Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson Page A

goddess,” as Ezra Pound described her, set them on their way. They have no choice. Only Tiresias can tell them the way home. They have made all their tackle secure and provided themselves with food and drink. The wind has joined the crew and is now there alongside the helmsman, guiding “the black ship in the bright sea” as their companion. But neither Odysseus nor any of his men is making this voyage with any hint of delight. This is a journey down and under the world, into the dark places, into themselves as much as to the edge of the physical universe. As the wind holds fair for them, they sit on their benches and grieve. Big, heart-wrenching tears fall on the pale timbers of the deck. The wind is taking them toward a terrifying destination, the place of death which Odysseus has so far exercised all his wit and skill to avoid. The wind knows nothing of that and propels their ship onward, its red-painted bows plunging and rising with each oncoming sea, the swells breaking and surging around the stempost, while above that foam of life the wind never falters or wavers.
    The wind catches the sail, bellying it out, and the blue-shadowed waves resound under the fore-foot of the running ship as she lies over on her course and races out to sea.
    Thus with stretched sail, we go over sea till day’s end.
    Sun to his slumber, shadows over ocean.

 
    4 • SEEKING HOMER
    All modern versions of Homer are descendants of the edition made by a French nobleman, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison. In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St. Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad that seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC , sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the “ germana et sincera lectio ,” the real and uncorrupted reading.
    Villoison thought he had discovered the essence of a work by a single poet called Homer. But he had sown the seeds of his own demise. The idea was already in the air in the eighteenth century that Homer was not one poet but many, and that the poems were the product of a whole culture, not an individual genius. Villoison’s discovery turned out to be the Copernican moment. The mass of alternative readings rejected by the Alexandrian scholars itself threw doubt on the idea of a single great original text. They had chosen to make a single Homer, but farther back in time it seemed as if there were multiple Homers to choose from. William Cowper, the English lover and translator of Homer, read Villoison and stood aghast at the fragmentation of his hero. As he wrote to his friend the Reverend Walter Bagot in the winter of 1790, “I will send you some pretty stories from [Villoison] which will make your hair stand on end, as mine has stood on end already, they so horribly affect, in point of authenticity, the credit of the works of the immortal Homer.”

    The title page of the 1788 Iliad edited by Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison.
    Homer now was not one but many, and most of them were obscure. In 1795 Villoison was challenged by the young, highly analytical German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. How could Villoison tell if the decisions made by the Alexandrian editors were the right ones? Surely what Villoison had published was evidence that the Iliad , as they all knew it, was a set of late, corrupt and unreliable texts, brought together in one poem but with their origins in bardic songs which had been radically altered by