Free Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

Homer intended for him? In the third century BC , Zenodotus, the first librarian at Alexandria appointed by the Ptolemies, rejected the line about the fates and their black ships. Aristarchus, his great second-century successor, agreed with him. And when Hector went on to claim immortality, Aristarchus thought his words “excessively boastful,” not the done thing, and highly suspect. In Aristarchus’s mind, although not entirely clearly, these lines were probably not Homeric.
    It is as if these editors were trying to make Homer into a proto-Virgil, to turn Hector into Aeneas, to transform the Greek epics into tales of irreproachable moral instruction, and in doing so to reduce their emotional and psychological range. But Homer was greater than his editors, rougher, less consistent and less polite, a poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite.

    A page from the Byzantine Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad with editorial anxiety marks in the margin.
    Compare Hector’s words with the speech made by the British officer, lieutenant colonel Tim Collins in the Kuwaiti desert about twenty miles south of the Iraqi border on 19 March 2003, the eve of the allied invasion of Iraq. Collins had found a place where he could address the men of the First Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment. In his Ray-Bans, with his cigar in his hand and a certain swagger, speaking off the cuff to about eight hundred men standing around him in the middle of a dusty courtyard, he spoke as Homer had Hector speak.
    â€œWe go to liberate, not to conquer,” Collins began, half remembering echoes of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Yeats, all mingling with the modern everyday in his ear.
    We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
    Alongside that restraint and magnanimity toward the enemy, and the sense that he is speaking as the representative of a great civilization himself, is something else. “I expect you,” he said, addressing his young soldiers, most of them from poor Catholic northern Irish backgrounds,
    to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose … The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction … As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity … If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.
    Hector wants his men to rock the Greeks’ world. There is an element of pretension and self-aggrandizement in both of them, but the modern British officer and the Bronze Age poet both know more than the scholar-editors in their Alexandrian halls. Homer’s subject is not elegance but truth, however terrible.
    The Alexandrians were keen on more than a moralized Homer. Their huge and careful gathering of texts from across the ancient world and from any passing ship was a complex inheritance, a braided stream they tried to purify and make singular, to make one Homer where previously there had been many.
    They did their job with scholarly decorum, sometimes deleting lines from the text they bequeathed to the future, usually in their commentaries doing no more than casting doubt on what Homer was meant to have said, marking the text with a skewer, an obelos , in the margin, as if to pin the error to the spot. If Homer got things wrong—killing off a warrior