The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (37 page)

Back in Smyrna, he continued to devote himself to poetry. But now he had no school to support him, and he set out on the wanderings that would last the rest of his life. In a place called Neon Teichos (New Wall) he was befriended by an armorer named Tychias and earned his bread by reciting verse. And although poverty drove the blind poet to move on, the inhabitants of Neon Teichos remembered him with affection and would point out the spot where he used to recite. In Cumae, his mother’s birthplace (from which she had fled to conceal her pregnancy), he once again found such a sympathetic audience for his verses that he decided he would like to settle there and asked the town council if they would support him with public funds in exchange for entertainment – promising them that he would make their city famous. But one grumpy councillor declared that if they fed every Homer (“blind man”) who came to Cumae, they would soon be overrun with vagabonds. Thereupon the council decided not to grant the poet’s request. The name “Homer” stuck, however.

Homer moved to nearby Phocoae, on the island of Chios, where a would be poet named Thestorides persuaded him to enter into an odd bargain. Homer would write poetry for Thestorides, in exchange for food and lodging. But his host finally broke his bargain and threw the blind man out. Homer continued as a homeless wanderer, singing for his supper. Sometime later, back on the mainland, he met some merchants from Chios who told him that their local poet, Thestorides, was singing verses that were virtually identical with Homer’s. Enraged that Thestorides was passing off his (Homer’s) verses as his own, Homer hastened back to Chios, where he met a kindly goatherd named Glaucus
who put him up for the night in his hut. Homer’s story of his travels so moved Glaucus that he went to his master and asked him to help the poet. The master was scornful, feeling that Glaucus had been taken in by a vagabond. But when he actually met Homer, he was so impressed by his learning and by his poetry that he engaged him as a tutor for his children.

Now, at last, Homer’s misfortunes were over. In the town of Chios he became a celebrity, and when the truth became known about Thestorides, the imposter was driven from the island. Homer became highly successful, both as a poet and a teacher of youth, and he married and had two daughters. Chios became so proud of Homer that it claimed to be his birthplace. As his reputation spread to Greece, he decided to travel there again. On the island of Samos he was recognized and played a part in a religious festival, then was a guest in many rich houses. After this he set sail for Athens but had only reached the island of Ios when he fell ill and died, probably of a stroke. (The legend claims that his death was brought on by frustration at being unable to answer a riddle propounded by the children of fishermen.) But as his fame spread throughout Greece, and bards recited his poems, Chian bards formed a school known as the children of Homer – or Homeridae – which was still flourishing when Herodotus wrote his life of Homer.

So while scholars insist on preserving caution, it seems a commonsense assumption that a blind poet named Homer was born in Asia Minor, traveled in Greece and Italy – perhaps even as far as Spain – settled in Chios, and died on his way to Athens. The school he founded learned his words by heart; why not the events of his life? The dates of these events are altogether more doubtful. Herodotus thinks Homer lived some four hundred years before himself – around 900
BC
. A later scholar, Crates, placed him around eighty years after the Trojan War (which has generally been dated about 1180
BC
but which modern scholars place as early as 1250 – a question to which we shall return in a moment). We now know that to be virtually impossible; for example, a reference in the
Odyssey
to the Phoenicians as traders dates it later than 900
BC
.

But anyone who has read the two epics will have noticed basic differences between them. Although a great deal longer than the
Odyssey
, the
Iliad
covers only a small part of the Trojan War – a few weeks in its tenth year – and is full of slaughter and violence. (The story is a simple one: The Greek hero, Achilles, quarrels with King Agamemnon about a pretty slave girl and refuses to take any part in the battle – until his closest friend, Patroclus, is killed by the Trojan Hector;
then Achilles goes out to meet Hector, chases him three times around the walls of Troy, and kills him.) The
Odyssey
is altogether softer and more lyrical in tone, describing the adventures of Ulysses as he tries to make his way back home from Troy to Ithaca. The Greek scholar Longinus, author of
On the Sublime
, takes the view that this difference is attributable to the fact that Homer wrote the
Iliad
when he was young and at the height of his powers, and the
Odyssey
in old age. But most modern scholars explain the difference by suggesting that two different poets wrote the two works. The author of the
Iliad
, they claim, was the blind poet described by Herodotus. The
Odyssey
was written by a later poet, whose identity is unknown. A widely held view is that the
Iliad
was composed about 750
BC
and the
Odyssey
about 700.

There is one very obvious difference between the two poems. In the
Iliad
, the gods play as prominent a part as the men; they are always interfering in the battle, and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, even swoops down and carries off Paris when he is about to be defeated by Menelaus. In the
Odyssey
, the gods still interfere in the narrative, but they could be eliminated without making much difference to the story of Ulysses. One example will suffice: when Ulysses is slaying his wife’s suitors, the goddess Minerva (Athena) puts in an appearance, disguised as the estate manager; but after the suitors have threatened her with violent reprisals, she turns herself into a swallow and flies up to the rafters. Such an event, one would expect, would clearly convince the suitors that something supernatural was going on and would lower their morale; in fact, they seem not to notice and proceed to attack Ulysses as if nothing had happened. The appearance of the goddess is not only pointless, it makes the scene absurd. It is almost as if the
Iliad
belongs to an earlier period of belief, while the
Odyssey
was written by someone for whom the gods were little more than a convenient plot mechanism.

But if the author of the
Odyssey
was not the blind Homer, then who was he?

The English writer Samuel Butler became aware of the puzzle in 1891. Butler is best known for his amusing satirical novel
Erewhon
, but it would be a mistake to think of him as a satirist. He was a serious thinker who devoted an important part of his life’s work to attacking Darwin’s theory of evolution. He objected to Darwin’s view that mutations cause species to change
at random
and that evolution is due simply to the survival of the fittest. Butler objected that Darwin had “banished God from the universe” and turned the universe into a gigantic machine. He preferred the views of the earlier zoologist Lamarck, who believed that species change because they make determined
efforts
to change. (For a more detailed account of the problem, see chapter 35.)

At the age of fifty-six Butler decided to compose a cantata entitled
Ulysses
. (He was also an amateur composer who wrote in the style of Handel.) His librettist, Henry Festing Jones, was relying on Charles Lamb’s
Adventures of Ulysses
, but Butler felt he should reread the
Odyssey
, of which he retained only vague memories from his schooldays. Butler found Homer’s Greek simple and straightforward and decided to make his own prose translation. As he worked, he became aware of a feeling of unease, of “a riddle that I could not read”. The
Iliad
is full of larger-than-life heroes. The
Odyssey
, by comparison, struck Butler as far more lifelike, in fact, as a kind of novel rather than an epic, full of real people and real observations. The latter begins by telling how Ulysses’s son Telemachus, sick of the horde of suitors who surround his mother, Penelope, goes off to see if he can find news of his father; he calls on King Menelaus, who is now living happily with his errant wife, Helen of Troy, and the domestic scene has an almost tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Here he learns that his father is a prisoner of the nymph Calypso.

The scene shifts to Calypso’s island, where Ulysses has been allowed to leave (owing to the intervention of Jupiter). But the god Neptune, who disliked Ulysses, caused a storm, which wrecked the hero on the coast of a country called Scheria. Here he was found lying asleep by Nausicaa, the king’s daughter, who took him back to the palace. And here, in due course, Ulysses tells the story of what happened to him after he left Troy (which was captured by means of a wooden horse). At this point, we have a long story-within-a-story, which forms the main part of the
Odyssey.

Butler was struck by the realism of the Nausicaa episode and its many homely touches. It confirmed his feeling that the
Odyssey
was a kind of novel, based on real people. A few books later, after Ulysses has encountered the Cyclops, the god of wind (Aeolus), and the man-eating Laestrigonians, he lands on the island of the enchantress Circe, who changes his men into swine. And it was as he was reading about Circe that Butler was suddenly struck by a dazzling intuition: that Circe was not created by a man but by a woman – and, moreover, by a young one. Closer reading convinced him of this. The males of the
Odyssey
are wooden creatures compared to the women, who have that touch of life. Butler also concluded that while the author of the
Odyssey
shows intimate knowledge of the affairs of women, he is often oddly uncomfortable when describing things that are the province of males, especially
seamen or farmers. What male would place the rudder in front of the ship? What seaman would believe that seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree? Or make the wind “whistle” over the waters? (It whistles on land, because of obstacles, but there are no obstacles at sea.) What man with any knowledge of farming would make a herdsman milk the sheep, then give them their lambs to feed (presumably with empty udders)? What countryman would make a hawk tear its prey
on the wing
? The author of the
Odyssey
makes these curious errors, and many more. Butler goes on to argue with great skill and conviction that the author of the
Odyssey
had to be a woman, and a young one at that.

Now if, for the sake of argument, we are willing to admit the possibility that the
Odyssey
was written by a young woman, a kind of Greek Jane Austen or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, then certain things become obvious. The first is that she had a great deal of leisure. In Jane Austen’s day the daughter of a country vicar would have had sufficient leisure to write novels; but in ancient Greece, life was far harder. (What moderns find so hard to grasp is that life in ancient Greece was a poverty-stricken affair, with most people living on a diet of olive oil and vegetables, with some boiled mutton every week or so.) For a woman to have had leisure enough to write, she would have had to have been a member of the aristocracy, one who had servants to look after her. (And we note that even Princess Nausicaa goes to the beach to do her own washing.)

Second, a Greek Jane Austen, like the English one, would have had a fairly restricted knowledge of life (in those days, girls stayed at home), and you would expect her to use her own background in her poem. Butler felt that all the older women in the poem – Helen, Penelope, Queen Arete (Nausicaa’s mother) – are basically the same person and that the same applies to the younger women – Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso – and to the men – Ulysses, Nestor, Menelaus, and King Alcinous (Nausicaa’s father). And if, like any young lady novelist, the authoress of the
Odyssey
put a portrait of herself into her book, then we have to choose between Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso. Nausicaa is the obvious choice. And presumably, Queen Arete and King Alcinous are portraits of the authoress’s parents.

But if the young authoress knew only her own home, then how did she manage to describe the travels of Ulysses so convincingly? Presumably, by using places she actually knew and transforming them into the lands of Polyphemus, Circe, the Laestrigonians, and so on. In other words, if one could find out where “Nausicaa” lived, one might recognize various features of the poem in its geography.

Now Nausicaa, as we have said, lived in a land called Scheria – which means “jut-land” – a peninsula jutting into the sea, which, according to Homer, was the land of a people called the Phaecians. When the naked Ulysses approaches her on the beach – covering himself with a bough for decency – she gives him food and clothing and instructs him precisely how to get back to her father’s house: “You will find the town lying between two harbors, approached by a narrow neck of land”. Later in the
Odyssey
, after the Phaecians have taken Ulysses back to his own land of Ithaca, the angry sea-god, Neptune, turns their ship into a rock in the mouth of the harbor. So Butler felt he had a number of clues about Scheria: it had to have a neck of land jutting into the sea between two harbors and a large rock that resembled a ship in the mouth of one of the harbors. It also seems clear from the
Odyssey
that Ulysses approaches Scheria from the east, so that the harbor must be on the western coast. Butler went to the British Museum and studied a map of Greece and Italy, looking for any west coast that had two harbors on either side of a promontory. He could find only one – the site of the town of Trapani, on the west coast of Sicily. Butler looked at Trapani more closely and became convinced that this had to be the home of Nausicaa. It was the only western coast in the whole area – including Italy and Greece – that fit the description. There was also a mountain – Mount Eryx – above Trapani, and Neptune is also reported in the
Odyssey
as threatening to bury the city of the Phaecians under a high mountain.