Odyssey 10.503-74

We’ve already had two members of Odysseus’ crew named, amongst a number of occasions where they speak in chorus. Sometimes we get the convention that ‘one on this side’ and ‘one on t’other’ says what follows, even though it is but a single speech enacted by a solo performer. There was Polites (‘Citizen’), the one Odysseus cared (or worried) most about (κήδιστος), who could not resist responding to the sound of a goddess’ voice. And there is Eurylochus (‘Broad-Ambush’) the antagonist, an annoying coward who nevertheless, like Thersites in the Iliad, speaks discomfiting truth to power. Now we meet young Elpenor (‘Man of Hope’), who seems most unfortunately to be used by Homer, or his present narrator Odysseus, to make some sort of point. The thing is, poor Elpenor makes this point by dying.

Who are you Elpēnor?

What is it that you’re here for?

Why did Homer make you live

To break your neck on Circe’s floor?

Who are you, sweet Elpēnor, and wherefore?

Circe has just given Odysseus assurance he needn’t worry about finding a guide to reach Hades. From where she is, apparently, it only takes a steady push from Boreas, the north wind, to get your vessel there. Hades must be somewhere to the south. But Circe does not predict or describe any sort of sea-crossing to which we have been used so far, such as crossing over the ‘deep’ (πόντος) or the ‘sea’ (θάλασσα); this is to be a crossing through a creature Homer calls Oceanus (Ὠκεανός):

Let’s not have your need for a guide on ship concern you,

But stand the mast, furl the white sails,

And sit back: the breath of Boreas, you see, will carry her.

But whenever it is, by ship, you cross through Oceanus,

There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—

Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (Od.10.505-10)

If they’ve been identified correctly, these are riparian trees. We are of course in the habit of using ‘ocean’ to refer to the biggest bodies of salt water in our environment. But no part of this decadent usage can have anything to do with the referent Homer intends. Oceanus is a stream or river, not an ocean, evidently running fresh water. On the shield of Achilles, it is described as a river which is set into the shield’s outermost rim, as though it ran right ’round the cosmos inscribed within.

Needless to say, we do not presently observe any such seemingly liquid ring around the world. It will therefore take some effort of imagination to realise what Homer may be describing or referring to.

Homer describes the constellation of the Bear as at the pole of the world and the centre of the shield. It spins upon itself and never sets, as only a constellation at the pole would appear to do. But this is an impossible configuration according to the dogmas of modern astronomy, which see the earth’s present motions and attitudes as the only ones of which it was capable in human memory. In particular, a back-calculation of the present precession of the equinoxes will never result in the north pole, presently pointed at the star Polaris in the Little Bear, being located within the Great Bear. (For Homer it was simply ‘the Bear’; Ursa Minor only became a ‘thing’ in later times. The Phoenicians are supposed to have taught it to the Greeks, likely because it had replaced the Bear as the asterism to navigate by.) Current theories attribute the precession to multi-body gravitational dynamics, and so to be somewhat variable, but if we take ancient measurements seriously, as we ought, it has slowed down significantly. It is reasonable to wonder if a sudden displacement of the pole within the chronology of human history may not have left a remnant wobble in the earth’s equilibrium, from which it is gradually recovering.

Note above how the artist has replaced the Bear at the centre with the sun’s chariot surrounded by the zodiac. This is a symptom of the post-Copernican religious egoism, which Homer cannot be seen to violate. The obvious falseness of Homer’s description to their present sky at night was not lost on ancient authors. Aristotle picks out Homer’s use of οἴη ἄμμορος, ‘alone without a share’, used to describe the Bear’s unsinking property, as an example of ‘metaphor’. Elsewhere I have drawn out the implications of Aristotle’s comment:

… not just Aristotle but his whole audience feels that the only way currently to understand this line of Homer’s, readily evoked by its two opening words, is as an illustration of what the philosopher means by ‘metaphor’. Metaphor is the only option, by settled opinion, clearly because what the line literally means cannot be true! There is no dispute here, expressed or implied, about what that literal meaning really is; that would defeat the purpose of an illustrative example of metaphor. So here lies the key element in this tidbit from Aristotle: it leaves no doubt that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of Homer’s phrase is that the Bear alone did not set …

Much later Strabo, in the Roman era, tried to defend Homer’s veracity by claiming that what Homer really meant by the Bear (ἄρκτος) must have been the ‘Arctic Circle’, or the ‘Bear’s Circle’ (ἀρκτικὸς κύκλος). One cannot navigate by the Arctic Circle, however, without going ’round in circles. One needs a fixed point. In our skies there is but one. Calypso asks Odysseus to keep the Bear to his left as he pushes off in his raft. If the Bear was a polar bear, her instruction has shown him how to head due east.

Always remember that Classicists, mythologists, astronomers, archaeologists, historians, biologists, and all manner of non-professional folk presume an awful lot about the layout of the earth and the sky in Homeric and other ancient times. (Within ‘Homeric’ we might also distinguish between the time of the telling and the time of the action.) Mainly the presumption is that nothing has changed in these things, except very slowly, which is an absurdly false one when it comes to the earth and the sky; it is a presumption in the modern uniformitarian ‘sciences’ as well, where only presently observable processes, mostly gradual, are allowed to be responsible for the manifold phenomena confronting us. These include miles-high mountains, miles-deep trenches, and vast canyons all on a supposedly gravitating sphere; the diversity of biological genera living and dead; ‘Ice Ages’; and the planet Venus. There are seashells and the bones of Amphitrite’s salt water creatures at the tops of the Himalayas. These presumptions should therefore be characterised as reflecting one or more of the developmental neuroses, or to sensory-cognitive after-effects comparable to those of brainwashing.

If we are to take Homer seriously—and what has there been written since, which should more demand our attention and discernment than the educator of Greece and Rome—then we must take his usage seriously. Homer’s comedy is serious business, unlike whatever can be meant by ‘epic’. Other musical geniuses, not only Beethoven and Bach but also Pindar and Sophocles, are allowed to remain eruptions into the timeline of human consciousness. But academic types don’t care for geniuses, especially ones they don’t themselves produce and nominate. The poet whom Pindar and Sophocles no doubt considered the greatest genius of them all is made out to be, at a deeply formative level, a product of an oral tradition. Such a tradition is entirely an invented postulate of the modern academy. It depends on the concept of a ‘metrical formula’, which in turn depends on ignoring all the marks of accentuation introduced into Homer’s text by the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era—a time when the Bear was not at the pole.

Metre is not prosody. Metre was originally performed by the feet, as the chosen name for the metrical unit, ‘foot’ (πούς), still attests. Prosody is accent (προσῳδία), ‘applied song’, performed by the voice. When these Greek accents, sharply rising and heavily falling in pitch, are applied to a metrical pattern, they produce rhythm as well as melody. The graphic accent marks demonstrate prima facie that the text of Homer, which the Alexandrians preserved and restored, was understood by them to be a musical score. If you ignore all the notes in a modern musical score, all you’ll find left are pitch-free metrical formulas. Beethoven and Homer instead generated scores that were demonstrably all three of the following: metrical (look to the time signature), rhythmic (look to the note durations and the bar lines), and melodic (look to your singing heart and the twist in your spine).

It should be clear that I find that neither Homer’s compositions nor the truth have been well served either by modern Homeric Studies or by modern science. What depresses is the extraordinary arrogance of academic closed shops, like the oral theory of Homer or gravitational cosmology. There is more than is dreamt of or realised in their philosophies, in the word-music of Homer. It may be that Homer was in some way connected, more or less intimately, to a tradition of versifying. He certainly paints more like a connoisseur than a neophyte. But how could we ever know who or what constituted such a tradition? The ‘oral tradition’ variegating now for generations like obsessive worldbuilding, is entirely based on the concept of the metrical formula: a notion that multitudes of phrases were transmitted in packets like so many clichés, to be available prepackaged to an improvising performer without, miraculously, becoming frozen or opaque in meaning over the passage of time.

Words carry meaning, and hence the transmission of phrases is meaningful tradition. But metre is not what the words con...