The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson

papyrus fragments, including the Hawara Iliad, also have marginal notes from these editors.

      It is difficult to escape the idea that the Alexandrian editors, who seem to have limited themselves to commentary rather than cuts, wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurise him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city, to make of him precisely the dignified monument which the family of the young woman in Hawara had placed beneath her head in death. There was a long tradition of treating Homer like this.

      In Plato’s Republic, written in about 370 BC, Socrates maintained that Homer would be catastrophic for most young men in the ideal city. Poetry itself was suspect, and dangerous if it disturbed the equilibrium of the citizen, but in some passages Homer stepped way beyond the mark. He quotes the beginning of Book 9 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is about to sit down to dinner in the beautiful palace of the king of the Phaeacians.

      Nothing, Odysseus says, is more marvellous in life than sitting down to a delicious dinner with your friends, the table noisy and the waiter filling the glasses. ‘To my mind,’ Odysseus says cheerfully, looking round him at his new friends who have saved him from the unharvestable sea, ‘this is the best that life can offer.’ Not for Socrates or his pupil Plato:

      Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.

      That frame of mind undoubtedly governed the editing process in Alexandria, and its presumptions appear at every turn. Towards the end of Book 8 of the Iliad, Hector is making a speech to the Trojans. It has been a long and terrible day on both sides. Among the many dead, Priam’s son Gorgythion had been hit hard in the chest with an arrow.

      Just as a poppy in a garden, heavy

      with its ripening seeds, bends to one side

      with the weight of spring rain;

      so his head went slack to one side,

      weighed down by the weight of his helmet.

      Night is now falling, and Hector is encouraging the Trojans to prepare themselves for the following day. He has been like a hound in the battle, pursuing the Greeks as if they were wild boar, slashing and strimming at their legs in front of him, his eyes glittering in the slaughter like the god of battle. The corpses had piled up on the field like the swathes of a hay meadow newly mown and yet to be gathered. There is scarcely room for a body of men to stand together. Now, though, Hector has summoned the Trojans ‘to a place that was clear of the dead’, and speaks to them of the state they are in. They should feed their horses, light fires, roast the meat of sheep and oxen, drink ‘honey-hearted wine’ and eat their bread. In Troy itself, the old men and the young boys should stand on the walls and the women light great fires in their houses, all to keep a watch so that the Greeks should not ‘ambush’ them. The word he uses is lochos, the same as will be used in the Odyssey to describe the Greeks hiding in the Trojan Horse, and which has as its root lechomai, meaning ‘to lie down’. The implications are clear: the Trojans stand to fight; the Greeks do so cheatingly, creepingly. The ambush, the covert attack, is the kind of violence the Greeks would do. This is Hector speaking as the man of the city, defending it against the treachery of its assailants, a man who in almost every line is the voice of his community.

      The Alexandrian editors accepted these noble statements without demur. In these passages Hector fitted the idea of restrained nobility which the Hellenistic Greeks required of Homer. But Hector then moves up a gear and goes on to speak of the next day and of himself. The Greeks are no better than ‘dogs, carried by the fates on their black ships’. Hector will go for Diomedes in the morning, and Diomedes will lie there, ‘torn open by a spear, with all his comrades dead around him’. And Hector himself will be triumphant:

      If only

      I were as sure of immortality, ageless all my days –

      And I were prized as they prize Athene and Apollo.

      A peppering of special marks in the margin, hooks and dots, all carefully transcribed by the Byzantine scholars, signals the Alexandrian editors’ anxiety at the vulgarity of these lines.

      This apparent self-promotion and self-assertion: can that really be what 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 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 civilisation and its raging opposite.

      Compare Hector’s words with the speech made by 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 1st 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.

      ‘We 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 towards the enemy, and the sense that he is speaking as the representative of a great civilisation 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-aggrandisement 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 moralised 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 who then reappeared in the battle a few lines later; if he repeated a line or group of lines with no variation; if it seemed as if something had been pushed into the poem at a later date; or if Homer’s ancient words simply didn’t make sense to Hellenistic