The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson

choice.

      It was also performed with enormous elaboration at the four-yearly festival of the Panathenaia, where, at least according to Eustathius, a twelfth-century Byzantine bishop of Thessalonica, the reciters of the Odyssey wore sea-purple and of the Iliad earth-red costumes, ‘the purple on account of Odysseus’s wanderings at sea, the red on account of the slaughter and bloodshed at Troy’. If the Odyssey men were soaked in the royal purple dye of the Phoenicians and those of the Iliad in the blood of the heroes, nothing could be clearer about the role Homer played in classical Athens’s idea of itself. At their most holy and self-conscious moment, the Athenians gathered for total immersion in the Homeric stories, drinking up the tales from which most of the great tragedies drew their plots and characters, thinking of Homer as the source of what they were.

      A clan of reciters from Chios on the eastern side of the Aegean, calling themselves the Homeridae, claimed to be Homer’s descendants and to have his precious poems in manuscript handed down to them by the great man their ancestor. There is no telling if there is any truth in that, but, under the Athenian surface, the main constituent of the Greek in which the epics are written is Ionic, which was spoken in Chios and other parts of western Anatolia. And there is an early piece of evidence for Chios in the so-called Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, written in Homeric hexameters, when the singer himself says:

      Remember me in after time whenever any one of the men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: ‘Who do you think, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?’ Then answer, each and all of you, with one voice: ‘He is a blind man, and lives in rocky Chios: his songs are forever supreme.’ As for me, I will carry your fame as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true.

      The Iliad also knows that country, not only the shape of the land around Troy, but the habits of the wind, the form of islands and the nature of the sea there. If Homer needs to turn for a comparison to a specific place, the choice he usually makes is there too.

      Chios lies only seven miles off the Turkish coast. Its dry limestone gorges push deep into its mountains and, on the bench of flat arable land beside the sea, acre after acre is covered in olive groves, vineyards and the dark, irregular mastic bushes, the source of a clear chewable gum, much valued in antiquity.

      The huge harbour at Chios town is almost empty of shipping now – a few yachts, a ferry, one or two container ships – but is still surrounded by the cafés on the port side, the banging of dominos on tables, the bales of stuff awaiting collection. Behind them are the crumbling neo-classical villas of the Chiote merchant class who in the nineteenth century made their fortunes trading around the Mediterranean. Chios is what it always has been: a commercial island, outward-looking – there are still some powerful ship-owning families here – and with its foundations resting on the products of the earth, the red wine, loved by Virgil, famous across the whole Mediterranean for its blackness, and the pungent, peppery green island oil.

      Far to the south of Chios town, a rare and extraordinary ghost of the Homeric world can be recovered. A narrow road curls its way down the length of the island. Drought is all around you, a blazing sky and burningly bright rocks. In among the rocks are the cisterns, the beautiful dark and buried places of cool and conservation, an eye of water at their heart, roofed in stone, protected from the sun. In a landscape of such exposure and harshness, the cistern seems like the guarantee of continuity.

      All this defines a dry world. It doesn’t rain in Chios from the beginning of June until the end of October. What rain has fallen in the winter sinks into the ground and emerges from the rock reservoirs as springs. There the soil gathers and the fertility builds in a landscape which is otherwise bones. The result is a kind of sharpness, super-definition, a world polarised between the inhabited and the bare, the habitable and the desolate.

      In places like this, the growing of human sustenance can only be governed by the presence of water. Where the springs emerge, vryses in modern Greek, is where the vegetable gardens are. ‘I am going to the springs’ means ‘I am going to the gardens.’ The roots of that word stretch far back into ancient Greek, from bruein, which when it describes water means ‘to gush out’, ‘to bubble up’, ‘to spring’. But further than that bruein means ‘to be full to bursting’, to swell, to abound, to be luxuriant, to teem with produce. It is the verb of emergent life.

      Beyond the gardens full of grapes and figs, pomegranates, plums and blackberries, those miraculous concentrations of sugar and juice in the damp corners of the island, often away from houses, the dry country stretches, the world of drought in which everything that grows infiltrates its roots between the rocks and is defended against the grazing and browsing teeth of the animals that would devour it. The leaves that survive are either bitter or armoured in thorns. Even the thorns are branched, thorns with thorns on them. Settlement here cannot choose to dispose itself carelessly as it can in a temperate or wooded country. Life must be concentrated: the city, the village, the gathered place is a necessary response to a landscape in which life is thin on the ground.

      Almost at the southern tip of the island, Emporio is little more than a scatter of one or two buildings and a taverna, a stub of a quay at which the fishing boats are tied up, a looped horseshoe of a harbour, a grey beach on which the Aegean laps. Its name means ‘the trading centre’, the emporium, which may also have been the name of this small settlement in antiquity. Here, in June 1952, came two of the great men of Homeric studies in the second half of the twentieth century: a young English archaeologist, John Boardman, then Deputy Director of the British School at Athens, with the young architect Michael Ventris, the man who would soon decipher Linear B, the written language of Mycenaean Greece.

      They walked up from the harbour – ‘a well-girt man carrying nothing in his hands can today reach the acropolis from the harbour side in twenty minutes without serious loss of breath’ – and high above the valley, on top of a dry, conical hill overlooking the little harbour, they found an ancient settlement, a rocky citadel, heavily walled against raiding pirates, the workmanship of the masonry, Boardman reported, ‘wretched throughout’.

      It was no great city, but a rather poor and abandoned village, probably built in about 800 BC, with outside the acropolis walls some small, stepped and paved, walkable streets between one- or two-roomed houses. There are stables and granaries beside them. The scale is domestic, and because nothing was built here later, everything is clear on the ground, looking much as it did when abandoned in 600 BC. The tall white spires of the asphodels glow on the stony, lizardy hillsides. Inside the acropolis walls there is a small temple to Athene (Boardman and Ventris found little votive shields in there, given by fighting men to the warlike goddess) and a megaron, a large columned room about sixty feet long and twenty wide, a gathering hall, with the stone bases of three wooden columns down its centre. Perhaps eighty people could have met here. It is not unlike a Saxon or Viking mead-hall, in which the sagas or Beowulf would have been heard or sung. It is the great house of the settlement, the only one inside the acropolis walls, and with a commanding view from its columned porch down across the hill to the harbour below. Boardman found little inside, a few pieces of pottery with a ‘heavy cream slip’, the handle of a wine jug, but stand in here now and you can start to feel your way towards the Homeric world of the eighth century.

       The megaron at Emporio, Chios.

      Beyond the lee of the island, the Aegean sparkles under the north wind. On the far shore, grey mountains step back into the Asian mainland – a promise of scale and richness outside the constraints of island life. The eighth-century sea is full of threat, and even in the sunshine, as cigarette smoke disappears in the brilliance of the light, Emporio feels carefully held back, marginal, defensive. It is cleverly designed so that the harbour can be seen from the acropolis, but the acropolis is almost invisible from the harbour. You can watch the people down there in the taverna, where the fish are smoking on the griddles, and they will not know.

      Boardman thought that about five hundred people might have lived here, in about fifty houses