Bernard Knox , the renowned Homer scholar, says that 3, years haven't changed the human condition. We're still lovers and victims of violence, and as long as we are, Homer will be read as the truest interpretation of humankind.
Can we love Homer without loving violence? I think Homer does not love violence in the end. Homer dramatizes violence as one of the aspects of the human condition, but he doesn't celebrate it. It's a grave misunderstanding to think that Homer is about how beautiful the violent warrior is.
The key to that comes at the end of The Iliad. You've had these terrible scenes where Achilles, the great Greek warrior, has killed Hector, the prince of Troy, and tied him to the back of his chariot and dragged him round the walls of Troy with his whole family looking down from the ramparts.
It's not some elegant funeral procession. It's a hectic, brutal moment, and we can only read that with horror in our minds. Michael Longley , the great Irish poet, calls The Iliad "an ocean of sadness. You say these are essentially authorless works.
Are there any manuscripts? Tell us about Venetus A. Homer's works were orally transmitted and orally performed poems, ever changing in the mouths of the different people who learned them and told them again. The Iliad survived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years as a spoken poem and was eventually written down, around to B.
But no manuscripts survive from that time. The earliest that survive were found rolled up under the heads of mummified Greek Egyptians in the Egyptian deserts from about to B. But they're just fragments, not the whole Iliad. The oldest complete Iliad is a manuscript found in the doge's library in Venice. A French scholar discovered it at the end of the 18th century, which is why it's called the Venetus A. It had come to Venice from Constantinople-Byzantium, where it had probably been made in about A.
More importantly, it contained all kinds of marginal notes, the so-called scholia, which had been made by the great editors of The Iliad in the Greek city of Alexandria sometime between the first century B. So what you have in Venetus A is not only the text of The Iliad but also what these ancient commentators thought about it.
One of the exciting things that emerge from that is that in the early days it seems there was no such thing as a single Iliad, no one fixed text, but this wild and variable tradition of the stories, with many different versions in different parts of the Mediterranean, endlessly interacting with itself, like a braided stream in the mountains. That's a very exciting idea for me—that texts are not fixed, unitary objects but like the mental bloodstream of a whole people.
You say Homer tells us who we are. There's not much in it for women, though, is there? Does your wife like Homer? And for me, it wasn't easy to spend a few years writing a book about Homer, because it basically shuts you out from the female world. There are wonderful women in Homer, like Odysseus's queen, Penelope.
The word Homer uses for her means her prime quality is her wise governance—that she knows how to organize things and maintain the state for 20 years while Odysseus is away. He deeply admires women like that. On the other hand, in the Greek camp, after chariot races, prizes are given. You either get a slave girl or a couple of oxen. So there's no doubt that the Homeric world is not one in which, on the whole, women are hugely empowered. You write that "a man is his ancestry. To what extent has your noble ancestry shaped your love for Homer?
I don't love Homer because it's about warriors striding the world in a manly, baronial way. I love Homer because Homer dramatizes the shared human condition of struggle and competitiveness and pain. The incredible honesty and courage with which Homer looks at those aspects of life is what makes it exciting. And the only reason I have that title, which I never use by the way, is because my great grandfather was a civil servant and ended up head of a British government department.
In those days they gave people peerages for that kind of thing. I'm not from some ancient, knightly world. I'm from a professional world. It's just a weird chance of history. Tell us about the poets of the Scottish Hebrides and how they may hold the key to the composition of Homer's work.
We have a modern assumption that something only has meaning if it's written down. But the literate world is minimal compared to the depths of human history. We're essentially oral. And in a funny way the modern, electronic communicative world is making orality take on a new significance. In traditional societies, the person who can learn and perform the stories has been treasured.
That's true not only in the European world but across Africa and the Americas too. See our timeline. These "Greeks" are relative late-comers to the area we now call "Greece" and likely originated to the East of Black Sea, around the area now called the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas, where Russia, Turkey and N. Iran meet. The story of Prometheus -- shackled to mount Caucus -- shows strong connections between their original culture and that of the Sumerians etc.
So these Mycenaean people were both influenced by and influenced other great civilizations even before there was written history or, for that matter, writing. Before the Mycenaeans arrived in the region, earlier "Greek" cultures worshipped ancient fertility goddesses probably related to Ishtar, Aphrodite, even Athena and Hera, and appear to have lived a rather peaceable, agricultural lifestyle we assume this because archeological digs show these pre-Mycenaean people lived without military weapons or fortifications In contrast to "the locals", the Greek legends we read celebrate war; this is the literature of military conquerors , so the Mycenaean people had as much in common with, say, the later Vikings as with the later philosophical, "civilized" Greeks: this is a culture of raiders, of looters and pillagers.
From this perspective, The Iliad is a work of military propaganda that justifies Mycenaen control of the most valuable sea passage of age the Bosporus , and The Odyssey justifies colonizing Italy and Sicily to the West.
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