Travelling Heroes

by Lane Fox, Robin

• ISBN13: 9780679763864
• ISBN10: 0679763864
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-03-09
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their gods develop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicist Robin Lane Fox draws on a lifetimers"s knowledge of the ancient world, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuing it through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the Mediterranean, encountering strange new sights-volcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones-and weaving them into the myths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization.

Author Biography

Robin Lane Fox is a Fellow and Garden Master of New College, Oxford, and a University Reader in Ancient History. His books include Alexander the Great, Pagans and Christians, The Unauthorized Version, and The Classical World. Since 1970 he has also been gardening correspondent for the Financial Times.

Excerpts

Chapter 1

Hera’s Flight

In the fifteenth book of Homer’s Iliad, the goddess Hera flies across to Mount Olympus and the poet compares her to a particular movement of the human mind. When a man has travelled far and wide, he tells us, his mind will sometimes leap and he will think, “I wish I was here, or I wish I was there,” as he “longs for many different things.” Hera’s sideways flight is as swift as these inconsistent thoughts as she moves from the peak of one mountain to another.

Two thousand seven hundred years later we still know from inner experience what Homer meant. We do not connect such thoughts with the speed of a passing goddess, which we imagine, rather, as the invisible speed of light. Homer’s imagination is so much more precise. When a goddess descends directly to earth he compares her descent to a vertical shower of hailstones. When she flies sideways he refers us inwards to those lateral fancies which express our enduring sense that life does not have to be as it is.

Two thousand seven hundred years are a very long gap between Homer and ourselves and at such a distance the psychology of his heroes has been thought by some of his modern readers to be primitive. Homer’s heroes think in their “hearts,” not their brains; like us, they can disown an idea or impulse, but they often disown it as if it has come from outside or from an independent source; they have no word for a decision and because they are not yet philosophers they have no word for the self. Yet, as Hera’s flight reminds us, Homer’s idea of the mind is not limited by the words which he happens to use. Like ours, his heroes’ inconsistent thoughts belong in one unifying mind; they decide on actions; like Hector outside the walls of Troy they sometimes know what is best, but fail to act on their knowledge. Above all, they share our human hallmark, the sense that our life could be lived elsewhere and that people once loved and lost can seem in the contrasts of the present as if they were never really so.

“I wish I was here, or I wish I was there . . .” In our age of global travel we are all potential heirs to the simile of Hera’s flight. Among writers it may seem most apt for novelists, the idealized heroes of our habits of reading. Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earth-bound historians have only to collect such mundane information as survives. Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop. Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms too. It is for them to assess the credentials of what survives, to pose questions which some of it helps to answer, and to check that there is not other evidence which tells against their answer and which cannot be explained. As they reconstruct a life, a practice or a social group, their sources control their image of it, but they also need to imagine what lies beyond their surface, the significant absences and the latent forces. When they imagine these absentees they need to think how life would have been beyond their own particular lives. “I wish I was here, or I wish I was there . . .”: these thoughts also flash in minds which have travelled far among evidence for other times and places.

Philosophers will continue to tell us that it is an illusion, that historians cannot be in two times at once or travel backwards while remaining themselves. Yet we “long for many different things,” to be good, perhaps, in the new age of the first Christian emperor Constantine, to be wonderfully wild with Alexander the Great, to question convention in Socrates’ Athens or to uphold it on an estate of outrageous size in late Roman north Africa, with the names and pictures of the family’s beloved horses on the villa’s mosaic flooring, a Christian saint’s shrin

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Excerpted from Traveling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer by Robin Lane Fox
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