The Perils of Homer (A True Tale)

by

Nicki Leone 

So I’m driving east on Interstate 40 headed towards the coast and I am way, way beyond anything resembling civilization. There isn’t, and isn’t going to be a rest stop or turn off to break the monotonous view for miles. The only thing I have to look forward to is the upcoming exit for Faison, NC—the proud home of the Mount Olive pickle.

It’s boring as hell but I don’t really mind, because I have the audio version of the Iliad playing and Achilles is wreaking havoc among the Trojans. It’s been five long books, but he has finally gotten off his duff to fight and is slaughtering the enemy left and right. “Rage,” intones Homer, “red, red Rage.”  The Bard has long since stopped talking about the “flashing helmets” of the armies and the “bright armor” of the heroes. Now it is all blood and gore—the spatter of it as Achilles’ chariot drives over the bodies of the fallen—Greek and Trojan alike—the way blood and tissue sprays up onto the flanks of his galloping horses, the way it cakes the wheels and sides of the chariot, and coats his outstretched arms.
 
The red rage of Achilles becomes an inferno when he sees Hector, the great Trojan warrior, on the field of battle wearing the armor he stripped from Petrocles, Achilles’ friend and lover. He leaps towards Hector mad with wrath, shouting, shouting in his fury and anguish and Hector flees all the while begging for mercy although he knows there is none to be had and the noise of war is incredible, roaring, and even the goddess Athena is shrieking and all of a sudden woooo-wooo-ooooo….
 
…I get pulled over by a sheriff because I apparently blew by him doing 85 miles an hour and never even saw him.
 
I enjoy audio books—they help me with the tedium of monotonous housecleaning tasks, they make the time go by when I’m doing yard work, and of course they are invaluable in the car, especially since I have moved out of town. It takes me at least 30 minutes to get anywhere, and audio books are a kind of inoculation against road rage.
 
My trip into the classics began when a good friend gave me the audio version of Virgil’s Æneid, specifically the Fitzgerald translation read by Christopher Ravenscroft. It was a few weeks before I found myself on the road with nothing new to “read,” so while keeping one eye on the logging truck ahead that was hogging the highway, I rummaged around in the box between the seat for an audio book that felt unopened, and came up with Virgil. On the theory that it was a classic for a reason and therefore must be pretty good, I tore open the plastic with my teeth, swerved slightly as I tried to extract disc number one, and settled in for the next four hours prepared to hear about the travails of the Trojan survivors looking for a new land to call home.

I already knew the story, of course. I grew up on Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Frazer’s Golden Bough. Like most little kids who liked stories, I loved myths and fairytales—they are the basic building blocks of literature, as fundamental to the written word as the primary colors are to an artist’s palette. So I knew that Aeneas would find refuge in Carthage, that the queen of the city would fall in love with him, that he would leave in search of the land fated to be his new home., and that the refugee Trojans would fall afoul of god and goddess alike in their wanderings before coming at last to the soil that would eventually be Rome.
 
What I had forgotten, and what held me so utterly enthralled that I not only missed my exit but didn’t even notice for at least five miles, was that these poems were meant to be performed. Recited. Heard. Experienced. Passages that had been merely repetitious when read on a page became rhythmic and sonorous in the reader’s rich voice. I started to feel lulled by the beauty of the constant references to “wine-dark sea” and the “Dawn, touching her rose-red fingers to the sky.” I shivered at his descriptions of “Rumor . . . A huge and horrid monster covered with many feathers: and for every plume a sharp eye, for every pinion a biting tongue” as it appeared again and again to thwart the hero’s way.
 
I spent a week with Aeneas, and then went out and found copies of Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I spent at least a month with Achilles and Odysseus. For the longest time when friends asked “What are you reading?” I found myself talking about the battles of the Greeks, about Calypso’s desperate love for her shipwrecked sailor, about Telemachus, waiting bitterly for the return of a father he last saw when he was a baby. I got a few very odd looks.

I had also forgotten—or perhaps never properly understood—that these epics re Literature (with a capital “L”).  They are narrative. They have plot and character development. They are psychologically fraught. The Æneid isn’t just a story about the founding of Rome. It is very much about how women and men live in a constant state of war and by what it means to be honorable or loved in an era when everything is settled by “the blood of your enemy dripping from your sword.” There is an intensely vivid moment in Virgil’s epic where the poet describes the hero striding through the ruin of Troy, lit now only by the sputtering flames of burning buildings, when he suddenly catches sight of Helen in one of the gaps between billowing smoke clouds. She is cowering and afraid. He is filled with black rage at the sight of the woman responsible for the destruction of his city, and their eyes meet across all the chaos—she knowing she will die, and he ready to kill—until the gods whisper in his ear, “But what of the fate of your own family? Are they safe?” He gasps and shudders, and wrenches himself away from the flaming city to seek his wife and son. Helen, we last see, crouches in the remains of a temple that offers nothing in the way of sanctuary.
 
Epics like the Æneid, the Odyssey, the Iliad (well, scratch that, because nothing is really like the Iliad) are full of these intense personal moments. There is a beautiful scene in the Iliad (Thomas Cahill mentions it in his lovely book, Sailing the Wine-dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter) where Hector, about to go off to battle, stops to play with his infant son, and the boy starts to cry—frightened by the war helmet crowning Hector’s head. The father laughs, takes off the helmet, and dawdles the child until he is smiling again.
 
I’ll tell you something about the legend of Troy—that scene isn’t in the myth. It is a piece of sheer poetic brilliance. Homer isn’t interested in national founding myths. He isn’t overly concerned with the religious devotion to the gods. He is interested in what it is to be human.
 
The travels of Odysseus were always entertaining—a kind of classical pulp fiction where the pace and the action just never let up. First he defeats the Cyclops. He confronts the Sirens and escapes. He barely survives the clashing perils of Scylla and Charybdis.  But the scene that sent shivers down my spine wasn’t any of these; no, it is the homecoming scene, where Odysseus returns to find his house overrun by worthless young men attempting to bully his wife into marriage.
 
He slaughters them all, of course, in a grim battle for which the word “bloodbath” would be whitewashing. When it is over, Penelope and her son confront this stranger in their house. Odysseus stands there—grimy, bloody, panting with exertion and anger and utterly changed from the man who had been forced to leave his home almost twenty years earlier. “Mother,” bursts out the boy, “do you not recognize my father and your husband?” Odysseus looks up and meets Penelope's steady gaze. “Patience,” she replies. “If this is truly Odysseus, I will know. Husbands and wives have ways of making themselves known to each other.”
 
Oh. oh.  WOOF!
 
Re-acquainting myself with the epics of Homer and the poetry of Virgil made it hard to read anything else that month. I found myself looking for excuses to get in the car, drive around and listen to the next stage of the hero’s journey, the next campaign in the battle. Somehow, the new “Miss Julia” or the paperback re-issue of the DaVinci Code just didn’t seem so important compared to Dido, frantically begging the man she has secretly married to stay, stay, just for one more season, one more month, even one more day. Listening to the ballads, losing myself in the sheer joy of the language and the fierceness of the stories, re-invigorated my reading.
 
It also made my driving rather reckless, but I was lucky. The sheriff was either a poetry lover or amused by the novelty of a woman speeding along the highway listening to Homer. He let me off with a warning.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program “Let's Read” on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of two dogs and one-and-a-half cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it