Chapter 9: Nobility of Nature: Homer
But in fact the first of these has the most powerful part, and I mean nobility of nature; all the same, we must, even hear—even if is something one is born with and does not acquire—rear up our souls as much as we can to greatness and make them, as it were, pregnant over and over again with a noble inspiration. 2. In what way, you will ask. I have written in another place something like this: sublimity is the resonance of greatness of mind. As a result, sometimes a bare thought, by itself, without a voice, is wonderful because of its nobility of mind, as the silence of Ajax in the Nekuia is great and more sublime than any speech. 3. Now first it is entirely necessary to set down beforehand how it is that the true public speaker ought to have a sensibility neither low nor ignoble. You see, those whose sense of things and behavior in the whole of life are petty and appropriate to a slave are not the sort who would bring out something wonderful and worthy of the ages; but the speeches and writings of those whose thoughts are grave are, as is likely, greatest. 4. And in this way what is beyond nature falls to those who most presume to have this sensibility, as Alexander the Great did when he said to Parmenio: “I would have been content.”
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… the distance from earth to heaven. And one might say this to be the measure no more of Strife than of Homer. 5. How unlike Homer is that Hesiodic saying about Sorrow, if, of course, The Shield is to be attributed to Hesiod:
out from nostrils mucus flowing.
He has made the picture not powerful, but hateful. But how does Homer magnify the daemonic:
As far as a man may see with his eyes into the mist,
As he sits on a hill-top gazing down on a wine-dark ocean,
Just so far leaped out the divine high-echoing horses.
He measures the leap of the steeds by a cosmic distance. Now who would not be likely, because of this hyperbolic greatness, to exclaim that if the horses of the gods should leap twice like that, they would no longer find in the cosmos a place to land? 6. And beyond nature too are the things he has imagined about the Battle of the Gods:
Heaven, mighty Olympus, trumpeted; unseen Hades,
Lord of the dead souls underneath, trembled in
horror, trembled upon the throne and screamed, lest
then Earthshaker Poseidon break earth open,
His home be seen by mortals and immortals,
Dire, mould’ring, hated in heaven.
Do you see, fellow pupil, how the earth is split open from its profound depths, Tartarus itself laid naked, the whole cosmos appears to overturn and break up-everything at once-heaven and Hades, the mortal and the immortal-how everything at once shares together in the war and in the danger of the fighting? 7. But though these are frightening, if one were not to take them as allegory, they are otherwise impious and unobservant of what is appropriate. In my opinion, you see, Homer in representing the wounds, factions, revenges, tears, bonds, and all-confused emotions of the divinities has (to the extent of his capacity) made the human beings in the Trojan tales into divinities and the divinities into human beings. But though to us, who are subject to hard destiny, death lies ahead as a haven from evils, he has made not the nature but the lucklessness of the divinities into something for the ages. 8. But much better than the fighting of the divinities are the ways in which he has made the daemonic element stand up as something truly undefiled, great, and undiluted, such as-and the passage has been worked out by many before us-the lines on Poseidon:
Great ridges, woodlands trembled,
Crested peaks, the Trojans’ city, the ships of the Grecians,
Under moving immortal feet of Poseidon. He walked on,
Strider of waves, and playing whales from sea depths
Ever emerge to behold their master. And,
Ocean exulting and parting his waves, onward his horses flew.
9. In this way also the lawgiver of the Jews, a man who did not just happen, since he made room for the power of the divine and made it appear in accordance with its worthiness, says in the introduction to his Rules, “God said”-what?-”Let there be light, and there was; let there be earth, and there was.” 10. Perhaps I would not be troublesome, fellow pupil, if I should set down one more citation from Homer and his scenes about humans, for the sake of learning how it was his custom to keep up with heroic greatness. Suddenly mist and impenetrable night take hold of the fighting of the Hellenes; there Ajax, being without device, says:
Father Zeus, from mist these sons of Achaea deliver; Make the sky clear, and give it to our eyes to see; And in the light, at least, destroy us.
How truly the emotion is Ajax’s: you see, he does not pray to live (the request is too low for a hero); but since in the incapacitating gloom he did not have a way to apply his manhood to anything noble, being therefore under pressure because he works to no effect in the fighting, he requests light as swiftly as possible, so as to find a funeral shroud entirely worthy of his excellence-even if Zeus should fight against him. 11. But Homer breathes like a favorable breeze right there in the trials of Ajax and has himself felt no other emotion than [what these lines express]:
Mad as Ares, shaking spears, or a fire destructive,
Mad down ridges he goes, in thickets deep m a woodland,
Foam of froth on lips.
All the same, throughout the Odyssey (and this we must also theorize about for many reasons) he shows that when a great nature is declining, there is-and this is a peculiarity of old age-a love of myth. 12. It is clear for many reasons that he composed it second; indeed we know it from his having throughout the Odyssey introduced as episodes of the Trojan War what was left over from the emotional experiences of those at Ilium; and, heaven knows, from his having presented as in payment of a long recognized debt wailings and lamentations for heroes. You see, the Odyssey is not other than a peroration to the Iliad:
There brave Ajax lies, and there Achilles;
There Patroclus lies, who counselled equal of heaven,
There my own dear son.
13. And the same thing is responsible, I take it, for his making the whole body of the Iliad, written when his spirit was at its acme, dramatic and full of conflict, while the Odyssey is more of a narrative tale-a thing that is peculiar to old age. As a result, one may liken Homer in the Odyssey to a sun setting, the greatness of which remains apart from its intensity. He does not, you see, any longer observe a pitch equal to that of the Trojan section of the poem, nor does he keep the sublimities on a level, without any dips, nor is there a similar pouring of emotions one on the other, nor a sense of flexibility and political life made dense by imagery based on truth; but both his absorption and wanderings in the mythic and the hard to believe appear in the ebbing of his greatness, as the ocean withdrawing gradually gives room to itself and deserts within its own measures. 14. In speaking of these things, the storms in the Odyssey have not really escaped my notice nor have the lines on the Cyclops and some other lines; but my tale is of old age-still, it is the old age of Homer; notwithstanding this, in all of these the mythic consistently prevails over the action. I have discussed these side issues in order to demonstrate how very easily things great in nature once past their acme are turned into showy trifles-such as the lines on the wineskin and those on the men fed like swine in Circe’s house (“howling piglets,” as Zoilus said), and Zeus reared like a youngling by and among doves, and the ten days without food in the shipwreck, and the unpersuasive lines on the slaughter of the suitors. What else, you see, might we say of these episodes than that they are in the dreams of Zeus? 15. And what I have said about the Odyssey should be investigated for a second reason also, so that you might understand how, when their emotion is past the acme, great prose-writers and poets slip off into characterization. Such is the description of characterization in Odysseus’ household, as if it were a kind of comedy of character.
