The Uniqueness of Homer
Mental meanderings and random thoughts.
One of the joys of doing what I’m doing is being “stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.”1 This happened while I was working on my roadmap for the Trojan War legend and while there are hints of it in my essay, True Colors, it was nascent and did not emerge until later. I’ve been thinking of it ever since and decided I’d record my thoughts and post them before moving on. If I’m all wet, perhaps some knowledgeable person can correct me.
The thought is this: Homer seems truly unique to me. Now I can imagine that garnering the response, “Well, duh,” since it hardly seems to be revelatory on its face, so I’ll try to explain.
It comes down to the way myth and history tend to be handled in cultures. Typically, going back to the Bronze Age, they are kept separate – mostly. Myth, divinity and history do intermingle in that what kings do has divine implications, and they were portrayed as having the blessings of their gods, being aided or inspired by their gods or doing their gods’ will, as indeed people tend to say even now. Also, kings and heroes are not infrequently deified after death: when a Hittite king died, the formula was “when [name of king] became a god” and they weren’t the only culture to do so; it’s actually fairly common: the Romans deified Caesar and there was a “joke” that Mao became a “god” after he died, but there could have been some serious intent behind it.
Further, heroes were worshiped in their own right. This was especially true in Iron Age Greece where hero “cults” were popular. “Cult” can be a loaded term these days and might tend to diminish the seriousness of the worship, but that’s the word which is commonly used. This hero worship (another loaded term) was highly local: each city or town could have their own hero[es] they venerated, built temples to and celebrated/worshipped in their own way. (Mycenaean sites especially became important ritual centers in the 8th century, possibly a little before.) To give just one example, Helen and Menelaus were regarded as deities in Sparta, and there was a Menelaion where the couple were worshiped.
So things are a bit muddy here and we might argue that Helen and Menelaus weren’t real historical people like Lysander or perhaps even the semi-mythical Lycurgus. But they were real to the Greeks, and so were Achilles and the other heroes. Further, the worship of heroes was distinct from the worship of gods. I’m not sure about this analogy, but the Greek’s worship of heroes might be closer to the veneration of saints in Christianity, as distinct from the worship of God.2
That said, there appears to be a separation between things deemed sacred or “mythical” (to use our terms) and things deemed to have a “historical” basis, even if legendary. I am aware of no evidence that the Mesopotamians felt a need to merge the Epic of Gilgamesh with the deeds of their kings. Likewise, the Hittites kept their historical accounts of their king’s deeds separate from their myths and sacred texts, and the Egyptians felt no need to merge the accomplishments of Ramesses the Great with their myths (cosmogonic myths or such like).
But the Greek’s Trojan War Legend is different. My hypothesis is it merges a mythopoetic tradition, essentially a cosmogonic account of how their world got to be the way it was, with a historically based legend of a war, which was a hugely significant event in their past.
The situation, as I see it now, is that with the flowering of Ionian poetry in the 8th century, the Greeks evolved a mythopoetic tradition that contains the cosmogony we see expressed in Hesiod’s Theogony; it blames both the Theban and Trojan wars for bringing an end to the heroic age and causing the extermination of the “race of heroes” due to their love of violence (Hesiod), and later, humanity’s wickedness.3
That same flowering saw Homer compose his epic about the Trojan War in the latter half of the century4, the legend of which had been around for centuries. Although the Trojan War legend had long incorporated folk heroes into it, it had stayed in the quasi-historical realm. I believe we can say that based on the way Homer deals with the mythological elements in the Iliad.
Homer’s theme is the rage of Achilles (his mênis – divine or “supernatural” rage) and its consequences, a very different focus and intent from the Theogony. The Cyclic poems show that the mythopoetic tradition had its own account of the Trojan War (and presumably also of the Theban War, which Homer knew about but how close the accounts were, we have no idea since the Theban War epics have not survived). The Aethiopis, in particular, reveals things Homer changed, rather radically, while the Cypria and the other poems suggest what he left out entirely or barely alluded to.
So there’s no reason the two should be integrated. Both are self-contained: the tradition described in the Theogony has no need of anything in the Iliad, and the Iliad is a standalone epic that needs nothing from the Theogony or the mythopoetic tradition to support it. (Also Homer’s cosmology seems to differ from Hesiod’s, suggesting a substantial gap between them.)
Scholars readily acknowledge the Iliad and the Cyclic poems were different in conception and purpose, as Jonathon Burgess states. Based on that, it would seem not only was there no reason to integrate Homer with the mythopoetic tradition, it’s odd. They were created for different reasons, in different places (Homer composed mostly in western Anatolia while the mythopoetic tradition evolved primarily in mainland Greece, per Finkelberg) and thus for different audiences; Homer would have had as his listeners and patrons Ionian Greeks, Greco-Anatolians and Anatolians. The mythopoetic tradition was for the diverse Greek-speaking peoples of the mainland.
But in the 7th century, there came to be an irresistible urge to integrate the two, and not just integrate, but replace large parts of the mythopoetic tradition. By that I mean, when the Iliad was brought in, the plot, timeline and character of Achilles changed, as did the whole meaning of his legend. It affected the story of Odysseus, about which there was some sort of “proto-Odyssey” that Homer seems to have been aware of to some degree, and caused the introduction of Memnon (who was probably around in name only, if that), Neoptolemus (based on a son, Pyrrhus, from Achilles’ original legend?) and other complications as well. So the Iliad was not just “slotted in” to the Trojan War legend, it came to dominate it and it’s the only part of the legend that survived other than the Odyssey which as a nostoi is outside of the legend itself.
The “sudden thought” I was stung by is that two things must have been at work: first, the Trojan War was such a monumentous event that it had to be included in the Greek’s cosmology; and second, Homer was such a monumental genius that his account of a small part of this war, although having no cosmogonic intent, demanded a place in the Greek’s theory of how their world came to be.
I cannot think of another example of this happening in history. Maybe I'm in the grip of a “romantic delusion,” as the Oralists might hint, but while historical figures have throughout history launched religious movements and religions themselves with profound consequences (a statement so obvious, it seems silly to say), I can’t think of a literary figure who wrote a literary (not explicitly religious) account of a historical event that was so powerful it had to be incorporated into the worldview of an entire culture (I guess two cultures, actually; Greek and Roman).
To try to put that in some sort of perspective, maybe think of it as if Tolstoy’s War and Peace were brought into the Bible, replaced a chunk of it, changed much of the rest, and became the new foundational document of Christianity. That feels so absurd I wince writing it. But the Iliad was the most popular and (I think) important epic in Greece and Rome for a 1000 years and lives on today.
This stands the oralist argument on its head in two ways. First, the changes I suggest were made to Achilles’ legend in the Iliad aren’t the sort that would arise from oral performance in accordance with Nagy’s evolutionary model; it seems they could only be done by an individual. But my assessment there may be too suppositional, as yet. What seems stronger to me is that if the Iliad arose from some sort of collective consciousness through oral tradition, this sort of thing should have happened in other cultures at other times. But I don't think it ever has. In this, it seems to me Homer is unique.
Again, this just occurred to me, so it is fresh in my mind and not a matured thought. But if there's anything to it, it calls for a renewed appreciation of just how amazing Homer was.
I'll have to think more about this. Speaking off the top of my head, the only candidate that comes to mind might be a figure like Moses in the Old Testament. Could there be any evidence of a similar kind of amalgamation of quasi-historical and cosmogonic traditions due to a literary account by an individual who wrote an “epic” about the Exodus which later came to include the covenant with God and Moses receiving the commandments?5
I can't imagine what that evidence would be? I know scholars have been assiduously seeking historical evidence of the Exodus, the Parting of the Red Sea, and the Battle of Jericho for ages, generally without reaching much in the way of conclusions, as far as I can tell. The Battle of Megiddo gave us the name “Armageddon,” but we still haven’t found archeological evidence for it (although we are confident of its historicity). How we’d detect evidence of a separate account of these events that changed the Old Testament the way I suspect the Iliad changed the Greek’s mythopoetic tradition is beyond me. My gut feel is those stories are organic to the Old Testament, but perhaps I’m flaunting my ignorance here. If anyone with better knowledge than me has any thoughts on this (a low bar to clear), please leave a comment.
Anyway, I think some smart person could do their doctoral thesis on this. 😉
Last comment: in chatting with my friend, Dr. Cynthia Gralla on this, she observed that she thinks “literature about the Wild West is as close to cosmogony as American literature gets.” I think that is a fascinating idea and someone should pursue it, too. Just goes to show there’s no end to the fun we can have when diving into ancient literature.
Update: I just found a podcast on YouTube about the history of the Old Testament. It is only an overview, so I should consult the book, but it sounds my notion about Moses is quite unlikely. The podcast is listed below, for anyone who would like to check it out.
I will update this post again, if any new developments or sudden thoughts “sting,” regardless of their implications.
Works Cited
I particularly recommend the podcasts of Erica Stevenson of MoAn Inc. Her interviews with leading scholars are highly informative as well as entertaining (and sometimes leave me a touch green with envy as she’s had a number of my favorites on), and her overviews provide good basic introductions to many topics in the Classics. Well worth watching to get a taste of the Classics that can be a springboard to further exploration.
Finkelberg, Margalit. “18. The Formation of the Homeric Epics” In Homer and Early Greek Epic: Collected Essays, 182-196. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671452-018
Footnotes
Turns out this quote is from Robert Browning. I always think it was Kipling, which shows I can’t be trusted about these things.
If you could ask an ancient Greek to describe the difference between “myth” and “religion,” I’m not sure what answer you’d get since it’s not clear to me what myth meant in ancient Greece.
It’s interesting to note that the flood myth undergoes a similar evolution from the Mesopotamian version, in which it is an arbitrary event inflicted by the gods to a divine punishment in the Old Testament, imposed because of the evil acts people were guilty of. In both cases, this may reflect a desire to show that catastrophes are not simply random but have human causes that can be managed and potentially avoided. (This is certainly the case in the Old Testament.)
Perhaps before Hesiod wrote, but that’s debated.
This shouldn’t be taken to imply the Iliad was some sort of “sacred text” to the Greeks or Romans. It was important, I might say foundational, to their worldview but their religion wasn’t based on texts, as Judeo-Christian religions are. It was based on rituals and sacrifice – physical acts of worship according to (usually) local traditions. I used a textual example in an attempt to transfer my notion into our cultural context.