The Book of Lost Books Read Free Page B

dwindles, a hum, an er, an inconclusive pause. Let’s begin with what we know:
Il.
and
Od.
Two long poems exist,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
and somehow someone somebody called Homer became convoluted within them.
    The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
were considered by the Greeks to be the pinnacle of their literary achievements, and subsequent centuries and countries have concurred. Egyptian papyrus fragments of the texts outnumber all other texts and authors put together; the two poems are the basis for many of the tragedies and are quoted, almost with reverence, by critics, rhetoricians, and historians. It is tempting to extract information about the poet from the poetry, as did Thomas Blackwell, who, in “An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer” (1735), found such a happy similarity between the work and the world. Or, like the archaeologist and inveterate pilferer Schliemann, one might scour the coasts of Asia Minor in search of hot springs and cold fountains similar to those in the verse. But Homer, himself, herself, whatever, is irredeemably slippery.
    Take customs. Bronze weaponry is ubiquitous in
The Iliad,
and iron a rarity, leading one to assume the poem describes a Mycenean Bronze Age battle. Yet the corpses are all cremated, never interred, a practice associated with the post-Mycenean Iron Age. The spear and its effect are historically incompatible. The language itself bristles with inconsistencies. Predominantly in the Ionic dialect, it contains traces of the Aeolic, hints of Arcado-Cypriot. Are these the snapped-up snatches of a wandering bard, linguistic sticky-burrs hitching on to the oral original? Or the buried lineaments of disparate myths corralled into a cycle, the brick from a Roman villa reused in the Gothic cathedral? The artificer cannot be extrapolated from the artifact.
    To the Greeks,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
were not the works of a poet, but of the Poet. So impressed were the people of Argos with their inclusion in
The Iliad
that they set up a bronze statue of Homer, and sacrificed to it daily.
    Seven cities—Argos, Athens, Chios, Colophon, Rhodes, Salamis, and Smyrna—claim to be the birthplace of Homer, although, significantly, all did so after his death. When he was born is just as contentious: Eratosthenes places it at 1159 B.C.E., so that the Trojan War would have still been in living memory, though a plethora of birthdates up until 685 B.C.E. have been offered. Most opt for the end of the ninth century B.C.E., a convenient average of the extremities. His father was called Maeon, or Meles, or Mnesagoras, or Daemon, or Thamyras, or Menemachus, and may have been a market trader, soldier, or priestly scribe, while his mother might be Metis or Cretheis, Themista or Eugnetho, or, like his father, Meles.
    One extensive genealogy traces him back to his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the god Apollo, and the muse Calliope, via the mythic poet Orpheus (who also was reputedly the child of Calliope). Since, as a muse, she would undoubtedly have been immortal, this is possible, though unsavory.
    The Emperor Hadrian tried to untangle these contradictory accounts by asking the Pythian Sibyl for her tuppence, and was told, “Ithaca is his country, Telemachus his father, and Epicasta, daughter of Nestor, the mother that bore him, a man by far the wisest of mortals.” If she was correct, and Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, was Homer’s sire,
The
Odyssey
becomes a biography of his grandfather as much as an epic poem.
    At Chios, a group of later rhapsodes announced themselves as the Homeridae, or the sons of Homer, who solemnly learned, recited, and preserved the works of the Poet. Were there literal as well as figurative offspring? Tzetzes mentions that a poem called
The Cypria,
dealing with the prequel to the Trojan War and attributed to one Stasinus, was for the most part written by Homer, and given to the poet Stasinus, along