Blind Bard? What History Tells Us about ‘Homer and His Iliad’
Homer Was as Fictional as His Tale of the Trojan War, Right? Robin Lane Fox Says No
G.K. Chesterton must be among our least Homeric modern writers, but in The Everlasting Man he paid striking tribute to the Iliad:
A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. . . . [T]his, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
Beautiful, poignant, and succinctly stated, this tribute to Homer is appropriately Homeric. But when Chesterton raises the question of “historical fact,” moderns balk. Questioning the existence of Homer and whether his works even originated as unified compositions has become a reflex.1
Unjustly so, according to classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox. Chesterton’s description of Homer as a blind, unlettered bard and whether there’s any fact behind it, as well as the tragic eternal themes of his greatest poem, are the subject of Lane Fox’s latest book, Homer and His Iliad.
How Much Can We Know?
In the first half of this book, Lane Fox makes a case for Homer as a single historical person who composed orally and who performed his masterpiece for dictation sometime in the early eighth century BC.
Dating Homer’s life to this period is crucial. This comes at the end of the “Greek Dark Age,” which lasted from c. 1200–1150 BC to about 700 BC. This period is “dark” because, in addition to abandoning their cities for a life eked out in the rugged countryside, the Greeks at this time lost the ability to read and write. Only borrowing and modifying the Phoenician alphabet brought them back into the light of literary evidence.
Homer, by Lane Fox’s estimation, lived early enough not to have learned to read but late enough to have his poem written down by someone who did, and for whom preserving Homer’s work was important. Lane Fox argues vigorously for this position based on modern literary and anthropological study of oral poets and on the strength of the Iliad itself.
The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure—“and then . . . and then”—stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.
The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.
All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.
Homer’s World
That covers the who and the how. Lane Fox’s study of where is equally compelling. He examines the geographic details in the Iliad to determine that, even if we can’t know precisely where Homer came from, he was personally familiar with the world of the eastern Aegean.
The poem describes the landscapes around Troy specifically and accurately. When Zeus travels to a mountaintop to watch the war, for instance, he chooses Mount Gargaron, a peak that presents a clear view of the Trojan plain and the Hellespont and is itself visible from Troy. Homer’s world is not a fantasy world, and the fantastical in his story derives its power from its grounding in the recognizably real.
This familiarity with local geography extends to flora and fauna. Homer knows which trees and flowers grow in different regions and includes numerous realistic descriptions of wild animals. These are not merely decorative but part of memorable and tonally appropriate artistic effects. When Hera visits Zeus on Mount Gargaron to distract him from the war, the god and goddess make love on a bed of hyacinths and a variety of yellow crocus that grows on the mountainside to this day.
The precision of Homer’s observation and the economy of his poetry come up again and again in the first three parts of the book, but in the final two parts Lane Fox turns to the Iliad’s artistic and thematic richness.
In topical chapters covering everything from shame and glory as the motivations of the heroes, the character and attitudes of the gods, and even the role played by horses in the story, Lane Fox shows that while these details may provide useful raw material for the critic or historian, they are more important as subtle support for themes that Homer develops across the entire poem.
Limitations and Critics
A responsible scholar, Lane Fox is alive throughout Homer and His Iliad to the limitations of the evidence and to alternative explanations. He argues meticulously against them, but is also too careful a student of Homer and the ancient world to be dogmatic or overconfident. “Such arguments,” he concludes, “can only be persuasive, as decisive evidence has not survived.” And yet the sheer mass of the evidence Lane Fox has marshaled suggests he is correct.
Beyond the evidence, Lane Fox also engages old interpreters who have gotten Homer wrong. These include classicists like M.I. Finley, critics like Erich Auerbach, philosophers like Simone Weil, and household names of the literary world like Virginia Woolf.
Against Auerbach, for example, who argued that Homer’s heroes have no psychological depth, Lane Fox calls forth Achilles, whose movement from rage to pity is a complete and convincing character arc. And against Woolf, whose glib condemnation of Homer’s women as nothing more than “mirrors” of the male characters has undergirded a century of feminist critique, Lane Fox brings the royal women, slave women, and goddesses of the poem.
He shows clearly that Homer conceived of and presented them as individuals with distinct needs, tied to but not purely dependent on the male characters, and that the goddesses in particular have depths that Homer exploited to create ironic tension in his first listeners. If Andromache and Helen are not as prominent as Hector and Menelaus, that is because of the poem’s subject, not sexism.
These chapters are especially welcome. Old complaints that the Iliad glorifies war or props up exploitive aristocracies or is an ode to mere “force” may have waned in influence, but accusations of misogyny and patriarchy are current and widespread. Lane Fox shows that, far from needing to be interrogated by female translators or subverted by female-authored parallax novels, Homer simply needs to be read open-mindedly and on his own terms. To read him ideologically is only to diminish his work.
‘Ruthless Poignancy’
It is the author’s love of Homer and the Iliad for their own sake that sustains and energizes this book and makes it such a pleasure to read. Lane Fox writes with immediately apparent care and enthusiasm—too rare a combination—and though demonstrating his mastery of the textual, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic evidence he still conveys what is most important about the Iliad: its lasting emotional power.
In the final chapter, which he structures around C.S. Lewis’s study of the Iliad in A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lane Fox examines what Lewis called the poem’s “ruthless poignancy,” an interplay of pathos, pity, and irony that results in “unwearying splendour.”
Beyond his arguments about Homer’s life, travels, and live performance, Lane Fox gives us a Homer who is a skilled poet making deliberate artistic choices about how to tell his story and subtly playing on his audience’s knowledge and expectations for maximum effect. That his work survived at all—and survived long enough for books like this to appear—is testament to his greatness.
Lane Fox does not quote this passage in Lewis’s Preface, but it is a fair summary of the book’s argument: “Homer’s poetry is, in an unusual degree, believable. There is no use in disputing whether any episode could really have happened. We have seen it happen.”
Fortunately for us, Lane Fox has disputed perhaps not the specific episodes of the Iliad, but everything else about the poem. And through this examination of Homer’s craft and the story he fashioned with it, he allows us to “see it happen” again. Homer and His Iliad is an indispensable study for anyone who loves the Iliad and wants to know it, its heroes, and its author better.
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As I revised this review, for instance, History Hit posted an hourlong breakdown of the movie Troy by historian Roel Konijnendijk, who qualified his description of the Iliad as “supposedly written by the possibly fictional poet Homer.”
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Fantastic article. Some epic quotes here:
"If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die."
“Homer’s poetry is, in an unusual degree, believable. There is no use in disputing whether any episode could really have happened. We have seen it happen.”
I’m going to have to get this book. Thank you for such a thought provoking review.