When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre
Harry Mount
THE FIRST POETS: LIVES OF THE ANCIENT GREEK POETS by Michael Schmidt Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 449, ISBN 0297643940 The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt's new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn't impress audiences, David Benioff said. 'I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, "Take the gods out."' More likely, the gods would say, 'Ouch, what a rubbish film.' But they couldn't attack Mr Benioff for playing around with the plot. That's been going on ever since the Iliad was written in around 700 BC. Even a century later, Solon, the tyrant ruler of Athens, one of the few poets to achieve high political office, was still forging lines in Book II, inventing new ships for the Greek fleet going to Troy in order to enforce Athens's muchdisputed claim to the island of Salamis.
Michael Schmidt, the Mexican-born publisher behind the Manchester poetry imprint, Carcanet Press, has an engagingly knockabout approach to the poets of ancient Greece, constantly reminding us that we know practically nothing about them, and that their works are often a reconstituted mish-mash of something one bard misheard from another 2,500 years ago.
It's mad, then, to worry about anachronisms — like the fact that the iron used in the weapons described in the Iliad was unknown in 1200 BC, when the Trojan war is supposed to have happened.
And it's impossible to read too much of the poets' biographical details into or out of their poetry. Sappho, it turns out, may well not have been a lesbian in either sense: yes, she wrote affectionate poems to women, but she also got married and had a child; and she might just as well have come from Syracuse as Lesbos. For future reference, pedants should talk of Vita Sackville-West going through a syracusan phase.
Dogged as Schmidt is in pursuit of the poets, hacking through oil refineries on the outskirts of Izmir to track down Hesiod's birthplace, his prey is elusive. Just as the poets build poems out of myths, so myths get stitched into their lives by later biographers, like the nutjob explanation for Pindar's brilliance: when he was a boy, he fell asleep on the road to Thespiai and bees settled on his lips and left a hunk of wax there. From then on, lot, he was blessed with the gift of poetry.
What a mixed bag the ancient poets produced. Schmidt sensibly doesn't reproduce too much of the lyrical and martial poetry that can easily be found elsewhere. Instead he picks out the obscure and the amusing, like these lines from Hesiod: 'Don't let your privates be seen smeared with semen/ Near the hearth at home' — a fairly self-evident piece of advice. In any case, where exactly is it advisable to let your privates be seen smeared with semen?
This is enjoyable stuff, but there's also a good deal of tedious and discursive myth to get through, for hardcore classics fans only. Jason's search for the Golden Fleece may have a sort of romance to it, but what a ludicrous beginning he had to his adventure. He lost a sandal fording a river, and the omen identified him to the evil King Pelias, who promised to give the throne to Jason if he undertook a heroic — and impossible — challenge. If your three-year-old daughter started talking such cobblers, you'd roll your eyes in despair. Because it's ancient myth, you nod your head sagely.
Reading some of the poetry here, you find yourself agreeing with Plato, who wanted poets to be kept out of the Athenian assembly; not because, as he thought, they were civically irresponsible, but because they are so bloody unreadable.
And then you come across a knockout passage of Homer, describing a gory battle scene where the Greek front line was so close to the Trojan champions that the crests of their helmets brushed against each other; so knockout that you realise why, 3,200 years after the Trojan war. Brad Pitt was so keen to do justice to the ancient heroes that he allegedly employed a foot double because he thought his feet weren't built along heroic lines. And you know what they say about the size of men's feet.
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