The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (6 page)

When his five companion ascetics abandoned him, he returned to a normal diet, his body became fully rounded again and “he gained the strength to win enlightenment.” When he walked toward the roots of a sacred fig tree (now called the
bodhi
tree,
Ficus religiosa
) intent on his high purpose, Kala, “a high-ranking serpent, who was as strong as a King elephant,” was awakened by “the incomparable sound of his footsteps” and saluted Gautama, who seated himself cross-legged in the most immovable of postures and said he would not arise until he had received Enlightenment. “Then the denizens of the heavens felt exceedingly joyous, the herd of beasts, as well as the birds, made no noise at all, and even the trees ceased to rustle when struck by the wind.”

Now he suffered his final trial, the siege of the satanic Mara, Lord of Passions. Mara’s demonic army, including his three sons (Flurry, Gaiety, and Sullen Pride) and three daughters (Discontent, Delight, and Thirst), attacked the impassive Gautama. He speedily dispersed Mara’s hordes, who fled in panic. The great seer, “free from the dust of passion, victorious over darkness’ gloom,” using his skill at meditation entered a deep trance. In the first watch of the night (6:00
P.M
. to 10:00
P.M
.) he recalled all his own former lives, the thousands of births he had been through. “Surely,” he concluded, “this world is unprotected and helpless, and like a wheel it turns round and round.” He saw that the world of samsara, of birth and death, was “as unsubstantial as the pith of a plantain tree.” In the second watch (10:00
P.M
. to 2:00
A.M
.) he attained “the perfectly pure heavenly eye” and saw that the rebirth of beings depended on the merit of their deeds, but “he found nothing substantial in the world of becoming, just as no core of heartwood is found in a plantain tree when its layers are peeled off one by one.” In the third watch (2:00
A.M
. to 6:00
A.M
.) he saw the real nature of the world, how greed, delusion, and ignorance produced evil and prevented getting off the wheel of rebirth.

The climax of his trance was Enlightenment, the state of all-knowledge. “From the summit of the world downwards he could detect no self anywhere.
Like the fire, when its fuel is burnt up, he became tranquil.” “The earth swayed like a woman drunken with wine … and the mighty drums of thunder resounded through the air. Pleasant breezes blew softly, rain fell from a cloudless sky, flowers and fruits dropped from the trees out of season—in an effort to show reverence for him.”

Gautama now at the age of thirty-five had become a Buddha. He arose and found the five ascetic monks who had abandoned him. To them he preached the middle way to Enlightenment, which became the essential doctrine of Buddhism: the Holy Eightfold Path—right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, and the Four Holy Truths. These Truths were: first, that all existence—birth, decay, sickness, and death—is suffering; second, that all suffering and rebirth are caused by man’s selfish craving; third, that Nirvana, freedom from suffering, comes from the cessation of all craving; and fourth, that the stopping of all ill and craving comes only from following the Holy Eightfold Path. These steps to the extinction of self were the way of the Buddha, the way of Enlightenment.

Is it any wonder that the Buddha dismissed those who asked when and how the world was created? That he aimed at them “the unbearable repartee” of silence? What soul en route to Buddhahood would waste energy on the mystery of creation? The Buddha aimed at Un-Creation. The Creator, if there was one, was plainly not beneficent. The Buddha charitably had not conjured up such a Master Maker of Suffering, who had imposed a life sentence on all creatures. If there was a Creator, it was he who had created the need for the extinction of the self, the need to escape rebirth, the need to struggle toward Nirvana. The Lord of the Buddhists was the Master of Extinction. And no model for man the creator.

T
HE
Greeks’ spirit of inquiry grew with the centuries. But their sacred epic had little to say about Beginnings. Instead it was a saga of human adventure and human gods. Homer’s two testaments, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, remain the first and greatest epics of Western civilization. Still, who Homer
was, how Homer worked, and how the stories were perpetuated have baffled scholarly detectives for three thousand years. And the making of the Homeric saga remains a parable of the mystery of creation.

Plato (427?–347
B.C.
), a mythmaker of proven talent, complained that while Homer was “the greatest of poets and the first of tragedy writers” it was unfortunate that he had become “the educator of Hellas” and the guide “for the ordering of human things.” He was troubled that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
offered no set of moral commandments or divine ordinances but only epics of a long-past heroic age. Homer sang in the
Iliad
of four days in the ten-year war of the Greeks against the Trojans and in the
Odyssey
recalled the adventures of one Greek on his way home. From about 1200
B.C.
and for seven hundred years until Plato’s time these two epics were the basis of Greek religion and morals, the chief source of history, and even of practical information on geography, metallurgy, navigation, and shipbuilding. Still more remarkable, for two and a half millennia after Plato, the Homeric epics as primordial works of the imagination reigned over the Western world of letters. The core of humanistic scholarship, the songs of Homer resound without interruption above the changing dogmas of politics, religion, and science. The prophetic Greeks called him “the poet.”

Homer’s survival is a stark contrast to the fate of the Greeks’ other creations. The Acropolis lies in ruins, and there is probably not one complete freestanding statue surviving from the Great Age. We cannot hear Greek music. Their literary legacy, which has dominated Western culture, survives only in fragments. While we know the names of at least 150 ancient Greek writers of tragedy, what remain for us are mere samples. Of all the 92 plays of Euripides whose names survive we have only a fifth (18 or 19), of the 82 of Aeschylus less than a tenth (7), and of Sophocles’ 122, a fifteenth (7). Would the power of the ancient Greeks have been greater or less if the bulk of their work had come to us? Of the works of Agathon, the most eminent follower of the three famous tragedians at whose house Plato set his
Symposium
, we have only fragments. Yet Agathon was reputed to be the great innovator, the first to write a tragedy on his own imaginary subject and the first to divide a play into acts. For us he is hardly more than a literary rumor.

In the lottery of time, Homer’s two great epics managed to survive. Why? How? Homer’s chances of survival were multiplied by his perennial popularity in all sorts of climates. His works were copied again and again, somehow undimmed by centuries of changing styles. There were some happy coincidences, such as the dry climate of Egypt that happened to provide natural museum conditions for preserving fragile manuscripts. And Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt (332
B.C.
) set the scene for Greek rulers to found the greatest of all ancient libraries at Alexandria. In the
literal sense, in Egypt Homer survived the test of time. Of the Egyptian papyri that have lasted into our century, about half are copies of the
Iliad
or the
Odyssey
, or commentaries on them. In the Hellenistic Age, after the death of Alexander the Great, educated Greeks continued to learn Homer by heart, much as, later, the people in the West would know their Bible, or as Muslims memorized their Koran.

Even after the rise of Christianity, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
remained the very model of the heroic epic, outshining Christian classics. English critics who disagreed about everything else were all Homer’s acolytes. Alexander Pope preached:

And the romantic John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” discovered the world:

Even the solemn Walter Bagehot from the heart of industrial England declared that “a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” Today the best American poets still test themselves as translators of Homer.

The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
took form centuries before the invention of the Greek alphabet. We still know very little about the language that the prehistoric migrants brought into Greece, and from which the language of Homer grew. Only after World War II, and its advanced science of cryptography, was the earliest Greek writing deciphered by the precocious English architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956). As a boy his twin passions were the classics and cryptography. At fourteen he heard Sir Arthur Evans describe a mystifying pictographic script he had uncovered on the clay tablets at Knossos, which he called Linear B. At the age of eighteen the determined young Ventris put his clues together in a paper for the
American Journal of Archaeology
. When Ventris returned from the war in 1949, he applied the latest statistical techniques to the growing data of archaeology from mainland Greece. He made his dramatic announcement on BBC radio in 1952. The mysterious Linear B, he revealed, was an archaic form of the classical
Greek language. (Its undeciphered predecessor Linear A still awaits another Michael Ventris.) It was a syllabic script of some ninety signs in which the ancient language of Mycenae had been written from about 1500
B.C.
Then, about 1200
B.C.
, in a rare example of lost technology, writing disappeared from the Greek mainland. Five hundred years passed before language was again written. Finally, around 700
B.C.
the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet into a phonetic way of writing their own language. It was during this interregnum of the spoken word, when there still was no way of writing Greek, that the Homeric epics came into being.

The Homeric epics, then, were inevitably an
oral
creation. They were recollections of bards in an era when there was no writing. How, without writing, were works of such length and complexity first put together? And then perpetuated? (A skilled Serbian bard who was recently engaged to sing a poem as long as the
Odyssey
, took two weeks, performing two hours morning and afternoon, to complete his tale.) In our literate age when printed matter is cheap, it is more difficult than ever to imagine how the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were created.

Still, in the last half century we have learned more about the creation of these long oral epics than was learned by Homeric scholars in the preceding thousand years. We owe this to a bold young American scholar, Milman Parry (1902–1935), who was inspired to go to the mountains of Yugoslavia, where illiterate bards still sang heroic epics to illiterate audiences. There he hoped to recapture the oral age. There he hoped to relive, as classical scholars before him had not, the tasks and talents of Homeric bards and the hopes and delights of their audiences. And there indeed he witnessed spectacular bardic feats. Contrary to modern assumptions, the bards do not recite lines that they have memorized. Instead, they compose anew before each audience, putting together their tale with poetic embellishments as they go along.

The bards, Parry found, were but skillful improvisers from a limited and familiar stock. Drawing on a repertoire of traditional themes—the promise of Zeus, the anger of Achilles, the ransoming of Hector’s body, the beauty of Helen and her kidnapping by Paris—they composed their song anew for each occasion. The episodes were held together by familiar phrases, which they used again and again, recognized by the audience as the proper idiom of song. In phrases like “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “owl-eyed Athena,” “city-sacking Achilles,” “sea-girt Ithaca,” which the modern reader tolerates as literary cliché, Parry found clues to the composition of oral epics. Stock phrases, ready-made to fit the meter of a Homeric line, gave the bard breathing space to choose the next episodes. To describe Achilles in the
Iliad
, there are at least thirty-six different formula-epithets. The one to be used depends on the space in the line and the needs of the meter. In the first
twenty-five lines of the
Iliad
there are twenty-five such formulas or pieces of them. A full third of both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
is composed of lines repeated elsewhere in the same poem.

The bard was singing to an audience. These listeners who could not read could not leaf pages to see how the story ended, nor look backward or forward to count the repetitious formulas. What they heard gave them both the joy of recognition and the pleasure of suspense. No wonder Homer expressed his doubts that mere Memory could be the mother of the Muses. Odysseus praised the “inspired” bard Demodokos and when Odysseus returned to Ithaca and was tempted to kill Phemius who had sung to the Suitors, the bard begged

No mere reciter of a fixed text, the self-taught Homeric bard was inspired by the gods and by the audience. While an actor in our literate age is circumscribed by the written word, the oral bard was far freer to respond to his audience. Each performance was spontaneous and unique, not only in
how
it was sung, but even in what was sung. We cannot find a literary original for an oral poem. Yet the different surviving versions have an uncanny similarity, as if copied from a divine original!