A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald by Ralph J. Hexter, Robert Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

poems to the actual history and everyday reality of these cultures is one of fictional representation, indeed, layers of fictional representation not unlike the layers of an archeological site. Commentators occasionally still claim to find “memories of Mycenae” in the Homeric poems, in other words, references to artifacts such as a boar’s-tooth helmet or the Mycenaean features of a floor plan. Traces of distant memories they may be, but we must remember that for Homer and his poems they were in no sense “Mycenaean”: he and his audience had a generalized sense of the glories of their forebears, but this had not yet been given a specific time and locale through the work of archeologists and historical linguists.
    Likewise, in an age when travel was difficult, and when no one had the bird’s-eye view of the Mediterranean we get easily today from maps and satellite photographs, none of those in Homer’s audience would have been able to say where Homeric geography diverged from that of the real world. Indeed, given the localization of knowledge which would characterize such a culture, audiences in different places would react differently to the representation of the world. To judge from the areas which are described fairly clearly, it would appear that the Homeric audience knew the Greek mainland and the Aegean basin, including the western littoral of what wenow call Turkey (parts of which were “Greek” into the present century—the evacuation of Smyrna/Izmir dates only to 1921, and possession of Cyprus, just outside the Aegean, is still hotly contested). West of the Greek mainland, the geography seems to have become uncertain very quickly. Even the precise assignment of Ithaka and its fellow islands in Homer to the actual landmasses northwest of Greece in the Ionian Sea engages scholars in controversy, and despite the clever arguments of many students of Homer, I have no confidence that “Homer” ever laid eyes on Ithaka. I am confident that most of his audience had not, and thus would not have cared about the “accuracy” of his descriptions of features of the Ithakan landscape (e.g., cave of the nymphs, bay) that frequently exercise commentators. Still less would they have striven to locate the land of the Kyklopês or the Laistrygônes; we must imagine that even the directions such places evoked in Homer’s audiences varied depending on whether they lived in Boiotia or in Pylos, to the north or to the south. By the same token, Homer’s audience would not have presumed that his geography was
not
accurate: the point is that accuracy measured by our standards was not and could not have been an issue. To a listener who had never left his mountain village in Arkadia, an accurate description of the currents in the Dardanelles might sound more fantastic than the most outlandish tale of gigantic shepherds living in what would otherwise be a familiar landscape.
    Earlier I suggested an analogy between the layers of historical representation or memory in Homer and the multiple horizons of an archeological dig. In the poems, however, the layers are often mixed, unconsciously of course, to a degree that would give a professional archeologist nightmares. Homeric implements and weapons are at times bronze, at other times iron, simultaneous in Homer in a way that does not reflect the revolution in technology and warfare that the introduction of iron actually meant for Mediterranean cultures. The contradictory customs of bride-price and dowry coexist in a manner unparalleled in any culture known toanthropologists. But while Aegean archeology and anthropology cannot explain such features, the archeology of the poems and the anthropology of their performance can. It is common to cite as a comparable case the rewriting of history which the events of 778 C.E .—for which we have testimony in several contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles—underwent in the process of making the
Chanson de Roland
. Neither contemporary