Victor Davis Hanson: The Real History Behind Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey,” is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of “The Odyssey.” And a lot of people have criticized it; a lot of people like it. 

I’m gonna talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sami Wink and I have talked variously about it. 

But I wanted to today just talk about “The Odyssey” as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions. 

We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan War probably occurred somewhere between 1200 BC and 1100 BC, in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece. 

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Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers, but their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more Near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians. 

In other words, they had palaces that, in sort of a totalitarian fashion, parceled out food and shelter and land, and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearing house, all recorded on Linear B tablets: the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not been invented yet. 

So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable, centrally located palaces in Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Gla or Thebes or Mycenae or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction. 

There was not a lot of independent, autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy, and when they get back, what they find is not good. Odysseus comes back; suitors are in his house. 

Agamemnon comes back; he’s killed. Ajax doesn’t come back. I could go on, and that might reflect the oral poetry’s attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Mycenaean event.  

So what’s happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw one-tenth of the population survive, and there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building, none of the signs of the Mycenaean prosperity and security. 

It was a dark age: a small, scattered, decentralized population, more goat, sheep, and cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people. 

During this depression era, I guess we would call it analogous to the European Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth century AD to nine hundred AD, all writing of the Mycenaeans was lost. People lost all knowledge of what had gone on and after, oh, we could say 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect. 

This was the era of Greek mythmaking. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace in ruins, he said, “The Cyclops must have built it.” 

Or if he fell into a tholos tomb, he’d say, “There were great demigods who built this.” And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputedly was, but they kept the stories alive. 

Now, we only have two of them: “The Odyssey,” about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War, and “The Iliad,” a four- or five-day snapshot of the 10-year-long war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamemnon, etc., etc. 

In these oral poems, then, Homer would get together with people, and over about a day and a half, almost two days, he would recite 1,200 lines, the entire poetry, by memory. 

Now, because things repeat, one-third of the poem is repeated. That’s the way the oral poet composed. So if he wanted to move from the Calypso scene back to a very different atmosphere on Ithaca, then he could just plug in entire type scenes: how to build a raft, how to build a fire. 

And these repetitions can be from the noun-adjective, swift-footed Achilles, long-suffering Odysseus, or they can be a whole line or a whole page in a modern text, but it was not written down. Somehow, Homer was probably the last generation in this bardic tradition when the city-state reemerged under a Western concept that we would call Western civilization. 

Sophisticated learning, writing returns with a Phoenician alphabet, history, rhetoric, science, all of that starts to reemerge, or get born maybe is a better word, and the last version of Homer is written down, and the bardic tradition ends.  

So Homer then is the authoritative text for these stories, and we don’t know his predecessors. 

Now, very quickly: Well, what’s the history of it then? The history of, in “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad,” there’s little, tiny memories of Mycenaean civilization five or six hundred years earlier. In the second book of “The Iliad,” there’s a catalog of ships, and they name all the places where the Greeks came from. 

And believe me, Homer, in that period when he composed it, 750, had no idea where some of those places were. There’s a mention of a silver-studded long sword or a boar’s-tooth helmet. He doesn’t know what those are. He just knows that they sound old, and they’re carried down generation, generation, generation in the bardic oral tradition. 

We know that there are some grammatical forms that are not Ionic, like those that Homer composed when he was probably a resident of what is now western Turkey or the Cycladic Islands, I should say the islands near the coast of modern Turkey or Ionia. And we call that the Ionian dialect. That’s what most of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” are composed in. 

Remember, twelve thousand lines, but it’s in a hexameter, dactylic hexameter. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. The line ends don’t rhyme, but they have the same shared meter.  

And here and there, there’s what we call Arcadio-Cypriot grammatical signs, and that we know that when the Mycenaean palaces fell, people fled to Arcadia and Cyprus, and maybe some of their dialect got included into the bardic tradition. 

So there are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of bardic transmission, there’s a lot of Dark Age things. And that would be primacy of javelin throwing or archery over close combat, or it would be more tales of goat herdsmen and lamb herdsmen and cattle than olive growing or grain growing or grape growing. 

And then there’s the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60%: Homer being a unique genius and the one bardic poet we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had reemerged. 

We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world, and there is intensive agriculture. Laertes’ farm is intensively farmed. There are people in assemblies now that vote. We know in “The Iliad” there’s a mention of mass warfare, not just chariot or javelin or archery, but massed heavily armed people with spears that would resemble Homer’s own time, with phalanx or what we call hoplite warfare. 

Let me just finish then. What do critics get wrong? They criticize Christopher Nolan because there’s not Bronze Age armor, but there isn’t in Homer either. There are just little traces of evidence from the Mycenaean or Bronze Age. They criticize him because of the dialogue. Well, we don’t know. And that’s from a different translation by Emily Wilson. 

There are better translations. Richard Lattimore’s is the best. But the dialect in Homer is repetitive and, as I said, formulaic, and it doesn’t approximate what most people are speaking.  

So if you’re gonna criticize the colloquial verse of Matt Damon, you have a point in that Homer’s own poem, when people heard it in 750 orally recited, or they read it 100 years later when it was composed or redone with a written text, it would have sounded archaic and not necessarily colloquial. 

These are just some of the items that are in the background of Homer’s Odyssey, and to the degree that they frame a film version, or to the degree that a director should work within both the poem and the historic realities in which it was composed, I’ll talk about in a subsequent one of our talks. 

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