The Long Way to Homer

Nearly fifteen years ago, I found myself in Istanbul on work. I was helping companies think about workers' rights in global supply chains, which meant spending long days discussing factories, audits, sourcing decisions, and international brands. In the evenings, I would return to my hotel overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

I remember standing by the window one evening, watching ships move silently across the water. At the time, it was just a beautiful view. I knew that somewhere beyond the horizon lay the Dardanelles, the narrow strait the ancient Greeks called the Hellespont. Beyond that lay Troy. I knew the names. That was about all. Looking back, I realize that wasn't my first encounter with Homer.

My first was probably when I was about ten years old, watching the comedy western My Name Is Nobody. I had no idea then that its title echoed Homer's sly scene in which Odysseus outwits the Cyclops simply by calling himself "Nobody." A few years later came Mr. Rosario's English class. We were studying Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters, and I remember him explaining how the Victorian poet imagined Odysseus's exhausted sailors yearning to abandon their journey home and remain forever on the enchanted island. Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind introduced me to another Nausicaä, though I never stopped to wonder where the name came from. I knew the story of the Cyclops. I knew about Argus, the old dog who waited years for his master's return. And of course, I knew about the Trojan horse. The word odyssey itself had entered everyday language as a synonym for any long and difficult journey.

Without realizing it, I had been picking up fragments of Homer for most of my life. What I had never done was read him. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey finally gave me a reason to. And it wasn't because I enjoyed the film.

Its spectacle is extraordinary and some sequences are breathtaking, but I left the cinema feeling unmoved. The characters felt distant, their relationships hurried, as though the film were racing from one famous episode to the next, anxious to reach the next visual masterpiece before lingering too long on the people themselves.

I found myself reading about the original poem.

What surprised me was how much the film left out. Calypso, for example, doesn't merely detain Odysseus for a brief interlude. He spends seven years on her island. Circe occupies another year of his life. These episodes unfold over years of temptation, longing, compromise, uncertainty and perhaps even contentment, allowing Odysseus to inhabit their world rather than merely pass through it.

As I read a little more about the poem, I found that the Odysseus I encountered wasn't the steadfast hero of Nolan’s imagination, struggling to return to his faithful wife. He was clever, certainly, but also deceptive, vain, violent, unfaithful and morally compromised. That complexity made Homer’s Odysseus much more modern than the Hollywood version. In trying to make him easier to admire, the film had also made him less interesting.

One question led to another. Homer led me to Troy, Troy to archaeology, and archaeology back to questions that had been occupying me for some time about the history of civilizations.

Growing up, I had absorbed the familiar picture mostly by osmosis. Ancient Greece stood at the beginning of "Western civilization." Troy was its eastern adversary. The Trojan War became the opening chapter in a story that eventually became Europe.

The city we call Troy appears in Hittite records as Wilusa. It stood not on the edge of civilization but within one of the great political and commercial systems of the Late Bronze Age. To the east lay the Hittite Empire. To the south, Egypt. These were not distant kingdoms waiting for Greece to bring civilization to the world. They were large, sophisticated states with bureaucracies, diplomatic treaties, international alliances and written archives stretching back centuries. Greece, by comparison, was still a collection of small Mycenaean kingdoms on the western fringe of that world.

Looking at the staggering size differences helps put the geopolitical dynamics into perspective. The Hittite Empire, at its peak around 1275 BCE, controlled roughly 500,000 square kilometres. That's an area spanning most of modern Turkey, plus parts of Syria, Lebanon, and northern Mesopotamia — larger than modern France or Ukraine. Ithaca, Odysseus's kingdom, by comparison was an island covering about 96 square kilometres. That's roughly the size of Manhattan.

Standing in Istanbul all those years ago, I had been looking at one of history's great trade corridors. Every ship sailing between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea passed through those narrow waters. Troy occupied the gateway. Suddenly the city no longer seemed like the poetic backdrop to Helen and Achilles. It looked like what it probably was: one of the most strategically valuable places in the Bronze Age. Control the straits, and you controlled trade. Wars have begun over less.

I wish I had known all this as I stood at that hotel window. The ships I was watching were carrying containers. Three thousand years earlier, other ships had carried copper, tin, timber and grain through the same narrow passage. My work had brought me there to think about global supply chains. I hadn't realized I was standing above one of humanity's oldest.

The more I learned, the less the ancient Mediterranean resembled a contest between East and West. It looked instead like a meeting place of civilizations: kingdoms trading, competing, borrowing from one another, sharing technologies, myths and ideas. Homer no longer appeared as the founding voice of a uniquely Western civilization, but as one extraordinary voice emerging from this much older conversation. Its stories had travelled through generations of merchants, sailors, diplomats, migrants and anonymous storytellers long before they became the poem we now call The Odyssey.

That, however, is not the story most of us inherited.

During the nineteenth century, Homer became something more than a poet. His poems became evidence of Europe's noble ancestors. Ancient Greece was elevated into the unquestioned cradle of Western civilization. Schoolchildren learned to admire the Greeks as the founders of reason, democracy and civilization itself, while Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Levant became the exotic backdrop against which the West supposedly emerged. Homer was recruited into an origin story that helped justify colonialism, racial hierarchy and the idea of European cultural superiority.

Archaeology has complicated that story. The Bronze Age Mediterranean looks less like the birthplace of a civilization than a meeting place of older civilizations. Greece was one participant in that world, not its sole heir, and certainly not its creator.

We inherit Homer, but we also inherit the stories that later generations wrapped around him. And while I had set out to discover the poet, I found myself questioning the story I had been taught about civilization itself.

I don't think Christopher Nolan made the film I was hoping for. But I am grateful that he made The Odyssey. It sent me on an unexpected journey through childhood memories, Victorian poetry, archaeology, imperial history, and back to a hotel room overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

Only now do I realize that the window framed far more than a beautiful stretch of water. Beyond the Sea of Marmara lay one of the great crossroads of the ancient world, where merchants, sailors, diplomats and armies had crossed for thousands of years before I happened to stand there watching container ships drift towards the Dardanelles.

I have ordered an English translation of The Odyssey. After a lifetime of meeting Homer by accident, I think I'm finally ready to meet him on purpose. Perhaps there was no better way to arrive at Homer than by taking the long way.