Epic Poetry and Ancient History -- with Susan Wise Bauer

The Histories, a text of such novelty and sophistication, almost without precedent in the ancient world, or so the story goes, begins with a rather memorable criticism of Homer's Illiad. In the opening paragraphs, Herodotus of Halicarnassus indicates his purpose to trace the hostilities of the Greeks and the barbarians (read: Persians) to their origin. The Illiad is evidence made to fit his needs. Paris, son of Priam, steals the Greek Helen away, thus setting into motion events that would culminate in the sack of Troy. A barbarian came west; prompting the Greeks to go east.

Herodotus applied his critical mind to the broad contours of the Illiad's narrative:

Thus far there had been nothing worse than woman-stealing on both sides; but for what happened next the Greeks, they say, were seriously to blame; for it was the Greeks who were, in a military sense, the aggressors. Abducting young women, in their opinion, is not, indeed, a lawful act; but it is stupid after the event to make a fuss about avenging it. The only sensible thing is to take no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.

Herodotus supposes himself able to see through the Illiad's plying poetic verse to the truth of things. The face that launched a thousand ships, Helen, had willing gone with her captor.

Whether Herodotus is able to substantiate his claims is here immaterial. The nature of his claims reveal a profound gulf between concerns of the epic poets, like Homer, and those of ancient historians. The Illiad is populated by gods and men (and a few women, like Helen). The gods fight their petty wars by proxy, through human beings. Priam was enflamed by the sight of Helen and carried her off. The Greeks were so roused by their anger to outfit a thousand ships for war. Almost every expression of emotion, in the heat of passion or battle, is another god pulling at the heart-strings, moving men like marionettes.

Those golden threads, tying gods to men (and a few women), are severed by Herodotus, who sees only base human motivations. And so is born , or so the story goes, the study of human history.

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Knowledge of the human past, and especially those bits of the past that have left no other material traces, are best preserved on textual evidence. Fragments come down to us in many forms, inscribed on many mediums. Actual sustained and developed thoughts generally take the form of mythology, preserved in the form of poetry, or history, preserved in what amounts to intellectual reflection on the origins and cause of this or that event.

Susan Wise Bauer makes judicious use of both these sources of information. Epic poetry is the more difficult with which to engage. 'BITS OF HISTORY[, she says,] glint from the facets of...myth.' The gods are only historical actors insofar as they animate the imagination of the poem's human audience. Even so, epic poetry is not merely about the gods, but also about human beings, and it is possible to disentangle, as it were, valuable information from the fantastical references.

Epic poetry provides us with rough estimate of different points on a cultural compass. Through it the ancient world may be seen from the inside out. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey are rough maps to a 'growing sense of a single cultural identity led to the weaving together of a number of different historical traditions...into two related epic poems which would soon be claimed by the entire peninsula as the heritage of every city on it'. The Indian epic, the Mahabharata, likewise purported to contain the story of one of the god Vishnu's (that is, the supreme being, Brahman, under one of its three possible masculine manifestations) most famous incarnations, Krishna, but contains much else besides. Epic poetry grow out of particular ways of understanding the world, and feed back into how future generations understand the world.

Ancient history is a slightly different beast, since it purports to do exactly what contemporary historians want, which is to narrate events and inquire into causes and effects. In the case of Herodotus, however, Bauer points out his anachronistic conflation of the Trojans with the barbarian Persia, which didn't exist at the time when Troy was supposed to have fallen. It can hardly be evidence for everlasting enmity between the Greeks and Persians. She points out the long shadow the Egyptian historian Manetho casts over how successive Egyptian dynasties are periodized. Where he situates three dynasties in quick succession, subsequent archeological evidence has shown three dynasties existing simultaneously. Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of Ancient China, receives a much gentler, more respectful, treatment. Lacking archaeological materials, Bauer says, 'we have no direct evidence from these centuries for the existence of any of the personalities that Sima Qian describes, more than fifteen hundred years after the fact.'

The gaps between different sorts of evidence, textual and otherwise, shows through in Bauer's work. That is to be expected, and it's to her credit to point them out. The historian cannot observe their subject matter directly. The evidence must be coordinated, the different forms measured against each other. The human voice, preserved in written form, requires a different set of interpretive sensitivities than does the remains of a building foundation or an arrowhead. But, in principle, different sorts of evidence may be assumed to cohere. For it bears the unique signature of an intelligence, much like our own, which makes something like a world history possible in the first place.