The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson

me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.

      No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in Book 3 of the Odyssey, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in Book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso’s island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in Book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea-salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, coloured by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very centre of the Odyssey, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.

      In the Iliad, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in Book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a sea shore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon’s terror:

      So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once,

      where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,

      praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth

      that they might bring the proud heart of great Achilles

      round with speed and ease.

      It is also the place of grief, where later in the Iliad, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night to

      wander in anguish, aimless along the surf, and dawn on dawn

      flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.

      As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawnlit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf: no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.

      As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer than the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The set-up for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These are the scenes which have the oldest form of Greek in them, and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.

      And so today a friend – Martin Thomas – stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying not shouting the goodbye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulae, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment, and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.

      So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudder-stock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?

      Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So, today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.

      But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice, and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.

      Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is ‘rosy-fingered’, but she also sometimes sits ‘on her golden throne’ as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear ‘her veil the colour of saffron’, krokopeplos, the crocus-cloth, the warmest colour in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of wellbeing and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the colour is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and ‘strike the sea with their oars’.

      That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can’t help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke – a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping on to the perfect skin of the sea – I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.

      But you long for wind. You imagine wind before it comes. You look for it on the water. None of this is far from praying for wind, or even sacrificing for it. Part of the Homeric ritual is to make a libation to the goddess as you leave. And the goddess whom you choose summons her own kind of wind. So Athene, never moderate, owl-eyed, all-seeing, sharp beyond all human understanding, sends a fierce wind for Telemachus as he heads out from Ithaca to find his father, a wind from the west ‘that bellowed roaring over the wine-coloured sea’. His voyage is anxious, uncertain, driven by that demanding mentor.

      At the same time, somewhere else in the realms of fantasy and loss, his father is being given a wind by the amorous goddess Calypso who has imprisoned him on her island of deliciousness for the last seven years. He has been sitting weeping on the shore, longing for home. Now at last she will release him, and her wind is like her, all-embracing, warm and seductive, a sleep-with-me wind sending him on his way. He spreads his sail gladly to it, a bosom of wind, wafting him away from her comforts to the world of truth and reality.

      As the wind comes, they hoist ‘the white sail’, the sail fills, ‘and the wind and the helmsman guide the ship together’. It is an act of cooperation between man and the world, a folding in of human intention with what the world can offer. The ship is a beautifully made thing, as closely fitted as a poem, as much a mark of civilisation as any woven cloth, and the wind in the Odyssey, when it is a kind wind, is a ‘shipmate’, another member of the crew. It is not the element in which you sail but a ‘companion’ on board. The human and divine dimensions of reality meet in it.

      And now, when I am out in the sound, and the right wind comes, I think of it like that, as something else to be welcomed aboard. That coming of the wind is a moment when you can’t help but smile, when the world turns in your favour. It is also a moment of extraordinary potency in Homer, never more than when in the Iliad the Trojans find themselves in a terrifying and difficult phase of the battle and things are against them, until they see