Is there a classical archaeologist in the house?

Think I mentioned a while back that we were watching Michael Wood's old PBS documentary, In Search of the Trojan War.

Don't think I mentioned that it inspired me to go back and re-read the Iliad.

Not cover to cover.  I've been jumping around in it, reading a passage here, a passage there, actually kind of working my way backwards, since I started with Hector's death.  I've also been going back and forth between translations, comparing Robert Fagles' Penguin edition to Robert Fitzgerald's, which is published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  Both are enjoyable, but I prefer Fitzgerald's just a little bit more.

This is the opening of Book One as rendered by Fagles:

Rage---Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Acheans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

And here's Fitzgerald:

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinious,
that cost the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men---carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
Begin it when the two men first contending
broke with one another---
                         the Lord Marshall
Agamemnon, Atreus' son, and Prince Akhilleus.

I don't know which one is truer to the Greek original, but Fitzgerald's strikes my ear as truer to the structures and cadences of spoken English.

I just re-read the second book, called by Fagles The Great Gathering of the Armies and by Fitzgerald Assembly and Muster of Armies.  (Fagles takes that round.)  And a couple of passages caught my attention, not for their beauty or failures as translated poetry, but for their journalistic exactitude.

Homer's recounting all the kings that followed Agamemnon to Troy and how many ships sailed with each king and most of it is standard epic magniloquence.  Diomedes "lord of the battlecry" and his 80 black ships.  The great spearman Idomeneus.  Nestor the noble old horseman from sandy Pylos.

But then there's this guy.  Nireus "the handsomest man who ever came to Troy," after Achilles, of course.  But he brings only three ships and he was "a lightweight, trailed by a tiny band."

What's he doing in the list?

Or this guy, "the veteran Protesilaus?"

Just as he vaulted off his ship a Dardan killed him,
first by far of the Argives slaughtered on the beaches. (Fagles.)

And that's it for Protesilaus.

Homer also reports that Odysseus came to Troy with only 12 ships.  Seems like a small number for so great a king and so important a character, especially when a lot of nobodies have 40 or more ships in their fleets, unless the implication is that 12 ships of Odysseus' troops are worth a hundred of Agamenon's.  Given what we know Odysseus and his men are going to go through in the Odyssey, that might be true, but it doesn't seem to be Homer's reason.  He reports that Odysseus had 12 ships because that's how many ships Homer knows he had.

Homer also reports that the bows of Odysseus' ships were painted red.

I keep using "reports" deliberately.

As epic embellishments go, these details aren't at all epic.  They're just "facts."   Journalistic "facts."

Homer scatters little bits of what I would call journalism throughout the Iliad, not just to tell us how the soldiers on both sides lived and fought and died, and not just to set the scene.  He uses them to make metaphors and offer comparisons so that his audience can relate their lives to the tales of the Heroes and demi-gods, in the process not only helping his contemporary audience but giving us in the future little pictures of life in Greece in his time.  He even throws in some natural history as well.

And as migrating birds, nation by nation,
wild geese and arrow-throated cranes and swans,
over Asia's meadowland and marshes
around the streams of Kaystrios, with giant
flight and glorying wings keep beating down
in tumult on that verdant land
that echoes to their pinions, even so,
nation by nation, from the ships and huts,
this host debouched upon Skamander plain.  (Fitzgerald)

Homer the epic poet has a touch of the realistic novelist.  Those facts about the good-looking but negligable Nireus and the unlucky Protesilaus and Odysseus' dozen ships are in there to add versimilitude.  They are counterweights to all the fairy tale passages about how the gods and goddesses kept butting in.  Homer wanted his story to seem real.

But where did he get those details?  Michael Wood says that he had sources for the tales, older poems and songs that told the stories of War and the heroes and those nuisances from Mount Olympus.  But how far back did those songs and tales go?  Judging by the inclusion of Nireus and Protesilaus and some of the other minor characters, I'd guess they went back to the Trojan War itself.

The reason Homer knew about those minor characters and details about Troy itself and the geography of the battlefield is that he was using---probably without knowing it---primary sources.  The reason Homer reported the existence of poor Protesilaus and the fact that he was the first Greek to die and that he did it in a perfunctory and unheroic fashion, like the soldiers who died on D-Day stepping out of their landing craft before they'd put one boot on the beachhead, is that someone was on the scene to see it happened and reported it.

Of course I'm not positing the existence of Heroic Age war correspondents.  But it's very likely that each one of those kings brought along with their troops and horses and chariots a bard, whose job it would have been to remember and recount the deeds of the king and his warriors.

Embedded poets.

In addition, the Greeks of the Heroic Age appear to have been literate.  They could read and write and it's possible that many of the soldiers were sending letters home and maybe some kept a kind of journal or diary.  These wouldn't have lasted long as they'd have been written on clay and Homer wouldn't have had access to them anyway.  I think Wood says that by Homer's day Greeks had apparently forgotten how to read and write.  They rediscovered how to do it within the following five hundred years.  That strikes me as weird.  I wonder how often this has happened in human history.   But the memories from those obscure bards' tales and soldiers' letters could have been preserved in other songs and stories.

In Search of the Trojan War was made 20 years ago and there has been some great finds on the archaeological front since that have provided more evidence that there really was a Trojan War---the walls and outlines of a greater city from the right time period and more closely resembling the beautiful and magnificent Ilium that Homer describes, signs of cremations along the shoreline where the Greeks would have held the funerals for their fallen warriors, for instance.

But have there been more discoveries about Homer and the sources of his epic too?  Anybody know?  Is there an archaeologist in the house?

How about a Classicist?

Comments

[Buce]

I don't really count as a classicist but I have read chunks of it in Greek. My take (and I think it is a common view) is that Fitzgerald is a pretty poem but not Homer. Fagles seems closer to the Greek. Moreso even does Richmond Lattimore, but at a price of some opacity (it's the handiest trot).

Penquin had a nice little reader with snippets from a dozen or more translations. And many people will recall War Music, the --homage, I guess you would call it--the poetry of Christopher Logue, who I believe reads no Greek, but who has an uncanny knack for catching the mood of the piece.

[Davis X. Machina]

The roll-call in Iliad 2 is often considered the newest and the oldest part of the work.

There are towns that were flyspecks in the eight century who have impressive detachments, because there's an older, Bronze-Age political geography showing through.

Some newly-important may have had detachments inserted retrospectively into Iliad 2, too, places that were flyspecks in the Bronze Age.

There is no explict reference to literacy in the Iliad beyond the cryptic 'sêma' that Bellerophon carried.

Homer seems to have no clue that there was such a thing as Linear A or Linear B, or that his Homeric heroes had enormous clerical staff in their home palaces taking inventories down to the last cumin seed.

His world-view seems in this regard much more a reflection of his own Iron-Age conditions than the glory days of Mycenae and Pylos.

[Davis X. Machina]

I think Wood says that by Homer's day Greeks had apparently forgotten how to read and write. They rediscovered how to do it within the following five hundred years. That strikes me as weird. I wonder how often this has happened in human history.

It happened again, almost -- in the Latin West, at least, in the late sixth and early seventh centuries AD. Literacy did not actually vanish, largely because of monasticism, but the infrastructure of lay literacy just about disappeared. In 675 AD I would guess that the literate population of western Europe was less than the literate population of just the city of Rome in 325 AD.

[Dave Schuler]

Fagles is closer to the Greek.

[Lars]

One reason for many seemingly surperflous details (e.g. the list of ships) may be that they were use to encode important information (just as e.g. Australian dream time myths were used to encode geographic imformation).

From http://www.onereed.com/articles/vvf/astrocalmyth.ht,

"There are numerous examples of astronomy encoded in myth, but it is especially surprising to discover their presence in the most familiar stories of classical literature, such as The Iliad of Homer, written about 750 B.C. Homer was probably the last poet in a long line of bards who memorized and passed on astronomical knowledge through an oral tradition. This is clearly demonstrated by Florence and Kenneth Wood in their book Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded (John Murray Ltd., 1999). After years of painstaking analysis of the Iliad, these authors found convincing evidence that Homer's great epic is the world's oldest astronomy book, written in metaphorical language. They show that Homer assigned each planet and star to a mythological character, and that battles between Greeks and Trojans mirrored the movements of stars and planets as they fought for ascendancy in the night sky. It becomes clear that Homer's purpose in relating the Iliad was the preservation of knowledge essential for life in ancient times and the usefulness of observations to support theoretical ideas about the nature of the universe."

[Lance Knobel]

Let me second Buce's recommendation of Christopher Logue's War Music. Nothing else in English gets close to the original.

It's not a line-by-line translation. It's the work of a poet at the top of his powers, freely interpreting Homer in a work that has evolved over several decades. But unless you want to spend a couple of years studying ancient Greek in order to pick your way through the original (as I did -- and it's worth it), grab Logue.

On interesting recent studies, I'd recommend Odysseus Unbound, the search for Homer's Ithaca, by Robert Bittlestone. It's about the other Homeric epic (let's not get into the argument as to whether there were two different authors for the moment), and is a meticulous work of archaeology and geography to try to identify the various sites of the Odyssey on Ithaca.

[Buce]

On the subject of studying Greek as an adult--it's no day at the beach but it is not impossible. And to actual reading, Homer turns out to be on the easy side--not as easy as Xenophon, but a lot more interesting, and not nearly as hard as Thucydides, or Aeschylus, or Pindar. The vocabulary (of Homer) is huge but the grammar is straightforward and the epics loaded with the catch-phrase epithets that help you move from place to place. It's not strictly "classical"--it is a stage-dialect all its own with bits of this and bits of that. But for one who doesn't really know classical anyway, hey, what's the big deal.

[smintheus]

The oral poems that Homer synthesized into the Iliad go back at least as far as ca. 1600, as we can tell through references to physical artifacts that archaeologists have uncovered.

Susan Sherratt published an important article in the early 1990s, since reprinted in several collections, that analyzed the artifacts mentioned by Homer, related them finds from Mycenaean and Dark Age Greece, and postulated an archaeology of the Iliad. Her argument briefly is that the tale was created in several stages, the earliest dating back to the Middle Helladic Period, and the latest dating to the 8th (?) century BC.

To my mind, this suggests that any historical kernel of a Trojan seige would have to be dated hundreds of years before people have been trying to place it. If you look at the remains at Hisarlik (Troy), the most impressive city appears to be Troy II, not the Troy VIIA (destroyed ca. 1190) that has long been the focus of attention. Emily Vermeule long ago said this as well, when she was at Berkeley for her Sather Lectures. Troy II (whose destruction dates to ca. 2000) would make a much better candidate for any putative historical Trojan War, than Troy VIIA.

No, there's no evidence that Homer's heroes could read, though they could recite epic (oral) poetry.

The recently revived excavations at Troy are said to have turned up a large defensive wall that might run entirely around the citadel, but having a much larger circumference. The excavators have also found what could be regular dwellings between the citadel walls and the out perimeter wall. But what this might mean for interpreting the Iliad is very unclear.

Oh, and the Iliad really benefits from reading start to finish. It acquires a hold over your imagination.

[Lance]

Thanks for the comments and the recommended books and articles, folks. Lots of good reading ahead for me.

I have a question about the two translations. I've been reading more of Fagles' version this time, because Fitzgerald's was the first one I read and the only one I've re-read beginning to end. How is Fagles closer to the original? Does he capture the sound and sense of the Greek poetry better? Is his a closer approximation of the actual words and phrasing? Or is his translation also thematically truer? Am I missing something essential to the story by reading Fitzgerald?

[Lance Knobel]

You're not missing any of the story with either. I think most classicists would agree that Fagles gets closer to the poetry of Homer, but translating any poetry is notoriously difficult. Really, seek out Christopher Logue and you won't be disappointed.

If that doesn't satisfy your Homeric thirst, it is wholly worthwhile to try and learn some ancient Greek. Buce is right that Homer is more approachable than some others. Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek is a good start for autodidacts.