Why Homer Matters (34 page)

 

11 • HOMER'S MIRROR

It is possible—just—to look at Homer the other way around, and to hear the story of the Greeks arriving in the Mediterranean not as the Greeks told it in Homer but as the inhabitants of the literate, bureaucratic, authoritarian civilizations of the Mediterranean littoral told it themselves.

Nothing survives that describes Achilles or Odysseus directly, but there is a handful of Egyptian, Hittite and Hebrew texts that deal with people and habits occupying precisely the culture space of Homer's Greeks: northern Indo-European warriors arriving in a world where they do not belong, where they seem like barbarians, people who don't quite know how to behave. These unsympathetic versions of the Homeric story are strangely unsettling. Suddenly here is Achilles as his enemies might have seen him; Odysseus described by the smart, rich, complacent city-folk; Greek heroism as gang hooliganism; the Greek habit of woman-theft as nothing but rape; the beautiful volubility of the Homeric warrior looking pompous and absurd. Here, in this new light, are the Homeric tales with “Homer”—the dignity, understanding and tragic beauty of the poems—stripped out of them.

The Tale of Sinuhe
is a short poetic biography of an Egyptian civil servant. It is a miraculous survival, the oldest version preserved on a reused roll of papyrus, buried in the tomb of a government official in the Egyptian city of Thebes on the west bank of the Nile in about 1800
BC
. Probably looted from the tomb, it found its way to a London auction room in
AD
1843, and versions of it are now preserved on fragments of papyrus in the British Museum and in Berlin. It had been popular in Egypt up to about 1000
BC
, but until the Victorian Egyptologists deciphered it, no one had read Sinuhe's story for three thousand years.

It is from almost exactly the moment the Greeks were arriving in the Mediterranean, piratical, violent men, hungry for the gold that soon enough would appear on the bodies and in the graves at Mycenae, but comes from a frame of mind perfectly opposed to theirs. This elegant, melancholic verse novel from the richest culture in the ancient world may be the contemporary of the first versions of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, but it loves nothing about them.

Sinuhe's Egypt is a huge state structure. He is part of the great service industry attending to the god-pharaoh's well-being, a court official—“a writing-man” is the Egyptian term—and a bureaucrat. It was the best possible job he could have. “Be a scribe,” a contemporary papyrus instructed its young readers. “Your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft. You will go forth in white clothes, honoured, with courtiers saluting you.”

The Homeric assumption that suffering and conflict lie at the heart of existence, that life is essentially uncomfortable, is simply absent from Sinuhe's world. His life is framed around repetitiveness, stability, normality, precision and security. Everything is measured and known. His tale begins on “the 7th Day of the 3rd Month of the Nile Flood Season, in the 20th year of the Pharaoh's reign.” The rough estimates of Homeric time, the wide, veering guesses at the date of the Homeric stories, the generations that pass unrecorded—all that belongs to a different conceptual universe. For Sinuhe—whatever the historical truth—the pharaohs had ruled as far back in time as it was possible to imagine. Peace had prevailed, one pharaoh had succeeded another, cosmically great, unaddressably powerful, each handing the throne to his successor in a single direct linear sequence. The heart of happiness for these Egyptians was submission to that authority. The pharaoh “makes those born with him plentiful,” Sinuhe says. “He is unique, god-given. How joyful this land, since he has ruled. He extends his borders. He is the lord of kindness, great of sweetness. Through love he has conquered. His city loves him more than its own members.” Set that alongside the description of Agamemnon and his gift-giving in the
Iliad
, and you suddenly see him as a would-be pharaoh, a provincial satrap with ambitions beyond his reach, vulgarly attempting pharaonic status in the face of Achillean integrity.

The life of the Egyptian poor was miserable. They could expect to die when they were thirty-five, thousands lived in workhouses, obliged to sweat out their days in forced labor camps for the pharaonic regime and its monumental ambitions. But above them a bureaucratic middle class, Sinuhe's class—perhaps 1 percent of the population was literate—managed the culture of continuity. In their linen-dressed elegance, the sense of overwhelming crisis and disruption that colors the deepest levels of the Homeric world was not even considered. Life was continuity. There was no need to be heroic, nor did the Greek hunger for honor play any part. For the ancient Egyptians, goodness consisted of service to pharaonic authority. As there was no distinction between that authority and the government of the universe, this life could be considered a kind of anteroom to heaven. The more silent and stable it could be made, the better.

Sinuhe loves the white linen he wears every day, and all the order in the Residence where he works. He is no self-sufficient hero. No existential crisis or anxiety about his individual identity or destiny ever pursues him. Sinuhe is a “Follower” and “True Acquaintance” of the pharaoh. His life is defined by the authority he serves. One of his tasks is to look after the pharaoh's children, but at the moment his story begins, this steady, beautifully organized life is destroyed by a flash of panic. He hears something, a report of the old pharaoh's murder in the palace. He thinks he should not have heard it, and worried in this totalitarian state that he might somehow be caught up in the repercussions, or even held responsible, he runs for his life, away from Egypt, north to the borders of Syria, and on across them, traveling at night, hiding at the edges of fields until at last he comes to a part of the world called Upper Retjenu.

It is the Egyptian name for Lebanon and maybe for the places beyond it. But Retjenu as a word is not a Semitic form; it does not belong in the Near East. It is Indo-European, probably from the language spoken by the Lycians, warrior inhabitants of southwest Anatolia, known to Homer as allies of the Trojans. Sinuhe, in other words, has found himself far out in the wilds surrounded by the warrior culture of the north. He has arrived in the land described by Homer. It is not the sort of world he is used to. It is a good country, he says, with figs and grapes, more wine than water, honey and oil, with all kinds of fruit on its trees. Barley is there, and emmer-wheat, and “numberless are its cattle of all kinds.” It is called Iaa, the “rushy place,” damp, fertile, rich in pastures, a million miles from the Egypt into which he was born.

The experience is horrifying at first. “This is the taste of death,” Sinuhe says, panicking at the disorder around him. All the calm of Egypt was gone. But then Sinuhe falls in with a chieftain, a warrior prince, a Diomedes or Sarpedon, and the chieftain does what heroes do in these circumstances: gives him plenty of cooked meat and wine, and delicious roast birds. They go hunting together, and from the great herds of cattle without which the Indo-European chieftains felt naked he gives Sinuhe “milk in every cooked dish.” The mark of Homeric civilization: beef in white sauce.

And so Sinuhe goes native. He abandons his white linen for armor. He turns warrior. His children become heroes, “each man subjugating his tribe.” Battle, which was absent from the life of an Egyptian bureaucrat, something that happened out here in the rawness of life on the frontiers, away from the deep calm of the central Egyptian state, now becomes the norm. He plunders cattle and carries off men and women as slaves. He kills again and again, as the Indo-European hero must do, and he attains “high regard” in the heart of his lord and chieftain, who loves him, knowing his valor.

Then the crisis: the naturally fissive atmosphere of the Indo-European warrior band breaks into the open, and a situation not unlike the opening scenes of the
Iliad
suddenly erupts. As Sinuhe latter recalls:

A hero of Retjenu came to provoke me in my tent;

he was an unmatched champion who had conquered all the land.

He said he would fight me, he planned to rob me, and had a mind to plunder my cattle, on the advice of his tribe.

Honor, rivalry, dignity, the brutally assertive self, the demands of violence, the contempt for communality—suddenly you are in the world of the Greeks outside Troy, but portrayed in an Egyptian tale. It doesn't take much to imagine the shudder of anxiety in listeners at a party in Thebes one balmy evening in 1850
BC
, just as the sun was setting over the western desert and the shadows were lengthening over the Nile. Did people out there really behave like this?

Sinuhe accepts the challenge, triumphs over the nameless hero, shooting him in the neck with an arrow and then killing him with his own ax, shouting his own vaunting war cry over the fallen hero's back. But he is still an Egyptian, asking, in one of the most resonant questions for this moment in human history: “What can establish the papyrus on the mountain?” That is also the great Homeric question. What place can civilization have in a world dominated by the brute geological facts of violence and dominance? How fragile are the fibers of papyrus when set against the great rock-thrusts of the heroic world? Could these two ways of being ever be compatible?

Sinuhe is so successful as an Indo-European warrior that he ends up with more cows than he knows what to do with. Even so, an everlasting longing for Egypt lingers in his heart. “What matters more than my being buried in the land where I was born?” he asks. Somehow, the new pharaoh hears of Sinuhe's longing, and soon enough an invitation arrives from him for Sinuhe to return to Egypt, where he will be honored and forgiven. Sinuhe gives his property in Retjenu to his eldest son and returns to Egypt, where he “touches the ground between the sphinxes” and comes face to face with the god-king he reveres.

“Act against yourself no more,” the pharaoh tells him, and as he hears the words, Sinuhe feels himself reabsorbed into the fabric of Egyptian society. The king says “he shall not fear,” and Sinuhe is re-created as a courtier. He abandons himself to the happiness of the king's grace, prostrating himself before the pharaoh. Here in “the enduring security of the state” is the beauty of order to which he is at last allowed to return. He is rewarded with the things he has been dreaming of all the years he was away in the Homeric world.

I was appointed to the house of a prince

And costly things in it, with a bathroom in it,

And mirrors,

Clothes of royal linen

Myrrh and kingly fine oil

With officials whom the king loved in every room

And every serving man at his duty.

The years were made to pass from my limbs

I became clean shaven and my hair was combed

I was clad in fine linen

I was anointed with fine oil

I slept in a bed.

It is his majesty who has caused this to be done.

There is no other lowly man for whom the like was done.

I was in the favours of the king's giving

Until the day of landing came.

The “day of landing” was the Egyptian phrase for the moment of death, the time when a human being at last achieves the goal of a perfect life, and Sinuhe's return to Egypt is like a return to heaven. For all his adventuring, Egypt had originally made him what he was. Only there could he be himself again, and only by submitting to the Egyptian powers could his day of landing be good.

Our Odyssean frame of mind looks on that scene of Sinuhe's reabsorption into his native world as a moment not of triumph but of diminution, a surrender of the vital if agonized self to the emasculated certainties of a beautifully bathed, shaved, linen-coated “Follower.” Was it really worth exchanging his florid Indo-European hair and beard, that fullness of self-assertion, for the bland comfort-soup of a happy “landing”? Or are we, as Homer's heirs, merely addicted to crisis? Why not accept with Sinuhe, and the profoundly impressive longevity of Egyptian civilization, that the world of white linen and pharaonic tyranny is a better place than the discomforts of Retjenu and the threatening behavior of “heroes”? Are those heroes not in the end exactly as the Egyptians saw them, little better than human hyenas, repetitively needing to establish their sexual, genetic dominance of the pack? Surely human life has more to it than the Homeric tragedy of necessity? Or to put it in a more Sinuhesque way: is that necessity really necessary? Why not accept the virtues of modesty and the realities of power?

No Homeric character could ever have behaved like Sinuhe or have thought that his destiny was so bound up with the blessing the pharaoh and his court could bestow on him. Sinuhe ends up with a single answer: it is better to be at home, to submit, to recognize that power is god. Across the whole of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, there is nothing singular like this. The Homeric view of the world is essentially traumatic and multiple. All is in contention; power is something to be fought for, not accepted; the gods themselves are at each other's throats; nature may stand there as a beautiful background, but it too is drenched in conflict and pain. The claims of individual triumph can never be reconciled with the claims of communal love and society. We live in the great and eternal war between those principles,
Tim
ē
and
Aret
ē
, honor and virtue, self and other. Achilles sees that war as the source of human tragedy, Odysseus as the opportunity for self-advancement. And beyond them both stands Homer, the great voice of understanding, regarding us all, refusing to decide.

The Tale of Sinuhe
is a mirror image of Homer, exploring the polarities of city and warrior-world from the opposite direction. But there are also parallels between them. Sinuhe could be seen as the Egyptian Odysseus, the hero thrust out into the wilds, gaining wisdom there, doing well even in his exile, finally returning, full of apprehension, to the place he longs to call home. And in one marvelous detail, they are clearly part of the same thought-world. Both, on reaching home, become themselves again by having a bath.