Justified True Belief

(●) The poet the Greeks learned to read on, whose two epics were the nearest thing the ancient world had to a shared book of scripture. + Dig through the rubbish mounds of a provincial Egyptian town and you will come up with schoolwork. Wobbly letters on broken pottery, a wax tablet with a line copied out four times, a scrap of papyrus where a boy has been set to write the opening of the Iliad and has misspelled it. That was Greek education, from the Nile to the Black Sea, for something like a thousand years. A boy learned his letters on Homer, memorized long stretches of him, and carried the lines around in his head for the rest of his life the way a churchgoing child once carried the King James Psalms. Which is why he matters to Christian readers. When Paul stood up on the Areopagus in Athens, the bare rock where the city’s oldest council sat, when Justin argued with a Jewish teacher named Trypho, when Basil wrote to young men about what to read, they were all addressing people whose first book had been Homer, who could finish a quotation before it was out of your mouth, and whose picture of what gods are like had been set by him before they were ten years old. Whatever the gospel had to say about God, it was saying it to a world that had already been taught, in beautiful verse, that the gods quarrel, take bribes, cheat on each other, and do not much care what becomes of us. The fathers could not ignore that. Most of them had learned it themselves. And here is the strange part. About the man, we know nothing. Not where he was born (seven cities claimed him, and the ancients could not settle it), not when, not whether he was blind as the tradition says, not even whether one poet made both poems. Scholars at Alexandria were already arguing that question in the second century BC. What we have instead is the text itself, and we have it better than we have any other work of Greek antiquity: more surviving papyrus of Homer has come out of the sand of Egypt than of any other Greek author.

(●) c. 1200 BC: The war he sings had been over for five centuries before anyone sang it in the form we have. + Start with the mound. On the northwest corner of what is now Turkey, a few miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles, there is a hill called Hisarlik that is not really a hill. It is the wreckage of a city rebuilt on its own rubble nine or ten times over, and archaeologists number those layers from the bottom of the heap upward, so that Troy I is the earliest town on the spot and Troy IX the last. Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman with more enthusiasm than method, dug into it in the 1870s and announced he had found Troy. Almost everyone since has been correcting him. Wilhelm Dörpfeld tidied up after him, Carl Blegen dug it again in the 1930s, and Manfred Korfmann worked the site from 1988 until his death in 2005, which is four generations of spades on one small hill. The layer that matters to a reader of Homer is the one called Troy VIIa, a crowded city with storage jars sunk into the floors of its houses, and it burned around 1180 BC. Documents from the other side help. The Hittite empire, which ran most of Anatolia (the broad peninsula that is now Turkey) in the Bronze Age, kept its archives on clay tablets, and those archives mention a place called Wilusa, which most scholars take to be the Greek Ilios: the other name for Troy, and the one the Iliad is named after. They mention a king of Wilusa named Alaksandu, which looks very like Alexandros, the other name Homer gives to Paris. And they mention a power across the water called Ahhiyawa, which many connect with the Achaeans, Homer’s usual word for the Greeks. None of this proves the poem. It does mean the songs were about a real place, and that a real war there is not a fantasy. The poems themselves carry fossils. In the tenth book of the Iliad, a warrior puts on a helmet made of boar’s tusks sewn onto leather, described in careful detail. Archaeologists have dug such helmets out of Mycenaean graves. Mycenaean is what we call the Bronze Age Greek world that came to its end around 1200 BC, named after Mycenae, the greatest of its fortress towns and the city Homer gives to Agamemnon. Nobody had worn one for four hundred years when the poem reached its final form, and the singers were still describing it correctly, which tells you something about how well a song can carry a memory.

(●) c. 800 BC: Greece learned to write again, and the oldest Greek sentences we have are already verse. + The Mycenaean palaces had a script, which we call Linear B, used almost entirely for inventories: so many chariot wheels, so many sheep. When the palaces burned around 1200 BC the script went with them, and for four centuries the Greeks did not write at all. Then, around 800 BC, they borrowed the alphabet of the Phoenician traders and did something the Phoenicians had not done: they took the letters they did not need for Greek consonants and used them for vowels. That is the ancestor of the alphabet these words are printed in. Now look at what they wrote first. Two of the oldest substantial Greek inscriptions we possess are scratched on pottery for wine. One is a jug from a grave near the Dipylon gate in Athens, from about 740 BC, promising the jug as a prize to whichever dancer performs most gracefully. The other is a clay cup from Pithekoussai, a Greek trading settlement on an island in the bay of Naples, from about 730 BC, which announces that it is the cup of Nestor and that whoever drinks from it will be seized by desire. Both carry hexameter, the six-beat line of Greek epic, one line of it on the jug and two on the cup, and the cup expects you to catch its joke: Nestor’s cup in the eleventh book of the Iliad is an enormous thing studded with gold that another man could barely lift from the table when it was full. So the songs were older than the writing, and were common property before anyone wrote them down. The alphabet arrived just in time to catch them.

(●) fl. c. 750 BC: Seven cities claimed his birth, and the singer behind the name cannot be got at. + The abbreviation in front of the date is an admission. Fl. is short for the Latin floruit, he flourished, and scholars reach for it when they can say roughly when a man was at work and nothing whatever about when he was born or when he died. Homer gets one, because the ancients wanted a life for him and could not produce one. Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos and Athens all claimed him, with variations in the lists, and the biographies that circulated under respectable names are plainly legend: one of them has him named Melesigenes after a river, blinded by illness, and dying on the island of Ios because he could not solve a riddle put to him by fishermen. The blindness comes from a poem, the Hymn to Apollo, whose singer calls himself a blind man who lives in rocky Chios; Thucydides quotes those lines in the fifth century BC and takes them for Homer’s own. Herodotus, writing around 430 BC, guessed that Homer and Hesiod (the other poet standing at the head of Greek literature, whose Theogony and Works and Days have come down to us complete) lived four hundred years before his own time and no more, which puts him near 850 BC. The dialect of the poems is mostly Ionic, the Greek of the coast of Asia Minor and the islands off it, mixed with older forms from elsewhere, which is why the convention is to call him a poet of Ionia and leave the city blank. What replaced the missing life is an explanation of how the poems were made. In the 1920s and 1930s a young American scholar named Milman Parry noticed that Homer’s repeated phrases (swift-footed Achilles, the wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn) are not decoration but a system: for any character, in any position in the line, there is a ready-made phrase of exactly the right metrical shape. Scholars call those ready-made phrases formulas, and a singer who has a stock of them has something better than a memorized text. He has a working method for composing at speed, out loud, in front of an audience. To test it, Parry and his student Albert Lord went to Yugoslavia and recorded illiterate village singers doing precisely that, building long heroic songs live out of inherited formulas. So there was a tradition of singers, stretching back generations, and out of it came two poems on a scale nobody had attempted. Whether Homer was the man who shaped both, or one who shaped the first, or a name the Greeks attached to the whole tradition, is the oldest unsettled question in European literature. Alexandrian scholars argued it; Friedrich August Wolf reopened it in 1795 and it has never closed. The honest answer is that we do not know.

(●) c. 750 – 700 BC: The Iliad took its shape: fifty days near the end of a ten-year war, and the subject is one man’s anger. + The first word of the poem, in Greek, is wrath. Not Troy, not Helen, not the Greeks: wrath. Agamemnon, the commander of the expedition, is forced to give back a captive girl he has taken, and takes Achilles’ captive girl instead to save his own face. Achilles, the best fighter in the army, walks out of the war. For most of the poem he sits by his ships while men he has eaten with are killed a mile away, and the poem does not tell you he is wrong, and does not tell you he is right. Then his closest friend Patroclus borrows his armour and is killed by Hector, the Trojan prince. Achilles comes back, not for the army but for revenge, kills Hector, and drags his body behind a chariot round and round the tomb of his friend for twelve days. And then, in the last book, Hector’s father Priam crosses the battle lines alone at night, walks into the tent of the man who killed his son, kneels down and kisses his hands, and asks for the body. That is where the poem ends. Fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three lines, twenty-four books, and Troy never falls in it. The wooden horse is not in the Iliad at all. It is worth sitting with how unusual that is. A war poem sung to warriors gives its most sympathetic speeches to the enemy, gives the enemy’s wife and baby son the most tender scene in the book, and closes on the funeral of the enemy’s champion. Homer knows which side he is singing to, and he will not let them off.

(●) c. 700 BC: The Odyssey followed, and its hero wants nothing in the world except to go home. + If the Iliad begins with wrath, the Odyssey begins with a man. Twelve thousand one hundred and nine lines, twenty-four books, and the scenery could hardly be more different: a raft lashed together with pegs, a laundry expedition to a river mouth, a swineherd’s hut, a scar on an old man’s thigh recognized by his childhood nurse while she washes his feet, a bed one of whose posts is a living olive tree rooted in the floor. The monsters are there too, the one-eyed Cyclops and the witch and the sirens, but they are told in flashback at a dinner party, and the real crisis of the poem is a house full of young men eating a missing man’s stores and pestering his wife. Ancient readers noticed how unlike the two poems are. A group of scholars at Alexandria known as the chorizontes, the separators, argued from that difference that the two epics had two authors. Aristarchus, the greatest of the Alexandrian critics, argued back. The debate is still going, and one popular modern guess is that the Odyssey is simply the later poem, by a singer working in the tradition a generation or so after the Iliad. What everyone agrees on is that the Odyssey turns the heroic code sideways. Achilles buys eternal fame with an early death. Odysseus is offered eternal life by a goddess, on an island, with no fighting, and turns it down to get back to a rocky farm and a wife his own age (T5).

(●) c. 522 BC: Athens made him official, and the text began to hold still. + Athens held a festival every four years called the Great Panathenaia, and at some point in the sixth century BC a rule was made about the recitation of Homer there: the poems were to be performed in order, one reciter taking up exactly where the last had stopped, straight through. Ancient sources credit the rule variously to Pisistratus, who had made himself master of the city, to his son Hipparchus, or to Solon the lawgiver a generation or two before them, and a story grew up that Pisistratus had the scattered poems collected and put in order, which may be an invention working backwards from the festival rule. Either way, a competition where a man is penalized for getting the sequence wrong is a powerful force for standardizing a text. The performers were called rhapsodes, which means something like song-stitchers. Unlike the older singers they did not compose; they held a staff instead of a lyre and recited what was fixed. Plato wrote a short dialogue, the Ion, about one of them, a champion reciter who can hold a crowd of twenty thousand and cannot explain a single thing about his own art. By Plato’s day Homer was the education of Greece, and Plato was uneasy about it. In the tenth book of the Republic he has Socrates say that when you meet admirers of Homer who tell you he has been the educator of Hellas (their own word for Greece) and that you should regulate your whole life by him, you may love and honour such people, and grant that Homer is the most poetic of writers and the first of the tragedians, and still refuse to let his poetry into a well-run city. Nobody censors a book that nobody reads.

(●) c. 200 BC: Alexandria edited him, and the divisions and the tools they invented are still in use. + The Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that took Egypt after Alexander’s death and held it down to Cleopatra, built a library at Alexandria and staffed it with the best readers in the Greek world, and their central job was Homer. Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace collated manuscripts, compared readings, and marked up their copies with small signs in the margin: an obelus, a short horizontal stroke, against a line they judged an intruder, other marks for lines they thought misplaced or duplicated. They divided each poem into twenty-four books and labelled them with the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, which is why a modern reader still cites Iliad XXIV. Textual criticism, the discipline of asking what an author actually wrote rather than what a copyist supplied, was invented in that library, on this poet. The results travelled. A tenth-century manuscript in Venice, known as the Venetus A and brought west by Cardinal Bessarion, carries the Iliad with the margins packed with notes descending from those Alexandrian scholars, so that a reader today can watch Aristarchus at work. The first printed Homer came off a press in Florence in 1488, edited by the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles, and the poems have not been out of print for a day since. Meanwhile the sand kept its own copies. Hundreds of papyrus fragments of Homer have been recovered from Egypt, some of them older than any complete manuscript of any classical author, and they show a text that had already settled close to the one we read.

What He Taught

(T1) The gods are deathless and powerful, and no better than the men they rule. + Consider how the first book of the Iliad ends. A priest has been insulted, his daughter carried off, and the god Apollo has answered by shooting plague into the Greek camp for nine days until the pyres are burning night and day. Up on Olympus, in the closing scene of that same book, the gods have a quarrel of their own, and it is defused when the lame smith-god Hephaestus takes over the wine-pouring and goes bustling round the hall on his bad leg, and unquenchable laughter breaks out among the blessed gods. The pyres are barely cold and the dinner party is a comedy. That is not Homer being careless. It is his settled picture. The Olympians (the gods who live on Mount Olympus, with Zeus at their head) are exactly like powerful human beings except that they cannot die. Hera hates Troy so deeply that she offers Zeus three of her own favourite cities to be sacked in exchange for it. Aphrodite gets a spear through the hand from a mortal and runs crying to her mother. Zeus is bound by promises he regrets and outmanoeuvred by his wife with a borrowed love-charm. Zeus does guard oaths and strangers (T4), but he guards them as his own prerogatives, and the poems nowhere hold the Olympians up as holy. Goodness is not what a Greek boy was taught to look for in a god. What you look for is power, and what you hope for is favour. The Greeks themselves eventually said so. Xenophanes of Colophon, a philosopher writing a century and a half or more after the poems took shape, complained that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and a disgrace among men: stealing, adultery, and deceiving one another. Plato threw those stories out of his ideal city and laid down the rule that God is good and the cause only of good. Both of them were reaching, from inside the Greek world, for something Israel had been told outright: "This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). The gap between Homer’s heaven and that sentence is not a gap in power. It is a gap in holiness.

(Q) "Shaker of the earth, of no sound mind wouldst thou repute me if I should fight against thee for the sake of pitiful mortals, who like unto leaves now live in glowing life, consuming the fruit of the earth, and now again pine into death." + Source: Homer, Iliad XXI, 462-466 (Lang, Leaf and Myers translation). Poseidon, god of the sea, has just tried to goad Apollo into fighting him over the Trojan war. Apollo declines. Human beings are leaves, and leaves are not worth a quarrel between immortals (T1).

(T2) A man’s worth is settled by how he walks toward a death he cannot dodge. + Two Lycian princes are standing under the wall of the Greek camp, about to lead an assault that one of them will not survive. Sarpedon turns to his cousin Glaucus and asks the question that holds the whole heroic world together: why exactly do the two of us get the best seats at home, the choice cuts of meat, the full cups, the best land by the river, and why do our people look at us as though we were gods? The answer he gives himself is that the honours are a wage, and the wage is paid in advance, and today the bill comes due. Underneath the speech is a Greek word worth learning: kleos. It means glory, but literally it is what is heard, the report of you that goes on being spoken after you are dead. In a world with no resurrection and no heaven worth having, kleos is the only thing that outlasts a man, and it can be bought with exactly one currency. Achilles is told plainly that he has two fates before him: stay at Troy and die young with a name that never dies, or sail home and live to old age in comfort and be forgotten. He knows the terms, says so out loud, and takes the first. Give this its due. It is the most serious thing the pre-Christian West found to say about death, and it is not cheap: it costs everything, and Homer never pretends otherwise. But notice what is on offer. The reward for dying well is that people will talk about you. Homer knows how thin that is, and says so in the same poem, when a warrior asked about his lineage answers that the generations of men are like the generations of leaves, one crop scattered by the wind while the forest buds and puts forth more. Isaiah says the same thing about grass, "All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field" (Isaiah 40:6), and then says the thing Homer had no way of saying: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever" (Isaiah 40:8).

(Q) "My good friend, if, when we were once out of this fight, we could escape old age and death thenceforward and for ever, I should neither press forward myself nor bid you do so, but death in ten thousand shapes hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and either win glory for ourselves, or yield it to another." + Source: Homer, Iliad XII, 322-328 (Butler translation). Sarpedon to Glaucus, at the foot of the Greek rampart. He is arguing that immortality would make heroism pointless, and that mortality is what makes it obligatory (T2). Sarpedon dies four books later, and his own father Zeus cannot save him.

(T3) Suffering is the human portion, and the only mercy on offer is the mercy people show each other. + Here is the scene the whole Iliad has been walking toward. An old king has lost the son who was holding his city together. The killer has been dragging the body behind a chariot for twelve days. And one night the old man loads a wagon with ransom, crosses the enemy lines with one elderly driver, walks unannounced into the killer’s shelter, takes hold of his knees, and kisses the hands that killed his son. Achilles is not softened by an argument. He is undone by being asked to think of his own father, who is also old, and who will also lose a son. The two of them weep, one for Hector and one for Patroclus and for Peleus far away, and then, because grief has to eat, Achilles gets up and sees to supper. What Achilles says in that shelter is Homer’s bleakest and truest theology. The gods spun this for us: to live in pain while they themselves have no cares. There are two jars on Zeus’s floor, one of evils and one of blessings, and he ladles out of them as he pleases; the luckiest man alive gets a mixture, and the unluckiest gets one jar only and is driven over the earth honoured by nobody. Achilles then applies it to his own father, the most fortunate man of his generation, who got a goddess for a wife and one son who will die young. Christian readers have found this passage almost unbearably close and almost unbearably far. Close, because it is honest about a world that hands out suffering without explanation, and because it locates the only comfort available in one human being sitting down with another. Far, because in the Christian account the compassion does not start with us. God is said to show compassion to those who fear him as a father shows compassion to his children (Psalm 103:13), and the God who hands out the jars, in the gospel, climbs down and drinks from one.

(Q) "This is the lot the gods have spun for miserable men, that they should live in pain; yet themselves are sorrowless. For two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus filled with his evil gifts, and one with blessings." + Source: Homer, Iliad XXIV, 525-528 (Lang, Leaf and Myers translation). Achilles to Priam, in the shelter, with the body of Hector still outside (T3). It is the nearest thing in Homer to a statement of the human condition, and it is spoken by the man who has caused most of the suffering in the poem.

(T4) The stranger at the door comes from Zeus, and a household is judged by how it treats him. + A princess and her maids take the laundry down to the river, and a filthy naked man crawls out of the bushes holding a branch in front of himself. The maids scatter. Nausicaa stands still, calls them back, and tells them to feed him, bathe him, and clothe him, because strangers and beggars come from Zeus. She does not ask his name. In Homer’s world you do not ask until the guest has eaten. The Greek for this is xenia, guest-friendship: a binding relationship between host and stranger, enforced by Zeus himself under the title Zeus of the Stranger. Bathe him, feed him, give him a bed and a parting gift, and only then ask who he is and where he is bound. The Odyssey is built out of tests of it. Eumaeus the swineherd, who owns nothing, kills two piglets for a beggar he does not recognize as his master. The Cyclops, asked for the customary gift, replies that he cares nothing for Zeus and eats two of his guests, which is the poem’s way of saying he is not a person at all. The suitors in Odysseus’s hall have inverted the whole thing: they are guests devouring the host. Any reader of Scripture will feel the pull of this. Abraham runs to meet three strangers at Mamre and has a calf killed for them, and one of them turns out to be the Lord (Genesis 18:1-8). Hebrews puts it as a standing rule: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Hebrews 13:2). But the resemblance should not be flattened. Homer’s stranger is protected because Zeus guards his own honour in the matter, and the man who takes him in is buying a claim on future help. In the Gospel the stranger is not a lottery ticket that might be a god in disguise; he is Christ, plainly and permanently: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25:35).

(Q) "Nay, but this man is some helpless one come hither in his wanderings, whom now we must kindly entreat, for all strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a little gift is dear." + Source: Homer, Odyssey VI, 206-208 (Butcher and Lang translation). Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king, to her frightened maids, about the shipwrecked stranger who has just appeared out of the undergrowth (T4).

(T5) A wife and a stony island are worth more than a goddess and an endless life. + For seven years Odysseus has been kept on an island by the goddess Calypso, and the picture Homer gives of him there is one of the most surprising in ancient literature: the great sacker of cities sitting on the shore in the mornings, staring at the water, crying. Calypso finally offers him the thing every hero in the Iliad would have traded his sword arm for. Stay, and you will never die. She adds, reasonably enough, that she is better looking than his wife. He agrees with her about the looks, and says no. He would like to go home. He knows the sea may kill him on the way, and says he will put up with that too, having put up with a great deal already. Set that beside the older poem and it is stranger still. Achilles bought glory with his life; Odysseus is offered life without limit and spends it on a farm, a grown son, an ageing wife, and an old dog that recognizes him and dies. That is why Christian readers have generally found the Odyssey the more congenial of the two poems. The ordinary loves are treated as the serious thing, and the great test at the end of the journey is not a monster but a bed: Penelope, who has been lied to by better liars than her husband, tests him by ordering the marriage bed moved, and he loses his temper, because he built that bed himself around a living olive tree still rooted in the ground and it cannot be moved. A secret shared by two people over twenty years is what proves him. Scripture does not have to be strained to agree that a faithful marriage is a great matter (Proverbs 5:18-19). Homer got there without help, and did it in the middle of a poem about monsters.

(Q) "Myself I know it well, how wise Penelope is meaner to look upon than thou, in comeliness and stature. But she is mortal and thou knowest not age nor death. Yet even so, I wish and long day by day to fare homeward and see the day of my returning." + Source: Homer, Odyssey V, 215-220 (Butcher and Lang translation). Odysseus answering Calypso’s offer of immortality on her island (T5). "Meaner to look upon" is the old translators’ way of saying less lovely to the eye.

(Q) "Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, oh great Odysseus. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that be departed." + Source: Homer, Odyssey XI, 488-491 (Butcher and Lang translation). Odysseus has gone down to the edge of the underworld and met the ghost of Achilles, and has tried to console him by pointing out that he was the most blessed of men alive and is a prince among the dead now. Achilles will have none of it: he would rather be a day-labourer for a poor farmer, alive, than king of the whole company of the dead. The greatest hero of the Iliad, asked afterwards, says the glory was not worth it (T2). Plato thought the lines dangerous enough to strike out of the education of soldiers, and quotes them in the third book of the Republic to do it; Christian readers heard in them the pagan world’s own verdict on the best answer the pagan world had.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church met him in the schoolroom, because converts who could read Greek had learned to read on him. + A missionary religion has to decide what to do with the books its converts already love, and the early church had to decide fast, because in the Greek-speaking world those books were one book. Two answers were given, and both stuck. The first was refusal. Tatian, a Syrian convert of the second century, wrote an address to the Greeks that treats the whole inheritance as a swindle and the gods of the poets as demons; Tertullian in Latin Africa asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem, which is to say what the schools of the philosophers had to do with the church, and he was not asking for the sake of argument. The complaint was not snobbery. If your neighbours have learned from childhood that heaven is a family of powerful liars, the poem that taught them is not neutral. The second answer was to sort. Clement of Alexandria quotes Homer constantly, as a man who cannot help it and does not want to, and argues that the Greeks had been given glimpses. Basil of Caesarea gave the Greek church its lasting answer in a short address to young men on how Christians should read the classics, written some time in the 360s or 370s, and he chose a homely image: bees do not visit every flower, and they do not carry off the ones they do visit; they take what they need and leave the rest standing. Read the poets that way. Basil’s own example, a few paragraphs later, is Odysseus coming ashore in front of Nausicaa with nothing to wear and nothing to recommend him but his character, virtue serving him for clothing, which is why Basil could say that the whole of Homer’s poetry is a praise of virtue. And then there is Augustine, who describes being beaten over his Greek lessons as a boy and finding Homer bitter for it, while he wept freely in Latin over Dido, the queen of Carthage whom Virgil’s Aeneas sails away from. The lessons took anyway. He still had the whole framework in his head years later, when he came to write about the two cities, the earthly one and the city of God.

(†) Reading Homer taught the church how to read, and the habits came over with the reader. + Two tools of Christian scholarship were built on Homer before they were ever used on Scripture. The first is allegory, which means reading a story as a coded account of something else: the words say one thing on the surface and are taken to mean another underneath. It began as a rescue operation. The gods behave so badly in the poems that readers who loved Homer went looking for a way to keep the poetry and lose the scandal, and from Theagenes of Rhegium in the sixth century BC onward they proposed that the battles of the gods had never been about persons at all. A fight between Apollo and Poseidon was fire against water, and, on the moral version of the same move, a fight between Athena and Ares was wisdom against folly: elements and states of mind quarrelling under divine names. The Stoic philosophers, the school that would go on to dominate educated Rome, turned this into a full system. The method then travelled. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Christ, applied it to Moses, so that the details of the Law came out as lessons about the soul. Origen of Alexandria, nearly two centuries later, worked it into a threefold sense of Scripture: the plain sense, the moral sense, and the spiritual sense. The results were mixed, and Christians said so at the time. The teachers of Antioch pushed back hard, insisting that a text means what it says and that a reader who can make it mean anything has stopped reading, and the argument between Alexandria and Antioch ran for centuries. The second tool wore better. The editors at Alexandria had invented marginal signs for Homer: Zenodotus the obelus, a short stroke against a line he judged an intrusion, and Aristarchus a set of others for lines misplaced or wrongly repeated. Origen borrowed those very signs for the Hexapla, his enormous six-column comparison of the Hebrew Old Testament with the Greek versions, using the obelus for what the Greek had and the Hebrew did not and the asterisk for the reverse. Jerome used the same marks when he came to work on the Latin Old Testament. The discipline of asking what the author actually wrote, rather than what a tired copyist supplied, came to the Bible from the library that curated the Iliad.

(†) His form outlived his gods: Christian poets told the gospel in his metre and even in his lines. + In AD 362 the emperor Julian, raised Christian and returned to the old gods, forbade Christians to teach classical literature, on the argument that a man who does not believe in Homer’s gods has no business making a living from Homer. The church historians Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen report that Apollinaris of Laodicea and his father answered by recasting Scripture in classical dress. The father put the Old Testament into Homeric hexameters, and into tragedies and odes besides; the son put the Gospels and the apostles into dialogues in the manner of Plato. If Christians were to be shut out of the classics, they would write their own. Julian died within a year, the ban lapsed, and those experiments are lost. The idea did not die with them. In the fifth century the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II and a professor’s daughter, composed a life of Christ, with the making of the world and the fall of man for a prologue, entirely out of Homer’s own lines rearranged into a new poem, a form the Greeks called a cento, which is simply a quilt made from other people’s cloth. Around the same time Nonnus of Panopolis turned the Gospel of John into Homeric hexameters, verse by verse. Whatever one makes of these as poetry, they show a church confident enough to use the enemy’s own vocabulary. Further west the debt was second-hand for a thousand years, because the Latin Middle Ages could not read Greek. Dante puts Homer at the head of the great poets in Limbo, the outer edge of his hell where the virtuous who died outside the faith are kept, and calls him the sovereign poet, sword in hand. Dante had never read a line of him. When the text came back to western Europe in the fifteenth century and Chapman turned it into English for Shakespeare’s London, the epic itself was promptly claimed for Christian purposes: Milton set out to write an epic about the fall of man, and in Paradise Lost he told his reader plainly that his subject was more heroic than the wrath of Achilles.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: gods who are not good, fate above heaven, and fame in the place of resurrection. + Set the poems beside Scripture and the distance shows in four places. Every one of them is in what Homer sang, not in what later readers did with him. - The gods. Homer’s Olympians are larger, deathless versions of us, with our appetites and our grudges and better weapons. They lie to each other, they take sides for personal reasons, and where they do punish a wrong it is because an oath or a guest or a priest of their own has been slighted. Scripture’s God is not a bigger version of anybody: "God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19). The difference is not one of degree. - Fate above heaven. When Zeus wants to save his own son Sarpedon from the death appointed for him, Hera tells him he may do it and that the other gods will not approve, and he lets his son die and weeps tears of blood over the battlefield. Something stands over the highest god and he yields to it. Scripture knows no such thing: "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose" (Isaiah 46:10). - Fame in the place of resurrection. Kleos is a memory kept by other mortals, and Homer is clear-eyed about what waits behind it: the shades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey are strengthless heads that cannot even recognize a visitor until they have drunk blood, and in the last book they go gibbering after Hermes like bats in a cave. Achilles himself calls it worthless. The Christian answer is not a better memory but a raised body: "When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54). Jesus asks a question that lands squarely on the heroic code: "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" (John 5:44). - The enemy. Homer’s pity for the defeated is real and it is one of the great things in ancient literature, but it arrives after the killing. Achilles drags a corpse for twelve days; cities are sacked and their women divided as property, and the poems record it without a word of blame; in the Odyssey twelve slave women are hanged in a row in the courtyard. Homer is reporting the world his hearers lived in, honestly. The measure of the distance is a sentence nobody in that world would have understood: "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). None of this is a demolition. Homer saw human beings more clearly than almost anyone who wrote before the gospel, and he had nothing to offer them but the memory of other human beings. The fathers kept him on the shelf for the seeing, and answered him about the offering.