Vision in the Iliad’s Deathless Prosopopoeia

Josef Albers, Tlaloc

Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature, spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore: de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.

— Francis of Assisi, from the Canticle of the Sun

Before the commencement of classes, my mother, wishing to ensure my academic success, prays to Saraswati. An Apollo-Athena hybrid, Saraswati is a Hindu goddess whose domains include music, poetry, and wisdom. I gradually grew skeptical of this prayer’s efficaciousness—not least because my grades belied divine stewardship—so I asked my mom where, exactly, Saraswati and the other divinities dwelled. She replied reciting a dictum of Thales: “Everything is filled with gods, so they’re anywhere you look.” My faculties of sight must’ve been exceptionally dull, for nowhere I saw Saraswati or any other deity—not even Krishna, whose cerulean skin should be conspicuous. Although I was myself in want of the ocular proof, every temple I went to I found decked with iconographically consistent depictions of these gods, so, presumably, someone once saw them and disseminated their aspects. Who? With infinite patience in the face of my continued pestering, my mother divulged that it was the poets who first saw them, inscribing their visions chiefly in a compendium of liturgical hymns (the Vedas) and two epic poems (the Mahabharata and Ramayana).

I was therefore unsurprised to hear Herodotus claim that, for the Greeks, it was also some poets, Homer and Hesiod, who first described the gods and told them “what they looked like.”¹ I wonder, then, what precisely privileges poets to first catch sight of the divine before other mortals? Maybe, their purported ability is just a powerful illusion borne out of poetry’s formidable endurance, an endurance that allows it to outlive even marble and the gilded monuments of princes. A historian might argue that “since the poet’s punch of meter and vividness of depiction etch her words in the annals of collective memory more deeply than anything uttered in prose, time effaces all that is unpoetic, and verse is all that’s left of a culture’s prehistoric stages. There’s then nothing divinely perceptive about the art. Poets are shroud in vestments by amnesia—at least, until the written word strips them away. For with the aid of writing, the ‘drug for memory,’ something like prosaic theology can flourish and rightfully snatch the spectacles of divine sight.² And so: an epoch of new, written gods, the Alpha and the Omega.”

In this essay I will argue against this desecration of poetry, and others like it, by attempting to furnish an apology for its innate, ahistorical sanctity. I contend that the poet is uniquely permeable to the divinity and, following a possibly ironic Socrates in Ion, can be likened to inert iron becoming imbued with magnetism, “inspired and possessed” by the gods.³ I think this divine madness naturally endows poets with spiritual sight. However, never having had such an ecstasy of verse, I was likely never divinely kissed. So to bolster my argument I’ll have to look to an exemplar to adduce how the poet channels and views these deities. The Iliad most appeals to me for this of all the epics populated with gods.

To be sure, Hesiod composed a divine genealogy which—tracing the flow of ichor through all creation—seems at first glance most suitable for my purposes. Divinity is always fixed at the forefront. But the Iliad places its gods at a gradation of distances from its anthropocentric narrative: thus the reader gets both close-ups of the gods and also their faint outlines, imprinted on other mortals and other beings. These varied “perspectives,” once collated, generate fuller divine likenesses.

So how to start? One route is to throw these likenesses together and sift out the differences, leaving me with a lump of commonalities that I may then purify into a general notion of the Deity. But this approach seems too inappropriately analytic to employ for a poem: it would tread underfoot the epic’s vivacity and anything that vivacity may intimate. And even if this route were fruitful, it would merely yield what the Homeric gods are but not how Homer saw them.

It’s therefore fortunate that Homer has set in the Iliad guideposts pointing toward a path wholly intertwined with his sight, the path of light. Light, of course, is the medium needed to arouse vision of any kind, and thus, so as to arouse his poetic vision, Homer lets light permeate the epic: the Iliad glistens. These lambent images come to a head on the divine, as I hope to later show. After all, Zeus’s messenger is Iris, goddess of the light’s bundled forms, the rainbow; and all other gods genuflect to the might of his thunderbolt, electromagnetism at its most striking. But for now I will ignore the divine and be satisfied with these hints. Instead, I’ll try to elucidate role light and its traits in the epic so that, ultimately, I’ll be equipped with a poetic Snell’s law that lets me trace an optical path back to Homer’s spiritual POV.

There are few (preindustrial) sources of light. But nothing like sunlight, the gleam around which the eye evolved, commands life. And for Homer gazing at the sunlight is a concomitant of living. When a newborn’s eye is flooded with the color, the sun is first stamping her with the world’s tinted forms (to impose Aristotle’s nomenclature); she is in a way inaugurated with light as a discrete being, as one out from the darkness in which she incubated. Thus Eilethyia, goddess of birth, is said to bring a child “to the light … [to] see the rays of the sun,”⁴ and Hera, likewise, “brings a child to the light.”⁵

The sun continually actuates the flow of the earth’s forms to the eyes. These visual forms not only instill pleasure, but spatially organize the surrounding environment (far more vividly than other sense-objects) and so definitively situate us within the world’s lush matrix: looking on objects illuminated by the sun’s light, we can rest assured that we’re among the living. Thetis seems to suggest as much when she laments her incapacity to aid Achilles “while yet he lives and looks on the light of the sun.”⁶ She implies I think, the latter is a corollary of the former, and in this she follows the warrior Diomedes. Earlier, he assumes the voice of someone who gashed him with a spear, a wound from which the foe thinks he’ll perish: “not for long shall he look on the bright light of the sun.”⁷ Souls, then, may smell in Hades (if we trust Heraclitus), but they do not see—for Zeus says, “in the nethermost bounds of the earth and sea,” one does not have “joy” in “the rays of Helios Hyperion.”⁸

Conversely, should the eyes’ stream of light wholly dry out, they’re primed for a visit down to the All-Hospitable (as the Hymn to Demeter calls Hades).⁹ When a warrior is, say, glutted to death by spear or arrow, Homer often drops the euphemism “darkness enfolded his eyes” (τὸν δὲ σκότος ὄσσε κάλυψ).¹⁰ In fact, this euphemism always signals a kill in the Iliad. But a close reader might interject, “That’s the case about twenty times, yet you missed a spot: there’s one instance where this phrase—or at least a variant—is applied to someone who doesn’t concurrently die, namely Andromache (who obviously remains alive at the end of the poem). See the following:”

Then on the wall [Andromache] stopped and looked, and caught sight of [Hector] as he was dragged before the city; and swift horses were dragging him ruthlessly toward the hollow ships of the Achaens. Down over her eyes came the darkness of night and enfolded her (τὴν δὲ κατ᾿ ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν).11

But actually, she does die. The scene continues: “she fell backward and gasped out her spirit (ψυχὴν)” even if, later, “she revived and her spirit (θυμὸς) returned into her breast.” —“However,” my interlocutor may respond, “Andromache doesn’t suffer true death here. Few return from the house of gloom. Instead, ‘gasping out her soul’ is likely a metaphor or itself a euphemism for something milder, like fainting.” Nonetheless it seems to me that the scene’s gravitas is underlined because of the euphemism’s other contexts, where it signaled only bona fide perishing.

(Note also the asymmetrical language here. Andromache’s psychē exits but never returns—her breast receives only the thumos which, perhaps, animates her just enough to go through the external motions of life, the drudgery. I’ll venture to say that, if she’s not “properly dead,” she is slain along with Hector as his corpse conveys to her the surety of bondage—slain in a way that befits the medium, in spiritual form. She knows from seeing the mangled corpse that she is no longer lord of her own spirit. Her psychē, Aristotle’s “form of the body,”¹² is decoupled from its concrete correlative and held in an indeterminate state, like the not-quite-alive, not-quite-dead shadow of Patroclus, which Achilles labels eidōlon kai psychēn, likeness and spirit.¹³)

I think this depiction of Andromache clinches tighter the connection between life and looking at the light of the sun. This is the last instance of the “darkness enfolds…” euphemism, and the vocabulary is perhaps distinguished (esebennos for skotos, opthalmos for osse) to highlight it as the final form where its elements are fleshed out. One added detail is that Andromache’s eyes suffer not mere “darkness” as earlier, but the darkness of night. “Into Oceanus [falls] the bright light of the sun drawing black night over the face of the earth,” and in the sun’s absence, we assume a corpse pose, rendering our whole bodies as close as possible to Hades, and undergo sleep, whose personification throughout the epic is called death’s twin.¹⁴ The sun’s departure, then, takes the form of life with it, and, consequently, “hateful” Night subdues (δμητήρ) even the deathless gods.¹⁵

All the preceding might suggest that vision has a binary relation to life in the poem, where the former’s brute existence confirms the latter’s. On the contrary, they fluctuate in degrees, too: when the vitality of life diminishes, so does vision’s. In a duel Sarpedon is struck “on the left thigh with [a] long spear, and the point sped through furiously and grazed the bone.” Deeply wounded, he is on the cusp of death, and his sight is vitiated as a result—but since he lives (for now) it’s not an opaque darkness enfolding him but “a mist” that’s “shed on” his eyes.¹⁶ On the other hand, when a warrior’s strength is invigorated, the “mist” is divinely taken from his eyes.¹⁷ Even when a mortal man (Nestor) rouses “the might and heart of every man” in the Greek camp, still does “from their eyes Athene thrust away the wondrous cloud of mist.”¹⁸ All the warriors, then, have at the pleasure of the gods a passive mist around the eyes, corresponding to their zeal.

The presence and vitality of vision are therefore carefully modulated by the presence and vitality of life. Perhaps this evinces that the metaphors of sight are not scattered, like a shotgun spray, at random. Rather, Homer consciously implements these locutions, which gives me hope I’m not hairsplitting over what are just metrically expedient stock-phrases for the extemporizing bard. The poet seems to intentionally underscore that life ≈ sight.

I’ll note in passing that our fellow tragedians also link the two. Aeschylus, for example does so in Agamemnon¹⁹ and in this line from Persians, “Xerxes himself is alive and sees the light of day.”²⁰ And likewise Sophocles employs it in at least in Electra²¹ and a couple times in Philoctetes, such as: “Is he also dead and gone? / Think of him as no longer in the world of light!”²² Euripides’ plays are everywhere peppered with it (though we do have more of them), in Trojan Women,²³ Suppliant Women,²⁴ Hippolytus,²⁵ Heracles,²⁶ and especially Alcestis.²⁷ Perhaps the surfeit is because Euripides agrees with and draws attention to Iphigenia’s literal raison d’être in Iphigenia in Aulis, “Do not kill me before my time: to see the light of day is sweet (ἡδὺ).”²⁸ I won’t speculate on the cause behind this motif’s preponderance among all these tragedians—whether it was actually Homer, the “educator of Greece,” that singed it into the literary milieu. I note this only because it heightens my desire to investigate why these different poets—who scarcely seem cut of the same cloth (see the Frogs)—import this correspondence. So I will try to uncover why precisely light correlates with liveliness, an investigation which, if successful, would naturally uncover the liveliest themselves, the “deathless” gods.²⁹

Sight has supremacy over the other sensations, at least for human beings. I defer to Augustine, who is well acquainted with the sway of each of organ: in his extirpation of the sensual he was hindered most by the eye. (I use the “eye” metonymically throughout to also mean the mental architecture that goes into visual processing.) He notes its power is such that we spread its associated phraseology to all other senses, “Thus we do not say Listen for anything red, or Smell how shiny”—instead we say, “Let’s see how this sounds … See how fragrant … See what this tastes like.”³⁰ That is to say, sight is for us is nearly synonymous with the very act of perception, and the sense-objects of the more muted senses all have the semblance of color, even to the non-synesthetic among us. Cicadas pour “out their lily-like voice” in the epic.³¹ (Maybe it’s best characterized by a philosopher Ezra Pound quotes in his first Pisan Canto, one Scotus Eriugena: “omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt” all things that are are lights.³²

And so we extend the sight’s nomenclature to what’s sensible in general, “I see what you mean, it’s clear/vivid/lucid,” “Here’s an elucidation/illumination/illustration of x.” Conversely the absence of light is a loss of sense: “It’s obscure/obfuscated/muddled/opaque.” A mist comes over Hector’s eye at the sight of his brother’s viscera gored out by Achilles, and he foolishly goes after him.³³ Likewise, Agamemnon blames his treatment of Achilles on “fierce blindness.”³⁴ He continues to personify this destructive force, “Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate who blinds (ἀᾶται) all—accursed one; delicate are her feet, for it is not the ground that she touches, but she walks over the heads of mean, bringing men to harm.”³⁵ Her power is such that “she once even blinded Zeus, though men say that he is the greatest among men and gods.”³⁶

What was Agamemnon’s failure of vision here? He failed to extricate himself from the passions of the moment; if he were able to peer into the future—like the seer he ironically humiliates—he would’ve realized that his abuse of Achilles rebounds to himself. (Socrates, for this reason, implores his interlocutors in Protagoras to learn the art of measurement, “our only salvation”—for with it one can ascertain the relations of “near and far” and envisage the future pains of an unchecked frenzy.³⁷ In other words, with mastery of measurement one can temporally (and spatially) decenter himself and see everywhere. Athena, I think, blesses Achilles with this foresight in Book I when she checks his wrath from brandishing a blade against Agamemnon, from wrecking calamity on himself.)

Let’s home in one of the quality of vision that accords it with this primacy, such that it can serve as a placeholder, at least a semantic one, for all sense, including our wits. Perhaps it’s merely a consequence of the definitiveness only sight can claim when it attaches its sense-data to an object. Sight verifies what sounds and the other senses faintly gesture at. Homer hence emphasizes this visual itch: Zeus wants to see with his eyes that the outcome of a battle comes to pass as he wishes, and Andromache rushes to witness the corpse of Hector once she had an inkling of his death.³⁸ This need for an optical testimony goes in hand in hand with our morbid curiosity, which, Augustine notes,³⁹ is satisfied solely by sight: no one wants to suffer the smell or touch of a mutilated corpse, much less its taste. And yet, indubitably, many will desire to see it. A poetic derivative of this might be why Homer presents to our mind’s eye such (admittedly captivating) gore. He can’t help but focus his poetic vision on each gruesome detail of war, and—maybe as self-indictment—lets us witness a warrior “strike beneath the brow at the roots of the eyes, and [drive] out the eyeball, and the shaft [go] clean through the eye.” The warrior holds it “high, like a poppy,” the sight of which incites rout.⁴⁰

But if this curiosity is a “lust of the eyes”—which, being a worldly pleasure, Augustine⁴¹ and Aquinas⁴² damn as a sin—where, exactly, does this desire and the pleasure of its fulfillment stem from?

Both seem to me to arise from what only the eye enjoys—diversity. No other sensation fuses on a single plane, at a single moment, such disparate components—the profusion of colors in their infinite arrangements. All of sight’s virtues are only obtained from this concurrent array: each pigment is placed in a spatial relation to the others, and the contrasts procured by these interrelations are what so strikingly define objects’ forms. A line, the element of any form, only exists by virtue of its differentiation in color from the surrounding plane. There is therefore no independent object presented to sight, a differentiated backdrop is always required for its being seen. Always sorting in such a manner, sight is revered as faculty of immediate relations and distinction—precisely why Aristotle claims human beings want to know more by it than any other mode of perception.⁴³ And its ability in this regard is extremely fine; once we’re familiar with a pattern, even the slightest disjunction sticks out like a sorε thumb.

The faculty’s caliber of definition is why, I think, we want to confirm with sight more so than with any other sensation. Vision unveils all with its clarity. Aroused by this rich mosaic of all things and the aspects of objects it brings, we want a fresh supply of color interrelations—fresh models of differentiation—so, I think, we look even what we know to be grotesque, hence our morbid curiosity. Human beings want to be sure that even the gut-wrenching is among the things of the world; we seek an acquaintance with every aspect of the cosmos. In fact, if an object can’t comport itself in such a way as to be made visible, it essentially doesn’t exist. Accordingly, throughout the epic “under the sun” or “dawn” means, “among all things.”⁴⁴ A visual aspect even suffices in place of the being itself. To save Aeneas from perishing under Achilles’ might, the gods set an eidōlon, a form-being, a phantom in his place, which the warriors surround as the real Aeneas is airlifted away.⁴⁵ Euripides, in Helen, toys with this idea to satirize the absurdity of war; he renders superficial the Achaean’s casus belli: “I never went to Troy,” says the eponymous character, “it was an eidolon.”⁴⁶ The real Helen slipped away to Egypt.

Sight, armed with variegated distinctions, furnishes the lineaments of a prodigious quantity of objects at one stroke. Homer, I think, delights in such a diverse splendor. Although he might not be a shepherd—though he suggestively knows their toils intimately—he might identify with their pleasure, when

in the sky about the gleaming moon the stars shine clear when the air is windless, and into view come all mountain peaks and high headlands and glades, and from heaven breaks open the infinite air, and all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart (γέγηθε δέ τε φρένα)47

For in this infinite air one takes in the sublime light of the moon and stars, and also the rippled countryside bathing in it. The shepherd rejoices in, at once, both the diversity of the landscape—its sacred forests, the motion of its geography—and also the inestimable array of constellations, the divinities encased in the vault of heaven, “the Pleiades and the Hyades and mighty Orion and the Bear, that men call also the Wain.”⁴⁸ His view hence shoots out indefinitely not only to the horizon but upwards; the sensation is as if the eye floats, taking the soul with it (I’m reminded of Pound’s erroneous analysis of the Chinese character 見 sight, as an eye with wings (actually, it’s an eye on legs)).⁴⁹ Nor is it only mortals who revel in the mountain-top view; Zeus sits “from a fold of Olympus, from which [he] will gaze and give [his] mind enjoyment (φρένα τέρψομαι)”⁵⁰ His delight might result from his office as steward of the sky—a summit higher than any mountain’s—and materialized in his favorite omen, the eagle: Priam calls it the dearest of birds to Zeus⁵¹ and the eagle is earlier said to have “the keenest of sight of all winged things”⁵²

Homer elsewhere highlights that the opposite of this “infinite” view causes, in turn, the opposite of this rejoicing, and I think he underscores its contrariety by deploying the same persona of the shepherd,

when the South Wind pours a mist over the peaks of a mountain, a mist that the shepherd loves not (οὔ τι φίλην), but that to the robber is better than night, and a man can see only so far as he can throw a stone, just so a dense dust cloud rose up from beneath [the soldiers’] feet as they went.53

Such mist hinders the spectacle (and renders difficult the shepherd’s pragmatic tasks)—in lieu of variety, a monochromatic cloud, the negation of sight’s richness.

Perhaps Homer’s love of this variety explains why Sun isn’t itself enshrined in a higher station in the poem: Helios, though prayed to, has no real authority, and is even commanded by Hera to set early. Although Homer may agree with the poet who composed the Mahabharata that “the great Sun is … the soul of the eye,” he, like him, relegates it beneath the sky—“the great Sun is the son of the sky”—because a soul or power better befits a philosopher’s inquiry.⁵⁴ Homer cares little for the Good in its homogeneity, he is stimulated by what issues from it (or is found in it), the manifold diversity of light. For the poet wants to filter light into forms. So it’s Zeus—with the procession of the heavenly bodies which filters through him, and with the translucent shapes he billows together (he is the “cloud-gatherer”)—who embodies the unweighted optical splendor where the poet is at home. Baudelaire, too, claims that the poet is like an albatross, ces rois de l’azur, prince des nuées, these kings of the sky, prince of the clouds.⁵⁵

Whether or not Homer himself rejoices with the shepherd and Zeus in the telescopic perspective of the landscape, and “loves not” when it’s fogged, he certainly seems to delight in a diverse assemblage of microscopic details. He projects to the mind’s eye such apparent minutiae as the preparation of the sacrificial roast, how the hide of a shield sticks to Hector’s neck and ankle, and the contours and ornaments of Nestor’s gilded cup,.⁵⁶ (So detailed was this last ekphrasis that Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy, was able to optimistically pair a Mycenaean artifact with it.)

Such a matrix of visual detail vivifies the poem. Since the eye is accustomed to being stamped with not merely the crude and monumental, but the fine as well, Homer stimulates its poetic counterpart, the mind’s eye, with what’s appropriate to it. His listeners are hence able to traverse the temporal and spacial distance between themselves and the work’s event (the war): in spite of all that differs from my world and that of the Bronze Age Aegean, this assortment of details instills the impression that we inhabit the same cosmos.

More relevant to the gods, Homer utilizes this fineness of sight in his skilled naturalism. He is sensitive the habits of not only domestic animals—such as cows, bulls, goats, sheep—and their predators (particularly lions), but also of insects, “before the onrush of fire locusts take wing to flee to a river, and the unwearied fire burns them as it comes on suddenly, and they cower down into the water …”⁵⁷ Paired with the monumental entities—the mountains, rivers, etc—these small details coalesce into a fulsome view of the natural world. With it, one is able to see the relationships that are crystallized in both the smallest attributes of a naturally produced object (say, a leaf) and the larger feature it’s encased in (say, a grove on a mountain)—when the whole grove reddens and yellows in autumn, the part and whole blur. These interrelations suggest that, in the natural sphere, there is no one single force behind the creation and alteration of an object; each is molded by the gestalt of the whole environment, at every scale. A tree, for example, is succored by imperceptible nutrients, drenched by the sky and rivers, and enlivened by the sun. Its fruits nourish primates, its seeds are unwittingly spread by rodents, and (as the poem makes reference to) its branches shelter birds.⁵⁸ As in sight, it’s impossible, it seems to me, to isolate either any natural object as a wholly independent entity, as a thing severed from the forces which engendered and sustain it, and which are engendered and sustained by it. What appears as a mosaic is a fluid continuum. And it’s only through sight, I believe, that can appreciate the full breadth of this complexity; only by looking am I able to behold at once the infinite intersection of things on each stratum. Perhaps this is why Homer thinks to see is to live. In Hades, this diverse complexity found under the sun is annulled and exchanged for the blankness of darkness. There, the shade is wholly shuttered from nature’s confluence.

But if Homer recognizes this natural interconnection of things, how does he suggest so in the poem? Nearly all the natural imagery he paints for us depicts a relation between at least two natural features. Specimen A:

And the assembly was stirred like the long waves of the Icarian sea, which the East Wind or the South Wind has raised, rushing on them from the clouds of father Zeus. And just as when the West Wind at its coming stirs the grain with its violent blast, and the ears bow, so was all their assembly stirred.59

and B:

But as dogs and country people pursue a horned stag or a wild goat, but a sheer rock or a shadowy thicket saves him from them, and it is not their lot to find him; and then at their clamor a bearded lion shows himself in the way, and immediately turns them all back despite their eagerness: so the Danaans…60

More broadly, however, I think he indicates it through the socialization of the gods. Mt. Olympus is a polity of the cosmos, where each personalization of a natural feature—nature taken quite broadly—communes with one another. (I haven’t yet reached the theogenesis, the way in which the poet forms (sees) these personalities as anthropomorphic entities. This, I hope, will put me on the right track.) To best illustrate how this socialization parallels nature’s intermeshing, I’ll examine the case of the god who is ostracized by the interpersonal circle—Hephaestus. He serves the other gods and is risible to them,

Then he poured wine for all the other gods from left to right, drawing sweet nectar from the bowl. And unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods, as they saw Hephaestus puffing through the palace61

What about his domain would suggest such exclusion (or the benighted appearance which would entail it)?

As smith and craftsman, he forges metals into the shapes that are deadlier and sturdier than anything supplied by the organic flux of things. Metal, it seems to me, is the very antithesis of this complex flux, as is betrayed by its preternatural uniformity. Whereas other natural objects have tinctures of their interactions, metals are “stubborn” and reveal nothing.⁶² Homer says he would need a heart of “bronze, unless the Muses of Olympus… call to [his] mind all those who came beneath Ilios.”⁶³ In other words, he would need to be immune to what the usually impacts and wears out the “heart” in this herculean feat. Once molded in a certain way, this imperviousness is metal’s key virtue, lest the sharpness of the blade curve at the shield, and lest the blade break through the shield. (Even gold, the most malleable metal, stops spears in the epic.)⁶⁴

Therefore, unlike all else in the cosmos, their utility comes out of a shape that is fashioned by one intelligence—that is, not by the whole complex flux—who endows it with objecthood, with a linear set of the four causes. This is Hephaestus. For since metal requires this agent for it to be dug up from the pockets of Hades, processed from ore, and meld into a useful form, Hephaestus is identified with the agent and not the object itself. His very being requires him to be removed from the world—to subject it. In this respect Hephaestus is quite unlike the other divinities, who are directly identifiable with a natural feature, be it the sky (Zeus), the sea (Poseidon), or grain (Demeter). And yet his apologist may reply, “Wouldn’t he, then, be like Apollo or Athena, who also lack a traceable correlate?” Apollo’s domain, at least insofar as it’s determinable in the poem, is too polygonal to sand down to single principle (my guess: he controls deaths unforeseen, hence the epithet “far-shooting”). But every avenue by which he aids his benefactors is a redirection of what appears to me to be a natural force or an amalgam of them: the plague, for example, or the arrow hitting its mark. Athena likewise exerts her divine power; she channels wisdom into the phrenas of warriors and marshals their bodies’ energies—neither of which are monolithic, resilient entities, they’re composite wholes permeable to outside pressures. Perhaps Apollo and Athena and gods like them correspond with these concentrations in the natural system. Hephaestus, on the other hand, is a craftsman (technēs).⁶⁵ He tailors objects not by redirecting, but by excising everything outside the lines of a desired template—and he does so principally with materials whose utility is obtained by their indifference to others’ natural compositeness, the uniform metals. (Even fire, which is called Hephaestus’s, has this sort of unnatural oneness to it, and reduces all to homogenous ash.) As this configuring, removed being, Hephaestus is removed from the variegated interflow, the other gods.

(He stains with his isolation whatever he touches. When attempting to save his mother from Zeus, the god says that the Olympian “caught me by the foot and hurled me from the heavenly threshold; the whole day long I was borne headlong, and at sunset I fell in Lemnos.”⁶⁶Appositely, when the Greeks wanted to quarantine a fetid warrior, Philoctotes, they choose this locale, where he “lay suffering mighty pains on an island, on sacred Lemnos, where the sons of the Achaeans had left him in anguish with an evil wound from a deadly water snake.”⁶⁷ If Sophocles accurately portrayed his tenancy on the island, Philoctetes follows the Hephaestus’s archetype and becomes a lonesome craftsman: his encampment is identified by Odysseus when he first comes across “A wooden cup—the work of an amateur—along with some firewood.”⁶⁸

So—if this analysis of Hephaestus is correct, the confluence in nature is mirrored in the divinities’ socialization. However, if this is so, and Homer aims to render to his listener the natural connection of things through these entities’ conversation and quarrels, is he doing so solely because he adopted his era’s infantile stage of scientific knowledge? For, armed with the repertoire of scientific inquiry, these cosmic interrelations can be decomposed into a series of phenomena, each presorted into an appropriate field—say, physics, chemistry, or biology—whose theoretical frameworks can dissect the gestalt into parts more comprehensible to human reason. We know better than to sacrifice our Iphigenias to placate a ticked-off Artemis; we know, instead, that Agamemnon’s ships can’t sail simply because of inopportune (not inauspicious) weather conditions. “Now that the truth about verifiable phenomena has been revealed,” our historian might succinctly put it, “the Greek gods, though richly imaginative in their own right, as explanations of the cosmos are primitive relics. Their poets traduced reality for titillation.”

Nevertheless, the father of materialist reduction still claimed that “everything is filled with gods.” What, if anything, restores piety? Indeed, it is vision. On our visual plane the plethora of colors is presented on a set scale of magnitude, or at least on a fixed range; otherwise, we would be able to toggle at will between, say, Gulliver’s Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian perspectives. Nature and its diverse components, and the interrelations of these, are present to the human eye at this scale: we don’t see a clump of particles or cells, rather cleanly cut polychromatic forms. And with vision’s built-in distinguishing and categorizing power, the eye of its own accord separates, by reference of these forms, the world into domains; it assigns what’s appropriate to one and what’s appropriate to another. Humans may unveil the mechanical processes underlying these domains if we follow the likes of Bacon, who enjoin us to observe, predict, and then—Bacon’s ultimate goal—dominate nature.⁶⁹ Doing so, we slice open the gods. Via meteorology, we can statistically predict Zeus’s moods. However, even when this same kind of empirical unraveling is applied to a human being, I feel that I’m not given the full picture. As Kant reminds us,

In regard to this empirical charac­ter, therefore, there is no freedom; and yet only in terms of this character can we consider a human being if we seek merely to observe him and, as is done in anthropology, explore physiologically the motivating causes of his actions.70

The human form still stares me in the face even with the potential for this knowledge in the back of my mind—by noting a human’s similarity to our form, I see myself mirrored in it; by this likeness-making I ignore the physiological data—the configuration of neurochemicals—that might predict the other person’s behavior. I take them at the superficial, as a being that is presented at my own scale and ascribe to them the same (illusory) freedom I find in my own internal state. And thus with the natural forms, as we see them. I see rivers, mountains, the sky, as composite blocks—as wholes out of many describable parts. I can recognize a personage in the sky even if I, with Homer, acknowledge that Zeus has no freedom, obeying physical laws, the fates,

But when the sun had bestrode mid heaven, then it was that the Father lifted up his golden scales, and set in them two fates of grievous death, one for the horse-taming Trojans, and one for the bronze-clad Achaeans; then he grasped the balance by the middle and raised it, and down sank the day of doom of the Achaeans … Then himself he thundered aloud from Ida, and sent a blazing flash into the army of the Achaeans.71

With attention to the intermeshing of the natural domain, even the unpoetic—the boffins who scientifically explain myths—may see a similarity between them and our own human interpersonal relationships. Nor are these social spheres concentric, never intersecting. On the contrary, human beings are drawn into the natural flux, sometimes devastatingly so,

a winter torrent at the full which with its swift flood sweeps away the embankments; this the close-fenced embankments do not hold back, nor do the walls of the fruitful vineyards stay its sudden coming when the storm of Zeus drives it on.72

Since I grew up in Virginia, blessed with a temperate climate, I had nurtured the fiction that nature is like clay, passively pressed and formed as humans please. Rainbows, for example, are lovely spectacles to me, not “a portent … of chill storm that makes men cease from their work on the face of the earth, and troubles the flocks.” But when seared by the heat of Greece’s summer—by the sun which shrivels “flesh around [the] sinews and limbs”—or when forced to take rooftop shelter while India’s monsoons level cities, I remember that humans live at nature’s behest.⁷³ Mt. Olympus’s polity of nature adduces more complex kinds of social interactions with human beings, that is, they do more to and with us than merely wreaking havoc. But this is the point for now: through its unparalleled devastation, nature asserts itself to us, and, since we note through vision its interrelations, it asserts itself as a mass of clashing personalities.

Yet Homer elevates the similarity between humans and gods beyond a likeness in “social form,” for this doesn’t give us the visage of each individual, the prosopon. He does so by a privilege he is conferred as a poet, an absolute freedom in this likeness-making. When this mode of comparison is applied to the monumental features which the eye forms Homer, I think, is able to form the gods.

To attempt to make myself clear, I want to focus on the mechanism undergirding the simile Homer so often avails himself of. Let’s examine one such instance of it where the pathos of a warrior’s death is accentuated by his comparison to a felled tree,

[Imbrius] the son of Telamon struck beneath the ear with a thrust of his long spear, and again drew out the spear; and he fell like an ash tree that on the summit of a mountain that is seen from afar on every side is cut down by the bronze, and brings its tender leafage to the ground; so he fell…74

Two unlikes are placed in an analogy—the juncture is at their similarities, and the eye oscillates by means of this bridge from the one, Imbrius, to the other, an ash tree. Where most mortals would distinguish and categorize the forms—to make “clear and distinct”—the poet forces the mind to suspend its fidelity to the principle of non-contradiction. Homer lets us glimpse at a like in the unlike: Imbrius and the ash tree are dissimilar in genus of being (plant and human), but similar in form and the information that form conveys (living, and upright in beautiful frames). The images blur—this is reinforced, I think, by the alternation of subject, first Imbrius, then ash tree, then Imbrius again; at this last instance, I picture almost a hybrid Imbrius-tree—the aspects of the two bleed into one another, as they fall together. After this being of blurred being has embossed itself onto my mind’s eye, the lineaments of the two come back into focus, each has the residual trace of the other: not only do I see Imbrius as treelike, I see the tree as humanlike. A homology is formed. I think this is why, when I read good poetry, I feel as though scales have been scraped off my eyes. As sight’s primacy allows it to stand in for the complete experience of the object (as discussed above), when I experience a tree with the entire package of senses, Homer’s visual poiesis humanizes the whole. Nor is it just the external impression; he accords to lions⁷⁵ and horses sensations that humans are familiar with only internally, like exulting in splendor,

Just as when a stabled horse that has fed his fill at the manger breaks his halter and runs stamping over the plain—being accustomed to bathe in the fair-flowing river—and exults; high does he hold his head, and about his shoulders his mane floats streaming and, as he glories in his splendor.76

It seems to me that what Homer accomplishes with these forms exemplifies the benefit of the Muses’ inspiration. With it, maybe, the poet sharpens the eye’s tendency to compartmentalize together that which is alike. But as she couples these forms, she sublates the visual and unthreads the beings’ boundaries—each is, afterward, suffused with the trace of the other. In this the poet parallels the ecological formation of natural things where, again, each part shapes the whole and the whole is shaped by each part. Unlike the poiesis of the craftsman, which refines elements into a determinate, useful form, the poet lets a form draw itself in the cauldron of the mind from what is supplied and crafted by the natural world. She lets the objects simmer together, and then take shape; a truth arises from an unsignifiable medium, a l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa, here where “the exalted vision loses its power.” ⁷⁷ If I had to concretize in the external the substance of this mental state where forms spume, I would choose something that resembles the mysterious quantum field which ripples into photons and binds them at infinite distances. So I’d pick the foamy Oceanus, into whom Helios, form-bringer, dips—and “from whom the gods are sprung.” ⁷⁸

And indeed, I think Homer’s theogenesis arises from this state of mind. By continuing to throw together these visual aspects together in the likeness-making cauldron, the distinctions between all beings begin to fade. Every aspect of the cosmos is soaked with our lifeblood, and the lifeblood in plants and animals soak each other and the environment which nourishes them. The only way to drain this form-flood is to channel it through the visual trough; Homer, drunk on muse-mana, bores eyes into nature. For, once the lines which divide beings are blurred, so is the one which sections off the sensing from the unperceptive. And to deny sight to nature would be to deny the full breadth of experience, and deny with it the experience of their connective tissue, form.

Is anything excluded from this? Metal, unwrought, carries no form of its own, thus has nothing to contribute, in fact, may stultify the process. Hephaestus’s “handmaids made of gold in the semblance of living girls” may have “understanding in their minds, and in them speech and strength” and knowledge of “cunning handiwork by gift of the immortal gods.”⁷⁹ But nonetheless, I think they’re unseeing beings, mechanically reacting without internal qualia.

Otherwise, everything is crafted by nature’s forms and touched by them—everything is filled with gods, who now, seen by poet, look back at us. Hence we see in the epic that divinities are wholly manifest in their eyes, which they may not cloak. Aphrodite attempts to trick Helen by speaking “to her in the likeness of an old woman, a wool-comber, who used to card the fair wool for her when she lived in Lacedaemon, and whom she especially loved.” But when Helen

caught sight of the beauteous neck of the goddess, her lovely bosom, and her flashing eyes, she was struck with wonder, and she spoke, and addressed her, saying: ‘Strange goddess, why is your heart set on deceiving me in this way?’80

Eye-contact dispelled the illusion; in it, the gods must reveal themselves; to dissimulate the eye is to deface the god. Every subsaharan mask and fetish, no matter the extent to which it distorts and deletes (to great artistic effect) the other features of the face—no matter how abstract it is—always bears a pair of eyes. When a being possesses eyes, it is bestowed sense, an internal state which makes it a living component of the world, into whom the world flows. Since light funnels into the eye as into a point, the being is localized at a certain coordinate in space: like the domains they correlate to, the gods are not immanent everywhere. Thetis, for example, must wait for Zeus while feasts with the Ethiopians, and she surreptitiously takes counsel with him when he returns, so that Hera doesn’t spot her.⁸¹

When I walk by someone on the street and don’t make eye-contact, they are a blur of color, découpaged cardboard—but if I do meet their gaze, they inflate with dimension. The whole envelop of flesh stitches itself around this mutual recognition of the internal. For we see each other as perceiving beings, and so suffering ones. As Homer makes eye-contacts with nature, he therefore gives it pain, as Ares and Aphrodites’ wounds evince.

With pain, sight brings the entire spectrum of the passions requisite for a polity of nature. In vision is lust. Hera, to distract Zeus from battle, adorns herself with the strap of Aphrodite “in which are fashioned all manner of allurements; in it is love, in it desire, in it dalliance—persuasion that steals the senses even of the wise.”⁸² With her other accoutrements, she is irresistible to the Olympian. And, as nature contains all, all are liable to be lusted after by the gods, as the litany of Zeus’s sexual exploits well attests. In vision is also pity. Rousseau asserts that human beings have “an innate repugnance against seeing a fellow creature suffer,”—it’s

so natural a virtue that even beasts [bête féroce] sometimes show perceptible signs of it. … What terrible agitation must be felt by this witness [témoin] of an event in which he has no personal interest!”83

From this I conjecture that Rousseau would attribute the sensation of pity to any being that is able to see; but if gods are above human beings, and enjoy an augmented form of our faculties, then they certainly have this innate pity that’s triggered by sight. In fact, Homer always mentions sight as a precursor to divine pity: Hera “pitied (κήδετο) the Danaans because she saw (ὁρᾶτο) them dying,” and “as [high-ranking Greeks] mourned the son of Cronos saw (ἰδὼν) them and pitied (ἐλέησε) them.”⁸⁴ And in vision is shame. He who wears the ring of Gyges (or cap of Hades) and is made invisible, is thereby inoculated from not only punitive repercussions but shame in the eyes of the polity. Thetis likewise attempts to render herself invisible, lest she let be seen in what she believes to be a shameful state,

I feel shame to mingle in the company of the immortals, since I have measureless griefs at heart. But I will go…So saying, the fair goddess took a dark-hued veil, than which no raiment was more black. 85

Shame also tempers the appetitive—an indispensable ingredient in the social glue (for which reason the Athenian Stranger hallows it and thinks that its cultivation would expunge or at least enervate the Dionysian element.⁸⁶ Apollo resists battling with Poseidon “for he felt shame to come to blows with his father’s brother.”⁸⁷

The attendant passions of these three secure a lively (often painful) community, as Homer depicts throughout the epic; vision is the substrate on which nature socially flourishes. Of course, as human beings are seen by divinities, and can see them, we, too are lusted after, pitied by and held in shame before the gods. Ichor then congeals in our blood; humans are infused with the spirit of the natural world itself. Thus we’re no longer just a passive party to Demeter’s mourning, blighting the earth. We host her and cheer her up, or so the Hymn to Demeter illustrates. “Gods are hard for mortals to see” its poet claims, but they willingly shroud themselves in human skin so as to communicate with us in familiar guise.⁸⁸ (Even so, the gods seem to have a numinous glow to them: Diomedes recognizes Ares aiding Hector in the “likeness of a mortal man.”⁸⁹ Do they speak to us like this solely because, as Athena says to Ares, “dangerous are the gods when they appear in manifest form?”⁹⁰Divine frames match the monumentality of their natural features, and, indeed, Ares is said to stretch seven plethora, ≈⁷⁰⁰⁰⁰square feet (according to my Loeb’s editor, William Wyatt). Perhaps, they assume a human form only so as to not overwhelm our senses.

But I think there’s another reason, if auxiliary to this one. Their human guise is necessary to fully involve themselves in our polity, for, otherwise, there would be a hindrance in speech. How does the form of our species facilitate speech? Only human beings are naturally endowed with the word; as with Balaam’s donkey in the Hebrew Bible,⁹¹ an animal may only speak in the Iliad with divine assent, which Hera grants to the immortal horses of Peleus. Gods comport themselves in such a way as is proper for conversation, putting on a human dress (though a certain closeness may override this prerequisite, as with Thetis and Achilles). Such is the case even outside of genial occasions: furious at his defilement, the river Scamander censures Achilles, but he still makes sure to call “to him in the likeness of a man,” even if the voice itself “came out of the deep eddy.”⁹²

However, it seems to me that this human manifestation is not just to appease our habit, which is accustomed to conversing with members of our own species. Often, the god’s guise is someone dear to the person with whom she wants to converse, as when Aphrodite appears to Helen in the form of a beloved woman. Appearance is itself communication, or at least a sweetener mixed in: when a foe implores his vanquisher that they be spared for ransom, he clasps his knees in submission.⁹³ Words, I think, have a visual component, which we lose when we “speak” through the gestureless rhapsodes, the letters of the alphabet. Socrates deprecates the written word in Phaedrus because it is lifeless, unresponsive, always saying the same thing to its reader. At which point I felt his frustration, for I wished I could’ve revived him and asked, “if the only problem is responsiveness, would it matter if, say, two human beings remained silent but communicated by writing characters on a tablet? There doesn’t seem to be an inherent problem in the alphabet by your reckoning; you just didn’t live to see its evolution into instant correspondence, email and texting.” However, in the Cratylus Socrates hypothesizes that the first “speech” was conducted through mimicry. Indicating the referent would’ve been “accomplished by bodily imitation of that which was to be expressed”⁹⁴—in other words, the human body was the first speaker, the begetter of logos. Traces of this persist: we modulate bodies, and especially our faces, in speech. (This gels with the legendary story recounted by Diogenes Läertius,

it seems that Plato was the first to bring to Athens the mimes of Sophron which had been neglected, and to draw characters in the style of that writer; a copy of the mimes, they say, was actually found under his pillow.)95

Humans therefore speak with the gods as manifest, visual entities.

Even in other forms of “communication,” the visual is the medium through which the message is sent, such as in omens. All of this is to say that the gods’ ability to speak with themselves and with us is evidence, I think, of a sensitivity to sight similar to our own. That only human beings and gods have this might be why gods socialize largely with us, if all else is equal among lifeforms. Not that our languages are identical, however: Zeus assumed “the likeness of a clear-voiced mountain bird that the gods call chalcis, but men call cymindis.”⁹⁶

The gods’ freedom to assume whatever form they like, as Zeus does here, is a result of their genesis in the poet’s supravisual state, or so I’d like to believe. Gods, formed in vision, live in and breathe in vision. And when we sacrifice to them, fire is the chief portal; we transmute flesh into smoke, suffusing and obliterating weight with light.

***

Someone attuned to poetic rhythm may protest: “You’ve given far too much primacy to a medium that Homer doesn’t even work with. Homer is a poet, not a visual artist. He, like Pindar, is

no statue-maker, fashioning images
that stand in idleness and do not budge
beyond their bases. No!
Sweet song, on every cargo boat and skiff,
go forth from Aigina.97

You’ve ignored Homer’s sweet song, the efforts he sweat for the sounds and rhythms which stream into the rhapsode’s ear and flow out of his fountain of the throat. Certainly sight is potent, and can bear packets of data sealed off to the other senses. And yet—though rosy-fingered dawn may be a sight beloved by all, it’s the lark’s warbling which wets the soul. Can you name in the visual boasting anything like music’s power to tint one’s entire mood and disposition? To place the poet’s medium, the living word, under the purview of light is to go too far, the déformation unprofessionnelle of the art and philosophy student. Much of the drama in the epic, which you’ve ignored, occurs through and is motivated by the verbal.”

I take their points. Perhaps another investigation could’ve reached the gods by way of an auditory analysis. This route might adduce that poets are especially attuned to the confused words that nature’s living pillars sometimes let out, and through this heightened sensitivity they hear the divine voices underlying them, as does an Oracle.⁹⁸ Yet, even if I grant that the poet is foremost a wordsmith, I nonetheless assert that the concept of the word itself seems to have a subordinate status to light in this epic. To be sure, I won’t venture to extend this lionization of vision to all poetry, maybe only to Homer. (What to make of his legendary blindness? Maybe the light imagery is a swan song for this sense that he loves, like Milton’s paean to vision in Paradise Lost⁹⁹ or Beethoven’s Appassionata.) An explicit contrast between words and sight is made by Aeneas as he confronts Achilles,

We know each other’s lineage, we know each other’s parents, for we have heard the words told of old by mortal men; but with sight of eyes you have never seen my parents nor I yours.100

Here he implies what I discussed earlier, that only sight provides true confirmation among the senses, but also that the testimony of words isn’t sufficient for a sure account—the Passion needs witnesses. As Aeneas continues to say,

Glib is the tongue of mortals, and words there are on it many and various, and of speech the field is wide on this side and on that. Whatever word you speak, such could you also hear.101

To avoid this glibness, I think Homer tries to remain a fairly dispassionate narrator; as far as I can tell, he avoids overly embellishing his scenes with ornaments, lest his images diffract into the floridity. (In this respect he’s quite unlike Virgil who adds spice indiscriminately, as if cooking up one of the exorbitant dishes Juvenal lambasts). Therefore, Homer corrects his characters’ inaccuracies when they stray from what the eye reports: Nestor, Agamemnon, and Achilles refer to Briseïs as a “girl” (κούρης),¹⁰²but Homer calls her a woman (γυνὴ).¹⁰³

Homer’s lexical exactness is largely possible through sight; for words, I think, obtain their fineness only because the eye often lends to it its own. Words refer only to a general notion of a thing, a trait of language which Hegel calls “divine,” one which sight is armed to serve.¹⁰⁵ When I distinguish a man from a boy, I distinguish not a particular person but all men and boys. Aristotle asserts, if I’m interpreting him correctly, that the mind has a power, a subsensible faculty, through which we take what is present in the particular (say three intersecting lines on a chalkboard) as the corresponding universal (a triangle).¹⁰⁶ In accordance, Hegel claims that “Perception takes what is present to a universal.”¹⁰⁷ That is to say, once presented with enough concrete instances of an image of a thing, the mind seems to naturally carve out (or recollect or superimpose the concept of) the universal form—the analysis of which is equivalent to an analysis of all the particulars. Vision is in the best position, it seems to me, to usher in the concrete to the general by virtue of its caliber of definition, discussed earlier. Loudness, sweetness, hardness are too fuzzy to be accurate on their own, but vision allows me to be more exact in categorizing. In age, for example: there is a gradual translation in appearance from childhood to adulthood, a bartender can spot a teenager when she sees one (and ask for his ID). Note also Theophrastus’s approach to establishing a definition for a tree: after inquiring into its constituent parts, he turned his attention to compartmentalizing aspects of its general image, “since it turns out that one’s understanding becomes clearer if one distinguishes according to form (εἴδη), it is well to do this for whatever things one can.”¹⁰⁸

My point is this: for the finest lexical exactness, I think we need a visual experience of a word’s referent. Even the experience of love, a word I might feel is universally obvious, is complicated by its inability to be stuffed into another language’s semantic field, as all Intro to Greek students who have encountered philos, agapē, and erōs know.

And Homer, I believe, relies on his listeners’ visual experience of the natural objects he refers to. However, it’s not just for the pleasure of the mind’s eye that he expects it of us—it seems to me he does so to better immortalize the humans slain in the war. Let’s return to Imbrius and the ash tree. The brightness of this simile, if not wholly dimmed, is faded if the listener has never seen and has to imagine for herself an “ash tree that on the summit of a mountain that is seen from afar on every side.” But Imbrius is also thereby faded. Immediately prior to the simile I examined, Homer offers this description of him,

He dwelt in Pedaeum before the sons of the Achaeans came, and had as wife a daughter of Priam who was born out of wedlock, Medesicaste; but when the curved ships of the Danaans came, he returned to Ilios and was preeminent among the Trojans, and he dwelt in the house of Priam, who held him in like honor with his own children.

Why this chronicle? Maybe, it’s so that the listener fills in a notion of this otherwise trivial man. This description, however, is little more than historical—nice to know for a prosopography, maybe, but otherwise it’s lackluster and fails to vivify him. Yet when Imbrius is placed in the simile, this short chronicle becomes vibrant, and his death becomes striking. For Homer stimulates our general image of an ash tree, and weaves Imbrius into it—he places this particular man with his own vita in a general visual form (general, because I can’t think of a “specific” ash tree with the description provided.) This template serves to enliven Imbrius, for now he has a referent for sight and activates the mind’s eye. And so he transcends an identity as a nondescript name: Imbrius becomes more than just another item on the necrology with an affixed bio. His death lives by virtue of his being entwined with this image we’ve seen. He is suddenly resuscitated in our epoch, in our ash trees (like the reverse panels of Duccio’s Maestà, painting the life of Jesus in Siena, against its medieval backdrop.)

Likewise with the catalog of ships. It may be a slog to read, but I think it’s Homer’s attempt to texture with life these otherwise empty names, symbols bereft of meaning. For in it, he does something like the simile above. The warriors are given dimension along with the cities from which they hail; this is accomplished by richly painting these locales with natural objects his listener have seen (or ought to have seen): “rocky Aulis,” “Arne, rich in vines,” “Anthedon on the seashore,” “Lycastus, white with chalk.” I’ve never been to any of these places, but I’ve surely seen towns that are rocky, rich in vines, or on the seashore. What the ash tree does with Imbrius, these natural features achieve with the cities of Greece and their warriors.

And, likewise, with nature itself, with the gods Homer immortalizes his epic. The Achaens fear that they will perish in Troy and have no name.¹⁰⁹ Homer ensures otherwise. He wants us, I think, to continue to bear witness to the horror of war, whose effects on the eye would of itself cause us to recoil:

The battle that brings death to mortals bristled with long spears which they held for the rending of flesh, and eyes were blinded by the blaze of bronze from gleaming helmets and corselets newly burnished and shining shields as they came together confusedly. Bold-hearted would a man be who rejoiced at sight of such toil of war and did not grieve.110

Through the natural referents, with its power to shape humans out of names, he deepens the thrust of this grief with a glut of similes. But how to ensure that anyone will hear these in the first place, that these beautiful bodies weren’t defleshed in oblivion? Meter and phonoaesthetics are certainly a boon to sustaining their memory—surely the addictive rhythm is one reason why Stephen Dedalus can’t help but mutter epi oinopa ponton over and over, and why Socrates is able to recall such a score of lines from the epic. However, Homer may worry that his epic would stimulate only Greek ears, ignored by the likes of the Trojans who are “not all like speech or one language, but their tongues [are] mixed… men summoned from many lands,” for whom Greek’s phonic qualities would be severed from meaning.¹¹¹He needs recourse to something more universal. This isn’t to make Homer a cosmopolitan avant la lettre (avant le Diogène)—but he might fear, with the war’s propensity to devastate, that the Achaeans would be wiped out with follies as foolish as the one which destroys the Trojans. So, as Horace and Martial immortalize their friends in their poems, as enough of us love wine and snarky quips for their poems to live, Homer immortalizes Troy by permeating his epic with the gods—as all of us human beings, everywhere, are natural creatures, living and dying with and against the flux of the cosmos. Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Athena, and so on—these are all specific names, pertaining to a specific religion, and of course distinct from the words for their domains; how would anyone but an Ancient Greek know what to do with them? But Homer (like the poet who composed Gilgamesh) goes out of his way to assign epithets and behaviors which internally define these deities’ domains and hierarchical positions. With each other in the full polis of Mt. Olympus, they compose an interrelated whole in the epic, like the natural world they personify.

The universals of the natural world assume of the ash tree, always refreshing with life by eyes of posterity, who see everywhere the theater of nature and put in it the drama of the war and the bloodshed it unleashes on the mutely drinking earth.

***

Homer’s immortalization, it could be argued, banks on the fact that the divine domains will always remain at the forefront of our lives, that we will forever be natural creatures first and human beings second. What happens if the affairs pertaining to our own species comes into a focus sharper than the natural world, whose vividness would then dampen?

There would be a Copernican turn in the polis. Within the cramped and crowded walls, only a sustained study of the human being would supply the apposite paideia to maneuver the social sphere. One doesn’t need to know how to fend off predators on the city-side of the Lion Gate. As the citizens become gradually acquainted with the human mind, the eye rotates and looks within. The poetically inclined man may still wish to see a like in the unlike, but he no longer requires the muse’s inspiration to seek the higher truths: they’re already latent in what underlies the eye’s generalizing faculty. (As a result, the eye itself is now reduced to a symbol on the ladder up to these higher truths). These neo-poets therefore no longer trouble themselves to range the environment in all its complexity to furnish nature’s visual forms—they learn nothing from trees. With the emphasis on the mind, they’re indifferent to the what’s in external: anything is now ripe to be generalized, from dirt to couches. (Similar to how all objects were made fair-game for the artist’s brush, Hegel says, after the Spirit evolved into the final stage of Romantic art.¹¹² And this mental power is invested indiscriminately, to all human beings, from aristocrat to slave boy. Only by conversing with others through dialectic does one reach the true Forms.

Plato, it seems to me, was Homer’s best student. To be sure, he chucked him out of the (infected) city, but he couldn’t resist the Homeric imitation he so severely admonishes; in fact, Socrates relays the whole Republic in the first-person, in the same way Homer channels the muses, and he imitates his interlocutors. I want to believe that Plato learned from Homer how to securely immortalize his own beloved, the philosophical life of Athens. After refining/corrupting the lessons of the Homeric simile into the theory of Forms—a way to see likes in unlikes, and likes above those unlikes—he deployed it in the dialogues so that succeeding generations may continue to resuscitate Socrates, his brothers, and his friends. For the Forms, unlike the visual referents which require their being seen, are within us all: were I never to even encounter a tree (heaven forbid), I’d still be able to follow Socrates when he draws a square in the sand or when he asks about and questions into knowledge, virtue, courage, friendship, and eros. Immortalization of this sort is, I think, more enduring and universal—it’ll survive climate change and the global ecological collapse, if there are still human beings around afterwards. So—despite its philosophical blemishes, and despite the fact that it can never capture half of the speech, the body and physiognomy—Plato writes. He portrays his characters’ passions, arguments, and ancillary discussions; he immortalizes their inner movements and makes it so that their souls are eternal, in our memories.

But Socrates is at his most memorable when he is outside the walls, when he bursts open with gods.

1. Herodotus, Histories 2.53
2. Plato, Phaedrus 274e
3. Plato, Ion 533e
4. Homer, Iliad 16.186–trans. Murray
5. 19.118
6. 18.443
7. 5.119f.
8. 8.480
9. First Hymn to Demeter, 17
10. Homer eg 13.575, 21.180f.
11. 22.463-6
12. Aristotle, On the Soul 412a20 (II.1)
13. Homer 23.104
14. 8.40 / eg 16.672
15. 14.258
16. 5.696f.
17. eg 5.124
18. 15.666f.
19. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1646
20. Aeschylus Persians 299—trans. Sommerstein, also 710
21. Sophocles, Electra 380f
22. Sophocles Philoctetes 414f—trans Lloyd-Jones, also 1210f
23. Euripides, Trojan Women 269
24. Euripides, Suppliant Women 532
25. Euripides, Hippolytus 56, 907
26. Euripides Heracles 524, 1223
27. Euripides, Alcestis eg 455, 722
28. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1217—trans. Kovacs
29. Homer 5.341
30. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions Bk. 10, “Concupiscence of the Eyes”–trans. Boulding
31. Homer 3.152
32. Ezra Pound, Canto LXXIV
33. Homer 20.420
34. 19.90
35. 19.90-4
36. 19.95f.
37. Plato, Protagoras 356ff.—trans. Lamb
38. Homer 15.600 / 22.454-62
39. Augustine of Hippo,
40. Homer 14.493-5
41. Augustine of Hippo,
42. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Q. 77. Art. 5
43. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1
44. Homer eg 5.265
45. 5.443
46. Euripides, Helen 583
47. Homer 8.555-9
48. 18.486f.
49. Ezra Pound, Translations of Confucius p. 20 / for the correction see Hanyu Da Zidian—a sort of Chinese OED—vol 6, p. 3663, 1
50. Homer 20.22f.
51. 24.215
52. 16.674
53. 3.10-4
54. Mahabharata 1.1.40—trans. van Buitenen
55. Baudelaire, “L’Albatros”
56. Homer 11.630ff. / 6.115
57. 21.12-4
58. 2.311
59. 2.144-9
60. 15.271-8
61. 1.596-600
62. eg 5.294, 14.25
63. 2.490-3
64. 21.165
65. 1.571
66. 1.590-3
67. 2.721-3
68. Sophocles, Philoctetes 42f.
69. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum CXXIX
70. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B578–trans. Pluhar; emphasis in original
71. Homer 8.68-75
72. 5.86-90
73. 23.190f.
74. 13.177-180
75. 17.134-6
76. 6.506-9
77. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.142–trans. Hollander
78. Homer 14.201
79. 18.417-20
80. 3.395-400
81. 1.423 / 1.500ff.
82. 14.215f.
83. Rousseau, Second Discourse Part II—trans. Cranston
84. Homer 1.55f. / 19.340
85. 24.90-4
86. Plato, Laws 671d
87. Homer 21.468f.
88. Hymn to Demeter 110
89. Homer 5.604
90. 20.131
91. Numbers 22:28
92. Homer 21.213
93. eg 20.463f.
94. Plato, Cratylus 423b—trans. Fowler
95. Diogenes Laërtius, Lives 3.18—trans. Hicks
96. Homer 14.291
97. Pindar, Nemean 5—trans. Miller; edited for clarity
98. Baudelaire, “Correspondences”1f.
99. Milton, Paradise Lost III.1-55
100. Homer 20.203-5
101. 20.246-9
102. 1.275 / 1.346
103. 1.348
104. 2.689
105. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit 109, Miller p.66
106. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a30
107. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit 110, Miller p.67
108. Theophrastus, An Inquiry Concerning Plants, Observing Living Beings Manual p. 7
109. Homer 12.70
110. 13.340-45
111. 4.437f.
112. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics III.III.iii.c