Homer’s torch

A litero-historical tale of books continuing each other

As you may remember, gentle readers, I’ve been working my way through some thoughts on how books continue each other. I use the word “books” in the loosest possible sense, because my little anti-theory has broad application. The term “books” can apply to poems of the epic, lyrical and narrative varieties; to songs both ancient and contemporary; to novels historical, serious, and farcical; to films, though generally only the good ones; to television of the edifying sort; and quite possibly to some genres I have not yet considered directly.

In the first post on the subject, I also tried to clarify what I mean by “continue.” Literary history, I suggest, can be seen as a kind of footrace, of the type that passes the Olympic torch. Each writer possesses a torch with a certain color and intensity of flame and, once that writer has reached the end of his particular race, someone else may come along and carry the same torch a bit further, adapting the qualities of the flame to suit the needs of his own time and personality. The quality of the flame – the cadence and language of the work – may change, but the light is essentially the same.

Here, I offered a buffet of brief examples of continuance, but now I invite you to sit down for a full meal. I propose to look at the ways one story and ensemble of characters, one “book,” if you will, has been continued in various forms, languages, and countries for over 3,000 years.

The Iliad, The Odyssey

I’ll begin with two of the oldest written works in Western literature: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These epic poems were written down in ancient Greek around the eighth century BC, but their stories and characters had been remembered in oral tradition for at least three hundred years. Even then, it seems, Homer was intensifying the light and passing the torch.

Achilles, angry over the death of his companion Patroclus, slays Hector, the Trojans' prince and strongest warrior.

The Iliad, of course, is the story of the turning of the tide in the Trojan War, told with Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, as the pivot and hero. The telling begins right in the middle of the action, in year nine of the Greek siege on the city of Troy, and Homer takes as his theme something particular about Achilles: his rage. Achilles is furious that his commander has taken away his “prize,” a girl he won in battle, and this anger causes him to withdraw from the war and let the Trojans gain the upper hand, so the Greeks will be forced to admit they can not win without him.

The epic contains many battle scenes, war counsels between Greek leaders, tender moments between the members of the Trojan royal family, and insight into the conversations of the gods on Mount Olympus. Achilles does eventually return to the fighting after his mother, a sea nymph named Thetis, asks Hephaestus, the gods’ blacksmith, to make him a new set of armor. His rage finally abates in the last section of the poem, when he agrees to let Priam, the king of Troy, ransom the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles had killed without mercy.

The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the story of Odysseus, a Greek king and warrior, and his ten-year quest to return home after the ten-year war. On his long journey, he is “blown time and again off course,” and he and his men encounter many cultures and peoples that seem strange to them. Odysseus angers some gods and pleases others, loses men and saves men, defeats monsters like the cyclops, avoids monsters like the sirens, has a brief liaison with a witch named Circe, and earns the love of a sea nymph, Calypso, who keeps him captive for several years, desiring him as a husband. Odysseus even makes a journey to the Land of the Dead in order to get information about how to return home. Eventually, though, Odysseus does reclaim his throne, reunite with his wife Penelope, and secure the kingdom of Ithaca for his son Telemachus.

This 1983 Greek postage stamp is a reproduction of a much older image of Odysseus encountering the Sirens.

Homer’s poems were beloved – and continue to be beloved – by the Greeks for many hundreds of years, and they were familiar through the time democracy was at work in Athens and a warrior culture made Sparta strong. They continued to be popular through the reign of Alexander the Great, when Hellenic culture spread through the Mediterranean basin.

Roman Virgil takes up the torch

After Alexander, however, Greek power waned. The Latin city of Rome gained strength and soon took over much of the territory that Alexander had once controlled. Rome went through hundreds of years of republican government, and then Julius Caesar became emperor in the first century BC. After Julius was assassinated, and after years of civil war, his nephew and heir Augustus came to power and ushered in a period known as the Pax Romana, the “Roman peace.” (This, by the way, is the same Augustus Caesar who declared the census that sent Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem to register, assuring that Jesus would be born in the “city of David.”)

The Romans, those great administrators of the ancient world, were not nearly as creative as they were organized. They adapted the Greek religious system of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, changing the names but leaving the system essentially unchanged, borrowed and adapted Hellenic architectural styles, and took on Greek literature wholesale. In fact, one of the earliest pieces of “Roman” literature was a Latin translation of Homer made by a Greek-speaking slave.

A poet living under Augustus decided to glorify the empire by telling Rome’s genesis story, tracing the ancient origins of Rome’s extensive power. Publius Virgilius, more commonly known simply as Virgil, wrote Rome’s greatest epic poem, The Aeneid, in which he reached back to Homer and the Trojan War. Just as the Iliad and the Odyssey had their heroes in Achilles and Odysseus, Virgil’s hero was Aeneas, a Trojan warrior mentioned in passing in the Iliad, but famous in Rome as one of its ancient founders.

Aeneas, a Trojan prince and ancient founder of Rome

According to legend, Aeneas survived the fall of Troy and escaped with a band of refugees, arriving eventually on the Italian peninsula and founding the dynasty that included Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who established the city of Rome. From Virgil’s perspective, then, the commitment of Aeneas to his people was the seed that eventually flowered into the reign of Augustus and the Pax Romana.

Although the Aeneid is unabashedly Roman in its sensibilities, its component parts are drawn heavily from the Iliad and Odyssey.

In the first half of Virgil’s poem, Aeneas and his people are shipwrecked, like Odysseus and his men in Homer’s. Aeneas’s people are given shelter by the queen of Carthage, Dido, and Aeneas tells the story of their wanderings at a banquet, just as Odysseus told his story to the king and queen who had sheltered him after he washed up on their shores. As Odysseus has liaisons with the witch Circe and the nymph Calypso, Aeneas has an affair with Dido. Both men leave their lovers because they anticipate a better future: Odysseus wants to return to his wife and family, and Aeneas has to think of “future history’s glories.” His destiny is to found the “high walls of Rome,” to establish the dynasty that will later build the city and the empire. Aeneas, like Odysseus, makes a journey to the Land of the Dead to receive instruction for his future.

Aeneas, though, is as much a fighter as a lover, and the second half of the Aeneid is written in the spirit of the Iliad rather than of the Odyssey. Once he has made it to Italy with the people most loyal to him, Aeneas has to fight to establish the kingdom promised by the gods. He makes an alliance with Latinus, king of the Latins, and marries his daughter Lavinia. However, he must engage an enemy named Turnus for control of the region in a conflict almost as bloody as the Trojan War. Like Achilles, Aeneas is given a new set of armor forged for him by Vulcan (the Roman name for Hephaestus, the blacksmith god). Eventually, Aeneas defeats his enemy with as much force as Achilles defeated Hector.

One of the Aeneid's most iconic images: Aeneas flees the fall of Troy.

Although the poem follows closely in Homer’s footsteps, though, it is a particularly Roman work. Whereas Odysseus is wily, quick-thinking, and adaptable, traits valued by the Greeks, Aeneas is marked by his unbending fidelity to his destiny and his people, both the Trojans in his past and the Romans in his future.

The Aeneid‘s most emblematic image, in fact, is of Aeneas escaping the fall of Troy carrying his aged father Anchises on his back and leading his young son Iulus by the hand; he is called to save both the past and the future. Aeneas is meant to be a shining example of Roman rationality and stoicism, and Romans are reminded through him to let destiny, rather than emotion, guide them.

 

Later, the Pax Romana ended, and Rome itself eventually fell to bands of invaders – Goths, Visigoths and Vandals – from North and Eastern Europe, though not before the official capital of the empire had been moved East, to Constantinople. Without Rome in the West, Europe was plunged into the “dark ages,” a period of decentralized political power, waning literacy, and other unpleasantries, like the Black Death. Around 1300, though, the various cities and principalities on the Italian Peninsula were beginning to get back on their feet. In Florence, a poet named Dante Alighieri took up Virgil’s torch, adapting the story and underpinning it with Christian theology.

Coming Soon: Homer’s torch 2, or Dante goes through Hell to get to Heaven