Homer’s epics were first written down at a curious turning point between two eras, when the Greek Dark Ages gave way to Classical Antiquity. Before the seventh century BCE, there had been no ‘Western literature’, only Western literacy. The earliest Greek writing system — Minoan Linear B — was a bean counter’s tool to make receipts and invoices, not a medium for fiction or poetry. But though most storytellers probably couldn’t read, they weren’t slack in developing their art. The Iliad is long and complex enough to compete with modern novels. Indeed, since it emerged from the mists of oral tradition, it’s inspired a big family of literate authors, from Virgil and Dante to Ezra Pound and Thom Gunn.
Until the twentieth century, we didn’t know much about those mists of oral tradition. Then, in the 1930s, an American linguist named Milman Parry visited rural Yugoslavia, where oral epics were still performed by illiterate singers. Studying their cultures, he hoped to learn how oral poems were composed, how they were taught to the next generation and how much a poem’s text changed between singers and locales. Unfortunately, Parry died from an accidental gunshot wound soon after his return to the US. It took his student Albert Lord many years to continue the research and publish it in a 1960 book, The Singer of Tales.
Parry and Lord made a startling discovery: oral epics weren’t recited from set texts, but rather improvised by the singer during each show. In Lord’s words, ‘An oral poem is not composed for but in performance.’ Traditional bards were therefore much closer to today’s freestyle rappers than to page-poets like Virgil. While they inherited storylines, devices and formulae, each telling of a story was unique and off-the-cuff. The Iliad we have now wasn’t based on a previously used text, but on a specific performance dictated to a scribe.
Even so, it’s a very old story. Since the 1870s, archaeologists have found piling evidence that there was a real Trojan War between Bronze Age Greeks and Hittites. This means that the Iliad had been told and retold for at least five hundred years before a version got written down.
Some parts of Homer only seem like features and not bugs when we consider this oral heritage. Why do the Iliad and the Odyssey both start with the now-hackneyed phrase ‘sing, Muse’? That’s the performer — palms sweaty, vomit on his chiton, mom’s spaghetti — invoking divine aid to bless his improv. After writing had given poets the leisure to save and redraft their work, the ‘sing, Muse’ trope stagnated from a living superstition to an undead cliché.
Such a situation makes special problems for translators. Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless. (Imagine a future where students pore over John Carpenter screenplays in Penguin Classics editions, but no living person has watched The Thing!)
John Dolan’s latest book, The War Nerd Iliad, offers a new approach to this challenge. Dolan is a retired professor and cult author most famous for blogging as ‘the War Nerd’, a curmudgeonly anti-expert who writes war analyses mixed with Swiftian black comedy. Since the early noughties, he’s sparred with right wingers over the legacy of ancient Greek civilisation — rebuffing the suggestion that it had any ‘Western values’ in common with modern America. The early Greeks, he emphasised, lived in a Talibanesque world shaped by endless warring between tribes and clans. Their culture allowed paederasty but frowned on any hetero desire that went beyond reproduction and arranged marriage. ‘Everything about [the Greeks] was alien,’ Dolan wrote in 2005.
I hadn’t read Dolan in a while — the War Nerd moved around too much for me to bother. But his columns were always rich entertainment and worth reading for a salutary dark side take.
On the Greeks, he has long been the anti-Victor Davis Hanson. I am not convinced Dolan’s thesis is quite right either. Or at least he’s committing everyone else’s error of too much weighting on a valid revelation. Everything about the Greeks was alien and yet much of what they left behind is encoded in our culture.
For that matter, once you get to before 1965, every step back in time or to another place increases the level of alienness. Faster than we normally think.
Both the Iliad and Odyssey appear to be folk memories of the end-of-Bronze-Age Sea Peoples migrations. Odysseus’ return to Ithaca has been dated to October 25th-30th, 1207 B.C. using astronomical references in the text.
Wait, I read that the slaughter of the suitors occurred on April 16, 1178 B.C.
Graham,”I hadn’t read Dolan in a while — the War Nerd moved around too much for me to bother…”.
I feel exactly the same. I hunted for his writings for a while and had trouble finding them. Eventually I stopped looking. I’ll have to start looking again. Every single article that I have read of his has been entertaining. He’s a great writer.
‘Everything about [the Greeks] was alien,’ Dolan
This is sorta true but this,
“…Greek civilisation — rebuffing the suggestion that it had any ‘Western values’ in common with modern America…”
Is not.
That the Greeks would go to war to get a Women that ran off I think is caring about Women much more than most other cultures would. Western Men have always given Women more latitude than other cultures.
There’s also the ideas of the Greeks where logic and experimentation is used to find the truth. Other cultures just don’t have that. I read a interview with Jim Sullivan just the other day that reiterated this. He’s a gun designer that worked with Stoner, (M-16 designer), and he worked on a great deal of very innovative firearm systems. He was working as a designer in Singapore. One of the big guys who hired him wanted the design to have some feature that he KNEW was a disaster and he publicly argued against it in a meeting with the big guy present. Sullivan said the big guy got so mad that he had to be removed form the room shaking with rage. People just didn’t do that there. The big guy was always right. They didn’t fire him because they recognized Sullivan came from a different culture and meant no offense. It was after all why they hired him in the first place. If you’re technically right even the biggest ego in Western Civilization will most likely give way to the junior if the junior can prove logically he’s correct. It’s a great strength of our civilization.
I think one thing the War Nerd misses, if I remember correctly, is the central gains of technology. He talks a lot about the spirit and viciousness of different cultures but people have always been ruthless and vicious.
Give ruthless and vicious a compound bow mounted on a fast pony and you get Genghis Khan.
Just in case someone is interested in machine gun design, very interesting, to me anyways. There’s three parts.
http://smallarmsoftheworld.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=110
I found “The War Nerd’s” output variable: sometimes a good and original take on things, but also sometimes weak on analysis or research. This particular book seems like it would play more to his strengths, though I add that, as Sam J. says, both he and VDH are right about the ancient Greeks. That partly derives from the fact that both authors have a tendency to over-simplify and speak about one or a few factors as though they explain the totality of the situation in question.
Sam, have you read Chinn’s The Machine Gun? It’s the classic reference on the topic. Amazing how much those 19th Century New England inventors got around!
Also, sorry for not getting back to you on the carriers question yet. In the last few weeks the Americanus household has been busy variously balancing work, a 1-year old with her first case of the flu (now better), and Mrs. Americanus’ grad school finals. I’ve done the research necessary but I haven’t pulled together all my thoughts yet.
Manas the epic poem of the Kyrgyz people takes a bard six months to complete if the bard recited for eight hours a day. And they have compared the various bards and they are word for word perfect. Indeed if a bard so called is not word for word perfect he is ignored by his peers. So at least to me if is strange that these epic poems are considered to be more of a “performance”. NO! I suspect much more.
The Hittite records don’t indicate that Troy was Hittite. Their name for Troy was Wilusa (cf. Greek Willios/Illios). It does not seem to have been a part of the Hittite Empire.
The only written inscription found at Troy is Luwian not Hittite.
“…“The War Nerd’s” output variable…”
Yes I agree but he is entertaining enough to make up for it.
have you read Chinn’s The Machine Gun?…”
Sigh…hangs head in shame. No. I have them too. Five volumes. I’ve read a LOT on machine guns and watched a lot of disassembly videos. I have read many, many years ago a tome filled to the brim with most anything you could think of about machine guns by, if I remember correctly, some guy who was a part of the US Amory or something like that. So I understand some of the basics.
The guns we have now and the ones they are about to get are mostly a far cry from what we should have and easily could have.
Sullivan said we have a first rate Air Force and Navy with 3rd rate infantry weapons. He’s right.
“…Also, sorry for not getting back to you on the carriers question…”
Take your time. It took me a while to formulate the idea. I bet I can make a decent case for any objections you have.
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A idea I have about the Spartans that seems indisputable to me is they were defeated by their Women. The Spartan Women, from what I’ve read, were able to do fairly well what they pleased while the Men had these horrendous duties and never ending training for battle. All the Women had to do was have kids…and they didn’t. Their numbers dwindled until I think it was a plague and an earthquake and there was just not enough slack for them to catch up and the Spartans were defeated. They ran out of soldiers. Hmmm…learning from the past and…look at American Women now.
The Romans too. The Romans I read had no fault divorce and marriage came to a halt for the same reasons it is today. The Divorce comes but the bills don’t stop. Eventually they taxed bachelors. I think Rome fell because the Men didn’t feel it was worth fighting for. Many were bound to the land and of course the Oligarchs went on as ever crushing them into it. If they could stay out of the way of the barbarians I sure it was a great relief to have the State smashed.
I find the notion of the ‘alienness’ of other peoples increasingly fascinating. Call it the merger of those parts of my brain that used to consume a lot of old-school SF, in much of which they didn’t make aliens alien enough, but in some of which they tried, with some later professional and intellectual interests.
VDH himself wrote at least one work in which he pointed out that Athens and the Athenian mentality were not the whole of the Greeks, although he was seeking an alternative, martial and agrarian element of his western tradition rather that seeking that which was outside it. Still worth it — even when one suggests the west is heir to the Greeks, even that thesis can encompass more than the most obvious strands. Democracy and oligarchy, liberty and authoritarianism, even conformist, collectivist democracy, have all had their heirs. So have Greek science/philosophy and mysticism/hermeticism, both. I’m not convinced the Dionysian rites don’t have their long term spiritual heirs.
Consider the much maligned “300″ movie. I usually defend it first as being meant to replicate a graphic novel, which was itself meant to give a mythic rather than a historical sensibility. I liked that it gave a sort of Norse darkness to the mythologization of a Hellenic historical moment. But, allowing that the specific choices included some epic nonsense [the ephors were maligned...], a lot of that in retrospect does convey the weird side of the Greeks. I don’t know what the experience of hearing from an oracle was exactly like, but it might not have been too different from that depicted.
In retrospect, I’m not sure Dolan wasn’t narrowcasting his idea of who “we” are today.
On the broader theme, we have heard much over the decades about how inscrutable some people or other are supposed to be. The past 15 years the Pashtuns have been given a lot of this. Now I am no expert either by direct encounter or scholarship — I have had a passing relationship with the topic. So no doubt there are vast depths of complexity to be plumbed. Yet the stuff that gets tagged as complex or inscrutable by the likes of the New York Times always seems pretty routine stuff. The Pashtuns don’t recognize our idea of universal values — they have concentric circles of loyalty. Me against my brother, and so on. This is not actually all that alien or different to understand. We can’t understand jihadis motives — they’re too alien. Uhhh… yes we can?
I realize that’s a bit of a tangent. But I suddenly realize our whole civilization might be on the autism spectrum.
“…old-school SF…”
#1!!!
You talking like Niven, Pournelle?
Whole lot of good reading in the “War World” series. Also the “There will be War” series is great.
Actually, yes. Come to think, the Fithp in Footfall are actually a pretty good example.
You will never elsewhere see anything like an attempt to construct the implications for social and behavioral norms, warrior culture, and political beliefs of being an intelligent, spacefaring pachydermid species.
On a somewhat coarser level, the Moties.
The philosophical tradition was invented by the Greeks. Which means it was, at first, as alien to the Greeks as computers were/are to us. It’s not hard to find parts of Greek life that hadn’t been eaten by philosophy yet. Western civilization has continued to develop philosophy, and it hasn’t eaten all of us yet either, more’s the pity.