The Epigrams of Homer

These sixteen short pieces are not Homer’s. They belong to the Homerica, the body of later verse that antiquity attached to the poet’s name, and they reached us not as a book but as quotations embedded in the ancient Lives of Homer — chiefly the pseudo-Herodotean Life, which supplies each one with an occasion: the poet arrives at Cyme and is refused a living; he blesses a shepherd who has fed him; he prays for a fair passage; he bargains with a gang of potters; he goes begging at the door with the boys at harvest-time. The biography is a fiction built backwards out of the verses, and the verses themselves are of very mixed date, some perhaps genuinely archaic and several plainly later. What holds them together is the fiction: this is the Homer that the Greek world wanted, a poor travelling singer who paid for his supper in hexameters.

Read as poems rather than as evidence, they are the most ordinary Greek in this volume, and that is their interest. The epic register is here, but bent to occasions the epic never touches. There is an epitaph spoken by a bronze statue on a tomb, which promises to keep saying who lies beneath it for as long as water runs and the sun rises — a conceit that Plato quotes and Simonides is said to have mocked. There is a curse on a kiln, which summons five demons with speaking names — Smasher, Crasher, Unquenchable, Shatterer, Raw-Tamer — and then Circe with her drugs and Chiron with his Centaurs, all to wreck one workshop because its owners might cheat a singer of his fee. There is a house-blessing sung at the door for a handout, the Eiresione, ending in the flat threat of every busker: pay, or we move on. And there is the riddle of the lice, in which the fishermen answer Homer with a paradox he cannot solve; the tradition made his failure to solve it the cause of his death.

The lines are given as the tradition prints them, in the traditional numbering I–XVI. Where the transmitted text is broken it is left broken rather than repaired into fluency — the fifteenth epigram in particular has suffered, and its broken half-line invoking Apollo Guiatis — a cult title no one has explained, and not the familiar Apollo of the Streets — keeps an ellipsis where the Greek has a word past construing. The speaking names of the kiln-demons are turned into English speaking names, on the principle used for the Battle of Frogs and Mice, with the Greek carried in the glossary. What to watch for is the recurrence, across pieces composed centuries apart by different hands, of a single word: xenia, the sacred obligation between host and guest. It opens the collection as a plea, powers the curse on the sailors who abuse it, and lies behind the poet’s prayer for vengeance on the man who cheated him. A wandering singer’s whole livelihood rested on that obligation, and these verses are what it sounded like when it was honoured, and when it was not.