Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE MIGHTY DEAD - WHY HOMER MATTERS by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

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ēmos d’ērigeneia phanē rhododaktulos eōs ... When rosy-fingered dawn, child of the morning, appeared in the east…

This, one of a number of lines repeated in the epic poems of Homer, resting places for the oral composer of the stories, I had by heart even before I read the Greek. In those poems I discovered a world recognised from childhood, peopled with heroes, monsters, deadly adventures, last-gasp escape from peril, in a strange landscape replete with all those elements which fired my burgeoning imagination, the signposts of curiosity which linger still.

Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original. Goethe, he says, ‘thought that had Europe considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better’. The ancient Greeks would have agreed for Homer formed the guiding agency of their own moral nurture. Concur or not, this book will help you decide and it’s an issue worth pondering.

Here Nicolson explores the all-important context of the composition of the poems, not written down and thereby, to a degree, fixed for centuries after their appearance as stories embellished, changed, developed, passed on, in the same way as the Gaelic bards and those of the Balkans told their own sagas as a way of charging the imagination of their audience, giving them souvenir of a way of life and action long gone, which they might emulate and by which be inspired. A modern audience will protest, perhaps that this is an androcentric world where women pay a secondary role and the charge is valid. However, Homer’s women present a side of the female spirit which, albeit not of apparent influence on the central landscape of the poems, the battlefield, save in the guise of the goddesses who intervene on human affairs and failings, their heroic exploits, their brutal death, nevertheless underpins all they do and contend for.

Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, remains in the kingdom of Ithaca in the lord’s absence, in the Trojan expedition and thus obliged to preserve the kingdom against his eventual return. Beset by a mob of brawling suitors eager to bed her and claim lordship, she outwits them by guile and, in Nicolson’s emphasis, displays what Homer calls her euēgēsia ‘good command’, nicely glossed by Nicolson as ‘the inner citadel of virtue and value’. I needn’t rehearse the story of her tapestry, woven by day, unpicked by night, her redoubtable patience in the task imposed on her. One example, only, in Homer’s exploration of the indomitable strength of the so-called weaker sex: the wiles of the sorceress Circe, mellifluous Calypso, the cave-bound monster Scylla, and Charybdis, the whirlpool into which a boat may be sucked. Sirens, uttering their seductive calls to give up, surrender, and we see, through Homer’s rich invention, the contrarieties of the sexual balance of power, between men who wield sword and spear in the forum of blood and women who control by subtler means. The female of the species more deadly than the male…? What upset that has caused in the virile heart and mind. So listen up, you men. Homer speaks.

There is much in this book to entice and inform not only in how Homer weaves his magic but in the way that fiction, stories told at bedtime to children or grown-ups later, plant the nurture of our own discovery of how life veers, its vicissitudes; the courage to outface, the spirit to persist, as Odysseus, time and again, puts his hand to the tiller and sails on after yet another confrontation with what had seemed insuperable odds. Invoking ‘the ability to regard all aspects of human life’ and from that understanding keep on, never yielding.

The very allure of Nicolson’s account of what Homer means to us, as he has meant to those generations which, in Keats’s phrase, ‘have trod’, is underlined by the fact that he has sailed treacherous waters in a small boat and knows, dry-mouthed, the conflict of tide and current, of wind and squall, the danger of the ‘unharvested sea’, that briny desert where survival rests always on a gunwale’s edge. He has sat in a grove on Ithaca at night, reading the account of the return of Odysseus to his home - the Odyssey is one of a number of nostoi, voyages home, whence our ‘nostalgia’ - and the ensuing bloodbath of vengeance on those who would have raped his queen and usurped his place as king, sat there even as the nightingale sang its tearful – oiktista - song. Read how Nicolson brings to vivid colour the evening when Keats read the vibrant translation of Chapman. ‘Here at last…was the moment, when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him.’

Horace referred to Homer when he speaks of the difficulties of writing, the challenges sometimes beyond us to surmount in words, despite the poems which Nicolson with penetrating insight investigates and honours. Horace wrote:

et idem

indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus

[Ars Poetica 358-9]

‘And yet, I mustn’t be hard on myself when even good Homer nods off’.

I’ve made furniture and was thrilled by Nicolson’s loving account of how Odysseus fashioned the raft which might carry him to safety, every peg and joint, every shaping and fitting.

The Mighty Dead is published by William Collins

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THEBES - THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF ANCIENT GREECE, by Paul Cartledge

 

"The core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

In what we know as Greece, their Hellas, the prominent power bases are celebrated: Sparta in the south, the formidable militaristic people, ruled by two kings; Athens, the fledgling democracy and agitator-in-chief in the centre and to the north, athwart the main invasion route, in Boiotia we find Cartledge’s aptly named ‘forgotten city’, Thebes. 

Variously oligarchy and democracy, Thebes was a political and social counterweight to its more prominent distant neighbours and often at odds with them in the matter of solidarity against a common foe. Indeed, as Cartledge tells us, its strategic position led to the surrounding region being called the orchestra (theatre’s dance floor) of the war god Ares. It was here that the resisting Greeks, forever quarrelsome, were, by great good fortune, marshalled under the Spartans, acknowledged masters of battle, in the climactic engagement which ended Persia’s attempt to subsume all mainland Greece/Hellas into its huge empire: Plataea, 79 BC, which unquestionably conserved Greek civilisation and culture for us. Hobbes called it crucial in world history. Consider: philosophy, tragedy and comedy, literature and political template…why bother to plumb the origins of Greek culture? The answer is here in Cartledge’s compelling account.

It may be that his more scholarly descriptions of how so much knowledge passes to us via archaeology, archaic inscription and tablet do not detain the average reader. Doesn’t matter: the core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick.

All cities look to their mythic foundation – ours, formulated by a mediaeval monk, was long since overlaid by ecclesiastical fictions, but ancient Greeks leaned much to myth, their word for story. Myth…in our parlance so often misused as meaning fairy tale. Not so to them: their myth is the very foundation of human understanding, it underpins all feeling and human response. Thebes claimed origin from no fewer than three mythic beings whose significance still resonates: Heracles, the strongman demigod, symbolic of human links with the divine, an important thread of our relationship with the universal pulse of nature and its manifestations, he whose celebrated Labours mirror our own travails and fortitude in coping with them; Dionysus, god of wine, ecstatic pleasure and passions, a good time, and Apollo whose cultural importance is wide-ranging within the influence of our arts. This may come across as a nonsensical construct, but in the ancient world mythic stories - Helen, addressing the lords of the Greek Trojan expedition, bids them sit and feast and ‘take joy in telling stories’. (Iliad IV 238ff) those stories are their life’s inspiration. For myth was central to the Greek examination and analysis of human sentience and behaviour, exploring and addressing the darker currents of the psyche and unconscious. They questioned things and fastened on the difficult, often frightening shifts of human nature; an admirable candour. What Cartledge terms our imaginary thought-world, echoed in myth.

Central to the Theban myth are the personages illustrated on the cover of this excellent study: Oedipus and the Sphinx, most potent elements in our own comprehension of the human psyche. Their myth/story drives three plays written by the outstanding Athenian tragedian, Sophocles. Other Athenian tragedians also looked to the myths of Thebes in their work, plays which thrill in their writing and action, and this alone gives some idea of the importance of a place so often overlooked in more general accounts of the basic ‘why Greece?’

Consider: a multiplicity of divine beings as representative of the great and teeming foison of Nature in this eco-age? Homer talks of ‘the earth that feeds us all’. It makes a lot of sense to me and Cartledge is an excellent guide to the evolution of such a forceful idea. The gods are capricious, argumentative, partial and problematic in their loyalties…why so? Because the people who conceived of their existence and behaviour exactly resemble them.

Greece, as the Romans named it, was eventually swallowed in the Imperium Romanum and we owe much of what survives of their literature etc to that subjugation. As the Latin poet, Horace, puts it: captive Greece took its untutored conqueror captive and introduced an uncultivated people to the arts and culture (Epistles II i 156ff).

This book is no homily but a fair-minded account of how embedded matters Greek are in our own culture - and best we acknowledge that, surely? Cartledge states that he aims to point out and to emphasise that ‘Apollo and Dionysus are both still vigorously at work deep within our collective and independent pysches.’

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece is published by Picador  

See also Graeme's review of Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE SPARTANS - AN EPIC HISTORY by Paul Cartledge

 

"A compelling and most necessary book."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday.

History – the Greek word means ‘explanation’ rather than the more obvious ‘story’ – tends to be written by the winners, real or perceived, and the reasons for Greek pre-eminence which persist derive, largely, from Athenian sources. Their collective brilliance – in architecture, literature (notably the startling innovation of Tragic drama), philosophy and democratic politics which came to the fore in the climactic fifth century BC is undeniable and its influence permanent. Athens led the charge against the incursion of the mighty Persian Empire, first at the battle of Marathon 490 BC, the first time, their great historian Thucydides writes, that Greeks faced, on Greek soil, the barbarians – so-called because they spoke an impenetrable bah-bah-bah babble - and again at the great victory of their triremes in the Bay of Salamis ten years later; the great tragedian Aeschylus fought in both. Their bravery and fortitude undoubtedly laid a base for other Greek states, some most recalcitrant, to lend support of the mainland opposition and from that, one may conclude that Greek cultural hegemony followed.

However, it was the Spartans, by any register a strange but vital people, to whom the eventual victory of Greek states, large and small, against the formidable Persian invasion may be attributed. First their unparalleled courage and determination displayed at the narrow Pass of Thermopylae in 480, before Salamis, may have done no more than dent Persian might, but as moral victories go it rests supreme, bred out of the depth of Spartan character. Famously Simonides celebrates it: ‘Go and tell the Spartans, passer-by/ That here, obedient to their laws we lie.’ Three hundred of them against uncounted thousands, sent under a king, no less, Leonidas, to show the Persians that Greece was going to be no pushover. For three days they held out, until, betrayed, they were encircled and, as Leonidas told them: ‘Tonight we dine in Hades.’ They had always known it was a suicide mission but strict discipline, rigid complicity to custom and law, firmness of spirit were the very thread of their being. When the Persian king, Xerxes, told the doomed Spartan king: ‘Hand over your weapons, the Laconian replied: molon labe (literally ‘having come, take them’). ‘Yours to take’ centuries before the famous ‘Nuts’ of the American general near Bastogne.

Spartan society was geared, obsessively so, to martial power, and there are many reasons for that – here explained – and their social structure, repressive in some ways, nevertheless gave much greater autonomy to women than many more so-called enlightened societies. Their devotion to Greece cannot be challenged, even if their sole contribution to its material culture may be the work of its lyric poets. The final victory over the Persian invasion at Plataea was masterminded and headed by the Spartan army and for that, if nothing else, we may assume that matters and things Greek came to infuse culture and civilisation across the Mediterranean and, thence, western Europe, for centuries thereafter.

If the Spartans were odd the Athenians were a dodgy bunch, described at the time as polypragmatist, ‘busybody’; argumentative, litigious, intellectually remarkable, culturally admirable, exemplary in so many fields. But their Socrates, described as most wise – because, he said, he knew nothing - was executed on a trumped-up charge after a show trial, the gadfly who, irritated by Athenian duplicity, hypocrisy and mealy-mouthed pliability, was, by speaking out, accused of corrupting the morals of the youth. But those very traits he deplored were roundly pilloried by the contemporary comic playwright Aristophanes. There was much to ridicule about the self-preening Athenians of their late decline. The Spartans, peculiar in their ways and beliefs, somehow forestalled their own decline by an example of social cohesion they perhaps did not intend to make a template for broader human behaviour as did the Athenians, more inclined to promote their own astonishing singularity, but Sparta lives on in so many ways and its very oddity, its eccentricity, influences western thought in a way as powerfully as do Athenian examples of artistic brilliance rooted in what by any calculation was a time of exceptional creativity and devotion to moral cause as fifth Century Greece through both its obvious leaders as well as lesser-known satellites.

Paul Cartledge’s The Spartans, a compelling and, I contend, most necessary book, is a superb study; his account of a fascinating – and puzzling – people always deft and well-managed, the scholarly rigour never lacking or oppressive, quite the opposite, in fact, an example to follow. He deals generously with disputed opinion, an outstanding merit in a historian. A melancholy conclusion, as must be, and hard to write, surely, but it cannot detract from penetrating and sympathetic analysis and celebration of a unique spirit and ethos.

The Spartans is published by Pan.

More of Graeme's choices:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

An interview with Graeme about No Common Assassin, his novel of the French Revolution