Homer illumined
Peter Levi
1-1 olin Macloed died young, by suicide, a
few days before last Christmas. He was the classical tutor at Christ Church, and a mature scholar. Indeed he was the most in- teresting Hellenist of his generation, but apart from a pamphlet of his own poems, this was his first book. The teacher he most admired was the formidable Edward Fraenkel, who all but adopted him as a son. The book about the Iliad he ranked above all others was by Simone Weil. That was a severe inheritance: a scholarship as human- ly profound as it was technically severe, and a spiritually rigorous and probing literary criticism. And a commentary on the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad is central to every live problem about Homer, which puts it exactly in the centre of the most humanly interesting part of classical studies. Expectation of this book was therefore very high.
It is a small text-book, unpromising in form and unappetising in appearance. But it is densely and lucidly written, rather in the manner of the late E. R. Dodds, that is, about a hundred times better than most commentaries, and beyond that, with a continual laconic grace and with passages of powerful flair in the introduction that put it in a class of its own. Colin was my friend and I had talked to him about Homer, but I had little idea how good his brief paragraphs were going to be, or how simple. He has a sharper understanding to offer of Homer as a poet than any other writer I have ever encountered.
Or at least the beginnings of understan- ding, because in the study of the Iliad we are still at the beginning. For something like a century, those who believed Homer was a writer in the same sense as Milton or Dante expended their energy in resisting those who saw him as a collection of ballads rammed together, a national tradition, a repertory adapted by generations. There was another argument, equally futile, between those who read Homer as a memorial of the Mycenean world, to be verified by ar- chaeology, and those who refused to do so. This second argument is largely irrelevant to the Iliad as a great masterpiece of poetry, and when the earlier quarrel is rightly resolved, the second becomes insignificant.
It is clear enough now that Homeric poetry came from an orally transmitted tradition of great antiquity, with a long and continuous process of refinement and adap- tation of phrases and verses and themes and set scenes. But it is also undeniable that Homer, the poet of the Iliad, was a con- scious maker, in astonishing control of the details of his vast poem. The criticism that sets out to reduce the Iliad to its original elements and to unpick the patchwork has not led to any interesting results, and the scholarship that sets out to explain the machinery of the oral tradition has been itself mostly too mechanical to inspire con- fidence. That is just not how poetry works in any tradition or language, and our first fact is that the Iliad is a terribly convincing poem.
What needs doing now is to show in full detail how the Iliad works, to use all the in- struments that scholars on both sides have perfected for the purpose of understanding a very great poet. That work has been undertaken at least since the war, but more effectively, until very recently, in German than in English. We know by now just enough to see how much there is to know. It has been clear for a long time that the last book of the Iliad is a master-stroke. In it the raging Achilles shows compassion, and the old man, Priam, begs back the mutilated body of his son. The Iliad ends with lamentation and the burial of the dead.
This commentary makes two vital con- tributions. It shows how intimately the last book is bound into the fabric of many early books, particularly the first, and how just because it reverses the apparent force and momentum of the whole long poem it has been implicit from the beginning; this is the unexpected ending that the story expects. The demonstration is as fine as a spider's web but irresistibly strong. To put such complicated arguments so briefly and clear- ly was an achievement of great intellectual power.
The second contribution is even more satisfying. It consists of a series of brief in- dications of what kind of a poet Homer is, and how the Iliad works. Colin Macleod picks on such details as the appearances of dawn in the Iliad, different from dawns in the Odyssey, the elements of contrast as well as likeness in the long similes, par- ticularly in the last book, and the constant indications that the inner momentum of the Iliad is that of tragedy. 'The Iliad is great not least because it can speak authentically for pity or kindness or civilisation without showing them victorious in life'.
It is naturally impossible in a short review to do justice to the details of this book, and its strength is of course in its details. But it may be a new thought to most readers to consider the time-scale of the Iliad. In book one and book twenty-four long and mysterious time passes. The first quarrel of the gods lasted 11 days; so did the anger of Achilles. The plague in the Greek camP lasted nine days; so did the lamentation for Hector. But the time of the whole action of the Iliad between the first book and the last is just three days.
To criticise these suggestive and produc- tive arguments from the point of view of the oral poetry of other cultures would be a mistake. We have no other poem like the Il- iad; not even the Odyssey is quite like It Homer 'at a strictly technical level cool- poses like an improviser'. But from that point onwards the Iliad is best understood by close reading of the Iliad. This is what has generated this astonishing and masterly book. It does in a way what Homer does; it 'deepens our understanding of the life of men, of the working of the gods, and the morality which can still exist despite human violence and divine indifference'.
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