Reading Homer

Homer, not Uncle Albert

In my last post, I referred to “the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn”. Some of you may be surprised to hear that I didn’t make that phrase up.

It is, in fact, an epithet used repeatedly by the Greek poet Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Pretty much every time he mentions the dawn - which is a lot – it’s waggling its rosy fingers.

Anyway, these books are kind of a big deal. They are, I hear, a central part of the Western literary canon.

And as we all know, the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan war and the Odyssey tells the story of Ulysses’ (the translations I read were all Romanised) return from Troy.

Or do they?

In fact, the Iliad tells a very small part of the Trojan war. It doesn’t include:

Just good ol' war buddies

1. The beginning
2. The end
3. The bit everyone knows with the Trojan Horse

Essentially, it tells the story of Achilles acting like a dick because Agamemnon acted like a dick, until his boyfriend Patroclus gets killed and then Achilles kills everyone.

Not included, again, is the bit about Achilles getting killed by tearing a ligament or whatever.

In fact, what we primarily have is to pad out the above is:

• Exhaustive descriptions of various Greeks’ and Trojans’ ancestry;
• Followed more or less immediately by exhaustive descriptions of how those sorry descendents died horribly.

If I learned one thing from the Iliad, it is that there are far more ways to fuck someone up badly with a spear than I had ever imagined.

For example:

The spear struck Archelochus, son of Antenor, for heaven counselled his destruction; it struck him where the head springs from the neck at the top joint of the spine, and severed both the tendons at the back of the head. His head, mouth, and nostrils reached the ground long before his legs and knees could do so.

Thereon Polypoetes, mighty son of Pirithous, hit Damasus with a spear upon his cheek-pieced helmet. The helmet did not protect him, for the point of the spear went through it, and broke the bone, so that the brain inside was scattered about, and he died fighting.

Menelaus hit Pisander as he was coming towards him, on the forehead, just at the rise of his nose; the bones cracked and his two gore-bedrabbled eyes fell by his feet in the dust.

And so on.

So that’s the Iliad. Think you know the Odyssey?

Think again. Far from focusing on the well-known, exciting parts of Ulysses’ voyages (eg encounters with the Cyclops, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, lashing himself to the mast to listen to the Sirens), these are all dealt with in one flashback.

About 70% of the Odyssey is taken up with the frankly rather weird situation going on with his wife Penelope and 115 “suitors” who have been having a three-year long bender round at Ulysses’ in his absence.

So an awful lot of the Odyssey concerns not, in fact, what you and I might call “an odyssey” – but rather:

1. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp and talking to a pig herder
2. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp hanging around the party, getting abused (someone throws a hoof at him!)
3. Ulysses continuing to pretend to be an aged tramp long after anyone normal would have said “I’m not really an aged tramp – I am, in fact, the king and I am not happy with all this”

Eventually, of course, the “aged tramp” routine wears as thin for Ulysses as it did for everyone else several books earlier and – as is the way of Greek epic poetry – it all ends happily ever after with a massive bloodbath.

On balance, I preferred the Iliad.