The Odyssey Page 0,2

is about the time by which the Minoan city of Knossos, on the island of Crete and formerly the leading power of the northeastern Mediterranean, seems to have been at least eclipsed and likely conquered by the Mycenaeans. Moreover, if the Trojan War ever took place, the best candidate for the date falls in the Mycenaean period; the archaeological evidence suggests that a prosperous era in the history of Troy was violently terminated—whether by war or misfortune has yet to be determined to the satisfaction of all scholars—in the late thirteenth century B.C. Since the site of Troy remained uninhabited from about 1100 to 700 B.C., at least some of the memories that inform the poems, which depict the city as a rich and powerful place, must reach back to the Mycenaean era.

But one cannot accurately describe the Mycenaean world as the Homeric nor assert without qualification that the poems were “set” in that time. After 1200 B.C., when Mycenaean culture went into its steep decline, the system of writing it had employed, Linear B, was forgotten (and, in fact, no literary texts have yet been found in that script, which apparently served mainly to record palace business). In this womb of historical silence, the Homeric epics gestated. So how—and to what extent—could the Mycenaean past have been preserved in the poems?

The answer lies in the nature of what has come to be called oral-formulaic verse. A young American scholar named Milman Parry deduced, by observing this form of poetic composition still being practiced in the Balkans during the 1920s, that the Iliad and the Odyssey had been composed and circulated as oral-formulaic verse for indeterminate generations before they were at last written down. In this method of poetic composition, a bard intimately familiar with the details of a traditional legend or set of legends improvises, often for hours at a time, night after night, a metrical chanting of the story. The bard often relies on a great many prefabricated phrases and lines that fit the metrical pattern conventional to the culture—in Ancient Greek, the pattern of long and short syllables. (The musical forms of calypso and hip-hop often work in roughly similar fashions.) Frequent repetition of such phrases as “early, rosy-fingered dawn” and “earth-shaking Poseidon,” as well as the tendency of characters to repeat word-for-word any message or description given them to repeat, demonstrates the origin of the Odyssey in oral-formulaic verse. Presumably, the same metrical phrases might be repeated in reference to the same characters, places, or incidents for centuries.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to imagine that the poem remained so little altered that Homer’s tale reflected the basic social facts of life in the time of the Mycenaeans. Oral-formulaic verse changes by nature. Not only does each retelling subtly alter the previous incarnations, but bards must appeal to the audience seated before them in order to earn their bread. Their incentive is to create a world that is meaningful to their listeners, not to preserve accurately the ways of life that belong to their ancestors. Homer, to be sure, clearly sets his tale in the golden age of what, even to his first readers, was the distant past, being careful to include archaisms such as chariot warfare and bronze weaponry that had vanished from the world of his own time. His gestures in this direction, however, are precisely what provide modern archaeologists with the proof that the Homeric poems reflect the Mycenaean world very imprecisely. Warriors in the Odyssey essentially fight as they did in Homer’s time: on foot, throwing and thrusting spears and, at close quarters, lunging with swords. When a Homeric hero steps into a chariot, he does so merely to arrive at the battlefield in high style, dismounting before drawing any of his weapons. The Mycenaeans, however, used their chariots as moving gunnery platforms from which to fire arrows. Indeed, some scholars believe they conquered the Grecian peninsula primarily by their mastery of chariots, part of a wave of victories by mainly Indo-European-speaking charioteers in India (the Aryan invasion), the Fertile Crescent (the misnamed “Hittite” Empire), and even Egypt (the Hyksos conquest). In Homer, the honored dead receive cremation; had this been the case in Mycenaean times, there would have been no tombs for Schliemann to open. Indeed, Homer’s poems record no suspicion that a major cultural and political disruption separated his own era from that of the Trojan War heroes. Certain Mycenaean fictions may survive in the poem, but