Homer and the Invention of an Author
Nobody knows who Homer was. Seven cities claimed him, ancient biographers supplied him with blindness, a family tree and a strange death, and for twenty-five centuries readers have kept building a poet to fit two poems. This book asks what that building tells us about the poems, and about the people doing the building.
Boris Kriger brings his method for deconstructing biographical narrative to the purest test case the genre will ever offer: a life story with no life underneath it. Then he digs below the poems into the ground they stand on. Bronze Age armor described by singers of the Iron Age. Heroes’ names scratched on palace inventories centuries before the epics were written down. A prince of Troy’s region signing a treaty with a Hittite king. Archaeologists who went looking for Priam and found what they had brought with them.
Finally he reads the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves, scene by scene, as poems deeply troubled by the question of who has the right to tell a story, and what happens to the teller once he does.
Warm, sharp and often very funny, Homer and the Invention of an Author is for readers who met Homer in school and suspected there was more to him, and for those who know the poems well and would like to see them from an unfamiliar angle.
Keywords: Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, deconstruction, Trojan War, ancient Greece, authorship
Contents
Chapter One — The Lyre on the Peg. 17
Chapter Two — The Lives of a Man Who Left None. 22
Chapter Three — Seven Cities and a Beggar 27
Chapter Four — A Name That Means Hostage. 31
Chapter Five — The Contest He Lost 35
Chapter Six — Four Encyclopedias, Four Homers 39
Chapter Seven — A Role Without a Poet 44
Chapter Eight — The Man Who Recorded Avdo. 49
Chapter Nine — Helmets Made of Boars 54
Chapter Ten — The Letter the Meter Remembers 58
Chapter Eleven — Achilles on a Clay Tablet 62
Chapter Twelve — A King Called Alaksandu. 66
Chapter Thirteen — Nine Cities on One Hill 70
Chapter Fourteen — The Merchant Who Invented Himself 75
Chapter Fifteen — When the Palaces Burned. 80
Chapter Sixteen — A Hero Buried with His Horses 84
Chapter Seventeen — A Shipping List from a Vanished World. 88
Chapter Eighteen — A Society That Never Existed. 92
Chapter Nineteen — A Drinking Cup Quotes the Iliad. 97
Chapter Twenty — The Librarian’s Dagger 102
Chapter Twenty-One — Sing, Goddess, the Wrath. 106
Chapter Twenty-Two — The Man Who Said What Achilles Said 111
Chapter Twenty-Three — Helen Weaves the War 115
Chapter Twenty-Four — Wounding a Goddess 119
Chapter Twenty-Five — A Baby Frightened by a Helmet 123
Chapter Twenty-Six — Three Envoys and a Verb for Two. 127
Chapter Twenty-Seven — The Price of Honor 131
Chapter Twenty-Eight — The Night Book. 135
Chapter Twenty-Nine — Zeus Asleep. 139
Chapter Thirty — The Son Zeus Did Not Save. 144
Chapter Thirty-One — A City at Peace on a Shield. 148
Chapter Thirty-Two — The River That Fought Back. 152
Chapter Thirty-Three — Dragging Hector 156
Chapter Thirty-Four — Two Jars on Zeus’s Floor 161
Chapter Thirty-Five — The Poem of Force. 165
Chapter Thirty-Six — Tell Me of the Man. 170
Chapter Thirty-Seven — A Son Looking for a Rumor 175
Chapter Thirty-Eight — Seven Years on a Beautiful Island. 180
Chapter Thirty-Nine — A Blind Singer at a Feast 184
Chapter Forty — My Name Is Nobody. 189
Chapter Forty-One — The Unverifiable Witness 194
Chapter Forty-Two — The Dead Who Need Blood to Speak. 199
Chapter Forty-Three — The Song That Was Never Sung. 203
Chapter Forty-Four — Five Lies from Crete. 207
Chapter Forty-Five — A Dog on a Dung Heap. 212
Chapter Forty-Six — The Scar 217
Chapter Forty-Seven — What Penelope Knew.. 222
Chapter Forty-Eight — Twelve Women and a Rope. 227
Chapter Forty-Nine — Where the Poem Ends 231
Chapter Fifty — One Poet or Two. 236
Chapter Fifty-One — Taught, Therefore Saved. 241
Chapter Fifty-Two — Homer’s Second Lives 246
Chapter Fifty-Three — The Case Against This Book. 251
Chapter Fifty-Four — Taking Down the Lyre. 256
Case Study One — The Bard Who Arrived Already Translated 266
Case Study Two — The Doctor Who Stitched a Nation. 268
Case Study Three — The Monk Who Was a Boy. 270
Case Study Four — A Glover’s Son and Seventy Earls 272
Case Study Five — The Word That Gave Hamilton Away. 275
Case Study Six — The Anonymous Insider 277
Case Study Seven — The Former Policeman Who Wrote Too Well 279
Case Study Eight — The Novelist Who Did Not Want to Be Found. 281
Case Study Nine — Nine Pages from Nobody. 283
Case Study Ten — An Afternoon in a Military Office. 285
Case Study Eleven — Sixty Notebooks in a Bank Vault 287
Case Study Twelve — The Map That Knew Too Much. 290
Case Study Thirteen — The Manuscript That Burned in 1812. 292
Case Study Fourteen — The Edges That Crumbled. 294
Case Study Fifteen — A Griot Speaks for the Record. 296
Case Study Sixteen — Half a Million Lines and a Birthday. 298
Case Study Seventeen — Sixteen Fragments in a New Museum 300
Case Study Eighteen — A Business Card from the Second Century. 302
Case Study Nineteen — The Silver Mines That Never Were. 304
Case Study Twenty — The Constitution Fails a Test 306
Ancient and Medieval Sources 333
Homer and the Homeric Question. 334
Theory of Authorship and Text 338
Preface
Sometime in the early 1890s an English gentleman of independent means, a confirmed bachelor with a beard like a garden hedge and no academic post of any kind, began spending his summers in Trapani, on the western tip of Sicily, because he had decided that the Odyssey was written there. His name was Samuel Butler. He had already published a satirical novel about a country that jails the sick and sends criminals to the doctor, and he had managed to pick a public quarrel with Charles Darwin, which in Victorian England was roughly like picking a quarrel with the weather. Now he had a new conviction, and it was a magnificent one. The Odyssey, he announced, had been composed by a young woman.
Not any young woman, either. In Butler’s reconstruction she was clever, unmarried, a little sharp-tongued and well placed in local society, and she had written herself into the poem as Nausicaa, the princess who goes down to the shore to do the family laundry and finds a naked castaway in the bushes. The evidence filled a whole book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897. The poet, Butler noticed, was exact about housekeeping and hazy about the things men are supposed to know. She made slips about ships and livestock that no sailor or farmer would make. She let her heroines out-think her heroes. She was hard on young men generally and merciless to suitors.
The classicists of the day responded the way professionals always respond when an amateur walks into the operating theater with an opinion: politely, briefly, and with a visible wish to see him leave. Butler did not leave. He translated both poems into English prose so plain it squeaks, he laid the wanderings of Odysseus over the coastline he walked every summer, and he died in 1902 still entirely sure of his authoress.
I have a soft spot for him, and not only because he was wrong in such distinguished company. What Butler did was not eccentric at all. It was the most normal thing a reader of Homer has ever done. He picked up a text with nobody attached to it and could not stand the vacancy. So he stared at the poem until he found a hollow in it shaped roughly like a person, and he poured someone in. His someone happened to be a girl from Trapani. The ancient biographers poured in a blind wanderer. The Romantics poured in an entire singing nation. German professors of the nineteenth century poured in a committee of editors, and the twentieth century, after a young American carried a recording machine into the mountains of Yugoslavia, poured in a tradition. Each of them was certain the hollow had exactly the shape of whatever they happened to have brought.
This book is about the hollow.
I have spent a large part of my working life writing biographies, and nearly all of them were biographies of ideas rather than of people: what a mind did that other minds did not, and what that cost. Somewhere along the way I grew suspicious of the genre itself. A biography is a text before it is a life, and texts have habits. They prefer causes to accidents, turning points to drift, and one protagonist to the crowd that actually did the work. Recently I wrote those habits down as a procedure, and the procedure became a formal method, published as A Formal Method for the Deconstruction of Biographical Narrative (Kriger, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23159974). Homer is the case that method was waiting for. Every biography is built partly from its subject’s own works. Homer’s is built from nothing else. There is no birth record, no letter, no grave anyone could open, and still the ancient Lives exist, several of them, packed with incident and even dialogue. It is the cleanest specimen the genre will ever hand to a laboratory: a life story with no life underneath it.
A book that stopped there, though, would be a cheap trick, the kind of debunking that hands the reader an empty box and calls it a present. The poems are not scenery behind the problem of their author. They are about that problem. They are crowded with singers, liars, weavers and messengers, and with men who tell long stories about themselves to audiences in no position to check a word. Homer’s characters keep inventing authors for the stories around them, and keep getting it wrong, and the poems watch them do it with an attention that seems to me, after many years of looking, entirely deliberate. So the longest stretch of this book reads the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves, episode by episode, with the text open on the table and the coffee going cold beside it.
The poems also rest on something, and it would be dishonest to read them as if they floated in the air. They carry objects, names and customs older than themselves by centuries, the way a river carries stones from mountains it no longer remembers passing. Some of those names turn up on clay tablets that were never meant to last. Some appear in the diplomatic mail of a Bronze Age empire that has nothing whatever to say about Achilles and a good deal to say about a troublesome town in the west. A hill in northwestern Turkey has been dug into for a century and a half by people who badly wanted it to say yes. The middle of this book is about that ground: what the poems remember, what they misremember, and what their excavators wanted them to remember.
A word about tools, since the word deconstruction makes some readers reach for their coats. I do not use it to mean that texts mean nothing, or everything, or whatever the most fashionable person in the room happens to think. I use it as a workshop procedure, the one I set out in Deconstruction and Reframing: What Derrida Was Pointing At. You find what a text needs in order to stand up. You find what it has pushed to the margin so that its center can look like a center. Then you lean on the margin and watch the building. Derrida pointed at this. He did not always say it in a way a tired person could follow after dinner, which is a pity, because it is exactly the sort of thing a tired person can do after dinner, and Homer rewards it more generously than any author I know.
Two more instruments travel with me. The first is Intellectual Substrate Mining, the method of my 2025 book Foundations of Intellectual Substrate Mining, which digs for what a text takes so completely for granted that it never says it: the floor under the assumptions, the bedrock nobody described because everybody was standing on it. The second treats a manuscript as a piece of evidence rather than a jar for a poem. The oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad is thick with marginal notes and small editorial signs recording what ancient scholars believed was spurious, and a document like that can be read with the procedure I described for structured documents in science, law and history (Kriger, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23166797). A margin full of arguments is a crime scene with the detectives’ notes still pinned to the wall.
I should say plainly whose shoulders this book stands on, because Homer studies are a crowded room and a newcomer who pretends otherwise deserves what he gets. Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer (2002) traced how the earliest Greek audiences assembled a poet out of the poems, and anyone who writes on the subject after her writes in her shadow. My book covers a longer stretch of time and asks a different question, less how the Greeks imagined Homer than what any culture does when a great text arrives without an owner. Pietro Pucci and John Peradotto read the Odyssey with tools close to mine a generation ago, and on several points they got there first. Where that happens I will say so in the chapter where it happens, not in a note at the back, where honesty goes to be forgotten.
You will not need any Greek. Now and then a Greek word will appear, because an argument hangs on it and a translation would hide the hook. The renderings of passages are working versions made for this book, kept close to the sense of the lines rather than to any one published translation, and plain enough that you can hear what a line is doing before anyone asks you to admire it.
Homer is funny. This surprises people who met him in a school anthology, standing in a toga beside a bust of Socrates and looking as if he disapproved of the reader. His gods behave like a large family at a wedding where the bar opened at noon, and the poet plainly enjoyed every minute of writing them. His heroes sulk, boast, bend the rules at sporting events and lie with an artistry the poems openly applaud. A book about Homer that never smiles misrepresents its subject. There are also pages in these poems where nobody laughs, and when we reach them, neither will I.
The road runs in four stretches. First comes the invented author: the ancient Lives, the name, the cities that fought over him, the encyclopedias that still quarrel about him in four languages, and the Balkan singers who showed the twentieth century what an oral poet can actually do. Second comes the ground: what lies under the poems in archaeology, in clay, in imperial archives, in the alphabet, and in the hands of the editors who decided what Homer had really written. Third, and longest, come the poems themselves, the Iliad and then the Odyssey, read slowly enough for the seams to show. Last, the two poems are set against each other, and then against this book.
I would like this book to notice something nobody has noticed, and I have one honest attempt at that which involves counting. In earlier work with Treasure Hunt on the seals of the Indus Valley, we measured how predictable each position in a sequence of signs is, and that simple measurement turned out to tell a code from a language (Kriger and Hunt, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19103880). Homer’s verse is built from stock phrases that settle into fixed places in the line, which makes it a natural target for the same instrument, and the ancient question of whether one poet made both poems can be put to it. I will report what the instrument says near the end of the book, including the possibility that it says very little. A dull result printed is worth more than a dazzling one kept in a drawer.
Two more of my own ideas walk through these pages, and since they will turn up more than once they deserve an introduction now. The first is that a name can do a job without pointing at anybody, the way the management can refuse your refund although nobody of that name has ever drawn a salary. I wrote about such roles in Role Without Referent (Kriger, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14764.22406), and Homer may be the oldest working example on record. The second is retrospective drift: once something has survived, we read its survival back into its qualities and then admire the qualities for having produced the survival (Kriger, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26532.64648). Homer is the most admired survivor in Western literature, which makes him the most dangerous place in the library to be careless with that argument.
I have assumed a reader who has heard of the Trojan War, may have met a stretch of one poem at school, and would like to know why anyone still argues about any of it. If you know the poems well, I hope you will find the arguments new even where the episodes are old friends. If you have never read a line, the book will tell you the story as it goes, and with luck you will close it wanting to read the poems themselves, which is the only result a book like this has any business wanting.
One more admission before we start. I began this project expecting to dismantle a myth and found, about a third of the way in, that the myth kept doing useful work. Readers needed a Homer, and the Homers they built told the truth about what they valued even when they told nothing true about Homer. A biography that lies about its subject can be a perfectly honest portrait of its author. That turns out to be the most interesting thing about the whole business, and the reason the title has an article in it: not the invention of Homer, but the invention of an author, which is something every reader of every book does a little, and the readers of these two books have done on a heroic scale.
I like to picture Butler on one of those Sicilian summers, sitting on the rocks below Trapani with a notebook on his knee, watching the women at the washing places by the water. He would have been looking at them the way readers have always looked at Homer: perfectly sure that if he waited long enough, one of them would straighten up from the linen, wipe her hands, and turn out to be the author.
Chapter One — The Lyre on the Peg
The herald comes back up the hill leading a blind man by the hand. This is the eighth book of the Odyssey, on the island of the Phaeacians, a people so comfortable that their king lists their national passions as feasting, the lyre, dancing, fresh changes of clothes, hot baths and bed. The king has ordered entertainment for a stranger who has not yet told anybody his name. The herald, Pontonous, sets a silver-studded chair for the singer against a tall pillar, hangs the clear-toned lyre on a peg above his head, and shows him how to reach it with his hands. Then he places a basket of food beside him and a cup of wine, to drink whenever his heart tells him to.
Before the man sings a note, the poem stops to introduce him. The Muse loved him above all others, it says, and gave him both good and evil: she took his eyes and gave him sweet song. One clause of loss, one of gift. It is the oldest job description for a poet in European literature, and like most job descriptions it leaves out the salary, which in this case is the basket.
Ancient readers found the scene impossible to resist. A blind singer at a feast, performing songs of Troy in front of a hero who was there: surely this was the poet painting himself into the corner of his own picture, the way a Renaissance painter tucks his face among the crowd at the edge of a crucifixion. The singer’s name, Demodocus, even means something like honored by the people. It looked like a signature.
There was a second piece of evidence, and it came with better credentials. Among the hymns that antiquity attributed to Homer is a long one to Apollo, and near its middle the singer turns to the girls of Delos and asks a favor. When a stranger arrives, he says, and asks which singer pleased you most, answer that it was a blind man who lives in rocky Chios. Thucydides, the least sentimental historian the Greeks ever produced, quoted those lines in the fifth century as Homer speaking about himself. If Thucydides believed it, the matter was settled for the next two thousand years.
Look closely at the movement that has just taken place. A reader picks up a character inside the poem, carries him out through the door of the text, and sits him down in the poet’s chair. The traffic only ever runs one way, and it is selective. The Odyssey draws its swineherd Eumaeus with far more tenderness than it draws Demodocus, yet nobody ever concluded that Homer kept pigs. Nobody decided he was a one-eyed giant with a cheese problem. Readers chose, out of everybody in the poem, the one figure who did the same job as the poet, and declared the resemblance a confession.
The choice was not foolish. Be wrong alongside the ancients for a moment and the blind Homer looks thoroughly reasonable. In many traditions of sung poetry the singer was very often blind, because singing was one of the few trades a blind man could practice with dignity. The kobzars of Ukraine were organized in guilds that admitted the blind almost exclusively. Filip Višnjić, whose songs of the Serbian uprising were collected in the early nineteenth century, had lost his sight to smallpox as a child. A Greek of the sixth century who heard that the greatest singer was blind would have nodded. Of course he was. Who else had time to learn all those lines?
And yet the poems themselves keep making trouble for the portrait. They are among the most visual texts ever composed. Dawn has rosy fingers, the sea is the color of wine, bronze flashes on the plain like fire on a mountain, and the poet notices the exact way dust rises behind a running man. Readers through the centuries have enjoyed the paradox rather than been bothered by it. The poet who could not see became the poet who saw everything, which is a lovely sentence and no evidence of anything.
The paradox, though, is the point. Greek culture knew a type: the man who loses ordinary sight and receives another kind. Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, is the model. Blindness in that frame is not a disability but a credential, a sign that the knowledge came from somewhere other than the eyes. A blind poet cannot have watched the Trojan War, so what he tells must have been given to him. The Muse is not decoration in the first line of the Iliad. She is the source of the information, and the poet’s blindness is her receipt.
Here the method I use throughout this book does its first piece of work. Take every fact in a biography and ask one question of it: could this have been derived from the subject’s own works? If the answer is yes, the fact is weak as evidence about the person and strong as evidence about the readers. Homer’s blindness passes the test with honors. It can be derived from the eighth book of the Odyssey and the hymn to Apollo, and it tells us, with complete reliability, what audiences needed a great poet to be. They needed him to be a channel rather than an eyewitness, someone whose authority came from outside, so that nobody could object that he had got the details wrong.
Notice too what the scene itself says about the maker of songs. Demodocus does not reach for his own instrument. Somebody else hangs it up, somebody else sets the chair against the pillar, somebody else guides his hands to the strings and puts food beside him. In the poem’s own picture of a poet, the poet is the only person in the hall who does not know where his lyre is. Every other figure in the room, the herald, the king, the guests, knows exactly where the singer’s things belong and arranges them for him.
That arrangement has been going on ever since. Each generation of readers has taken the herald’s part, fetched the singer, hung the lyre at a height that suited its own ceiling and placed the poet’s hands where it believed they ought to go. The ancient biographers, whom we meet in the next chapter, did it with an energy that would exhaust a modern publicist.
The lyre is still up there on its peg, above a chair against a pillar, and the herald is still waiting to see whose hands he will be asked to guide to it next.
Chapter Two — The Lives of a Man Who Left None
An orphan girl named Critheis finds herself pregnant in the town of Cyme, on the coast of Asia Minor, and her guardian, anxious about the family’s reputation, packs her off to the new settlement of Smyrna. There, at a festival on the banks of the river Meles, she gives birth to a boy and names him after the river: Melesigenes, Meles-born. A local schoolmaster called Phemius, who teaches letters and music, hires her to spin wool, falls in love with her, marries her, and adopts the child. So begins the Life of Homer that antiquity attributed to Herodotus, who did not write it.
It is a delightful document. The boy grows up clever, takes over his stepfather’s school, and is persuaded by a ship-owner from Leucas named Mentes to see the world. On Ithaca he develops trouble with his eyes and is looked after by a man called Mentor. Later, at Colophon, he goes completely blind. Back in Cyme he asks the town council for public support, offering in return to make their city famous. A councillor objects that if Cyme starts feeding every blind man, which in the local dialect were called homeroi, the town will soon be overrun with them. The motion fails. The young man acquires a nickname, Homer, and leaves cursing Cyme, which in the Life never produces a decent poet again.
From there he drifts. In Phocaea a schoolmaster named Thestorides offers him board and lodging in exchange for permission to copy his poems, then sails off to Chios and recites them as his own, an early and depressingly modern case of plagiarism. On Chios a goatherd’s dogs rush at the blind stranger, and the goatherd, Glaucus, calls them off and takes him in. Eventually Homer founds a school there, marries, has two daughters, and sets out late in life for Athens, dying on the small island of Ios on the way.
Readers of the Odyssey will already be grinning, because almost every name in this story walked out of the poem. Phemius is the singer forced to perform for the suitors in Odysseus’s hall. Mentes is the disguise the goddess Athena wears when she first visits Telemachus. Mentor is the old friend whose shape Athena borrows later on. The scene with the goatherd’s dogs is the scene at Eumaeus’s hut, where the swineherd’s dogs rush at the disguised Odysseus and the swineherd drives them off with stones. The biographer even supplies the reason for the overlap: Homer, he explains, put Mentes, Mentor and Phemius into his poems as a thank-you to people who had been kind to him. Immortality as a tip.
This is the inversion that runs through the whole tradition. The poem contains a Phemius; therefore the poet must have known a Phemius; therefore the poem contains a Phemius because the poet knew him. The circle closes so neatly that it is hard to see the seam. A biography assembled this way cannot fail to fit the works, because it was cut from them.
The Herodotean Life was not alone. Two Lives went under the name of Plutarch, one sober and one less so, and the second preserves a story attributed to Aristotle. In that version a girl on Ios becomes pregnant by a spirit who dances with the Muses, is carried off by pirates to Smyrna, and is married there to Maeon, king of the Lydians. The child is Homer, and his patronymic Maeonides, son of Maeon, becomes a stock name for him in later poets. That Aristotle, the most systematic mind of the ancient world, could pass this along without visible discomfort tells you how ordinary the genre was. A Life of Homer was not a historical claim. It was a kind of literature about literature, and nobody expected it to survive cross-examination.
There were more. Proclus summarized several in his handbook. The Byzantine lexicon called the Suda gathered rival parents and birthplaces into a heap. A Roman Life and two Lives preserved in a manuscript at the Escorial added variants of their own. Taken together they do not converge on a person. They behave like witnesses at a trial who have each been coached by a different lawyer, and who agree on only two points: the man was blind, and he traveled.
My method asks us to sort every fact in a biography into bins. Some facts come out of the subject’s works. Some come out of the subject’s name. Some come out of the interests of whoever is telling the story, a city, a guild, a school. Whatever is left over is the residue that might, with luck, be about a real human being. When I sorted the Lives of Homer this way the residue was so small I could not find it with tweezers. The blindness and the wandering came from the Odyssey. The name came from a pun. The births by the Meles, on Ios, on Chios, came from cities that wanted him. Even the plagiarist Thestorides, who does not appear in the poems, serves an obvious purpose: he explains why other people were reciting Homer’s verses, and lets the biographer award the credit back to the right man.
There is one more tell, and it is the most charming. The Herodotean Life dates Homer’s birth with suspicious exactness, a hundred and sixty-eight years after the fall of Troy and six hundred and twenty-two years before Xerxes crossed into Europe. Nobody in antiquity could have known either number. Precision is a costume that invention puts on when it wants to look like record-keeping, the way a forged letter tends to be dated to the hour.
None of this makes the Lives worthless. They are excellent evidence, only not about Homer. They show what Greek audiences expected a poet’s life to contain: humble or mysterious birth, a gift paid for with suffering, wandering, ingratitude from the hometown, theft by lesser men, a school of followers, and an obscure death far from home. That is a template, and it fits the poems because the template was drawn around the poems first.
Somewhere in that Life a council of Cyme still sits in session, voting against one more blind mouth to feed, and has no idea that it is giving the most famous name in literature to the man it is turning out of the door.
Chapter Three — Seven Cities and a Beggar
In 1635 the English playwright Thomas Heywood, a man who claimed a hand in some two hundred plays and kept writing as if paid by the line, turned an old Greek epigram into a couplet that has outlived nearly everything else he wrote: Seven cities warr’d for Homer, being dead, / Who, living, had no roofe to shrowd his head. Heywood did not invent the joke. He inherited it from a cluster of Greek epigrams that list the rival cities, and the lists do not agree. Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithaca, Pylos, Argos, Athens, Rhodes, Salamis: depending on the version, different towns fill the seven seats, and across all the versions the number of claimants comfortably exceeds the number of chairs.
The disagreement is the first thing worth noticing. A real birthplace leaves one answer and a lot of noise around it. A contested honor leaves a waiting list. If you collect every place ever named as Homer’s home you do not get a cluster around a spot on the map. You get a list of the places that had a reason to want him.
Smyrna wanted him more than anyone, and spent money to prove it. The geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, describes a library in Smyrna and a building called the Homereion, a square colonnade with a shrine and a statue of the poet, and adds that the city struck a small bronze coin also called a Homereion. Under the Roman emperors Smyrna’s coins showed Homer seated, a scroll in his hand, looking every inch the local boy who made good. Nothing says I was born here like putting a man on the currency.
Chios had a better argument and a guild to make it. A family or clan called the Homeridae, the sons of Homer, lived on the island and claimed descent from him, and by the fifth century their name was known well beyond Chios. The island also has a rock above the sea near Vrontados, a seat cut from stone that tradition calls the Daskalopetra, the teacher’s stone, where Homer is supposed to have taught his pupils. It is almost certainly an ancient shrine to the mother goddess Cybele. Visitors sit on it anyway and look at the sea, which is what Homer would have done, if he had been there, and if he could have seen it.
Ios had the grave. The Herodotean Life ends there, and in 1771 a Dutch adventurer in Russian service, Count Pasch van Krienen, announced that he had found Homer’s tomb on the island, complete with inscriptions. Scholars have treated the find with the expression reserved for a relative who returns from a holiday with a certificate of noble descent. The island remains proud of the tradition, and it would take a heart of stone to argue with it in summer.
Egypt entered the competition late and with flair. In the novel Aethiopica, written by Heliodorus some time in the third or fourth century, an Egyptian priest explains that Homer was an Egyptian, the son of the god Hermes and a priest’s wife, and that he was born with a patch of hair on his thigh. Since the Greek for thigh is meros, the boy was called Ho-meros. The priest delivers this with a straight face. So, I suspect, did Heliodorus, who knew perfectly well what game he was playing and was playing it better than the city councils.
The game has never stopped. In 2010 two districts of modern Izmir, the Turkish city that stands on the site of Smyrna, fell into a public dispute over which of them was the true birthplace. The mayor of Gaziemir argued that the history books place Homer’s birth at the source of the river Meles, and that the Meles rises in Gaziemir. Bornova had already opened a Homeros Valley, a visitor attraction near a cave that local tradition says the poet used as his study. The Gaziemir mayor said, with some feeling, that the valley had been built in the wrong place. Both men agreed on one point: Homer was from Izmir. The argument was only about which side of town.
It would be easy to laugh at the mayors, and I do not intend to. They were doing exactly what the council of Smyrna did two thousand years earlier, and with smaller budgets. A city that claims a poet is not making a statement about the past. It is making a statement about itself: we are the kind of place where such a man could be born. The claim costs nothing and returns a little identity, a little tourism, and a reason to put up a statue. Heywood’s epigram has the economics exactly right. A living beggar costs a meal. A dead poet is free, and he pays dividends.
That is the deeper sting in the couplet. The epigram does not mock the cities for being wrong about the birthplace. It accuses them of ingratitude, of refusing the man a roof while he lived and then fighting over his bones. That accusation depends on the Lives being true, on there having been a blind wanderer knocking on doors. If there was no such man, the cities committed no crime. They simply bid for a property that had no previous owner, which is less shameful and much more interesting.
At Yeşilova Höyük, a Neolithic mound on the edge of Izmir, older than Troy by thousands of years, someone has set up a bust of Homer with an inscription in the first person. It says, roughly, I compiled the Iliad and the Odyssey on this land. The poet who never once says I in his own voice, who begins both poems by asking a goddess to do the talking, has finally been given a sentence of his own, and it is a claim of residence.
Chapter Four — A Name That Means Hostage
In the second book of Lucian’s True History, a satire from the second century that sends its narrator to the moon, into the belly of a whale and finally to the Island of the Blessed, the narrator meets Homer among the dead and does what any scholar would do. He asks where Homer was born. Homer tells him he was a Babylonian, that his name at home was Tigranes, and that he acquired the name Homer later, when he was handed over as a hostage to the Greeks. The narrator then asks whether he wrote the lines that the Alexandrian critics had marked as fakes. Homer says he wrote every one of them, and that the critics were fools. Lucian, plainly, had spent time in libraries.
The joke works because the Greek word homeros really did mean hostage, or more precisely a pledge, a person handed over to guarantee an agreement. Ancient readers knew this, and the word offered itself as a biography. The Lives that preferred the hostage story made the poet’s father, or the poet himself, a pledge between cities or a captive of the Persians. Others preferred the Cymaean dialect word for blind that we met in the previous chapter. Whichever meaning a writer picked, the name was doing what names in these stories always do: it was generating the life that was later used to explain it.
The mechanism is worth slowing down for, because it is the engine of the whole Homeric biography. A culture receives a name with no person attached. The name means something, or sounds as if it does. Storytellers ask how a man might have come by such a name, and invent an episode to answer the question. The episode is then cited as the origin of the name, and the circle closes. The name came first and grew a past backward, the way a river delta grows land behind itself.
Modern scholarship has offered a third etymology, and it is the most interesting because it does not need a biography at all. Gregory Nagy, among others, has argued that Homeros can be read as he who fits together, built from roots meaning together and to join, the same family of sounds that gives Greek harmonia, a joining. On that reading the name describes a function, not a man: the one who assembles the song. Nagy pointed out that Hesiod’s name can be read in a similar way, as something like he who sends forth the voice. If he is right, the two great poets of early Greece both carry names that sound less like names than like job titles. Nobody is surprised to learn that a man called Smith worked at a forge. We should perhaps be less surprised to learn that the man called Assembler assembled things.
Etymology is a slippery floor, and serious linguists dispute this reading. I do not need it to be correct. What matters for the argument of this book is that a functional reading is available, and that once it is available the biographical readings lose their monopoly. A name that might mean hostage, blind man or joiner is a name with no anchor, and a name with no anchor drifts toward whatever story needs it.
The Homeridae of Chios help us see the drift in action. By the time the poet Pindar opened his second Nemean ode, in the early fifth century, he could refer to the Homeridae as singers of stitched verses, poets who begin, as they usually do, with a prayer to Zeus. The phrase stitched verses gives us the word rhapsode, a stitcher of song, the professional reciter who performed Homer at festivals. The Homeridae may have begun as a real clan claiming descent from an ancestor named Homer. They may have begun as a guild of performers who took the name of the art they practiced, the way a modern union of electricians does not claim descent from Volta. Either way, by Pindar’s time they controlled something valuable: the authority to say what Homer’s songs were.
Plato preserves the last stage of the process with a malice that is still funny. In his dialogue Ion, Socrates questions a celebrated rhapsode who has just won first prize at a festival in Epidaurus and is preparing for the great Panathenaic festival at Athens. Ion is very pleased with himself. He tells Socrates that he speaks about Homer better than anyone alive and that he deserves to be crowned with a golden crown by the Homeridae. Socrates then spends the dialogue showing that Ion knows nothing about chariot racing, medicine, fishing or generalship, although Homer talks about all of them, and concludes that the rhapsode is not an expert but a man possessed, a link in a chain that hangs from the Muse like iron rings from a magnet.
Ion’s crown is the end of the line. A name that may once have meant joiner, or pledge, or blind man, has become an institution with prize committees, an approved repertoire and a recognized family entitled to bestow honors. The Homeridae did not need a historical Homer. They needed the name, and the name was enough to keep a profession in business.
Nobody stops to ask Ion where Homer was born. The question has become irrelevant to the people who make a living from him. Ion simply stands at the door of the dialogue, newly crowned at Epidaurus, glowing with pride, holding out his head for a golden circle from the sons of a man none of them had ever met.
Chapter Five — The Contest He Lost
Hesiod hated the sea, and he tells us so. In the Works and Days, his long poem of advice to a lazy brother, he admits that he sailed only once in his life, across the narrow strait from Aulis to Euboea, to attend the funeral games of a nobleman named Amphidamas at Chalcis. There, he says, he won a tripod with handles for a song and dedicated it to the Muses of Mount Helicon, where they had first taught him to sing. He does not name the singer he defeated. Many centuries later the travel writer Pausanias was shown a tripod on Helicon said to be the very one.
Nature abhors an unnamed opponent, and Greek storytellers abhorred one even more. By the fourth century the orator Alcidamas had filled the blank: the poet Hesiod beat at Chalcis was Homer. The story survives in a text known as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, written down in its present form in the second century, since it mentions the emperor Hadrian, but built on much older material. Two papyrus scraps, one from the third century before Christ, show that versions of it were circulating in Egypt long before the surviving copy was made.
The contest itself is a delicious piece of theater. The two poets trade riddles, impossible questions and lines that must be completed on the spot. Hesiod throws Homer a half verse that seems to lead somewhere absurd, and Homer rescues it with a second half that turns it into sense. Homer wins every round of wit. The audience is with him. When the judges call for each poet to recite the finest passage of his own work, Homer chooses lines from the thirteenth book of the Iliad, the Greek ranks locked shield on shield and helmet on helmet, spears trembling in bold hands. Hesiod recites his instructions for when to plow and when to harvest by the rising and setting of the Pleiades.
The crowd calls for Homer. The presiding king, a brother of Amphidamas named Panedes, gives the prize to Hesiod. His reasoning is the hinge of the story: the man who calls people to farming and peace deserves the victory over the man who describes battles and slaughter. Greek proverbs preserved a phrase for an unjust verdict, the judgment of Panedes, so not everyone in antiquity agreed with the king.
Why would anyone tell a story in which the greatest poet in the world loses? The answer comes from asking whose story it is. The Contest is not a biography of Homer. It is an argument about what poetry is for, staged as a match, and the referee has been chosen in advance. A culture that had made Homer its schoolbook needed somewhere to put its unease about a schoolbook full of killing. It put that unease into the mouth of a provincial king, gave him the deciding vote and let him say what parents said at home: very beautiful, dear, but would it not be better to learn something useful?
Seen this way, the Contest belongs alongside the Lives as another example of a text built around an empty chair. Hesiod at least speaks of himself in his poems; he has a brother, a father who came from Aeolian Cyme, a village in Boeotia that he describes as bad in winter, miserable in summer and good at no time. He gives the storytellers something to hold. Homer gives them nothing, so they stand him next to someone who does, and let the contrast do the characterizing. Homer becomes the poet of war because Hesiod is the poet of farming, and the pairing makes each of them more definite than either is alone.
Then the storytellers kill him, and the manner of his death is the strangest thing in the whole tradition. An oracle had warned Homer to beware a riddle posed by young men. Years later, on Ios, he sits by the shore and asks some boys returning from fishing whether they caught anything. They answer: what we caught we left behind, and what we did not catch we carry with us. Homer cannot work it out. They have been picking lice from their clothes; the lice they caught they killed and left, the ones they missed they are still wearing. Remembering the oracle, the old man realizes his end has come. In one version he dies of grief; in the Contest he slips in the mud on his way home and dies three days later.
The tale is old. Heraclitus, the riddling philosopher of Ephesus, writing around 500 BC, already uses it: people are deceived about what is obvious, he says, just as Homer was, who was the wisest of all the Greeks, for boys killing lice deceived him. Heraclitus disliked Homer and wanted him whipped out of the poetry contests. The lice story suited him perfectly.
Read the death as a text and it says something exact. The poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey knows everything. He knows what the gods said to each other on Olympus, what a man thought as the spear went in, the names of minor Trojans who die in a single line. His narrator is as close to omniscient as literature gets. The tradition answered that omniscience with a story in which the all-knowing man is defeated by children and vermin. Every culture that venerates a source of total knowledge seems to need a second story in which the source is caught out by something small. It keeps the veneration from turning into idolatry, and it keeps the schoolboys quiet.
The boys on the beach walk off with their nets, scratching. The old man stays where he is, turning the words over, and the waves come in across the sand the way they come in across every page he ever composed.
Chapter Six — Four Encyclopedias, Four Homers
A Byzantine scholar in the tenth century, compiling the vast lexicon known as the Suda, reached the entry for Homer and seems to have decided that, since nobody could agree on anything, the honest course was to write everything down. The result reads like a hotel register filled in by a crowd of men all using the same false name. Homer’s father appears as Meles, as Maeon, as a man called Daemon, and under several other names. His mother is Critheis in one report and somebody else in the next. His birthplace changes from line to line. The list of works attached to him includes not only the two great epics but comic poems, hymns and assorted orphans that later centuries would quietly return to the foundling hospital.
I find the Suda entry oddly admirable. It is a biography that refuses to choose. Whatever its compiler believed privately, the page itself records a field of possibilities, and a reader who looks at it sees immediately that the person under all those names cannot be recovered by adding them up. Most encyclopedias are less candid.
The method I want to apply in this chapter grew out of the formal article on biographical deconstruction, where I proposed that one of the most powerful ways to see what a biography is doing is to compare different versions of the same life written for different audiences (Kriger, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23159974). Not to find out which is right. To find out what each one needs. Every reference text claims to be a neutral window onto its subject, and every one of them is a mirror tilted at a particular angle. Put several side by side and the angles become visible.
Take the standard English-language entry, the one that a curious person anywhere on earth reaches within a few seconds of typing the poet’s name. Its opening is a small masterpiece of cautious drafting. Homer is described as the ancient Greek poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the hedging verb carries the whole weight of the twentieth century. Credited is a word from accounting and from film. It means that the books bear his name, without committing anyone to the claim that he wrote them. The article moves quickly to the Homeric Question, to oral tradition, to the scholarly consensus that the poems emerged over a long period. English-speaking scholarship has had more than a century of argument about authorship, and its encyclopedic summary reads like a contract drafted by people who expect to be sued.
Now turn to the paragraph about Homeros that circulates in Turkish, copied word for word across bookshop websites and reading platforms, so that every Turkish edition of the Iliad on the internet arrives wrapped in the same introduction. It is much more confident. Homer is an Ionian poet who is thought to have lived in the region of Smyrna, that is Izmir, at the end of the eighth century before Christ. His name, the paragraph says, meant slave in ancient Greek. It cites the British classicist George Thomson, who in his Marxist study of the prehistoric Aegean judged Chios the likeliest birthplace and Smyrna the next most likely, and it mentions in passing that some scholars doubt a single poet composed the poems at all, before noting that most believe the stylistic differences came from Homer writing the Iliad as a young man and the Odyssey in old age.
Every one of those sentences is doing something. Smyrna is named first and glossed with the modern city’s name, so that a Turkish reader learns at once that Homer was, in a sense, local. The doubts about single authorship are mentioned and then dissolved by the most comfortable possible explanation, the poet’s own aging. And the etymology has shifted. Hostage, a pledge between parties, has become slave, which is a different social category entirely. A word about diplomacy has been translated into a word about bondage. Nobody need have intended this. The shift happens naturally when a term passes through several languages and several generations of summarizers, each choosing the nearest familiar word. But it gives Homer a biography he never had in any ancient source: the great poet as a man born unfree.
Thomson himself makes a fine third mirror. He wrote in 1949 as a committed Marxist, and his Homer belongs to the history of class society, the singer of a declining aristocracy at the moment the old clan order gave way. His Homer is not more or less real than the Suda’s crowd or the English entry’s credited name. He is exactly as real as the theory that needs him.
The fourth mirror is the one the Greeks of Chios hold up today, and it is the warmest. On the island the poet is not a hypothesis. He is a neighbor with a stone seat above the sea, a cultural center in the main town that bears his name, and a school he is supposed to have kept on the hillside. The reference texts that matter there are not encyclopedias at all but the guidebooks, the plaques and the stories told to visitors, and in all of them the question of whether Homer existed would sound faintly rude, like asking a family whether their grandfather was real.
Lay the four side by side and a pattern appears that no single one of them shows. The Byzantine compiler, working inside an empire that read Homer as the foundation of Greek education, preserved every variant because preserving variants was the scholar’s duty. The English entry hedges because its readership includes the specialists who will correct it within the hour. The Turkish paragraph locates Homer in Anatolia because its readers live there, and there is nothing dishonest in a city remembering that the Greek world once included its coast. The islanders of Chios keep him at home because he has been at home for twenty-five centuries. Each Homer fits the hands that hold him.
There is one feature the four share, and it is the reason this comparison belongs in the first part of the book. None of them can say anything about Homer that does not come from the poems, from the ancient Lives we have already sorted, or from the interests of the people writing. The man is absent from every version equally. What changes from language to language is the shape of the empty space and the furniture placed around it.
On a Turkish reading platform, under a scanned cover of a 1941 Turkish translation of the Odyssey, the same paragraph waits for the next reader, confident, tidy and a little sad, explaining that the name of the greatest poet of antiquity meant slave.
Chapter Seven — A Role Without a Poet
Herodotus, around 430 BC, sits with two epic poems in front of him and decides that one of them cannot be Homer’s. The suspect is the Cypria, a long poem about the causes of the Trojan War, now lost except for a summary and scraps. In the Cypria, Herodotus notes, Paris carries Helen from Sparta to Troy in three days with a fair wind and a calm sea. In the Iliad, Paris takes her by way of Sidon. The two accounts contradict each other, so the Cypria must be by someone else. Herodotus then moves on, pleased with himself, the first recorded literary critic to use a timetable as evidence.
The episode tells us something about the state of the name before Herodotus. If he had to argue that the Cypria was not Homer’s, then some people thought it was. In the seventh century the elegiac poet Callinus, according to Pausanias, attributed an epic about the war against Thebes to Homer. Aristotle, a century after Herodotus, still treated a comic poem called the Margites, about a man so stupid he did not know which of his parents had given birth to him, as Homer’s work, and compared it to comedy the way the Iliad and Odyssey stood to tragedy. The Hymns were Homer’s. A mock epic called the Battle of Frogs and Mice, in which a mouse prince named Crumb-snatcher drowns while riding on the back of a frog king named Puff-jaw, circulated under his name for centuries.
In the early period, in other words, Homer was not a man who had written two books. Homer was a category. The name meant something like the old poetry of heroes, or the best poetry we have, and anything of the right kind and sufficient quality could be filed under it. Over the next several centuries the category shrank. Herodotus removed the Cypria. Later critics removed the hymns and the comic poems. By the time the scholars of Alexandria had finished, Homer had been reduced to two epics, and a few of those scholars, whom we will meet near the end of this book, tried to take one of those away too.
I want a precise word for what the name Homer was doing, and I have spent some time building one. In Role Without Referent I argued that many of the most important terms in science and in public life are best understood not as names for things but as slots in a working structure: positions that do a job inside a system whether or not anything in the world occupies them (Kriger, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14764.22406). A role can be fully functional and entirely empty at the same time. The test is not whether you can find the occupant. The test is whether the system would behave differently if the slot were removed.
By that test the role called Homer is one of the most functional slots ever devised. Remove it and the whole apparatus of Greek literary culture changes shape. There is no fixed point against which to measure other poets, no single source of authority for the schoolroom, no figure whose quotations can settle an argument about the gods or about virtue. The Greeks quoted Homer the way medieval Europe quoted Scripture, and you cannot quote a tradition. You need a name at the bottom of the page. The name did the work whether or not a man answered to it.
Michel Foucault arrived at a neighboring idea from another direction in his 1969 lecture What Is an Author? He observed that an author’s name is not just a label attached to a person. It sorts texts into groups, guarantees that they belong together, and sets the rules for how they should be read. If a newly discovered page is shown to be by Shakespeare, we read it differently in the next five minutes than we did in the previous five, though not a word on it has changed. Foucault called this the author function. What Homer adds to his account is the extreme case: an author function running at full power for two and a half thousand years with no author anywhere in sight.
Modern life has a few cheerful examples of the same arrangement. In 1935 a group of young French mathematicians began publishing a vast, rigorous treatise on the foundations of mathematics under the name Nicolas Bourbaki. Bourbaki had an invented biography, an invented home in an imaginary country called Poldavia, and at one point a wedding announcement for his daughter. His members changed over the decades; they retired, by tradition, at fifty. The name stayed. Mathematicians around the world cited Bourbaki, argued with Bourbaki and complained about Bourbaki’s austere style, which was very much the style of the role and not of any of the people filling it at a given moment.
Hollywood offers a sadder version. For decades a director who wanted his name removed from a film that had been butchered in the editing room could have it credited instead to Alan Smithee. Smithee acquired a filmography, a style of sorts and even a reputation. The role existed to absorb authorship that nobody wanted to claim. Homer did the opposite job, absorbing authorship that everybody wanted to give away.
Seen as a role, the Homeric tradition stops looking like a puzzle with a missing piece and starts looking like a well-designed machine. Rhapsodes performing in many cities needed a common reference. Teachers needed a canon. Cities needed a hero to claim. Critics needed a standard against which to measure spurious lines. Each of those needs pulled on the same name, and the name held because none of them required the occupant to be available for comment. An absent author is the most cooperative author there is. He never contradicts the editor.
This does not prove that no single poet composed the Iliad. Nothing in this chapter could prove that, and I will argue near the end of the book that the question can be sharpened though perhaps not closed. What the chapter does claim is that the name worked in exactly the same way whether or not a poet lay behind it, and that the evidence we have, the Lives, the cities, the guild, the shrinking list of works, is all evidence about the role. None of it reaches the occupant.
In 1968, after more than thirty years of publication, the members of Bourbaki circulated a mock funeral notice announcing the death of their founder. It was a joke, and the treatise went on being published. Homer has never had such a notice. Nobody was ever in a position to send it.
Chapter Eight — The Man Who Recorded Avdo
In the summer of 1935, in the small market town of Bijelo Polje in Montenegro, a young professor from Harvard set up his recording equipment in front of an elderly farmer who could neither read nor write, and asked him to sing. The professor was Milman Parry, thirty-three years old. The farmer was Avdo Međedović, about sixty, a veteran of the Ottoman army, a butcher by trade at some point in his life, and a singer of heroic songs accompanied on the gusle, a one-stringed bowed instrument that sounds like an argument between a violin and a goat. Over the following days Avdo sang a single song, The Wedding of Smailagić Meho, and when he stopped it ran to more than twelve thousand lines. The Odyssey has about twelve thousand one hundred.
Parry had come a long way to hear that. In 1928, in Paris, he had defended a doctoral thesis on the traditional epithet in Homer, a minutely technical study of phrases like swift-footed Achilles, grey-eyed Athena and wine-dark sea. Earlier scholars had treated these as decoration, little ornaments that the poet scattered about for color. Parry showed that they were something much more interesting: a system. For each major hero and god, in each grammatical case, there tends to be one epithet phrase to fill each metrical slot in the line, and rarely more than one. Swift-footed brilliant Achilles fits exactly into the end of a hexameter after a certain pause; Achilles son of Peleus fits another position; there is very little duplication. The economy was too strict to be an accident and too large to be the invention of one man.
What could produce a system like that? Parry’s teacher in Paris, the great linguist Antoine Meillet, had pointed him toward an answer: poets who composed in performance, without writing, and needed ready-made phrases that fitted the meter so they could keep singing without stopping to think. The Slovene scholar Matija Murko had already described singers in the Balkans who could perform for hours. Parry decided to go and listen to them himself.
Between 1933 and 1935 he and his assistant, a young Harvard student named Albert Lord, traveled through Yugoslavia with a recording apparatus that cut sound onto aluminum discs. They recorded hundreds of singers and thousands of songs, and they asked questions. Do you sing a song the same way each time? Yes, said the singers, word for word, exactly the same. Then Parry recorded the same singer performing the same song on different days, and the versions differed in length, in episodes and in wording. The singers were not lying. For them the same song meant the same story told with the same equipment, not the same sequence of words. The idea of a fixed text simply did not belong to their world.
Avdo was the star. Parry arranged an experiment: another singer performed a song Avdo had never heard, while Avdo sat and listened. When it was over Avdo sang the same song back, and his version was nearly three times as long, richer in detail and, by the judgment of everyone present, better. He had not memorized anything. He had taken the story and rebuilt it out of the stock of phrases, scenes and patterns that a lifetime of listening had given him. The original singer, to his credit, admired the result.
Parry did not live to write the book this material demanded. In December 1935, back in California, he was killed by a pistol shot in a hotel room in Los Angeles, apparently an accident with a gun packed in his luggage. He was thirty-three. Lord carried the work on for another forty years and in 1960 published The Singer of Tales, which turned Parry’s discovery into a theory that reshaped the study of every oral tradition from Old English to the epics of West Africa.
For the argument of this book the consequences are drastic. If the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed in the way Avdo composed, then the idea of an original text, a first and authentic version from which later copies descend, becomes very hard to apply. There were performances. Each performance was the song. The version that eventually reached writing was one of them, captured at a particular moment, by particular hands, for reasons we will examine in the next part of the book. Asking for Homer’s original Iliad is like asking for Avdo’s original Wedding of Smailagić Meho. There is a recording from 1935. There is no original.
Here the twentieth century did with Parry’s discovery what every earlier century had done with the empty chair. It poured in a new occupant, and this time the occupant was the tradition itself. Homer stopped being a man and became the voice of generations of singers, collective, anonymous, impersonal. That picture is more honest than the blind wanderer, but it is still a picture, and it has its own temptations. Avdo was not a tradition. He was a particular old man with a particular memory, a particular talent and a habit of taking other people’s songs and making them better. The Bijelo Polje recordings prove that a tradition can carry a song for centuries. They also prove that, at the moment of performance, a single gifted person decides what the song becomes.
Both of those things may have been true of the Iliad. The formula system requires a tradition. The architecture of the poem, which we will spend a long stretch of this book examining, has the look of one mind’s decisions. Lord himself believed in a single monumental singer who brought the tradition to its peak. Others think the peak was reached by many hands. The aluminum discs cannot settle that argument, but they changed the terms forever, because after them nobody could pretend that the question of who wrote the Iliad was a question about a man sitting at a desk.
The discs are kept at Harvard in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, and many of them can now be heard by anyone. If you play one, you hear a scratchy room in the Balkans in 1935, a bow dragging across a single horsehair string, and an old man’s voice, steady and unhurried, starting a song that will last longer than the Odyssey, with no idea that half the world’s classicists will eventually be listening to him for the sound of someone else.
Chapter Nine — Helmets Made of Boars
In the tenth book of the Iliad, two Greek heroes prepare to sneak into the Trojan camp at night, and one of them, Odysseus, has come out without a helmet. Meriones lends him one. The poet stops the action to describe it with the care of an auction catalogue. It is made of leather, stretched tight with many thongs on the inside, padded with felt, and on the outside the white teeth of a boar with gleaming tusks are set close together in rows, skillfully, this way and that. Then comes the provenance. Autolycus stole it from a house in Eleon by breaking through the wall; he gave it to a man from Cythera, who gave it as a guest-gift to Molus, who gave it to his son Meriones to wear. Now it sits on the head of Odysseus, who happens to be the grandson of the original burglar.
For centuries readers took this helmet as poetic fancy. Then archaeologists began opening Mycenaean graves and found the plates of boars’ tusks themselves, cut, drilled and arranged in rows exactly as described. Helmets of this type appear in the shaft graves at Mycenae from the sixteenth century before Christ, on ivory carvings, on frescoes, in the rich warrior burial at Dendra. A single helmet required the tusks of a good many boars, since each animal supplied only a few usable plates, and hunting boars with a spear is not a hobby for the unhurried. By the end of the Bronze Age the type had gone out of use. Nobody in the eighth century could have seen one on a living warrior.
So a poem shaped in the Iron Age contains a precise description of an object that had vanished from use about half a millennium earlier. The poet did not reconstruct it from ruins; there were no museums. The description traveled in the song, as a set of phrases handed from singer to singer, long after the last helmet had rotted in its grave. And the poem knows the object is old. It gives the helmet a pedigree, a chain of owners stretching back into a previous generation. The text is carrying an antique and labeling it as one.
That label is the best thing in the passage, and almost nobody stops to admire it. The Iliad is quietly describing its own condition. Formulas, scenes and objects came down to the poet the way the helmet came to Meriones: through theft, gift and inheritance, each hand adding a little history. A poem built that way is not a picture of a single moment. It is a stack of moments pressed together, and if you look closely you can find the joins.
Ajax’s shield is another join. The poet calls it a shield like a tower, made of seven layers of oxhide with a facing of bronze, and the image fits the great body-shields of the early Mycenaean period, tall rectangles or figure-of-eight shapes that covered a man from neck to ankle. Elsewhere in the same poem warriors carry round shields with a central boss and handle, the kind used much later. Hector, walking off the field, has a shield that knocks against his neck and ankles as he goes, which is only possible with the old tall type. The poem shifts between the two without noticing. Its warriors are dressed partly in heirlooms and partly in contemporary kit, like an amateur production of Hamlet in which the prince wears doublet and hose and a wristwatch.
Then there are the chariots. In the Iliad heroes ride to the battle in chariots, step down and fight on foot, while the driver waits nearby to carry them off again. Generations of scholars have complained that this is not how chariots were used in the great Bronze Age battles of the Near East, where massed chariotry wheeled across the field as a weapon in its own right. Homer’s chariots behave like taxis. The complaint is fair, and also a clue. A tradition that remembered chariots without remembering chariot warfare is exactly what we would expect if the vehicles survived in the song as prestige objects while the tactics were forgotten.
Metal tells the same story from the other direction. The weapons in the Iliad are overwhelmingly bronze: bronze spears, bronze swords, bronze armor, the pitiless bronze that cuts men down. Yet iron keeps slipping in. Hearts are called iron. Arrowheads are sometimes iron. At the funeral games for Patroclus, Achilles offers as a prize a lump of iron and remarks that the winner will have enough to keep his shepherd and plowman in tools for five years. That is an Iron Age remark in a Bronze Age setting, and it is as revealing as a modern detective novel set in 1890 in which a character checks the time on his phone.
Burial gives a third layer. The heroes of the Iliad burn their dead on pyres and gather the bones into urns. Mycenaean lords of the great period were mostly laid in the earth, in shaft graves and beehive tombs, with their goods around them. Cremation became widespread in Greece only after the palaces fell. The poem describes the funerals of its own age while dressing the mourners in the armor of a much older one.
In the preface I mentioned the procedure I use for structured documents, which begins by refusing to treat a document as a single act of writing (Kriger, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23166797). Every long-lived document has layers: the original clause, the amendment, the gloss, the copyist’s correction. The job is to date the layers separately before asking what the whole means. The Iliad, read that way, turns into something closer to a city than a book, with foundations from one century, walls from another and a roof put on by whoever was living there when it was finally written down.
Odysseus, meanwhile, goes out into the dark wearing his grandfather’s stolen helmet, and kills a Trojan spy before morning. The helmet does its job perfectly. It does not matter to him that it is five hundred years out of date. He is, after all, a character in the same poem, and in the poem nothing is out of date. Everything is simply old and still in use, like the words themselves.
Chapter Ten — The Letter the Meter Remembers
Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, spent a large part of the early eighteenth century in litigation with his own fellows, who tried for decades to remove him and never managed it. In the intervals he did some of the best textual criticism ever done in English. In the 1720s, preparing an edition of Homer, he noticed something odd about Homer’s meter. In hundreds of places the verse seemed to break its own rules: two vowels meeting where the poet normally avoided such collisions, short syllables counting as long for no visible reason. Bentley proposed that the lines had once contained a letter that was no longer written, a w sound that had dropped out of the Ionic dialect in which the poems were transmitted. Put it back, and the meter came right.
The letter is called digamma, from its shape, which looks like one capital gamma stacked on another, rather like our F. It survives in some early Greek inscriptions and in dialects outside Ionia, and it was certainly in the language that the Mycenaean scribes wrote down, as we will see in the next chapter. The Greek word for lord, anax, had been wanax. The word for wine, oinos, had been woinos, which is why it looks like a cousin of vinum and wine. In Homer the letter is gone from the spelling but not from the rhythm. Lines composed when the sound was still pronounced kept the shape it gave them, and singers who no longer pronounced it went on scanning the lines as if it were there.
There is no better example anywhere of what Derrida meant by a trace: a mark of something absent that continues to organize what is present. The digamma is not in the text. Its effect is everywhere in the text. The meter remembers a sound the alphabet never recorded, and a reader who knows how to listen can hear the gap where it used to be, like the slight dip in a wooden stair where generations of feet have stepped.
The digamma is one thread in a much larger tangle. The language of Homer is a dialect nobody ever spoke. Its base is Ionic, the Greek of the islands and the Anatolian coast, but it is shot through with Aeolic forms from the north, older forms that resemble the Greek of Arcadia and Cyprus, and a few Atticisms picked up on the way through Athens. A single line can contain two forms of the same word from different dialects, chosen because one fits the meter here and the other fits it there. German scholars called it a Kunstsprache, an art language, and the term has stuck. It is a toolbox assembled over centuries, in which each generation kept whatever still worked.
The usual explanation is that the epic tradition passed through stages. An older phase in Aeolic-speaking regions left its forms embedded in the formula system, a later Ionian phase overlaid its own dialect, and the older forms survived wherever replacing them would have broken the meter. Singers did not preserve the archaic forms out of reverence. They preserved them because a formula is a fitted piece, and you do not file down a fitted piece unless you have another that fits as well.
Because language changes at roughly measurable rates, the mixture can be used to date the poems, at least relatively. In 1982 Richard Janko published a statistical study that counted the frequency of particular innovations and archaisms across the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. The Iliad came out as the most archaic, the Odyssey slightly younger, Hesiod younger again. Janko’s absolute dates put the Iliad in the second half of the eighth century. It was a beautiful piece of work, and it rested on an assumption that the language of each poem froze at a single moment, the moment of its fixation in writing. If the poems were fixed later than that, or by stages, the clock reads differently.
Other scholars, led by Martin West, pushed the Iliad later, into the first half of the seventh century, using clues from inside the poem: a reference to the immense wealth of Egyptian Thebes, the style of certain objects, possible echoes of events in Anatolia. The disagreement between roughly 750 and roughly 670 sounds technical, but it matters. On the earlier date the Iliad stands near the invention of the Greek alphabet. On the later one it comes after a couple of generations of writing, when long texts on papyrus had become thinkable. Every theory of authorship has a preferred date, and every date quietly flatters a theory of authorship.
The method in this book asks a simple question here: what does each layer of the language need? The Aeolic forms need a north Aegean past. The Ionic surface needs an Ionian present. The digamma needs a time when the w was still spoken, which reaches back toward the second millennium. No single poet, sitting in a single place, could have produced this mixture from his own speech. Whoever composed the Iliad inherited a language that was already a palimpsest, and composed in it the way a modern poet might write in a hymn-book English full of thee and thou, except that the Homeric singer had no hymn book. He had his ear.
Bentley, characteristically, did not stop at noticing. He planned an edition of Homer with the digamma restored throughout, which would have looked as startling to his readers as a modern edition of Chaucer with the spelling of Old English put back in. He never finished it. The notes survive in his copies at Trinity, and the letter he heard was eventually confirmed by inscriptions he never saw. A quarrelsome old man in a Cambridge study, surrounded by lawsuits, had listened to a dead language carefully enough to hear a sound that had been silent for more than two thousand years.
Chapter Eleven — Achilles on a Clay Tablet
On the first of July 1952, an English architect not yet thirty named Michael Ventris went on BBC radio and told listeners, in a pleasant, slightly apologetic voice, that he had deciphered the script that archaeologists called Linear B, and that the language it recorded was Greek. Ventris had been obsessed with the script since the age of fourteen, when he heard Sir Arthur Evans lecture about Knossos. He had spent the war as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, and he had worked on the problem in the evenings, circulating his notes to a small group of scholars, most of whom believed until almost the end that the language would turn out to be something else. Ventris believed it too, for a while. Then the grid of signs he had built kept producing Greek words, and he had the grace to follow the evidence rather than his hunch.
Linear B is a syllabic script. Each sign stands for a syllable such as ka, ko or ku, and the system fits Greek badly, like a suit borrowed from a larger man. Final consonants are dropped, clusters are simplified, and l and r are not distinguished. The tablets themselves are mostly small slabs of unbaked clay, written by palace clerks as temporary records: inventories of sheep, rations for workers, lists of bronze issued to smiths, offerings to gods. They were never meant to last beyond the year. They survived only because the palaces that stored them burned, and the fire baked the clay hard.
Carl Blegen had found the archive of the palace at Pylos, on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese, on the first day of his excavation in 1939, which is the kind of luck archaeologists do not discuss in front of colleagues. In 1953, with Ventris’s values in hand, Blegen cleaned a tablet his team had found the previous season and checked it. It listed tripod cauldrons and other vessels, with small pictures of each item beside its description, and the descriptions, read by Ventris’s values, matched the pictures: a tripod, a tripod with one foot burned off, a jar with four handles. A skeptic can argue with a grid. It is very hard to argue with a picture of a broken cauldron captioned broken cauldron.
Read through the decipherment, the tablets give us the Greek of the late Bronze Age, centuries before Homer, and they contain names that later turn up in the epics. A-ki-re-u appears, which is Achilleus. E-ko-to, Hector, appears at Pylos. There are others. None of them is a hero. They are ordinary people on the lists, workers and landholders, one with a name that will later belong to the greatest warrior of Greek myth, another with the name of the defender of Troy. The heroic names were in circulation among clerks and shepherds before any poem we know made them grand.
That should give us pause, and it gives me a small thrill. It means the epic did not invent its heroes’ names; it inherited a stock of personal names already old, and attached them to legendary figures in ways we cannot trace. Somewhere in the palace of Pylos an Achilles drew his rations without the slightest idea that his name would one day be sung in front of kings. Nobody in the Iliad has a name invented for the occasion. The poem, like the helmet in the previous chapter, uses what it was given.
Titles tell a stranger story. The Linear B word wa-na-ka is wanax, the digamma-bearing ancestor of Homer’s anax, lord, and on the tablets it denotes the king at the top of the palace hierarchy. Another word, qa-si-re-u, is the ancestor of basileus, the word that in Homer and in all later Greek means king. On the tablets the qa-si-re-u is a local official of modest rank, sometimes associated with a group of bronzesmiths, more foreman than monarch. When the palaces fell, the wanax vanished with them, and the local men who survived inherited the top of a much shorter ladder. Their title rose with them. The word king in Homer is the word for foreman in the palace accounts.
This single shift is a whole history in miniature, and a fine example of what Intellectual Substrate Mining is designed to find: an assumption so deeply laid that the text never examines it. Homer’s world takes for granted that a basileus is a great man. The tablets show that the assumption has a date and a cause. Somebody, after a catastrophe, moved up.
The tablets also show how much the epic forgot. Linear B records a palace economy of tremendous administrative detail: thousands of sheep counted by district, perfume makers, bronze allocations, land tenure categories, religious offerings to named gods including Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and a figure called Dionysus, whom scholars had long thought a late arrival. The Iliad knows nothing of clerks or rations. Its kings give gifts and take plunder. The administrative world that wrote down Achilles’s name had been wiped out of the memory that kept his name alive.
Ventris did not enjoy his fame for long. In 1956, a few weeks before the publication of the great book he wrote with the Cambridge philologist John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, he drove his car into a parked truck late at night and was killed. He was thirty-four. The tripod tablet from Pylos is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, a lump of clay a few inches long, recording for the palace inventory one cauldron with a burned leg, written by a clerk who never imagined anyone would read it after the end of the season.
Chapter Twelve — A King Called Alaksandu
In 1906 a German Assyriologist named Hugo Winckler began digging at a village called Boğazköy in central Anatolia and within weeks was pulling clay tablets out of the ground by the thousand. He had found Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire, and its royal archives. Winckler was not a patient man, and his excavation methods left later archaeologists grinding their teeth, but the tablets he uncovered transformed the history of the eastern Mediterranean. They were written in cuneiform in several languages, and the main one, Hittite, turned out to be Indo-European, a distant relative of Greek, Latin and English. A Czech scholar, Bedřich Hrozný, proved this in 1915.
Among the archives were treaties, letters, annals and lists of vassal kingdoms, and in 1924 the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer published a sensational claim. Two names in the Hittite texts, he said, matched names from Homer. The kingdom of Ahhiyawa, a power somewhere to the west, was the land of the Achaeans, Homer’s commonest name for the Greeks. The western Anatolian kingdom of Wilusa was Ilios, Troy, written with the digamma it once had, Wilios. Forrer was attacked fiercely, and for decades the identifications were treated as an amateur’s enthusiasm. Most specialists now accept the Ahhiyawa equation, and many accept Wilusa as well.
The most startling document is a treaty, from around 1280 BC, between the Hittite king Muwatalli the Second and a ruler of Wilusa named Alaksandu. The name looks remarkably like Alexandros, which is the second name of Paris, prince of Troy, in the Iliad. The poem uses both names for him, a curious habit for a Trojan prince, since Alexandros is a good Greek name and Paris is not. Alaksandu’s treaty lists the gods who witness it, and among them is a figure called Appaliunas, whom some scholars connect with Apollo, the god who in the Iliad fights on the Trojan side.
There is more. A letter from a later Hittite king, Hattusili the Third, to the king of Ahhiyawa, known to scholars as the Tawagalawa letter, refers in passing to a dispute between the two powers over Wilusa, in which, the king writes, they had been at enmity, and asks that the matter be considered closed. Another letter, sent to the Hittite court by a western vassal named Manapa-Tarhunta, mentions an attack on Wilusa. A third, the Milawata letter, speaks of restoring a king of Wilusa named Walmu who had been driven out. In the Hittite records, Wilusa is a small, troubled kingdom on the edge of the empire, repeatedly caught between the great power to its east and a pushy maritime power from the west.
Nobody in these documents is named Achilles, Agamemnon or Priam. The Hittite chancellery did not do heroic narrative. It did border disputes, extradition clauses, complaints about fugitives and polite reminders about tribute. One rogue figure, Piyamaradu, a western adventurer who raided Hittite territory and fled under the protection of Ahhiyawa, recurs through several letters like a minor character in a soap opera whom the scriptwriters cannot bring themselves to kill off. The Hittite king addresses the Ahhiyawan king as my brother and as a great king, which tells us that, at least for a while, the Greeks across the water counted as a power of the first rank.
Set these letters beside the Iliad and two kinds of text appear, describing the same corner of the world from opposite ends. The Hittite archive is bureaucratic, contemporary and indifferent to individual glory. The poem is heroic, retrospective by several centuries and indifferent to administration. Each sees something the other cannot. The archive confirms that Greeks and the people of Wilusa did come into conflict in the thirteenth century, perhaps more than once. The poem preserves what the archive never could: how such a conflict felt to the descendants of those who fought it, after every clerk who recorded it was dead.
Caution is necessary here, and I want to state it honestly because the temptation runs in one direction. Matching names across languages is a game in which the player usually wins. Alaksandu could be an Anatolian name that merely resembles Alexandros. Wilusa could be another town. There is no record of a Greek army destroying Wilusa, and no Hittite king ever mentions a ten-year siege. What the documents establish is a plausible setting, not a historical Iliad. When people say the Hittite tablets prove the Trojan War, they are doing what Schliemann did with his spade, and we will meet the results of that in two chapters.
Still, the letters do one thing for a deconstructive reading that nothing else can. They put the Trojans back into a world of their own. In the Iliad, the Trojans speak Greek, pray to Greek gods and organize themselves like Greeks; the poem has absorbed them entirely into its own frame, which is what victors’ stories do. The treaty of Alaksandu reminds us that the people of Wilusa had their own kings, their own diplomatic standing and their own gods, and that they wrote to the emperor in Hattusa as a recognized partner. The poem’s center has a margin, and the margin kept its own files.
The Alaksandu treaty survives only in fragments, its clay copies broken in the ruins of Hattusa. It ends, as Hittite treaties do, with a list of curses on anyone who breaks it and blessings on anyone who keeps it, the gods of both lands summoned as witnesses. Somewhere in that list of witnesses, if Forrer and his successors are right, Apollo is already standing on the side of Troy, five hundred years before Homer gives him his bow.
Chapter Thirteen — Nine Cities on One Hill
In the spring of 480 BC the Persian king Xerxes, marching an army of unprecedented size toward Greece, stopped at the ruins of Troy. Herodotus says he went up to the citadel of Priam because he wanted to see it, heard the story of the place from his guides, and sacrificed a thousand oxen to Athena of Ilion while his magi poured libations to the heroes. That night, Herodotus adds, a panic swept through the camp. A century and a half later Alexander the Great came the other way, landed near the same spot, anointed himself and ran naked with his companions around the grave mound believed to be Achilles’s. Both conquerors understood that the hill was not merely a place. It was a page in a book everyone knew, and standing on it was a way of writing yourself into the next chapter.
The hill is called Hisarlik, the place of fortresses, and it sits a few miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey. It is not tall. What makes it remarkable is that it is made almost entirely of town. People lived on it for about four thousand years, built, burned, collapsed, leveled the debris and built again, until the hill rose by many meters on the accumulated remains of its own past. Archaeologists divide the stack into nine principal cities, numbered from Troy I at the bottom, around 2900 BC, to Troy IX at the top, the Roman town of Ilium, and then subdivide them into dozens of phases. Digging at Hisarlik is like reading a book whose pages have been glued together and then partly set on fire.
Heinrich Schliemann, whose story belongs to the next chapter, dug through the hill in the 1870s with a speed that destroyed a great deal of what he was looking for. He decided that Homer’s Troy was the second city from the bottom, because it had fortifications and treasure. It was the wrong city by about a thousand years. After his death his architect, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a careful man who had learned his trade at Olympia, returned in 1893 and 1894 and found what Schliemann had cut through: the great walls of Troy VI, with sloping masonry faces and towers, belonging to the late Bronze Age. This, Dörpfeld argued, was Priam’s city.
In the 1930s an American expedition under Carl Blegen, whom we met finding the Pylos archive, reexamined everything with modern methods. Blegen concluded that Troy VI had been brought down by an earthquake, and that its successor, Troy VIIa, a crowded, poorer settlement built within the old walls, had been destroyed by fire around 1180 BC, with signs of violence: unburied human remains, arrowheads, storage jars sunk into house floors as if for a siege. Troy VIIa became his candidate for the city of the Iliad. Scholars have argued about the dates ever since, and the destruction of VIIa is now placed somewhat earlier by some and its violence questioned by others.
The modern phase of excavation began in 1988 under Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen, who brought geophysical survey to the site. Magnetometers, which detect slight differences in the magnetism of buried material, revealed a ditch cut into the bedrock some distance below the citadel, enclosing a lower town. If the lower town was densely inhabited, late Bronze Age Troy was not a small fortress but a substantial city of perhaps five to ten thousand people, a regional power fit to be the Wilusa of the Hittite letters. In 1995 Korfmann’s team found a small bronze seal in the late levels, inscribed in Luwian hieroglyphs, the first writing ever recovered at Troy. It names a scribe and his wife. The poem’s Trojans had no writing; their actual successors had at least one clerk.
Korfmann’s reconstruction drew an attack from his own university. Frank Kolb, a Tübingen ancient historian, accused him in 2001 of inflating thin evidence into a metropolis, of turning a modest fortified settlement into a trading center for the media and the tourist trade, and of reconstructions that owed more to Homer than to the trench. The quarrel was conducted in newspapers, became personal and culminated in a public symposium at Tübingen in February 2002 attended by hundreds of people, which settled nothing and was enjoyed by everyone except the participants. Excavation has since shown that parts of the lower town were indeed occupied, though how densely remains disputed.
The Tübingen quarrel is useful to this book because it shows, in modern dress, the same mechanism we found in the ancient Lives. Two scholars stood in front of the same evidence: a ditch, some house walls, a few square meters of excavated lower town. One saw a great city because the poem and the Hittite letters had prepared him to see one. The other saw a village because he was determined not to be prepared. The ditch did not care. A field of thin evidence has room in it for whichever city you brought with you.
Since 2013 a Turkish team led by Rüstem Aslan has continued work at the site, and a large museum, built of rusted steel like a buried block of the hill itself, opened nearby in 2018. The hill is a national park and a World Heritage Site. A wooden horse stands at the entrance for the visitors, and children climb up inside it to have their photographs taken, which is, if you think about it, exactly what the original horse was designed for.
What the archaeology of Hisarlik establishes is real and substantial. There was a large, rich, fortified city at the mouth of the Dardanelles in the late Bronze Age. It controlled an important coast. It was damaged and destroyed more than once. Its name was very probably Wilusa, and its neighbors to the west were very probably Greeks. What the archaeology cannot establish is the Iliad. No layer contains a wrath, a funeral or a quarrel over a captive woman. The hill gives us a stage. The play came from somewhere else.
Xerxes, after his thousand oxen, marched down to the Hellespont and had it bridged with boats. When a storm broke the first bridge, Herodotus says, he ordered the sea whipped with three hundred lashes and a pair of fetters thrown into it. A man who has just made sacrifice at Troy and then flogs the water is a man who has read the story very closely and taken the wrong part.
Chapter Fourteen — The Merchant Who Invented Himself
In the introduction to his book Ilios, published in 1880, Heinrich Schliemann told the world how it had all begun. When he was a boy of seven in a village in Mecklenburg, his father gave him a Christmas present, an illustrated history of the world, with a picture of Troy in flames and Aeneas carrying his father out through the gate. The boy looked at the massive walls and announced that walls like that could never have vanished entirely. They must still be under the ground. He and his father agreed that one day he would dig them up. Half a century later, he did.
It is one of the great origin stories of modern scholarship, and there is no trace of it in any of Schliemann’s writings before he became famous. His diaries and letters from the decades when he was building his fortune are full of business, languages and travel, and nearly empty of Troy. The vow first appears in print when the man who had found Troy needed a childhood that pointed toward it. A life that ended at Hisarlik acquired a beginning at Hisarlik too.
The biography Schliemann wrote for himself is a rich field for the method of this book, because unlike Homer’s it has a living author who could edit it. He was born in 1822, the son of a pastor who was dismissed for misconduct. He worked as a grocer’s apprentice, survived a shipwreck, became a clerk in Amsterdam and then an agent in St. Petersburg, where he made a fortune in indigo and other commodities, and a much larger one supplying military goods during the Crimean War. He taught himself languages at an astonishing rate, by his own account learning each in about six weeks, by reading aloud and writing compositions he had corrected by native speakers. Whatever else is true, the languages were real.
Much else was not. In 1851 he went to California, where his brother had died, and opened a bank in Sacramento buying gold dust from miners. He later published a vivid eyewitness account of the great fire in San Francisco. Close study of his diaries by David Traill showed that the description was assembled from newspaper reports. In 1869 he obtained American citizenship in New York by asserting that he had been resident in California in 1850, when it became a state, which he had not. In the same year he secured a quick divorce from his Russian wife in Indianapolis, whose laws were famously accommodating, and wrote to a friend in Athens, a former teacher, asking him to find him a Greek wife who loved Homer. The friend sent photographs. Schliemann chose Sophia Engastromenos, who was seventeen, and married her that autumn. He was forty-seven.
He was also not the man who found Troy. Frank Calvert, a member of a British family long settled at the Dardanelles, owned part of the hill at Hisarlik, had dug trial trenches there in the 1860s and was convinced it was Troy. In 1868 he explained his reasons to a rich German visitor who had arrived believing that Troy lay at another site, Bunarbashi, a few miles away. Schliemann changed his mind, began excavating in 1870 partly on Calvert’s land, and in his publications steadily reduced Calvert to a footnote and then to a nuisance.
In 1873, near the end of a season, Schliemann announced the discovery of Priam’s Treasure: a mass of gold and silver vessels, thousands of gold beads, diadems and earrings, found together near the walls of the second city. He described how Sophia had carried the objects away in her shawl while he cut them out of the earth, to keep the workmen from seeing. Sophia, Traill later established, was in Athens at the time, mourning her father. The treasure was real, and so were the photographs of Sophia wearing the great diadem, which became some of the most famous images of the nineteenth century. Whether every object was found where and how Schliemann said has been doubted ever since. What is certain is that it belonged to a city about a thousand years older than any Priam.
At Mycenae in 1876 he did it again, opening shaft graves inside the citadel and finding gold masks on the faces of the dead. One of them, bearded, noble and slightly too perfect, has been called the Mask of Agamemnon ever since, although it dates to around 1550 BC, three centuries before any plausible Trojan War. Schliemann was later said to have telegraphed the King of Greece that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. He did not say it in those words, but the sentence was too good to let a man’s actual telegrams stand in its way, which is a lesson he could have taught himself.
Here the kindness clause of my trade obliges me to be wrong alongside him for a moment. Schliemann’s guess that the walls survived underground was correct. His instinct that the poems preserved real geography was correct in outline. His speed destroyed evidence, but nobody else in the 1870s had the money or the nerve to dig a hill that size, and the professionals who mocked him were not digging at all. And his lies have a pattern that is almost touching. Nearly every one of them improves the story by moving him closer to the center of it. He did not invent treasures. He invented himself as the man destined to find them.
That is retrospective drift in its purest human form (Kriger, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26532.64648). A life that happened to end in a great discovery is read backward until every earlier moment seems to have been aiming at it. Schliemann did the reading himself, which is unusual, and he did it in print, which is more unusual still. The boy with the picture book is to Schliemann what the blind singer at the feast is to Homer: a portrait drawn from the finished work and hung at the beginning of the life.
Priam’s Treasure went to Berlin, disappeared at the end of the Second World War and turned up in 1993 in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where it remains. Schliemann himself collapsed in a street in Naples on Christmas Day in 1890 and died the following day. He lies in the First Cemetery of Athens in a mausoleum shaped like a small Greek temple, and around its base runs a frieze in which a figure that looks very like Heinrich Schliemann directs workmen at Troy, while Sophia stands nearby and Homer’s heroes look on, all of them in marble, all of them exactly where he wanted them.
Chapter Fifteen — When the Palaces Burned
Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, a wealthy trading city on the Syrian coast, wrote a letter to the king of Cyprus that has become the most quoted cry for help of the ancient world. My father, he wrote, the ships of the enemy have come; my cities have been burned, and they have done evil things in my land. My troops are in the land of the Hittites and my ships are in Lycia. Seven enemy ships have come and done us great damage. Not long afterward Ugarit was destroyed and never rebuilt. For a while it was believed that the letter had been found in a kiln, still baking when the city fell, a message that never got sent. That story turned out to be a misreading of the excavation. The fear in the letter was real.
Around 1200 BC, give or take a few decades, the interconnected world of the late Bronze Age came apart. The Hittite empire collapsed and Hattusa was abandoned. Ugarit fell. Cities across the Levant were destroyed. In Greece the palaces of Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes and others burned or were abandoned over a few generations. Egypt survived, but on the walls of his temple at Medinet Habu, Ramesses the Third had himself shown defeating a coalition of invaders, by land and sea, in the eighth year of his reign, which falls around 1177 BC. The Egyptians called them peoples of the sea, or more precisely foreigners from their islands, and listed tribes with names like Peleset, who are probably the Philistines, Shekelesh, Sherden and others.
For a long time historians explained the collapse with a single cause: invaders, the Sea Peoples, sweeping across the eastern Mediterranean like a storm. Each generation since has found more causes. Pollen cores and lake sediments show a long drought in the region. Earthquakes struck several of the destroyed sites in a cluster. Trade networks carrying the copper and tin needed for bronze broke down. Palace economies that depended on tight central control had no slack when harvests failed. Internal revolt cannot be ruled out. Eric Cline’s popular book on the year 1177 made the multiple-cause picture familiar to a wide public.
Peter Kriger has proposed a sharper version of this idea in his work on clustered multi-vector shocks (Peter Kriger, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21405843). His point is that systems which comfortably survive any single shock, a drought, a war, a supply failure, can fail suddenly when several shocks arrive close together, because each one consumes the reserves needed to absorb the next. The collapse looks like the work of one terrible blow only in retrospect. In reality it is a stack of ordinary blows arriving faster than the system can recover. The late Bronze Age palaces were magnificent and brittle in exactly this way. They were built for a world in which bad years came singly.
For Greece the consequences were drastic. Within a century or two the population appears to have fallen sharply. Many sites were abandoned for good. Monumental building stopped. The palace administrators vanished, and with them went the Linear B script, which had been a tool of the palace and had no other users. For roughly four hundred years, as far as we know, nobody in Greece wrote anything at all. Historians used to call this the Dark Age, and some still do, though the phrase describes our evidence more than the lives of the people living through it.
This is the gap across which the Iliad had to be carried, and it changes how the poem should be read. The singers who shaped the tradition in these centuries lived among ruins. Huge walls built of blocks so large that later Greeks said they must have been laid by giants, the Cyclopes, stood on hills above villages of wood and mud brick. Graves full of bronze and gold were occasionally broken into. The poem’s grandeur is the grandeur of a lost world seen from below, by people who knew it only through stones and stories, and its heroes are routinely described as stronger than men nowadays, able to lift boulders that two men of the present could not. Every generation is told it is smaller than its grandfathers. This one had the walls to prove it.
The collapse also explains one of the great oddities of the epic, which is its silence about itself. The Iliad does not know how the palace world ended. It does not mention a great catastrophe, or Sea Peoples, or famine. Its heroes go home after the war, some to trouble, and the Odyssey tells some of those homecomings, but the end of their whole civilization is not a subject. What people remember is rarely what destroyed them. They remember what they had.
Deconstruction has a name for what a text cannot say about the conditions of its own production, and the collapse is that unspoken condition for Homer. Every line was made possible by an event no line describes. The poem could exist only because the world it celebrates disappeared, leaving behind enough wreckage to inspire awe and too little record to restrain imagination. Had the palaces survived, with their clerks and their archives, we might have had inventories of the Trojan campaign. We would not have had the Iliad.
In Pylos the fire that destroyed the palace burned hot enough to fire the clay tablets in the archive room, and in the excavation the tablets lay where they had fallen when the shelves collapsed. The last records of the palace are lists, some of them, scholars have suggested, concerned with rowers and watchers along the coast. Whether those men were posted because the palace feared an attack from the sea, nobody can say for certain. The lists stop. Nobody wrote the next one.
Chapter Sixteen — A Hero Buried with His Horses
In 1980 a bulldozer clearing a field on the island of Euboea, at a low hill called Toumba near the village of Lefkandi, cut into an ancient structure, and the owner of the land was about to build a house on the spot. British and Greek archaeologists, led by Mervyn Popham and Hugh Sackett together with Petros Calligas, mounted a rescue excavation, and what they found rewrote the history of the so-called Dark Age in a single season. It was a building about fifty meters long, with an apse at one end, walls of mud brick on stone foundations and a roof held up by wooden posts. It dates to around 950 BC. At the time it was built there was nothing remotely like it anywhere in Greece.
Under its floor were two shafts. In one lay the remains of four horses, two of them with iron bits still in their mouths. In the other were two human burials. A man had been cremated, and his ashes, wrapped in a cloth that partly survives, had been placed in a bronze amphora made in Cyprus, decorated with hunting scenes, and already old when it went into the ground. Beside him was an iron sword. Next to him lay a woman, not cremated but buried, wearing gold ornaments on her chest, gold coils in her hair, gold rings on her fingers, with an iron knife lying near her head.
Some excavators have suggested that the woman was killed to accompany the man. The evidence is not conclusive. If it is true, she was young, she was dressed in her finest things, and the knife by her head was used for its purpose.
Anyone who knows the twenty-third book of the Iliad will recognize the scene before the description is finished. When Achilles burns the body of Patroclus, he builds a pyre a hundred feet square. He slaughters sheep and cattle, lays jars of honey and oil against the bier, kills four horses and throws them on the fire, kills two of the dead man’s dogs, and then, in the passage that the poet introduces by saying he devised evil things in his heart, kills twelve young Trojans with his bronze and puts them on the pyre too. Afterward the bones of Patroclus are gathered into a golden bowl, wrapped in a double layer of fat, and a mound is raised over the spot.
The resemblance between Lefkandi and the funeral of Patroclus is not exact, and no serious archaeologist claims that the man of Toumba was a hero of the Trojan War. But it is close enough to show that the kind of funeral the Iliad describes was not a poetic fantasy. Around 950 BC, roughly two centuries before the poem took the form we know, somebody on Euboea was buried with horses, a sacrificed companion or at least an accompanying wife, a cremation in a metal vessel and an antique heirloom, and then the whole building was deliberately filled with earth and covered with a mound. Whoever planned that funeral was thinking in the same terms as the poet who would later describe the funeral of Patroclus.
The heirloom matters as much as the horses. The Cypriot amphora that held the man’s ashes was a century or more old when it was buried. The man was put to rest inside an antique, just as Odysseus went out on his night raid wearing one. People in this period valued objects precisely for their age and their stories, and they buried those objects with the dead whose prestige they confirmed. Their poems did the same with words. The tradition was a culture of heirlooms in metal and in verse at the same time.
About two centuries later the Greeks began doing something new at the old graves. In the eighth century people started leaving offerings in Mycenaean tombs that had stood unvisited for hundreds of years: pots, small figures, food. At Mycenae a shrine was eventually set up to Agamemnon, and near Sparta a sanctuary to Menelaus and Helen grew up on a ridge above the river. The communities of the new Greece were adopting the dead of the old one as ancestors and heroes, and the timing coincides closely with the spread of the epic poetry that named them. Which came first, the cult or the poem, is one of those questions where each answer depends on the other, like asking which came first in a marriage.
This is the point where my concept of retrospective drift needs to be used carefully, because it would be easy to overuse. The poems did not cause the hero cults, and the cults did not cause the poems. Both were ways in which the people of the eighth century made sense of the ruins around them, and both selected, from a vast field of forgotten dead, the few who could be given names and stories. The tholos tomb that received offerings was not necessarily the tomb of anyone important. It was the tomb that happened to survive and be noticed. The heroes of Greece were, among other things, the people whose graves were still standing.
Lefkandi itself shows that the selection had already begun. The great building at Toumba was not left as a hall for the living. Soon after the burials it was pulled down or filled in and covered, so that it became a mound, and for the next century and more the people of the settlement buried their own dead in a cemetery just beside it, as close as they could get. The richest graves in that cemetery cluster near the mound.
Archaeologists have found in those later graves objects from Egypt, the Levant and Cyprus, and ornaments of gold that suggest a community with long-distance connections and ambition. Its people chose to lie beside the man in the antique urn. They did not know his name, or if they did, nobody wrote it down. They knew where he was, and they wanted to be near him, the way readers have wanted to be near Homer ever since without knowing his name either.
Chapter Seventeen — A Shipping List from a Vanished World
Just before the longest list in Greek poetry, the poet loses his nerve. Tell me now, Muses who have homes on Olympus, he says, for you are goddesses and are present and know all things, while we hear only the report and know nothing. Then he explains why he needs help: the mass of men he could not name or count even if he had ten tongues and ten mouths, a voice that never broke and a heart of bronze. So he asks the Muses to give him the leaders and the ships. What follows, in the second book of the Iliad, runs to roughly two hundred and seventy lines and is known as the Catalogue of Ships.
It is not easy reading, and generations of students have skipped it with a clear conscience. It lists twenty-nine contingents of the Greek army, with their leaders, their home towns and the number of their ships, which add up to nearly twelve hundred. It begins, surprisingly, with the Boeotians, from central Greece, who are not especially prominent in the rest of the poem, and gives them fifty ships each carrying a hundred and twenty young men. It names something like a hundred and seventy places. Many of them were obscure even in antiquity. Ancient geographers argued about where some of them had been, and Strabo spent pages trying to locate towns that had vanished before his time.
In 1970 two British scholars, Richard Hope Simpson and John Lazenby, did what Strabo could not and walked the ground. They compared the places in the Catalogue with archaeological surveys of Greece and found that a remarkable number of the identifiable sites had been inhabited in the Mycenaean period, and that some had been abandoned afterward and never resettled. The Catalogue, in other words, preserves a map of the late Bronze Age with considerable accuracy, including towns that nobody living in the eighth century could have visited because they were already ruins or fields.
There are other signs of age. The Catalogue does not list the great city of Thebes, only a place called Hypothebai, Lower Thebes, as if the citadel were already destroyed, which matches the legend that Thebes fell a generation before Troy. It does not mention the Dorians, who in later Greek tradition arrived after the war and dominated much of the Peloponnese in historical times. Its political geography is that of an earlier world, or at least of a world remembered as earlier. Some scholars have also noticed that the Catalogue reads like an account of an army mustering at Aulis at the start of the war rather than of one camped at Troy in its tenth year, which would make it a piece from a different song stitched into this one.
Here the procedure I described for structured documents becomes useful, because the Catalogue is a structured document embedded in a poem (Kriger, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23166797). The first question in that procedure is what kind of document this is pretending to be. The answer is a muster roll, a record of who owed and supplied what to a joint enterprise. The second question is who had an interest in what the record says. And here the Catalogue gives us a small, perfect scandal.
The entry for the island of Salamis says that Ajax led twelve ships from Salamis and stationed them where the Athenian battalions stood. Two lines, no more. In the sixth century Athens and its neighbor Megara fought a long dispute over the possession of Salamis, and according to Plutarch and Aristotle, the Athenians appealed to Homer as a witness: the Iliad places Ajax’s ships beside the Athenians, therefore Salamis belonged with Athens. The Megarians answered that the Athenians had inserted the line themselves, and some sources say Solon or Peisistratus did the inserting. The Megarians offered their own version of the passage, in which Salamis belonged with Megara. Both sides were treating the poem as a land register, and both accused the other of forging it.
The scandal is a perfect illustration of something the Lives of Homer have already taught us. A text without an owner becomes property, and property attracts claims. When a city can win an island by citing a line, the line becomes worth forging, and the absence of an author who could object makes forgery easy. Every disputed line in Homer is a small Salamis, and the ancient scholars we will meet in a few chapters spent their careers trying to adjudicate between rival claimants.
Now return to the invocation. At the very moment when the poem turns most documentary, most like an archive, the poet hands authorship to the Muses and declares that he himself knows nothing, only report. The word for report is kleos, which also means fame, glory, the reputation that heroes fight and die to win. The poet says, in effect: what I am about to give you is not my knowledge but the glory that has come down to us, and only goddesses can vouch for it. The most fact-heavy passage in the Iliad is introduced by the poem’s most explicit disclaimer of eyewitness authority. The author steps out of the room precisely where an author would be most useful.
I find that moment one of the most honest in all of ancient literature. It anticipates by more than two thousand years the problem every historian faces, which is that the sources we have are kleos, report and reputation, and that the past is available only through what other people chose to pass on. The poet’s solution was to call in an infallible witness. Ours is to call in Hope Simpson and Lazenby with their survey maps. Both solutions are ways of not having been there.
There is a small joke hiding in the invocation, and I think the poet knew it. He says he could not list the common soldiers even with ten mouths. Then he lists the leaders, their towns and their ships for nearly three hundred lines, with one mouth, and never once stops for breath.
Chapter Eighteen — A Society That Never Existed
In 1952 Moses Finley was dismissed from his teaching post at Rutgers University after refusing to answer questions from a Senate committee about whether he had been a member of the Communist Party. He was a New Yorker, born Moses Finkelstein, a former child prodigy who graduated from Syracuse University at fifteen and later absorbed the economic history of the ancient world with an appetite few have matched. Unable to find work in American universities, he moved to Cambridge in England, where he eventually became Master of Darwin College and was knighted. In 1954, as he was preparing to leave for England, he published a short, brilliant book called The World of Odysseus.
Finley’s argument was that the poems describe a coherent society, and that it could be dated. Not to the Bronze Age, whose palace bureaucracies were nowhere in the epics, and not to the eighth century, with its emerging city-states, but to the period in between, roughly the tenth and ninth centuries. In this world, he argued, wealth was measured in herds and treasure, power rested with heads of great households, and the central institution was the exchange of gifts, which bound men together in a web of obligation more binding than any law. Finley drew on anthropology, on Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift, and he made Homeric society feel like a real place, with its own economic logic, as distinct from ours as the Trobriand Islands.
It was a wonderful book, and it has never gone out of print. Twenty years later another Cambridge scholar, Anthony Snodgrass, published a short article that undermined its central premise. It was called An Homeric Society?, and the question mark was the argument. Snodgrass looked at Homeric marriage. In some passages a man wins his bride by giving gifts to her father, called hedna. In others the bride’s father provides a dowry that goes with her into her husband’s house. In a few places both seem to happen at once. These are two different systems, Snodgrass noted, belonging to different kinds of society, and they are rarely found together. A poem that contains both is not describing one society. It is describing several, mixed together over time.
Snodgrass’s conclusion was that Homeric society is an artificial amalgam, a composite of practices from different centuries and regions, held together by the language of the tradition rather than by any community that ever lived. There was no time and place in which people married exactly as the Homeric heroes marry, fought exactly as they fight and buried their dead exactly as they bury them. Each layer of the tradition contributed something, and the poem kept all of it, because nothing in its method required consistency.
The debate did not end with Snodgrass. Ian Morris argued in the 1980s that the poems do reflect a real world, that of the eighth century in which they took shape, and that the archaic elements are deliberate distancing devices, a way of placing the heroes in an imagined past. Others have found the society coherent enough to study as a functioning system, whatever its origins. The question is still argued. For the purposes of this book what matters is the shape of the argument, because it repeats exactly the shape of the argument about the author.
Finley’s Homeric society is a single coherent world built out of the text, much as the ancient Lives built a single coherent poet. Snodgrass’s objection is the same as the one we made against the Lives: the pieces come from different places and times, and the coherence is supplied by the reader. Morris’s position resembles the defenders of a historical Homer, who accept that the material is old but insist that a single moment organized it. Three scholars standing in front of the same evidence reproduce, at the level of society, the three main positions on authorship. The empty chair at the feast has a whole empty town around it.
One episode in the Odyssey makes the point vividly. When the Phaeacians, whose island Odysseus reaches near the end of his wanderings, are introduced, the poet tells us how their city was founded. Their king’s father led them from their old home, built a wall around the new city, put up houses, made temples for the gods and divided the fields. That is a description of an eighth-century colonial foundation, of the kind Greeks were establishing at that very moment in Sicily and southern Italy, inserted into a story set before the Trojan War. The poem’s own sense of the past is thoroughly present.
Equally telling is what the poem says about politics on Ithaca. At the start of the Odyssey, Telemachus calls an assembly, and an old man rises to say that no assembly has met since Odysseus left, twenty years before. A society in which the public meeting can lapse for twenty years without anyone noticing is either very different from a Greek city-state or a city-state imagined by people who were not yet sure what one was. Either reading tells us that the institutions of the poem are being worked out on the page rather than reported from life.
What does this do to a reader? It should not make us stop treating the poems as evidence about early Greece. It should change what we think they are evidence of. A composite society is not a fake. It is the record of how people over several centuries imagined the heroic past, using whatever pieces of their own world fitted the story. In that sense the society that never existed is one of the best-documented things in Greek history.
Finley was a man who knew what it was to be judged by people who had made up their minds before hearing him. He was careful, in later editions of his book, to respond to his critics, and he changed little. His Homeric world is still there, between its covers, coherent and alive, a country with no borders on any map, where every man who arrives at a house as a stranger is given a bath, a meal and a gift before anybody asks his name.
Chapter Nineteen — A Drinking Cup Quotes the Iliad
Sometime in the third quarter of the eighth century, on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, a boy of about ten or twelve died and was cremated, and among the things buried with him was a broken clay drinking cup made in Rhodes. Scratched on its side, from right to left in the alphabet of Euboea, were three lines. The first is prose, or nearly: I am the cup of Nestor, good to drink from. The second and third are perfect hexameters, the verse of epic: whoever drinks from this cup, at once the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite will seize him. The settlement on Ischia, called Pithekoussai, was a trading post founded by Greeks from Euboea, and the cup is one of the earliest substantial Greek inscriptions ever found.
The joke depends on the reader knowing who Nestor was. In the eleventh book of the Iliad, the old king Nestor has a famous cup, so big and heavy that another man could barely lift it from the table when full, though Nestor raised it easily. It is studded with gold nails, has four handles and has golden doves feeding on it. Compared to that, a cheap Rhodian cup is a comedy, and the boast that this is the cup of Nestor reads like a bar joke: this is the legendary goblet, drink up and see what happens. The humor requires a shared knowledge of the epic tradition among people drinking together on the far western edge of the Greek world, around 730 BC.
Whether the cup alludes to our Iliad or simply to the wider tradition of tales about Nestor cannot be settled. What it proves is that hexameter verse, epic names and a sense of humor about them were being written down by the second half of the eighth century, at a trading post full of sailors and merchants, using an alphabet that had been in Greek hands for only a few generations. A similar inscription on a jug from Athens, from roughly the same time, also in hexameter, announces that the jug is the prize for whichever dancer dances most gracefully. Writing arrived in Greece and almost immediately began to be used for verse and for fun.
The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician script, probably in the ninth or early eighth century. The Phoenicians wrote only consonants. The Greeks took some Phoenician letters for sounds that Greek did not need and turned them into vowels, creating the first full alphabet, in which every sound of speech could be represented. This was a change of enormous consequence, because a full alphabet can record verse exactly, including its rhythm, which a consonant-only script cannot. In 1991 Barry Powell argued, provocatively, that the Greek alphabet was invented precisely in order to record Homeric poetry. Most scholars think this goes too far. But the coincidence of dates is striking: the technology that could fix a hexameter poem appeared at almost the moment the tradition was producing its greatest poems.
The Iliad itself knows almost nothing of writing, and the one exception is chilling. In the sixth book a Lycian warrior tells the story of his grandfather Bellerophon, who was sent by a king to another king carrying what the poem calls baneful signs, scratched on a folded tablet, many and deadly, that instructed the recipient to kill the bearer. The only written message in Homer is a sealed death warrant carried by its own victim. If you wanted a single image for the suspicion of an oral culture toward the new technology, you could not find a better one.
How, then, did the poems get written down? There are several theories, and each comes with its own picture of Homer. One, associated with Albert Lord, imagines dictation: a great singer performing slowly for a scribe, as Avdo performed for Parry’s team, producing a text longer and more carefully worked than any single performance at a feast. Another imagines the poems fixed by a guild of rhapsodes over time, each generation refining a memorized text until it hardened. A third, drawing on Gregory Nagy, describes a gradual crystallization in which the poems became more and more stable through repeated performance at major festivals, without any single moment of writing.
Antiquity told a different story, and told it about Athens. Cicero, writing in the first century before Christ, says that the tyrant Peisistratus, who ruled Athens in the sixth century, was the first to arrange the books of Homer, which had been in confusion, in the order we now have. A dialogue attributed to Plato says that Peisistratus’s son Hipparchus brought the poems to Athens and required the rhapsodes at the Panathenaic festival to recite them in sequence, one taking over where the last left off. Modern scholars disagree sharply about how much of this to believe. It is suspicious that the stories make Athens responsible for the definitive Homer, since Athenians were the ones telling them. It is also suspicious that the Athenians were accused, as we saw in the Catalogue, of inserting lines to suit themselves. A city that controlled the official performance of Homer had both the means and the motive.
From the point of view of this book, the competing theories of writing are competing theories of authorship in disguise. Dictation produces a single author, the great singer, and a single moment. Rhapsodic stabilization produces a profession. Crystallization produces a tradition. The Peisistratean story produces an editor, a committee working for a state. Each one solves the problem of how a text arose from performance by placing a particular kind of agent at the critical point. The evidence is thin enough that each can be defended. And in each case the agent chosen tells us more about the scholar’s picture of literature than about the eighth century.
Whatever happened, the poems were written, and by the fifth century there were many copies in circulation, varying from city to city. The Athenians had theirs. Other cities had their own. When the scholars of Alexandria later gathered copies from across the Greek world, they found editions from Marseille, from Chios, from Argos and elsewhere, and found that they did not agree.
The boy on Ischia knew none of this. He was buried with a cup that promised its drinker the desire of Aphrodite, a joke he was too young to have understood, perhaps placed in his grave by adults who thought it was the right thing to give him. It is the oldest surviving trace, outside the poems themselves, of a world in which Homeric verse was already something people quoted, played with and took with them to the end.
Chapter Twenty — The Librarian’s Dagger
In 1788 a young French scholar named Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison published an edition of a manuscript he had found in the library of St. Mark’s in Venice. It was a copy of the Iliad written in the tenth century, now known as the Venetus A, and it was unlike any copy of Homer that modern Europe had seen. Around the text, in the margins, between the lines and running down the edges of every page, were notes in tiny script, the scholia, preserving the arguments of scholars who had worked in Alexandria more than a thousand years earlier. And beside the lines of the poem were small critical signs: a horizontal stroke, a pointed bracket, a star, a dot. Those signs were the fingerprints of a vanished science.
The science had been born in the Library of Alexandria in the third century before Christ. Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first head of the Library, produced the first critical edition of Homer by comparing copies and removing lines he thought were spurious. He was followed by Aristophanes of Byzantium and then, in the second century, by the greatest of them, Aristarchus of Samothrace, who wrote commentaries on Homer of such depth that his name became a byword in antiquity for a severe critic. The strongest of his principles is usually summarized as explaining Homer from Homer: if you want to know what a word means or whether a line is genuine, compare it with Homer’s usage elsewhere, not with what later writers or your own taste would expect.
The horizontal stroke was the obelos, which means a spit, the kind you roast meat on. Aristarchus placed it beside lines he believed did not belong to Homer. He did not delete them; he marked them, and explained his reasons in his commentary. The sign has had a long afterlife. It survived into medieval manuscripts and early printing, and it is the ancestor of the typographical mark we now call the dagger, which still sends a reader to the bottom of the page to find out what is wrong. Every dagger in a modern book descends from a librarian in Alexandria saying, about a line of Homer, I do not believe this.
The reasons Aristarchus gave for athetizing a line, as the practice was called, are revealing. Sometimes the line repeated another and seemed out of place. Sometimes it contradicted something said elsewhere. Sometimes it was unseemly, showing a god or a hero behaving in a way Aristarchus thought improper. The last category tells us that ancient criticism was not purely technical. Aristarchus had a picture of what Homer would and would not do, and he used it to judge the text. The author he believed in became the instrument for deciding what the author had written. In the second book of the True History, Lucian had Homer cheerfully tell the Alexandrians, from beyond the grave, that he had written every line they rejected. The joke landed because the circularity was obvious even then.
When Villoison published the Venetus A, the scholia landed in the middle of European scholarship like a box of letters from a family that everyone thought had died out. They showed that the text of Homer had been contested, variable and edited in antiquity. In 1795 a German philologist named Friedrich August Wolf used this evidence in a Latin treatise, the Prolegomena ad Homerum, which argued that the poems had been composed without writing, transmitted orally in shorter units, and assembled into their present form much later, probably in the age of Peisistratus. The book caused a sensation. Goethe was at first delighted and then, in later years, recoiled, preferring to believe in a single poet after all. He spoke for many readers who found that they could live without proof of Homer but not without Homer.
Wolf’s book opened what came to be called the Homeric Question, and for more than a century it divided scholars into two parties. The analysts took the poems apart, looking for earlier layers, separate songs, interpolations, the seams where different hands had joined. The unitarians defended the poems as the coherent work of one great poet, explaining inconsistencies as artistic choices or as the ordinary slips of a long composition. The two parties argued with great learning and greater heat, and the debate was settled, if it was settled at all, only when Parry’s work changed the terms, making both the analysts’ compilers and the unitarians’ solitary genius look like projections of literate assumptions onto an oral tradition.
The Venetus A deserves a final look, because it is a perfect object for the method of this book. It is a structured document in which the main text is surrounded by layer upon layer of evidence about its own uncertainty. The margins preserve the history of disagreement. The critical signs preserve decisions and the doubts behind them. Reading only the central column is like reading a court judgment without the arguments of either side. Read the whole page and you see a poem that was never simply received but always argued over, defended, trimmed and patched, and you see the scholars who did the arguing as characters in its history.
In 2007 the manuscript was photographed in high resolution as part of the Homer Multitext project, and anyone can now look at it online. It is a beautiful thing. The main text sits in a broad column in a firm, regular hand. Around it the scholia crowd in, smaller and smaller, filling every space, climbing up into the top margin and down into the bottom, as if the commentary had been poured over the poem and was slowly soaking into the page. Here and there, beside a line, a short horizontal stroke: a spit, a dagger, a librarian saying no.
Chapter Twenty-One — Sing, Goddess, the Wrath
An old priest walks into an army camp carrying a golden staff wound with the ribbons of Apollo and a ransom beyond counting. His name is Chryses, and his daughter has been taken as a prize by Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks. He asks for her back. The army shouts its approval. Agamemnon tells the old man to get out, adds that his daughter will grow old in Argos working the loom and sharing the king’s bed, and warns him not to be found near the ships again. Chryses walks away along the shore of the loud-roaring sea without a word. Then he prays to Apollo, and for nine days the god’s arrows fall on the camp, on the mules first, then the dogs, then the men.
That is how the Iliad starts its story, but it is not how the poem begins. The poem begins with a single noun, placed first in the first line where Greek puts what matters most: wrath. Menin aeide thea, sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, the destructive wrath that put countless griefs on the Achaeans and sent many strong souls to Hades. The word menis is not ordinary anger. In early Greek it is used overwhelmingly of gods, a cosmic, lasting, dangerous rage, the kind that brings plague. The linguist Calvert Watkins argued that it may have been a word people preferred not to say aloud. The Iliad says it first.
The quarrel that follows is about property and status. To stop the plague Agamemnon must return Chryses’s daughter, and he demands compensation. Achilles, the best warrior in the army, points out that there is no common store of prizes to draw on. Agamemnon replies that in that case he will take Achilles’s own prize, the captive woman Briseis. Achilles half draws his sword; the goddess Athena, visible only to him, pulls him back by the hair. He sheathes the sword, calls Agamemnon a dog-faced drunkard with the heart of a deer, swears a great oath on the scepter he holds, and withdraws from the war. Heralds come to his tent and lead Briseis away, and she goes unwillingly. That single adverb is nearly all the poem gives her for now.
Achilles then does something astonishing. He goes down to the sea, weeps, and calls his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, and asks her to persuade Zeus to give the Trojans victory, so that the Greeks are driven back to their ships and Agamemnon recognizes what he has lost. In other words the hero of the poem asks the king of the gods to arrange the deaths of his own comrades. Zeus agrees, nodding his dark brows so that Olympus shakes. The proem had already told us this would happen: the will of Zeus was being accomplished. The poem’s plot is the fulfillment of a sulk with divine backing.
For the next several books Achilles is not there. He sits by his ships. The Greeks fight, are pushed back, build a wall, lose men; heroes we hardly knew rise and fall; the Trojans reach the ships and set one on fire. The poem named after the city of Ilios and devoted to the wrath of Achilles spends most of its length showing what happens when Achilles is absent. He returns briefly in the ninth book to refuse an embassy, sends his friend Patroclus out in his place in the sixteenth, and only returns to battle in the twentieth. If the Iliad were a play, its leading actor would be offstage for much of the evening and would still get top billing.
Here deconstruction stops being a technique and becomes a description. Jacques Derrida argued that the structures we build our thinking around usually have a center that holds the whole together while itself escaping the rules of the structure. The center is both inside and outside. The Iliad makes this literal. Achilles is the center of the poem and the person who has removed himself from it. Everything turns on him and he does nothing. His absence is the most active force in the story, more destructive than any Trojan, and the poem measures his importance by counting the dead his withdrawal produces.
I want to say something about how this structure echoes the problem of the poem’s own maker, because it is not a coincidence I am inventing. A poem about an absent center was composed by an absent author, and both absences generate an enormous amount of activity around them. The Greeks spend books trying to cope without Achilles. Readers have spent centuries trying to cope without Homer. In each case the community fills the gap with substitutes: Patroclus wearing Achilles’s armor, scholars wearing Homer’s name. The substitute in the poem dies. The substitutes in scholarship have mostly had longer careers.
There is a further turn. The wrath of the first line is aimed at Agamemnon, but by the end of the poem Achilles’s anger has moved on to Hector, and finally burns itself out in an encounter with Hector’s father. The noun that begins the poem does not stay attached to its first object. It drifts, the way the poem’s name drifts, from the man to the city, from Achilles to Ilios. The title we use, Iliad, the poem about Ilios, is not in the text at all. It was given later. The poem itself declared its subject to be a feeling.
Readers usually hurry past Chryses, who disappears after the first book once his daughter is returned. He deserves a moment longer. He is the first suppliant in the poem and the first father to come to the enemy camp with ransom and ask for a child. He is refused and humiliated, and the consequences destroy hundreds of men. At the end of the poem another old father will come to the camp with ransom to ask for a child, and he will not be refused. The Iliad opens and closes with the same scene played in two keys. Everything between is the cost of the first answer.
After the quarrel, the poet shows Achilles sitting by his swift ships, nursing his wrath, never going to the assembly where men win glory, never going to war, but wasting his own heart away as he stayed there, longing for the war cry and the battle. The man who has refused the war is shown missing it.
Chapter Twenty-Two — The Man Who Said What Achilles Said
Agamemnon has a dream, sent by Zeus, telling him that he can take Troy today. He decides, for reasons the poem never makes entirely clear, to test the army first by proposing the opposite: give up, go home. The test fails catastrophically. The men cheer, rush to the ships and start dragging them down to the sea, and it takes Athena and Odysseus together to stop the stampede. Odysseus borrows Agamemnon’s scepter, the ancestral staff made by Hephaestus, and goes through the camp speaking politely to leaders and hitting ordinary soldiers with it. Most of the men are herded back to the assembly ground. One keeps talking.
His name is Thersites, and the poet introduces him with a description of a kind found nowhere else in the Iliad. He is the ugliest man who came to Troy. He is bandy-legged and lame in one foot, his shoulders hunched together over his chest, his head pointed with a sparse stubble of hair. He is hateful to Achilles and Odysseus above all, because he is forever abusing them. The poet takes pains to make us dislike him before he opens his mouth, which is always a good sign that what he is about to say will be worth hearing.
What Thersites says is this. Agamemnon, what more do you want? Your huts are full of bronze and women, which we Achaeans give you first whenever we take a town. Do you want more gold, ransomed by some Trojan for his son whom I or another man brought in bound? Or a young woman to sleep with? It is not right for a leader to bring the sons of the Achaeans into trouble. Weaklings, let us go home and leave him here at Troy to digest his prizes, so he can find out whether we are any help to him or not. He has dishonored Achilles, a far better man than he is, by taking his prize. If Achilles had any gall, that outrage would have been your last.
Set this beside Achilles’s speeches in the first book and the overlap is almost exact. Achilles too complained that Agamemnon takes the greater share while others do the fighting. Achilles too threatened to sail home. Achilles too called the king greedy and shameless. Thersites is saying in the assembly, in front of the army, what the poem’s greatest hero said in the same place the day before. The difference is who is speaking. When Achilles says it, the poem treats it as tragedy. When Thersites says it, the poem treats it as an offense.
Odysseus rounds on him, threatens to strip him naked and beat him out of the assembly, and then hits him across the back with the golden scepter. A bloody welt rises. Thersites sits down, frightened and in pain, wiping away a tear. And the army, which only minutes before was stampeding to the ships to do exactly what Thersites proposed, laughs at him. The men say to one another that Odysseus has done many good things, but this is the best thing he has done among the Argives, stopping that foul-mouthed slanderer.
This is the margin that holds up the center. The Iliad’s world is built on a hierarchy in which leaders take prizes, the best man is defined by fighting and the army follows its kings. Achilles challenges that hierarchy from within, as a king himself, and his challenge can be dignified as a crisis of honor. Thersites challenges it from below, and his challenge must be suppressed, mocked and beaten, not because it is wrong but because it is the same challenge in the wrong mouth. The poem needs him in order to show that the critique of Agamemnon is permitted only to heroes. It also needs him to be ugly, so that the audience can enjoy the beating.
The kindness clause in my working rules says never to mock the subject of a chapter or the people who suffered in it. Thersites is both, and the person the poem invites us to laugh at. I would rather laugh at the army. Ten minutes earlier it was running for the boats; now it is congratulating Odysseus for punishing a man who wanted to run for the boats. Crowds have always been like this, and the poet, who was not a fool, may have known it. The very excess of the description, every deformity stacked on the next, reads in places like a parody of the aristocratic disgust it describes.
Later tradition did not forgive Thersites either. In the lost epic called the Aethiopis, he mocks Achilles for grieving over the Amazon queen Penthesilea, whom Achilles has just killed, and Achilles kills him with a blow. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida he becomes the play’s railing chorus, a scabrous commentator who sees through everyone and is loved by no one, and gets many of the best lines. The man who said what Achilles said was punished three times in literature, and survived all three as the one character who never pretended.
Thersites also matters for a reason connected with the theme of this book. He is the only common soldier in the Iliad who speaks at length. Everyone else in the poem who has a voice is a king, a god, a hero, a hero’s wife or an old man of rank. The ordinary men who row the ships, dig the ditches and die in the catalogues of the slain are silent, unless they are shouting as a crowd. When one of them finally gets a speech, it turns out to be a speech the poem has already given to someone more important. The common man in Homer is permitted to repeat the hero. He is not permitted to be original.
Thersites sits down on the assembly ground with the welt rising on his back and wipes his eyes, and the poem moves on to the battle. Nobody mentions him again in the Iliad. The army goes back to fighting the war he wanted to end, and goes on fighting it after the poem has stopped watching, until there is no city left to fight for.
Chapter Twenty-Three — Helen Weaves the War
When the messenger goddess Iris comes looking for Helen in the third book of the Iliad, she finds her at a loom, weaving a large double-folded purple cloth. Into it Helen is working the many struggles of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-armored Achaeans, which they were suffering for her sake at the hands of Ares. The woman over whom the war is being fought is making a picture of the war. She is, in the only literal sense the poem allows, composing it.
Ancient commentators noticed this, and called the cloth a model of the poet’s own work. I want to go further. Helen is the poem’s internal author, and the scene is the first of several in which the Iliad shows one of its characters producing a version of the Iliad. She weaves the war; Achilles, as we shall see, sings it; the Sirens in the Odyssey will offer to sing it to Odysseus. The poem keeps placing copies of itself in the hands of the people inside it.
Iris summons Helen to the walls to watch a duel between her two husbands, Menelaus, whom she left, and Paris, with whom she left. On the tower above the Scaean gate sit the old men of Troy, too old to fight, chattering like cicadas on a tree. When they see Helen approaching, they say quietly to one another that there is no blame on Trojans and Achaeans for suffering so long for such a woman; she looks terribly like an immortal goddess. Then they add that she should be sent back on the ships anyway, so that she does not remain a grief to them and their children. It is the most realistic political conversation in the poem: aesthetic admiration followed immediately by a motion to deport.
Priam, kinder than his elders, calls her to sit beside him and says that he does not blame her; he blames the gods. Then he asks her to name the Greek heroes he can see on the plain below: who is that big man there, so kingly? Helen names them. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Ajax. Idomeneus. This scene is known as the Teichoskopia, the viewing from the wall, and it contains one of the great impossibilities in the Iliad. The war is in its tenth year. Priam has been looking at these men across the plain for nearly a decade. He would hardly need his daughter-in-law to tell him who Agamemnon is.
The analytic scholars of the nineteenth century took this as evidence that the scene belonged to a song set at the beginning of the war and had been transplanted into the tenth year. They may be right about its origin. But a deconstructive reading asks what the scene does where it now stands, and the answer is that it lets Helen narrate. For a few dozen lines the woman whose abduction caused the war becomes the poet’s mouthpiece, introducing the heroes to the audience as a catalog, in her own voice, with her own judgments. The impossibility is the price of giving her that authority. Homer bends chronology so that the cause of the war can introduce its cast.
Helen’s narration contains one of the most quietly devastating moments in the poem. She looks for her two brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, and cannot find them. Perhaps, she says, they did not come, or perhaps they came and will not join the fighting because of the shame and reproach that attach to me. And the poet adds: so she spoke, but the life-giving earth already held them, there in Lacedaemon, in their own dear native land. Helen does not know her brothers are dead. The poet does. In that gap between the character’s narration and the narrator’s knowledge sits everything the poem knows about the limits of telling.
The duel goes badly for Paris, and Aphrodite rescues him, snatching him away in a mist and setting him down in his own fragrant bedroom. Then she goes to fetch Helen, disguised as an old wool-worker. Helen recognizes the goddess by her lovely neck and shining eyes, and turns on her: are you going to take me to some other city now, to some other favorite of yours? Go and sit with him yourself, give up the paths of the gods, and fuss over him until he makes you his wife or his slave. I will not go to his bed. Aphrodite answers with a threat so naked that Helen obeys in silence. No other mortal in Homer speaks to a god this way. Helen is the only person in the poem who openly refuses the story she has been placed in, and the story wins.
Three books later, Helen says something to Hector that turns the whole poem inside out. She calls herself a dog, an evil-scheming, horrible thing, and says that Zeus has set an evil fate on her and on Paris so that in time to come they may be subjects of song for people yet to be. Here a character inside an epic explains her suffering by reference to the epic. She knows she is material. She understands that her misery exists, at least in part, so that later generations will have something to sing about. The audience listening to the Iliad is the audience she is predicting.
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This is as close as the poem comes to a theory of itself, and it is a dark one. Song does not merely record suffering. In Helen’s account, the gods arrange suffering for the sake of song. The singer, the poem, the listeners, all of them become, in her words, the purpose for which people like her are made to suffer. The modern reader who finds the Iliad beautiful is participating in exactly the economy Helen describes, and the poem lets her say so while we are listening.
The purple cloth on Helen’s loom is never mentioned again. We do not know whether she finished it, or what happened to it when the city burned. Somewhere in the poem’s imagination it is still on the frame in a room in Troy, half woven, the battles of the Greeks and Trojans worked into it in thread, waiting for the weaver to come back and decide how it ends.
Chapter Twenty-Four — Wounding a Goddess
On the battlefield in the fifth book of the Iliad, the Greek hero Diomedes is wounded in the shoulder by an arrow and prays to Athena. She answers by giving him extraordinary strength and something even rarer: she lifts the mist from his eyes so that he can tell gods from men in the fighting. She tells him not to fight any of the immortals except one. If Aphrodite enters the battle, he may stab her. So he does. When Aphrodite comes down to rescue her son Aeneas, Diomedes chases her and drives his spear through the delicate robe the Graces made for her, into her hand at the wrist. Immortal blood flows, the ichor that runs in gods instead of blood, and the goddess of love screams, drops her son and flees.
Up on Olympus, the scene turns into domestic comedy. Aphrodite, sobbing, borrows the chariot of Ares, rushes to her mother Dione and shows her the wound. Dione comforts her with a list of other gods who have suffered at mortal hands. Athena and Hera, watching, make fun of her: she was probably trying to persuade some Greek woman to run off with a Trojan and scratched her hand on a brooch. Zeus smiles, calls his daughter over and tells her gently that warfare is not her department; she should look after weddings and leave fighting to Ares and Athena.
Ares does not do much better. Later in the same book, with Athena herself riding in Diomedes’s chariot and guiding the spear, Diomedes wounds the god of war in the belly. Ares bellows as loud as nine or ten thousand men shouting in battle, and both armies freeze in terror. He rushes up to Olympus, sits next to Zeus and complains about Athena. Zeus answers that Ares is the most hateful to him of all the gods on Olympus, that he loves nothing but strife and war, and that if he were anyone else’s son he would long ago have been thrown lower than the Titans. Then Zeus has him healed, because he is still his son.
Why would a poem about war show its gods of love and war being wounded by a mortal and scolded like children? Ancient philosophers were scandalized. Xenophanes, in the sixth century, complained that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods everything that is shameful among men. Plato wanted such passages banned from the education of the young. The defenders of Homer responded by reading the scenes as allegory: Diomedes wounding Aphrodite meant reason overcoming desire. That approach saved the text by declaring that it meant something else.
A deconstructive reading takes the passage at its word. In the world of the Iliad the gods are immortal and powerful, but they are not serious. They are wounded and recover; they quarrel and are reconciled; they suffer pain without consequence. Mortals, by contrast, can die, and because they can die their actions carry weight. The divine comedy is the background against which human seriousness becomes visible. When Ares bellows and runs home to his father, the audience laughs; when a mortal falls in the next line, nobody does. The gods are the poem’s measure of what is not at stake.
The sixth book pursues the same contrast from the other side. On the battlefield Diomedes meets a Lycian warrior named Glaucus and asks who he is, adding that he will not fight a god again. Glaucus answers with one of the most famous similes in the poem. Why ask my lineage? As the generations of leaves, so are those of men. The wind scatters the leaves to the ground, and the forest burgeons and puts out others when the season of spring comes round. So one generation of men grows and another passes away. Then he tells his lineage anyway, at length, because that is what a Homeric hero does even after explaining that it means nothing.
In the course of the story it emerges that Glaucus’s grandfather Bellerophon was once the guest of Diomedes’s grandfather. The two warriors are therefore guest-friends by inheritance, and they agree not to fight each other. They exchange armor as a pledge. And then the poet, in a rare comment in his own voice, observes that Zeus took away Glaucus’s wits, for he exchanged gold armor for bronze, the worth of a hundred oxen for the worth of nine.
That line has puzzled readers for a long time, because it is one of the very few places where the narrator passes a value judgment on a character’s action, and the judgment is about price. In the middle of a scene of mutual recognition and the courtesy of ancient friendship, the poet suddenly does arithmetic. Some readers take the line as a joke, others as a sign of the poem’s down-to-earth realism. I take it as a seam. The gift economy of heroes says that exchange is about honor and relationship, not value. The poet’s own aside says otherwise. For one line the narrator stands outside the heroic code and sees it from the position of a merchant, and the merchant is not impressed.
Put the two halves of the episode together and they give a compact account of the Iliad’s values. Men are leaves; their lineage, which they recite with such pride, is a temporary arrangement of foliage. Yet they must keep reciting it, because a name and a story are all they have against the wind. Gods, who are not leaves, are permitted to be silly. And someone, the poet or the tradition behind him, knows exactly what a set of gold armor would fetch and thinks Glaucus has been had.
Aphrodite, healed, returns to her usual business before the end of the book. Ares, healed by the physician of the gods, sits down beside his father in the full glory of his strength. Diomedes goes on fighting with bronze armor, now worth a hundred oxen, which he did nothing to deserve except remember his grandfather’s manners.
Chapter Twenty-Five — A Baby Frightened by a Helmet
Hector comes into the city in the middle of a battle, still in his armor, sent by his brother the seer to ask the women of Troy to pray to Athena. At the Scaean gate the wives and daughters of the Trojans run to him, asking after their sons, brothers, friends and husbands. He tells them all to pray, and the poet adds that for many of them sorrows were waiting. Hector’s mother offers him wine; he refuses, because his hands are filthy with blood and wine would weaken him. He finds Paris at home, polishing his armor, and scolds him back to the fighting. He finds Helen, who offers him a seat and calls herself a dog. He declines the seat. He has one more house to visit, and when he gets there, his wife is not at home.
Andromache, a housekeeper tells him, heard that the Trojans were being driven back and ran to the walls with the nurse and the baby, like a madwoman. Hector turns and goes back through the streets. He meets her at the gate. The scene that follows, in the sixth book of the Iliad, is the one most readers remember if they remember anything, and it is the place in this book where the jokes stop for a while.
Andromache takes his hand and tells him that his own courage will destroy him. She has no one else. Achilles killed her father when he sacked her city, and killed her seven brothers in a single day among their cattle and sheep. Her mother was ransomed and then died. Hector, she says, you are father to me, and mother, and brother, and my young husband. Then she does something no wife in heroic poetry should do: she gives military advice. Station the army by the fig tree, she says, where the wall is easiest to climb; three times the best of the Achaeans have tried there.
Hector answers with a speech of terrible clarity. He knows Troy will fall. He knows the day will come when sacred Ilios is destroyed, and Priam, and his people. But none of that grieves him as much as the thought of her, carried off weeping by some Greek, working at another woman’s loom in Argos, carrying water from a spring, and someone seeing her tears and saying: that is the wife of Hector, who was the best fighter of the Trojans when they fought around Ilios. He would rather be dead and under the earth, he says, than hear her cry as they drag her away.
Notice what Hector imagines. He imagines a sentence spoken about his wife in the future, a sentence that names him and records his fame, and it is the sentence he dreads most. His glory, which is what heroes fight for, will survive him attached to her slavery. Helen, a few dozen lines earlier, said that her suffering existed so that people to come would have songs. Hector sees the same economy from the inside, and it horrifies him. The kleos that the poem celebrates is exactly the thing he cannot bear to have spoken over his wife’s head.
Then he reaches for his son. The baby, Astyanax, whom Hector calls Scamandrius after the river, is in the nurse’s arms, and when his father bends toward him, the child shrinks back screaming against the nurse’s breast, frightened by the bronze and by the horsehair crest nodding from the top of the helmet. His father and his mother laugh. Hector takes off the helmet and puts it on the ground, shining. He kisses his son, dandles him in his arms, and prays to Zeus that the boy may become like him, outstanding among the Trojans, and that some day people may say he is far better than his father, as he comes home from war carrying the bloody spoils of an enemy he has killed, and his mother may rejoice.
Everything in that moment matters. The helmet that terrifies the child is the uniform of the role Hector plays; the baby does not recognize his father inside it. Only when the father takes off the warrior does the son know him. And then, with the helmet lying on the ground beside him, Hector prays that his son will grow up to put it on and become exactly the thing that frightened him. The scene stages an identity as a costume, removes the costume for a moment, and immediately prays for the costume to be inherited.
Andromache takes the child back to her fragrant breast, laughing through her tears. Hector, seeing her, pities her, strokes her with his hand and tells her not to grieve too much: no man will send him to Hades before his fate, and no man, brave or coward, escapes his fate once he is born. Go home, he says, see to your loom and distaff and set the maids to work. War is for men. He picks up his helmet. She goes home, turning back again and again to look at him, and when she reaches the house she and her women mourn Hector while he is still alive, because they do not believe he will return.
The poem does not tell what happens to the baby. It does not need to. The audience knew from the wider tradition, preserved in the lost epics of the cycle and later in Euripides, that when Troy fell the Greeks took Astyanax and threw him from the walls, so that Hector’s son would not grow up to avenge his father. The prayer that the boy might one day come home with bloody spoils was answered with the walls of the city his father died defending. Hector never knew. The listeners always did.
In the boar’s tusk helmet of the tenth book the poem carried an antique so carefully that it listed the previous owners. Here it shows us a helmet that will have no next owner. Hector puts it back on, turns and goes out to the plain, and the shining bronze and the nodding crest go with him, and somewhere behind him a child who has stopped crying is being carried home.
Chapter Twenty-Six — Three Envoys and a Verb for Two
Night has fallen in the ninth book, and the Greeks are in trouble. The Trojans are camped on the plain, their fires burning like stars, ready to attack the ships in the morning. Agamemnon weeps in front of the assembled leaders and proposes, this time seriously, that they go home. Diomedes rebukes him. Old Nestor advises that someone be sent to Achilles to make peace, and Agamemnon agrees and lists an enormous set of gifts he will give if Achilles returns. Three men are chosen: Phoenix, the old man who raised Achilles as a boy; Ajax, the biggest of the Greeks; and Odysseus, the cleverest. Two heralds go with them.
And here something strange happens to the grammar. Greek, like some other old languages, has a dual number, a separate set of verb and noun forms used for exactly two of anything. As the embassy walks along the shore toward Achilles’s hut, the poem describes the envoys with dual verbs. The two of them went along the shore, it says, praying to the god who holds the earth. When they arrive, Achilles greets them with a dual: welcome, you two. Phoenix, who was chosen to lead the embassy and is the third envoy, seems to have vanished from the grammar while remaining in the story.
Readers have been arguing about this for more than two thousand years. The analysts of the nineteenth century had a simple answer: the original version of the embassy had only two envoys, Ajax and Odysseus, and Phoenix was added later by a poet who wanted his long speech and did not bother to fix the verbs. Others suggest that the dual refers to Ajax and Odysseus while Phoenix, as leader, walks ahead; or to the two heralds; or that the dual in Homeric language was already loose and could stand for more than two. Gregory Nagy proposed that Achilles’s greeting deliberately excludes Odysseus, whom he dislikes. None of these explanations has won.
For a deconstructive reader, the dual verbs are a gift. They are a grammatical trace of a version of the story that the present text has written over. Like the digamma that the meter remembers, they preserve the outline of something that is no longer officially there. The text knows two envoys and three envoys at the same time, and it does not resolve the contradiction because, in the way it was made, it never had to. A performance moves forward; nobody in the audience at a feast stops the singer to count verb endings. Only a reader with the written text and centuries of leisure finds the seam.
Then there is what the envoys find when they arrive. Achilles is not sulking, sharpening weapons or brooding in the dark. He is playing the lyre, a beautiful lyre with a silver bridge, which he took as booty when he sacked the city of Andromache’s father. He is singing the glorious deeds of men, klea andron, and Patroclus is sitting opposite him in silence, waiting for him to finish.
Pause on this. The greatest warrior in the poem, who has withdrawn from the fighting because his honor was insulted, is spending his days singing about the honor of other warriors. He is doing what Homer does. He is the only hero in the Iliad who performs epic poetry, and he does it at the exact moment when he has refused to be its subject. The lyre on which he plays came from a city he destroyed, from the household of a man he killed and then, as Andromache told us, buried with honor. The instrument of song is itself a trophy of the violence the song records.
Here our motif from the first chapter returns with a difference. Demodocus needed a herald to hang his lyre on the peg and guide his hands to it. Achilles holds his own lyre, which he took for himself. The blind singer of the Odyssey receives his instrument; the hero of the Iliad seizes his. The two poems give us two images of the maker of songs, one passive and dependent, one sovereign and violent. Readers who wanted Homer to be Demodocus never asked whether he might have been more like Achilles in his hut, singing about glory to a silent friend, while outside the army he had abandoned was preparing to die.
Phoenix, whatever the grammar says about him, makes the longest speech in the embassy. He reminds Achilles of his childhood: how the old man held him on his knees, cut his meat for him and how the boy spat out wine all over his tunic. Then he tells a story from an older generation, the tale of Meleager, a hero who also withdrew from battle in anger over an insult, refused gifts and entreaties, and returned to fight only when his own city was burning, when it was too late for the gifts to be given. Learn from him, Phoenix says. Do not wait until the fire reaches the ships.
The Meleager story is a poem within the poem, and it is told in order to change the outcome of the frame story. Phoenix, in other words, is trying to do with a song exactly what the Muse does with the Iliad: shape action by narrative precedent. He fails. Achilles listens, tells him to stay the night, and refuses. A story about a man who refused too long does not persuade the man who is refusing. Songs, in the Iliad, do not change the minds of heroes. They only record what the heroes did when their minds would not change.
The two heralds, whom no one counts and who may or may not be the dual pair of the grammar, stand by throughout and never speak a word. When the embassy is over, Ajax and Odysseus go back to Agamemnon’s hut to report failure, and Phoenix stays behind with Achilles, sleeping on a bed of fleeces and fine linen that Patroclus has had made up for him. The grammar, from the beginning, had made room for only two men walking back along the shore.
Chapter Twenty-Seven — The Price of Honor
Agamemnon’s list of gifts reads like an inventory compiled by an anxious man with a large treasury. Seven tripods never put on the fire. Ten talents of gold. Twenty shining cauldrons. Twelve prize-winning racehorses. Seven women from Lesbos, skilled in handiwork, whom he chose for himself when Achilles took the island. Briseis, returned, with a solemn oath that he never went to her bed. When Troy falls, as much gold and bronze as Achilles can load on a ship, and twenty Trojan women second only to Helen in beauty. And when they get home, one of Agamemnon’s daughters in marriage, with no bride-price, and a dowry larger than any father ever gave, and seven well-populated cities near the sea.
Then, at the very end, the king adds: let him yield to me, inasmuch as I am more kingly and can claim to be older. Odysseus, when he repeats the list to Achilles in the hut, word for word, leaves out that last sentence. It is one of the finest pieces of diplomatic editing in literature. He knows that the gifts are a peace offering only if the price of accepting them is hidden.
Achilles hears the list and answers with the longest speech any character makes in the Iliad, and the angriest. Hateful to me as the gates of Hades, he begins, is the man who hides one thing in his heart and says another, and it is hard not to suspect he has guessed exactly what Odysseus left out. Then he attacks the logic of the whole system. The same portion comes to the man who holds back and to the one who fights hard. The coward and the brave are held in the same honor. The man who has done nothing and the man who has done much both die alike.
He goes further. He likens himself to a mother bird who brings each morsel she catches to her unfledged chicks, and goes hungry herself. He has sacked twelve cities from the ships and nearly as many on foot, he says, and handed the spoils to Agamemnon, who sat back by the ships and gave out a little and kept the most. Then the speech arrives at its center. Cattle and sturdy sheep can be raided, tripods can be won and the tawny heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back, cannot be raided or captured, once it has passed the barrier of his teeth.
And then Achilles tells them about his two fates. His mother has told him that if he stays and fights at Troy, he will lose his homecoming but his glory will be imperishable, kleos aphthiton. If he goes home, his glory will perish, but his life will be long and death will not come quickly. He announces that he will sail tomorrow morning, and that if they care to watch they will see his ships on the Hellespont at dawn. He advises the rest of them to go home too.
In 1956 the young American scholar Adam Parry, son of Milman Parry, published an essay called The Language of Achilles, which proposed a provocative reading of this speech. Homeric language, he argued, built from traditional formulas, was a language of consensus: it expressed a world in which honor, gifts and glory hung together. Achilles has seen through that world, but he has no other language in which to say so. He can only use the old words in strange ways, asking questions that the formula system was not designed to ask. His speech is the sound of a man trying to break out of a vocabulary from inside it. Other scholars replied that Achilles’s language is perfectly ordinary and that his disillusion is expressed clearly enough. The argument has continued ever since, which is usually a sign that both sides have hold of something real.
Whatever we decide about the words, the logic is unmistakable. The heroic code says that honor is shown by gifts. A great man receives a great share; a greater man receives a greater one. Moses Finley, we saw, built a whole society on the idea. Achilles takes that code to its conclusion and finds it empty. If honor can be measured in tripods and horses, then it can be bought, and if it can be bought, it is not honor. Agamemnon’s offer is generous by every standard of the system, and Achilles rejects it because the system itself has failed. The gift economy is being deconstructed by its own most privileged participant. Nobody in the poem has more to gain from the gifts. Nobody else could have said what he says.
There is a further irony, and it reaches into the question of the poem’s authorship. Achilles chooses, or at least discusses choosing, between a long life and imperishable glory. The glory he would win by staying is precisely the glory that the Iliad confers. The poem is the payment. When Achilles weighs his life against a song, he is weighing it against the very text in which he is speaking. The Iliad presents itself, through his mouth, as the only currency that can be exchanged for a human life, and then shows him wondering aloud whether the exchange rate is fair.
He does not sail at dawn. He stays by his ships, and at the end of the embassy his position has softened very slightly; he tells Ajax that he will not think of fighting until Hector reaches the Myrmidon ships and sets them on fire. The threat to go home was real enough when he spoke it and turned out to be untrue, which is the condition of most threats spoken in anger, including the ones we make in our own kitchens.
Ajax, at the end, gives the shortest and bluntest speech of the embassy, addressed not to Achilles but to Odysseus. Let us go, he says; the man is pitiless; a man accepts compensation even for a murdered brother or son, and the killer stays in the community having paid a great price, but the gods have put an implacable heart in Achilles’s chest, all for the sake of one girl. Then he turns to Achilles and says he should respect his own house. Of all the arguments made that night, Ajax’s is the only one from which no gift could be subtracted, and it is the only one that moves Achilles at all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight — The Night Book
A marginal note on the first line of the tenth book of the Iliad, preserved in one family of the medieval manuscripts, says something that no editor of any other book of the poem would dare to say. The ancients, it reports, claim that this book was composed separately by Homer and was not part of the Iliad, but was put into the poem by Peisistratus. The book in question is known as the Doloneia, after a Trojan spy named Dolon who dies in it, and it has been an embarrassment to defenders of the poem’s unity for more than two thousand years.
The story is simple and vivid. On the same night as the embassy to Achilles, Agamemnon cannot sleep. He sees the Trojan fires, hears the flutes and pipes from their camp, pulls out his hair and wanders through the Greek lines waking up the leaders. They decide to send a scout across to the Trojan side. Diomedes volunteers and chooses Odysseus as his companion. They arm themselves with what is lying around, and it is here that Odysseus is given the helmet of boars’ tusks we examined in the history section of this book, the antique with its chain of owners going back to a thief.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Hector asks for a volunteer to spy on the Greeks, promising the man the horses of Achilles as a reward. A Trojan named Dolon steps forward. He is ugly but fast, the only son among five sisters, and rich. He dresses in a wolfskin, puts on a cap of ferret hide, takes a bow and a spear and sets off. Diomedes and Odysseus see him coming, let him pass, then cut off his retreat and chase him down like two hounds after a fawn. Caught, Dolon begs for his life, offers ransom, and tells them everything: where the Trojan guard posts are, which allies are camped where, and that the Thracian king Rhesus has just arrived with horses whiter than snow and faster than the wind. When he has told them all, Diomedes kills him with a blow across the neck as he reaches up to plead, and his head falls in the dust still speaking.
The two Greeks go on to the Thracian camp, kill Rhesus and twelve of his sleeping men, steal the white horses and ride them back to the Greek lines, where Nestor greets them and the others laugh with joy. Odysseus hangs Dolon’s bloody gear on the stern of his ship as an offering to Athena. Then the two heroes wash off the sweat in the sea and take a bath and sit down to a meal.
Read in sequence, the Doloneia sits oddly in the Iliad. It takes place at night, when everything else in the poem happens by day. It is a story of stealth, deceit and disguise in a poem that celebrates open battle. Its characters wear animal skins rather than bronze. Its central figure is Odysseus, the trickster, rather than Achilles or Hector. The book could be removed entirely and the poem would run on without a jolt, since nothing that happens in it is referred to again. Its language contains a slightly higher proportion of unusual words. Modern scholars are divided between those who think it was composed by the same poet as the rest and those who think it was a separate song inserted later, and the ancient note shows that the doubt is very old.
The deconstructive question is not whether the Doloneia belongs, but what the Iliad looks like when we read it from the Doloneia outward. And the answer is that the Night Book is the place where the poem’s other ethic surfaces. The Iliad’s official values are daylight values: face your enemy, announce your lineage, strip his armor in public, win glory in front of both armies. The Doloneia shows that alongside those values another set was always available, the values of the ambush, the lie, the stolen horses and the man killed in his sleep. Those are the values of the Odyssey, and of Odysseus. The Night Book is the Odyssey’s embassy inside the Iliad.
Seen this way, the doubt about the book’s authenticity becomes evidence in itself. A culture that wanted the Iliad to be a single coherent statement of heroic values had every reason to mark the Night Book as alien. Its presence complicated the picture. The scholiast’s note, attributing the insertion to Peisistratus, also does something convenient: it blames Athens for the embarrassing part, which is precisely what the Megarians did about the line on Salamis. The margin of the manuscript is where the poem’s unity is defended, and the defense works by assigning the awkward material to a different author.
The Doloneia also had a strange afterlife. A tragedy called Rhesus, which tells the same story, survives among the plays attributed to Euripides, and its authenticity has been doubted too. So the book whose authorship was questioned produced a play whose authorship was questioned. Some texts seem to attract the question the way some houses attract lawsuits.
Dolon himself deserves a word, because the poem gives him one of the most degrading deaths in literature, and the kindness clause says not to make fun of the people who suffer. He volunteered for a dangerous mission because he wanted the horses of Achilles, which Hector promised and which, the Greeks point out, no one but Achilles can drive. He told his captors the truth. He was killed while begging. He is described from the start as unattractive and greedy, so that the audience will not mind. The poem treats him with the same aristocratic disdain it applies to Thersites. Neither of them is allowed the dignity of a heroic death, because neither of them is a hero, and both of them, in their different ways, say exactly what they mean.
Odysseus, back at the ships, takes off his grandfather’s helmet. The boar’s tusks are still in their rows, white in the lamplight. The night raid is over, the poem returns to daylight in the next book and never mentions the night again, and the helmet, as far as the Iliad is concerned, is never worn by anyone again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine — Zeus Asleep
Hera, queen of the gods, looks down from a peak of Olympus and sees two things that displease her. Her brother Poseidon is secretly helping the Greeks on the battlefield, which pleases her. Her husband Zeus is sitting on the summit of Mount Ida watching the Trojans win, which does not. In the fourteenth book of the Iliad she decides to remove Zeus from the war for an afternoon, and the method she chooses is the oldest one in the world.
She goes to her private chamber, built for her by her son Hephaestus with a secret bolt no other god can open, and gives herself the full treatment. She washes with ambrosia, anoints herself with an oil whose fragrance, when stirred in the house of Zeus, spreads over earth and heaven. She combs and braids her hair, puts on a robe Athena embroidered, gold brooches, a belt with a hundred tassels, earrings with three drops, a veil, sandals. Then she goes to Aphrodite and lies. She needs, she says, to visit the ends of the earth to reconcile two aging gods, Ocean and Tethys, who have not slept together for years because of a quarrel. Could she borrow Aphrodite’s embroidered strap, in which are worked love, desire and the sweet talk that steals the wits even of the wise? Aphrodite, who is on the other side in the war, hands it over with a smile.
Next Hera needs Sleep. She finds him on the island of Lemnos and offers him a golden throne with a footstool if he will put Zeus to sleep after she has done her part. Sleep refuses: the last time he did that for her, Zeus woke up furious and threw gods around the palace, and Sleep only survived by hiding with Night, whom even Zeus did not dare offend. Hera raises the bid. She offers him one of the Graces, Pasithea, whom he has long desired, as his wife. Sleep makes her swear a great oath by the river Styx, and agrees.
Zeus sees Hera coming up Ida and desire covers his mind. Where are you going, he asks, and she gives him the same story about Ocean and Tethys. Zeus says the trip can wait. And then he delivers what may be the most catastrophically misjudged seduction speech in the whole of literature. Never before, he tells his wife, has desire for any goddess or woman so overwhelmed him, not when he loved the wife of Ixion, nor Danae, nor the daughter of Phoenix, nor Semele, nor Alcmene, nor Demeter, nor Leto, nor, indeed, Hera herself on previous occasions. He lists seven of his affairs to his wife as a compliment. Hera, who has every reason to strangle him, plays modest, says someone might see them, and Zeus wraps them both in a golden cloud. The earth puts up fresh grass, clover, crocus and hyacinth beneath them. Then Sleep pours himself over the king of the gods, and Poseidon, told the news, drives the Trojans back.
Plato was horrified. In the Republic, Socrates cites this scene among the passages that must be kept away from the young, since a story in which the supreme god forgets all his plans in a moment of lust can only teach young men to do the same. Later defenders of Homer, the allegorists whose works survive under the name of Heraclitus the Allegorist, explained that the union of Zeus and Hera on Ida represented the mingling of the upper and lower air, or the coming of spring. The flowers springing up beneath them were offered as evidence. Few passages in Homer have generated so much learned embarrassment.
What the scene actually does in the poem is precise. The proem of the Iliad told us that the will of Zeus was being accomplished. The whole plot runs on that will, set in motion by his nod to Thetis in the first book. Now the will that governs the poem is switched off by a borrowed belt and a bribed god. For an afternoon the center of the cosmic structure is unconscious, and the battle runs on without it. The sovereign of the universe is absent, the way Achilles is absent, and once again the absence produces a great deal of action.
This is the second time in the poem we have watched the center of a structure disappear and leave the structure working, and it is not the last. The parallel with Achilles is too exact to be accidental: one central figure removed by his own wrath, the other by his own desire, each removal turning the course of the battle. A poem whose maker is a name without a body has a hero who removes himself and a supreme god who can be put to sleep. Wherever it looks for an authority that holds everything together, it finds an authority that can be switched off.
The comedy is not decoration here. It is the poem’s method of telling the truth about its gods. Gods who can be seduced, bribed and deceived are gods whose will is not a law of nature but a political arrangement, liable to coalition and maneuver like any court. Hera’s plot is the work of a politician. She lies to Aphrodite, negotiates with Sleep, manages her husband and gets her result. The poem watches her with admiration, and allows the audience to enjoy the spectacle of the father of gods and men being handled like a provincial husband.
Intellectual Substrate Mining asks what a text assumes so completely that it never says it. Here the assumption is striking. The Iliad never imagines that the gods’ government of the world could be just in any simple sense. It assumes that the cosmos is ruled by beings who are powerful, partial, quarrelsome and often ridiculous, and that human beings must make their way through a world shaped by their moods. The philosophers who wanted to make the gods good, from Xenophanes to Plato, were proposing a new theology. The poem’s theology is the older one, in which divine order is real but has the reliability of a family dinner.
When Zeus wakes, in the next book, he sees the Trojans routed and Hector lying on the ground vomiting blood, and he knows at once what happened. He turns on Hera with threats of the old punishment, when he hung her from the sky with anvils tied to her feet. She swears she had nothing to do with Poseidon’s intervention, which is true in its wording and false in its spirit, a lawyer’s oath. Zeus smiles. Somewhere on Lemnos, Sleep is preparing for his wedding to a Grace, and the golden throne he was first offered stands unclaimed.
Chapter Thirty — The Son Zeus Did Not Save
Patroclus has gone into battle wearing the armor of Achilles, and the Trojans have broken before him, mistaking him for his friend. In the sixteenth book of the Iliad he meets Sarpedon, the leader of the Lycians, an ally of Troy, a man the poem treats with unusual respect, and the son of Zeus by a mortal woman. They leap down from their chariots to fight. Watching from above, Zeus feels pity and speaks to Hera. It is fated, he says, that Sarpedon, dearest to me of men, will be killed by Patroclus. My heart is divided: shall I snatch him alive out of the battle and set him down in rich Lycia, or let him die?
Hera answers coldly. Do you mean to save a mortal man, doomed long ago by fate, from death? Do it; but not all of us other gods will approve. And think of this: if you send Sarpedon home alive, some other god will want to send his own dear son out of the fighting too, and many sons of the immortals fight around Priam’s city. You will make them all resentful. Let him die, and afterward send Death and Sleep to carry his body home to Lycia, where his brothers and kinsmen will bury him with a mound and a pillar, for that is the right of the dead.
Zeus agrees. And then the poem does something no other passage in the Iliad does. Zeus sheds bloody raindrops on the earth, honoring his son, whom Patroclus is about to kill. The sky weeps blood. Sarpedon falls like an oak or a poplar or a tall pine cut down in the mountains by shipwrights, and dies calling on his friend Glaucus to protect his body. There is a long fight over the corpse. Then Zeus sends Apollo to lift Sarpedon from the battle, wash him in the river, anoint him with ambrosia and give him to the twin brothers Sleep and Death, who carry him swiftly to Lycia.
This is the most theologically loaded scene in the poem. The supreme god, who in the previous chapter could be put to sleep, here stands awake and in full possession of his power, and chooses not to use it. The question that has troubled readers since antiquity is whether he could have used it. Is Zeus above fate or bound by it? The passage seems to say that he could act against fate, since he considers doing so and Hera warns him only of the consequences, not of impossibility. The poem leaves the metaphysics open and supplies a political answer instead.
That political answer is the heart of the scene. Zeus is not stopped by fate or by law. He is stopped by precedent. If he saves his son, every god will want to save theirs, and the whole structure of the war, which depends on mortals dying, will collapse. A ruler with the power to override the system declines to do so because the exception, once made, would become the rule. He keeps the order by sacrificing the thing he loves most in it.
I have written about this kind of authority in a paper called The Uncorrected Sovereign, which concerns systems at whose summit sits a power that no one can correct, and the curious ways such powers are nonetheless constrained. The argument there is that an uncorrectable sovereign is often more tightly bound than a correctable one, because every action it takes becomes a precedent with no higher court to limit it. Every decision is, in effect, a constitutional amendment. Zeus over Sarpedon is the earliest and perhaps the most moving illustration I know. He can do anything, and so he can do almost nothing, because anything he does, everyone will do.
The deconstruction here concerns the poem’s center of power, which we watched being switched off on Mount Ida. Now we see it switched on and paralyzed by its own scope. Omnipotence turns out to be a position in a structure, constrained by every other position, rather than a freedom. The poem has no theory of this, but it has the scene, and the scene is better than a theory. It shows a father weeping blood over a decision he made correctly.
Patroclus, meanwhile, goes on killing. Achilles had told him to drive the Trojans back from the ships and then return, not to pursue them to the city walls. He forgets. Three times he climbs the angle of the wall of Troy and three times Apollo pushes him back. He charges three more times into the Trojan ranks and kills nine men each time, and on the fourth charge, the poet says, the end of his life appeared. Apollo, wrapped in mist, comes up behind him and strikes him between the shoulders with the flat of his hand. The helmet of Achilles flies off and rolls under the horses’ hooves, its plumes fouled with dust and blood, the poet says, for until then it had never been allowed to touch the ground. The god breaks his spear and unties his breastplate. A Trojan named Euphorbus stabs him in the back. Hector finishes him with a spear in the belly.
Patroclus is the substitute, and the substitute dies. He went into battle as Achilles, was taken for Achilles, fought like Achilles, and was killed as himself. The armor did not save him; it marked him. He is the purest case in the poem of what happens when somebody takes the place of an absent center: the community welcomes him as the real thing, and the gods, who know better, remove him.
Dying, Patroclus tells Hector that his own death is near, at the hands of Achilles. Hector, pulling the spear from the body, asks why he should believe a prophecy from a dying man. Who knows, he says, whether Achilles will not die first, struck by my spear. Then he goes off after the horses of Achilles, which are standing apart from the battle, weeping. The poem says so plainly. The immortal horses stand motionless, their heads bowed to the ground, hot tears running from their eyes, their manes soiled in the dust. Zeus, seeing them, pities them too, and regrets that he ever gave immortal creatures to a mortal man, since of all things that breathe and crawl upon the earth, nothing is more miserable than man.
Chapter Thirty-One — A City at Peace on a Shield
Hephaestus, the lame smith of the gods, is at work in his bronze house when Thetis arrives to beg new armor for her son, whose own was stripped from the body of Patroclus. The god puts his bellows to the fire and begins. The shield he makes in the eighteenth book of the Iliad is described in about a hundred and thirty lines, and it is the most famous object in Greek poetry. What is surprising, for an object made to be carried into the bloodiest fighting in the poem, is how little of it is about war.
He puts on it the earth, the sky and the sea, the tireless sun and the full moon, and all the constellations: the Pleiades, the Hyades, Orion and the Bear, which alone never bathes in Ocean. Then he makes two cities. In the first there are weddings and feasts. Brides are led through the streets by torchlight from their chambers, the wedding song rises, young men whirl in the dance to flutes and lyres, and women stand at their doors and marvel.
In the same city a crowd has gathered in the marketplace because a quarrel has broken out. Two men are disputing over the blood-price for a man who has been killed. One claims he has paid it in full and is declaring it publicly; the other refuses to accept anything. Both are eager to bring the matter to an arbitrator. The people shout for one side or the other; heralds hold them back. The elders sit on polished stones in a sacred circle, holding the staffs of the heralds, and rise one after another to give judgment. In the middle lie two talents of gold, to be given to whichever of them speaks the straightest judgment.
The second city is under siege. Two armies are camped outside it, arguing whether to sack it or take half its wealth. The defenders have not given in; they set an ambush by a river where cattle come to drink, kill the herdsmen and drive off the cattle, and a battle follows in which Strife and Tumult take part, and deadly Doom drags men through the fight by the feet, one wounded, one unhurt, one dead.
Then Hephaestus leaves the cities and makes the countryside. A field being plowed for the third time, with a man handing a cup of wine to each plowman when he reaches the end of the furrow, and the soil turning dark behind the plow although it is made of gold, which the poet calls a wonder. A king’s estate at harvest, with reapers cutting, binders tying, children gathering armfuls, and the king standing silent among them, holding his staff, happy in his heart, while under an oak heralds prepare a feast. A vineyard heavy with grapes, where young people carry the fruit in baskets while a boy sings the Linos song to his lyre and the others dance. A herd of cattle attacked by two lions, the dogs barking but afraid to close in. A pasture with sheep. And finally a dancing floor like the one Daedalus once made in Knossos for Ariadne, where young men and women dance hand in hand and two acrobats tumble among them. Around the rim runs the great river Ocean.
In 1766 the German critic Lessing used this passage as the centerpiece of his essay Laocoön, arguing that Homer does not describe the shield as a finished thing but shows it being made, turning a static object into a sequence of actions, because poetry unfolds in time while painting occupies space. He was right, and his insight still defines how the passage is taught. I want to push the reading in another direction.
The shield is the place where the Iliad puts everything it cannot otherwise include. Weddings, lawsuits, plowing, harvest, vintage, dancing: none of these happen anywhere else in the poem, which is set entirely in a war camp and a besieged city. Peace exists in the Iliad only as an artifact, a picture forged by a god and carried into battle on a killer’s arm. Derrida called this kind of thing a supplement: something added to a whole from outside that turns out to reveal what the whole was missing all along. The shield supplements the Iliad with the world the war is destroying, and by doing so shows that the poem’s war has meaning only against that world.
The similes do the same work throughout the poem, and they are the poem’s second voice. When the fighting is evenly balanced at the Greek wall, the poet compares it to an honest working woman weighing wool on a pair of scales, adjusting the weight against the fleece so that she can earn a pitiful wage for her children. When a hero falls, he is a poppy in a garden, weighed down by its seed and the spring rain. Warriors are compared to farmers, woodcutters, shepherds, fishermen, mothers keeping flies off a sleeping baby. Thousands of lines of battle are interrupted by these flashes of a peaceful working world, as if the poem were keeping a second, smaller poem running underneath the first, and every so often letting it show.
Return to the lawsuit in the first city, because I think it is the most important scene on the shield. A man has been killed. Two men disagree about compensation. The community has a procedure for settling the dispute: arbitration, elders, a public hearing, a prize for the best judgment. And the poem does not tell us the verdict. The scene is frozen at the moment before judgment, with the gold lying in the middle and the elders rising in turn to speak.
That unresolved trial is the Iliad’s whole story in miniature. The poem began with a quarrel over a woman taken as a prize and a refused compensation. It will continue with Achilles refusing Agamemnon’s gifts, and end with Achilles accepting Priam’s ransom for Hector’s body. The question of whether a death can be paid for, and whether payment can end a quarrel, runs from the first book to the last. On the shield, in the city at peace, the same question is being argued under civil procedure, and the god who made the scene left the verdict out. Achilles carries the unsettled lawsuit into battle on his arm, and goes out to kill the man whose death, at the end of the poem, will be ransomed after all.
Chapter Thirty-Two — The River That Fought Back
A young Trojan named Lycaon has bad luck twice. The first time, Achilles caught him cutting branches in his father’s orchard at night, took him prisoner and sold him as a slave on the island of Lemnos. A family friend paid a ransom, and Lycaon came home. He had been back in Troy less than two weeks when he ran into Achilles again, at the river Scamander, in the twenty-first book of the Iliad, without his helmet or shield or spear, which he had thrown away as he struggled out of the water.
He clasps Achilles’s knees and begs. He reminds Achilles that he once ate the bread of Demeter in Achilles’s camp, that he was sold for the price of a hundred oxen and ransomed for three times that, that he is not of the same mother as Hector who killed Patroclus. Achilles answers him with a speech that is among the most frightening in literature, because it is quiet. Before Patroclus died, he says, I used to spare Trojans; I took many alive and sold them. Now no one will escape. So, friend, you die too. Why weep about it? Patroclus died, who was a far better man than you. Do you not see how tall and handsome I am? My father is a good man and my mother a goddess. Yet death and strong fate are on me too. There will be a dawn or an evening or a midday when someone takes my life too, with a spear or an arrow.
Lycaon lets go of his knees and spreads out both his arms. Achilles draws his sword and kills him, then takes him by the foot and throws him into the river, telling him the fish will lick the blood from his wound and his mother will not lay him on a bed to mourn him.
The word friend in that speech, philos, has troubled every translator. It is a word of affection, used between companions, and Achilles uses it to a man he is about to kill. There is no irony in it, or not the kind we usually mean. Achilles has reached a place where he and his victim are equally mortal, equally doomed, and he addresses Lycaon from inside that equality. The intimacy makes the killing worse, not better.
Then the river objects. Achilles has been filling the Scamander with corpses, and the river, a god in his own right, takes the shape of a man and speaks from a deep eddy. My lovely streams are full of dead men, he says; I cannot pour my water into the sea, so choked am I with corpses, and you go on killing. Stop. Achilles refuses, and leaps into the middle of the river. The Scamander rises in fury, churns up the dead and throws them onto the bank, bellowing like a bull, and pursues Achilles across the plain with a great wave. Achilles, running, grabs an elm tree on the bank; the tree comes up by the roots. For the first time in the poem the greatest warrior is in flight, from water.
Hera intervenes, sending Hephaestus with fire. The god of fire burns the corpses on the plain, dries it out, and then turns his flames on the river itself, burning the elms, willows and tamarisks along the banks, the lotus, rushes and galingale. The eels and fish leap about in the scorching water. The river boils. Scamander begs Hera to make her son stop, swearing never again to help the Trojans, and Hephaestus withdraws.
Something has happened here that the poem has never allowed before. The natural world has spoken. It has spoken not as decoration, not as a simile, but as a character with a complaint, and its complaint is about pollution. The river cannot reach the sea because the hero has clogged it with bodies. Modern readers, who have lived through rivers poisoned, dammed and filled with plastic, cannot help hearing the scene with new ears, and I do not think we are wrong to. The poem gives the landscape a voice at the exact moment when human violence has exceeded what the landscape can bear, and then it lets one god of nature be defeated by another, fire against water, until the river surrenders.
Then, astonishingly, the poem turns to farce. The gods, who have been watching, start fighting among themselves. Athena throws a boulder at Ares and knocks him flat, covering seven acres of ground with his body, his hair fouled with dust, and laughs over him. Aphrodite tries to lead Ares away, and Athena punches her in the chest. Poseidon challenges Apollo, who declines with a speech of unexpected dignity: he would not be sensible, he says, to fight his uncle for the sake of wretched mortals, who are like leaves, flourishing for a time and then wasting away lifeless. Hera seizes Artemis by the wrists, takes the bow and quiver off her shoulders, and boxes her ears with them, smiling, while the arrows spill out. Artemis runs off crying to Zeus, who laughs.
Why does the poem put the gods’ slapstick directly after Lycaon and the burning river? Because the juxtaposition is the argument. We have just watched a man kill another man who was holding his knees, and a river fight a hero and lose to fire. Then we see immortals brawling for sport, because nothing they do to each other matters. Apollo’s speech gives the reason: mortals are leaves, and fighting over leaves is beneath a god’s dignity. The gods’ comedy is the backdrop against which human suffering looks as it really is. The laughter on Olympus is louder because Lycaon’s arms are still spread out on the bank.
The Scamander settles back into its bed after Hephaestus withdraws, and flows on between its burned banks. It flows still. A river with that ancient name, the Karamenderes, runs across the plain below Hisarlik toward the Dardanelles, and in summer, much reduced by irrigation and drought, it barely reaches the sea.
Chapter Thirty-Three — Dragging Hector
Every Trojan who can has fled inside the walls, panting like fawns, and leaned on the battlements to cool off and drink. Hector alone stays outside, in front of the Scaean gate, because his fate holds him there. Achilles is coming across the plain, blazing like the star the poets call Orion’s Dog, the brightest and the most baleful, which brings fever to wretched mortals. Old Priam sees him first and stretches out his hands to his son from the wall, tearing the white hair from his head and begging Hector to come in. Hector’s mother loosens her dress, holds out her breast and says: Hector, my child, respect this, and pity me, if ever I gave you this breast to quiet you. Come inside. Do not stand against that man.
Hector does not move, and the poet takes us into his mind, one of the rare interior monologues in the Iliad. He cannot go in, because he refused advice to withdraw the army the night before, and his stubbornness has cost lives, and he is ashamed to face the Trojans and the long-robed Trojan women. He considers taking off his armor, going unarmed to meet Achilles and offering to give back Helen and all the treasure. Then he catches himself. This is no time, he thinks, to chat with him from an oak or a rock, the way a young man and a girl chat together. He would kill me like a woman. Better to fight.
Then Achilles arrives, and Hector runs. Three times they circle the walls of Troy, past the lookout point and the windy fig tree, past the two springs of the Scamander, one hot and one cold, where the Trojan women used to wash their clothes in the time of peace before the Greeks came. The poet stops, in the middle of the chase, to tell us about the washing. Then he gives us a simile from a nightmare: as in a dream one man cannot catch another in flight, and the other cannot escape, so Achilles could not overtake Hector, and Hector could not get away.
On the fourth circuit Zeus takes out his golden scales and puts two fates of death on them, one for Achilles and one for Hector, and lifts them by the middle. Hector’s day of doom sinks down toward Hades. Apollo abandons him. Athena goes to Achilles and tells him to stand still and catch his breath. Then she goes to Hector disguised as his brother Deiphobus and offers to stand with him. Hector, overjoyed, turns to fight. He throws his spear; it bounces off the shield of Achilles. He calls to Deiphobus for another spear. There is no one there. He understands at once. The gods have called him to his death, he says; Deiphobus is inside the walls; Athena has tricked me. Then let me not die without a fight and without glory, but do some great thing for men to come to hear of.
The glory again, the song for later listeners, the same economy Helen and Hector himself described in the sixth book. Even the trick that kills him becomes, in his last thought, material for the poem.
Achilles finds the one gap in his armor, the armor Hector stripped from Patroclus, where the collarbone joins the neck, and drives his spear through. Hector, dying, begs him to return his body to his parents for ransom. Achilles refuses with a sentence so savage that commentators have hesitated to translate it plainly: he wishes his own fury would let him cut Hector’s flesh and eat it raw. No ransom will save the body from the dogs. Hector, with his last breath, prophesies that Paris and Apollo will kill Achilles at the Scaean gate. Achilles replies that he will accept his death whenever Zeus and the other gods decide.
Then he pierces the tendons of Hector’s feet between heel and ankle, threads leather thongs through them, ties them to his chariot and drives toward the ships, dragging the body in the dust, the dark hair spreading out, the head that was once so handsome trailing on the ground, given by Zeus to his enemies to be shamed in his own native land.
Andromache does not know. She is at home in the inner room, weaving a double-folded purple cloth with flowers worked into it, and she has just told her maids to put a great tripod on the fire so that Hector will have a hot bath when he comes back from the fighting. Foolish woman, the poet says, she did not know that far from baths Athena had killed him. Then she hears the wailing from the wall, the shuttle falls from her hand, and she runs out to see her husband dragged behind the horses toward the ships.
The double-folded purple cloth on Andromache’s loom is the same kind of cloth Helen was weaving in the third book, when she was working the war into it. Helen wove battles. Andromache weaves flowers. One woman’s loom holds the story; the other’s holds the life the story destroys. And the bath that will never be used belongs to the same world as the washing places by the springs, which the poet described in the middle of the chase. The poem keeps showing us the domestic world at the exact moment it is being annihilated, the way the shield showed us peace on the arm of the killer.
In the next book, after Patroclus is finally buried, Achilles holds funeral games, and the mood of the poem changes so completely that first-time readers often feel giddy. There is a chariot race. Young Antilochus, son of Nestor, cuts Menelaus off on a narrow stretch of the course with a maneuver that nearly wrecks them both. Menelaus protests, demands that Antilochus swear by Poseidon that he did not cheat, and Antilochus, gracefully, apologizes and offers him the prize, and Menelaus, mollified, gives it back. Old Nestor gets a prize for having been a great athlete once, and delivers a long speech about his own victories at a funeral decades before. Achilles presides over it all with a tact we have never seen in him, smoothing quarrels, giving extra prizes, finding a reward for everyone.
The man who just dragged a corpse behind his chariot is now the most generous host in the poem. Readers sometimes find this hard to reconcile. The poem does not reconcile it. It sets the two side by side and lets them both stand, as if to say that the same man can be both, on consecutive days, and that the community needs the games precisely because of what happened before them. Every so often, in the middle of the games, someone glances toward the body of Hector, which is lying face down in the dust beside Patroclus’s bier.
Chapter Thirty-Four — Two Jars on Zeus’s Floor
For twelve days after the death of Hector, Achilles drags the body three times around the tomb of Patroclus each morning and then leaves it lying face down in the dust, and Apollo keeps it from corruption, covering it with his golden shield. The gods grow disgusted. Apollo tells them that Achilles has destroyed pity and has no shame, which harms men greatly and helps them too. Zeus summons Thetis and tells her to persuade her son to give the body back for ransom. He sends Iris to Priam to tell the old king to go to the Greek camp alone, with a single herald, a wagon and a ransom, and not be afraid.
Priam’s wife Hecuba thinks he has lost his mind. You are going alone to the ships of the Achaeans, she says, into the sight of the man who killed so many of your sons? Your heart must be made of iron. Then she says she wishes she could fasten her teeth in the middle of Achilles’s liver and eat it, and Priam goes anyway. He piles a wagon with robes, cloaks, blankets, tunics, ten talents of gold, tripods, cauldrons and a beautiful cup given to him on an embassy to Thrace, which he did not spare, so badly did he want to ransom his son. On the way out of the palace he drives off the Trojans gathered in the courtyard and abuses his surviving sons, calling them liars and dancers and thieves of lambs.
On the road at night he meets a young man who offers to guide him. It is the god Hermes in disguise. Hermes puts the guards to sleep, opens the gates of the Greek camp and brings Priam to the hut of Achilles, then reveals himself and leaves. Priam goes in alone. Achilles has just finished eating. Two companions are clearing the table. No one sees the old king enter. He kneels, takes Achilles by the knees and kisses his hands, the terrible man-killing hands that killed so many of his sons.
Remember your father, Priam says. Have pity on me, remembering your father; I am more pitiable than he is, for I have endured what no other mortal on earth has endured: I have put to my lips the hand of the man who killed my son.
Both men weep. Priam, huddled at Achilles’s feet, weeps for Hector. Achilles weeps now for his own father, whom he will never see again, and now for Patroclus. The sound of their weeping fills the hut. Then Achilles raises the old man up by the hand and speaks to him in words that every reader of the Iliad has had to face. On the floor of Zeus’s house, he says, stand two jars, one full of evils and the other of blessings. To some men Zeus gives a mixture; they meet sometimes with bad and sometimes with good. To others he gives only from the jar of evils, and they wander the earth, honored by neither gods nor men. My father Peleus was given splendid gifts, wealth, a kingdom, a goddess for a wife, but also this evil, that he had only one son, and that son will die young, and I am not looking after him in his old age, but sitting here far from home, bringing grief to you and your children.
Notice what the parable does not contain. There is no jar of blessings only. Nobody, in Achilles’s theology, is given pure good. The best a mortal can hope for is a mixture. This is the bleakest statement about human life in the poem, and it is made as consolation. Achilles offers it to Priam not as an argument but as an acknowledgment that they share the same condition, and that the condition is not anyone’s fault.
The scene has been read for centuries as the moral climax of the Iliad, the moment when wrath finally gives way to pity, and I do not want to argue with that reading. I want to add to it. Look at what has happened to the structure of the poem. In the first book an old father came to the Greek camp with ransom to ask for his child and was refused, and the refusal caused the plague. In the last book another old father comes to the Greek camp with ransom to ask for his child, and is received. The opening scene has been played again with the opposite outcome. The poem is built like a lawsuit retried in a higher court, and this time the verdict the shield left out is finally given.
There is also a moment of genuine danger. Priam, when Achilles bids him sit, refuses: he will not sit while Hector lies uncared for. Achilles flares up. Do not provoke me further, old man, he says; I mean to give him back, but do not stir my heart in its grief, or I may not spare even you, a suppliant in my own hut, and sin against Zeus. Priam is frightened and obeys. The wrath of the first line is still there, under the surface, and the peace of the last book is held in place by an effort of will that the poem shows us in mid-strain.
Achilles has his servants wash and anoint the body away from Priam’s sight, so that the old man will not see what has been done to his son and break out in anger and provoke Achilles to kill him. Achilles lifts Hector onto the bier with his own hands. Then he insists that they eat. Even Niobe remembered to eat, he says, though her twelve children were killed in her halls, and he tells the story briefly, a story of a mother turned to stone and still weeping in the mountains. They eat. And then, the poet says, Priam gazed at Achilles, marveling at how tall and handsome he was, like the gods face to face, and Achilles gazed at Priam, marveling at his noble face and listening to his words. When they had taken their fill of looking at each other, Priam asked for a bed.
Achilles grants a truce long enough for Priam to mourn and bury his son. He warns the old man that he will have to sleep in the porch, in case some Greek leader comes in and sees him and tells Agamemnon. Before dawn Hermes wakes Priam, harnesses the mules and drives the wagon through the camp unseen. The old man comes back across the plain to Troy with his son’s body on the wagon, and his daughter Cassandra, from the citadel, is the first to see them coming.
Chapter Thirty-Five — The Poem of Force
In the summer of 1940, as German armies occupied Paris, a thirty-one-year-old French philosopher named Simone Weil, who had worked in a factory to understand the condition of workers and had briefly joined the anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War, sat in Marseille finishing an essay about the Iliad. It was published in the Marseille journal Cahiers du Sud across the winter of 1940 and 1941, under an anagram of her name, Émile Novis, because a Jewish name on the masthead had become dangerous. Its title was The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, Weil wrote, is force. Force as wielded by men, force that subdues men, force before which human flesh shrinks back. Force, in her definition, is that which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. In its most extreme form it makes a corpse out of what was a person. In milder forms it makes a slave, a suppliant, a man who is still alive but has become, for the moment, an object at the disposal of another. And it works on the one who wields it as relentlessly as on the victim. Achilles, killing Lycaon, is as much a thing as Lycaon; he has been taken over by what he does.
Weil’s reading was not the first moral reading of the Iliad, but it was the one that changed how the poem was read in the twentieth century. She found in it an extraordinary evenhandedness: the poem grieves for Trojans and Greeks alike, refuses to make any side simply good, and describes the deaths of minor characters with the same precision as the deaths of heroes. She saw it as the only true epic the West possessed, and contrasted it with the Aeneid and the Chanson de Roland, which take sides. A few years later, in the United States, the Bulgarian-born philosopher Rachel Bespaloff, who had fled France herself, published another meditation on the poem, written in the same years, which found in it not only force but a tragic justice, a grace that comes through suffering.
Both essays are magnificent, and both use the Iliad as the women in the poem use their looms: they weave the war of their own time into it. That is not a criticism. It is the condition of reading Homer that this whole book has been describing. Each generation finds in the poem the war it is living through, and the poem has room for all of them, because its own war was already composed of many.
Half a century after Weil, an American psychiatrist named Jonathan Shay, working with Vietnam veterans suffering from severe combat trauma at a clinic in Boston, noticed that his patients’ stories followed the pattern of the Iliad with uncanny exactness. In 1994 he published Achilles in Vietnam. The decisive injury, Shay argued, was often not the violence itself but a betrayal of what is right by a person in authority: a commander who violated the moral order of the unit, as Agamemnon violated it by taking Briseis. After the betrayal came the shrinking of the soldier’s social world to a single beloved comrade, the death of that comrade, the berserk state in which the soldier no longer cared about his own life, and the desecration of enemy dead. Shay called the first injury moral injury, and the term has since entered the language of military psychiatry.
Shay’s book is the strongest evidence I know against the idea that the poem is merely a document of an alien age. Men who had never read it recognized themselves in it when it was read to them. The sequence of the wrath, from the quarrel in the first book to the dragging of Hector, turned out to describe a pattern of psychological collapse that a Vietnam infantryman of the late twentieth century could follow step by step. A poem made from formulas inherited over centuries was carrying, among other things, an accurate clinical description.
How can a composite text, shaped by many hands over a long time, be so precise about the inner life of a single man? This is one of the strongest arguments for a single great poet, and I want to give it its full weight. A tradition can carry formulas, scenes and themes. It is harder to see how a tradition could arrange those materials into a psychological sequence as coherent as Achilles’s descent and return. Someone, at some point, saw the whole shape. Shay’s veterans are the best witnesses that whoever did it had either seen war or listened very carefully to people who had.
The deconstructive reader must also ask what the moral readings of the twentieth century needed the poem to be. Weil needed a poem without sides, at the moment when Europe was being carved up by force. Bespaloff needed grace, writing as a refugee. Shay needed a diagnosis that the institutions of his time did not have, and found it in a text older than any institution. Each found what was there. Each also brought something to the hollow in the poem, the same hollow that the biographers filled with a blind man and the scholars with a tradition, and filled it with the war they knew. The poem took the new occupant as willingly as it had taken the old ones.
There is one feature of the poem that every moral reading has to reckon with, and it is the ending. The Iliad does not end with the death of Achilles, which happens outside the poem. It does not end with the fall of Troy, which happens outside the poem too. It ends with the funeral of the enemy. For the days of the truce Achilles granted, the Trojans gather wood. On the last day they burn Hector’s body, quench the pyre with wine, gather the white bones, wrap them in soft purple cloth, place them in a golden box, put the box in a grave and pile stones over it, with sentinels posted in case the Greeks attack. Then they hold a feast in Priam’s palace.
The final line of the poem names the man it has been mourning. So they held the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. The greatest epic of the Greeks ends on the name of a Trojan, with a formula that called him a tamer of horses at a moment when the horses that dragged him are still standing by the ships. The poem that began with the word wrath ends with an epithet of peace.
Chapter Thirty-Six — Tell Me of the Man
The first word of the Iliad is wrath. The first word of the Odyssey is man: andra, the accusative, the object of the verb that follows. Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered very far after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the griefs he suffered at sea, fighting for his life and the homecoming of his companions. And then, after twenty lines of introduction, the poem finally gives us his name.
The name is withheld so long that its withholding becomes the first fact about the poem. Who is this man? The audience knows, of course. Everybody knew. But the poem insists on describing him first by his qualities: his turns, his wanderings, his sufferings, his knowledge of other men’s minds. The adjective polytropos, of many turns, has given every translator trouble. It can mean much-traveled, turning this way and that across the sea. It can mean versatile, wily, a man of many devices. It can even suggest a man who has been turned, twisted, pushed about by fate. In 2017 Emily Wilson, the first woman to publish an English translation of the Odyssey, rendered it as complicated, and the single word provoked more argument than some whole translations have.
The ambiguity is the right introduction to Odysseus, and to the poem’s preoccupation with naming. In the Iliad heroes announce their names and lineages before they fight; a name is a declaration of identity and a claim to fame. In the Odyssey the hero spends much of his time without his name, or hiding it, or using false ones. He is nameless among the Phaeacians until he chooses to reveal himself. He becomes Nobody in the Cyclops’s cave. He spends the second half of the poem disguised as a beggar in his own house, inventing life stories for himself. The man of the first line is a man whose identity is constantly in play.
The scholar John Peradotto, in a 1990 book called Man in the Middle Voice, built a whole reading of the Odyssey around this problem. The Greek middle voice, a grammatical form between active and passive, describes actions done by a subject to or for itself. Peradotto argued that Odysseus is a man in the middle voice, someone who is neither simply the agent of his story nor simply its victim, and that the poem keeps its hero’s identity open, undetermined, the way names in the poem keep slipping. I said in the preface that where earlier scholars got there first I would say so in the chapter. This is such a chapter. Peradotto got there first, and anyone who reads the Odyssey for the theme of names is walking on a path he laid.
What I can add is the connection to the problem of the author. The Odyssey begins by asking the Muse to tell of a man without naming him, just as later readers would ask tradition to tell them of a poet whom they could not name with certainty. The first line of the Odyssey describes its hero by his journeys and his knowledge rather than by his identity, and the Lives of Homer, as we saw, described the poet the same way: a wanderer who saw many cities and knew many men. The Lives modeled their Homer on Odysseus, among others. The poem’s description of its hero turned into a description of its maker.
The proem adds something else, and it is easy to miss. Odysseus fought for the homecoming of his companions, the poet says, but he did not save them, though he wanted to; they perished through their own recklessness, the fools, because they ate the cattle of the Sun, and the god took away the day of their return. From the first lines the poem distributes responsibility: the hero tried, the men chose wrongly, the god punished. The tone is markedly different from the Iliad’s, where the will of Zeus organizes everything.
The point is made explicit a few lines later in a scene on Olympus. Zeus speaks to the assembled gods, and the first thing he says sets the moral program of the entire poem. How mortals blame the gods! They say their evils come from us, but they themselves, through their own recklessness, suffer griefs beyond what is fated. He gives an example: Aegisthus, who seduced the wife of Agamemnon and killed him on his return, although the gods sent Hermes to warn him not to. Aegisthus has paid for it all.
This is the first speech made by any character in the Odyssey, and it is a theodicy, a defense of the gods against the charge of causing human suffering. It looks back at the Iliad, where Achilles told Priam about the two jars on Zeus’s floor, and answers it. The Iliad’s world is one in which suffering is distributed by the gods and must be borne. The Odyssey opens by claiming that much suffering is self-inflicted and could have been avoided. The two poems disagree about the gods in their first scenes, and the disagreement is one of the oldest arguments for their having different authors, or at least different moments of composition.
Intellectual Substrate Mining asks what each poem takes for granted. The Iliad takes for granted that the world is ruled by divine powers who cannot be relied on and must be endured. The Odyssey takes for granted that the world has a moral order in which wrongdoers are punished and the patient are rewarded, at least in the end. Both assumptions are so deeply built into their poems that neither poem argues for them. The Odyssey’s assumption makes possible a story with a happy ending; the Iliad’s makes possible a story without one.
Then the goddess Athena speaks up. She agrees about Aegisthus. But her heart is torn, she says, for wise Odysseus, who is suffering far from his friends on a sea-girt island at the navel of the sea, held there by a goddess who wants him to forget Ithaca. He longs to see even the smoke rising from his own land, and wants to die. Do you not care, Olympian? And Zeus, who in the Iliad had to choose between his son and the order of the world, answers her lightly. My child, what a word has escaped the barrier of your teeth. How could I forget godlike Odysseus? And the homecoming is set in motion, by a father who has nothing at stake, for a hero who has been waiting seven years for anyone in heaven to remember his name.
Chapter Thirty-Seven — A Son Looking for a Rumor
A stranger arrives at the gate of a house full of drunk young men, and the only person who notices him is the son of the house. Telemachus, sitting among the suitors who are eating his father’s cattle and courting his mother, is daydreaming about his father coming home and throwing them all out, when he sees a guest standing unattended at the door and is ashamed. He takes the stranger’s spear, leads him to a good chair away from the noise, has water brought for his hands and food set before him. The stranger says he is Mentes, a chief of the Taphians, a seafaring people, on his way to trade iron for copper. He is the goddess Athena, and the name she has borrowed is the same name the Life of Homer gave the ship-owner who took the young poet traveling.
The stranger asks the young man whether he is really the son of Odysseus; he looks remarkably like him, around the head and the beautiful eyes. And Telemachus gives an answer that has unsettled readers for centuries. My mother says I am his, he says, but I do not know. Nobody has ever known his own father by himself.
The sentence is meant, at one level, as plain biology: paternity in the ancient world was a matter of trust. But it is also the most precise statement anywhere in Homer of the problem this book has been circling. Telemachus knows his father by report. He has never seen him, since Odysseus left when he was a baby. Everything he knows about the man comes from what others say. He is, in that respect, exactly like every reader of the Odyssey who has ever asked who Homer was: an heir who knows his origin only through testimony, and who cannot verify the testimony himself.
So he goes to collect it. The first four books of the Odyssey, called by scholars the Telemachy, follow the young man as he leaves Ithaca in search of news of his father. He visits old Nestor at Pylos, the king whose enormous cup we met in the eleventh book of the Iliad and on a clay cup at Pithekoussai. Nestor is sacrificing bulls on the beach when Telemachus arrives, and talks at great length, as he always does, about the voyages home from Troy. He tells the story of Agamemnon’s murder and the vengeance taken by Agamemnon’s son Orestes, and holds Orestes up as a model for Telemachus. About Odysseus himself he knows nothing. He has not heard of him since the fleet divided after the war.
Nestor sends his son with Telemachus to continue the journey by chariot, and the son’s name is Peisistratus. This is the name of the sixth-century tyrant of Athens who, according to the stories we examined in the nineteenth chapter, arranged the poems of Homer in their order. Scholars have long noticed the coincidence. The Athenian Peisistratids claimed descent from Nestor’s family, and some have suspected that an Athenian hand gave Nestor’s son that name to flatter the tyrant’s lineage. Others think the tyrant was named in memory of the epic character. Either way, a young man named Peisistratus rides beside Telemachus as he goes in search of his father’s story, and a man named Peisistratus was said to have arranged the story in which they ride.
At Sparta they find Menelaus and Helen, home again and living in splendor. Helen recognizes Telemachus at once by his likeness to his father. When the memories of Troy make everyone weep, she slips into their wine a drug she brought from Egypt, which takes away grief and anger and every sorrow, so that whoever drinks it would not shed a tear that day even if his mother and father died before his eyes. Then she tells a story. Odysseus, she says, once came into Troy disguised as a beggar, his body marked with blows, wearing rags. Nobody recognized him but Helen. She bathed him, anointed him, and swore not to reveal him, and he told her all the plans of the Greeks. She was glad, she says, because by then she had come to regret leaving her home and her husband.
Menelaus praises the story and immediately tells another. When the Greeks were hidden inside the wooden horse, Helen came and walked around it three times, touching it, calling out the names of the Greek leaders and imitating the voices of their wives. Several of the men inside wanted to answer or leap out. Odysseus held them back, and when one of them, Anticlus, was about to call out, Odysseus clamped his hands over the man’s mouth until Athena led Helen away.
These two stories cannot both represent Helen accurately. In the first she is a secret ally of the Greeks, already repentant. In the second she is still working for the Trojans, trying to trick the men in the horse into betraying themselves. Menelaus tells his story in his wife’s presence, as a compliment to Odysseus, and nobody in the scene remarks on the contradiction. The poem simply places the two accounts side by side, under the influence of an Egyptian drug that removes the capacity to grieve, and lets the audience notice that testimony about the past can be flatly incompatible and still be offered by the people who were there.
Menelaus then tells the story of his own voyage home, in which he wrestled the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, Proteus, who turned into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, water and a tree before giving up and answering his questions. Proteus told him that Odysseus was alive and held by the nymph Calypso on her island. This is the first true news of his father that Telemachus receives, and it comes from a god who must be pinned down and held while he changes shape before he will tell the truth.
The Telemachy is a small epistemology of the past. Telemachus collects report from an old man who knows nothing, two conflicting stories from people who were present, and one true fact extracted by force from a source that keeps changing form. That is a fair description of the materials historians have always worked with. It is also a fair description of the Lives of Homer, the encyclopedias, the archaeology and the scholia. The son goes looking for his father and finds rumors, and the poem lets him find them without telling him which to trust.
He comes home in the end, avoiding an ambush the suitors have laid for him in the strait. By then his father has already landed on Ithaca, asleep on the beach where the Phaeacians left him, without knowing where he is. The two of them are on the same island for several books before they meet. When they do, in the swineherd’s hut, Odysseus reveals himself, and Telemachus does not believe him. You are not my father, he says. You are some god deceiving me. The son who knew his father only by report is not ready to accept him in person.
Chapter Thirty-Eight — Seven Years on a Beautiful Island
Hermes, sent by Zeus to tell the nymph Calypso to release Odysseus, flies down over the sea like a cormorant hunting fish and arrives at her cave on the island of Ogygia. A great fire is burning on her hearth, and the fragrance of split cedar and juniper drifts across the island. Calypso is inside, singing in a lovely voice as she moves back and forth at her loom with a golden shuttle. Around the cave grows a wood of alder, poplar and cypress, where owls, falcons and sea crows nest; a vine heavy with grapes trails over the entrance; four springs flow in different directions; soft meadows of violets and parsley surround it all. Even a god, the poet says, would gaze and be delighted, and Hermes stands there gazing before he goes in.
Odysseus is not in the cave. He is where he always is, sitting on the shore, weeping, wearing out his heart with tears and groans and grief, looking out over the barren sea. The nymph keeps him there by force. At night he sleeps beside her in the cave, unwilling with a willing woman, as the poet puts it, and by day he sits on the rocks and cries. He has been there seven years.
Calypso receives the message from Zeus with fury. You gods are hard-hearted, she says, and jealous beyond all others, because you resent goddesses who openly take mortal men as lovers. When Dawn took Orion, Artemis killed him. When Demeter lay with Iasion in a thrice-plowed field, Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt. And now you begrudge me a man whom I saved when he was clinging to the keel of his ship. Her speech is the first explicit complaint about a double standard in European literature, and it is entirely correct: the male gods have mortal lovers by the hundred, as Zeus himself told Hera at inconvenient length on Mount Ida. But she obeys.
She goes down to the shore and tells Odysseus he may leave. She will help him build a raft. He suspects a trick, and makes her swear an oath that she plans no harm. She laughs at him, strokes him with her hand and says that he is a rogue and never at a loss for a thought. Then she makes him one last offer. If you knew, she says, how many sorrows you are destined to suffer before you reach your homeland, you would stay here with me and be immortal, however much you long for your wife. I can hardly be inferior to her in form or stature; it is not fitting for mortal women to compete with goddesses in beauty.
Odysseus answers with perfect tact. Mighty goddess, do not be angry with me. I know very well that wise Penelope is less impressive than you in looks and stature to anyone who sees her, for she is mortal and you are deathless and ageless. Even so, I want and long every day to go home and see the day of my return. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. I have suffered a great deal already, in war and on the waves. Let this be added to the rest.
He is refusing immortality. It is one of the great choices in literature, and it is made without heroics. He does not argue that mortal life is more meaningful, or that love is worth death. He simply wants to go home. He is choosing a finite life with an aging wife on a rocky island over an endless one with a goddess in a garden, and he gives as his reason only that he longs for it.
The goddess’s name explains what he is refusing. Calypso comes from the Greek verb kalyptein, to cover, to conceal. She is the concealer. Her island is far from every other land, at the navel of the sea, with no ships and no neighbors, and while he stays there Odysseus is hidden from the world, from his family, from the gods themselves, who seem to have forgotten him for years. He is also hidden from story. Nothing happens on Ogygia. Seven years pass in a few lines. Immortality on Calypso’s island would mean a life with no events, no suffering and therefore no song. The man who refuses it chooses to re-enter narrative.
Here the poem quietly turns into an argument about itself. A hero who stayed on Ogygia would have no Odyssey. The poem exists because he leaves, and because leaving means storms, monsters, a disguised homecoming and a slaughter. The choice of mortality is the choice of plot. Achilles, in the Iliad, weighed a long life against imperishable glory in song, and Odysseus, in a very different key, makes the same calculation: an endless life without a story against a short one with a story in it. Both men choose the story. Both poems are the reward and the price.
Odysseus builds the raft in four days, felling twenty trees with an axe Calypso lends him, and sets sail on the fifth. For seventeen days he sails steadily, steering by the stars as she taught him, keeping the Bear on his left hand. On the eighteenth day he sights the mountains of the Phaeacians’ land. Then Poseidon, returning from the Ethiopians at the edge of the world, sees him and remembers his grudge. The god stirs up the winds, the raft is smashed, and Odysseus spends two days and nights in the sea. A sea goddess, Ino, who was once a mortal woman, takes pity on him and gives him her veil to wrap around his chest, which will keep him from drowning, on condition that he throw it back into the sea when he reaches land. He does, and crawls ashore at the mouth of a river, and makes himself a bed of dead leaves under two olive bushes growing from the same root, one wild and one cultivated, and lies down in it, covering himself with leaves.
The poet gives a simile for the moment. As a man on a remote farm with no neighbors hides a glowing brand in a heap of black ashes, to save the seed of fire so that he will not have to go elsewhere to light it, so Odysseus covered himself with leaves. The man who refused the island of concealment has buried himself again, this time in the ashes of his own exhaustion, and the poem calls him the seed of a fire.
Chapter Thirty-Nine — A Blind Singer at a Feast
The stranger has not told anyone his name, and the Phaeacians are too polite to ask. They have given him a bath, clothes and a seat at the king’s feast, and now the herald has brought in the blind singer from the first chapter of this book, set his chair against the pillar, hung his lyre on the peg and guided his hands to it. We have come back to the scene where the book began, and this time we stay for the songs.
Demodocus sings three of them. The first is about a quarrel at a feast between Odysseus and Achilles, a quarrel that does not appear in the Iliad and that Agamemnon, the song says, was glad to hear, because an oracle had told him that the best of the Achaeans quarreling would mean the end of Troy was near. As the singer sings, Odysseus pulls his purple cloak over his head and hides his face, ashamed to let the Phaeacians see him weeping. Whenever the singer pauses, he wipes his eyes and pours a libation; whenever the song begins again, he covers his head and groans. Only the king, Alcinous, sitting beside him, notices. Alcinous tactfully proposes that they all go outside for athletic contests.
The games are almost a sitcom. A young Phaeacian named Euryalus taunts the stranger, saying he looks more like a merchant captain worried about his cargo than an athlete. Odysseus, stung, picks up a discus heavier than any the Phaeacians use and throws it past all their marks, and then challenges anyone to box, wrestle, run or shoot, everyone except his host, since only a fool fights the man who feeds him. Alcinous smooths things over by admitting that the Phaeacians are not much good at boxing or wrestling, but that they run, they sail, and they are very good at comfort, which he admits without a trace of embarrassment. Then he calls for Demodocus to sing again, and young men dance.
The second song is a comedy. Aphrodite, married to the lame smith Hephaestus, has been sleeping with Ares. The Sun sees them and tells the husband. Hephaestus forges chains as fine as spider’s webs that no one can see, drapes them around his bed and pretends to leave for the island of Lemnos. Ares and Aphrodite rush to bed and are caught in the net, unable to move. Hephaestus calls all the gods to come and look. The goddesses stay home out of modesty. The gods come, stand in the doorway and break into unquenchable laughter. Apollo asks Hermes whether he would like to be caught in such chains if he could sleep beside golden Aphrodite. Hermes says he would gladly accept three times as many chains, with all the gods and goddesses looking on. More laughter. Only Poseidon does not laugh; he negotiates a fine for Ares’s release.
Odysseus enjoys this one. So do the Phaeacians. The poem gives us a song within the song, told by a blind singer, about a lame craftsman who catches the beautiful and the strong in a net of his own making and displays them to an audience. If anyone in the Odyssey is a portrait of an artist, it is Hephaestus in this tale, the man nobody looks at who makes the thing everybody looks at. Readers who made Demodocus into Homer might as easily have made Hephaestus the author. His traps are invisible, his audience laughs, and his victims are gods.
After a further round of gifts, Odysseus sends the singer a choice cut of pork from his own plate, carried across by the herald, and asks for a third song: the wooden horse, the trick that Odysseus himself led into Troy. Then he says something that is the closest Homer comes to a theory of poetic truth. Demodocus, I honor you above all mortals. Either the Muse taught you, or Apollo. For you sing the fate of the Achaeans very properly, all they did and suffered and labored, as if you had been there yourself or heard it from someone who was.
As if you had been there. The test of a good song, for the man who was there, is whether it sounds like eyewitness testimony. Odysseus is the only person in the hall who can judge, and he judges by fidelity. The blind singer, who cannot see the present and was not at Troy, receives the highest praise a song can get: it sounds like it was seen. The poem here states the paradox that its tradition later built into Homer’s biography. A song can be true without a witness behind it, and the man who was present cannot tell the difference.
Demodocus sings the horse, the Greeks hidden inside, the Trojans debating whether to break it open, the sack of the city, Odysseus going to the house of Deiphobus with Menelaus. And Odysseus melts. The poet compares him to a woman who throws herself on her husband’s body when he has fallen in front of his city, fighting to protect it; she sees him dying and gasping and wails over him, while the enemy behind her strike her back and shoulders with their spears and lead her away to slavery and toil, her cheeks wasted with pitiable grief. So Odysseus wept.
The simile is one of the most daring in all of Homer. Odysseus, the sacker of cities, the man whose trick destroyed Troy, is compared not to a victor but to a victim, a Trojan widow being dragged into slavery by men like himself. The song of his own triumph turns him into the person he defeated. Andromache had imagined exactly this fate for herself, being led away from Troy by a Greek, and Hector had said he would rather be dead than hear her cry. Here, in the Odyssey, the hero hears the cry in his own throat.
Alcinous notices again. He stops the singer and asks the stranger, at last, to say who he is, where he comes from, and why he weeps when he hears of the fate of the Greeks at Troy. The gods, he says, spun destruction for those men so that there might be a song for people to come. The king repeats, almost word for word, the thought Helen had in the Iliad, and he says it to the man who lived it. Odysseus wipes his eyes and begins: I am Odysseus, son of Laertes. And the singer, who sang so well that he made the hero weep and revealed his identity, sits at the pillar with his lyre on its peg and says nothing more for the rest of the poem.
Chapter Forty — My Name Is Nobody
Odysseus, telling the story of his travels to the Phaeacians, describes an island lying off the land of the Cyclopes, and he describes it the way a real estate agent would. It is wooded and full of wild goats, because no hunters ever come there. It is neither plowed nor sown. The Cyclopes have no ships and no shipwrights, so they never cross to it. Yet it is a fine island, Odysseus says, and would bear everything in season. There are well-watered soft meadows by the shore where vines would never fail; level land for plowing where tall crops could be harvested; a harbor so good you would not need to tie up, with a spring of clear water at its head and poplars growing around it. Any people with ships could have made it a well-settled place.
That is the eye of an eighth-century Greek colonist, looking at an empty coast and seeing farmland, a harbor and a town. The poem has placed it in the mouth of a hero sailing home from Troy. The Cyclopes, by contrast, are described as a people with no assemblies, no laws, no agriculture; they rely on the gods to make things grow, and each rules his own wife and children without regard for the others. They are, in the colonist’s picture, people who do not deserve the land they have. A great deal of later European history can be found in miniature in that passage, and it is told by the most charming liar in literature.
Odysseus goes across to the mainland with twelve men and a skin of strong wine, out of curiosity, he admits, and in hope of guest-gifts. They enter a huge cave full of cheeses and pens of lambs and kids, and his men beg him to take some cheese and run. He refuses. He wants to see the owner. The owner arrives, a giant with a single eye, drives his flocks in and closes the entrance with a boulder that twenty-two wagons could not move. He asks who they are. Odysseus asks for hospitality in the name of Zeus. The Cyclops replies that the Cyclopes do not care for Zeus, seizes two of the men, dashes their brains out against the floor and eats them for dinner.
The next evening, after the giant has eaten more of his companions, Odysseus offers him the wine. The Cyclops drinks three bowls, delighted, and asks his guest’s name, promising him a gift. Odysseus answers: Nobody is my name. Nobody my mother and father call me, and all my companions. The giant says his gift will be that he will eat Nobody last. Then he falls asleep, vomiting wine and lumps of human flesh, and Odysseus and his men heat the point of an olive stake in the fire and drive it into his eye.
The Cyclops screams. The other Cyclopes come running from their caves and shout through the boulder: what is wrong, Polyphemus, that you cry out in the night? Is someone driving off your flocks? Is someone killing you by trickery or by force? And Polyphemus answers from inside: Nobody is killing me by trickery, not by force. The others say: well, if nobody is harming you, it must be an illness sent by Zeus, and you had better pray to your father Poseidon. They go home. And Odysseus, telling the story, says that his heart laughed, because his name and his excellent cunning had fooled them.
In Greek the joke works twice. The name Odysseus gives is Outis, nobody. But when the other Cyclopes ask whether anyone, or nobody, is harming him, the grammar requires a different form of the negative, me tis, and me tis sounds exactly like metis, cunning, intelligence, the quality for which Odysseus is famous. Nobody and Cunning are, in the ear of a Greek listener, the same word. Odysseus has not just hidden his name. He has replaced it with his defining quality, so that the giant shouts his attacker’s essence into the night without knowing it. Peradotto, whose work I credited in the chapter on the poem’s opening, built much of his reading on this pun, and I am glad to build on it again.
The escape is famous: the men tied under the bellies of the rams, Odysseus clinging to the fleece of the biggest ram, the blinded giant feeling the backs of his animals as they leave the cave and missing the men beneath. The giant talks to his favorite ram, asking why it is last out of the cave today, when it is usually first; it must be grieving for its master’s eye. It is the only moment of tenderness in the Cyclops’s whole story, and the poet gives it to him just before he is mocked.
For then Odysseus, safely back on his ship and pulling away from the shore, cannot resist. He shouts back at the giant, taunting him. His men beg him to stop, since the Cyclops has already thrown one boulder that nearly swamped them. He shouts again, and this time he says his name. Cyclops, if anyone asks you who blinded your eye, tell him it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.
The giant groans. An old prophecy told him, he says, that a man called Odysseus would take away his sight, but he always expected someone tall and handsome and strong, not a weakling who overpowered him with wine. Then he prays to his father Poseidon. Grant that Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca, may never reach home. Or if it is his fate to see his friends and his house again, let him come late and in misery, having lost all his companions, in a ship that belongs to others, and find troubles in his house.
Look at what has happened. As Nobody, Odysseus was safe. As Odysseus, son of Laertes, of Ithaca, with every element of his identity spelled out, he gave the giant exactly what a curse requires: a name, a lineage, an address. The signature made the curse possible, and the curse governs the rest of the poem. Every misfortune between this beach and the slaughter in his hall can be traced to the moment he claimed authorship of his own deed. In the Odyssey, naming yourself as the author is the most dangerous thing a man can do.
The first chapter of this book made a joke about how readers selected Demodocus as Homer’s portrait and never chose the one-eyed giant with the cheese. The joke has a second edge I did not show you then. The Odyssey contains two blind figures. One is a singer who receives honor, food and a seat by the pillar. The other is a shepherd blinded by a man who boasted of his name, sitting at the mouth of his cave with his hand on the back of a ram, cursing a signature.
Chapter Forty-One — The Unverifiable Witness
Halfway through the night, in the middle of the most famous story ever told at a dinner party, the storyteller stops. Odysseus has been talking for hours, telling the Phaeacians of his wanderings since Troy, and he has just finished a long list of the famous women he met among the dead. Now, he says, it is time to sleep, either here or on the ship, and my journey home is in the hands of the gods and of you. The hall falls silent, held as if by a spell. Then Queen Arete speaks up: what do you think of this man, Phaeacians, his looks, his stature and his steady mind? Let us not hurry to send him away, and let us not be stingy with gifts. King Alcinous agrees, and adds a sentence that every reader of the Odyssey ought to hold onto.
When we look at you, Odysseus, he says, we do not take you for a cheat and a swindler, of the kind the dark earth breeds in great numbers, people who make up lies out of things no one could ever see. You have a grace in your words and a good mind within, and you have told your story with skill, like a singer. The night is long. Tell us more. And Odysseus, having been offered more gifts, tells more.
This is the core of the Odyssey’s strangest structural decision. The adventures for which the poem is most famous, the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, the bag of winds, the cannibal Laestrygonians, Circe and her pigs, the visit to the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun, are not told by the poet. They are told by Odysseus, in the first person, in four long books, to an audience of strangers on an island that no other human being can reach. Every man who shared those adventures with him is dead. There is not a single surviving witness.
Think about what that means. The poet, who in the Catalogue of Ships asked the Muses for help because he himself knew only rumor, here hands the narration of his poem’s central marvels to a man famous throughout the tradition for lying. The audience inside the poem, the Phaeacians, cannot check anything he says. The audience outside the poem, us, cannot either. Alcinous’s guarantee rests on Odysseus’s appearance and his eloquence: he looks honest and talks like a singer. Those are precisely the qualities a skilled liar would have.
Antiquity noticed. The phrase a tale for Alcinous became proverbial for a long, tall story, and Plato used it in the Republic as a byword. The Roman satirist Juvenal, many centuries later, imagined the Phaeacians listening to Odysseus’s stories of man-eating giants and whirlpools and wanting to throw the storyteller into the sea for lying. Some ancient critics suggested that the most fantastic adventures in the Odyssey are fantastic because Odysseus invented them, and that the poet put them in his mouth so as not to have to vouch for them himself. A narrator who hands the unbelievable parts to a character has protected himself the way a newspaper protects itself by putting an accusation inside quotation marks.
Read within the poem, the story Odysseus tells has a striking feature: in every episode, his companions fail him or are destroyed. At Ismarus they disobey and stay to feast, and men are killed. With the bag of winds, they suspect it contains treasure and open it within sight of Ithaca, blowing them back to the beginning. At the land of the Laestrygonians every ship but his own is smashed in the harbor. On the island of the Sun they eat the forbidden cattle while he sleeps. The narrator consistently comes out as the wise, careful, long-suffering leader whose men ruin everything. The proem of the Odyssey already said so: they perished by their own recklessness. Now we know where the proem got its information. It came from the only survivor.
Deconstruction calls this the problem of the self-authorizing narrative, and the Odyssey stages it with uncanny precision. A text that tells the story of its own reliability has nowhere outside itself to stand. Odysseus is the author, the hero and the only witness of his own story. The Phaeacians pay him for it, in gold, tripods and cauldrons, and send him home on a magic ship. He is, in the most literal sense, a professional storyteller rewarded for a performance, exactly like the singer Demodocus whose song made him weep earlier the same evening.
Here the poem’s preoccupation with its own authorship becomes something close to a confession. The Lives of Homer described a wandering singer who traveled from city to city, telling stories in exchange for food and lodging. The Odyssey describes a wandering hero who arrives on an island destitute and leaves it rich, having told stories in exchange for gifts. The poem has put its own maker inside it again, not in the figure of the blind singer at the pillar, but in the figure of the sole survivor who tells a long, unverifiable story to strangers so well that they cannot stop listening.
I do not think the Odyssey is telling us that its hero lied. The poem confirms some of his account from outside: Zeus and Athena in the divine scenes acknowledge Calypso and Poseidon’s anger, and Teiresias’s prophecy is referred to later. What the poem does instead is more subtle. It refuses to give us a way to know. It shows a man telling the most famous adventure story in history and then, through the mouth of a king, raises the possibility that he made it all up, and then refuses to settle the matter. That refusal is the poem’s honesty. It knows what kind of evidence stories are.
One detail from the end of that night stays with me. When Odysseus finally finishes, he does not end with his rescue or his arrival on Scheria. He ends with Calypso, whom he has already described to his hosts earlier, and says that it is hateful to him to tell again a tale that has already been plainly told. With that he stops. The man who has just told the longest story in the poem breaks off because he will not repeat himself, and the Phaeacians sit in the shadowy hall, enchanted, unable to move, not knowing what is true and not caring.
Chapter Forty-Two — The Dead Who Need Blood to Speak
The first ghost to reach Odysseus at the edge of the world of the dead is a man who died stupidly. Elpenor, the youngest of the crew, not very brave in battle and not very bright, had drunk too much on Circe’s island and gone up to sleep on the roof for the cool air. When he woke to the noise of his companions preparing to leave, he forgot where he was, walked straight off the edge and broke his neck. Nobody noticed. They sailed without burying him. Now his ghost comes to meet his captain and asks one thing: burn me with my armor, build me a mound on the shore of the gray sea, and plant on it the oar I rowed with when I was alive among my companions.
In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the land of the dead, the Nekyia, on instructions from Circe, to consult the dead prophet Teiresias. He does not go down into the underworld. He sails to the stream of Ocean at the edge of the world, digs a pit a cubit square, pours offerings around it of honey and milk, wine and water, sprinkles white barley, then cuts the throats of a ram and a black ewe so that their blood flows into the pit. And the souls of the dead come swarming up out of the darkness: brides, young men, old men who had suffered much, girls with grief fresh in their hearts, warriors wounded by bronze spears still wearing their bloodstained armor. They come with an eerie cry. Odysseus draws his sword and sits by the pit to keep them back, because none of them may drink before Teiresias.
The rule of this underworld is that the dead cannot speak meaningfully, or even recognize the living, until they have drunk the blood. Without it they are shadows without minds. With it, briefly, they remember who they were and can talk.
I can think of no better image for what a reader does with an old text. Homer’s characters, Homer’s world, Homer himself, if there was such a man, are shades. They cannot speak on their own. They need something living poured out for them, the attention of a reader, the time a person gives to the page, before they can remember who they were and say anything at all. Every reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey is a pit dug at the edge of the world with a ram’s blood in it, and every reader sits with a drawn sword deciding which ghost may drink first. Readers who wanted the blind singer let him drink first. Scholars who wanted a tradition let the tradition drink. The pit is the same.
Teiresias drinks and prophesies. What he says about the end of Odysseus’s life belongs to the last chapter on the Odyssey, and we will save it. Then Odysseus sees his mother, Anticleia, who was alive when he left for Troy. She drinks and recognizes him at once, and asks how he came here while still living. He asks how she died. She says it was no disease and no arrow of Artemis; it was longing for you, my child, and your gentle heart that took away my sweet life. Three times he tries to embrace her, and three times she slips through his arms like a shadow or a dream. She explains that this is what happens to mortals when they die: the sinews no longer hold flesh and bones, the fire destroys them, and the spirit flits away like a dream.
There is no joke to be made here, and I will not try.
Then come the heroes. Agamemnon arrives, still bitter about his murder by his wife and her lover, and warns Odysseus never to trust a woman, before conceding that Penelope is different. And then Achilles comes, and Odysseus greets him with flattery: no man was ever more blessed than you; in life we honored you like a god, and now you are a great prince among the dead; do not grieve at your death.
Achilles answers with the most devastating speech in the Odyssey, because it is aimed at the Iliad. Do not try to console me about death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather be a hired laborer working the soil for another man, some poor man without much land, than be king over all the dead who have perished. The hero who in the Iliad weighed a long life against imperishable glory, and chose glory, now says the choice was wrong. The glory is real; he has it; it is worth nothing down here. He would trade it for the lowest form of life the Greek imagination could conceive, landless day labor for a poor man. Then he asks about his son Neoptolemus, and when Odysseus tells him that the boy fought bravely at Troy, the ghost of Achilles strides away across the meadow of asphodel, glad.
The Odyssey is answering the Iliad, and the answer is a retraction delivered by the Iliad’s own hero. If the two poems had one author, he changed his mind about the central value of his first poem and put the recantation in the mouth of the character who embodied it. If they had different authors, the second has used the first poem’s hero to argue with it. Either way, the speech shows that the Odyssey knows the Iliad, and that it wants to say something about it that the Iliad, which ends before Achilles dies, could not say for itself.
The last of the heroes is Ajax, who killed himself after losing the armor of Achilles to Odysseus in a contest judged by the Trojans and Athena. Odysseus speaks to him gently, wishes he had never won the armor, calls the gods responsible, and begs him to come and talk. Ajax does not answer. He turns and goes away into the darkness to join the other dead. An ancient critic, the author of On the Sublime, picked out this silence as greater than any speech, and I cannot improve on that judgment.
Odysseus sails away from the edge of the world in terror, afraid that Persephone will send up the Gorgon’s head. He returns to Circe’s island to bury Elpenor as he promised. They burn the body and the armor, raise a mound, set up a stone on it, and on top of the mound they plant his oar. It is the first time in the Odyssey that an oar is set upright in the earth as a sign. It will not be the last.
Chapter Forty-Three — The Song That Was Never Sung
Circe gives Odysseus the instructions with the brisk efficiency of a ship’s pilot reading out hazards. First you will come to the Sirens, she says, who enchant all men who come near them. Whoever approaches them unknowingly and hears their voice will never go home to his wife and little children; the Sirens charm him with their clear-voiced song, sitting in a meadow, and around them is a great heap of bones of rotting men, with the skin shriveling on them. Stop your companions’ ears with softened wax. If you yourself want to hear, have them tie you hand and foot to the mast, and if you beg them to release you, have them tie you tighter.
Odysseus does exactly that. As the ship approaches the Sirens’ island, the wind drops and the sea goes flat. He cuts a wheel of wax with his sword, warms it in his hands and stops his men’s ears. They tie him to the mast and row on. When the ship is within shouting distance, the Sirens see it and sing.
Come here, they sing, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans, bring your ship to rest so that you can hear our voice. No one has ever sailed past here in a black ship without listening to the honey-sweet voice from our lips, and then going on his way delighted and knowing more. For we know all the toils that the Argives and Trojans endured in wide Troy by the will of the gods, and we know everything that happens on the fertile earth.
That is the whole of the Sirens’ song as the poem gives it. It is not the song itself. It is the advertisement for the song. The Sirens describe what they will sing, and what they offer, specifically, is the Trojan War: all the toils of the Greeks and Trojans at Troy. They are offering to sing the Iliad. And beyond that, they offer omniscience, knowledge of everything that happens on earth, which is exactly what the poet of the Iliad asked the Muses for before the Catalogue of Ships. The Sirens are Muses with a meadow full of bones.
Pietro Pucci showed in an article published in 1979 that the Sirens’ words are composed in the formulaic language of the Iliad, not of the Odyssey: they address Odysseus with epithets typical of the earlier poem and speak of Troy in its idiom. Here, as I promised, I give the credit where it belongs. Pucci saw it first. What I want to add is what the episode does when read as a statement by the Odyssey about its own position.
The Odyssey is the poem of homecoming. Its hero’s whole purpose is to get home. And the one song that would stop him from getting home, that would leave him dead on a meadow of bones, is the song of the Trojan War, told with total knowledge. The deadliest poetry in the world, in the Odyssey’s account, is the Iliad. A man who lets himself be held by it forever never returns to his wife and children. The Odyssey survives by tying its hero to the mast while the Iliad is being sung, letting him hear the invitation and then rowing past.
And the poem does not reproduce the song. We get the Sirens’ promise, and then the next line tells us that Odysseus wanted to listen, signaled to his men with his eyebrows to release him, and that they rowed harder and two of them got up and tied him with more rope. When they are past, the men take the wax from their ears and untie him. What did the Sirens actually sing? The Odyssey never says. The song is the great absent text at the center of the poem, more powerful than anything the poem could have quoted, because it is not there.
The episode has had an enormous afterlife in philosophy. In 1944, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno made it the founding allegory of Western rationality. Odysseus, they argued, is the first bourgeois subject. He enjoys art but makes it harmless by binding himself, so that it can no longer move him to action; and his men, the workers, row with their ears stopped, cut off from beauty altogether, so that their labor can continue. Art becomes a concert that the master hears in chains while the workers keep the ship moving. It is a dark and brilliant reading, and it has its own hollow: Horkheimer and Adorno needed the Odyssey to be about the origins of capitalism, and they found it there.
Franz Kafka, a quarter century earlier, wrote a short parable in which the Sirens have a weapon more terrible than their song, which is their silence. In Kafka’s version, Odysseus, sailing past with wax in his own ears and chains around his body, sees their throats moving and thinks they are singing, and believes himself protected by his own cleverness, when in fact they have chosen not to sing at all. Kafka’s Sirens grasp the point that the Odyssey itself makes by withholding the song. An absence can enchant more powerfully than any presence.
Bring this back to the subject of this book. The poet of the Odyssey had in front of him, in one form or another, the tradition of the Trojan War. He chose not to sing it. He let his hero hear it, bound to a mast, and he let his audience hear only its promise. The poems of Homer are not one continuous tradition but two that define themselves against each other, and the Sirens episode is where the second one draws the line. Here, it says, is the song that will hold you forever. Row past.
Beyond the Sirens are Scylla, who takes six men from the deck, and Charybdis, who swallows the sea three times a day, and then the island of the Sun. Odysseus loses everyone. But for a few lines, on the flat sea by the meadow of bones, he is the only man in the world who has heard the Sirens and lived, and he is tied so tightly to the mast that he can do nothing with the knowledge except tell it, later, to strangers who cannot check.
Chapter Forty-Four — Five Lies from Crete
Odysseus wakes on a beach in Ithaca, where the Phaeacians have set him down asleep with his treasure, and does not recognize his own island, because Athena has covered it with mist. A young shepherd approaches, handsome and well-dressed, carrying a javelin. Odysseus asks where he is. The shepherd tells him: this is Ithaca, famous even as far as Troy. Odysseus is overjoyed, and immediately lies. He says he is a Cretan, who fled after killing the son of Idomeneus, a swift runner named Orsilochus, because the young man had tried to rob him of his share of the plunder from Troy. He ambushed him at night by the road with a companion and speared him. Then he hired a Phoenician ship to take him away, and the Phoenicians, blown off course, left him here, asleep, with his goods.
The shepherd smiles. She takes on her true form, a tall and beautiful woman skilled in splendid handiwork, and strokes him with her hand. It would take a cunning and thievish person, she says, to get past you in tricks, even a god. You stubborn, wily man, never tired of deceit, not even in your own country can you stop lying and telling the stories you love from the bottom of your heart. But let us leave that; we both know about tricks, you the best of all mortals in counsel and stories, and I among all the gods for wisdom and cunning.
The goddess of wisdom is delighted by a lie. She does not rebuke it, or punish it, or treat it as a sin. She admires it as a piece of craftsmanship, as one artist admires another’s work. Odysseus has invented, on the spot, a story with a name, a motive, a geography, a timetable and a murder, and the person he has lied to turns out to be the patron goddess of lying well.
Over the next books he tells versions of this story four more times. To the swineherd Eumaeus, in his hut, he presents himself as the bastard son of a wealthy Cretan named Castor, who went to Troy, then raided Egypt, saw his comrades slaughtered when they plundered the countryside against his advice, threw himself on the mercy of the Egyptian king, became rich, was cheated by a Phoenician, shipwrecked, rescued by the Thesprotians, and sold by sailors who tied him up in rags, from which he escaped. To the suitor Antinous he tells a shortened version. To Penelope herself, in the nineteenth book, he says he is Aethon, the younger brother of Idomeneus of Crete, and that he once entertained Odysseus in his house on his way to Troy. To his old father Laertes, at the end, he tells yet another, claiming to come from a place called Alybas. The poet sums up the scene with Penelope in a single line. He made many falsehoods seem like the truth.
That line is almost word for word the claim made by the Muses in the opening of Hesiod’s Theogony, the poem of the man who beat Homer at Chalcis in the story told by later generations. The Muses tell Hesiod, a shepherd on Mount Helicon, that they know how to tell many falsehoods that seem like truth, and that they also know, when they wish, how to tell the truth. The goddesses of poetry, in other words, claim both powers and do not say which they are using. Odysseus has the same power, and in the Odyssey he uses it more often than any other character, including the gods.
Look closely at the lies and something remarkable emerges. They are full of realistic detail of a kind the true adventures lack. There are no monsters, no witches, no magic. There are Egyptian raids, Phoenician traders, Thesprotian kings, shipwrecks and slave markets. Odysseus’s invented Crete, an island famous in antiquity as a place of tall stories, is a world of real Mediterranean commerce and violence, and some historians have suggested that the raid on Egypt in the tale to Eumaeus preserves a memory of the kind of seaborne raiding that the Egyptians recorded on the temple walls at Medinet Habu, which we visited in the chapter on the collapse of the palaces. The lies are more historically plausible than the truth.
That is the paradox the deconstructive reader cannot resist. Odysseus’s true story, told to the Phaeacians, features cannibal giants, a bag of winds and a goddess who turns men into pigs. His false stories feature trade routes, inheritance disputes and the price of slaves. If you had to guess which one was invented, you would guess wrong. The poem is showing us, in its own terms, that realism is a technique, not a guarantee, and that the most convincing details in a story may be the ones made up to convince.
Penelope’s interview with the false Cretan is the masterpiece of the series. When she asks him to prove he really met Odysseus, he describes what her husband was wearing twenty years before: a double purple cloak with a golden brooch, on which was worked a hound holding a dappled fawn in its forepaws, and a tunic shining like the skin of a dried onion. Penelope weeps, because she herself gave him those clothes. The detail is true. It is used to support a lie. And the lie is in the service of a truth, since the man telling it really is her husband. Every layer of the scene reverses the one beneath it.
The tradition of Homer, as this book has described it, is built of exactly this material. The Lives of Homer are falsehoods like the truth, constructed from real details of the poems and arranged into an invented life. Schliemann’s autobiography is another, with a real fortune and real languages wrapped around an invented childhood vow. The Turkish encyclopedia paragraph about the meaning of the poet’s name is another. Each of them would have earned a stroke on the cheek from Athena. Each tells us more about its teller than about its subject, and each was believed.
The Cretans themselves acquired a reputation that has outlasted the Odyssey by millennia. A line attributed to the Cretan poet Epimenides, in the sixth century, says that Cretans are always liars, and it became, much later, the most famous paradox in logic, since a Cretan said it. Odysseus chose Crete as his false homeland four times out of five. He must have known the joke was already old.
Chapter Forty-Five — A Dog on a Dung Heap
On the road into town a beggar and a swineherd meet the goatherd Melanthius, who is driving the best of his goats down to the palace for the suitors’ dinner. Melanthius takes one look at the beggar and starts insulting him: here is one filthy wretch leading another, like god bringing like together; where are you taking this greedy pest, who will rub his shoulders on many doorposts begging for scraps? Then, as he passes, he kicks the beggar in the hip. The beggar considers killing him with his stick, or lifting him up and smashing his head on the ground. He endures it. The beggar is the king of Ithaca, home after twenty years, disguised by Athena as an old man in rags, and he is about to arrive at his own front door.
At the gate of the palace lies a dog. He is lying on a heap of dung from mules and cattle, piled up by the doors until the servants carry it out to fertilize the fields. He is covered in ticks. His name is Argos, and Odysseus raised him as a puppy and trained him, but left for Troy before he could enjoy him. In the old days the young men took him hunting after wild goats, deer and hares. Now, with his master gone, he lies neglected. The poet says all this in a few lines, and the next lines are among the most famous in the poem.
When he became aware that Odysseus was near, he wagged his tail and laid back both his ears, but he no longer had the strength to come closer to his master. Odysseus, looking away, wiped a tear, hiding it easily from Eumaeus, and asked about the dog: what a fine animal, lying on the dung; did he have speed to match his looks, or was he one of those table dogs that masters keep for show? Eumaeus answers that the dog belonged to a man who died far away, and that if he could see him as he was when Odysseus left, he would be amazed at his speed and strength; no beast he chased in the deep forest ever escaped him. But now the women do not look after him, and servants do nothing when their masters are not there to command them.
And then: as for Argos, the fate of black death seized him as soon as he had seen Odysseus again, in the twentieth year.
Twenty years is roughly the span of a dog’s life, stretched to its limit. The dog waited exactly as long as he was able to, recognized the one person whom no human being in the house had yet recognized, and died. He is the first creature in the palace to see through the disguise, and he can do nothing with the knowledge except lower his ears. Athena’s magic can fool wives, sons and suitors. It cannot fool a dog’s nose, and the poem lets the oldest, weakest, most neglected creature on the estate be the first witness of the return.
The scene works because it is told almost entirely through restraint. Odysseus cannot show his grief, because a beggar has no reason to weep over a stranger’s dog. The swineherd does not know whom he is talking to. The dog cannot rise. The poet does not linger: four lines after the recognition, Argos is dead, and the story goes inside. This is the alternation that every good writer learns from Homer, the plain statement of loss with nothing added, and it is followed almost immediately by farce.
Inside, the beggar works his way around the hall, holding out his hand to each suitor for scraps, so that he can learn which are decent and which are not. Most give him something. The ringleader, Antinous, refuses, abuses him, and finally picks up his footstool and hits him with it on the shoulder. Odysseus stands like a rock and says nothing, except to pray that death may come to Antinous before his marriage. Even the other suitors are uneasy: what if this beggar is a god in disguise? The gods, they say, take the form of strangers and go through the cities, watching the violence and lawfulness of men. They are right. The poem is about to show them how right.
The next day, a professional beggar arrives, a huge, greedy man named Arnaeus whom the young men call Irus, after Iris the messenger, because he runs errands for anyone. He tells Odysseus to get off his doorstep before he is dragged off by the foot. The suitors, delighted, arrange a boxing match between the two beggars, with a prize of a goat’s stomach stuffed with fat and blood, roasting by the fire. Odysseus hitches up his rags and reveals thighs, shoulders, chest and arms that make the suitors whisper to one another that Irus is about to be un-Irused. Irus begins to tremble, and the suitors push him into the ring anyway. Odysseus hits him once, under the ear, and breaks his jaw. Irus falls in the dust, bleeding from the mouth, kicking his heels. The suitors throw up their hands and nearly die laughing.
The beggar who wins is the master of the house, and the man he defeats is the official beggar of the house, which is a position nobody in the Iliad would have recognized. The Odyssey’s world has room for an institutional beggar with a nickname and a regular pitch, a man who carries messages and gets fed. It is a world with a social bottom, which the Iliad, with its kings and their silent armies, barely shows. And it lets its hero step into that bottom, wearing its rags, and fight from there. The noblest man in the poem spends the climactic books as the poorest man in his house, and it is from that position that he learns who is loyal.
This is where the Odyssey’s theme of identity becomes a test of morality. The beggar is a stranger, and the laws of Zeus require that strangers and suppliants be treated well; the suitors keep reminding themselves of this even as they break it. Every person in the palace is tested by how they treat a man with nothing. The swineherd shares his food. The old nurse washes his feet. The dog wags his tail. The goatherd kicks him, the ringleader throws a footstool, and the suitors laugh at a fight between two hungry men. By the time the beggar takes up his bow, the poem has already sorted the household, and the sorting was done by rags.
After the fight, Odysseus drags Irus by the foot through the porch and out to the courtyard, props him against the wall, puts a stick in his hand and tells him to sit there and keep the pigs and dogs away. Then he goes back inside, accepts the stuffed goat’s stomach, and sits down at the threshold. Outside, by the gate, the dung heap where Argos lay has not been cleared away, and nobody in the house has noticed that the dog is gone.
Chapter Forty-Six — The Scar
Eurycleia, the old nurse who brought up Odysseus, is told by Penelope to wash the stranger’s feet. The beggar sits away from the fire and turns his face toward the dark, because he has suddenly remembered that he has a scar. She brings a gleaming basin, pours in cold water, then hot, and begins. As soon as she touches him, she knows. And at the very moment of recognition, in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, the poem stops and tells us where the scar came from.
It came from a boar. When Odysseus was a young man he went to visit his grandfather, Autolycus, on Mount Parnassus, and hunted with his uncles. A great boar lay in a thicket so dense that neither wind nor rain nor sun could get through it. The boar charged, and the young man, first to attack, drove his spear into it, but not before the boar had slashed him above the knee with its tusk, tearing away much flesh but not reaching the bone. His uncles bound the wound, stopped the blood with a charm, and sent him home with gifts. His parents asked him all about it, and he told them.
Inside that story is another. When Odysseus was born, the poem says, Autolycus came to Ithaca, and Eurycleia herself placed the baby on his knees and asked him to name his grandson. Autolycus said: since I have come here angry at many men and women across the earth, let his name be Odysseus. The Greek verb odyssasthai means to be angry with, to hate, to be the object of hatred. The name of the hero means something like the man of wrath, or the man hated, or the man who causes trouble. Autolycus, we were told in the Iliad, was the burglar who stole the boar’s-tusk helmet, and here he is in the Odyssey naming the child, a master thief bestowing a name built from rage.
The digression runs to some seventy-five lines. Then the poem returns to the basin. The old woman feels the scar, lets go of his leg, and his foot falls into the basin, which clangs and tips over, spilling water on the floor. Joy and grief seize her heart; her eyes fill with tears; her voice catches. She touches his chin and says: you are Odysseus, my dear child, and I did not know you until I had felt all of my master’s body. She turns toward Penelope to tell her, but Athena has turned Penelope’s attention away. Odysseus grabs the nurse by the throat with one hand and pulls her close with the other. Nurse, he says, do you want to destroy me? You nursed me at your own breast. Be quiet.
In 1946 the German scholar Erich Auerbach published Mimesis, a study of the representation of reality in Western literature that remains one of the great works of criticism of the twentieth century, and its first chapter is called Odysseus’ Scar. Auerbach compared the Homeric way of telling a story with the way the Hebrew Bible tells the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. In Homer, he argued, everything is brought into the foreground and fully illuminated. The digression about the scar does not create suspense; it pushes the recognition aside and fills the present moment with a complete, uniformly lit episode from the past. Homer knows no background, Auerbach wrote. Genesis, by contrast, is fraught with background: it leaves out everything that does not serve its purpose, and its silences are full of meaning. Homer’s style seeks to make us forget our own reality for a few hours; the Bible’s style seeks to overcome our reality and claim it.
Auerbach’s essay is magnificent, and like all magnificent readings it has a hollow, which a deconstructive reading must find. Look again at what the digression actually contains. It contains a name, given in anger by a thief. It contains a wound inflicted by a boar in a dark thicket where no light reaches. It contains a childhood, a grandfather and an inheritance. That is not foreground. That is the deepest background the Odyssey possesses: the origin of the hero’s identity, the meaning of his name, and the mark on his body that is the only thing about him that cannot be disguised. The digression is the poem showing us what lies underneath the man in rags, and it is arranged so that the recognition and the origin happen together.
Moreover, the scene is constructed around a deliberate interruption of knowledge. The nurse knows, Penelope does not, Odysseus silences the one who knows. The reader is told the whole story of the scar in the middle of a moment when its discovery is being suppressed. Auerbach saw the uniform light. He did not see that the light falls on a story nobody in the room is allowed to tell.
There is a reason for that, I think, and it belongs to the history of the book itself rather than to the Odyssey. Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Istanbul, where he had fled from Nazi Germany, between 1942 and 1945, and he said in his epilogue that he wrote it without access to a proper library of European scholarship, which, he suggested, was perhaps why the book could be written at all. A scholar in exile, cut off from his sources, working from a few texts and his memory, wanted to see in Homer a world without hidden depths, all foreground, all present. He saw a homeland without background at the moment when his own background had been taken from him. Every reading, as the Weil and Shay chapter showed, is woven on the loom of its own time.
The scar matters for this book for another reason. In the chapter on the boars’-tusk helmet I argued that the Homeric poems carry objects and phrases from the deep past and label them with their history. Here the poem does the same with a body. Odysseus’s scar is an heirloom of the flesh, received on a boar hunt at his grandfather’s house, carried for decades, and read at last by the woman who once laid him as a baby on the thief’s knees. The helmet came down from Autolycus by theft and gift. The scar came down from Autolycus by a hunt. The name came down from Autolycus by anger. The grandfather is the source of everything that marks the grandson, and the grandfather is a burglar.
Eurycleia keeps silent, as she is told. She goes to fetch more water, since the first basin has spilled. She washes his feet again and anoints them with oil. Odysseus pulls his chair closer to the fire and covers the scar with his rags.
Chapter Forty-Seven — What Penelope Knew
For three years, Penelope has been weaving a shroud. She told the suitors that she would choose a husband from among them as soon as she had finished it, a burial cloth for her husband’s old father, Laertes, so that the women of the country would not reproach her for letting a man of such wealth lie without one. Every day she wove at the great loom. Every night, by torchlight, she unpicked what she had woven. The trick worked for three years, until one of her maids betrayed her and the suitors caught her at it, and she was forced to finish the shroud against her will.
The weaving that is undone every night is the most perfect image in ancient literature for the method this book has been using. Deconstruction, in the plainest terms, is the patient undoing of a fabric to see how it was made, carried out with the same care that went into weaving it. Penelope’s work is not destruction. It is the deliberate postponement of an ending that others are trying to force on her. As long as the shroud is unfinished, her story is unfinished, and she remains free to wait.
What did she know, and when? That is the question that has divided readers of the Odyssey since the middle of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth book Penelope has a long conversation by the fire with the beggar, who tells her the lie about being Aethon of Crete and describes her husband’s brooch and tunic. She weeps. She gives him a bed. She asks the nurse to wash his feet, which leads to the scar. And then, still speaking to the beggar, she tells him a dream.
She keeps twenty geese at the house, she says, and loves to watch them eating grain from the water. In her dream a great eagle came down from the mountain and broke all their necks, and they lay dead in heaps in the hall, and she wept and wailed. Then the eagle came back, sat on the roof and spoke to her in a human voice: these geese are the suitors, and I, who was an eagle, am now your husband, returned to bring a shameful death on all of them. The beggar says that the dream needs no interpretation. Penelope answers that dreams are hard to read, and that some come through a gate of horn and are true, and others through a gate of ivory and deceive. Then she announces that tomorrow she will set the suitors a test. Whoever can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axeheads set in a row will be her husband.
In 1950 the American scholar Philip Harsh argued that Penelope had recognized her husband, or at least strongly suspected, during this conversation, and that her decision to announce the contest of the bow was a deliberate move to put the weapon into his hands. Later scholars, among them Jack Winkler, developed the idea of a Penelope who is the poem’s other master strategist, testing the stranger as carefully as he tests her, and arranging the climax while appearing to surrender. Others reply that the poem plainly states that Athena prevented her from noticing the nurse’s recognition, and that her grief and confusion are genuine. The text supports both readings, and that, I suspect, is its design.
Look at the dream again. Penelope tells a man she may or may not recognize that she dreamed of her husband killing the suitors, and asks him to interpret it. In the dream she weeps for the geese. Her grief for the suitors, or for something the geese stand for, is the strangest emotional detail in the poem, and it has never been satisfactorily explained. A wife waiting twenty years might take some pleasure in the attention of a hundred young men, even while refusing them. The dream lets her mourn that pleasure in the same moment that it announces its end. It is a message whose sender and meaning are equally uncertain, delivered to a listener whose identity is uncertain, in a scene where the most important fact, the presence of Odysseus, is concealed from one of the two speakers, or perhaps from both, or perhaps from neither.
The ambiguity reaches its peak in the twenty-third book, after the slaughter, when Odysseus, bathed and dressed by Athena to look like a god, sits opposite his wife and waits for her to embrace him. She does not. Telemachus scolds her for her hard heart. She says that if this is really Odysseus, they have signs between them, secret ones, that others do not know. Then she gives an order to the nurse: move the great bed out of the bedroom, the one he built himself, and make it up for him outside.
Odysseus explodes. Who has moved my bed? No man alive could shift it easily. He built it himself, he says, around the trunk of an olive tree growing in the courtyard. He built the bedroom around the tree, cut off the branches, trimmed the trunk with an adze and made it the bedpost, and inlaid the frame with gold, silver and ivory. That is the sign, he says. Now I do not know whether it is still there, or whether someone has cut the trunk and moved it.
Penelope’s knees give way. She runs to him, throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. The poem calls it a sign, sema, the same word used for a grave marker and for the deadly signs in Bellerophon’s tablet. And this sign is the opposite of every other sign in the Odyssey. It cannot be faked, because it is rooted in the earth. It cannot be moved, because it is a living tree. It cannot be borrowed or disguised. Penelope tested her husband not by asking him for information, which a clever liar could supply, but by making him lose his temper, and the anger is what proves him. She has beaten the master of disguises at his own game, by producing in him the one response he could not have planned.
So the Odyssey contains both of the possible attitudes toward meaning that this book has been describing. Penelope’s loom is the endless undoing of a text, the refusal to let a meaning be fixed. Penelope’s bed is the one meaning that cannot be undone, a sign grown into the ground. The same woman controls both. She knows when to unpick and when to point to the root.
After they recognize each other, the poem says, they went gladly to the place of their old bed. Athena holds back the dawn at the edge of Ocean so that the night will be longer. And the poet compares Penelope’s joy at seeing her husband to the joy of shipwrecked sailors who see land after Poseidon has smashed their ship, and swim to shore with brine caked on their skin. The simile that we would expect to describe Odysseus describes his wife. She was the one at sea.
Chapter Forty-Eight — Twelve Women and a Rope
When the killing in the hall is over and the suitors lie in heaps like fish dragged from the sea in a net, gasping on the sand, Odysseus calls for the old nurse Eurycleia and asks her which of the women of the household have dishonored him and which are innocent. She tells him that there are fifty women servants in the house, taught to card wool and endure their slavery, and that twelve of them have behaved shamelessly, showing no respect to her or to Penelope.
Odysseus orders that these twelve be brought into the hall. They come, wailing and weeping. He makes them carry out the bodies of the suitors and pile them in the porch, and wash the tables and chairs with water and sponges, while Telemachus and the two loyal herdsmen scrape the floor with shovels and the women carry out the blood-soaked filth. Then he orders Telemachus to take them out to the courtyard and kill them with swords.
Telemachus does not use a sword. He says he will not give a clean death to women who poured shame on his head and his mother’s and slept with the suitors. He takes the cable of a dark-prowed ship, ties one end to a tall pillar and throws the other around the round-house, and stretches it high so that their feet cannot reach the ground. The poet gives a simile. As thrushes with long wings or doves fly into a net set in a thicket, seeking a resting place, and a hateful bed receives them, so the women held their heads in a row, and nooses were around all their necks, so that they would die most pitifully. They twitched their feet a little while, not long.
Then they bring out Melanthius, the goatherd who kicked the beggar on the road. They cut off his nose and ears with bronze, tear off his genitals and throw them to the dogs to eat raw, and cut off his hands and feet.
The poem does not comment. It moves directly to the fumigation of the house with sulfur, and the women who remained loyal come out to embrace their master, kissing his head and shoulders and hands, and he is seized by a longing to weep, because he recognizes every one of them.
Readers in the last century have found it increasingly difficult to read past the hanging. The women were slaves. Whatever relations they had with the suitors were relations with free men who had taken over the household and who held power over everyone in it. The poem tells us that the suitors slept with them. It does not tell us whether the women could have refused. It does not ask. The category of disloyalty the poem applies to them assumes a freedom that slaves in their position did not have.
In 2005 Margaret Atwood published The Penelopiad, a short novel in which Penelope tells her story from the underworld, and the twelve maids form a chorus that interrupts her with songs, a sea shanty, an anthropology lecture and finally a courtroom drama in which they put Odysseus on trial. Atwood said in an afterword that the hanging of the maids had haunted her since she first read the Odyssey. Her chorus answers the poem with the voices it denied them.
A deconstructive reading does not need to add anything to that. It only needs to point out that the poem’s ethical structure depends on this scene. The Odyssey is built on the distinction between loyalty and betrayal. Penelope is loyal, the suitors are wicked, the swineherd is faithful, the goatherd is treacherous. The poem’s moral order requires that every member of the household be sorted into one category or the other, and the sorting is carried out with a rope. The women who were not free to choose are judged as if they had chosen. They are the margin that holds the center up. If they are not traitors, the moral clarity of the ending does not hold.
It is easy to condemn the poem from the safety of the present, and I do not think condemnation is the most useful response. The Odyssey was composed in a world where slavery was universal and the absolute authority of a master over his household was assumed. What is remarkable is not that the poem endorses that order, but that it shows so clearly what the order costs. The simile of the birds in the net is not triumphant. It is pitiful, and the poet uses the word. The feet that twitch a little while, not long, are not described by someone who enjoyed the scene. The poem tells the truth about the killing even while it accepts the reasons for it.
The twelve women have no names. Melantho, the sister of Melanthius, who insulted the beggar in the hall, is named earlier in the poem. The rest are a number and a row of feet. The Odyssey gave a name to a dog on a dung heap and a nickname to a beggar. It did not give names to the women who washed the blood from the floor before they died.
Chapter Forty-Nine — Where the Poem Ends
Two scholars of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus, both of whom we met holding the librarian’s dagger, are reported in the margins of the medieval manuscripts to have said something extraordinary about the Odyssey. They said that it ends at the two hundred and ninety-sixth line of the twenty-third book. That line describes Odysseus and Penelope, reunited, going gladly to the place of their old bed. The note uses two Greek words for what happens there, telos and peras, end and limit. Everything after it, the remainder of the twenty-third book and the whole of the twenty-fourth, would on this view be an addition by another hand.
Nobody knows exactly what the two scholars meant. Perhaps they meant that the story reaches its natural goal at the reunion, and that what follows is a kind of appendix. Perhaps they meant that the original poem stopped there and that the rest was spurious. Modern scholars have argued about the ending for two centuries, and some editions still mark the final book as suspect. It is one of the stranger facts about the most influential poem of homecoming in Western literature that its own ancient editors were not sure where it finished.
What comes after the reunion is unusual. First, a second visit to the dead. Hermes leads the souls of the slaughtered suitors down to the underworld, squeaking like bats, and there they find Achilles and Agamemnon in conversation. Agamemnon praises Achilles’s magnificent funeral, which the poem now describes at length, the mourning of Thetis and the Muses, the golden urn, the great mound over the Hellespont. Then the suitors arrive and one of them tells the story of their deaths, and Agamemnon cries out in praise of Penelope’s loyalty, contrasting her with his own murderous wife. The poem lets the dead of the Iliad review the outcome of the Odyssey.
Then Odysseus goes to his father. Laertes is living in poverty on a farm, digging around a vine in a filthy patched tunic, leather leggings and gloves against the thorns, with a goatskin cap on his head, nursing his grief. Odysseus, who could simply embrace him, tests him with one last lie, pretending to be a stranger who once entertained Odysseus. The old man weeps and pours dust on his head. Only then does Odysseus reveal himself, and offers as proof the scar and a list of the trees his father gave him as a boy: thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees and fifty rows of vines. Readers have long wondered why a man would test his grieving father this way. The answer the poem gives, I think, is that Odysseus cannot do anything else. He has become his method.
Finally the families of the suitors arm themselves and march on the farm to take revenge, and a small civil war breaks out. Laertes, rejuvenated by Athena, kills the father of Antinous with a spear. Then Athena shouts to both sides to stop, Zeus throws down a thunderbolt, and the goddess, disguised once again as Mentor, imposes a peace. The poem ends abruptly with the treaty. It is the closest thing in Homer to a deus ex machina, and readers who think the ending is a later addition point to its haste.
A deconstructive reader is in no hurry to decide which ending is genuine, because the uncertainty itself says something about the poem. A story of homecoming has a natural end in the reunion of husband and wife. A story about a society has to deal with what happens after a man kills more than a hundred of the young men of his island. The two endings correspond to two different poems that the Odyssey is at the same time: a romance and a political epic. Aristarchus, by placing the end at the bed, chose the romance. The final book insists on the politics.
And there is a third ending, which is not in the poem at all, because it lies in the future. In the eleventh book Teiresias told Odysseus, and in the twenty-third book Odysseus tells Penelope in bed, before they sleep, that his wanderings are not over. When he has killed the suitors he must take a well-made oar and set out on foot, walking inland until he comes to a people who know nothing of the sea, who eat no salt with their food and have never seen a ship or the oars that are the wings of ships. The sign will be this: another traveler will meet him and say that he is carrying a winnowing fan on his shoulder. There he must plant the oar in the ground and make sacrifice to Poseidon, and then go home. Death will come to him gently, from the sea or away from the sea, the Greek phrase can mean either, in a sleek old age, with his people prosperous around him.
I promised in the chapter on the dead that I would return to the oar, and here it is. When Elpenor was buried, his oar was planted on his mound, and there it was a sign everyone understood: here lies a sailor. At the end of Odysseus’s last journey, an oar will be planted in a place where nobody can read it. To the inland people it is not an oar but a farming tool, a winnowing fan for separating grain from chaff. The same object, carried away from the context that gave it meaning, becomes another object. The sign of the sea becomes a sign of the field.
Derrida spent a career arguing that the meaning of a sign depends on its context, and that no context can ever be fully closed, so that every sign can be carried somewhere else and made to mean something different. The Odyssey dramatized this in a single image twenty-seven centuries before him. The hero who has spent the whole poem being recognized and misrecognized, who has hidden his name, invented his past and revealed himself by a scar and a bed, ends his story in a place where his most familiar tool is unrecognizable, and where nobody has ever heard of the sea, or of Troy, or of him. The story ends where the story cannot be read.
Dante, who never read the Odyssey because he could not read Greek, imagined in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno a different last journey, in which Ulysses sails out through the Strait of Gibraltar, beyond the limits set for men, and drowns within sight of a mountain. Tennyson, centuries later, gave his Ulysses an old man’s restlessness that refuses to settle down with an aged wife on a barren island. Both poets felt that the Odyssey’s ending was unfinished, and both finished it in the opposite direction to Teiresias, outward to sea rather than inland to the people who do not know what an oar is.
The Odyssey itself does not narrate the walk. It leaves its hero lying in bed beside Penelope, describing a journey he has not yet taken to a place where no one will understand what he is carrying, and then it lets them sleep.
Chapter Fifty — One Poet or Two
In the second century before Christ, a handful of Alexandrian scholars named Xenon and Hellanicus argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of different poets. They were called the chorizontes, the separators, and they were in the minority; Aristarchus wrote against them. We know almost nothing about their arguments except that they pointed to differences between the two poems, in vocabulary, in the behavior of the gods, in what each poem knows. Their opponents explained the differences as the work of one poet at different stages of life. The treatise On the Sublime, from the first century after Christ, put that explanation into a famous image: the Iliad was written at the height of the poet’s powers, the Odyssey in old age, like the setting sun, whose size remains but whose force has gone. Two thousand years later, as we saw, the standard Turkish encyclopedic paragraph about Homer offered exactly the same solution.
The question has never been settled, and every method brought to it has found evidence for both sides. The Odyssey’s gods are more moral and more distant; its Athena is a constant companion rather than a partisan. Its world includes beggars, swineherds, slaves with names and a lively interest in household management. Its vocabulary contains words the Iliad lacks, and some scholars count it as linguistically younger. But both poems share the same meter, the same formula system, the same stock of epithets and type scenes, and the same habits of composition. The Odyssey knows the Iliad intimately and seems to avoid repeating its episodes, as if its maker had the earlier poem in front of him. Samuel Butler, of course, solved the problem by assigning the second poem to a young woman in Trapani.
In the preface I promised to put the question to an instrument, and here is what happened. The instrument comes from my work with Treasure Hunt on the seals of the Indus Valley (Kriger and Hunt, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19103880). There we measured, for each position in a short sequence of signs, how predictable the sign in that position was: whether a few signs dominated it or many different signs appeared there with roughly equal frequency. The pattern of predictability across positions turned out to separate a registration code from a language. The same measurement can be applied to a line of Homeric verse. In each line, the first word, the second, the third, the third from last, the second from last and the last occupy positions that the formula system treats differently, and the predictability of each position can be measured book by book.
For this book I applied the measurement to the standard digital Greek text of both poems, as published by the Perseus Digital Library, with accents removed so that the same word written slightly differently counts once. Each of the forty-eight books was treated as a separate sample. To keep long and short books comparable, the measurement was taken on many random handfuls of four hundred lines from each book and averaged; four of the shortest books of the Odyssey were too small for this and were left out. Then I asked a simple question: if I hide the name of the poem, can the pattern of predictability across the six positions tell me which poem a given book came from?
The answer was yes, more often than chance allows. Matching each book to whichever poem’s average pattern it most resembled, the instrument assigned thirty-one of forty-four books to the right poem. When the labels Iliad and Odyssey were shuffled at random and the test repeated many hundreds of times, the shuffled labels did as well only very rarely, fewer than one time in two hundred. So the two poems differ, measurably, in the way their lines are built.
Then I ran the control, which is where honest instruments earn their keep. If the two halves of the Iliad, books one to twelve and books thirteen to twenty-four, can be told apart just as easily, then the instrument is detecting changes of subject matter within a poem, not a difference between poems. I ran the same test on the two halves of the Iliad and on the two halves of the Odyssey. In both cases the instrument did no better than chance. Inside each poem, the pattern is stable. Between the poems, it shifts.
Where does it shift? Not at the end of the line. The last word of the hexameter, the position where the great noun-epithet formulas cluster, the slot that Milman Parry studied first, is almost exactly as predictable in the Odyssey as in the Iliad. At the end of the line the two poems are using the same machine in the same way. The difference lies at the beginning. The opening word of the line is noticeably more predictable in the Odyssey, and the third word somewhat more so. The Odyssey’s lines begin more often in the same few ways.
What does that mean? It is tempting to announce that the instrument has found two poets, and I am not going to. The line-final stability is exactly what we would expect if both poems came out of a single formula tradition, whoever composed them. The line-initial difference has several possible explanations. The Odyssey contains much more conversation, and conversation in Homer is introduced and connected by recurring opening words. Its narrative has more transitions of the type and then, and when, but he. A single poet telling a different kind of story could produce exactly this shift. So could a different poet. So could a different stage in the fixing of the text. The instrument has located the difference with precision. It cannot tell us who made it.
I find that result more interesting than a verdict would have been. It says that the two poems share their deep machinery, the formula system that a tradition builds over centuries, and differ in the part of the line where a teller decides how to move from one thing to the next. If you want to look for an individual at work in Homer, the beginning of the line is where to look, not the end. The tradition owns the ends of lines. Someone, or several someones, owned the beginnings.
This is a modest finding from a simple measurement, done on a single digital edition, without the refinements that a full study would need: separating speeches from narrative, controlling for repeated lines, comparing with Hesiod and the Hymns. I report it because I promised to, and because a result that says less than one hoped is still a result. The separators of Alexandria were right that the poems differ in measurable ways. Longinus was not wrong that a single poet in a different mood might account for the difference. Both can now be stated a little more exactly, and neither can be proved.
Somewhere in the Perseus text, among the twenty-eight thousand lines I counted, the same short phrase opens line after line of the Odyssey: but when, autar epei. The Iliad uses it too, about half as often, line for line. A great deal of the difference between the two poems, measured this way, seems to come down to how often a storyteller pauses to say: and then, after that was done.
Chapter Fifty-One — Taught, Therefore Saved
At a dinner party in Athens, in a dialogue Xenophon wrote about an evening in 422 BC, the guests take turns saying what they are proudest of. A young man named Niceratus says that his father, the general Nicias, wanting him to become a good man, made him learn all of Homer, and that he can still recite the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart. Another guest, the philosopher Antisthenes, immediately points out that the rhapsodes also know all of Homer by heart, and that they are the stupidest class of people in existence. Niceratus concedes the point. Socrates explains that the rhapsodes do not understand the hidden meanings. The conversation moves on. Nobody suggests that learning the whole of Homer by heart might be an unusual thing to ask of a boy.
It was not unusual. For a thousand years and more, Homer was the foundation of Greek education. Children learned to read by copying his lines. Teachers explained his vocabulary, his geography, his gods and his heroes. Orators quoted him to prove points, philosophers quoted him to attack or to borrow his authority, and every educated person could finish a line of the Iliad if you began it. When papyrus fragments of ancient books began to emerge from the sands of Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Homer outnumbered every other author by a wide margin. In the rubbish heaps of provincial Egyptian towns, the most commonly discarded literature was the Iliad, and much of it was in the handwriting of children.
Plato, who loved Homer, wanted to throw him out. In the Republic, Socrates proposes banishing the poets from the ideal city, or at least censoring them severely, and Homer is his chief target, for showing the gods behaving badly and heroes lamenting like women. But even as he does so, Socrates admits that a certain love and reverence for Homer, held since childhood, makes him hesitate to speak. The attack on Homer in the Republic is conducted by a man who cannot stop quoting him, which is the surest sign that the poet had already won.
Alexander the Great carried a copy of the Iliad on his campaigns, a text corrected by his tutor Aristotle, and Plutarch says he kept it under his pillow with his dagger. When the treasure of the Persian king Darius was captured, Alexander was shown a precious casket and asked what he would keep in it. The Iliad, he said. Rulers of later empires preferred more expensive symbols. The pattern was set: Homer as the inheritance of the educated and the powerful, the text that marked you as Greek.
Homer did not survive because he was the best poet of antiquity, though he may have been. He survived because he was taught. A text in the school curriculum is copied over and over, in every town that has a teacher, generation after generation. It exists in thousands of copies at any one time, scattered over a wide area. Nothing short of the collapse of literacy itself can destroy it. A text that nobody teaches exists in a handful of copies in a few libraries, and when those libraries burn, flood or simply lose interest, the text disappears. The Epic Cycle, the poems that told the rest of the Trojan story, the Cypria and the Little Iliad and the Sack of Ilion, were not taught. They are lost.
This is where the idea I called retrospective drift must be applied with full force (Kriger, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26532.64648). When something has survived a long filtering process, we tend to explain its survival by its qualities, and then to admire those qualities as if they had been the cause. We say Homer survived because he was great. Some of that is true; the schoolmasters chose him because they found in him what they wanted to teach. But much of what we call his greatness is itself the product of his survival: the influence he exerted because every later poet learned him at school, the centrality he acquired because every argument referred back to him, the authority he gained because there was no other text of comparable age to compare him with. The survivor shapes the standards by which survivors are judged.
None of this makes the poems less remarkable. It makes our admiration less innocent. The Homer we read is not a random sample of early Greek poetry. It is the sample that passed through the classroom, and the classroom chose for reasons of its own: the moral lessons teachers could draw from it, the authority that came from being old, the grammar it illustrated, the Greekness it guaranteed. Every judgment we make about Homer’s quality is made from inside a tradition that was built by teaching him.
In the Latin West, after the knowledge of Greek faded in the early Middle Ages, Homer survived in a strange form. For roughly a thousand years, Western readers who wanted the Iliad read a Latin poem of about a thousand lines, a drastic abridgment written in the first century, known simply as Homerus Latinus, or the Latin Iliad. It was a school text too. Dante, who placed Homer among the great poets in Limbo as the sovereign poet, had never read a line of him in Greek. Neither had Chaucer. The most famous poet of the European tradition was known to most of Europe through a summary.
In the Greek East the poems never stopped being read. Byzantine schoolboys learned Homer as their Athenian predecessors had. In the fifth century the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius the Second, composed a version of the Gospel stories entirely out of lines borrowed from Homer, rearranged so that verses about Achilles and Odysseus told the life of Christ. In the twelfth century Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, wrote a commentary on the Iliad and Odyssey of colossal length, drawing on ancient scholarship that is otherwise lost. When Byzantine scholars came to Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they brought Homer back to the West with them.
Petrarch received a Greek manuscript of Homer in 1354 as a gift from a Byzantine diplomat named Nicholas Sigeros. He could not read a word of it. He wrote to thank Sigeros, saying that his Homer was mute to him, or rather that he was deaf to Homer, but that he took delight in the mere sight of him and often embraced the book and sighed. He arranged for a Latin translation to be made by a difficult and bad-tempered scholar named Leontius Pilatus, whom Boccaccio lodged in his own house. The first printed edition of Homer in Greek appeared in Florence in 1488.
For a man of the fourteenth century to kiss a book he cannot read is, for the method of this book, a perfect image. Petrarch embraced Homer as a presence, a name, a source of authority, entirely detached from any content he could understand. It is the role without a referent in its purest form, and it was enough to keep the book safe on his shelf until somebody arrived who could read it.
Chapter Fifty-Two — Homer’s Second Lives
In 1713 a twenty-five-year-old English poet named Alexander Pope, who was four and a half feet tall, suffered from a tubercular spine, and knew Greek only moderately well, proposed to translate the Iliad into English rhyming couplets and to sell it by subscription. The six volumes appeared between 1715 and 1720. The subscription brought Pope several thousand pounds, an extraordinary sum for a writer, and made him the first English poet to live independently on his earnings. His Iliad is polished, witty, elegant and in many places very far from the Greek. The scholar Richard Bentley, whom we met hearing the lost letter in Homer’s meter, is supposed to have said that it was a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but that he must not call it Homer.
Bentley’s remark, whether or not he made it, contains the whole history of Homer’s afterlife. Every translator, adapter and imitator has made a pretty poem and called it Homer, and every one of them has, in doing so, invented a Homer to stand behind it. Pope’s Homer was an Augustan gentleman who would have been at home in a London coffeehouse. George Chapman, whose translation of 1616 Pope used and disdained, had produced a rough, energetic, Elizabethan Homer, and two centuries later a young medical student named John Keats, having borrowed Chapman from a friend and stayed up all night reading it aloud, wrote a sonnet about the experience: then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken. The planet Keats discovered was Chapman’s Homer. He never read Greek.
Virgil had begun the pattern long before. The Aeneid, written in the reign of Augustus, is constructed out of the Iliad and the Odyssey: its first half is a voyage of wandering and its second a war in Italy, and it borrows scenes, similes and whole situations from Homer, transposing them to the founding of Rome. Virgil’s Homer is a model and a rival, a source to be surpassed. The Romans who read the Aeneid in school learned their Homer through Virgil, and for most of the Middle Ages the West knew Virgil far better than his Greek original.
In the twentieth century the second lives multiplied. James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, maps the Odyssey onto a single day in Dublin, the sixteenth of June 1904, with an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom as Odysseus, a young intellectual named Stephen Dedalus as Telemachus, and Bloom’s unfaithful wife Molly as a Penelope who has not been waiting patiently. The Cyclops is a bigoted nationalist in a pub; the Sirens are barmaids. Joyce took the Homeric structure so seriously that he gave each chapter a Homeric title in his notes, then removed the titles from the published book, leaving readers to find the structure themselves. His Homer was a modern novelist hidden in an ancient poet.
Nikos Kazantzakis, in 1938, published an enormous poetic sequel called The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, which sends Odysseus out from Ithaca again on a journey across Africa to the South Pole. Constantine Cavafy, in his poem Ithaca, advised the traveler to hope the road is long, because Ithaca has given you the journey and has nothing else to give. In 1990 the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott published Omeros, a long poem in which the fishermen of St. Lucia, named Achille and Hector, quarrel over a woman named Helen, and the narrator meets Omeros, the Homer of the title, as a blind old man in the Caribbean. Walcott won the Nobel Prize two years later.
The cinema has been at it for a century. In 2000 the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? set the Odyssey in Depression-era Mississippi with George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill and a one-eyed Bible salesman as the Cyclops. In 2026 Christopher Nolan released a film of the Odyssey on a scale that sent journalists back to the Turkish hillside outside Izmir where local tradition says the poet had his cave. Each of these works reinvented the poem for its audience, and each reinvented its author. The Coen brothers’ Homer was a blues singer. Nolan’s will be whatever its audiences decide.
Translations have their own history of invented authors. For centuries every English translation of the Odyssey was made by a man, and many readers felt the effect only when Emily Wilson’s translation appeared and they read a version that noticed the enslaved women, the household and the domestic economy in ways earlier versions had smoothed over. Every translation is a decision about who Homer was: a gentleman, a bard, a primitive genius, a modern realist, a feminist avant la lettre, a tradition. No translator can avoid making the decision, because translation forces a choice of voice, and a voice implies a speaker.
This is the final stage of the process that began in the Lives of Homer. The ancient biographers invented a person to account for the poems. Each subsequent age has invented another, and each new invention fills the empty chair with a figure resembling the inventors. Pope’s Homer resembled Pope, Joyce’s resembled Joyce, Walcott’s resembled a Caribbean fisherman who had heard the old songs. None of them is wrong. All of them are productive, because each invention made a new work possible.
Here the deconstruction of this book turns back on itself. I have been showing that every Homer is an invention, and the reader may suspect that I have been building a Homer of my own: an absent author, a role without a referent, a poem full of figures who invent authors. The suspicion is just. My Homer resembles the concerns of a writer who has spent years working on biography, on the ways texts construct their authors, and on how survivors are mistaken for the best. I have put him in the chair because those are the tools I brought. The next chapter puts this book on trial for it.
Omeros closes on a shoreline, with the water still moving after the man has walked away from it. The poem leaves its Homer where the Homeric poems themselves left their heroes, by the water, with the story still in motion and the singer about to fall silent.
Chapter Fifty-Three — The Case Against This Book
A book that has spent fifty chapters showing how readers fill an empty chair with figures that resemble themselves owes its own readers a trial. I will act as prosecutor, since I know where the bodies are buried, and I will let the defense answer only where it honestly can.
The first count is that the method proves too much. If every fact in a biography that can be derived from the subject’s works is suspect, then the lives of nearly every ancient poet dissolve. Sappho’s biography was built largely out of her poems; so was Archilochus’s; so, in part, was Hesiod’s. Yet scholars generally believe that Sappho and Archilochus were real people, and if the same test is applied to them, it looks like an engine for manufacturing nonexistence. The defense can answer that the test does not claim the subject did not exist. It claims only that certain facts are poor evidence. That is true, and it is also narrower than some of the rhetoric of the opening chapters, which enjoyed its own skepticism a little too much.
The second count is that deconstruction is unfalsifiable. A reader looking for absent centers will find them in any text, because every text leaves something out and every structure has something it cannot account for. Achilles’s absence, Zeus’s sleep, the silence of the Sirens’ song: a hostile critic will say that I went looking for absences and, unsurprisingly, found them. The defense can point to the specific textual facts, the dual verbs, Helen’s line about being a song for people to come, the pun on nobody and cunning, the Alexandrian note on the end of the Odyssey, which are there for anyone to check. The generalization that connects those facts into a theory of the poems as self-aware texts about authorship is less checkable. I believe it. I cannot prove it.
The third count is that much of what is valuable in this book was said before. Barbara Graziosi traced the early invention of Homer. Gregory Nagy proposed that the name might mean the fitter-together and described the poems as crystallizing slowly in performance. Pietro Pucci and John Peradotto read the Odyssey’s language of naming and its relation to the Iliad more deeply than I have. Albert Lord and Milman Parry changed the terms of the whole question before I was born. I have credited them in the chapters where their work was used, but a reader who knows the field may feel that the novelty of this book lies more in its arrangement than in its discoveries. That count I accept.
The fourth count is the most serious, and it comes from my own toolbox. Retrospective drift says that when we look at survivors we mistake the filter for the cause. Apply that to this book. I chose the episodes. Helen at her loom, Demodocus at the pillar, Odysseus as Nobody, the Sirens, Penelope’s bed: these are the passages in which the poems seem to reflect on telling, naming and authorship, and I built my argument out of them. I did not choose the hundreds of lines in the battle books where one man kills another with a spear through the nipple and nobody says anything about poetry. The poems contain far more of those lines than of the ones I quoted. A reader who selected different episodes would find a different poem. I have no answer to this count except to name it. Every chapter of this book is a survivor of my own selection.
The fifth count is that I have underweighted the evidence for a single designing mind. The Iliad is built with a symmetry that is hard to attribute to a committee. Its first book and its last mirror each other, as we saw, with an old father coming to the Greek camp with ransom. Cedric Whitman argued in 1958 that the whole poem is organized in rings of corresponding scenes. Jonathan Shay’s veterans recognized in Achilles a psychological sequence too coherent to be accidental. The evidence for a great poet at some stage of the tradition is strong, and this book, focused on the processes that invented Homer, may have given the impression that there was nobody there at all. That would be a misreading, but I made it easy.
The sixth count concerns the measurement in the fiftieth chapter. It was run on a single digital edition, without separating speech from narrative, without controlling for repeated lines and type scenes, and without comparing other early Greek hexameter poetry. It found a real difference between the poems at the beginning of the line and no difference at the end, and I was careful to say that the difference could not identify an author. A specialist will say that the result is suggestive and no more. The specialist is right.
The seventh count is that the humor in this book trivializes a body of poetry about death, grief and slavery. The defense is that the poems themselves are often very funny, that the gods are written as comedy, that the games for Patroclus and the fight with Irus are meant to make an audience laugh, and that this book stopped joking where the poems stop, at Andromache’s gate, at the pit of the dead, at the rope in the courtyard. I hope that is true. Readers will judge whether the alternation worked or whether, in places, the lightness intruded where it should not have.
The eighth count is the one I cannot answer. This book argues that every age has filled Homer’s empty chair with a figure resembling itself. The figure in this book’s chair is an absent author, a role without a referent, a poet whose poems are full of people inventing poets. That figure resembles a writer who has spent years thinking about biography, about how texts construct their makers, and about the way survivors are mistaken for the best. The case against this book is that it is one more Life of Homer, written by a biographer, and that it has the shape of its author as surely as the Lives had the shape of the Odyssey.
The prosecution rests. The defense would like to point out, in mitigation, that this book knows it, and has said so, which the ancient Lives never did. It is not clear to me that knowing it changes anything. A biographer who admits his portrait resembles himself has still painted the portrait.
Chapter Fifty-Four — Taking Down the Lyre
In the twenty-second book of the Odyssey, when the hall is full of dead men and Odysseus is still standing with his bow, a singer is cowering by the back door. He is Phemius, the bard whom the suitors forced to sing for them through all the years of their occupation, the man whose name the Life of Homer gave to the poet’s stepfather in Smyrna. He is holding his lyre. He has to decide whether to slip out and take refuge at the altar of Zeus in the courtyard or to throw himself at Odysseus’s knees. He decides to plead. And before he does, he does something no other singer in Homer does. He lays the lyre down himself, on the ground, between the mixing bowl and the silver-studded chair.
Then he clasps Odysseus’s knees and makes the most remarkable speech any poet makes in Homer. I beg you, Odysseus, respect me and have mercy. You will be sorry later if you kill a singer, who sings for gods and men. I am self-taught, and a god has planted all kinds of songs in my mind. I am fit to sing beside you as beside a god. Do not be eager to cut my throat. Telemachus will tell you that I did not come to your house willingly to sing for the suitors; they were more and stronger and they brought me by force.
Telemachus confirms it, and asks his father to spare both the singer and the herald Medon, who hid under a chair wrapped in a fresh oxhide. Odysseus smiles and lets them go. They go out and sit by the altar of Zeus in the courtyard, looking around in every direction, still expecting to be killed.
Look at what Phemius claims. He calls himself autodidaktos, self-taught, and in the same breath says that a god planted the songs in his mind. Readers have argued about whether these two claims contradict each other. I do not think they do. They are the poem’s own answer to the question this book has been asking. Where does the song come from? From the singer, who taught himself, and from a source outside him, which he did not choose. From a person and from a tradition, at the same moment. Phemius, pleading for his life, gives the most precise account of Homeric authorship that has ever been offered, and he gives it as a defense in a capital case.
The motif of this book has been the lyre on the peg in the first scene with Demodocus: a blind singer who did not know where his instrument was, whose hands someone else guided, whose chair someone else placed. I said in the first chapter that every generation of readers has played the herald, hanging the lyre at the height that suited them and guiding the poet’s hands where they believed the hands should go. That was true, and it was incomplete. It made the singer passive. It made Homer a figure that readers arranged.
Phemius corrects it. The Odyssey’s other singer is not led anywhere. He holds his own lyre, decides for himself where to go, takes the instrument down and lays it on the ground when the moment requires, and speaks for himself. He was forced to sing, but he did not lose his voice. His songs came from a god and from his own teaching. The poem contains both pictures of the maker of songs, the one who is arranged by others and the one who arranges himself, and the tradition, wanting a portrait, chose the first. It is worth asking why. A passive, blind, divinely guided singer is a convenient author. He cannot object to what his readers do with him. A self-taught man who lays down his lyre and argues for his life is much less convenient. He might have opinions.
So the motif comes apart. The lyre was never only on the peg. In the eighth book itself, when the Phaeacians go outside for the games, the herald has to run back to the palace to fetch Demodocus’s lyre, because it was left behind. The instrument moves around the poem. It is placed and fetched, held and laid down, plucked by a blind man at a feast, played by a hero in a hut, and set on the floor of a hall full of corpses by a man begging not to be killed. It never stays where any single scene puts it.
That, finally, is what this book has to say about Homer, and it is less than an answer and more than a doubt. The poems were made by people, at least one of them of extraordinary genius, working in a tradition that taught them and that they changed. Those people are gone. What remains is the instrument, two long poems full of singers, weavers, liars and witnesses, and a long history of readers deciding who held it. You cannot recover the hands. You can stop pretending that someone else has to guide yours.
Every reader of Homer stands, in the end, where Phemius stood: in a hall full of other people’s noise, holding something made partly by a god and partly by long practice, deciding what to do with it. The herald is not coming. Nobody is going to lift the lyre down from the peg and place your hands on the strings.
Take it down yourself. It is lighter than it looks, and it has been waiting a very long time.
Conclusion
In the British Museum there is a marble relief, carved around the second century before Christ by a sculptor who signed himself Archelaus of Priene, that shows Homer being made into a god. It was dug up in the seventeenth century near Bovillae, south of Rome, and it is arranged in tiers like a mountain. At the top sits Zeus. Below him are the Muses and Apollo with his lyre. At the bottom, in the place of honor, Homer sits enthroned, holding a scroll, and two small kneeling figures beside his chair represent the Iliad and the Odyssey. Behind the throne stand two figures crowning him with a wreath. Their labels survive. One is Chronos, Time. The other is Oikoumene, the Inhabited World. Under the poet’s footstool, someone has carved mice.
I did not know about this relief when I started writing, and when I found it I laughed out loud, because it says in one panel of marble almost everything this book has spent fifty-four chapters arguing. Homer is not crowned by the Muses who inspired him, or by the cities that claimed him, or by the heroes he sang. He is crowned by Time and by the World: by survival and by readership. The sculptor understood that the poet’s divinity was conferred from behind and above, by forces that had nothing to do with whoever composed the poems and everything to do with what happened to them afterward. The mice are a joke about the Battle of Frogs and Mice, the comic poem that used to go under Homer’s name, or perhaps about the creatures that eat libraries. Either way, the sculptor put them at the bottom, nibbling, where the truth of every reputation lives.
The argument of the book can be put simply, and I will put it once and then leave it alone. A text without an owner is unbearable to the people who receive it, and they will build an owner for it out of whatever they have to hand. The Greeks built a blind wanderer out of the eighth book of the Odyssey. The cities built a native son out of civic pride. The rhapsodes built an ancestor out of their guild’s name. The Alexandrians built an editorial conscience. The Germans built a committee, the twentieth century built a tradition, the moral critics built a witness to force, and the Turkish encyclopedia, through a mistranslation nobody intended, built a slave. Each owner was made of the builders’ own materials.
What this book has tried to add to that well-known story is two things. The first is the poems’ own share in it. The Iliad and the Odyssey are not innocent objects onto which readers projected authors. They are themselves full of people projecting authors, inventing stories, weaving wars, refusing names, lying beautifully, tying themselves to masts so as not to be held by a song. A long tradition of composition produced two poems obsessed with the question of who gets to tell a story and what it costs the teller, and the obsession was in the text long before Wolf or Parry or anyone else made it a scholarly problem. The second is the ground under the poems, which turned out to be built on the same pattern: a hill where every excavator found the city he came with, a Hittite archive where a name like Alexandros sits beside a dispute over a town in the west, a muster roll that preserves a world no living singer had seen. History and text and biography were all made the same way, by layering, and all of them invited someone to come along later and declare the layers a single thing.
Here I want to say something that the chapters did not, because it reaches past Homer into the present, and it is the reason I think this old question matters now. For most of history, a text without an author was an exception. Texts came from people: a scribe, a poet, a clerk, a committee whose members could be named. Homer was the great anomaly, the case that showed what happens when the name has nobody behind it. We are now entering a period in which texts without authors in the ordinary sense are produced in enormous quantities every day. Machines write paragraphs, summaries, stories, letters and poems, and they are read by people who do not know where they came from. Readers who suspect that a text was written by a machine already react the way the ancient audiences reacted to Homer: they want to know who stands behind it, and when they cannot find out, they assign someone, or condemn the text, or praise it, on the basis of a guess.
The history in this book suggests a few things about how that will go. People will build authors for these texts, as they always have, and the authors they build will resemble the builders. Some will imagine a vast intelligence behind a paragraph, and others will imagine a hollow mechanism. Both will be portraits of their makers. Detection tools will be built, and they will make mistakes, as the critics of Alexandria made mistakes when they marked genuine lines as spurious because the lines offended their sense of what Homer would write. The question of authorship will be fought over for money and for property, as the line about Salamis was fought over, because a text whose origin is uncertain is a text whose ownership can be claimed. None of this is new. The Homeric Question is the oldest rehearsal we have for the present.
It also suggests what a reader can do. The method I have used is not a professional secret. Ask of any story where each of its facts could have come from. Ask whether a fact about the teller could have been derived from the tale. Ask who benefits from a given version, and whether the version that has survived survived because it was true or because it was taught. Look at the margins of the page, where earlier readers left their disagreements. Notice what a text takes for granted so completely that it never says it. And when you find a scene in which a character inside a story explains why the story exists, read it twice. Helen did that in the third book of the Iliad. Phemius did it with his lyre on the floor. They were telling us something about how their poems worked, and they were telling us in time.
The method has limits, and the last chapters were meant to show them. It can tell you that a portrait resembles its painter. It cannot tell you that the sitter did not exist. Somebody shaped the Iliad into the poem we have, with its first and last books mirroring each other and the wrath running between them like a fuse. Somebody made the Odyssey hold back the Sirens’ song. Perhaps the same somebody did both, and perhaps not; the measurement in the fiftieth chapter located the place in the line where an individual voice might be heard, and could not say whose voice it was. I do not know who these people were. I am glad they were there.
Over the course of this book, I have stopped thinking of the absence of Homer as a loss. The poems have gained more from not having an owner than they would have from having one. A known author pins a text to a life, a period, a set of intentions, and every reading is checked against them. The Iliad and the Odyssey have never been pinned. They have been free to become a schoolbook in Athens, a scripture for Alexandrian scholars, a quarry for Virgil, a Christian gospel in the hands of a Byzantine empress, a Latin summary for medieval monks, a revelation for a young doctor reading Chapman by candlelight, a day in Dublin, a Caribbean beach, a clinical manual for veterans of Vietnam. The empty chair has been the most generous seat in literature. Everyone who sat in it brought something, and the poems took it all.
Ingres, in 1827, painted his own Apotheosis of Homer for a ceiling of the Louvre, with the blind poet enthroned before a Greek temple, crowned by a winged Victory, and the great writers and artists of later centuries crowding the steps below him, some of them looking at the viewer as if to say: you see, we were invited. The painting is grand, and serious, and has no mice in it. I prefer the marble.
The relief in the British Museum is weathered now. The faces of Time and the World are worn smooth by the centuries that crowned the poet, which is a fair outcome for both of them. The mice under the footstool are still there, small and busy, chewing at the bottom edge of something, while above them the throne is crowded with figures who have arrived to honor a man none of them ever met.
