Homer and the Passage of Time

 

Homer and the Passage of Time

A careful reading and systematic study of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the two foundational pillars of western literature, reveal both their enormity and their complexity. The Iliad explores the themes of wrath, revenge, war, mortality, love, honour and the struggle between the opposing forces of free will and fate, whereas the Odyssey turns on the interplay of the themes of hospitality, loyalty, vengeance and the longing for home and the return to it. Both works also delve into the role that the gods play in the doings and the lives of mankind over the length of time portrayed by their individual stories. A fundamental difference between the two works is the time span covered by the two lengthy poems, but the literary devices and techniques that Homer uses to treat the passage of those time frames are similar in both works.

We know from legend that the Trojan War lasted for 10 years and modern thinking actually suggests a date of 1194-1184 BC, but the Iliad itself narrates only the last 50 days of the war, from the onset of the wrath of Achilles until the death of Hector, a mere fraction of the elapsed time of the conflict. The Odyssey, on the other hand, spans a period of 20 years, including the decade-long war itself and then the time lapse from the fall of the Dardanian citadel at the end of the Trojan War until the return of Odysseus to Ithaca and his subsequent loving reunification with his faithful wife Penelope and his exacting of revenge upon her arrogant suitors. The days come and go in regular fashion in the Iliad as the final weeks of the war progress, but the Odyssey does not relate events in the same strictly linear way, although overall it tracks Odysseus’s longing for home and the events occurring during the 10 year return of the hero to Ithaca. The first four books of the Odyssey are set in the present day and detail the struggles of Penelope and Telemachus and the latter’s journey to find evidence of his father’s fate. Books 5 through 8 start ‘in medias res’ or in the middle of the action, with Odysseus stranded for seven years on Calypso’s island of Ogygia and then his departure from there and his washing ashore in Phaeacia. Various flashbacks are used to provide the reader or listener with the details of Odysseus’s journey and escapades. Finally in the 13^th book Homer returns us to the present, with the arrival of Odysseus on Ithaca and his subsequent efforts to regain his wife and his kingdom.

As one method of demonstrating the onset of time, Homer deftly ages his characters, particularly Odysseus, Penelope and Helen, in an attempt to chronicle the passing of the years from the time of the Trojan War to the final homecoming of the hero on Ithaca a decade later. Whereas Achilles was not content to return home and to age gracefully without “kudos” or valour, choosing instead to die as a young man in the glory of battle and to remain famous forever, Odysseus changes over time from being a youthful, arrogant and boastful combatant to a wise and seasoned leader who demonstrates patience and self-control and who is happy to live out his days and to embrace a ripe old age with his wife Penelope, as the prophecy of Tiresias predicts for him. Homer depicts him as aging mentally as well as physically and his ten year journey is not just a physical one, but also a journey of internal growth and character development.

In Penelope’s case, Homer tells us little about the changes in her physical characteristics over time, presenting her as a beautiful woman who is skilled in handiwork and household management. Instead Homer concentrates on telling us how the clever and resourceful Penelope manages to deal psychologically and mentally with the twenty year absence of her husband and the challenges which she faces in dealing with the arrogant suitors and in protecting the well-being of her son Telemachus. The reader’s admiration for Penelope grows exponentially as she displays her rising levels of patience and loyalty over the period of the story.

In the case Helen, we watch time change her from the white-armed, lovely-haired love-struck adulteress whose face launched a thousand ships, to a self-proclaimed “bitch” and hateful creature standing on the ramparts of Troy with her father-in-law Priam, to a repentant self-loathing sinner who is aware of and acknowledges her misdeeds and their consequences and finally to a loving and loyal wife who returns to her husband Menelaus and lives out her days, not as the beauty queen of old, but as the dutiful Queen of Sparta. However, these subtle changes in the lives of the central characters over long periods of time all take second place in comparison to the rapidity of the onset, maturation and dissipation of the wrath of Achilles over the span of the final fifty days of the Trojan War. Here the timeline and wrath are clearly linked as the story rushes to its dramatic conclusion.

There are several fascinating elements to Homer’s treatment of the passage of time. It is generally agreed that Homer, if indeed there was a Homer (but that is another subject for discussion), wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime in the late 8^th or early 7^th centuries BC. That sets the date of his writing at approximately 450 years after the events were supposed to have taken place. His ability to be able to describe with incredible detail the intricacies of war, armaments, battle formations and strategies, animal husbandry and farming, all things nautical, medical, artistic, theological, psychological, interpersonal, gastronomical, astronomical and meteorological without reference to pre-existing written texts, film or photography displays his genius beyond measure. To bring that genius into perspective, just imagine today writing twenty-four books of detailed description about the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588, not based on written records, but solely on hearsay and oral tradition. Homer was one of the world’s first true polymaths, for he knew so much about so many things. He may have been blind, but he was not without insight or vision.

Another notable element of Homer’s treatment of the passage of time is his ability to immerse us directly into the action, whether it takes place in the past or the present. The reader is not a witness to the narrative but rather a full participant in the happenings. Homer’s ability to describe the action means that we seethe along with Achilles in his wrath, wince with pain as the arrow tip strikes the shoulder, weep freely with Priam as he begs for Hector’s body, feel deeply the helplessness of Telemachus, know the terror of Hector’s son as he gazes upon his armoured father and shudder with the anguished memory of losing a pet of our own, as we watch Argos look upon his returned master and die with a sigh of peace. These are all moments in time described by Homer, but lived by the reader in the now of real life and personal emotions. He accomplishes this by his vivid and accurate descriptions of the action, which help the reader visualize clearly what is taking place and by his clever use of literary devices designed to engage the reader in the timeline.

Homer’s use of similes, metaphors, epithets and motifs enhances his unique storytelling ability and provides the reader with a broader and deeper understanding and connection with the events portrayed. They link the reader with the timeline of the narrative and the passage of time within it. Chief among these literary techniques are those which are employed to signify the arrival of the dawn at the beginning of a new day and the onset of night at the end of it. The passage of a decade is a little difficult for a reader to envision, but Homer makes the passing of a day easy to grasp. It is a familiar concept and one that he presents with skill.

Imagine the surprise of that first audience that heard the wandering minstrel pluck his lyre and sing about “early-born rosy-fingered Dawn”. They must have shaken their heads in wonder and amazement at words that so accurately captured what they witnessed in the skies above them. But let us be clear about what Homer was describing. This was not the time of daybreak or the “crack of dawn” as we know it, that time of the morning when the first shaft of sunlight rises above the eastern horizon. No, this is the time that precedes the first appearance of the sun, when reflected colours of red and orange and yellow fill the sky with a palette of glory, before we witness the actual appearance of the rising sun itself. Many of the most notable translators have their own ways of describing what Homer tells us in Odyssey 2.1:

Ἠμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς

(ēmos d' erigeneia phane rhododaktulos Eos)

When early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared

Robert Fitzgerald: When primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light

Samuel Butler: Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared

Robert Fagles: When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more

Alexander Pope: Now reddening from the dawn, the morning ray Glow’d in the front of heaven

Richmond Lattimore: But when the young Dawn showed again with her rosy fingers

Emily Wilson: Not content with sticking with Homer’s repetitive epithet for rosy-fingered Dawn, Wilson translates the phrase in some thirty different ways in her work. We know that Homer had several epithets for various characters and that he would choose the one that best filled out his line of dactylic hexameter. Wilson wrote her translation of the Odyssey in iambic pentameter and perhaps she needed to insert different versions of the phrase in question to meet her metric requirements. Her work has been hailed as the “best” English translation available and an amazing achievement, but her abandonment of Homer’s familiar repetition takes away somewhat from the oral tradition of the original work.

Describing the coming of a new day and the rising of the sun, as well as the setting of the sun and the beginning of the night, are common techniques used by various authors to denote the passing of the days. In the Aeneid, Vergil also uses the coming of the Dawn to denote the onset of time (Aeneid V.42), but not with quite the same degree of artistry, a criticism that I would make of his entire work when compared to the Iliad and the Odyssey which he attempted to emulate and copy, for political reasons more-so than artistic ones. However, we can give him some credit for the talent he showed in writing the following:

Postera cum primo stellas Oriente fugarat clara dies

When, in the rising of the sun which followed, bright day had put the stars to flight

Eos rises several times in the Iliad and her appearance is noted at least twenty times in the Odyssey. In addition to denoting the actual passage of time, there is a wealth of intense significance to the coming of the Dawn and the Dusk in Homer’s epics. We are all familiar with the ancient rhyme:

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight

It is uncertain just how old the saying is, but it is cited in the New Testament in Matthew 16:2-3:

Jesus is quoted as saying, "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.'"

From strictly a meteorological point of view, in areas where the prevailing winds are generally west to east, reddish colour-producing water vapour in the atmosphere in the eastern sky at sunrise indicates that bad weather is likely to blow in with a low pressure system from the west, whereas water vapour in the western sky at sunset indicates that bad weather and a low pressure system have already passed by, being borne along on the winds that are blowing from west to east.

Homer seems to ignore the ancient rhyme and to discount commonly held meteorological wisdom because, regardless of the presence of a reddish sky in the morning or at nightfall, the poet generally looks at the rising of early-born rosy-fingered Eos and the coming of the new day as a time of hope and new beginnings, and the coming of the night as the harbinger of bad times, and indeed often uses a description of the onset of night as an epithet for death.

Dawn is an actual character in the Iliad and Odyssey and is personified as the goddess Eos, rosy-fingered or saffron-robed. The appearance of the deity denotes the start of a new day and thereby helps the reader or listener to track the passage of time, but as well, a shift in Homer’s narrative most often accompanies the rising of the sun. The end of the darkness of the night and the spectacle of the morning sunrise is not just nature unfolding itself as it does each new day, but rather serves as a definitive indication of a reset to the scene and the introduction of a new chapter of events, be that the start of a journey, a resumption of battle, or a change of strategy or behaviour for one of the major characters. The Eos motif symbolizes a new day as well as a set of fresh starts in the unfolding of the epic’s story.

With the onset of night, the setting of the sun and the appearance of the stars, Homer signals the end of the day. Unlike the coming of a new day and its promise of hope and good tidings, the transition to night marks a different change to the narrative, one which foretells the coming of danger, suspense, mystery or the arrival of something supernatural. Red sky at night is no promise of smooth sailing ahead. Homer regards the stars of the night with awe and uses their appearance to paint a picture of danger and an indication of mythical creatures or deities that are active during the hours of darkness. Night-time indeed does bring blessed sleep and the opportunity to rest, but just as often it can be a time of danger and conflict and the setting for interactions with shades, shadows, monsters, magical beings, nightmares and bad dreams and the souls of the dead. Homer so closely associates death with night that he often describes the moment of death as one when the darkness of night comes over the eyes of the warrior who is being killed. He uses that epithet quite often as he recounts in the Iliad the battlefield deaths of some 240 fighters and the immortal Night, the blinding mist or the hateful darkness which overcomes them.

Time plays a central role in both the Iliad and the Odyssey and the depiction of its passage, be it a span of 50 days or 20 years, is artfully mastered by the author. Various techniques are used to denote the passing of the days, weeks, months and years of the two stories and these techniques not only chronicle the events as they unfold, but immerse the reader or listener firmly into the heart of the action. We do not witness time unfolding, we experience it. The “Homeric Question” and the issue of single, dual or multiple authorship has long been discussed, but I would suggest that the similar, subtle and artistic way that the subject of the passage of time is treated in the Iliad and the Odyssey tends to lean one’s thinking in the direction of single authorship. The possibility that two or more authors could have developed the same stylistic tendencies to the extent that they are demonstrated in the two works is indeed remote.