‘Homer and His Iliad’ by Robin Lane Fox assessment

Faced with a jumble of bewildering ruins, trendy guests to Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, the location of historic Troy, might discover themselves perplexed and generally dissatisfied. The broad bay the place the Greeks so famously beached 1,000 ships is gone, buried in silt from an area river, whereas past the tremendous sloping partitions, a palimpsest of settlements spanning 4,000 years lies scarred and disfigured by the deep trench gouged by Heinrich Schliemann, its first archaeologist, throughout twenty years of digging within the nineteenth century. Schliemann had been drawn to Hisarlik, and in addition to mainland Greece, by his ardour for the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and his conviction that they described or mirrored actual societies and occasions, not least the decade-long Trojan Struggle. So enthusiastic was he that when (in controversial circumstances) he ‘discovered’ a cache of jewelry at Troy, he proclaimed it had belonged to Helen. At Mycenae, excavating a royal grave, he lifted a gold masks and, swearing that the options beneath it had survived for an instantaneous earlier than crumbling to mud, knowledgeable the king of Greece by telegram: ‘I’ve gazed on the face of Agamemnon.’ The truth is, each artefacts have been sooner than the presumed date of the Trojan Struggle: the masks by some centuries; the jewels by greater than a millennium. In a way, nonetheless, this didn’t matter. Schliemann had achieved what he got down to do. He had found key Homeric websites and proven that the poems have been grounded in actuality.

However what of these poems themselves, particularly the Iliad, which takes its title from Troy’s different identify, Ilion (itself derived from the Hittite Wilusa)? Since antiquity, students have debated however by no means agreed on the way it got here to be written. Multi-layered Hisarlik may nicely function a metaphor for his or her often-contorted arguments. Most settle for that the Iliad has its roots in oral poetry carried out at gatherings held within the Greek ‘Darkish Ages’ and maybe earlier; some recommend that it’s an amalgam, a ‘stitching collectively’ of shorter works remodeled a few years; others that it’s a ‘snowball’ with a core of authentic materials expanded over generations by totally different arms. Whereas classical authors believed that it was the product of 1 man, generally imagined as a blind poet from Samos, few in trendy instances have felt compelled to attempt to observe down who that man may need been. Enter Robin Lane Fox. Having used topographic and literary detective work to ‘discover’ Hippocrates on the island of Thasos (in his current and good e book, The Invention of Drugs), he now makes use of his sleuthing expertise to attempt to uncover Homer, the person who he believes authored many of the Iliad.

‘Authored’, not ‘wrote’. Homer was, Lane Fox maintains, an oral poet, taught by nice masters, a part of a protracted custom which can have stretched again to the Bronze Age. However whereas earlier reciters have been content material to hyperlink collectively current free-standing episodes to kind a linear narrative, the Iliad is totally different, its particulars interlinked all through the textual content, which ‘solely make sense within the mild of the entire’. It’s partly this construction which reveals the genius of a single creator who dictated his rehearsed, perfected composition to scribes versed within the newly honed Greek alphabet (which can even have been invented for this goal). Already well-known, his oral Iliad (Lane Fox’s ‘most popular guess’ is that Homer ‘first carried out a model for troops who have been out at warfare’) was the product of post-mortem and expertise. Primarily based on the west coast of Asia Minor, someplace between Ephesus and Miletus, he travelled south to Lycia and north to Troy to garner element. However in response to Lane Fox he was not merely a poet. He might have been a charioteer – ‘I prefer to consider he drove a racing crew himself’ – a hunter, even a ‘putative gardener’. The truth is, as he sharpens into focus, this Homer more and more turns into a mirror picture of Lane Fox, himself an ideal horseman, who as soon as declared: ‘On my deathbed I’ll consider Homer, then gardens, the nice ladies I do know, and lastly my greatest days fox searching. After which I’ll die.’

Like Schliemann, Lane Fox has a profound emotional connection to the poem. As a younger man, he tells us, he sought to outdo Alexander the Nice by working bare round ‘what I took to be your entire metropolis’, and now ‘at any time when I learn [the Iliad], it reduces me to tears’. Like Schliemann, too, he appears at instances to have been so seduced by the sheer energy of the poetry that he’s the sufferer of a ‘Homer Impact’, the place reality and fantasy are blurred. However this could not blind us to his enormous achievements on this e book. Whereas there are flights of fancy (‘I take [Homer] in my thoughts’s eye on an uphill stroll for a number of hours on a crisp day in early spring, up via the crocuses which have been carpeting the slopes with gold beneath Gargaron and on to the foot of its gray peak’), for essentially the most half this exceptional e book – scholarly but passionate, and nearly hypnotically readable – will certainly stand as one of the crucial important contributions to Homeric research written for a normal readership in recent times. Combining an in depth examine of the textual content, analyses of similes and characters, dialogue of morality and ethics, gods, ladies and nature, comparisons with epic poems from different cultures, and an understanding that solely a lifetime of examine can produce, it’s a paean to maybe the best poem ever written. For these nonetheless to learn it, it’s an exhilarating introduction; for individuals who comprehend it nicely, an often-provocative problem to long-held certainties. For all his flamboyance, Schliemann found Troy, and on this e book, Lane Fox could have found Homer. Even when not, his masterly survey of the Iliad, its majesty, its pathos and its unparalleled development from wrath to pity make it a compelling companion to the poem that impressed it – a worthy Patroclus to the Iliad’s Achilles.

Homer and His Iliad
Robin Lane Fox
Allen Lane, 464pp, £30
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)

David Stuttard is the creator of Phoenix: A Father, a Son and the Rise of Athens (Harvard College Press, 2021).