Jan Parker - The Iliad and the Odyssey: The Trojan War: Tragedy and Aftermath

Odysseus Travels

W e classicists and ancient historians have long been amused by the potential confusion and the resulting jokes between our Homer and that character made world-famous by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons . Reading the original Homer is no laughing matter though neither is it deadly serious; rather, it is exhilarating and enlightening but it does take the breath away to think that two very long poems, each composed in a verse language never spoken outside the context of a recital of epic poetry, represent the very start of world literature; the oldest literature to have been written down, memorized, recited, continuously, for almost 3,000 years. This makes Greek the longest tradition of continuous poetic language in the whole wide world.

Which means that those two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey , must have something, something very special, going for them. I am going to be unashamedly personal in these few remarks: it was a reading of Homer, when I was aged just 8, that set me on my lifes course as a classicist, as a historian and as a perpetual student of the ancient Greeks. Of course I didnt then read them in the original ancient Greek: that had to wait until I went to university, when I read the whole of both of them, all forty-eight books and almost 30,000 lines of verse. I soon found that the more one read at a go, the faster ones reading speed and the greater ones enjoyment (some 300 lines an hour, if memory serves).

That was just about a decade after my first introduction as an 8-year-old. Then and I still have the two little books in the mid-1950s I read them both in Told To the Children versions beautifully moderated by Jeannie Lang, daughter of the famous Butcher and (Andrew) Lang duo well known to older and adult classical readers and scholars. And they came with a bonus, one that I learned to appreciate fully only much later illustrations in full colour by a certain William Heath Robinson (yes, the Heath Robinson, so famous for his drawings of highly complex machines and mechanical devices that he has given his name to a saying a Heath Robinson effect).

In my minds eye, I can always still see how Heath Robinson conjured up the Iliad s greatest hero, Achilles, resplendent in the shining new suit of armour that his goddess mother, Thetis, had commissioned from the lame Olympian armourer-god Hephaestus. It didnt occur to me then to wonder how Hephaestus had managed to get the dimensions and the fit just right. But of course it was all done by magic the magic, not least, of the epic poets brilliant description. As a boy, the derring-do of Achilles, especially in his fatal duel with Trojan champion Hektor, was what most caught my attention and fired my imagination.

Even more impressive to my impressionable younger self, though, was the magical mystery tour of the Odyssey , and if for different reasons at different stages of my life my all-time favourite of Homers many characters, who was and is the divine (in more senses than one) lady Calypso. She somehow contrived to keep the eponymous hero Odysseus with her on her small island for more than two-thirds of the ten years it took him finally to get back home from the once-mighty, destroyed city of Troy overlooking the Hellespont/ Dardanelles strait to his small rocky island kingdom of Ithaca off mainland Greeces west coast.

Calypsos name would, to an ancient Greek reader or listener, have instantly conveyed secrecy, something hidden or covered up. But her secret was known to all-seeing Zeus on Mount Olympus, who sent the divine messenger Hermes to order her to let Odysseus go; to let him go home to his faithful Spartan wife, Penelope, who had never given up hope of his eventual return, and done all she possibly could to fight off the attentions of no fewer than 108 suitors, all equally keen to get their hands on Odysseus (presumed) widow and kingdom, and to dispossess her barely adult son Telemachus.