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Friday 5 December 2008

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer

Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox

In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are. One of them, however, has always inspired a faint measure of perplexity. Describing the impact of the Greek troops’ feet on the earth, Homer compares it to ‘the anger of Zeus who delights in thunder, whenever he lashes the ground around Typhoeus in Arima…’ Zeus, of course, was the king of the gods, and Typhoeus his deadliest rival, a colossal and snake-headed monster — but what or where was Arima? ‘Even the ancients,’ as Robin Lane Fox puts it in his new book, ‘were uncertain.’

‘So what?’, some well may be tempted to mutter. Yet the mystery soon stands revealed as the very opposite of pettifoggery. Lane Fox — for all the vulpine character of his surname — is a man who regularly rides to hounds: he knows how to pick up an interesting trail and pursue it far and wide. As we follow him through the pages of this learned, original and ceaselessly intriguing book, we find a strange and alien landscape opening up before us, one so remote that it had hitherto seemed lost to utter darkness. What the grove of Nemi was to Sir James Frazer, the identity of Arima is to Lane Fox: an opening onto an entire world in which myth and history are brought spectacularly to mix.

Yet Travelling Heroes is not, as The Golden Bough was, a book given over to abstraction and extravagant speculation. Lane Fox has always been a classicist with a genius for hunting down the unexpected nugget of hard evidence, whether an obscure text, a fragment of pottery, or a view such as an Alexander or a Constantine might have recognised. In his new book, however, he surpasses himself. His quarry is not the Mycenaean warriors who most likely sacked the historical Troy, but rather Homer’s own contemporaries, the Greeks of a period that has always been notoriously, indeed rebarbatively, obscure: the 9th and 8th centuries BC.

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