It's an honor to be here, and I'm really, really grateful
for the invitation.
Excuse me while I undress.
And I think that it's a particular pleasure
to be here during Poetry Month.
I think Poetry Month may be a bit too long for poetry.
I think you should probably have a Poetry Week.
But Poetry Month is ambitious.
In England, we have a Poetry day,
and that exhausts everybody completely.
So I'm full of admiration.
The book I've just finished--
not just finished writing, but that's just
been published in this country is called The First Poets.
And it's about the Greek poets, starting with Homer-- well,
starting with the legendary poets,
and then going on to Homer.
And tonight I'm talking about Homer,
and I'm talking about Homer in relation
to his otherness, the things that we don't necessarily
take into account when we read Homer--
his remoteness, in a sense, from us,
and what we might learn from him if we understand
that remoteness, that otherness.
And I'd like to start with a reflection.
When I was in Boston, just a couple of weeks ago-- just
a week ago, actually, I was given
to read an essay that Simone Weil wrote about Homer in 1940,
just before she died.
And in it, she talks about the strange relevance of Homer
to Europe at the time of the beginning of the Second World
War, after the Spanish Civil War.
And she talks about how in Homer, she
hears a tone of bitterness.
And it's a very brilliant essay.
It hasn't been, as far as I can tell,
collected in any of her books of essays.
It's also, I think, totally wrong about the tone of Homer.
I'd like to address that, but also possibly--
maybe in the questions, we can address this issue of otherness
and the notion possibly of Homer's relevance
to us in our current historical, as it were,
situation, especially of the Iliad, a poem, as you know,
about the invasion of another country.
Very different, of course, from the modern country.
I'd like to begin with a poem which grows directly out
of the Iliad, a poem which was written at the same time
as Simone Weil's--
excuse me while I adjust this.
There-- as Simone Weil's essay, and a poem which
has captured my imagination quite strongly
in the last two to three years.
It's a poem called "The Shield of Achilles" by W. H. Auden.
You'll remember that Achilles, the man who
killed Hector and, really, whose activities led
to the downfall of Troy, was half divine.
His mother was a nymph called Thetis,
and Thetis was owed great debts by Hephaestus--
Vulcan-- who was the great maker of armor.
Also the great architect, if you like, of Olympus.
She went to Hephaestus, and he prepared in the Iliad
the most beautiful armor ever for Achilles.
It was an armor which showed peace.
It showed plenty.
It showed cities.
It showed the countryside.
And it showed a kind of cosmic harmony.
And what Auden shows is Thetis going to Vulcan, asking
him to make a shield for her son, and what he makes
is something very different.
What he makes is something that is--
her expectation is that he's going to do the kind of thing
that he did in the Iliad, but he does something quite different.
And the something he does relates very closely
to the Spanish Civil War, and to Auden's own experiences
in the Spanish Civil War.
Now, as you probably know, Keats got a lot of his imagery
for the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from
the original Homeric "Shield of Achilles."
This is very different.
What is, I think, beautiful about the Auden poem
is, it does rather what Simone Weil does.
It's in two forms.
There's an old-fashioned lyric form,
and then there is another form, and it's interspersed.
So you get this short, beautiful, lyrical voice
of Thetis, and you get this other voice,
which is much more matter-of-fact and objective.
"She looked over his shoulder for vines and olive
trees, marble, well-governed cities, and ships
upon untamed seas.
But there on the shining metal, his hands
had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky
like lead."
Then there's a change of key in the verse form.
"A plain without a feature, bare and brown, no blade of grass,
no sign of neighborhood, nothing to eat,
and nowhere to sit down.
Yet congregated on its blankness stood
an unintelligible multitude--
a million eyes, a million boots in line, without expression,
waiting for a sign.
Out of the air, a voice without a face
proved by statistics that some cause was just in tones as dry
and level as the place.
No one was cheered, and nothing was discussed.
Column by column, in a cloud of dust
they marched away, enduring a belief whose logic brought them
somewhere else to grief."
Then back to the lyric voice.
"She looked over his shoulder for ritual pieties,
white flower-garlanded heifers, libation and sacrifice.
But there on the shining metal, where the altar should
have been, she saw by his flickering forgelight
quite another scene."
Change of key.
"Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot,
where border officials lounged, one cracked a joke,
and sentries sweated, for the day was hot.
A crowd of ordinary, decent folk watched from without,
and neither moved nor spoke as three pale figures were
led forth and bound to three posts driven
upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world,
all that carries weight and always weighs the same,
lay in the hands of others.
They were small, and could not hope for help,
and no help came.
But what their foes like to do was done.
Their shame was all the worst could wish.
They lost their pride, and died as men before their bodies
died."
Change of key again.
"She looked over his shoulder for athletes at their games,
men and women in a dance moving their sweet limbs,
quick, quick to music.
But there on the shining shield, his hands
had set no dancing floor but a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
loitered about that vacancy.
A bird flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone.
The girls are raped, the two boys knife a third,
were axioms to him who'd never heard of any world where
promises were kept, or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer--" that's Hephaestus.
"The thin lipped armorer, Hephaestus, hobbled away.
Thetis of the shining breasts cried out
in dismay at what the god had wrought
to please her son, the strong, iron-hearted, man-slaying
Achilles, who would not live long."
So that's the point.
It's the difference between expectation and effect.
And what I think is powerful about that poem
is the theme of this lecture, really.
It is this notion of the disparity between expectation
and reality, and the way that the poet actually, in some way
or other gives us, as much as the poet can, the reality.
But the Iliad is a very odd poem in lots of ways.
And when we speak of the poet, we
speak of the poet with lots of qualifications.
And just before I came to the States,
I went to the British Museum.
And when I used to be--
when I was writing this book, which
took about four or five years, I used
to go to the British Museum and always
go to the Greek sections.
This time, I decided I would not go to the Greek section.
As soon as I got to the British Museum,
I went to the Greek section.
And I saw a vase--
I love the Greek vases, the brown and black vases.
And I saw a vase I had not seen during the writing of the book.
It was from the Campana collection,
and it showed the death of Priam.
Now, you probably all know that Priam
was the king of the Trojans.
He was the father of Hector.
He was the father of Paris and a bunch of other princes.
And he was a symbol of a stable society.
He was venerable.
He was old.
He had ruled over a society of beautiful buildings,
wide streets, and a wonderful sort of horse-raising society.
On this particular vase, he's being killed.
The Greeks have overrun the city of Troy, and he's being killed.
He's being killed, in fact, on the altar of Zeus,
the father of the gods and the father of Troy.
So the father of Troy is being bent
back over the altar of Zeus, and he's being bludgeoned to death.
The man who's bludgeoning him to death
is the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, who's
been brought to Troy after his father has
been killed by Paris.
And he has come in with the invading Greek forces,
and he's there killing Priam, who
was the father of the man who killed his father.
And what is he using to bludgeon this old man to death with?
If you look closely, you see that he's
holding the corpse of a child.
He's bludgeoning Priam to death with the body
of his grandson, Hector's son--
Hector, who had, of course, been killed by Achilles' father.
Astyanax.
So you have this really terrifying scene.
Unsentimental.
Unsentimentalized.
It's obviously one of the legends of the Trojan War.
He's beating Priam to death with the body of his infant
grandson.
And looking on is Andromache, Hector's widow and the child's
mother, with her arms raised like that.
The whole bowl is in black and brown,
except for the hair the beard and the hair of Priam, and--
I hear a child.
And the flesh of Andromache, who's--
she's got a white chest and a white face.
It's a very, very powerful image, and a very unsettling
one.
And this is in a sense the essence, to me,
of the kind of truths that Homer tells, and the kind of truths
that those who learn from Homer in the Greek period tell--
unsentimental, unvarnished, and alarming in lots of ways.
This vase is dated from 540 BC, and it's from Athens.
I'd like to look at this book, into a little part
of the introduction called "Otherness,"
because it's in this part where I discuss the thing that really
fascinated me most in writing the book, which
was this distance from our culture, from our sensibility,
of the early Greek sensibility.
"'Why did the whole Greek world exalt over the combat scenes
in the Iliad,' asks Nietzsche?"
Friedrich Nietzsche. "'We modern readers do not even begin
to understand them in a sufficiently Greek manner,' he
says.
If we understood them in Greek, we should shudder.'" Title
of the lecture.
Nietzsche does not mean in the Greek language
but, I think, in the Greek spirit.
Whoever reads the Iliad--
or many of the other earlier poets,
like Hesiod in the Theogony, or Archilochus or Hipponax--
has to come to terms with this profound otherness
of a tradition that's at the root of our tradition,
but that our tradition in a sense
has lost this directness of content.
'When one speaks of humanity,' Nietzsche says,
'the idea is fundamental that this is something which
separates and distinguishes man from nature.
In reality, however, there is no such separation.
Thus the Greeks, the most humane men of ancient times,
have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate,
a trait that is also very distinct in that grotesquely
enlarged mirror image of the Hellenes in Alexander
the Great, but that really must strike fear into our hearts
throughout their whole history and mythology if we approach
them with a flabby concept of modern humanity.'" Then he
tells us this really dreadful story about Alexander
the Great, who fancied himself as a kind of Greek hero,
even though, of course, he was a Macedonian.
He was spreading Hellenistic culture
throughout the Mediterranean.
"'When Alexander has the feet of Batis,
the brave defender of Gaza, pierced and ties him alive
to his carriage to drag him about while his soldiers mock,
that is a revolting caricature of Achilles.'
Alexander re-enacts with deliberation-- and conceit,
if you like--
what Achilles, after 10 years of deprivation and struggle
in Troy, had done instinctively and angrily
in revenge for the death of his own dear friend Patroclus.
And in the end, Alexander did not hand Batis' body back
to Gaza's Priam.
He didn't give the body back, but he left it
as carrion for the dogs to eat.
Alexander's crude literary gesture is out of key
with Homer's compelling impartiality."
And I think the word impartiality
is the one that I'd like us all to take away with us tonight
after this talk.
"It's an impartiality determined by the way in which the poems
were composed and transmitted.
Alexander is a theorist, if you like, a theoretical reader--
an idealist trying to make a general case out of Achilles'
very particular experience.
He understands the Iliad is, in some way, exemplary,
teaching us how to act, whereas in fact, it's
how to act under specific circumstances.
'Before we begin seriously reading Greek
poetry,' Nietzsche says, 'we need to exercise and strengthen
our concept of humanity.
We have to be prepared to recognize a cultural difference
so basic that we cannot assimilate it to our own ends.'
We seek not distance-- objective detachment--
but what he calls engagement that leads
to illumination, a self-effacement that
yields understanding.
We have to, as it were, put aside our own prejudices,
our own expectations.
And Nietzsche is right, but I don't think
he takes into account sufficiently
the formal challenge of Greek poetry--
its origins, its prosody, and indeed its oral nature,
especially in the case of Homer, obviously.
And Auden, too, insists on this distance between us
and the Homeric, but again, without focusing
on formal issues beyond the oddness of the metaphor.
Archaic and classical Greek poetry
concentrate on male experience.
One talks about the Odyssey as having
a lot of female experience, and it has very little, really,
in relation to the experience of Telemachus and Odysseus.
There is one big exception, and that's, of course, Sappho,
but she is an exception.
And Homer's female figures, apart from the goddesses
and sorceresses, are compelling and credible,
but move in very restrictive space restricted spaces."
So it's only the goddesses who are truly,
in a sense, feminine in a way that we might identify with.
And I think that is one of the determining features
of the Homeric.
Nietzsche insists that at the heart of all Greek--
early Greek poetry, especially the Homeric,
and the pre-classical is the Agon, the trial
or contest of the individual.
Battle besting revenge, keeping face, retaining divine support,
they're all compelling male motives.
And Nietzsche saw the city-state and paradoxically I
guess the emergence of Athenian democracy,
is in some way hostile to this kind of culture
and morally destructive of it.
He's-- somehow democracy was effeminating if you like.
Delphi was the ultimate museum of Greek hatred for Greeks,
of mutually inflicted suffering immortalized
in the loftiest works of art, again to quote Nietzsche.
Other critics are much less comfortable than Nietzsche
was with this fact.
The historical horrors attendant on heroizing the male rage
as Eleanor Wilner calls it.
And Donald Davie talks about this, too,
when he's writing of The Iliad and the psalms of David.
The darker the deed, the brighter the fiction
it has generated he says, the worst atrocities
requiring nothing less than divine sanction.
And it's in this spirit that Alexander
marks his conquest of Gaza and ties
Batis' ankles to his chariot.
The difference, I think, between the Old Testament
and the Greek poems is that in the Old Testament,
the Jews are the chosen people.
There is a strong sense in which if the Jews are punished,
they're punished for bad conduct in relation to their God
whereas in the Homeric texts, there's
a great sympathy, a really profound sympathy, which
we'll come to in just a moment for, the Trojans--
for the Trojan plight.
And it is this I think that makes
the work such an amazing, amazing work to read.
So over the psalms of David, we have the vindictive figure
of Jehovah; over the Homeric poems
we have a multitude of gods.
Well, not a multitude, a population
of gods each backing, sponsoring his or her own heroes
and each of them in a sense supporting
one cause or another.
The gods are not as real perhaps to Homer
as they were to those poets who came before him as they
were perhaps to Orpheus, assuming that he ever existed.
The gods have become humanized in various ways.
There's a very interesting author called Roberto Calasso
who writes about this, and he speaks
about the way in which in Homer the gods don't
appear to everyone in all their fullness.
They appear in some way diminished, in some way
lessened, if you like.
They're always taking on other forms.
They never appear as themselves.
And this moving back from the real presence,
which George Steiner talks about,
is one of the declines in the sense
that the Homeric poems are built upon.
The real in Homer is always the material reality.
Language and the things that language names
exist in a rare harmony.
As classical poetry develops, the gods
continue to recede those that we meet in Apollonius Rhodius are
feeble and innervated beside those
in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Magic has taken over from divine power.
And when it reaches the Alexandria,
poetry comes out of the sun and moves into the library.
Now with The Iliad, there still are points of real vigor,
and I want to--
extremely powerful vigor-- and I want to actually look
just a couple of these to talk to focus on how Homer makes
us or should make us in a sense shudder,
and there's a letter that Goethe wrote to Schiller which
says from Homer, I every day learn more clearly
that in our life here above ground, we have,
properly speaking, to enact hell.
So, again, Goethe was responding to this element
that Nietzsche identified.
In book eight of The Odyssey, the blind Bard, the blind poet
Demodocus is entertaining King Alcinous
and his anonymous guest.
At this point, we--
Alcinous doesn't know that his guest is in fact Odysseus.
And-- but we know he's Odysseus.
And Demodocus the poet, who's a blind poet
as Homer was supposed to be blind,
entertains the court with songs about the deeds of the Greeks
during the Trojan War.
In particular, he sings of the wooden horse.
The wooden horse, of course, doesn't come in The Iliad
but in The Odyssey as a kind of recollection
sung about by this blind poet.
It's interesting that the poets that Homer creates are the--
give us the image of Homer.
I think one of the main reasons we think that Homer might
be blind is that Demodocus is blind or might have been blind.
So the Phaeacian court attends closely to Demodocus's song,
and the guest-- this anonymous guest who is Odysseus--
weeps into his roughed up hood.
He covers his face and cries into his hood.
He weeps, the poem tells us, the way
that a woman weeps for her husband.
That's an interesting image, isn't it?
He weeps as a woman might weep for her husband.
An arresting simile, the most masculine of men
emasculated by his grief if you like.
But the poem doesn't leave it there.
The metaphor goes further.
Like many epic similes, it works towards a metamorphosis,
a real transformation.
And in Samuel Butler's wonderful 19th century--
late 19th century prose translation of the passage,
we read Odysseus was overcome as he heard him--
as he heard Demodocus-- and his cheeks were wet with tears.
He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself
on the body of her husband who has fallen
before his own city and people, fighting bravely in defense
of his home and children.
So it's so real to him, to Odysseus,
that helpless to affect the narrative.
The narrative has now become history
and he can't be-- can't touch it.
All he can do is lament in the unbridled yet formal way
of Mediterranean mourning.