This book is the result of a lifetime spent teaching the Iliad. Its first part puts a historian’s focus on how, where, and when the epic was composed, its second on the significance of the poem itself and its view of our human predicament. The approach is scholarly and based on a walker’s deep knowledge of Homer’s landscapes, but also entertainingly idiosyncratic, with much use of the personal voice. As one of few remaining Homerists to have been brought up among one of the last aristocracies, that of England, and a proud scion of its most aristocratic school, as he often tells us, Lane Fox has a better instinct for the ethos of Homer’s heroes than do most moderns. Since my first teenage job was to teach Latin to an Earl aged ten, whose family graciously admitted this plebeian to their Palladian hall through the main portal rather than the tradesman’s entrance, I can myself attest to Sarpedon’s ethos of noblesse oblige.
Lane Fox is (rightly) a Unitarian, because he not only believes each epic to be a unified whole, but holds that the Iliad and Odyssey have a single author, whom he calls Homer.[1] Much of the book is meant for a general audience, and rather than read Lane Fox’s summaries and translations of the Iliad Homerists may prefer the poem itself. Here I will focus on the book’s argumentative sections, where Lane Fox’s expertise in Iron Age Greece makes one expect fresh historical insights.
Lane Fox confirms that Homer knew personally the view of Samothrace from Troy, if not the springs at Pınarbașı (17); he could add more on the results of geophysical research by Manfred Korfmann’s team on the underground watercourse at Troy and the size of the bay where the Greek camp was. As for Homer’s origins, he defends the old consensus that several similes point to Ionia and Smyrna; his Iliadic focus makes him neglect the likelihood that the Odyssey was composed in Euboea, as its West Ionic dialectal forms and joke about Euboea (Od. 7.321) indicate. He rejects the Catalogue of Ships and Doloneia; yet neither differs from the rest in its stage of linguistic development, and both are integrated into the poem (Nestor borrows his son’s shield at Iliad 14.9–11 because the latter had lent his to Diomedes at 10.255–7). He thinks the epic was performed at a festival (71), but the hubbub of festivals is less suited to it than lengthy weddings or funeral games like Amphidamas’ would be. He supposes that Homer sang only at the beginning, and afterwards recited, presumably by analogy with the style of Avdo Međedović (but how can we know?).
Turning to the nature of the epic, his fine account of the long history of research into oral poetry brings in both South Slavic and Kyrgyz song. Lane Fox adds to our knowledge by pointing out that Wilhelm Radloff had already concluded from experience of Kyrgyz singers that it is ‘impossible that so enormous a work as Homer’s poetry could have survived a decade had it not been written down’ (90).[2] Lane Fox traces a line from the researches of Friedrich Krauss on Bosniac epic to that of Milman Parry, via Arnold van Gennep and Marcel Jousse (91–3). He deems Homer’s anonymity in terms of his teachers and home town significant, since such details would have been remembered if he had sung in the seventh century or later (106). He imaginatively draws out the implications of oral-composition-in-performance for the kind of subtleties that we should expect in such a poem and those that we should not (108). Like both Parry and Lord,[3] he cogently argues for a Homer who left behind a dictated text, composed by using all the resources that a rich oral tradition provides—formulae, typical scenes, story-patterns, and endless opportunities for rehearsal (118–28), and for whom the Iliad was a fixed text before the Odyssey was composed (114); he does not address Zlatan Čolaković’s revolutionary finding that Homer and Avdo Međedović were both post-traditional oral poets.[4] In discussing why the poems were written down, he rejects (126–7) my suggestion that Homer’s patron wished to preserve the poems because kingly rule was beginning to come under attack, by conflating ‘aristocratic’ with ‘kingly’ rule. The Iliad explores the misbehaviour of monarchs, just as the Odyssey explores that of aristocrats, viz. the suitors. But both poems do reflect traditional images of authority just when, in the eighth century, aristocrats were starting to impose term limits and other restrictions on kings; moreover, political theory did exist back then—οὐκ ἀγαθὴ πολυκοιρανίη, εἷϲ κοίρανοϲ ἔϲτω. Lane Fox is right that a dictated text would have been a valuable possession for the poet’s heirs, but where would they have obtained the means to create it, unless Homer were to have been a prince himself?
So when was the poem written down? Lane Fox prefers c.780–750, on the ground that writing was sufficiently well established by then and that Nestor’s cup from Ischia refers to Homer’s Nestor (134–9). He sees Homeric allusion in Tyrtaeus but also in Hesiod’s word ὁμηρεῦϲαι at Th. 39 (141–2). The clearest material termini post quos for Homer’s date are Agamemnon’s gorgoneion at Il. 11.36–7, which is an orientalizing shield of the mid-seventh century but certainly interpolated,[5] and Hera’s earrings at Il. 14.182–3, Early Geometric II in date. Lane Fox takes these to be ‘mid ninth century’ (175–6), but Nicholas Coldstream’s absolute chronology of the Iron Age Aegean faces a stiff challenge from new sets of radiocarbon dates at Sindos in Macedonia and Sidon in Lebanon, which suggest that the chronology of the whole period between c.1150 and 735 needs to be revised upward, in the earlier phases by over a century. If so, the date of the invention of the alphabet will need to be raised well into ninth century.[6] But Lane Fox’s arguments for an eighth-century dating of Homer, summarized at 182–3, are likely to remain cogent.
Surprisingly for such a romantic, who confesses to having run naked around the walls of Troy (151), Lane Fox denies that the Greeks remembered a Trojan War, although he accepts that King Alakšandu of Wilusa bore the Greek name Alexandros (147–8). However, the Hittite treaty with this ruler, alone of thirty-three such treaties, discusses the royal succession; since this fact can be tied to the Mycenaean system whereby kingship passed from father to son-in-law, a war over the succession is far from excluded.[7] Similarly, Lane Fox deems the story of the Minotaur and labyrinth an invention based on the ruins of Knossos (155–6), though Minoan bull-leaping and ‘the lady of the labyrinth’ on Knossos tablet Gg702 support its Bronze Age origin.[8] Instead he follows M. I. Finley in seeking the origin of Homer’s legends in the Iron Age. Homerists need expertise in both periods.
Some minor slips: the earliest portrayal of an individual on a Greek coin is Themistocles on the coins of Magnesia that he himself minted, not Homer on those of Ios (6 with Plate 3, where the coin is bronze, not silver). Hittite Taruisa is generally referred to the region of Troy and Wilusa to the town of Ilium, not the reverse (32). The Linear B for lyre-player, λυρᾱτᾱϲ, is ru-ra-ta (78). Phrases like φάϲγανον ἀργυρόηλον may go back not just to 1300 bce (79), but to Shaft Grave period, when such swords appear. The genitival endings -οιο and -ου differ by date rather than by dialect (85), since the latter is contracted via -οο from the former. Parry’s death (103) was surely a murder (see BMCR 2021.11.27).
To sum up, this is an (almost) state-of-the-art discussion of the date and origin of the Homeric Iliad, melded with a fine personal account of the impact of the poem as a profound meditation on our human condition in what remains a dangerous world.
Notes
[1] L.F. ought not to doubt (3 with n. 8) that Callinus (fr. 6 West) was first to mention Homer by name, since it is harder to emend ΚΑΛΑΙΝΟϹ in Paus. 9.9.5 to ‘Callisthenes’. As Callisthenes quoted Callinus (fr. 5b) for Ionian history, when in fr. 8 the MSS of Strabo 14.4.3 vary between the two names we should read Καλλῖνοϲ δὲ ⟨καὶ⟩ Καλλιϲθένηϲ.
[2] пoэма такого объема как песня Гомера не могла бы сохраниться в народе даже продолжение одного десятилетия, если бы не была записана. I had to hunt to find out when Radloff became the first to make this crucial point (Образцы народной литературы Северних тюркских племен (St. Petersburg, 1885), xx).
[3] M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. A. Parry (Oxford, 1971), 451; A. B. Lord, ‘Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts’, TAPA 84 (1953) 124–34.
[4] ‘Avdo Međedović’s post-traditional epics and their relevance to Homeric studies’, JHS 139 (2019) 1–48.
[5] As is often noted, the Gorgon’s head lolls uncomfortably in the same place as the central shield-boss of cyanus, and the couplet is better deleted. For a similar insertion of allegorical figures like Deimos and Phobos cf. Il. 18.535–8, which are demonstrably based on [Hes.] Sc. 156–9.
[6] S. Gimatzidis, ‘Greek Dates and Chronologies Revised: the Historical and Archaeological Context of the Radiocarbon Dates from Sindos’, in E. Kaiser and W. Schier, Time and Materiality (Vienna 2021), 83–107; id., ‘The Geometric pottery from Sidon and its implications for Aegean chronology’, Museum 54 (2021) 443–78. Likewise, by Coldstream’s chronology Euboeans settled at Pithecussae in c.775 (181), but Euboeic pottery made there is present in the earliest layers at Carthage, dated by radio-carbon to before 800, and the earliest alphabetic inscription, that from Gabii near Rome, is dated by the same method to no later than 825 (Latial IIB2).
[7] R. Janko, ‘Helen of Troy—or of Lacedaemon?’, in J. J. Price and R. Zelnick-Abramovitz, Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama: Essays in Honor of Margalit Finkelberg (London and New York 2020), 118–31.
[8] Even so remote an event as the Santorini eruption was remembered in a family tradition from Ceos versified by Pindar (Pae. 4.35–45): see W. D. Taylour and R. Janko, Ayios Stephanos: Excavations at a Bronze Age and Medieval Settlement in Southern Laconia (London, 2008), 589–90.