I am reading Homer on the Fort DeSoto Beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. Actually a book about Homer: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson. (Picador/2014) A rich read making The Iliad and The Odyssey even more beautifully terrifying. It is a perfect beach book. The Iliad takes place mainly on the beach below the walled city of Troy and the Odyssey takes place on many island beaches from Pylos to Ithaca. Sand and waters clash as warriors contend with land and sea and each other. Civilizations behaving in an uncivilized manner.
Twenty eight years ago while on this same beach I was reading the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s book about a Amazonian tribe, Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Through Chagnon’s text we meet a Stone Age culture still alive. Through Homer’s text we meet a Bronze Age people, the ancestors of our Western way. A ethical challenge for anthropologists is observing strange cultures without imposing judgement. The same ethical challenge awaits the readers of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer gives us a window into an ancient seafaring warrior culture, patriarchal to the core and polytheistic to accommodate the various manifestations of the human spirit from the war-making Ares to the love-making Aphrodite.
The obvious question; why do we need a window into the Bronze Age? That was a long time ago. We’ve come a long way since then.The answer, because in significant ways the spirit of the Bronze Age is still alive today. Camille Paglia, an American feminist scholar has written and spoken about the lack of historical depth in the American educational system:
. . . . . these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization.
The long expanse of human history, short by geologic standards, has seen the turning and overturning and returning of themes and patterns as human communities lay claim to their place on the earth. On any given Sunday afternoon during football season, we enjoy watching warrior culture celebrated on fields of play. Ares the war god lives in the clash of male bodies and the accumulation of points, and Aphrodite the goddess of feminine love and beauty cheers them on.