Heritage Month Day Seven: Homer

Happy Homer Day!

It is day seven of Heritage History month and today we celebrate the contributions of the Greek poet Homer. We are not interested here in debates about whether the Iliad and Odyssey had a single author. While it’s pretty clear that the tales preceded Homer’s writing of them, it was the fact that they were written that makes them part of our past—we are wholly severed from such oral traditions.

Homer has been said by some to be the Father of Western Civilization. WC of course is in many ways the combination of Greek philosophy and heroism, Roman civics, and Christian religion. Undoubtedly, Homer presents for us the archetypes and moral vision of the Heroic World that characterizes Greek antiquity.

One of the most important things about Homer, which is indeed representative of that world—and something we have lost—was observed by Thomas Carlyle in his History of Literature; namely, that Homer believed the things that he wrote. The modernist, obsessed only with “facts” and disinterested in the Myth, scoffs at such things. But Carlyle notes that it was not about whether Homer would swear to the propositions in a court of law, but rather that he expected his listeners (his readers) to let the stories shape their understanding of the world and the history that made them.

To believe that a story is true is to operate in light of the vision that it sets for you. This is an important point in dealing with the modern critics of Myth. The epic poems which recount the tales of our deep past record traditions and structure our understanding of where we came from. To dismiss them as fiction is an exercise is cultural deconstruction. Carlyle therefore wants us to recognize that Homer thought of them not as fiction, but as historical narrative, and expects those who come after to treat them the same.

Homer presents for us the tales and struggles of Odysseus, who lived a life of grand confrontation with the world of glory and tragedy. Odysseus is not a hero merely for his various overcomings, but for the journey that he took. And today, deep in our psyche, we have tendencies toward the praise of the hero and our disgust for the slothful. We refer to things as Trojan horses, and understand that seemingly impenetrable men and institutions always have an Achilles’ heel.

Homer provides for us fixed models of heroism and and dishonor. Their narratives functioned to provide for Greek aristocrats—unlike for our present day elite—the basis of the good life, characterized by honor, nobility, and higher purposes. While modern man, flooded with technological know-how, lavishes praise on himself for the rise in living standards and life-longevity, Homeric man would have considered a short heroic life full of glorious deed to be far superior to a long life of mediocrity and boredom.

“Ah, how shameless--the way these mortals blame the gods.
From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,
but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,
compound their pains beyond their proper share.”