334. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Did Homer Write History? (Ep 3)

14:29Simon Goldhill:We know it wasn't like, but it's an incredibly powerful image that became extremely influential in the world as what it should be like. And so we've always got to play with that sensitivity to where does fiction come from? So, yes, the boar's head helmet could have existed. There may be an early one with tusks on it. Why not? It's also extremely easy to imagine it as a fictional object. It's not too hard to get there. You're doing my head in.

14:55Anita:You're doing my head in, Simon, because I don't know what to believe.

14:58Simon Goldhill:I'm trying to, Anita. I'm trying to. Okay, all right. You should bury yourself in the world of Homer and the world will become real for you.

15:06Anita:I love the world of Homer, But now you've got me questioning everything. Was the Cyclops lactose intolerant? Did he have cheese? I mean, was there even a Greek expedition against Troy? I mean, what do we know of that? Was there a Greek expedition against Troy?

15:21Simon Goldhill:Well, first of all, the word Greek doesn't even exist in this period. So no, it isn't. It's a collective. What we're told in Homer is that because Helen was taken by Paris, the Greeks all got together, all the different nations, to mount an international expedition to destroy Troy, which was such a huge city that it took so many people and so many years to do. Did that happen? Who knows what happened? What it is, I'm afraid, we've been to Troy, we've dug on Troy, everybody thinks there's a Troy. Whatever it was, it wasn't a huge city. It just don't exist in that period, in that place. The walls weren't the size described by Homer.

16:02Simon Goldhill:The groups of people, I mean, the thousands of people who went there, how are they going to feed themselves? It's a little like when we look at the Bible. Everybody knows that the Bible is absolutely true, perfectly true, every word true. How do they get seal skins to make the cover for the Torah in the desert? How did this? I mean, it doesn't stop the Bible having a truth. You don't have to be literal in the way you understand texts. You have to understand it's a world picture. It's an image being produced for a particular reason. So when we get the catalogue of ships in Book 2 of the Iliad, which lists all the people who went to Troy, it gives you a real map of the Greek world.

16:45Simon Goldhill:You can trace that map around the Mediterranean. It goes city to city in the right order around the Mediterranean. And it gives you some sense of the size of the city because of the number of troops it sent. So we're getting a map of a real world. But did that actually happen? I think you don't want to be too literalist, Anita. I think you just have to get into the world of fiction. So the brilliance of Homer is that he creates so convincing a world that you want to go into it, you want to experience, you want to believe it. And that's what great poetry will do.

17:15Anita:I get all of that, but I still need truth in my poetry. I do need a little modicum of something. You're very difficult. I'm sorry about this, but I just want to know, okay, we're not going to call them Greeks. I'm not going to do that again because they weren't. But Mycenaeans and Troy, do we know whether they had conflicts? What do we know about the conflicts? Are we saying that there were lots of little conflicts that were stitched together and became a basis for the Trojan War? What are we saying?

17:43Simon Goldhill:We do know that based on economic trade, there were fights over control, over routes, over immigration, over resources. And we know those sometimes were international, as we would say. It's not too far from Greece to Troy. It's just across the sea, the Greek East. These are places that speak Greek for a lot of period too. So it's the same community and they're fighting. And we have no idea what level there was. We can see that Troy, where we think Troy was, was destroyed. We've done the archeology on that. So you can see that There were cities that were destroyed over time. And so we know that these were done by the natural disasters, but more likely there are plenty of cases where we can see it was through war.

18:26Simon Goldhill:So we know there are wars in this period. Were they of the scale of the Trojan War as predicted? Was the city ever big enough to need a horse full of people to go through a gate? No, I mean, we know it's not that big. It can't be.

18:39William:We have found Mycenaean pottery.

18:42Simon Goldhill:Is that right? There's no doubt there is trade. There's trade between these areas. We know that we've always, for the last 200 years, we have tended to underestimate the long-term, long-scale trade from all the way from China to India to Greece and back. We can show it in Africa. We can show it all around. So we know this is going on. And there's no trade without fighting in this period. So, yes, there's fighting. Yes, there's competition. And, yes, you need stories to explain it. You need stories to build it up, to talk about it. So, I'm sorry Anita, I can't give you the truth because it doesn't exist.

19:19Anita:I'm not going to say I'm not disappointed, but on the upside, there may not be an Agamemnon for me to loathe and despise as much as I do. I mean, is that what you're saying? That these people may be confected as well?

19:31Simon Goldhill:Well, how lovely it is that we have the so-called death mask of Agamemnon as dug up by Schliemann. And there are two things to say about that. There's no reason to associate it with Agamemnon at all. as a casual, that's a beautiful mask. And it's a thousand years too early, isn't it, or something? It's the wrong period. That's exactly right. But what most archaeologists would do these days would be more interested in the seeds they found inside the mask than the gold mask itself, because it would tell us more about the culture.

19:59Anita:You mentioned this was an oral tradition, and Willie was talking about the dramatisation and the stories of Papu and how they are memorised. But it's 15 ,000 lines in this work attributed to Homer, one person who may or may not have been one person called Homer. How does that poem transmit orally?

20:19Simon Goldhill:Well, it's very difficult to imagine, isn't it? We know that there are structured scenes. We know that the easiest thing to do is to imagine the structure of the poem. And it has a very, very clear structure. So you know which scene comes next. So you're not worrying about the narrative. We also know that it's made up of what they call formulae. So you can recreate scenes in different ways. What most people say is that actually each performance would have been different, but at some point it becomes fixed. That's what's so interesting, that by the fifth century we have our Homer. When there's lots of trouble with manuscript editions, there's very little trouble with the Homer manuscript edition.

20:55Simon Goldhill:There are very few places we say, we don't know whether that's really there or not, because it got fixed very early.

21:01William:The Rajasthani poets get also very fixed. There are tiny variations within lines, but the basic line by line, anthropologists have recorded them 20, 30 years apart, and there's almost no difference.

21:16Simon Goldhill:And there are other examples elsewhere where the poems change to fit new societal norms. So, if you've got a genealogy which justifies power and you find power has changed, you find that in 20 years the genealogy has changed. So, you get different people's stories.

21:33Anita:So, this oral tradition though, we've talked before on this podcast about this extraordinary collapse of the Bronze Age where literacy itself is devoured and destroyed and And the population is in decline and it's all pretty chaotic and dark in this time. How does this oral tradition then survive a collapse like that?

21:59Simon Goldhill:Well, that's one of the great mysteries, isn't it? One can only assume that even through the collapses and horrors of a society and disarray, there is still some need for imaginative projection of a better world. And consequently, even in despair, you can produce great art and you can continue to respond to the world through it. And that's the only explanation we can give for what happened. And why we get such a mishmash when we get two or three hundred years later and we see what survived, why it doesn't quite fit together in the way that you would like it to do, to be historical truth. It's because it has that, so not only layers of history, but layers of fragmentation built into it from the beginning.

22:39Simon Goldhill:It's part of its very nature.

22:40William:Just to pursue that again, what do you mean by layers of fragmentation?

22:43Simon Goldhill:we can see that there are different parts of stories that are put together in certain ways. And that sometimes in the past, people have been rather naive about that and hunted for contradictions. But there are ways you can see that there are bits of the story that are surprising the way they're put together. You say, well, that doesn't quite make sense. Why is that the case? Why do we need that? And it seems to be that it's because they've put together different bits of stories in different ways. That said, it's a remarkable unity overall, which makes those disjunctions all the more evident in some ways.

23:15Simon Goldhill:But it's fascinating that they've not been excised from the text and they're left in there for us all to see. What makes Homer remarkable is the incredible unity of the narratives. Thus, it's all the more surprising when you can see the disjunctions, when stories seem to have been forced together in some way or another. Critics have leapt on that as a sign of the oral composition. But it's also a sign of a sort of history of fragmentation, a history of how different people have had their go at this poem before it comes to where we are.

23:46William:We're going to take a break now. When we're going to come back, we're going to ask Simon about how this poem actually reflects the reality of the Bronze Age collapse.

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26:13William:Welcome back We were looking at the nature Of the oral tradition Before the break But I'm interested Simon, how much can we use this text, this extraordinary text that survived, that's written so much later, how far can we use it as a source for the Bronze Age collapse?

26:32Simon Goldhill:I think it's very hard to get an image of Bronze Age collapse per se. There's no writing in Homer. I mean, there's half a hint of some signs on one bit of paper that was sent, but otherwise there's no writing, which is a sign of the later period rather than the Mycenaeans who did have writing. Interesting. There is no sign of genuine, what you might call, empire organization. What we have for Mycenaean culture is catalogues, lists of food, of tribute.

27:06William:This is in the Linear B you're talking about?

27:07Simon Goldhill:In the Linear B material. And none of that seems to have come through in Tahoma in an interesting way. So there are silences that I assume are a product partly of that collapse and partly of Homeric fantasy about the past when we don't have the modern technology because it's in the old days. So, I mean, Homer was singing at a time when writing is coming into being again in the 8th century. So there are some people who think writing was invented to write down Homer, which I think is probably a bit romantic. But I do think the fact that Homer probably comes from the first days of the rediscovery of writing is a fascinating moment to think, well, why doesn't he write about writing?

27:49Simon Goldhill:Why does he avoid telling us about technology? Well, it could be because of the Bronze Age, or it could be because he doesn't want to talk about modernity.

27:58William:Would you say that the poems are both haunted by the idea of collapse, this pervasive sense of an ending, of a world passing away? as you said, people today aren't as wonderful as they once were, that whole sense of a world getting lost.

28:13Simon Goldhill:Yeah. The sense of a lost world is everywhere in Homer, but fascinatingly, there's no real description of the destruction of Troy. So the one thing you would expect would be the destruction of Troy, but the Iliad ends with the burial of Patroclus and Achilles left on his own, awaiting his death. And by the time we get to the Odyssey, Troy has fallen a long time ago. And the only time we get a story about it is when another bard sings a story in Faesia. So it's already become the subject of song. So we don't get anything like the full-scale description that we get, for example, in the Aeneid, book two of the Aeneid, The Destruction of Troy, the very, very long version, which comes out of Roman violence and Roman sense of how cities can be destroyed.

28:56Simon Goldhill:So it's interesting we don't get that. What we do get, of course, is a fascinating indication in the Odyssey in particular of the possibilities of migration, of colonialism, of discovering new lands and new places. And that too is a crucial part of the Bronze Age development in the Mediterranean.

29:12William:Of boatloads of violent men turning up on far shores and often running amok.

29:18Simon Goldhill:Yes. And we see stories of that that Odysseus tells of himself. The first thing he says when he's telling his own story in the land of Scariot, the Phaeacians and the Phaeacian king, He says, we arrived at this place and of course we sacked a town. And then he finished. That's the first thing he says as his story. And it's very interesting that we do get that sense that even the Cyclops says to him, are you brigands when they turn up? Because the Cyclops even expects there to be brigands around the place. So you're absolutely right. This idea that we get of a Mediterranean world in which boatloads of violent men turn up and do nasty things, but also where you can colonize and build new cities.

29:55Simon Goldhill:and a real sense of cultural difference in the Odyssey right from the beginning, opening lines. It says, Odysseus saw the towns of many men and learnt their minds. Cultural difference is built into this homogenous world. That's part of the Bronze Age dispersion of population.

30:14Anita:There is also, and I don't know, you've touched on this before, so I'm thinking that I'm picking up the threads from you, that there is a nostalgia that before was better. That, you know, this sort of period, even in this period of collapse and murder and intrigue, that actually, you know, the bad guys get it in the end. You know, there's some justice, there's some natural order. I mean, is that right?

30:39Simon Goldhill:Oh, I don't know. I'm not going to go there. I don't think it's as sweet as all that, I'm afraid. I mean, you've got to remember that Achilles is a psychopath. He's the hero, but he's the person who always goes too far. And he goes on a murderous rampage after Patroclus. and he desecrates the corpse of Hector. He does human sacrifice on the tomb. He's not a good guy in that sense.

31:02Anita:But he doesn't live happily ever after, does he though, Simon? I mean, that's the thing, you know.

31:06Simon Goldhill:But that's what's so wonderful about these poems is they are just the world is a better place. But we're left at the end of the Iliad. We're left with Achilles in despair. His friend has died. He's got what to look forward to? Nothing but the loss of his own life.

31:23Anita:Yeah, I know. I take that point. But I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there are giants, not Cyclops-style giants, but there are fine men. There's a nostalgia for these heroes that existed.

31:38Simon Goldhill:You're absolutely right that there is a sense that in the past there were these grand figures who can provide models of how we think about what could be good today. But like the Hebrew Bible, there is no hero who is unflawed. You know, it's very interesting. It's modernity that wants its heroes simple. It's Hollywood, or some would say saints, Christian saints. We want them to be perfect, but they're not. A disuse is a nasty, tricky bastard who kills everybody he meets, loses his hold. I mean, he's not Captain Kirk.

32:09Anita:Oh, Penelope should have dumped him so early on, I swear.

32:14Simon Goldhill:You don't think she did? I mean, seriously.

32:18Anita:There are some young women I'd love to have chats with. What are you doing? Move on, lady.

32:26William:One thing that's very interesting is that it isn't just, of course, the human characters who are very flawed. It isn't just Achilles, who's a difficult thing, and Odysseus, who's a brigand. The gods themselves are incredibly flawed.

32:38Simon Goldhill:They certainly are. And humans get to stab gods in the Iliad. I mean, Diomedes actually stabs Aphrodite, who runs off crying, and Athene teases the disuse in the Odyssey, and Zeus gets tricked by his own wife. Sexually, though they are not paradigms in the sense of being perfect, they're paradigms of how power works and what it's like to imagine a world where consequences are so different. So in the middle of the Odyssey, we can tell a story of how the god Ares of war has adulterous sex with Aphrodite and gets caught in bed by her husband with a magic cobweb-like unbreakable bond. And all the male gods turn up and just giggle.

33:28Simon Goldhill:And Hermes says, it'd be worth to be caught in bed with Aphrodite. Blimey, I'd do that. This in the middle of a poem, which is going to punish potential adulterers with death. The human world, completely different consequences to your actions. And so that's a very interesting idea about what's it like to imagine a world not just of better heroes, but a place where consequences aren't quite the same.

33:53Anita:So this is, to me, really interesting because he does paint the gods often as being a bit ridiculous. You know, sort of this whole fanar, fanar, standing around a bed and making filthy jokes. As you know, this couple of court having an adulterous fight. And, you know, many, many other examples where they're simply, they can be a bit ridiculous. Now, do we know whether that is actually quite seditious at the time? That people used to worship at temples, they would sacrifice at temples. In the spirituality of the time, there was utter veneration. And then you've got Homer.

34:31William:You wouldn't try that in India today.

34:33Anita:Or the Catholic Church.

34:34William:No, absolutely.

34:35Anita:So is he seditious then? No, it's very interesting.

34:39Simon Goldhill:So let's go back to your favourite historians of the fifth century. And if we go to Herodotus, who knows a great deal about other cultures and gods and all the rest, he says explicitly, Homer gave the Greeks their gods. Homer defines what the gods are for Greeks. So far from being seditious, he's fundamental. Yeah. Okay. So that's fantastic, isn't it? So what we have to relearn when we read Homer is how culturally biased our views of divinity are and how much monotheism as a concept in the West and religious piety in the East has overwhelmed the possibility of a much different sort of religious activity where, yes, you can joke about some gods.

35:25Simon Goldhill:Yes, I mean, you don't joke about Zeus normally on stage, but you could joke about quite a lot of gods. And you can also go to temples. Let me give you an example. When you're in the second century and you're with Lucian, a Syrian Greek satirist, he describes in his work the Erotes going to a temple of Aphrodite, the Aphrodite of Canaidos, and they sit around and they tell dirty stories to each other. That's a way of worshipping Aphrodite and have a long discussion. Is it better to sleep with a boy or a girl? And they argue about that and they tell stories about it. And that's a perfectly good way of observing the religiosity and the piety of a temple of Aphrodite.

36:03Simon Goldhill:And no, that's not what happens in the Catholic Church.

36:07William:Simon, how far is what Herodotus says actually drew? Because the gods who we get in Homer are there also in the Linear B tablets, aren't there? They're older gods.

36:18Anita:And Linear B, we should remind people, I mean, those tablets are contemporary with the Bronze Age. That's why they're really important.

36:23Simon Goldhill:Yes, that's right. That's why they're important. Yes, absolutely. They're Bronze Age tablets and they've been deciphered largely, unlike Linear A, and we can read what they're about. We get the names of gods and we know they're occult, but we have no real representations. So even though Dionysus is there, we don't see him as the long-haired, slightly effeminate, drunkard figure or the bearded Dionysus of theatre or whatever. So it's Homer who gives the stories that fill the imagination. And the important thing is that Homer becomes the furniture of the Greek mind. You can't explore the world, experience the world without Homer in the Greek world.

37:00Simon Goldhill:So it's always layered with this past, this Bronze Age memory, as Anita puts it, this sort of haunting. But at the same time, those gods have a touch of, well, I'd be very careful before you call me ridiculous because people who do that in Greek tend to get zapped, Anita. So watch out.

37:18Anita:Smite me if they want. I'm right here. Come smite me if you feel you're hard enough.

37:25Simon Goldhill:Oh dear, that's brave talk I would never be there

37:29Anita:So shall we talk about sort of the archaeological record because what I would be fascinated to know is that has everything been dug up that can be dug up when it comes to Troy and you say there was no big, I mean if someone dug up an horse

37:43Simon Goldhill:A very large horse

37:44Anita:A large horse, or you know is there anything that has been discovered in the recent past that has changed scholarship in your area?

37:54Simon Goldhill:Well, in the last 150 years, for sure, the whole discovery of Troy and where they think Troy is has been absolutely fascinating. So throughout the 19th century, various sites were promised to be Troy and they tried to do it from the text of Troy. And now we have a site that we think is Troy and we're happy with that. And it does show us quite a lot, but it's been very well dug. So too has Mycenae. And you can tell that we know the size of Mycenae. We can see what it was like as a population. We know it was not capable of mounting an expedition of the size mentioned in Troy. That's just physically impossible.

38:30Simon Goldhill:But at the same time, you've got the extraordinary Lion Gate and the possibility of discovering other things like that that give you some sense of how the city represents itself. And the tombs. And the tombs are remarkable. And there are new discoveries being made all the time. not always of Bronze Age, sometimes of later ages, but these archaeological discussions do regularly change what we know about Philip of Macedon, about Alexander, about that sort of period. There have been very recent discoveries on that area. I think we're constantly learning more about the archaeology of trade and of migration and seeing how these cities interrelated with each other.

39:11Simon Goldhill:I think that's one of the things we are learning a lot about.

39:13William:So, Simon, we've got a new movie coming out with Ulysses at the centre with Matt Damon and all the rest of it and a black Helen, we're told. What is the relevance of Homer today? Why should we continue reading it beyond the fact that it's just this wonderful story that generation after generation love to hear?

39:31Simon Goldhill:Well, it is a wonderful story, but what's important about it is the way in which it's emotionally, socially, politically productive. So it's not just that we repeat it because it has the authority of the past. Right from the beginning, Homer gets rewritten because he becomes a resource for telling the important stories we want to tell. Greek tragedy is a constant rewriting of Homer. Virgil, that great classic of European literature, a rewriting of Homer, all the way up to James Joyce and beyond. We want to retell the stories of Homer because they're not simple, because they're engaged. They create the world, which gives us our sense of values about power, about masculinity, about what it is to have a family, what it might mean to go home, what it is to be lost, what it is to return.

40:20Simon Goldhill:All those categories are so important and don't stop being important because Homer has set the field for the discussion. That's why it never goes away.

40:32Anita:And just finally, just between us, between friends, would you go and watch a movie, a retelling of Troy, with a stress toy or a notebook? How do you cope with retellings? Are you fine with it?

40:47Simon Goldhill:I am not a gatekeeper, but perhaps I could end with a story that always amuses me at least that I was asked to go and see the film Troy when it opened the first night to review it for the evening standard. And I had to sign a waiver as I went in, promising not to reveal the plot in my review.

41:08Anita:Oh, that's gorgeous.

41:10Simon Goldhill:Troy Falls Shock.

41:12Anita:Oh, it's an absolute delight to have you. Thank you so much. Simon Goldhill has been an absolute delight. And William, what have we got coming next? Because this is such a lovely topic to be discussing.

41:23William:So we're moving back from text to archaeology in the next three episodes. We've got Eric Klein, who's big bestseller on the Bronze Age collapse, 1187, how civilization came to an end. That is where we're going now. And we're going to look in detail at how not just Troy and Mycenae, but Ugarit and half the rest of the city-states on the Levantine coast went down and how Egypt didn't.

41:54Anita:And interestingly, if you cannot wait for the next episode, you just don't have to. All you need to do is join our club, EmpirePodUK.com, EmpirePodUK.com, and you'll get it right here, right now, I promise. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

42:10William:And goodbye from me, William. Turnbull.

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