient world. Homer's word for bath is asaminthos, linked to hyacinth and labyrinth. Heroes in epics all had a bath when they got home: Jacob in Genesis, Gilgamesh, Odysseus abd Sinuhe (in an Egyptian epic) (pp 214 - 215)
• anagnorisis: the moment when you see beneath the surface; the shock of recognition that Keats had 'On the first looking into Chapman's Homer'. (p 20)
• "All modern versions of Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman" in 1788 (p 35)
• The Isle of Ischia near Capri in the Bay of Naples was a cosmopolitan place in 700 BC; the graves show no ethnic zoning and contain corpses from Italy, Phoenicia, Syria and Greece. (p 62)
• The word prekteres  links to practice, practical, pragmatic ... (p 218)
• The Philistines who invaded Gaza in the 13th and 12th centuries BC may well have been Mycenean Greeks (p 224)
• "Certain clusters of human genes ... which have their heartland in the copper-mining districts of Albania ... rarely appear elsewhere in Europe, except in two specific concentrations: one in the modern inhabitants of Galicia in north-west Spain, the other in the people of north-west Wales, both important centres of copper mining in the early Bronze Age." (p 116)
• "Lizards seem to be the only liquid" (p 134)
• Homer associates heroes with fame and glory, klus or klutos, and throughout the Indo-European world hero names have parts reflecting this, such has Herakles. (Presumably also Patroclus, beloved of Achilles and Phereclus, the Trojan shipwright.)
• Hermes "is the god of the thief, the shepherd, the craftsman, the herald, the musician, the athlete and the merchant. He is at home with all kinds of cunning and trickery, charms and spells. He is the god who invented music and discovered fire. Dangerous magic and a kind of phallic potency glimmer around him like static. He is at home outside the limits of normality and stability, and so he is the god of boundaries and thresholds, of roads and doors, of transitional and alien places, of mines and miners, of the ability to make and transform the fixities and pre-arrangements of the world." (p 231)
• Homer describes Penelope as periphron: "she has a mind which encompasses all sides of a question". (p 243)
• Homer uses the word doupeo (thump) for the sound of a dead body falling to the ground; it is often accompanied by the rattle of his armour (arabeo) (p 120)

In brief, this is a phenomenal book, justly longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2014 but why wasn't it short-listed, why didn't it win?

September 2016; 251 pages