If Helen is the face that launched a thousand ships, Homer will be, undoubtedly, the pen that inspired a thousand poets.
Though Homer first penned The Iliad and The Odyssey nearly twenty-eight hundred years ago, the epics had been recited from memory for four hundred years before that. As some of the oldest surviving epics, they are, literally, the foundational works of Western literature. To rework a Tolkien metaphor, Homer’s “Cauldron of Story” has been boiling for more than three thousand years, and we still use its stock to make our soup today, and expect our posterity will too, for several millennia to follow.
So the question naturally arises: what is it about the Homeric epics that have resonated so deeply with readers for the past thirty-two centuries? What is so significant about these poems that they have compelled so many generations to use the stock from the Homeric cauldron to make their own soup? Why do we still recite these poems, still reread them, and still re-purpose them with such alacrity?
One answer might be the hero narratives that drive the plots of these epics. The heroic aspect touches that thymatic part of the human soul where the hero exists in all of us. In the Greek understanding of the human soul there are three parts: noetic, thymatic, epithymatic. Noetic refers to the cerebral or intellectual aspect of the soul. The thymatic refers to the spirited (e.g. courage) aspect. And the epithymatic refers to the passionate aspect of the soul (i.e., the bed and the table). This is what C. S. Lewis is referencing in the Abolition of Man when he says, “The head rules the belly through the chest.” It is the thymatic aspect of the human soul that yearns for the heroic.
Examples that testify to the venerability and versatility of the heroic narratives are legion in both life and literature. For example, one contemporary Psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, has accomplished ground-breaking work using The Iliad and The Odyssey to treat veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Through a personal traumatic experience, Dr. Shay began reading the classics and discovered many of his patients at the V.A. clinic were wrestling with issues similar to the Greek warriors of the Homeric Epics: “betrayal by those in power, guilt for surviving, deep alienation on their return from war.” Realizing the heroes of Homeric epics were telling the same deeply human stories as the modern warriors he was treating, he was able to make significant advancements in treating patients with PTSD.
The poet, Lord, Alfred Tennyson, too, found inspiration in the heroic narrative. His Poem, Ulysses (the Roman transliteration for Odysseus), is one of early Victorian literature’s finest dishes, and it is derived entirely from the Homeric Cauldron of Story. Consider the last stanza where the aged Odysseus beholds the ship and harbor while he contemplates his final adventure:
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
For one who has not read The Odyssey, Tennyson’s poem will lack the potency intrinsic in the Homeric Cauldron of Story, but for those who have, it is impossible to miss the hearty flavor of the heroic heart.
There are clear echoes of Teiresias’ prophecy concerning Odysseus when he looked into Hades: “Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age.”
The heroic heart is a heart of one equal temper, one which is common to all those who desire knowledge and adventure, those who desire to “drink life to the lees.”
As long as there are men who, though made weak by time and fate, have the strong will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, there will be poets who make their soup from the Homeric Cauldron of Story, and people enough for a thousand generations to eat it.
Are you interested in joining a group of creative professionals, homeschooling parents, and book lovers who are reading through the classics? The Homeric Epics course begins July 1st. Learn more and register here.