Why is Homer so hard to read?
On epic poetry, the challenges of an authorless book, and an LA shooting.
Last week, a burglar broke into an apartment in Rome and got arrested after he’d become so enthralled by a book he’d picked up from a bedside table, he forgot he was on a job. The book in question was The Gods at Six: The Iliad at Aperitif Time by Giovanni Nucci, which apparently retells the story Homer’s epic from the perspective of the Olympian gods, drawing parallels between the Homeric age and the present.
The story of a home-breaker engrossed in Homer sounds too allegorical to be true, like a pastiche Italo Calvino fable. In any event, I heard about the Roman burglary just as I was leaving Rome, having recently finished reading The Odyssey, Homer’s epic about homesickness and homecoming. It’s a saga ultimately set in motion by a home-wrecking, when Paris, a Trojan prince who is staying in the home of Menelaus, king of Sparta, decides to run off with his host’s wife.
Nucci’s achievement—captivating a burglar midway through a break-in—is a remarkable feat because, let’s face it, Homer is no easy read. Getting to the end of the over-400-page Odyssey, albeit in Emily Wilson’s fine translation, is a challenge. As Martin Amis once observed of Cervantes’s voluminous novel Don Quixote, if you manage to reach the end “you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”
I’m not the first to say that The Odyssey is difficult; what Amis would call an “impregnable masterpiece.” Even in antiquity, Homer had his detractors. If he bored some, he outraged others. Plato may have admired Homer, but he condemned his portrayal of the gods and his morally flawed heroes. Dio Chrysostom, the Greek historian and orator, was more outspoken. Homer, he claimed, was a fraud and a bad storyteller.
It’s not only the length of the Homeric epics, their frequent repetitions, stock phrases, and narrative inconsistencies, there’s also the question of the pervasive and gratuitous violence, along with the heros’ moral vacuity. Odysseus is described throughout as a wily liar, hardly epithets ascribable to a hero. He boasts of sacking towns, wantonly slaughtering their inhabitants, and raping their women folk. In fact, The Odyssey ends in a bloodbath when the hero exacts his revenge on his wife’s greedy suitors. There’s no shying away from the blood and gore, as Odysseus exterminates his rivals. When he learns that some of the palace’s female slaves have been disloyal and fraternized with the suitors, Odysseus forces them to mop up the blood from his killing spree and then has them hacked to death with swords.
But despite this, there’s enough striking detail and psychological insight in the poem to carry the reader through, even when the plot flags. Like the description of the dead suitors at the end, poignantly rendered by Wilson in her translation as “squeaking/ like bats in secret crannies of a cave” as their restless souls flit to the underworld.
However, perhaps the biggest challenge reading Homer is knowing that he didn’t exist, even though his name is emblazoned on the cover. The evidence suggests there was no Homer, but rather the epics were oral poems, recited over centuries by different bards, hence the many incongruencies in dialect, style, and story.
To read an authorless poem or novel is unsettling because our instinct as modern readers is to tether words to a singular life and mind, even when their identity is anonymous. The “author” exists as an imagined self beyond the page, a ghostly presence giving contextual coherence to the story. The author, if you like, is the story’s homemaker, the person who invites us in. In this sense, oral storytelling rehearses many of the challenges of an AI world, where fictions are rehashed by a diffused agency that can never be imaginatively grasped. In his 1967 essay, ‘The Death of the Author,’ the French cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that the meaning of a text depends on the reader’s interpretation, not the author’s intentions. But the “death” he was writing about didn’t involve the absolute elimination of the author; a novel by Balzac was still a novel by Balzac.
The question of Homer’s existence or non-existence—the “Homeric Question,” as it is called— has been debated for centuries. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, that a convincing theory of the epic’s oral composition was put forward by Albert Lord, a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard. When I came across his book, The Singer of Tales, as an undergraduate student taking a course on Greek poetry, it changed how I understood literature.
The book is based on work that Lord undertook as an assistant to Milman Parry, a brilliant Harvard classicist. Born in Oakland, California, in 1902, Parry studied at UC Berkeley before going on to the Sorbonne, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on “traditional epithets in Homer,” exploring the repertoire of fixed expressions which appeared to function as mnemonic devices, suggesting that the epics had evolved over time within an oral tradition—rather than being the work of some poetic genius.
In the early 1930s, Parry visited Yugoslavia with Lord, travelling to remote mountain villages where he recorded guslari, the Serbo-Croat term for singers of traditional tales who performed to the accompaniment of a gusle, a two-stringed instrument played with a bow. This was the field research that gave rise to Parry and Lord’s so-called “oral formulaic hypothesis.”
In 1935, after his second trip to Yugoslavia, Parry returned to Los Angeles with his wife to settle some family business there. On his travels through the Balkans, he’d taken to carrying a gun, which he’d packed in his suitcase. Early in the evening, on December 3 at the Palms Hotel, Parry’s wife heard a shot and found her husband, who had been dressing for dinner, slumped on the floor. The police concluded that it was an accidental shooting; the gun’s safety catch had been released and the trigger had apparently got tangled in one of Parry’s packed shirts. Rumors, however, soon began to circulate. Some alleged it was suicide. Parry’s daughter, Marian, claimed that her father had been murdered by her mother. It was left to Parry’s protégé, Lord, to work through their recordings and he eventually published his findings in 1960.
As I read The Odyssey, I often thought of Parry, the man who killed Homer but died aged thirty-three with a bullet through his heart before he could write the book.