In preparation for re-reading The Iliad and The Odyssey
with a few friends, I’ve been taking in The Cambridge Companion to Homer and M.I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus. And I’ve enjoyed the insight, the
speculation, the scholarship involved in parsing the puzzle of the pre-Homeric
world. But sometimes, it seems to me, the scholars are taking this all a little
too seriously. Consider this:
Imagine, if you will, that the world as we know it is
completely wiped out – all humankind, all buildings, cars, libraries, computers,
animal life, plant life, all our daily accoutrements, all record that we ever
existed. There’s not even any rubble with which to piece together the facts of
our civilization. Everything, everyone is dust. Except for one thing, one thing
remains as a document of our existence, a record that we were here. That one
thing is a DVD of Oliver Stone’s most recent movie Savages.
Now suppose that some marauding alien spaceship lands on our
decimated earth and finds that one thing left of our entire history and
civilization, they find that last existent copy of Savages. Naturally, said aliens pop the DVD into their playing
device (go along with me here) and conclude that life, indeed, had existed on
this earth, and they watch the DVD over and over and over again trying to
figure out who we were, what our world was like, what happened to us and why.
It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen Savages or not to continue the scenario. It could be any action
movie, any form of heroic popular entertainment. Think Jason Bourne of the
Bourne Series, Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies, Tom Cruise of Mission
Impossible. In Savages, the plot line
is essentially this: Two highly successful Californian pot growers and
distributors, Dan and Chon, are being pressured by the Tijuana drug cartel to
give the cartel a cut of their business. The Californians are the heroes,
essentially nice guys who just want to be left alone to do their thing. The
Mexicans are violent, underhanded, moral-less. When the threat of violence
isn’t enough to convince Dan and Chon to partner with the Mexicans, the
Mexicans kidnap the girlfriend they share, Ophelia, the one thing they both
care about most in the world. The rest of the movie centers around the various
plots the two enact to get Ophelia back. There’s also a dirty DEA agent who
works on the down-low with all the parties involved to further his own
interests; there’s the head of the cartel, Lorena Elena Sanchez, who inherited
the drug empire after her husband and sons were assassinated; there’s Elena’s
Mexican henchmen who perpetrate horrific violence on anyone who stands in the
way of their plans; there’s Elena’s daughter who attends college in the US and
who tries to keep her distance from her mother’s world but ends up getting
dragged in anyway.
For us, understanding the plot is simple enough. What are
our aliens to make of this, though? Remember, this is the only document of our
civilization, and the aliens don’t have the benefit of knowing this was merely
popular entertainment, a fictional story with hyped-up characters and scenes
that are intended to wow an audience as opposed to keep a proper history of our
world. What would they make of Dan’s peaceable Buddhist leanings versus Chon’s
post-Iraq-war-vet tendency toward violence that seems to win out in the end?
And how about the crucifixes, tarot cards and blood-lust of the Mexicans? Why
is there always a landscaping crew in a rickety pick-up truck every time Lado,
our main henchman, visits an American home? When Ophelia describes her namesake
as “the bi-polar basket case who committed suicide in Hamlet,” what the heck does that mean? When various characters
refer to the Red Queen, Bono, Cheech and Chong, Butch Cassidy, 1984, and Henry VIII, how could anyone
ever figure out those references? And, for the love of God, is everyone in this
world perpetually high on weed, coke, or booze?
The world of Homeric scholarship is a bit like aliens trying
to construct a clear picture of our world through analyzing an action flick.
Yes, that’s a bit reductive – the earth’s prehistory wasn’t completely wiped
out before Homer, it was simply not recorded. And modern civilization has a
vast array of scientific and analytic tools at its disposal to piece together
evidence from ancient civilization and figure out what it might have been like.
But so far our best source for piecing together the Bronze Age of Greek history
is Homer, and that is a bit like aliens having to rely on Oliver Stone’s
aggrandized story-telling to piece together a picture of our modern world.
Homer was a storyteller, a poet. He was a performer, not a
historian. The Homeric heroic poems may not
have even been considered high art
in their day. That’s not to say they are not artful – there is incredible
talent in the creation, memorization, and performance of the poems. Homer, like
Mr. Stone, has a studied technique, a masterful presentation. And, like Oliver
Stone’s story, there are side tales of morality, of belief, of friendship, of love
from which we might draw some reasonable conclusions about the values and
beliefs of the characters. But these are characters
and this is a fictional story. Let’s
not forget that even though archeologists have discovered and excavated what is
probably “Troy,” there is no evidence of a decimating battle between the
Achaeans and the Trojans. There is no evidence that any of the heroes of the epics
ever existed. And even Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer’s, complains that
Homer’s depiction of the gods in the lives of the Bronze Age heroes takes into
account little of what people likely believed at the time.
Oh, shoot, that’s right. I forgot all about the gods! Maybe
I should be comparing the epics to the latest Superman, Batman or Ironman
flick instead of a straight-up action movie. Oh, well, listen: Just pass the
popcorn and pour me a large fountain drink – I’m sitting back and cracking open
The Ilaid tonight, ready to be
entertained.
