Myths of ancient Greece, poems by Homer. Homer is the most famous poet of antiquity. Odysseus and the Laestrygonians

Homer is the first poet of Ancient Greece whose works have survived to this day.

Homer is still considered one of the best European poets today. He was the author of two heroic poems of antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are among the first monuments of world literature. Homer is considered a legendary poet because we know nothing reliably about him.

From Homer's biography:

There is no reliable information about Homer himself. The name "Homer" first appears in the 7th century. BC e. It was then that Callinus of Ephesus gave this name to the creator of the Thebaid. They tried to explain the meaning of this name back in antiquity. The following options were offered: “blind” (Ephorus of Kim), “following” (Aristotle), “hostage” (Hesychius). However, modern researchers believe that all of them are as unconvincing as the proposals of some scientists to attribute to him the meaning of “accompanist” or “compiler”. Surely in its ionic form this word is a real personal name.

The biography of this poet can only be reconstructed speculatively. This even applies to Homer's birthplace, which is still unknown. Seven cities fought for the right to be considered his homeland: Chios, Smyrna, Salamis, Colophon, Argos, Rhodes, Athens. It is likely that the Odyssey and Iliad were created on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, which was inhabited at that time by Ionian tribes. Or perhaps these poems were composed on one of the adjacent islands.

The Homeric dialect, however, does not provide any precise information about which tribe Homer belonged to; it remains a mystery. It is a combination of the Aeolian and Ionian dialects of ancient Greek. Some researchers suggest that it is one of the forms of the poetic Koine that formed long before Homer.

Was Homer blind? Homer is an ancient Greek poet, whose biography has been reconstructed by many, from ancient times to the present day. It is known that he is traditionally depicted as blind. However, it is most likely that this idea of ​​him is a reconstruction, typical of the genre of ancient biography, and does not come from real facts about Homer. Since many legendary singers and soothsayers were blind (in particular, Tiresias), according to the logic of antiquity, which linked the poetic and prophetic gifts, the assumption that Homer was blind seemed plausible.

Antique chronographs also differ in determining the time when Homer lived. He could create his works in different years. Some believe that he was contemporary with the Trojan War, that is, he lived at the beginning of the 12th century. BC e. However, Herodotus argued that Homer lived around the middle of the 9th century. BC e. Modern scholars tend to date his activities to the 8th or even 7th century BC. e. At the same time, Chios or another region of Ionia, located on the coast of Asia Minor, is indicated as the main place of life.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer. There are nine biographies of Homer in ancient literature, but they all contain fairy-tale and fantastic elements.

There is information that in the first half of the 6th century. BC. the Athenian legislator Solon ordered the performance of Homer's poems at the Panathenaic festival and that in the second half of the same century, the tyrant Peisistratus convened a commission of four people to record Homer's poems. From this we can conclude that already in the 6th century. BC. Homer's text was well known, although what kind of works they were was not precisely established.

Serious study of Homer's poems began in the Hellenistic era in the 4th - 2nd centuries. BC. A number of scientists from the Library of Alexandria studied his poems, among whom the most famous were: Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus of Samothrace, Didymus. But they also do not provide any accurate biographical information about Homer. The general and popular opinion of all antiquity about Homer was that he was an old and blind singer who, inspired by the muse, led a wandering lifestyle and himself composed both the two poems known to us and many other poems.

If we talk about the exact date of Homer’s birth, it is not known for certain until today. But there are several versions of his birth. So, version one. According to her, Homer was born very little time after the end of the war with Troy. According to the second version, Homer was born during the Trojan War and saw all the sad events. If you follow the third version, Homer's life span varies from 100 to 250 years after the end of the Trojan War. But all versions are similar in that the period of Homer’s creativity, or rather, his heyday, falls on the late 10th - early 9th centuries BC.

The legendary storyteller died on the island of Chios.

Due to the insufficiency of many biographical data in connection with the personality of Homer, it began to appear a large number of legends.

One of them says that shortly before his death, Homer turned to the seer so that he would reveal the secret of his origin into the world. Then the seer named Chios as the place where Homer would die. Homer went there. He remembered the sage’s admonition to beware of riddles from young people. But remembering is one thing, but in reality it always turns out differently. The boys who were fishing saw the stranger, got into conversation with him and asked him a riddle. He could not find an answer to it, he went in his thoughts, stumbled and fell. Three days later, Homer died. There he was buried.

About Homer's work:

Homer is known to the world as an ancient Greek poet. Modern science recognizes Homer as the author of such poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but in antiquity he was recognized as the author of other works. Fragments of several of them have survived to this day. However, today it is believed that they were written by an author who lived later than Homer. This is the comic poem "Margate", "Homeric Hymns" and others.

Homer wrote two brilliant poems: “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad”. The Greeks have always believed and continue to think so. Some critics began to question this fact and began to express the point of view according to which these works appeared only in the 18th century and they did not belong to Homer at all.

Just as the existence of Homer's personality has been questioned in principle, there is also an opinion that the authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to different people who lived at different times.

It is clear that the Odyssey and Iliad were written much later than the events described in these works. However, their creation can be dated no earlier than the 6th century BC. e., when their existence was reliably recorded. Thus, Homer's life can be attributed to the period from the 12th to the 7th century BC. e. However, the latest date is the most likely.

There is a legend about a poetic duel that took place between Hesiod and Homer. It was described in a work created no later than the 3rd century. BC e. (and some researchers believe that much earlier). It's called "The Contest between Homer and Hesiod." It tells that the poets allegedly met at games in honor of Amphidemus, held on about. Euboea. Here they read their best poems. The judge at the competition was King Paned. Victory was awarded to Hesiod because he called for peace and agriculture, and not for massacres and war. However, the audience's sympathies were precisely on Homer's side.

In the 18th century, German linguists published a work in which they talk about the fact that during Homer’s life there was no writing, texts were stored in memory and passed on from mouth to mouth. Therefore, such significant texts could not be preserved in this way. But such famous masters of the pen as Goethe and Schiller still gave the authorship of the poems to Homer.

Since the 17th century, scientists have been faced with the so-called Homeric question - a dispute about the authorship of legendary poems. But, no matter what scientists argue about, Homer went down in the history of world literature, and in his homeland for a long time after death he had special respect. His epics were considered sacred, and Plato himself said that the spiritual development of Greece was the merit of Homer.

Anyway, Homer is the first ancient poet, whose works have survived to this day.

25 interesting facts about the life and work of Homer:

1.The name Homer translated from ancient Greek means “blind.” Perhaps it was for this reason that the assumption arose that the ancient Greek poet was blind.

2. In antiquity, Homer was considered a sage: “Wiser than all the Hellenes put together.” He was considered the founder of philosophy, geography, physics, mathematics, medicine and aesthetics.

3. About half of the ancient Greek literary papyri found were written by Homer.

4. Selective translation of Homer’s texts was carried out by Mikhail Lomonosov.

5. In 1829, Nikolai Gnedich first translated the Iliad completely into Russian.

6. Today there are nine versions of Homer’s biography, but none can be considered completely documentary. Fiction occupies a large place in each description.

7. It is traditional to portray Homer as blind, but scientists explain this not so much by the real state of his vision, but by the influence of the culture of the ancient Greeks, where poets were identified with prophets.

8. Homer distributed his works with the help of aeds (singers). He learned his works by heart and sang them to his aeds. They, in turn, also memorized the works and sang them to other people. In another way, such people were called Homerids.

9. A crater on Mercury is named after Homer.

10. In the 1960s, American researchers ran all the songs of the Iliad through a computer, which showed that there was only one author of this poem.

11.The system of ancient Greek education, formed towards the end of the classical era, was built on the study of Homer’s work.

12. His poems were memorized in whole or in part, recitations were organized based on their themes, etc. Later, Rome borrowed this system. Here since the 1st century AD. e. Virgil took Homer's place.

13.Large hexametric poems were created in the post-classical era in the dialect of the ancient Greek author, as well as in competition with or in imitation of the Odyssey and Iliad.

14. In ancient Roman literature, the first surviving work (albeit fragmentarily) was a translation of the Odyssey. It was made by the Greek Livius Andronicus. Let us note that the main work of literature of Ancient Rome - Virgil's Aeneid - in the first six books is an imitation of the Odyssey, and in the last six - of the Iliad.

15. Greek manuscripts in the last years of the Byzantine Empire, and then after its collapse, came to the West. This is how Homer was rediscovered by the Renaissance.

16.The epic poems of this ancient Greek author are brilliant, priceless works of art. Over the centuries, they have not lost their deep meaning and relevance. The plots of both poems are taken from a multifaceted and extensive cycle of legends dedicated to Trojan War. The Odyssey and Iliad depict only small episodes from this cycle.

17.The Iliad depicts very clearly the habits, traditions, moral aspects of life, morality and life of the ancient Greeks.

18. The Odyssey is a more complex work than the Iliad. In it we find many features that are still being studied from a literary point of view. This epic poem mainly deals with the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War.

19. “The Odyssey” and “Iliad” have characteristic features, one of which is the epic style. The sustained tone of the narrative, unhurried thoroughness, complete objectivity of the image, unhurried development of the plot - these are the characteristic features of the works that Homer created.

20. Homer was an oral storyteller, that is, he did not speak writing. However, despite this, his poems are distinguished by high skill and poetic technique, they reveal unity.

21. In almost all the works of antiquity one can discern the influence of the poems that Homer created. His biography and work were also of interest to the Byzantines. In this country Homer was carefully studied. To date, dozens of Byzantine manuscripts of his poems have been discovered. This is unprecedented for works of antiquity. Moreover, Byzantine scholars created commentaries and scholia on Homer, compiled and rewrote his poems. Seven volumes are occupied by Archbishop Eustathius' commentary on them.

22. In science in the mid-19th century, the prevailing opinion was that the Odyssey and the Iliad were unhistorical works. However, he was refuted by the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, which he carried out in Mycenae and on the Hissarlik hill in the 1870-80s. The sensational discoveries of this archaeologist proved that Mycenae, Troy and the Achaean citadels existed in reality. The contemporaries of the German scientist were struck by the correspondence of his findings in the 4th hipped tomb, located in Mycenae, with the descriptions made by Homer.

23. One of the main arguments in favor of the fact that the historical Homer did not exist was that not a single person is able to remember and perform poetic works of such a volume. However, in the middle of the 20th century in the Balkans, folklorists discovered a storyteller who performed an epic work the size of the Odyssey: this is discussed in the book of the American Albert Lord “The Storyteller”.

24.A summary of Homer’s works formed the basis for many creations of authors who lived in Ancient Rome. Among them we can note the “Argonautica” written by Apollonius of Rhodes, the work of Nonnus of Panopolitanus “The Adventures of Dionysus” and Quintus of Smyrna “Post-Homeric Events”.

25. Recognizing the merits of Homer, other poets of ancient Greece refrained from creating a large epic form. They believed that the works of Homer were a treasury of the wisdom of the people of Ancient Greece.

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

MBOU secondary school in the village of Mokshino

Essay

In the discipline "Literature"

on the topic of:

“Myth and reality in Homer’s poem Iliad”

Completed by: 6th grade student,

Novozhilov Denis

Checked:

Vyazanitsyna N.A

Mokshino village, 2012

Trojan War

The French say: “Look for a woman.” This phrase has not only a purely everyday meaning. It carries a deep philosophical component, once again emphasizing that the root cause of historical conflicts and many tragedies must be sought in the weakness and depravity of human nature, its tendency towards selfishness, self-interest and pleasure. A woman, in herself, is only a consequence of the manifestation of such unsightly qualities that many representatives of the human race are endowed with from birth.

A striking example of unbridled passions, unsatisfied desires, deeply offended pride, and greed that knows no bounds is the Trojan War, glorified in the Iliad and Odyssey by the great Homer (approximately lived in the 8th century BC).

The existence of this historical figure is in great doubt, but excavations of ancient Troy show: in the first half of the 13th century BC. e. the city was subjected to a long siege and was completely destroyed.

The reason for such a sad end can be attributed to “sea ​​peoples" They destroyed the most ancient civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean (only one of them survivedAncient Egypt ) just in the 13th century BC. e. and laid the foundation for the ancient world that we call Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.

At the same time, the poems mention states and peoples that existed long before the Hellenes. From this we can conclude that the Trojan War was a sad consequence of internecine strife, and the true cause was precisely a woman.

Causes of the Trojan War

Apple of discord

If we take Homer's stories as the original ones, then it all began at a wedding feast. The groom was the Argonaut Peleus, the bride was the sea nymph Fedita. All celestials were invited to the celebration. We ignored only Eris - the goddess of discord, the daughter of Nyx herself (goddess of the night).

Offended female pride came up with a sophisticated revenge. At the height of the feast, a beautiful golden-haired young man appeared among the guests. In his hands he held a golden tray with a ripe, rosy apple lying on it. The young man attracted the attention of those present when he approached three proud beauties standing aside from the celebrants and having a leisurely conversation.

With a bow, the boy put the tray in front of him and offered to take the apple to the most beautiful of women. The three goddesses stared at the delicious fruit. One of them, Hera, the patroness of marriage, considered that the ripe fruit rightfully belonged to her, and extended her hand. Athena, the warrior and patroness of knowledge and art, thought the same thing. Her graceful palm also hovered over the apple. The third of the women did not lag behind them. She was Aphrodite - the goddess of beauty and love. With a confident movement of her hand, she tried to take the fruit for herself.

Three palms collided over the ripe fruit. Everyone present froze, realizing the awkwardness of the situation. There was a ringing silence. The goddesses removed their hands, but none of them expressed a desire to give up the apple to the other two. The women decided to turn to Zeus, the god of thunder and lightning, so that he could decide who rightfully owns the apple.

The mighty Thunderer found himself in a difficult situation. In order to get out of the situation with honor, he transferred such a sensitive issue to Hermes, the god of trade and profit. The latter was distinguished by great dexterity and ingenuity in solving various kinds sensitive matters.

He did not take responsibility, but suggested turning to an independent and unbiased judge who could objectively and impartially resolve such a scandalous case. This is what God called Paris, the son of King Ilion (another name for Troy) Priam. Paris was herding sheep in the vicinity of Ilion (Troy) and at the moment when the goddesses, accompanied by Hermes, found themselves on the rocky lands of Asia Minor, he was resting under a tree.

Judgment of Paris

He listened to the god of trade and, not even remotely imagining what kind of trouble he might get himself into, readily agreed to help. But when it came down to it, I was confused. All three women were distinguished by their extraordinary beauty. It was simply not possible to give one of them the “palm of championship”. Paris clearly hesitated in his choice. Subtle female natures sensed the latter’s indecisiveness and began to call the king’s son aside under a plausible pretext.

In a businesslike tone, each of them began to offer the heir to the throne all conceivable and inconceivable benefits. Proud Hera promised power over the entire coast of Asia Minor until the end of his days. The arrogant Athena declared that she would make the man the best commander and military leader - on the battlefields he would glorify his name for centuries. Charming Aphrodite assured Paris that she would give him the love of the woman he chooses as a reward.

After such tempting offers, the heir to the throne chose Aphrodite and handed the ill-fated apple into her hands. This, in fact, became the prelude to the fact that the Trojan War soon broke out. It lasted for ten long years and was glorified in the Iliad and Odyssey, depicted on artistic canvases and was the subject of long debate among historians: whether it actually took place in those distant times or not.

Findings of G. Schliemann

Schliemann was born in a small German town. As a little boy, he became interested in the legends about the exploits of Homer's heroes; then he did not believe that no one knew where such a powerful city as Troy was located. Henry promised himself that when he grew up, he would definitely find Troy. Heinrich kept his word.

Schliemann studied many languages, including ancient Greek, in order to read the Iliad in the original. Being engaged in commerce, he managed to make a decent fortune, but Schliemann suddenly gave up everything and in 1863 went on a trip around the world. After several years of travel, guided primarily by the instructions of the Iliad, in 1870 G. Schliemann began excavations on the Hissarlik hill in Asia Minor. Schliemann's efforts were crowned with success. In the upper layers of the hill he managed to discover the ruins of the city and various utensils, but the most remarkable thing was that under the upper ruins Schliemann discovered other ruins - a total of nine cultural layers. Schliemann believed that the second and third layers from the bottom are Troy from the time of King Priam. When, on the last day of excavations in 1873, Schliemann discovered gold objects in these layers, he called this find “Priam’s treasure.” However, modern scientists are inclined to believe that Troy, described by Homer, was located in the sixth cultural layer, which means that the treasure found by Schliemann could not belong to Priam.

G. Schliemann died suddenly in 1890. The excavations of G. Schliemann were of great importance - they marked the beginning of the archaeological study of the most ancient stage in the history of Greece.

Reality

After ten years of exhausting war and siege, one fine morning the Trojans, not believing their eyes, saw that the Greek camp was empty, and on the shore stood a huge wooden horse with a dedicatory inscription: “In gratitude for the future safe return home, the Achaeans dedicate this gift to Athena.” . Ancient people treated sacred gifts with great reverence, and, by the decision of King Priam, the horse was brought into the city and installed in the citadel dedicated to Athena. When night came, the armed Achaeans sitting on horseback got out and attacked the sleeping inhabitants of the city. Thus, thanks to the horse, Troy was captured, and thus the Trojan War ended.

Nowadays, this legend is known to everyone, and the Trojan horse itself has long become a common noun - our ironic contemporaries even named a destructive computer virus after it. The fact that Troy fell because of a horse is taken as an axiom. But if you ask someone why the horse was the cause of the death of Troy, the person will most likely find it difficult to answer.

But really, why?

It turns out that this question was asked already in ancient times. Many ancient authors tried to find a reasonable explanation for the legend. A wide variety of assumptions were made: for example, that the Achaeans had a battle tower on wheels, made in the shape of a horse and upholstered in horse skins; or that the Greeks managed to enter the city through an underground passage on the door of which a horse was painted; or that the horse was a sign by which the Achaeans distinguished each other from their opponents in the dark... It is now generally accepted that the Trojan horse is an allegory of some kind of military trick used by the Achaeans when taking the city.

There are many versions, but, admittedly, none of them gives a satisfactory answer. It would probably be naive to believe that in this short study we will be able to comprehensively answer such an “old” question, but it’s still worth a try. Who knows - maybe the Trojan horse will reveal its secret to us a little.

So, let's try to enter into the position of the Achaeans. Simulating the lifting of the siege, they were supposed to leave something under the walls of Troy that the Trojans would simply be obliged to take into the city. Most likely, this role should have been played by the initiatory gift to the gods, because neglecting the sacred gift from the point of view ancient man meant to offend the deity. And an angry deity is not to be trifled with. And so, thanks to the inscription on the side, the wooden statue receives the status of a gift to the goddess Athena, who patronized both the Achaeans and the Trojans. What to do with such a dubious “gift”? I had to bring it (albeit with some caution) into the city and install it in a sacred place.

However, the role of a dedicatory gift could be played by almost any sacred image. Why was the horse chosen?

Troy has long been famous for its horses; because of them, traders came here from all over the world, and because of them, raids were often made on the city. In the Iliad, the Trojans are called "hippodamoi", "horse tamers", and legends say that the Trojan king Dardanus had a herd of magnificent horses, descended from the northernmost wind Boreas. In general, the horse was one of the creatures closest to humans in ancient horse breeding, agricultural and military culture. From this point of view, it was quite natural for the Achaean warriors to leave a horse under the walls of Troy as a dedicatory gift.

By the way, the images for sacred statues and sacrificial gifts were not chosen by chance. Each deity had animals dedicated to him, and he could take on their appearance: for example, Zeus in myths turns into a bull, Apollo into a dolphin, and Dionysus into a panther. In Mediterranean cultures, the horse in one of its aspects was associated with the fertility of the fields, with a bountiful harvest, with mother earth (in ancient mythology, the goddess Demeter sometimes turned into a mare). But at the same time, the beautiful freedom-loving animal was often associated with violent, spontaneous and uncontrollable force, with earthquakes and destruction, and as such was the sacred animal of the god Poseidon.

So, maybe the key to unlocking the Trojan horse is in the “Earth Shaker” Poseidon? Among the Olympians, this god was distinguished by his unbridled character and penchant for destruction. And he had old scores to settle with Troy. Perhaps the destruction of Troy by horse is just an allegory strong earthquake who destroyed the city?

It turns out that this really happened. But this only happened with another Troy.

Before Priam, the ruler of Troy was King Laomedon, famous for his stinginess and treachery. Once, the gods Apollo and Poseidon, punished by Zeus, were given to his service. Apollo tended the flocks, and Poseidon labored as a builder: he built invulnerable walls around the city. However, after the expiration of the term, the gods did not receive any reward for their work and were kicked out with threats. Then they sent an epidemic and a sea monster to the city. Hercules volunteered to save Troy from the monster and successfully carried out his undertaking, but the greedy king here too regretted the due reward - he did not give up the magic white horses. Then Hercules gathered an army, returned to the walls of Troy, destroyed the city to the ground and killed Laomedon, and installed Priam as king (“Priam” means “bought”: he was indeed bought from slavery by his sister).

Modern archaeologists believe that the legendary Troy of Laomedont has its own historical analogue - the so-called Troy VI, which died from a strong earthquake shortly before the events of the Trojan War. But earthquakes, as is known from mythology, were sent in anger by the “Earth Shaker” Poseidon. It is possible that the cataclysm that destroyed the city took in the myth the allegorical form of Poseidon’s anger at the Trojans. In addition, white horses, his sacred animals, formally caused the disaster. (Troy seemed to be haunted by some kind of fate: to be destroyed twice because of horses!)

Unfortunately, divine wrath was unlikely to have anything to do with the Trojan horse. Priam's Troy did not fall due to a cataclysm (this has also been proven by archaeologists), but was captured and plundered by the Achaeans. In addition, in the Trojan War, Poseidon takes the side of the Trojans, and the idea of ​​​​infiltrating the city with the help of a horse is suggested by his eternal rival Athena.

So, the symbolism of the horse does not end with Poseidon...

In some, especially archaic, traditions, the horse symbolizes the transition to another space, to another qualitative state, to a place inaccessible to ordinary means. On a horse with eight legs, the shaman makes his mystical journey; among the Etruscans, the horse transports the souls of the dead to the underworld; the wonderful horse Burak carries Muhammad to heaven. Why go far - remember our Little Humpbacked Horse, who takes Ivanushka to the Far Away Kingdom and to visit the Sun and Moon.

What does this have to do with Troy, you ask? The most direct thing. According to Homer, the Trojan War lasted almost ten years; for ten years the Achaeans could not take the walls of the city, built, according to myth, by the god Poseidon himself. In fact, from the point of view of myth, Troy was an “inaccessible” place, a kind of “enchanted city” that could not be defeated by ordinary means. In order to get into the city, the heroes did not even need military cunning, but a special, magical “carrier”. And such a carrier becomes a wooden horse, with the help of which they accomplish what they have been trying to do for ten years without success (naturally, when speaking about the wooden carrier horse and the “enchanted city,” we mean not historical, but mythological reality).

But if you follow this version, then Troy, described by Homer, takes on a completely special meaning. We are no longer talking about a small fortress on the banks of the Pontus, or even about the capital of the ancient state of Asia Minor. Homeric Troy receives the status of a certain transcendental place for which a battle is being waged. And the battles taking place under the walls and within the walls of this Troy are by no means a vendetta between two tribes, but a reflection of events of global significance. The Trojan Horse opens the last act of this world drama.

By the way, this is confirmed by the scale of the war. Archaeologically, Troy is just a small fortress. Why, according to Homer, to take it, ships are sent from 160 city-states of Greece - from 10 to 100 ships, that is, a fleet of at least 1600 ships? And if you multiply by 50 warriors each - this is an army of more than 80 thousand people! (For comparison: Alexander the Great needed about 50 thousand people to conquer all of Asia.) Even if this is the author’s hyperbole, it indicates that Homer attached exceptional importance to this war.

What happened under the walls of Homer's Troy?

It is usually believed that the war began with the famous feast of the gods at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, at which the goddess of discord threw an apple with the inscription “To the Fairest” and three goddesses - Athena, Hera and Aphrodite - argued among themselves for the right to receive it. Their dispute is resolved by Priam's son, Paris, who, seduced by the prospect of having the most beautiful wife in the world (Helen), awards the apple to Aphrodite (then Paris kidnaps Helen, and a war breaks out).

But, in fact, the war began much earlier: when Zeus, tired of the complaints of Mother Earth, to whom the human race caused suffering with its wickedness, decided to destroy part of humanity, but not with the help of a cataclysm, but with the hands of the people themselves. The goal of the “world drama” is clear, it’s up to the main characters.

Then, from the marriage of Zeus and Nemesis, Helen is born, a perfect beauty for whom the entire heroic world will fight. From the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the last greatest of mortals is born - the hero Achilles. And finally, the “instigator” of the war, Paris, is born with the prediction that he will destroy the Trojan kingdom. So, all the characters are there, Helen is kidnapped and a war breaks out, the real goal of which is to destroy two great kingdoms and the best of the heroes of the ancient world.

And what Zeus planned comes true: almost all the heroes, both Achaeans and Trojans, die under the walls of Troy. And of those who survive the war, many will die on the way home, some, like King Agamemnon, will find death at home at the hands of loved ones, others will be expelled and spend their lives wandering. In essence, this is the end of the heroic age. Under the walls of Troy there are no victors and no vanquished, heroes are becoming a thing of the past, and the time of ordinary people is coming.

By the way, it is interesting that the horse is also symbolically associated with birth and death. A horse made of spruce wood, carrying something in its belly, symbolizes the birth of a new one, and the Trojan horse is made of spruce boards, and armed warriors sit in its hollow belly. It turns out that the Trojan horse brings death to the defenders of the fortress, but at the same time it also means the birth of something new.

Modern researchers date the Trojan War to around 1240 BC. (archaeologically, the death of Troy VII falls on this date). Around the same time, another event occurred in the Mediterranean. an important event: one of the great migrations of peoples began. Tribes of the Dorians, a barbarian people who completely destroyed the ancient Mycenaean civilization, moved from the north to the Balkan Peninsula. Only after several centuries will Greece be reborn and it will be possible to talk about Greek history. The destruction will be so great that the entire pre-Dorian history will become a myth (so much so that only with mid-19th centuries, scientists will begin to talk seriously about Mycenaean Greece and Troy, and before that they will be considered a fairy tale). Of the 160 Greek states mentioned by Homer in his Catalog of Ships, half will cease to exist, and the greatest, Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos, will turn into small villages. The Trojan War will become a kind of boundary between the ancient and new worlds, between Mycenaean and classical Greece.

Of the heroes who fought under the walls of Troy, only two survived: Odysseus and Aeneas. And this is no coincidence. Both of them have a special mission. Aeneas will set out to create his “new Troy” and lay the foundation for Rome, the civilization of the world to come. And Odysseus... the “much-wise and long-suffering” hero will make a great journey home to find his promised land. In order to lose and regain everything that is dear to him on his journey, including given name. To reach the borders of the inhabited world and visit countries that no one has seen and from which no one has returned. To descend into the world of the dead and again “resurrect” and wander for a long time on the waves of the Ocean, the great symbol of the Unconscious and the Unknown.

Odysseus will make a great journey, in which the “old” man will symbolically die and a “hero of the new time” will be born. He will endure great suffering and the wrath of the gods. This will be a new hero - energetic, insightful and wise, inquisitive and dexterous. With his ineradicable desire to understand the world, his ability to solve problems not with physical strength and valor, but with a sharp mind, he is not like the heroes of the “old” world. He will come into conflict with the gods, and the gods will be forced to retreat before man.

It is probably no coincidence that Odysseus will become the ideal of the coming era - classical Greece. Together with Troy, the old world will irrevocably go away, and with it something mysterious and hidden will go away. But something new will be born. This will be a world whose hero will be man: a master and a traveler, a philosopher and a citizen, a man no longer dependent on the forces of Fate and the game of the gods, but creating his own destiny and his own history.

Myth

Events before the Trojan War

It all started withJupiterdecided to marrynymphThetis. But oraclepredicted that the son from this marriage would be stronger than his father, and Jupiter decided to abandon the marriage with Thetis and give her in marriage toArgonaut And his grandsonPeleus. At the wedding Peleus and Thetisall the gods were present except the goddess of discordEris. She showed up at the wedding without an invitation and provokedapple of discord dispute between Juno, Minerva And Venus. The judge of this dispute was a TrojanParis(son Priam), upon whom the wrath of the losers in the dispute over the apple of Juno and Minerva fell. And Venus (in gratitude for winning the argument) promised Paris the most beautiful girl -Elena. Paris stole Helen at her husband's Menelaus And took her to Troy, which led to the Trojan War

Events of the Trojan War

The Trojan stink lasted ten years. Moreover, for the first nine years, neither side had an advantage - the Greeks, despite their courage, could not take Troy, and the Trojans, despite their courage, could not expel the Greeks. Main events:

Odysseus in Homer's poem talks about the island of Crete. Today, the island of Crete, part of Greece, is inhabited by about half a million people. Residents mainly do agriculture. Industry is poorly developed railways No. In a word, the abundance that Homer reports is not now on the island of Crete and in
at all. Until the 70s of the 19th century, the inhabitants of Crete had no idea that under their feet in the ground lay in ruins an ancient civilization that was once the pearl of the Mediterranean.

A certain Cretan merchant named Minos Halokerinos, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, namesake of the famous King Minos, came across the ruins of an ancient building and found ancient utensils. Reports of this discovery spread around the world and interested the famous G. Schliemann, but the Englishman Arthur Evans began excavations in 1900, who became the discoverer of Cretan culture. Evans saw the magnificent palace of Minos (as Evans called it), multi-story, with a huge number of rooms, corridors, baths, storerooms, with water supply and sewerage. In the palace halls the walls were painted with frescoes. Along with huge vessels (pithos), weapons, and jewelry, tablets with writing were found. Homer did not lie, Crete was truly the center of the wealth and arts of antiquity.

The apparently lost Cretan-Mycenaean culture undoubtedly had its own literature. However, nothing remains of it except writings on clay tablets, which were deciphered only in 1953 by the Englishmen Ventris and Chadwig. However, the Cretan-Mycenaean culture cannot be ignored in the history of literature. This is the link between the culture of Ancient Egypt and Hellenic culture.

Until the 20th century, science, in essence, knew nothing about the antiquities of Crete, except for the testimonies of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Diodorus, which were perceived as legendary, fairy-tale material.

The heyday of Cretan culture apparently dates back to the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Legends connect it with the name of King Minos. “Minos, as we know from legend, was the first to acquire a fleet, taking possession of a large part of the sea, which is now called Hellenic,” wrote the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Herodotus called Minos "lord of the sea." Cretan cities did not have fortifications. Apparently, Crete had an excellent fleet, which completely ensured the safety of its cities. Thucydides and Diodorus considered Minos a Greek. Homer called him "Kronion's interlocutor."

...The Homeric epic and all mythology are the main legacy that the Greeks transferred from barbarism to civilization.
F. Engels

Homer is so great, so significant both for the spiritual history of the ancient world and for subsequent eras in the history of all mankind, that an entire culture should rightfully be named after him.

Homer was a Greek, apparently from the Ionians from the shores of Asia Minor.

Nowadays, in the five billion family of humanity, there are relatively few Greeks: something like 12 million, and one third of them live outside Greece. They were once a huge cultural force in the world, spreading their influence far beyond the borders of the metropolis.

The ancient Greek tribes, of course, were not a single people, and they did not call themselves Greeks. This is what the Romans later called them after one of the small tribes in Southern Italy. They themselves called themselves Hellenes. The Hellenic ancestry is lost in the 12th century BC. e. The indigenous population at that time, apparently, were the Pelasgians; tribes that came from Asia Minor and from the north of the Balkan Peninsula merged with them.

What were the Greeks like in those distant times? These days they are relatively short (165-170 cm), with dark wavy hair, dark skin and dark eyes. In those days, the height of men, judging by archaeological excavations, reached 180 cm.

Homer calls the Achaeans “curly-headed”, Menelaus “fair-haired” or “golden-haired”. Agameda, an ancient healer who “knew all the medicinal herbs as long as the earth bore them,” was also light-haired. Odysseus and, presumably, most of the Greeks were fair-haired. Homer paints picturesquely the appearance of his heroes. Agamemnon is tall and thin, Odysseus is shorter and stocky. Standing next to Menelaus, he was somewhat inferior to him, but sitting down he looked “more attractive.” Menelaus spoke little, fluently, but weightily, “strikingly,” expressing himself directly, “incongruously.” The portrait of Odysseus in the Iliad is magnificent. So he stood up, lowered his eyes, fixed them on the ground, stood quietly, motionless, as if he was searching and could not find words and did not know what to say, “like a simple man.” What is it, or is he speechless from anger, or is he completely stupid, inarticulate, “poor-witted”? But then a voice burst from his mighty chest, and a speech, “like a strong blizzard, rushed from his lips” - “No, no one would dare to compete with Odysseus in words.”

Homer captured details of the lives of his contemporaries. Sometimes they are no different from what we observed in our days. Here he tells how a playing boy builds something on the seashore from wet sand and then “scatters it with his hand and foot, frolicking,” or how “jugular mesks” (hinnies) “drag a ship’s beam or a huge mast from a high mountain along a cruelly lumpy road ...”, or how a working person rests:

…the woodcutter’s husband begins to prepare his dinner,
Sitting under a shady mountain, when my hands had already had enough,
The forest overthrows the tall forest, and languor finds its way into the soul,
His senses are overwhelmed by the hunger for sweet food.

Homer is very detailed - from his descriptions one can vividly imagine the labor process of a man of his day. The poet, apparently, was close to the common people; perhaps in his youth he himself built rafts and ships and sailed on them on the “boundless sea.” This can be felt in how detailed and, perhaps, lovingly, he describes the work of Odysseus building his raft:

He began to cut down trees and soon finished the work,
He cut down twenty logs, cleaned them with sharp copper
He scraped it out smoothly, then leveled it, trimming it along the cord.
That's when Calypso returned to him with a drill.
He began to drill the beams and, having drilled everything, brought them together,
I sewed them together with long bolts and pushed them through with large spikes.

Etc. (V). Using Homer's detailed and loving description, the carpenter of our day will freely build the structure made by Odysseus.

Homer accurately and in detail described the cities in which his contemporaries and compatriots lived. The city of his days appears to our imagination quite realistically and visibly with streets and squares, churches and houses of citizens and even outbuildings:

...Walls surround it with loopholes;
The pier is surrounded by a deep pier on both sides: the entrance
The pier is crowded with ships to the right and left
The shore is lined, and each of them is under a protective roof;
There is also a shopping area around the Poseidon Temple,
Standing firmly on the hewn stones of the huge ones; tackle
All the ships there, a supply of sails and ropes in vast
The buildings are stored, where smooth oars are also prepared.

The city walls are “wonderfully beautiful,” Homer does not forget to insert, for the townspeople of his time thought not only about the inaccessibility and strength of the walls, but also about their beauty.

We will find out the truth in general outline, and about the existence of medicine in Homer's day. The Achaean army had its own doctor, a certain Machaon, the son of Asclepius, the god of healing. He examined Menelaus's wound, squeezed out the blood and sprinkled "medicines" on it. Homer does not say exactly what these means were. It's a secret. It was revealed to Asclepius by the centaur Chiron, the kindest creature with the face of a man and the body of a horse, the educator of many heroes - Hercules, Achilles, Jason.

Healing is carried out not only by specially trained people, the “sons of Asclepius,” or healers like the fair-haired Agameda, but also by individual warriors who have learned certain recipes. Both the hero Achilles knew them from the centaur Chiron, and Patroclus, who learned them from Achilles.

Homer even described the surgical operation:

Having stretched out the hero, he used a knife from the sting of the cannon
I cut it out with a bitter feather and washed it with warm water.
Black blood and hands sprinkled with the worn-out root
Bitter, healing pain, which is completely for him
The pain quenches: the blood has subsided, and the ulcer has dried up.

The Greeks considered Homer their first and greatest poet. However, his poetry crowned a large culture created by more than one generation. It would be naive to think that it, like a miracle, arose on uncultivated soil. We know little about what preceded it, but the very system of poetic thinking of the great elder, the world of his moral and aesthetic ideas, suggests that this is the pinnacle of a centuries-old cultural process, a brilliant generalization of the spiritual interests and ideals of a society that has already come a long way in its historical formation. Historians believe that Greece during the time of Homer was no longer as rich and highly developed as in the previous Cretan-Mycenaean era. Apparently, inter-tribal wars and the invasion of new, less developed tribes had an impact, which delayed and even pushed Greece back somewhat. But we will use Homer’s poems, and in them the picture is different. (Perhaps these are just poetic memories of times long past?) Judging by Homer’s descriptions, the peoples who inhabited the shores of Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the entire East
Mediterranean, lived richly, Troy was already a well-built city with wide areas.

The height of culture is evidenced by the household items described by Homer.

The lyre on which Achilles played was “magnificent, elegantly decorated”, with a “silver pendant on top.”

His tent has chairs and luxurious purple carpets. On the table are “beautiful baskets” for bread.

Speaking about Helen sitting at the loom, Homer does not fail to glance at the canvas: it turns out to be a “light, double-folded cover”, something like an ancient tapestry, which depicted scenes from the Trojan War (“battles, exploits of horse-drawn Trojans and Danaev"). It must be assumed that in the time of Homer, episodes of the Trojan War were the subject of not only oral traditions and songs, but also pictorial and plastic creations.

The height of the general material culture of the world in the era of Homer is also evidenced by the cosmetic tricks of the goddess Hera, colorfully described by the poet. The poet describes in detail, with delight, the decoration of the goddess, all the intricacies of the women's toilet, her beauty:

I put beautiful earrings with triple pendants in my ears,
Those who played brightly: the goddess shone with charm all around.
The sovereign Hera overshadowed the head with a light covering.
Lush, new, which, like the sun, shone with whiteness.
She tied the beauty of a magnificent mold to her fair legs,
Thus adorning the body with delightful decorations for the eyes,
Hera came out of the lie...

The poet loves to fix his gaze on military armor, clothing, chariots, drawing in detail every detail of them. Using his descriptions, it is possible to accurately recreate the household items used by his contemporaries. Hera's chariot had two copper wheels with eight spokes on an iron axle. The wheels had gold rims, with copper spikes tightly placed, and the hubs were rounded with silver. The body was secured with straps, richly trimmed with silver and gold. Two brackets rose above it, the drawbar was trimmed with silver, and the harness with gold. “A marvel to behold!”

And here is a description of the warrior’s attire: Paris, going to battle with Menelaus, puts “lush” leggings on his “white legs”, fastening them with silver buckles, put copper armor on his chest, threw a belt and a silver-nailed sword with a copper blade on his shoulder, and put it on his head a shiny helmet with a crest and a horse's mane, he took a heavy spear in his hands.

Such weapons, of course, were bulky and heavy, and Homer, reporting the death of one or another warrior, usually concludes the scene with the phrase: “With a noise he fell to the ground, and the armor thundered on the fallen.” Armor was the warrior’s pride, his property, and quite expensive, so the winner was in a hurry to take it off the vanquished; it was an honorable and rich trophy.

There was no state apparatus yet in the days of Homer, peoples lived in patriarchal simplicity, producing everything on their kleros (allotment). But the beginnings of taxation are already emerging. “He rewarded himself for the loss with a rich collection from the people,” says Alkina in the poem. Class stratification was already quite pronounced in Greek society in the days of Homer. The poet colorfully depicts the life of the elite of the people, the luxury of their homes, clothes, and comfortable life. It is unlikely that Odysseus’s house was very luxurious, but even here there are “rich armchairs of skillful workmanship”, they are covered with “patterned fabric”, a bench is placed under the feet, a “silver basin” for washing hands, a “golden washstand”. The “smooth table” was apparently light; it was pushed forward by a slave. Slaves and youths serve food, the housekeeper manages the supplies and issues them. Here the herald makes sure that the cups are not empty.

Nestor’s house was also rich, where Odysseus’s son Telemachus arrived, received by the elder as an honored guest. He lays Telemachus “in ringing, spacious peace” on a “slotted” bed.

The youngest daughter of Nestor took Telemachus to a cool bath, washed him and rubbed him with “pure oil.” In a tunic and a rich mantle, the young son of Odysseus came out of the bathhouse, “like a god with a radiant face.”

Homer also described the rich feasts of the Greeks, to which, presumably, all the free citizens of the city were invited, as, for example, in Pylos during the festival of Poseidon (“the azure-haired god”):

There were nine benches there: on benches, five hundred on each,
People were sitting, and there were nine bulls in front of each one.
Having tasted the sweet womb, they already burned the Thigh before God...

Homer described in detail how, during a feast, the youths spread the “light drink” around the circle of guests, “starting from the right, according to custom,” how they throw the tongues of sacrificial animals into the fire, etc.

At feasts they ate meat (fish was not included in the range of delicacies), sprinkled generously with barley grains. After the feast, the young men sang a hymn to God (“loud paean”).

The fate of the poor is sad. One can judge this by how Penelope’s suitors and even the slaves treated the unrecognized Odysseus, who came to his house in the rags of a beggar, what fun they made for themselves from the argument and fight of two beggars, one of whom was Odysseus in disguise (“the suitors, clasping their hands, everyone was dying of laughter"):

Just wait, I'll deal with you, you dirty tramp:
You are bold in the presence of noble gentlemen and not timid in soul.

One of the suitors threatens Odysseus. The threat to the old beggar is even more terrible:

I'll throw you into the black-sided ship and send you instantly
To the mainland to King Ekhet, the destroyer of mortals.
He will cut off your ears and nose with merciless copper,
He will rip out your shame and give it raw to be eaten by dogs.

Homer's poetry, of course, was already the pinnacle of some very great artistic culture, which has not reached us. She raised him, shaped his artistic taste, and taught him to understand physical and moral beauty. He embodied the highest achievements of this culture in poetry as a brilliant son of his people. In Ancient Greece there was a cult of beauty, and above all the physical beauty of a person. Homer captured this cult in poetry, and the great sculptors of Greece, somewhat later, in marble.

All the gods, except, perhaps, the lame Hephaestus, were beautiful. Homer constantly talks about the beauty of his heroes.
Helen, the daughter of Leda, was so beautiful that all her suitors, and these were the rulers of the city-states, in order to avoid mutual insults and civil strife, agreed among themselves to recognize and protect her chosen one, and when Helen, already the wife of Menelaus, was kidnapped by Paris and taken from Mycenae to Troy, the treaty came into force. All of Greece went to Troy. So it began Great War, described by Homer in the Iliad. Paris, according to Homer's descriptions, is “bright in beauty and clothing”, he has “lush curls and charm.” He received “the kind gift of golden Aphrodite” - beauty.

Everything in Homer is beautiful: gods, people, and all of Hellas, “glorious for its women’s beauty.”

Homer describes Elena's appearance with soulful tenderness. So she stood up, covered with silver fabrics. She went, “tender tears streaming down her face.” The elders saw her. It would seem that they should all be inflamed with hatred and indignation, because it excited so many peoples and brought so many troubles to the inhabitants of Troy. But the elders cannot contain their admiration: she is so good, so beautiful - this “lily-ramen” Elena:

The elders, as soon as they saw Elena walking towards the tower,
The quiet ones spoke winged speeches among themselves;
No, it is impossible to condemn that the sons of Troy and the Achaeans
Such a wife suffers abuse and troubles for such a long time:
Truly, she is like the eternal goddesses in beauty!

For Homer, there are no guilty people in the world, everything is done according to the will of the gods, however, they are also subject to the great moirai - fate. Helen is also innocent, her escape from Mycenae is the will of Aphrodite. Elder Priam, the ruler of besieged Troy, treats a young woman with fatherly care. Seeing Elena, he called to her in a friendly manner: “Come on, my dear child!.. You are innocent before me: only the gods are guilty.”

Drawing the scene of the wounding of Menelaus, Homer pays tribute to beauty here too: “the thighs were stained with purple blood, the steep, beautiful legs” - and compares them with “stained in purple” ivory. He likens the “young” Simonisius, a Trojan killed in battle, to a felled poplar, a “wet meadow pet” that is “smooth and clean.” The god Hermes appeared before Priam, “like a noble youth in appearance, with the first brad, whose youth is charming.”

Priam, complaining about fate and foreseeing his violent death, fears most of all that he will appear to the eyes of people in an indecent form, with a body distorted by old age:

...Oh, it’s nice for the young man,
No matter how he lies, fallen in battle and torn to pieces by copper, -
Everything about him and the dead, no matter what is revealed, is beautiful!
If the gray hair and the gray head of a man,
If dogs defile the shame of a murdered old man, -
There is no more woeful fate for unhappy people.

Talking about Ajax, Homer will not fail to note the “beauty of the face,” he will talk about the “beautiful Achaean wives.” About Ermia: “he had a captivating image of a young man with virgin fluff on fresh cheeks, in a beautiful color of youth.” Megapeid “captivated with its youthful beauty.” Etc.

Homer also glorifies the beauty of things. They are created by artists. He glorifies both his brothers, “singers who console the soul with the divine word,” and skilled jewelers. Thus, at the most pathetic point in the story, Homer fixes his gaze on a skillfully crafted plaque; he cannot help but stop and describe it in detail:

Golden, beautiful, with double hooks
The mantle was held on with a plaque: the master skillfully used the plaque
A formidable dog and in his mighty claws a young
The doe was sculptured: as if alive, it trembled; and scary
The dog looked at her furiously, and tried to escape from his paws.
To fight, she kicked with her legs: in amazement that plaque
She brought everyone.

Myths of Homeric Greece

Myths are the first form of poetic consciousness of the people. They contain his philosophy, his history, his morals, customs, his anxieties, worries, dreams, ideals and, in the end, the whole complex of his spiritual life.

Everyday life ancient Greek took place in constant communication with the gods. This communication, of course, was not in reality, but in the imagination, but this did not lose the force of reality for him. The entire world around him was inhabited by gods. In the sky and stars, in seas and rivers, in forests and mountains - everywhere he saw gods. Reading Homer these days, we cannot perceive his narrative as a realistic depiction of true events. For us, this is a wonderful poetic fantasy. For the ancient Greek, a contemporary of the poet, it was an undeniable truth.

When we read in Homer: “The young Eos with purple fingers rose from the darkness,” we understand that morning has come, and not just morning, but a bright, southern, sunny morning, a beautiful morning, fanned by the fresh breath of the sea, a morning like a young goddess , because Eos, named here, is “young” and has “purple fingers.” The ancient Greek perceived this phrase in the same emotional connotation, but if for us Eos is a poetic image, then for the ancient Greek it was a real being - a goddess. The name Eos spoke a lot to his heart. He knew both beautiful and tragic stories about her. This is the goddess of the morning, sister of Helios, the god of the Sun, and Selene, the goddess of the Moon. She gave birth to stars and winds - cold, sharp Boreas and soft, gentle Zephyr. The ancient Greek imagined her as the most beautiful young woman. Like real, ordinary women, she lived the life of the heart, she fell in love and suffered, enjoyed and grieved. She could not resist the courageous beauty of the god of war Ares and thus aroused the wrath of Aphrodite, who was in love with him. The goddess of love instilled in her a constant and insatiable desire as punishment. Eos fell in love with the handsome Orion and kidnapped him. The name of Orion entailed a string of new legends. He was the son of the sea god Poseidon. His father gave him the ability to walk on the surface of the sea. He was a strong and brave hunter, but also daring and arrogant. He dishonored young Merope, and the girl's father blinded him. Then, in order to regain his sight, he went to Helios himself, and he, with his life-giving rays, restored his sight. Orion died from the arrow of Artemis and was carried to heaven. There he became one of the constellations.

The Greek also knew another sad story about the morning goddess. She once saw the young Trojan Titon, brother of Priam, and, conquered by his beauty, carried him away and became his lover, giving birth to his son Memnon. Her love was so strong that she begged Zeus to give him immortality, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. The handsome Titon became immortal, but every day something was lost in him. Life faded away, but did not disappear completely. In the end, he became decrepit: he could no longer move. The unfortunate goddess could only bitterly mourn her fatal mistake.

They say that Tithon personified for the ancient Greeks the passing day, the fading, but not yet extinguished light. Maybe! But what a wonderful and exciting legend about this natural phenomenon was created by the poetic imagination of a brilliant people!
So, pink-fingered Eos! Morning! Morning and youth! Morning and beauty! Morning and love! All this merged in the minds of the ancient Greek, intertwined into legends of amazing beauty.

We read in Homer the following phrase: “Heavy night fell from the menacing sky.”

Night (Nyx in Greek) is also a goddess, but her name is associated with other images - gloomy ones. She is the daughter of Chaos and the sister of Erebus (darkness) and, as Homer writes, “the queen of immortals and mortals.” She lives somewhere in the depths of Tartarus, where she meets her antipode and brother Day to replace him in the eternal cycle of days.

Night has children and grandchildren. Her daughter Eris (strife) gave birth to Strife, Sorrow, Battle, Famine, Murder. This evil, insidious goddess planted an apple of discord at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis and led entire nations - the Greeks and the Trojans - to war.

From the Night, the formidable goddess of retribution Nemesis was born. Her judgment is fair and speedy. She punishes the evil done by man. Sculptors depicted her as the most beautiful (the Greeks could not do otherwise) woman with a sword, wings and scales (sword - retribution, punishment, punishment; wings - speed of retribution; scales - balancing guilt and punishment).

The night gave birth to the nymphs of the Hesperides. They live in the far west, near the Ocean River, in a beautiful garden, and there they guard apples that give eternal youth. The Son of Night was the mocking god Mom, the great mockingbird and bully. He is a slanderer, he laughs even at the gods themselves, and the angry Zeus expelled him from the kingdom of the gods of Olympus.

Thanatos, the merciless god of death, was also the Son of Night. One day Sisyphus managed to chain Thanatos, and people stopped dying, but this did not last long, and Thanatos, freed, again began to destroy the human race.

The Night had three terrible daughters: the Moiras, goddesses of fate. One of them was called Lachestis (draws lots). Even before a person was born, it determined his fate in life. The second is Clotho (the spinner). She spun a man the thread of his life. And the third is Atropos (inevitable). She broke this thread. Russian translators of Homer Gnedich and Zhukovsky called moira parks in their translations. The Greeks did not know such a word, “parks” is a Latin word, as the ancient Romans called moira, transferring them to their pantheon.

Perhaps the most beautiful son of Night was Gymnos, the god of sleep. He is always beneficent, he heals people's sorrows, gives respite from heavy worries and thoughts. Homer paints a sweet scene: Penelope grieves in her chambers for her missing husband, for her son Telemachus, who is threatened by both the “evil sea” and “treacherous murderers,” but then ... “A peaceful sleep came and comforted her, and everything in her calmed down.” .

Homer calls him "the sweetener." Him too Living being, a beautiful young man living on the island of Lemnos, near the spring of oblivion. He also has completely human feelings. He is in love with one of the Charites, Pasiphae, in love for a long time and hopelessly. But Hera needed his service; Zeus had to be put to sleep. Gymnos hesitates, afraid of the wrath of the strongest of the gods. But Hera promises him the love of Pasiphae:

You will finally embrace her, you will call her your wife
That Pasiphae, for which you have been sighing all day long.

And Gymnos is delighted, only asks Hera to swear “by the Styx by water” that she will fulfill her promise.

The Greek saw gods everywhere, and they were beautiful in their not divine, but human feelings, he elevated people to the ideal of deity, he reduced the gods to people, and this was the attractive power of his mythology.

However Greek mythology has undergone a certain evolution.

The first, most ancient gods were terrible. They, by their appearance and their actions, could only inspire fear. Man was still very weak and timid before the incomprehensible and formidable forces of nature. The raging sea, storms, huge waves, the whole immensity of the sea space were frightening. A sudden, inexplicable movement of the earth's surface, which until then seemed unshakable, is an earthquake; explosions of a fire-breathing mountain, hot stones flying to the sky, a column of smoke and fire and a river of fire flowing down the slopes of the mountain; terrible storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, turning everything into chaos - all this shocked souls and required explanations. Nature seemed hostile, ready to bring death or suffering to man at any moment. The forces of nature seemed like living beings, and they were scary. The gods of the first generation are fierce. Uranus (sky) threw his children into Tartarus. One of the Titans (sons of Uranus and Gaia) (earth) castrated his father. From the blood that spilled from the wound, monstrous giants with thick hair and beards and snake legs grew. They were destroyed by the Olympian gods. A fragment of the frieze of the altar in Pergamon (2nd century BC) has been preserved, where the sculpture depicts Gigantomachy - the battle of the Olympian gods with giants. But the sculptor, obeying the reigning cult of beauty, depicted a giant with huge snake rings instead of legs, but also with a beautiful torso and a face similar to the face of Apollo.

Cronus, who overthrew his father, devoured his children. To save Zeus, his mother Rhea threw a huge cobblestone into the father god's mouth instead of a child, which he calmly swallowed. The world was inhabited by terrible monsters, and man bravely entered into a fight with these monsters.

The third generation of gods - Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades - Homeric gods. They carried bright humanistic ideals.

The Olympian gods invite people to participate in their battles with the terrible giants, with all the monsters that Gaia gave birth to. This is how people-heroes appeared. Russian word"hero" of Greek origin (heros). The first generation of Greeks fought monsters. Hercules killed, while still a youth, the lion of Cithaeron, then the Nemean lion, taking possession of its skin, invulnerable to arrows, and killed Lernaean hydra about nine heads, cleaned out the stables of Augeas, killed a monster bull in Crete. So he performed twelve labors, cleansing the world of filth and monsters. The hero Cadmus, the son of the Phoenician king, killed the dragon monster and founded the city of Thebes. The hero Theseus killed the minotaur monster on Crete. The daughter of Minos, in love with Theseus, helped him get out of the labyrinth, holding on to a thread (Ariadne's thread). Heroes make long journeys. The Argonauts, led by Jason, go to distant Colchis and mine the Golden Fleece.

The next generation of heroes fights at the Scamander River - these are already characters from Homer's poems.

The history of the Greek gods went from chaos to order, from ugliness to beauty, from gods to man. The world of the gods is patriarchal. They live on Olympus. Each of them has his own house, built “according to creative plans” by the lame blacksmith, artist and architect Hephaestus. They argue and quarrel, feast and enjoy the singing of the Muses and “the sounds of the beautiful lyre rattling in the hands of Apollo,” and, like people, they taste “a sweet dream.” “Blessed inhabitants of heaven!”

Olympus, where they say they founded their monastery
Gods, where the winds do not blow, where the cold rain does not make noise,
Where there are no snowstorms in winter, where the air is cloudless
It is poured with light azure and permeated with the sweetest radiance;
There, for the gods, all the days pass in unspeakable joys.

Although the gods live on high Olympus, they are in constant communication with people, almost like friends, almost like neighbors. Achilles' mother Thetis informs her son that yesterday Zeus with all the gods, “with a host of immortals,” went to visit the distant waters of the Ocean, to a feast with the “immaculate Ethiopians.” Apparently, the feast must have lasted many days, for Zeus returned to Olympus only on the twelfth day. The idea of ​​the country of the Ethiopians is still quite vague; they live somewhere on the edge of the inhabited earth, near the distant waters of the Ocean.

The gods flew, they wore golden sandals with wings, as Hermes did, or ascended in the form of a cloud. Thetis rose "from the foamy sea" with the "early fog." She appeared before her crying son “like a light cloud.”
For the ancient Greek, the gods were always close to him, they helped or hindered him, they appeared to him in the form of people close to him or people known to him. Most often they came to him in a dream. So, Athena entered Penelope’s bedroom through the keyhole, “blowing through the air,” appeared before her in the guise of her sister Iftima, “the beautiful daughter of the elder Icarius,” the wife of “mighty Ephmel,” and began to admonish her, who was in “sweet slumber.” in the silent gates of dreams,” do not be sad. “The gods, who live an easy life, forbid you to cry and complain: your Telemachus will return unharmed.”

The gods send their signs to people. This was usually the flight of birds, most often an eagle (on the right - good luck, on the left - bad luck).
Whatever serious action the Greek was planning, his first concern was to appease the gods so that they would help him. For this he sacrificed to them.

Homer described in great detail the act of sacrifice in honor of the goddess Athena. They brought the best heifer from the herd, shod her horns with gold, Nestor’s sons washed their hands in a tub lined with flowers, and brought a box of barley. Nestor, having washed his hands, took a handful of barley and sprinkled it on the heifer’s head, his sons did the same, then they threw the wool from the heifer’s head into the fire, praying to Athena, and then Thrazimedes plunged an ax into her body. The heifer fell down. The women cried out - Nestor’s daughters, daughters-in-law and his “meek-hearted” wife. This detail is wonderful: how humane the women of Homer’s time were!

The Greeks asked and begged the gods, but they also scolded them in their hearts. Thus, in the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the first, when his sword broke into pieces from a blow on Paris’s helmet, “shouted out, looking at the vast sky: “Zeus, not one of the immortals, like you, is evil!”

Elena speaks just as sharply and abusively to Aphrodite when she calls her to the bedchamber, where Paris is waiting for her “on a bed of chiseled beauty and clothing.” “Oh, cruel! Are you burning to seduce me again? Do you appear to me with malicious deceit in your heart? Go to your favorite yourself... always languishing with him as a wife or slave.”
Even the chief of the gods is sometimes not spared. One of Homer’s characters addresses the sky in his hearts: “Zeus the Olympian, and you have already become an obvious false lover.” The gods, of course, respect their supreme leader. When he enters the palace (on Olympus), everyone stands up, no one dares to sit in his presence, but his wife Hera greets him completely unkindly (she does not forgive him for his sympathies for the Trojans): “Which of the immortals is with you, treacherous, built councils ?

Zeus has black eyebrows. When he “washes them” as a sign of agreement, his “fragrant” hair rises and the multi-hill Olympus shakes.

No matter how formidable Zeus is, he is clearly afraid of his wife. She argues with him, and “yells,” and can “embarrass him with insulting speech.” When the nymph Thetis, the mother of Achilles, turned to him for help, he “sighed deeply,” replies: “It’s a sad matter, you arouse the hatred of the arrogant Hera against me,” promises to help, but so that his wife does not know about it: “Get away now , but Hera won’t see you on Olympus.”

The gods, of course, guard justice. (This is how it should be.) And Zeus, “looking at our deeds and punishing our atrocities,” and all the other inhabitants of Olympus.

The blessed gods do not like dishonest deeds,
They value good actions in people and justice.

But this, as they say, is ideal. In fact, they suffer from all the vices of people. They are deceitful, and insidious, and evil. Hera and Athena hate and persecute all the Trojans only because one of them, the shepherd Paris, called Aphrodite, not them, the most beautiful. This latter patronizes both Paris and all the Trojans, not at all caring about justice.

The Greeks feared the wrath of the gods and tried in every possible way to appease them. However, sometimes they dared to raise a hand against them. Thus, in the Iliad, Homer tells how on the battlefield the frantic Diomedes, in the heat of anger, throws his spear towards Aphrodite, who was here trying to save her son Aeneas, and wounded her “tender hand.” “The immortal blood flowed” of the goddess. It was not blood (after all, the gods are “bloodless, and they are called immortal”), but a special moisture, “which flows from the happy inhabitants of the sky.” But the goddess was in pain (“In the darkness of feelings, the beautiful body faded from suffering”) - “she moves away, vague, with deep sorrow.” Zeus, having learned about her trouble, said to her with a fatherly smile:

Dear daughter! Noisy warfare is not commanded for you.
Do the pleasant things of sweet marriages.

It seems that Homer’s heroes do not do a single more or less serious act without the advice or direct order of the gods: Agamemnon gravely insulted Achilles, the ardent warrior was inflamed with anger, his hand reached out to the sword, but then Athena, sent by Hera, appeared to his gaze, appeared, visible only him and no one else, and stopped him, saying: “Use evil words, but do not touch the sword with your hand.” And he obeyed, “clenching his mighty hand,” remembering the truth that was instilled in the Greeks from childhood: everything comes to man from the gods: both love and death, which crowns life. It is predetermined by the Moirai. Some die from a “slow illness”, which, “tearing apart the body”, takes away from it the “exhausted soul”, others suddenly from the “silent arrow” of Artemis (women) or Apollo (men).

The Greeks believed in an afterlife, but it was the existence of shadows that preserved all the feelings of a person: as soon as “the hot life leaves the cold bones, having flown away like a dream, their soul disappears.”

Homer also described Hades, the region of the dead. It must be assumed that someone nevertheless visited the northern latitudes in those distant times, because the description of Hades is very similar to the description of the north during the polar night: Helios (the sun) there “never shows a radiant face to the eyes of people,” “Night from time immemorial, the bleak surroundings surround those who live there”:

...Everything here terrifies the living; they are running noisily here
Terrible rivers, great streams; here of the Ocean
The waters flow deep, no one can swim across them.
And Odysseus, who got there, was seized with “pale horror.”

All the dead, both the righteous and the villains, go to Hades. This is the lot of all mortals. Odysseus saw there the mother of the “joyless sufferer” Oedipus, Jocasta, who “opened the doors of Hades herself” (committed suicide), and his own mother Anticlea, who “ruined the sweet life”, yearning for him, Odysseus. He saw his friend and comrade Achilles there. The conversation that took place between them has a deep meaning; it glorifies life, the one and only (“joyful light”, “sweet life”!). In Hades, Achilles reigns over the dead, and Odysseus reproaches his friend for his grumbling:

And so he answered, sighing heavily:
- Oh, Odysseus, don’t hope to give me any consolation in death;
I would rather be alive, like a day laborer working in the field,
To earn my daily bread by serving a poor plowman,
Rather than reign over the soulless dead here, the dead.

This is Hades, the abode of the dead. But there is an even more terrible place - “Deep Tartarus,” the very “last limit of land and sea.” It is darker than Hades, where Odysseus visited, there is eternal darkness:

A distant abyss, where the deepest abyss is underground:
Where there is a copper platform and iron gates, Tartarus.
As far from hell as the bright sky from home.

The defeated gods languish there - the father of Zeus Kron, once the supreme god, there the father of Prometheus, the Titan Iapetus, they “can never enjoy the wind or the light of the high rising sun.”

The ancient Greek believed in the existence somewhere on Earth of the beautiful Champs Elysees, where “man’s lightly carefree days pass by.” The lucky ones live there. Homer does not say who exactly, he only draws this eternal, alluring dream of humanity. There:

“There are no snowstorms, no downpours, no colds of winter,” and “zephyr blows sweetly noisily, sent there by the ocean with a slight coolness to the blessed people.”

Homer's personality

Don't try to find out where Homer was born and who he was.
All cities proudly consider themselves his homeland;
It is the spirit, not the place, that is important. The poet's homeland -
The brilliance of the Iliad itself, the Odyssey itself is a story.
Unknown Greek poet. II century BC e.

This is how the ancient Greeks finally resolved the dispute about where the great poet was born, although seven cities claimed to be the homeland of the author of the famous poems. Modern times have already ceased to be interested in this issue, but debates in science have flared up on another issue, whether there was a Homer at all, whether this is a collective image of the poet, and whether poems existed in the form in which we know them now. It was suggested that each of their songs was composed separately by different aeds and then only they were combined and made up a single narrative. However, the internal unity of the poem, which we feel as we read it now, the unity and harmony of the narrative, the whole unified logic of its general concept, figurative system, convince us that we have before us one creator, a brilliant author, who, perhaps, using individual already existing with small songs about various episodes of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus, he composed the poem as a whole, permeating its entire fabric with a single poetic breath.

Homer educated the ancient world. The ancient Greek studied it from childhood and throughout his life he carried within himself ideas, images, feelings generated in his imagination by the poems of the great old man. Homer shaped the views, tastes, and morality of the ancient Greeks. The most educated, most refined minds of the ancient world bowed to the authority of the patriarch of Hellenic culture.

He is, of course, the son of his century, his people. From childhood he absorbed the morals and ideals of his compatriots, therefore his moral world is the moral world of the Greeks of his time. But this in no way detracts from his personal individual qualities. His inner spiritual world, which he revealed with such moving poetic power in his poems, became the world of all his readers for thousands of years, and even we, removed from him by centuries and space, experience the beneficial influence of his personality, perceive his ideas, concepts of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Which of us is not excited by the picture of Agamemnon returning to his homeland and then his vile, treacherous murder?

He began to kiss his dear fatherland; seeing again

What troubles could Agamemnon expect at that moment?
What suspicions should you have towards anyone?

Meanwhile, it was at this hour that his death awaited him, and from the people closest to him - his wife Clytemnestra and a relative
Aegistha. The latter, with a “gentle call,” brought him, “to the suspicion of a stranger,” into the house and killed him “at a merry feast.” Together with Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, we are shocked by the betrayal and such a tragic ending to the hero’s joyful return to his homeland:

...my sweet heart was torn to pieces:
Having cried bitterly, I fell to the ground, I felt disgusted
Life, I didn’t even want to look at the sunlight, and for a long time
He cried and lay on the ground for a long time, sobbing inconsolably.

Homer made one feel the abomination of betrayal, because he himself felt hatred and disgust for all cruel and treacherous acts, that he was humane and noble, and this personal quality of his is felt in every verse, in every epithet.

An ancient poet unknown to us is right when he said that what is important is not where the poet was born, but what he put into his poems - his thought, his soul.

Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, we constantly feel the presence of the poet, his moral, political and aesthetic ideals, we look at the world through his eyes, and this world is beautiful, because that’s how it seemed to the poet.

Homer's story is far from biased, but he is not dispassionate, he is excited. His heroes rage, passions play with their souls, often pushing them to madness, the poet does not judge them. His narrative is imbued with humane tolerance. His position in relation to the events taking place in his poems and to the characters is similar to the position of the chorus in the ancient theater. The choir rejoices, saddens, but never gets angry, does not condemn or interfere in events.

Homer cannot hide his constant admiration for both the world and man. The world is grandiose, great, it is beautiful, it can be formidable, it can bring death to a person, but it does not suppress a person. Man submits to inevitability, for the gods also obey it, but he never shows slavish self-abasement towards the gods. He argues, protests and even takes aim at the gods. The world is beautiful in all its manifestations: in good and in evil, in joy and in tragedy.

And this is the position of the poet himself, these are the signs of his personality.

In his poems, Homer also expresses his own political opinions. He is for a single ruler (“there is no good in multiple powers”). The ruler holds power from God (he is given the “Scepter and Laws” by Zeus). He is “obliged to both say the word and listen.” The great quality of a ruler is the ability to listen. The ability to listen to opinions, advice, to take into account the situation, events, circumstances, to be flexible, as we would say in our time, is the most valuable thing a ruler can have, and the wisest Homer understood this well. Through the lips of Elder Nestor, he instructs the ruler: “Carry out the thought of another, if someone inspired by your heart says something good.” And at the same time, Homer reminds us that “all in all, one person cannot know everything.” The gods endow one with the “ability to fight”, the other with a “bright mind”, the fruits of which “cities stand” and “tribes prosper mortals.”

Homer praises the good ruler. Odysseus was a kind, wise king and loved his people, “like a good-natured father.” The poet repeats this more than once. Homer admires nature:

Night…
In the sky there is about a month of clear host
The stars seem beautiful if the air is calm;
Everything opens up all around - hills, high mountains,
Doly; the heavenly ether opens up all boundless;
All the stars are visible; and the shepherd, marveling, rejoices in his soul.

And here is a winter picture:

The snow rushes in and falls in frequent flakes
In winter... the snow is continuous;
The heads of the highest mountains and the tops of the cliffs,
And flowering steppes, and fat plowmen of the fields;
Snow is falling on the shores and piers of the gray sea;
Its waves, rushing in, absorb it; but everything else
He covers.

Talking, for example, about the journey of Telemachus looking for his father, he talks about the coming morning.

It would seem a simple, unpretentious and local picture. The sun rose, its rays began to play... but Homer gave it a cosmic and universal character:

Helios rose from the beautiful sea and appeared on a copper
The vault of heaven, to shine for immortal gods and mortals,
The fate of people who live on fertile land is subject to fate.

Homer's attitude to events, to the world, to man is expressed in epithets and comparisons, and for him they are visual, picturesque and emotionally charged. He is kind, infinitely and wisely kind. So, he says that Athena removes the arrow shot into the chest of Menelaus, “like a tender mother drives a fly away from her son, who has fallen asleep in a sweet sleep.”

Together with Odysseus and his comrades we find ourselves on the shore of a warm south sea. We are captivated by the beauty of the world and life, depicted with such wonderful power genius poet: “The divinely languid night has come. We all fell asleep to the sound of the waves hitting the shore”; We admire, together with Homer, the beautiful Penelope, the personification of eternal femininity, when she resides “in the silent gates of dreams,” “full of sweet slumber.”

Every word of Homer contains his soul, his thoughts, his joy or sadness, it is colored by his feeling, and this feeling is always moral and sublime.
ill
Here he shows us Odysseus, who is in deep grief, far from his native Ithaca:

He sat alone on a rocky shore, and his eyes
Were in tears; flowed away slowly, drop by drop,
Life for him is in constant longing for his distant homeland.

And we believe that for the sake of his homeland, he could, like his singer Homer, refuse both immortality and the “eternal blooming youth” that the nymph Calypso offered him.

Homer loves broad picture comparisons. They become like inserted short stories, full of drama and dynamics. Talking about how Odysseus cried while listening to the aed Demodocus, Homer suddenly stops and diverts us to another human misfortune: after a stubborn battle, a warrior fell in front of the besieged city. He fought to the last, “striving to save his fellow citizens and family from the fatal day.” Seeing how he shuddered “in the mortal struggle,” his wife leans towards him. She is nearby, she is with him. Now, clinging to his chest, she stands, crying sadly, already a widow, and her enemies beat her with spear shafts, tear her away from her dear body and “the poor thing (Homer is beautiful in his all-pervading compassion) is carried away to slavery and long grief.” Slavery and long sorrow! Homer will not forget to add that there, in captivity, slavery, her cheeks will wither from sadness and crying.

Homer's poems glorify life, youth and beauty of man. He applies the most tender epithets to the words “life” and “youth.” We see in this the features of wise old age. Homer was undoubtedly old, knew a lot, saw a lot, thought about a lot. He can already talk about “beautiful youth” and that youth is careless, arrogant, that “youth is rarely sensible.” Based on his extensive life experience and deep reflections, he can draw sad conclusions about man and his universal fate:

The omnipotent gods judged us, unfortunate people,
To live on earth in sorrow: the gods alone are carefree.

And this is where his wise tolerance comes from. He looked into human souls and described the boiling of passions, either raising a person to the skies of the most lofty ideals, or casting him down into the abyss of monstrous atrocities. Homer did not idealize either his gods, who were similar to people in everything, or his heroes, who were similar to their gods in both vices and virtues. The wise old man did not allow himself to judge either one or the other. They were taller than him. For him, in essence, there was no one to blame in the world. Everything - both evil and good - all comes from the gods, and for the gods (they are also not omnipotent) - from the great and omnipotent Fate.

We know nothing about Homer the man. Who is this genius creator? Where was he born, in what family, where did he die and was buried? Only a sculptural portrait of a blind old man has reached us. Is this Homer? - Hardly. But he is alive, he is with us, we feel his closeness. He is in his poems. Here is his world, his soul. Even in those distant times, he could have said about himself, like the Russian poet: “No, all of me will not die, the soul in the treasured lyre will survive my ashes and escape decay...”

Iliad

Wrath, oh goddess, sing...
Homer

This is how the Iliad begins. We understand the word “sing” as a call to glorification. But the poet does not turn to the muse in order to glorify anger. He asks her to help him truthfully (certainly truthfully, because only in the truth did he see the dignity of the story) to tell about the affairs of distant antiquity, about battles and massacres, and about what troubles an uncontrollable angry outburst of a person can cause, if this person holds power in his hands and strength.

Anger, anger and anger! The theme of anger permeates the entire poem. One can only marvel at the unity of concept and execution.
Let us trace the history of anger, how it began, how it manifested itself and how it ended.

The main character of the Iliad and the main bearer of anger is Achilles, the son of the Myrmidon king Peleus, the grandson of Aeacus and the daughter of the river god Asopa. So, Achilles descends from the gods, he is the great-grandson of Zeus. His mother is also not a mere mortal. She is the nymph Thetis. According to Greek mythology, forests, mountains and rivers are inhabited by beautiful and young creatures - nymphs, “living in beautiful groves and in bright springs, and in flowering valleys.” In the mountains these are oreads, in the seas - nereids, in forests - dryads, in rivers - naiads. One of these Nereids was Achilles’ mother Thetis. She, of course, cannot claim equality with the Olympian goddesses, but she always enters Zeus, and he receives her friendly and affectionately.

Achilles's domain is somewhere in the east of northern Greece, in Thessaly. Subject to his father Peleus, and therefore to him, the Myrmidons trace their origins to ants, as their very name indicates. The Greek word for ant is myrmex. The myth tells that during the reign of Achilles' grandfather Aeacus, the goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, sent a disease to his people, and they all died out. Then Eak offered his prayers to the main god, his father, and he gave him new subjects - ants, turning them into people.

A chain of events connects Achilles with Troy. The tragedy that would ultimately lead to the destruction of Troy and all its inhabitants began at the wedding of his parents, Thetis and Peleus. All the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding, except one - the Goddess of Discord. The offended goddess insidiously planted the so-called “apple of discord,” on which was written “for the most beautiful.” Three goddesses immediately declared their claims to him - Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them considered herself the most beautiful. Zeus, although he was the most formidable of the gods, knowing the character of the goddesses,
prudently avoided the decision and sent them to the Trojan shepherd Paris, let him judge as an outsider and impartially. Paris was, of course, not a simple shepherd, but a young prince, the son of Priam and Hecuba. At his birth, Hecuba had a terrible dream, as if she gave birth not to a boy, but to a burning brand that burned Troy. The frightened queen removed the born son from the palace, and he grew up and matured on the wooded slopes of Ida, grazing
livestock It was to him that the beautiful inhabitants of Olympus turned. Each promised her gifts: Hera - power, Athena - wisdom, Aphrodite - the love of the most beautiful of the women of Hellas. The last gift seemed the most attractive to young Paris, and he gave the apple to Aphrodite, winning her constant favor and the equally constant hatred of the other two. This was followed by his journey, a stay with the hospitable and simple-minded Menelaus, from whom he kidnapped his beautiful wife and countless treasures with the connivance of Aphrodite. It was because of them that the warlike Achaeans and their allies, judging by Homer’s description, ended up at the walls of Troy, numbering about one hundred thousand, on multi-oared ships from 50 to 120 warriors each. Fifty ships of them were commanded by the leader
The Myrmidons are the mighty Achilles, whom we see in the Iliad young, full of strength, courage and anger.

From the background it is necessary to point out two more circumstances. At his birth, Thetis was predicted that her son would not live long if he wanted to fight and achieve military glory. If he agrees to obscurity, he will live to a ripe old age in peace and prosperity. Thetis, like any mother, chose the latter for her son. When they began to gather an army for the campaign against Troy, she hid him in women's clothing on the island of Skyros, believing that among the daughters of King Lycomedes he would remain unrecognized. But she did not know Odysseus’s tricks. This latter, wanting to entice the hero on a campaign, came to Skyros with gifts. Of course, it was difficult to distinguish young Achilles, whose fluff had not yet appeared on his upper lip, from the girls surrounding him. And Odysseus offered a choice of women’s jewelry, and among them were swords and spears. The girls chose jewelry, Achilles grabbed the sword and was recognized.

So, Thetis failed to provide her son with a long and calm life; he preferred a short life, but full of storms, anxieties, and glory. Achilles knew about his early death, others knew about this, and above all his mother, whom we see constantly sad, trembling for his fate.

An aura of tragedy surrounds the young head of Achilles. “Your life is short, and its limit is near!..” - Thetis tells him. “In an evil time, O my son, I gave birth to you in the house.” Homer reminds us of this more than once in the poem, and this shadow of imminent death, which constantly follows Achilles, softens our attitude towards to the young hero. It also softens the kind heart of Homer, who, not considering himself the right to judge the acts of the gods and heroes of antiquity, cannot describe the acts of Achilles’ cruel ferocity without an internal shudder. And they are truly ferocious.

Achilles is quick-tempered (“fussy”) and indomitable in anger, wild, angry, and long-memory.

His friend Patroclus reprimands him in his hearts:

Unmerciful! Your parent was not the good-natured Peleus,
Mother is not Thetis; but the blue sea, gloomy rocks
you were born, stern in heart, like yourself!

The entire poem, as if through a single core, is permeated with the theme of this anger. And Homer does not sympathize with this essentially selfish, reproachless, ambitious feeling of his hero. What caused this anger? Agamemnon, the supreme military leader of the troops of all the Achaeans, took the captive Briseis from Achilles after dividing the spoils of war. He did this because he himself had to part with his prey Chryseis, who was returned to his father at the behest of Apollo. Agamemnon, as the poet described him, is brave and powerful, like all warriors, and fierce in battle, but not stable in decisions, susceptible to panic and, perhaps, not smart. He took the spoils of war from Achilles without thinking about the consequences. Then he will deeply regret it and will offer the warrior both rich gifts and the taken maiden. But Achilles will proudly reject them. His fighters, more than two thousand of them, and he himself remain aloof from the battles, and the Achaeans suffer one defeat after another. Now the Trojans, led by Hector, came close to the besiegers’ camp, approaching the ships to burn them and doom all the newcomers to death. Many of them, Achilles’ recent comrades, died, but he only gloats at their failures and thanks Zeus for this.

And only at the last minute, when the danger of general destruction loomed over everyone, he allowed his soldiers, led by Patroclus, to go to the aid of the Achaeans. Patroclus died in this battle. Hector killed him. Homer described in detail and colorfully the dispute and battle around the body of Patroclus, because he was wearing the weapons of Achilles; "immortal armor of a strong man." Patroclus! Homer calls him meek (“meek-hearted”). As a child, he experienced a terrible tragedy that left an indelible mark on his soul. In a child's game and argument, he accidentally killed his peer, the son of Amphidamas. And I could no longer stay at home. Menoetius, his father, brought the boy to Pelias. He, “receiving him favorably,” tenderly raised him with his son Achilles. Since then, an inextricable friendship has bound the two heroes.

In the social hierarchy, and it already existed in Greece during the time of Homer, Patroclus was placed below Achilles both by birth and status, and Menoetius instructed his son to obey his friend, although he was younger than him in years.

For Patroclus, who had a gentle and flexible character, this was not difficult, and Achilles loved him dearly. What Patroclus meant to him, he understood with all his might after his death. Grief, like all feelings of the passionate, temperamental leader of the Myrmidons, was frantic. He tore out his hair, rolled on the ground, screamed, screamed. And now a new wave of anger gripped him - anger against the Trojans and especially Hector, who killed his friend.
There was a reconciliation with Agamemnon.

Achilles became convinced that his resentment, his proud removal from his brothers, brought many troubles not only to them, his comrades, but also to himself. Now he rushed into battle against the Trojans with bitterness, with a frantic passion to take revenge, to torment, to kill (“a black bloody field flowed... under the divine Pelid, hard-hoofed horses crushed corpses, shields and helmets, the entire copper axle and the high semicircle of the chariot were splashed with blood from below... Brave Pelid ...stained his undefended hands in blood").

Homer talks about all this with trepidation. He cannot allow himself to blame the hero, because he is a demigod, the grandson of Zeus, and it is not for him, the poor singer, to judge who is right and who is wrong in this terrible battle of nations. But, reading the poem, we feel how the old man shudders internally, depicting the cruel fury of Achilles.

The Trojans flee in panic, looking for salvation. Here in front of them is the terrible stream of Scamander. They try to take refuge along its rocky shores. In vain, Achilles overtakes them. “Having tired his hands with murder,” he selects twelve young men from among them, maddened with fear “like young trees,” binds their hands and sends them to the Myrmidon camp, so that they can then throw Patroclus into the fire as a sacrifice. Here he sees young Lycaon, the youngest of the sons of Priam, and does not believe his eyes, because quite recently he captured him, attacking him at night, and sold him into slavery on the island of Lemnos, receiving “a hundred hundred dollars in price.” By what miracle did this young man escape? Lycaon fled from Lemnos and, happy, rejoiced at his newfound freedom and homeland, but not for long. “At home for eleven days I had fun with my friends” and on the twelfth... he is again at the feet of Achilles, unarmed, without a shield, without a helmet and even without a javelin:

Lycaon approached half dead,
Ready to hug Pelidu's legs, he indescribably wished
Avoid terrible death and near black doom.
Meanwhile, the long-bodied dart was carried by fleet-footed Achilles,
Ready to burst out, he ran up and hugged his legs,
Having crouched down to the valley; and the spear whistling over his back,
A trembling, greedy human blood was stuck into the ground.
The young man hugged his knees with his left hand, begging,
The right one grabbed the spear and, without letting it go from his hand,
So he prayed to Achilles, sending out winged speeches:
- I will hug your legs, have mercy, Achilles, and have mercy!
I stand before you as a supplicant worthy of mercy!

But Achilles did not spare. He told him that in the old days, before the death of Patroclus, it was sometimes pleasant for him to pardon the Trojans and set them free, taking a ransom, but now - to all “the Trojans, death, and especially the children of Priam!” He also told him that there was no need to weep, that death befalls even those better than him, Lycaon, that Patroclus died, and he himself, Achilles, will die, and meanwhile:

Do you see what I am like, both beautiful and majestic in appearance,
The son of a famous father, I have a goddess for a mother!
But even on earth I cannot escape this powerful fate.

“Consolation” did not reassure Lycaon, he only realized that there would be no mercy, and submitted. Homer paints a brutal murder scene with startling truth:

“...the young man’s legs and heart trembled.
He dropped the terrible dart and, trembling, with his arms outstretched,
Achilles sat down, quickly tearing away the sword from each other,
Stuck in the neck at the shoulder, and right up to the hilt
The sword plunged into the entrails, prostrate in the black dust
He lay down, prostrate, blood gushing out and flooding the ground.
Taking the dead man by the leg, Achilles threw him into the river,
And, mocking him, he spoke feathered speeches:
“Lie there, between the fishes! Greedy fish around the ulcer
They will carelessly lick your blood! Not the mother on the bed
Your body will be laid down to mourn, but Xanth is fleeting
A stormy wave will carry you into the boundless bosom of the sea...
So perish, Trojans, until we destroy Troy.”

The kind and wise Homer, of course, pities the young Lycaon, but he does not dare to judge the actions of Achilles himself and hands him over to the judgment of the river god Xanthus. And “Xanthus was cruelly irritated with him,” “in the form of a mortal, God cried out from the deep abyss: “... My light-streaming waters are full of the corpses of the dead... Oh, refrain.” And after that:

A terrible storm of excitement arose around Achilles,
The hero's shafts sway, falling on his shield; he's on his feet
Bole could not resist; grabbed the elm,
Thick, spreading, and the elm, toppling over with its roots,
The shore collapsed with itself, blocked the fast-flowing waters
Its branches are thick and stretch across the river like a bridge,
Leaning over on top of her. The hero, having disappeared from the abyss,
In fear he rushed through the valley to fly on his swift feet,
The furious god was not far behind; but, rising after him, he struck
The black-headed shaft, burning to curb Achilles
In the feats of war and Troy, protect the sons from murder.

And if not for Poseidon and Athena, who came to the call for help and, “taking on the form of people,” gave him their hands and saved him, the mighty Achilles would have died “an inglorious death... like a young swineherd.”

The culmination of the story of Achilles' wrath was his duel with Hector. A great human tragedy is unfolding before us. Homer prepared us for it, often prophesying the death of the main character of the Trojans. We already know in advance that Achilles will win, that Hector will fall under his hand, but we are still waiting for a miracle until the last minute - our hearts cannot come to terms with the fact that this glorious man, the only true defender of Troy, will fall, struck down by the alien’s spear.

Homer treats Achilles with trepidation and, perhaps, fear; he endows him with the highest military virtues, but he loves Hector. The Trojan hero is human. He never cast a sidelong glance at Helen, and she was the culprit of all the Trojans’ misfortunes, and he did not reproach her with a bitter word. And he had no ill feelings towards his brother Paris, and from him all the troubles came. It happened to him, in annoyance at his brother’s effeminacy, carelessness and laziness, to hurl angry reproaches, because he should have understood that the city was under siege, that the enemy was about to destroy the walls and destroy everyone. But as soon as Paris admits that he, Hector, is right and obeys, Hector’s anger cools down, and he is ready to forgive him everything:

"Friend! “You are a brave warrior, often only slow, reluctant to work,” he tells him, and his soul is tormented for him, and would like to protect his careless brother from blasphemy and reproach. The most sublime poetry of marital and paternal feelings sounds in the verses of Homer, depicting the scene of Hector’s meeting with Andromache and his son, still a child, Astyanax. This scene is famous. For two thousand years it has stirred the hearts of readers, and none of those who write about Homer and his poems have passed it over in silence. It has entered all the anthologies of the world.

Andromache is worried about her husband. For her, he is everything (“You are everything to me now - both father and dear mother, you and my only brother, you and my beloved husband”), for Achilles killed all her relatives by attacking her hometown, and her father, Elder Etiope, and her seven brothers. He released his mother for a large ransom, but she too soon died. And now all the hopes, all the joys and worries of Andromache are directed towards two beings dear to her - her husband and son. The son is still a “wordless baby” - “lovely, like a radiant star.”

Homer expresses his feelings with vivid epithets, metaphors, and comparisons. Hector named his son Scamandreus in honor of the Scamander River (Xanthus), while the Trojans named him Astyanax, which meant “lord of the city.” Hector wanted to take the boy in his arms and hug him, but he, frightened by his sparkling helmet and “shaggy-haired comb,” screamed and pressed the “magnificent robe of the nurse” to his chest, and the happy father smiled, took off the “magnificently shiny” helmet (Homer cannot live without a picture epithet imagine describing neither a person nor an object), puts him on the ground, taking his son, “kisses him, rocks him.” Andromache smiles at them through her tears, and Hector is “soulfully touched”: “Good one! Don’t ruin your heart with immoderate grief.”

The scene is full of tragedy, because Hector knows about the imminent destruction of Troy (“I firmly know myself, convinced both in thought and in heart”), and Andromache knows this.

Hector is not just a strong and brave warrior, he is a citizen, and Homer emphasizes this all the time. When Elena asks him to enter the house, sit with them, soothe “his aching soul,” he replies that he cannot accept the welcoming invitation, that they are waiting for him there, on the battlefield, that his “soul is drawn to the defense of his fellow citizens.” When one of the fighters pointed to an eagle flying from the left as a bad omen (flying from the left was considered a bad sign), Hector menacingly told him that he despises signs and does not care whether the birds are flying from the left or the right. “The best sign of all is to fight bravely for the fatherland!”

This is Hector. And this is his last hour. The Trojans fled to the city in panic and hastily closed the gates, forgetting about Hector. He was left alone outside the city walls, alone in front of a host of enemies. Hector's heart trembled, and he was afraid of Achilles. They ran around Troy three times. All the gods looked at them, and the Trojans from the city walls, and the crying Priam, his father. Good-natured Zeus took pity on the hero and was ready to help him, to rescue him from trouble, but Athena intervened, reminding her “black-cloud” father that since ancient times fate had destined for people a “sad death.” And Zeus allowed her to speed up the bloody outcome. The goddess's actions were cruel and treacherous. She appeared before Hector, taking on the image of Deiphobus. Hector was delighted, he was touched by his brother’s self-sacrifice, because Deiphobus dared to come to his aid, while others remained in the city and looked indifferently at his suffering. “Oh Deiphobe! And you have always been kind to me, from infancy.” Athena, in the image of Deiphobus, resorts to great deceit, says that both his mother and father begged him (Deiphobus) to stay, and his friends begged him not to leave the city, but that he, “lamented by longing” for him, came to him for help. Now there is no need to hesitate, there is no need to spare spears and forward into battle, together.
“Thus prophesying, Pallas stepped forward insidiously,” writes Homer. And Hector went into battle. Achilles threw a spear at him and missed. Athena, unseen by Hector, raised the spear and handed it to her favorite. Then Hector threw his spear towards Achilles, the spear hit the shield and bounced off, because Hephaestus himself forged the shield. Hector calls Deiphobus, asks for a second spear, looks around - no one! He understood the evil betrayal of the goddess. He, unarmed, remained in front of his mortal enemy:

Woe!.. I thought that my brother was with me...
He is within the walls of Ilium: Pallas deceived me,
Near me there is only death!

Thus the fate of the glorious defender of the city was fulfilled. Already dying, he asks Achilles not to mock his body, but to return it to his home for a decent burial. But Achilles, burning with anger and hatred, says to him:

“It’s in vain, dog, you hug my legs and pray for your family!
I myself, if I listened to anger, would tear you to pieces,
I would devour your raw body.”

With this Hector dies - “quietly the soul, leaving his lips, descends to Hades.” Achilles, “drenched in blood,” began to tear off his armor. The Achaeans who ran up again and again pierced the already lifeless body of the hero with their pikes, but even defeated and dead, he was beautiful, “everyone was amazed, looking at the growth and the wonderful image.”

Achilles, however, had not yet quenched his anger and “conceived an unworthy deed,” he pierced the tendons of his legs, threaded belts and tied Hector’s body to a chariot, drove the horses, dragging the body along the dusty road. The hero’s beautiful head was beating along the road, his black curls were scattered widely and covered with dust. The inhabitants of Troy looked at everything from the city walls, old Priam wept, tore out his gray hair, Hecuba sobbed, Andromache’s grief was immeasurable. But this did not quench Achilles’ thirst for revenge; having brought Hector’s body to his camp, he continued the “unworthy deed” there, dragging his body around the grave of Patroclus, “so he swore at the divine Hector in his anger.” Looking at this from Olympus, Apollo “silver-bowed” could not stand it. He charged the gods with a grave accusation of malice, ingratitude towards Hector and unfair favor towards his murderer:

You decided to be favorable to Achilles the robber,
To the husband who has banished justice from his thoughts, from his heart
He rejected all pity and, like a lion, only thinks about ferocity...
So this Pelid destroyed all pity, and he lost shame...
The frantic husband insults the earth, the dumb earth.

Homer nowhere mentions the famous heel of Achilles, the only weak spot in the hero's body. And, apparently, it is no coincidence that then his duel with Hector would look like a monstrous murder, because before him the Trojan would appear unarmed (vulnerable).

What is Achilles' fault? And he undoubtedly carries within himself a tragic guilt. Why does Homer silently condemn him? And the condemnation is almost obvious. In the loss of a sense of proportion. Here we have before us one of the greatest commandments of the ancient Greeks both in life and in art - a sense of proportion. Any exaggeration, any departure from the norm is fraught with disaster.

Achilles constantly violates boundaries. He loves excessively, hates excessively, is excessively angry, vengeful, touchy. And this is his tragic fault. He is intolerant, quick-tempered, and intemperate when irritated. Even his beloved Patroclus is afraid of him: “He is flighty” (hot-tempered) and in anger he can accuse the innocent, he says about his friend. How much more human Patroclus himself looks. When Briseis, because of whom Achilles’ fatal anger arose, returned to him, she saw the dead Patroclus. He was not her lover, and she did not love him. But he was kind to her, attentive, he consoled her in grief, was responsive to her, a captive woman whom Achilles barely noticed. And, perhaps, she felt the greatest pity for the deceased. Her grief was genuine and so unexpected in the poem. Homer did nothing to prepare us for this:

Oh my Patroclus! O friend, ill-fated, priceless for me...
You've fallen! I will mourn you forever, dear young man.

The poem ends with the scene of the ransom of Hector's body. This is also the famous scene where Homer showed his greatest psychological insight. Old Priam, accompanied by one driver, entered the guarded camp of Achilles, bringing him a rich ransom for the body of his son. Zeus decided to help him in this and sent Hermes to him, who appeared before the old man, “like a youth in appearance, whose youth is charming with the first braid,” and escorted him unharmed to Achilles.

The meeting and conversation between Achilles and Priam, in essence, is the denouement of the entire knot of events and feelings that began at the very beginning of the poem in the word “anger.” This is the moral defeat of Achilles! Priam defeated him with the power of human love:

The old man, unnoticed by anyone, enters peace and, Pelidu,
Falling at your feet, he hugs your knees and kisses your hands, -
Terrible hands that killed many of his children!
Scary hands!

Homer has truly outdone himself. How much intelligence, heart, talent is needed to understand this! What an abyss of the human soul had to be explored to find this stunning psychological argument!

Brave! Almost you are gods! Have pity on my misfortune,
Remember Peleus’s father: I am incomparably more pitiful than Peleus!
I experience what no mortal has experienced on earth:
I press my hands to my lips to my husband, the murderer of my children.

And Achilles is defeated. For the first time, pity for a person penetrated his heart, he saw clearly, he understood the pain of another person and cried along with Priam. Miracle! These tears turned out to be sweet, “and noble Pelid enjoyed the tears.” How wonderful, it turns out, is the feeling of mercy, how joyful it is to forgive, forget about evil and cruel revenge and love a person! Priam and Achilles, as if renewed; cannot find in themselves a recent feeling of bitterness and hostility towards each other:

For a long time Priam Dardanides marveled at King Achilles,
His appearance and majesty: he seemed to see God.
King Achilles was equally amazed at Dardanides Priam,
Looking at the venerable image and listening to the elders’ speeches.
They both enjoyed themselves, looking at each other.

This is the finale of the great pan-human drama of all times and peoples.

There was a legend that a competition took place between Homer and Hesiod and preference was allegedly given to Hesiod as the singer of peaceful labor (the poem “Works and Days”). But Homer did not glorify war. He, of course, admired the courage, strength, bravery and beauty of his heroes, but he was also bitterly sad for them. The gods were to blame for everything, and among them the god of war, the “husband-killer”, “destroyer of nations, destroyer of walls, covered in blood” Ares and his sister - “unsatiated with the fury of Strife.” This person, judging by Homer’s descriptions, at the very beginning is quite small in stature and crawls and grovels, but then she grows, expands and becomes so huge that her head rests on the sky and her feet on the ground. She sows rage among people, “to mutual destruction, prowling around along the paths, multiplying the groans of the dying.”

The god of war, Ares, is wounded by Diomedes, a mortal warrior from the Achaean camp. Ares complains to his father, “showing immortal blood streaming from the wound.” And what about Zeus?

Looking at him menacingly, the thunderer Kronion proclaimed:
“Be silent, oh you changeling! Don't howl, sitting near me!
You are the most hated to me of the gods who inhabit the sky!
Only you enjoy enmity, discord, and battles!
You have a motherly spirit, unbridled, always obstinate,
Hera, which I myself can hardly tame with words!

Homer describes the battle with perhaps some degree of surprise and horror. What bitterness does to people! “Like wolves, the warriors rushed one at another; man to man grappled." And the death of the warriors, “young, blossoming with life,” is mourned with paternal sadness. He compares Simois, struck down by a spear, to a young poplar. Here it is, the poplar is “smooth and clean,” “a pet of a wet meadow,” it was cut down to make a wheel for a chariot, now it is drying, lying “on the bank of its native stream.” This is how Simoes lay, young and naked (without armor), killed by the hand of the “powerful Ajax.”

Homer filled his poem with many names and historical information, brought together hundreds of destinies, provided it with the most vivid realistic pictures of the life and life of his fellow tribesmen, colored it with poetic comparisons and epithets - but placed Achilles in the center. He did not add to the portrait of his hero a single implausible feature that elevates him. His hero is monumental, but he is alive, we hear how his heart beats, how his handsome face is distorted with anger, we hear his hot breath. He laughs and cries, he screams and curses, at times he is monstrously cruel, at times soft and kind - and he is always alive. His portrait is true, we will not see a single false, invented, or added feature in him. Homer's realism is here high level, satisfying the highest requirements of modern realistic poetics.

Homer's heart is filled with horror and pity, but he does not judge his hero. The gods are to blame. Zeus allowed this.
Life is happening before us in its tragic apotheosis. A stunning picture with its drama! But there is no humiliation of man before the forces of the world beyond his control that depresses us. Man, both in death and in tragedy, is great and beautiful.

This is precisely what determined the aesthetic charm of the tragedy itself, when “sadness” becomes “delight.”

One day there will be a day when sacred Troy will perish,
With her will perish Priam and the spear-bearing people of Priam.
Homer

This prophecy is repeated several times in the Iliad. It came true. Sacred Troy perished. Priam the spear-bearer and all those who lived, loved, suffered and rejoiced with him also died. The helm-shined Hector, the fleet-footed Achilles, and the curly-headed Danaans perished. Only the “roaring, deeply abyssed Scamander” still poured out its stormy waters into the sea waves and the wooded Ida, from which the cloud-catcher Kronion once looked at the magnificent city, towered above the surroundings as of old. But neither human voices nor the melodic sounds of the ringing lyre were heard here anymore.

Only birds and dust storms and snowstorms swept over the hill on which palaces and temples once stood proudly. Time has covered the remains of the fortress walls and burned-out dwellings with a dense, multi-meter layer of earth. It became difficult to recognize the place where Homer's heroes acted.

But Homer's poem remains. They read and re-read it, admired the beauty of the verse, the intelligence and talent of their creator, although they hardly believed in the truth of the story, in the reality of the events described in it, and even in the fact that “sacred Troy” ever existed. Only one enthusiastic person in the 19th century believed Homer (it cannot be that everything told with such convincing truth was not true!) and began the search for the legendary Troy. It was Heinrich Schliemann. His biographer describes the moment of Schliemann’s first meeting with those places where he was supposed to excavate Troy and reveal it to the world of civilized humanity: “... his attention was again and again attracted by a hill rising fifty meters above the Scamander Valley.

This is Gissarlik, effendi,” says the guide. This word in Turkish means “palace”... (more precisely, a fortress, fortification - “khysar.” - S.A.). Behind the Hissarlik Hill rises the forested Mount Ida, the throne of the father of the gods. And between Ida and the sea, bathed in the evening sun, stretches the Trojan plain, where for ten years two heroic peoples confronted each other. It seems to Schliemann that, through a light haze of fog that has fallen to the ground, he sees the bows of ships, the camp of the Greeks, the fluttering plumes of helmets and the shine of weapons, troops scurrying here and there, hears war cries and the cry of the gods. And behind rise the walls and towers of the glorious city.”

This was the summer of 1868. Schliemann began excavations with a volume of the poet Homer in his hands. This is how Homeric Greece was discovered.

Precise and rigorous science made its own adjustments to Schliemann’s romantic conclusions, established the boundaries and level of occurrence of urban strata, and determined the time of the emergence and death of cities that were built one on top of the other over centuries and millennia. The dream of Troy faded somewhat in the light of the dry facts of historical realities, but Homer's world was open.

Homer “helped” Schliemann continue his excavations and find new sensational finds. Homer’s epithet “gold-abundant” (“gold-abundant Mycenae”) prompted him to search for and ultimately acquire the richest gold objects of Ancient Greece, which he called “the gold of Agamemnon.”

You talked to Homer alone for a long time,
We've been waiting for you for a long time,
And bright you came down from the mysterious heights,
And they brought us their tablets.
A. S. Pushkin

This is how Pushkin greeted Gnedich’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. This was an event in Russian culture. The greatest poet of Greece spoke in Russian.

The translation language is somewhat archaic. We no longer say “dondezhe” (“until when”), “paki” (“again”) or “vyya” (“neck”). Neither Gnedich himself nor his contemporaries in Rus' spoke like that anymore. These words, having left the spoken everyday language, remained for special occasions, woven into the prayer hymn, creating a feeling of the unusualness of what was happening, of something important, not everyday, sublime. This was precisely the language of Homer’s poems for his listeners in Ancient Greece. The ancient Greek listened to the measured speech of the aed and was in awe and filled with awe: it was as if the gods themselves were speaking to him. Gnedich, with great tact, resorted to Old Russian words in order to convey similar sensations to the Russian reader. The archaic nature of the language, of course, complicates the understanding of the text, but at the same time gives it a high artistic coloring. In addition, there are not so many obsolete words - within a hundred.

Russian people have transferred a lot into their language from the Greek language. Gnedich, translating the Iliad, created verbose epithets based on the Greek model, unusual for our eyes and ears, but they also create the effect of elation of speech. The poet (and scientist at the same time) worked on the translation for more than 20 years, publishing it in 1829. Pushkin spoke enthusiastically about him (“I hear the silent voice of the divine Hellenic speech, I feel the shadow of the great elder with a confused soul”).

Gnedich's life's work. Now in St. Petersburg on memorial cemetery At the Alexander Nevsky Lavra you can find a burial mound with a marble tombstone. Inscribed on it:

“To Gnedich, who enriched Russian literature with the translation of Omir - from friends and admirers.” And then - a quote from the Iliad:

“The sweetest honey flowed from his prophetic lips.”

By the way, Pushkin also resorted to “high style”, to pathetic archaisms when the content of the work required it:

But what am I seeing? A hero with a smile of reconciliation
Coming with a golden olive.

Or from the same poem (“Memories in Tsarskoe Selo”):

Be comforted, mother of Russian cities,
Behold the death of the stranger.
Weighed down today on their arrogant necks
Hand of the avenging creator.

Odyssey

For six hours the boat maneuvered against the wind until it reached
Ithaca. It was already night, velvety black, a July night,
filled with aromas of the Ionian Islands... Schliemann thanks
gods that they allowed him to finally land in the kingdom of Odysseus.
G. Shtol

The island, sung by Homer, is still called Ithaca. It is one of the seven islands of the Ionian Sea off the southwestern coast of Greece. Heinrich Schliemann undertook archaeological excavations on the island, hoping to find material evidence of the advanced culture that Homer described. But nothing could be found. Science has so far only established that around the 5th century. BC e. there was a small settlement there. In a word, neither Odysseus, nor Penelope, nor their son Telemachus, nor their rich house, nor the city on the seashore - none of what Homer so colorfully and vividly described ever existed in Ithaca. Is it possible?

Is all this really a fruit of the artistic imagination of the ancient Greeks? It’s hard to believe this: the appearance of the island and everything that was on it is described in great detail, truly documented in the poem:

This is Eumaeus, no less than the beautiful house of Odysseus!
Even among many others, it is not at all difficult to recognize him.
Everything here is one to one. Skillfully the jagged wall
The yard is surrounded, the double-leaf gates are amazingly strong...

Everything is alive, everything is visible, we are introduced into everyday life, we are there together with the heroes of Homer. Here is “the black night... has come”, “everyone went home” and “Telemachus himself retired to his high palace.” In front of him, Eurycleia, the “faithful housekeeper,” carried a torch. Homer, of course, also reported that Telemachus’s palace faced the courtyard, “that an extensive view opened before the windows.” Here Telemachus enters the “rich bedroom,” sits down on the bed, and takes off his thin shirt. The caring old woman “carefully” takes the master’s robe, folds it into folds, and smoothes it with her hands. Homer talks about the bed - it is “skillfully turned”, and about the door handles - they are “silver”, there are also latches - they are tightened with a belt.

Homer doesn't miss anything. He also describes the storeroom in Odysseus’s house:
The building is spacious; there were heaps of gold and copper there;
A lot of clothes were stored there in chests and fragrant oil;
Kufas made of clay with perennial and sweet wine stood
Near the walls, containing a divinely pure drink.

Of course, the doors to the pantry are special, “double doors, double locked.” The order in the pantry was maintained with “experienced vigilant diligence” by Euryclea, the “reasonable” housekeeper.

In modern science there is no consensus on the origin of Homer's poems. Many assumptions have been made; in particular, that the Odyssey was created a hundred years later than the Iliad. Very possible. However, the author of the Iliad more than once calls Odysseus “cunning”, “many-minded”, “a famous sufferer”. The poems in the Iliad dedicated to Odysseus seem to anticipate everything that will be told about him in the Odyssey. “Brave, his heart always dared in the face of danger”, “enterprising”, “steadfast in labor and in troubles”, “loved by Pallas Athena”, capable of emerging from a “burning fire” unharmed, “his mind is so rich in inventions” . All these qualities of Odysseus will be revealed vividly and picturesquely in the second poem of the great Homer.

Marx called ancient Greek society the childhood of humanity. Homer's Odyssey, perhaps more than any other work of poetry, illustrates this famous saying. The poem is dedicated, if you think about its main philosophical plan, to the discovery of the world by man. In fact, what do the wanderings of Odysseus, Menelaus and other warriors returning home after the destruction of Troy mean? Knowledge of the Oikumene - the inhabited part of the Earth, then known to Greece. The boundaries of this area were very small. The Greek imagined that the entire Earth was surrounded by the Ocean, a river that fed all the lakes, seas, streams and rivulets that were inside. No one dared to go beyond the Ocean. Homer knew the countries close to the Mediterranean coast in the west, no further than Gibraltar. The island of Euboea seemed to him a border, “beyond which there is nothing,” and yet this island was located in the Aegean Sea. Sailing to the island of Euboea seemed to be the work of especially brave sailors.

In the days of Homer, the Greeks explored new lands in the western and eastern borders of the then Oikumene. Homer calls those living from the eastern and western sides of the Oikumene “extreme people,” “settled in two ways”: “one, where the luminous God descends,” the others, where he ascends.

Menelaus saw a lot in his wanderings, who, like Odysseus, did not immediately reach his native shores. For seven years he wandered after the capture of Troy around the then world before returning to his native Argos:

I saw Cyprus, visited the Phoenicians, reached Egypt,
Infiltrated the Black Ethiopians, stayed with the Sidonians, Erembi,
In Libya was, finally, where horned lambs are born.
On the other side of the fields there is a lord and a shepherd of lack
In cheese and meat, and thick milk they do not have,
Cows are milked there in abundance all year round.

The journey of Odysseus was even longer (10 years). His wanderings have already been described in detail. His foe and friend - the sea - are described in equal detail.

It became one of the main characters of the poem. It is beautiful, like its ruler Poseidon, the “azure-curly” god, but it is also terrible and destructive. Before this formidable element, man is insignificant and pitiful, like Odysseus in the raging waves during a storm. Of course, Poseidon is to blame for everything; he “raised a wave from the abyss... terrible, heavy, mountain-huge.” “The waves boiled and howled, rushing fiercely onto the high shore from the sea... Cliffs and reefs stuck out. Odysseus was horrified." But then “the azure-curly Eos” appeared, and everything was transformed, the storm calmed down, “the sea all brightened in a quiet calm.”

Most of all epithets, the most varied and sometimes contradictory, are accompanied in the poem by the word “sea”. When it threatens with an unknown danger, then it is “foggy” or even “dark foggy”, sometimes it is “evil”, “poor-bearing”, “terrible” and always “abundant”, “great”, “sacred” - then “abundant with fish” and “ many fish”, sometimes “barren-salty”, sometimes “noisy” or even “broadly noisy”, sometimes “desert” or “infinitely deserted”.

For the inhabitants of Greece, with its rugged coastline and its numerous islands, the sea was an important element of economic and cultural activity. As a result of things, the Greeks became brave and skillful navigators, so in Homer the word “sea” takes on the epithet “much-tested.”

A typical representative of the Greeks, or better yet, of all humanity, with his thirst for knowledge, with his indomitable strength to fight, with great courage in troubles and misfortunes, is truly Odysseus. In the Iliad, he is only a warrior - brave, strong and also cunning, intelligent, eloquent, “wise in advice.” Here, in the poem “Odyssey”, he appeared in all his human greatness.

His patroness is Athena, the wisest and most active goddess. Here she is stern, but not cruel. When one of her favorites, Tydeus, whom she wanted to make immortal, showed ferocity, she turned away from him in disgust. (He, according to myth, having killed one of his opponents, split his skull and in a wild frenzy sucked out his brain.) She kills the gorgon Medusa, helps Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus, personifies the art of crafts, so valued in Greece, and patronizes Odysseus, admires him: “You kindly accept every piece of advice, you are understanding, you are bold in execution,” but sometimes he blames him for his cunning - “a schemer, daring to make insidious inventions.”

In carrying out his plans, Odysseus is stubborn and persistent, which is not always liked by his companions. But their censure sounds like great praise to him:

“You, Odysseus, are unyieldingly cruel, you are gifted with great Strength; there is no fatigue for you, you are forged from iron.”

Odysseus is a faithful husband, a loving father, a wise ruler, for which the people of Ithaca value and extol him, but he is not created for home peace and quiet family joys. His element is struggle, overcoming obstacles, learning the unknown. He, as Homer reports about him, did not like either “field work” or “quiet home life.” He was attracted by “battle and winged arrows”, “copper-shining spears” (“formidable, causing great awe and bringing fear to many”).

When the sorceress Circe warns him against the terrible Scylla, he is not going to retreat, but wants to “fight back with force”:

"ABOUT! Unbridled, he again conceived of the exploits of war,
You dream about fighting again; you are glad to fight with the gods.”

Odysseus is brave, courageous, shrewd (“cunning”). But perhaps his most characteristic feature is curiosity. He wants to see everything, hear everything, learn everything, experience everything. Often this involves him in the most serious troubles, from which he always finds a way out.

He is assured that the maiden siren birds are dangerous, that they have already destroyed many with “sweet” and “enchanting” singing. He strives to hear them and orders each of the crew to cover their ears tightly with wax, while he himself left them open and, tied with strong ropes to the mast post, experienced the power of the singing of wonderful and terrible maidens-birds.

Why is he doing this? To know.

Homer reports that even after Odysseus returns to his native Ithaca, he will not calm down and will again go in search of adventure. Nothing stops him. “The thought of death has never troubled my heart,” he says about himself. He visited a place from which no mortal has ever returned - in the kingdom of shadows, in Hades, and in the fairy-tale land of happiness and peace, where the complacent Alcinous rules...

This is Odysseus and his main features. But, besides them, he also has a great, cherished feeling - this is an unquenchable love for his homeland. He yearns for her, sheds tears for her, refuses eternal youth and immortality, which the nymph Calypso offers him, just to be back where he was born and raised. And the eternal feelings, close to everyone at all times, are expressed by the ancient poet with stunning, sometimes tragic truth.

“Our dear fatherland, where we were born and blossomed.”

“There is nothing sweeter to us than our homeland and our relatives,”

Homer sings, and his “Odyssey” becomes a hymn in honor of his homeland.

Not only Odysseus, but also other heroes love their homeland to the point of oblivion:

Joyfully, the leader Agamemnon set foot on his parent’s shore.
He began to kiss his dear fatherland, seeing again
The desired land, he shed warm tears abundantly.

Homer showed both insidious human cruelty, with indignation, contempt (the murder of Agamemnon), and tenderly and reverently - family feelings: marital, filial and parental love (Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus). He seemed to contrast two destinies, two moral categories - Penelope’s loyalty and betrayal, the crime of Clytemnestra and “Aegisthus the despicable.”

Homer tenderly and tenderly draws the image of Penelope. She is a faithful wife, constantly thinking about her absent husband, she is a mother, and her worries for her son are described with heartfelt warmth. For her, he is “a youth who has never seen need and is not used to talking to people.” Telemachus is twenty years old, he is quite independent and sometimes declares himself the eldest in the house and can even order his mother to retire to her chambers:

But succeed: take care of the housekeeping as you should,
Yarn, weaving; see that the slaves are diligent in their work
Were ours; It’s not a woman’s job to talk, it’s a matter of
My husband, and now mine: I am my only ruler.

The subordinate position of women in Ancient Greece here, as we see, is presented very clearly. Penelope heard her son speak like this for the first time and was amazed and, perhaps, filled with pride for him, but, like any mother, he will forever remain a child for her. Having learned that, furtively from her, he went in search of his father, and furtively because he did not want to disturb her, so that “the freshness of her face would not fade from sadness,” as Homer, who always glorifies beauty, explains, she becomes alarmed. “The heart trembles for him, so that no misfortune happens to him on the evil sea or in a foreign land among a foreign people.”

Homer everywhere emphasizes the youthful modesty and shyness of Telemachus. When Mentor sends him to ask Nestor’s “bridle horses” about his father, Telemachus hesitates: is it proper for younger people to question their elders?

The Greeks believed that every person has his own demon, a special patron, a kind of spirit that will prompt him in time and the right thought, and the right word, and the right action (hence the expression “his genius” in our everyday life):

You can guess a lot yourself, Telemachus, with your intellect,
The demon will reveal many things to you...

To some extent, Homer's Odyssey is also a utopia, man's great dream of happiness. Odysseus visited the country of the Phaeacians. The Phaeacians are a fabulous, happy people. Their country is truly an ancient Eldorado. Their king Alcinous admits:

The ships of the Phaeacians do not know either pilots or rudder, “clothed in darkness and fog,” they fly along the waves, obeying only the thoughts of their shipmen. They are not afraid of either storms or fogs. They are invulnerable. The amazing dream of the ancient Greek: to control mechanisms directly with just one thought! They call it autokinesis these days.

But the wonderful, fabulous city of the Phaeacians will become inaccessible. An angry Poseidon will close it with a mountain, and access to it will be forever blocked for everyone, and the Phaeacians, protected from the world of troubles, worries and sorrows, will remain alone in an eternal blissful existence. This is how fairy tales about dazzlingly alluring and unrealizable happiness always end.

Homer sang a song about heroic natures; he glorified their strength and courage. The heroes left, died, but their life became a song, and therefore their fate is wonderful:

In the Iliad, Homer does not talk about the aedas. He reports the songs and dances of young men at feasts and during the grape harvest, but there is no mention yet of specialist singers. True, in the second song he mentions a certain Thamir from Thrace, who decided to compete in singing with the muses themselves and, as punishment for such insolence, was blinded and deprived of “the divine gift sweet for songs and the art of rattling the harp.”

Songs and epic tales about heroes to the accompaniment of the lyre were performed in the Iliad not by professional specialists, but by ordinary amateurs.

We, I will say, are not excellent either in fist fighting or in wrestling;
Fast on their feet, but incredibly first at sea;
We love luxurious dinners, singing, music, dancing,
Fresh clothes, voluptuous baths and a soft bed.
For this purpose, death and a disastrous lot were sent down to them.
Gods, may they be a glorious song for posterity.

Homer's art

Singers are highly honored by all, she taught them herself
Singing Muse; She loves the singers of the noble tribe.
Homer

Achilles, in his luxurious tent, during the calm hours from the battle, played the lyre and sang (“with the lyre he delighted the spirit, singing the glory of the heroes”).

The Iliad was apparently created much earlier than the Odyssey. During this time, some changes took place in the life of society. Special performers of epic tales appeared. The Odyssey talks a lot about them.

Moreover, there is already talk about charlatan storytellers, “boastful deceivers,” “many vagabonds who go around the earth, scattering lies everywhere in absurd stories about what they have seen.” The personality of Homer himself, his affiliation with professional singers in the Odyssey are manifested quite tangibly, and his professional interests, and professional pride, and his aesthetic program.

The ancient Greeks, contemporaries of Homer, saw divine inspiration in poetry (the poet is “like the high inspired gods”). From here stemmed the deepest respect for poetry and recognition of creative freedom.

If all the thoughts and actions of people, according to the ancient Greek, depended on the will and instigations of the gods, then this was all the more true for the Aeds. Therefore, young Telemachus objected when his mother Penelope wanted to interrupt the singer Phemius, who was singing about the “sad return from Troy”:

Dear mother, objected the sensible son of Odysseus,
How do you want to ban the singer from our pleasure?
Then chant what awakens in his heart? Guilty
It is not the singer who is to blame, but Zeus, who sends from above, is to blame.
People of high spirit are inspired by their own will.
No, do not interfere with the singer about the sad return of the Danae
Sing - with great praise people listen to that song,
Every time she delights her soul as if she were new;
You yourself will find in it not sadness, but joy from sadness.

Freedom of creativity was already becoming the aesthetic principle of the ancient poet. Let us remember Pushkin’s sorcerer from “The Song of the Prophetic Oleg”: “Their prophetic language is truthful and free and friendly with the will of heaven.”

Ancient man, whose spiritual life took place in the realm of myth and legend, did not accept fiction. He was childishly gullible, ready to believe everything, but any invention must be presented to him as truth, as undeniable reality. Therefore, the truthfulness of the story also became an aesthetic principle.

Odysseus praised the singer Demodocus at a feast with King Alcinous, primarily for the authenticity of his story. “One might think that you yourself were a participant in everything, or that you learned everything from faithful eyewitnesses,” he told him, but Odysseus was an eyewitness and participant in exactly those events that Demodocus sang about.

And finally, the third principle - the art of singing should bring people joy, or, as we would now say, aesthetic pleasure. He speaks about this more than once in the poem (“captivating our hearing,” “delighting us,” “delighting our soul,” etc.). Homer's observation is amazing that a work of art does not lose its charm when read again - each time we perceive it as new. And then (this already applies to the most difficult mystery art), drawing the most tragic collisions, it brings an incomprehensible peace to the soul and, if it causes tears, then the tears are “sweet”, “pacifying”. Therefore, Telemachus tells his mother that Demodocus will bring her “delight from sorrow” with his song.

The ancient Greek, and Homer was his most glorious representative, treated the masters of art with the greatest respect, no matter who this master was - a potter, foundry, engraver, sculptor, builder, gunsmith. In Homer's poem we will constantly find words of praise for such a master artist. The singer is given a special place. After all, he calls Femius a “famous singer,” a “divine man,” a man of “high spirit,” who, “captivating our ears, is like the inspired high gods.” The singer Demodocus is also glorified by Homer. “I place you, Demodocus, above all mortal people,” says Odysseus.

Who were they, these singers, or aeds, as the Greeks called them? As we see, both Phemius and Demodocus are deeply revered, but, in essence, they are beggars. They are treated like Odysseus Demodocus, who sent him from his plate “the backbone of a sharp-toothed boar full of fat,” and “the singer gratefully accepted the donation,” they are invited to a feast, so that after the meal and libations they can listen to their inspired singing. But, in essence, their fate was sad, just as sad was the fate of Demodocus: “The muse at birth rewarded him with evil and good,” gave him “sweet singing,” but also “darkened his eyes,” that is, he was blind. Tradition has brought to us the image of the blind Homer himself. This is how he remained in the imagination of peoples for three thousand years.

Homer amazes with the versatility of his talent. He truly embodied in his poems the entire spiritual arsenal of antiquity. His poems caressed the subtle musical ear of the ancient Greek and the charm of the rhythmic structure of speech; he filled them with picturesque picturesque, poetic expressiveness, pictures of the ancient life of the population of Greece. His story is accurate. The information he provided is invaluable documentation for historians. Suffice it to say that Heinrich Schliemann, while undertaking excavations at Troy and Mycenae, used Homer’s poems as geographical and topographic map. This precision, sometimes downright documentary, is amazing. Transfer military units, who besieged Troy, which we find in the Iliad, seems even tedious, but when the poet concludes this enumeration with the verse: “like leaves on trees, like sands on the seas, countless are the armies,” we involuntarily believe this hyperbolic comparison.

Engels, addressing military history, uses Homer's poem. In his essay “Camp,” describing the system of construction of military fortifications and defense among the ancients, he uses information from Homer.

Homer remembers to call everyone by name characters of his poem, even the most distant ones in relation to the main plot: the sleeping bag of King Menelaus “the agile Asphaleon”, his second sleeping bag “Eteon the venerable”, not forgetting to mention his father “Eteon, son of the Voets”.

The impression of complete authenticity of the story is achieved by the extreme, sometimes even pedantic, precision of details. In the second song of the Iliad, Homer lists the names of the leaders of the ships and squads that arrived at the walls of Troy. He does not forget to remember the most insignificant details. By naming Protesilaus, he reports not only that this warrior died, the first to jump off the ship, but also that he was replaced by a “same-blooded” brother, “youngest in years,” that in his homeland the hero was left with a wife “with a torn soul,” a house “half-finished” " And this last detail (the unfinished house), which might not have been mentioned at all, turns out to be very important for the overall credibility of the entire narrative.

It gives individual characteristics of the warriors listed and the places from which they came. In one case, “the harsh fields of Olizona”, there is the “bright lake” of Bebendskoye, the “lush city of Izolk” or “rocky Pithos”, “high-cliffed Ifoma”, “lumpy Larissa”, etc. Warriors are almost always “famous”, “armoured” “, but in one case they are excellent spear throwers, in the other they are excellent shooters.

Homer's contemporaries perceived his tales about the adventures of Odysseus with all the seriousness of their naive worldview. We know that there was and is not Scylla or Charybdis, there was not and could not be the cruel Circe, turning people into animals, there was not and could not be the beautiful nymph Calypso, who offered Odysseus “both immortality and eternal youth.” And yet, reading Homer, we constantly catch ourselves in the fact that, despite the skeptical consciousness of a person of the 20th century, we are irresistibly drawn into the world of naive faith of the Greek poet. By what force, by what means does he achieve such influence on us? What is the effect of the authenticity of his narrative? Perhaps, mainly in the scrupulous details of the story. By their randomness they eliminate the feeling of fantasy bias. It would seem that these some random details might not have existed, and the story in terms of plot would not have suffered at all, but, it turns out, the general mood of authenticity would have suffered.

For example, why did Homer need the figure of Elpenor, who appeared quite unexpectedly during the story of the misadventures of Odysseus? This companion of Odysseus, “not distinguished by courage in battles, not generously gifted with intelligence from the gods,” in other words, cowardly and stupid, went to sleep at night “for coolness” on the roof of Circe’s house and fell from there, “broke a vertebral bone, and his soul flew into area of ​​Hades." This sad event did not have any impact on the fate of Odysseus and his comrades, and if we adhere to the strict logic of the narrative, then it could not be reported, but Homer spoke about it in detail, and how Odysseus later met the shadow of Elpenor in Hades and how they buried him, erecting a hill over his grave, and placing his oar on it. And the poet’s entire narrative acquired the authenticity of a diary entry. And we involuntarily believe everything (it happened! Everything was accurately described down to the smallest detail!).

Homer's detailed and thorough story is vivid and dramatic. It’s as if we, together with Odysseus, are fighting against the raging elements of the sea, we see the rising waves, we hear a frantic roar and desperately fight with him to save our lives:

At that moment a large wave rose and crashed
All over his head; the raft spun rapidly,
Snatched from the deck into the sea, he fell headlong, missing
Steering wheel from hand; the mast fell down, breaking under the heavy
Opposite winds, blowing against each other.
...A fast wave rushed him to the rocky shore;
If only he had been instructed in time by the bright goddess Athena
He wasn’t, he grabbed the nearby cliff with his hands; and clinging to him,
He waited with a groan, hanging on a stone, for the wave to pass
Past; she ran, but suddenly, reflected in the return
She knocked him off the cliff and threw him into the dark sea.

The ancient poet also picturesquely and dramatically depicts the state of Odysseus, his constant conversation with his “great heart” and his prayer addressed to the gods, until the “azure-curled” Poseidon, having quenched his anger, finally took pity on him, taming the sea and calming the waves . Pitiful and exhausted, Odysseus was carried ashore:

...under him his knees gave way, his mighty arms hung; at sea his heart grew weary;
His whole body was swollen; spewing out both mouth and nostrils
Ode of the sea, he finally fell, lifeless, voiceless.

Paintings are portraits of heroes. In the poem they are given in action. Their feelings and passions are reflected in their appearance. Here is a warrior on the battlefield:

Hector raged terribly, under his gloomy eyebrows
They glowed menacingly with fire; above the head, rising with a crest,
The helmet of Hector, who was flying through the battle like a storm, swayed terribly!

A portrait of another person, one of Penelope’s suitors, was painted with the same expression:

Antinous - seething with anger - his chest rose,
Pressed by black anger, his eyes glowed like flaming fire.

The woman’s feelings manifested themselves differently, here there was restraint in movements, a deep hiddenness of suffering. Penelope, having learned that the suitors were going to destroy her son, “was speechless for a long time,” “her eyes were darkened with tears, and her voice did not obey her.”

It has become commonplace to talk about constant epithets in Homer’s poems. But is it only in Homer's poems?

We will find constant epithets and special, tightly welded speech patterns among the poets of all peoples of antiquity. “Pretty maiden”, “good fellow”, “ White light", "damp earth". These and similar epithets are found in every Russian fairy tale, epic, and song. And what is remarkable is that they do not age and do not lose their pristine freshness. An amazing aesthetic mystery! It’s as if the people have honed them forever, and they, like diamonds, sparkle and shimmer with an eternal, enchanting brilliance.

Apparently, the point is not in the novelty of the epithet, but in its truth. “I remember a wonderful moment...” “Wonderful!” - a common, ordinary epithet. We often repeat it in our everyday speech.

Why is it so fresh and seemingly primordial in Pushkin’s line? Because it is infinitely faithful, because it conveys the truth of feelings, because the moment was truly wonderful.

Homer's epithets are constant, but at the same time varied and surprisingly picturesque, that is, in a word, they recreate the situation. They are always appropriate, extremely expressive and emotional.

When sad Telemachus, full of thoughts about his missing father, goes to the sea in order to “wet his hands with salt water,” the sea is “sandy.” The epithet paints us a picture of the sea coast. When it came to Telemachus setting out on a journey in search of his father, the epithet was already different - the “foggy sea”. This is no longer a visual image, but a psychological one, talking about the difficulties ahead, about a path full of surprises... In the third case, the sea is already “terrible” when Eurycleia, worried about the fate of Telemachus, dissuades him from going to Pylos. When Telemachus sails from Ithaca at dawn, the sea again acquired the picturesque epithet “dark” (“a fresh whiff of zephyr, making the dark sea noisy”). But when dawn broke, Homer used one epithet to describe the picture of the morning - “purple waves.”

Sometimes the sea is “dark and foggy,” that is, full of threats and troubles, “much water,” “great.”

The waves in a storm are “mighty, heavy, mountain-like.” The sea is “abundant with fish,” “broadly noisy,” “sacred.” When Penelope imagines what troubles her son might encounter at sea, it already becomes an “evil” sea, full of worries and dangers, “anxiety of the foggy sea.”

To give his listener a visible idea of ​​winter, Homer reports that the warriors’ shields “were covered with thin crystal from the frost.” The poet paints scenes of battles picturesquely and even, perhaps, somewhat naturalistically. So, the spear of Diomedes hit
Pandarus in the nose near the eyes: flew through white teeth,
The flexible tongue was cut off at the root by crushing copper
And, the tip shining right through, it froze in the chin.

Another warrior was pierced by a spear in the right side, “straight into the bladder, under the pubic bone,” “with a cry, he fell to his knees, and death overshadowed the fallen one.” Etc.

Homer is not always emotionless. Sometimes his attitude towards people and events is expressed quite clearly. Listing the allies of the Trojan king Priam, he names a certain Amphimachus, apparently a fair fanfare and lover of showing off, so that “he even went into battle, dressing up in gold, like a maiden. Pathetic! - Homer exclaims contemptuously.

Homer is a poet, and, as a poet, he appreciates that main element of poetic creativity, that brick from which a separate verse, song, poem - word. And he feels the vast expanse of words, he literally bathes in the expanse of speech, where everything is under his control:

Human language is flexible; there are plenty of speeches for him
All sorts of things, the field for words here and there is limitless.

To summarize, we should outline the main, in my opinion, features of Homer’s poems. They are different in their topics. The Iliad is a work of historical nature. She talks about events not only of national, but also international significance at that time. The tribes and nationalities of a huge region collided in a great confrontation, and this confrontation, long remembered by subsequent generations (it is believed to have taken place in the 12th century BC), is described with the accuracy required for historical science.

This work reflected with encyclopedic breadth the entire spiritual world of Ancient Greece - its beliefs (myths), its social, political and moral norms. It captured its material culture with plastic clarity. Conceived as a historical narrative, it recreated with great artistic expressiveness the physical and spiritual appearance of the participants in the event - it showed specific people, their individual traits, their psychology.

The poet isolated the main moral problem of his narrative, subordinating to it, in essence, the entire course of the story - the influence of human passions on the life of society (the wrath of Achilles). This reflected his own moral position. He contrasted anger and bitterness with the idea of ​​humanity and goodness, ambition and the pursuit of glory (Achilles) with high civic valor (Hector).

“The Odyssey” absorbed the civil and family ideals of ancient Greek society - love of the homeland, family hearth, feelings of marital fidelity, filial and paternal affection. However, this is mainly a story of “discovery of the world.” A man, in this case Odysseus, looks with curiosity at the mysterious, unknown, concealing many secrets, the world. His inquisitive gaze seeks to penetrate its secrets, to know, to experience everything. An uncontrollable desire to comprehend the unknown is the main ideological core of Odysseus’s wanderings and adventures. To some extent, this is an ancient utopian novel. Odysseus visited the “underworld”, Hades, and the country of social justice and general welfare - the island of the Phaeacians. He looked into the future of humanity technical progress- sailed on a ship controlled by thought.

Nothing stopped his curiosity. He wanted to endure everything, experience everything, no matter what troubles threatened him, in order to learn, to comprehend the as yet untested, unknown.

The Iliad shows the cunning and cunning of Odysseus as his main and, perhaps, not always attractive traits, while the Odyssey shows curiosity and an inquisitive mind. True, even here the spirit of guile does not leave him, helping him in the most difficult situations.

So, two poems that covered the life of the ancient Greek people. The first illuminated the entire society in all the diversity of its historical existence, the second illuminated the individual in his relationships with people and mainly with nature. Odysseus acts as a representative of all humanity, discovering and understanding the world.

Greek lyrics

Homer is the shining pinnacle of Greek culture. Below, if we stick to the metaphorical form of speech, stretched the vast fragrant plains of classical Greece with its lyric, drama, historical, rhetorical and philosophical prose. Athens was its geographical center, the 5th century was its most flourishing period.

Homer ends an era in ancient world culture - its initial national stage, when it was created by the whole people. Some of its brilliant representatives only generalized and synthesized the achievements of their fellow tribesmen. The memory of the people did not always retain their names. Sometimes she, preserving for us the name of one of them, especially distinguished and especially honored, attributed to him the best creations of other authors. This is what happened to Homer. And since the ancient peoples saw divine inspiration in creativity, individual authorial originality was not valued. The authors continued established traditions, their own personality seemed to be obscured. This was an epic stage in the history of culture. Everything I have told about the ancient literatures of China, India, the countries of the Middle and Near East and Homeric Greece refers to this epic period of world culture, when
the author's personality has not yet claimed an individual creative style. (“...In my songs nothing belongs to me, but everything belongs to my muses,” wrote the Greek poet Hesiod in the 7th century BC.)

Literature is usually divided into three main types: epic, lyric and drama. This division, of course, is arbitrary, because in the epic one can find elements of lyricism and in the lyric poetry - elements of the epic, but it is convenient, since it points to the most important distinctive features each of these types of literature.

In the most distant times, an epic poem could not yet arise; it was still too complex for a person of the prehistoric era, while a simple song with a clear rhythm was quite accessible to him. Initially these were labor songs and prayers. The prayer expressed human emotions - fear, admiration, delight. The lyrics were still nameless and expressed the emotions not of an individual, but of a collective (clan, tribe); it retained established, as if frozen, forms and was passed on from generation to generation. Songs of this type were already described by Homer:

In their circle there is a beautiful youth with a ringing lyre
Sweetly rattled, singing beautifully to the flaxen strings
In a thin voice...

Then legends appeared, epic narratives about events in the world of deities, about heroes. They were composed and performed by the Aeds, orally passing them on from generation to generation, “polishing” and improving them. Poems began to be composed from these songs (in Greece they were called Homeric hymns). Such compilers in Greece were called rhapsodes (collectors, “stitchers” of songs). One of these rhapsodes was, obviously, Homer. The lyrics remain at the level of traditional ritual forms (festivals, sacrifices, funeral rites, crying). But later it pushed aside the epic and came out on top, and has already acquired a new quality. In the field of art it was a real revolution, conditioned, of course, by social factors. The individual began to isolate himself, stand out from society, and sometimes even came into conflict with society. Now the lyrics began to express the individual world of an individual.

The lyric poet differed significantly from the epic poet, who recreated external world- people, nature, but the lyricist turned his gaze to himself. The epic poet strived for the truth of the picture, the lyric poet - for the truth of feeling. He looked “inward”, he was busy with himself, analyzing his inner world, your feelings, your thoughts:

I love and as if I don’t love,
Both crazy and sane... -

wrote the lyric poet Anacreon. Passions are boiling in the soul - a kind of madness, but somewhere in the corners of the consciousness a cold, skeptical thought nestles: is it so? Am I deceiving myself? The poet is trying to figure out his own feelings. The epic poet did not allow himself to do this, not attaching importance to his personality.

Homer turned to the muses to help him tell the world about the anger of Achilles and all the tragic consequences of this anger, the lyric poet would ask the muses for something else: may they help him (the poet) talk about his (the poet’s) feelings - suffering and joys, doubts and hopes. In the epic the pronouns are “he”, “she”, “they”, in the lyrics - “I”, “we”.

“My lot is to be in the sunshine and in the beauty of a lover,” sang the poetess Sappho. Here, what is in the foreground is not beauty and the sun, but the poetess’s attitude towards them.

So, the majestic and luxurious epic poetry of Homer was replaced by excited, passionate and languid, caustic and harsh poetry, lyrical in its personal quality. Alas, it has reached us truly in fragments. We can only guess what kind of wealth it was. We know the names of Tyrtaeus, Archilochus, Solon, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and others, but little of their poetry has survived.

The lyric poet showed his bleeding heart, sometimes, driving away despair, he called himself to patience and courage. Archilochus:

Heart, heart! Troubles stood before you in a menacing formation:
Take heart and meet them with your breasts...

The personality became her own biographer, she talked about the dramas of her life, she was her own portraitist and saddener. The poet Hipponactus, turning to the gods with a bitter smile, spoke about the pitiful state of his wardrobe:

Hermes of Cyllene, son of Maya, dear Hermes!
Hear the poet. My cloak is full of holes, I’ll tremble.
Give clothes to Hipponactus, give shoes...

Lyrical poets also glorify civic feelings, sing of military glory and patriotism:

It’s sweet to lose life, among the valiant warriors fallen,
To a brave husband in battle for the sake of his fatherland, -

Tyrtaeus sings. “And it is praiseworthy and glorious for a husband to fight for his homeland,” Kallin echoes him. However, moral principles have noticeably wavered: the poet Archilochus does not hesitate to admit that he threw his shield on the battlefield (a serious crime in the eyes of the ancient Greek).

The Saiyan now wears my flawless shield,
Willy-nilly I had to throw it to me in the bushes.
I myself, however, avoided death. And let it disappear
My shield! I can get no worse than a new one.

His only excuse was that he was in a mercenary army. But the Spartans did not forgive him for his poetic confession and, when he once found himself on the territory of their country, he was asked to leave.

The poets cared about the beauty of their verse, but the main thing they asked from the muses was emotion, emotion, passion, the ability to ignite hearts:

O Kaliope! Conceive us a lovely one
Light a song and conquering passion
Our anthem and make the choir pleasant.
Alkman

Perhaps the main theme of lyric poetry was, and is, and, apparently, will always be - love. Even in ancient times, a legend arose about Sappho’s unrequited love for the beautiful young man Phaon. Rejected by him, she allegedly threw herself off a cliff and died. The poetic legend was dispelled by modern scientists, but it was sweet to the Greeks, giving a tragic charm to the entire appearance of their beloved poetess.

Sappho maintained a school of girls on the island of Lesbos, teaching them singing, dancing, music, and sciences. The theme of her songs is love, beauty, beautiful nature. She sang of female beauty, the charm of female modesty, tenderness, and the youthful charm of a girl’s appearance. Of the celestial beings, the goddess of love Aphrodite was closest to her. Her hymn to Aphrodite, which has survived and reached us, reveals all the charm of her poetry. We present it in full, translated by Vyacheslav Ivanov:

Rainbow Throne Aphrodite! Zeus' daughter is immortal, she's a trickster!
Don’t break my heart with sadness!
Have pity, goddess!
Rush from the heights above, as it was before:
You heard my voice from afar:
I called - you came to me, leaving your Father’s heaven!
She stood on the red chariot;
Like a whirlwind, she carried her in fast flight
Strong-winged above the dark earth
A flock of doves.
You rushed, you stood before our eyes,
She smiled at me with an indescribable face...
"Sappho!" - I hear: - Here I am! What are you praying for?
What are you sick with?
What makes you sad and what makes you mad?
Tell me everything! Is the heart yearning for love?
Who is he, your offender? Whom will I persuade?
Sweetheart under the yoke?
The recent fugitive will not be excommunicated;
He who did not accept the gift will come with gifts,
Who doesn't love will love soon
And unrequitedly..."
Oh, appear again - through secret prayer,
Rescue your heart from a new misfortune!
Stand up, armed, in gentle warfare
Help me.
Eros never lets me breathe.
He flies from Cypris,
Plunging everything around into darkness,
Like northern lightning flashing
Thracian wind and soul
Shakes powerfully to the very bottom
Burning madness.

The name of Sappho's contemporary and compatriot Alcaeus is associated with political events on the island of Lesbos. He was an aristocrat. Usually in those days in the Greek city-states, in these small city-states, there were several eminent families who considered themselves “the best” from the word “aristos” (“best”), which is how the word “aristocracy” (“power of the best”) appeared.

Usually they traced their ancestry back to some god or hero, were proud of this relationship and were brought up in the spirit of ancestral pride. This gave a certain charm to the myths and allowed them to be retained in memory, and sometimes enriched with new poetic details, flattering to the representatives of the clan. Myths morally nourished aristocratic youth. Imitating heroic ancestors, not degrading their honor with any unworthy act was a moral principle for every young man. This inspired respect for the aristocratic family.

But times have changed. Aristocratic families became poorer, richer townspeople entered the political arena, class conflicts arose, and in some cases significant social movements occurred. People who previously stood at the top of society found themselves left behind. Such was the fate of the poet Alcaeus, an aristocrat thrown out of the usual rut of life, who became an exile after the reign of the tyrant Pittacus in Mytilene.

Alcaeus created in poetry the image of a ship-state, tossed from side to side by the raging sea and stormy wind.

Understand, who can, the furious revolt of the winds.
The shafts are rolling - this one from here, that one
From there... In their rebellious dump
We are rushing around with a tarred ship,
Barely resisting the onslaught of evil waves.
The deck was completely covered in water;
The sail is already shining through,
All full of holes. The clamps have loosened.

This poetic image of a state shaken by political storms later appeared more than once in world poetry.

In political and philosophical lyrics the poet is interesting and political figure Solon. His reforms carried out in the 6th century went down in history. BC e. Aristotle called him the first defender of the people. His reforms took into account the interests of the poorest sections of Athens. Solon did not share his feelings with the reader; rather, he was a moral and political mentor (“Instructions to the Athenians”, “Instructions to Oneself”), instilling feelings of patriotism and citizenship. His poem “Weeks of Human Life” is known, which generally characterizes the ancient Greek’s view of human life, its time boundaries, age characteristics person. We present it in full:

A little boy, still foolish and weak, loses
He has a row of his first teeth, he is almost seven years old;
If God brings the second seven years to an end, -
The youth is already showing us signs of maturity.
Thirdly, the young man has a rapid growth in all his limbs.
The beard is a gentle fluff, the color of the skin changes.
Everyone in the fourth week is already in full bloom
Everyone sees bodily strength, and in it there is a sign of valor.
Fifth, it’s time to think about marriage to the desired man.
To continue your lineage in a number of blooming children.
The human mind fully matures in the sixth week
And he no longer strives for impossible tasks.
In seven weeks reason and speech are already in full bloom,
Also at eight - a total of fourteen years.
People are still powerful in the ninth, but they are weakening
For all-valiant deeds, his word and mind.
If God brings the tenth to the end of the seven years, -
Then there will be no early death for people.

In modern times, the name of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, a cheerful old man who glorified life, youth and the joys of love, was especially loved. In 1815, sixteen-year-old lyceum student Pushkin called him his teacher in humorous verses:

Let the fun come running
Waving a frisky toy,
And it will make us laugh from the heart
Over a full, foamy mug...
When will the east get rich?
In the darkness, a young angel
And the white poplar will light up,
Covered with morning dew
Serve the grapes of Anacreon:
He was my teacher...
"My Testament"

Youth is beautiful with its bright perception of the world. Such was Pushkin’s youth, and it is not surprising that the distant, long-ago poet who lived twenty-five centuries before him so delighted him with his cheerful, cheerful, mischievous poetry. Pushkin made several translations from Anacreon, amazing in beauty and fidelity to the spirit of the original.

Unfortunately, little of Anacreon’s poetry has reached us, and his fame is, perhaps, more based in modern times on numerous imitations of him and the charm of the legend that developed about him in ancient times. In the 16th century, the famous French publisher Etienne published a collection of poems by Anacreon based on a manuscript of the 10th - 11th centuries, but most of them did not belong to the poet, but were talented pastiches (imitations). There is a rich anacreontic poetry. In Russia, Anacreon was especially fascinated in the 18th century. M. V. Lomonosov’s ode “The skies were covered with darkness at night” even became a popular romance.

The name of the poet Pindar is associated with a phenomenon in the public life of Ancient Greece, amazing in scale, beauty, and moral nobility - the Olympic Games. Pindar was truly their singer. The poet lived an ordinary human age, something within seventy years (518-442), the Olympic Games lasted for more than a millennium, but his poetry painted this millennium with the rainbow colors of youth, health, and beauty.

The first sports competitions took place in Olympia in 776 BC. e. in a quiet valley near Mount Kronos and two rivers - Alpheus and its tributary Kladea - and were repeated every four years until 426 AD, when Christian fanatics, destroying the old pagan culture of antiquity, destroyed the Olympic Altis (temples, altars, porticos, statues of gods and athletes).

For one thousand two hundred years, Altis was the center of everything beautiful that the ancient world contained. The “father of history” Herodotus read his books here, the philosopher Socrates came here on foot, Plato visited here, the great orator Demosthenes gave his speeches, here was the workshop of the famous sculptor Phidias, who sculpted the statue of Olympian Zeus.

The Olympic Games became the moral center of Ancient Greece, they united all Greeks as an ethnic whole, they reconciled warring tribes. During the games, the roads became safe for travelers, and a truce was established between the warring parties. Throughout the world of that time, known to the Greeks, special messengers (theors - “sacred messengers”) went with the news of the upcoming games; they were received by “proxenes” - local representatives of the Olympic Games, persons who enjoyed special honor. Crowds of pilgrims then rushed to Olympia. They came from Syria and Egypt, from the Italian lands, from the south of Gaul, from Tauris and Colchis. Only morally impeccable persons who had never been convicted or convicted of any unworthy acts were allowed to participate in the games. The spirit of the times, of course, manifested itself here too: they were not allowed (under pain death penalty) women, as well as slaves and non-Greeks.

Pindar composed solemn choral chants in honor of the winners of competitions (epinikia). The hero himself, his ancestors and the city in which the hero lived were glorified in the mighty sound of the choir. Unfortunately, the musical part of the chants has not been preserved. The poet, of course, did not limit himself only to the pathos of the dithyramb; he wove into his song philosophical reflections on the role of fate in human life, on the will, sometimes unfair, of the gods, on the need to remember the limits of human capabilities, on the sense of proportion sacred to the ancient Greek.

In ancient times, poems were chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre or flute. There were poems and songs. The poet not only composed the text of the poem, but also came up with a melody and even composed a dance. It was melodic poetry, consisting of three elements: “words, harmony and rhythm” (Plato).

Music occupied a significant place in the daily life of the ancient Greeks, it is a pity that crumbs of it have reached us.
The term "lyric" - from the word lyre, a musical instrument used as accompaniment - appeared relatively late, around the 3rd century. BC e., when the center of Greek culture moved to Alexandria. Alexandrian philologists, who were engaged in the classification and commentary of the literary heritage of classical Greece, united under this name all poetic genres that differed from the epic with its hexameter (hexameter) and other rhythmic forms.

“There is a craze for black glasses that everyonewants to be Homer at least a little.”

Andrey Voznesensky

It is well known that myths are ancient tales about gods and legendary heroes, about the origin of the world and life on earth. But, most often, a myth is understood as something fantastic, implausible, unreal and fictitious. In fact, this is not so, because man, as a product of Nature, is not able to invent something that has never been or will not be.

For a long time it was believed that “The Iliad” and “Odyssey” were Homer’s fiction, without historical truth, and Homer himself was not considered the author, because he did not sign any of his works with his name, and there was not a single real biography of him. there was. Don’t be surprised, but the fact that we today attribute these epics to Homer is justified only by the fact that they were read every time at the Panathenaea at the beginning of the 6th century. BC, like his works. This was the situation until the publication in 1795 of the study of the famous German philologist F. A. Wolf “Prolegomena ad Homerum”. Based on the principle of contradictions and noting, in his opinion, numerous compositionally weak places in the epics, Wolf tried to prove that: “The Iliad” and “Odyssey” could not belong to one poet, but were the fruit of the creativity of many singers and poets; the combination of individual songs into two large epics occurred many centuries after the time of composition of the songs; few prominent individuals were involved in compiling and editing songs; final edition belonged to 602,602 editors at the court of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus at the beginning of the 6th century. BC. Thus, the foundations of the “Homeric question” were laid: did Homer exist in reality?

But, as the Gospel says: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). As soon as Heinrich Schliemann believed in the veracity of Homer’s description of the location of Troy in the Iliad, an archeology lover found the city where no one was looking for it. And at the same time, as a reward for perseverance, he found Priam’s treasure. Then G. Schliemann found the treasure of Agamemnon in Mycenae. It's a pity that not all archaeological finds We know how to date. However, the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann put on the agenda the question of Homer as a real historical figure, who described very real historical events. Our wonderful philosopher and encyclopedist A.F. Losev, summarizing the results of two centuries of research into world Homeric studies, came to the conclusion that Homer lived at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. and, like most writers in the world, is an immanent author. This means that he wrote about most of the real events that were directly related to his own life. This, it turns out, is why G. Schliemann was not mistaken in his trust in Homer! But the specific dates of the events, as well as the time of Homer’s life, still remain unclear. Therefore, today all encyclopedias presumably believe that Homer lived in the 9th century. BC, and the events of the Trojan War date back to the 12th century. BC. In this regard, the question arises: do not Homer’s texts contain indications of specific dates of events and details of his biography? And, if they do, then how to carry out “archaeological excavations” of the text in order to irrefutably get to the bottom of the truth hidden by the author thousands of years ago?

Let us ask ourselves: what is the minimal structure of the text of such epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey, apart from letters and words? This is probably the next line of poetry called a hexameter. We will not go into the historical details recorded by the ancient Greeks themselves, that they were taught to form hexameters by the Hyperboreans, i.e. Cimmerians and Scythians. Note that the hexameter is the key structure of the text that allows you to break up a text written continuously, and also makes it possible to check the safety and even the quality of the Homeric text. The loss of one hexameter can also be noticed when analyzing the content of the epic.

Another, larger structure is the breakdown of each of the epics into songs. It is believed that this work, supposedly for Homer, was carried out by Alexandrian scientists. In fact, it turned out that the original texts with the author's breakdown have reached us. Another structural division of the narrative text by day was proposed by V.A. Zhukovsky, using Homer’s formulaic phrases denoting the beginning of the day, for example, such as “Young Eos with purple fingers rose from the darkness.” Guided by this, he divided the entire narrative of the Odyssey into 40 days, although there were other points of view on this matter. Upon detailed analysis, it turned out that Homer packed the entire story about the 10-year voyage of Odysseus (the allegorical meaning of the name “Odysseus” is “It is I”) into 58 days, which ended with his 58th birthday and the words “I was born in Alibantus” placed in the last, 24th, song, in 304 hexameter, with the serial number of the name Alibant in this song - 119. The question arises: how, in this case, could Homer encrypt these key years and dates for the future?

Before answering this question, we need to look at the chronology that might have existed at that time. Of course, Homer still knew nothing about the Nativity of Christ and the new era associated with it. It is believed that in the 4th century. BC. It was customary to count the years from the 1st Olympiad, when the names of its winners were first recorded, this happened in 776 BC. So, all subsequent years were counted according to the number of the Olympics and the number of years before or after it. It is possible that it was Homer who proposed to conduct the chronology precisely from 776 BC. This is evidenced by the attention he paid to the description of sports games in the Iliad and Odyssey. It was probably the Olympics that prompted Homer to break each epic into 24 songs, and together into 48 songs, which symbolize 48 months or 4 years, which corresponds to the period of the Olympics. But, apparently, Homer himself kept a simple count of the years, starting from the year of the first Olympics. So, after all, the calculation of the dates of the Olympics did not appear in the 4th century. BC, and after the Panathenaic games, i.e. at the beginning of the 6th century. BC.

We will not go into the complex counting of the months of ancient Greek chronology, there were 12 of them since ancient times, and talk about how it was possible to close the year if the months were alternately divided into 30 and 29 days. There were no weeks then, and the month was divided into three decades. I will only note that, probably, after a seven-year stay in Egypt, Homer developed his own calendar for internal use, very close to ours. Its year was divided into 12 months with alternation in each of the months, called the Ides and dedicated to certain gods and events, while the odd months contained 31 days, and the even months - 30. The Ides, called the “Month of Mutual Treats” and falling on our February 15-March 15(16) had 28 days in normal years, and 29 in leap years, i.e. one more day was added as a “treat”. Moreover, Homer’s leap years did not fall on the years of the Olympics (as is customary with us today), but on the even years between them. As for the beginning of the year, it was different in different policies of Ancient Greece. Homer focused on Athens, where the year began after the summer solstice (around the beginning of August), which according to our calendar occurs on June 22. Therefore, the first day of the month of their new year corresponded approximately to the 2nd half of our July and the 1st half of August, i.e. Conventionally, according to our calendar, July 16 is considered the first day of the ancient Greek year.

If you now put yourself in Homer’s place and take into account the complexity of calculating years and days, then the question arises: what is the easiest and most reliable way to encrypt the number of years and days from the first Olympiad? Probably the first thing that suggested itself could be to take into account the number of hexameters from the beginning of the poem to the key words, as the successive number of years and the number of days after the new year, without indicating the month. In this case, even a partial loss of text threatened at most a loss of days, not years. But to do this, they had to be written down as one number, i.e. 10 years and 250 days would have to be 10,250 hexameters. Or it should be 102 years and 50 days. When this idea came to me, I began to look for key words at the end of the Odyssey that would indicate Odysseus's birthday, i.e. Homer, taking into account immanence. It is clear that this is probably what caused the creation of epics in such a large volume. That's what came out of it.

In total, the ancient Greek text of the Odyssey that I had at my disposal contained 12,106 hexameters. In the last XXIV song there is a phrase in the 304th verse: “I was born in Alibanto.” Counting the number of hexameters showed that this key phrase falls on the 11862nd hexameter. Since the figure 862 is too large for 365 days a year, we need to count the number of years that have passed since the 1st Olympiad as 118, and the number of days as 62 after the new year (from July 16 according to our calendar) and as a result you can get Homer's birthday - September 15, 657 BC. But that is not all. Homer was well aware that the date needed to be recorded in a more reliable way than counting the total number of hexameters, the loss of which was more likely than, for example, the names mentioned within the text of one song. That’s when I had to pay attention to the above-mentioned numbers for the name Alibant: the 304th hexameter and the 119th serial number of the name. As a result, the date was clarified by subtracting 304 from the 365 days of the 119th year, and we get the exact birthday after the end of the 118th year: i.e. 365-304=61st day or according to our chronology it will be September 14, 657 BC. Since this calculation is a priori more accurate, it can be argued that an extra hexameter appeared in one of the surviving copies of the ancient Greek text of the Odyssey, but clearly not in the 24th canto. These calculations serve as clear evidence of the careful attention with which Homer's texts were copied. They may rightly point out to me that my pathos here is not justified, since these are just two cases. I hasten to reassure you that today there are already several dozen confirmations of this date, not only from texts on papyrus and parchment, but also in the epigraphic record on the so-called Mastor stone. This stone was found on the island of Berezan in 1900 by Skadovsky and the text written on it was mainly deciphered by the famous epigrapher V.P. Yaylenko. I continued the decryption only for 3 letters out of 45, and only for those that were not readable. As a result, it turned out that it was an epitaph dedicated to Homer. It is clear that the epitaph was not read in plain text. The details of identifying the acrotelestich on the Mastor stone, as well as the identification of all the places of Odysseus’s journey with real objects, can be found in my book “Homer. Immanent biography" (Nikolaev, 2001). From reading the acrotelestich of the epitaph, the date of Homer’s birth, obtained from completely different material - the text of the Odyssey, was confirmed, and the exact date of Homer’s death was revealed - August 14, 581 BC. The most amazing thing is that, according to the myth of the death of Odysseus, he was buried on the island of Ee (Berezani), where Circe lived, and this was confirmed! The question is, what could be more real than a myth after this?!

Similarly, we can determine the time of the arrival of Homer's sister, Helen, in Ilion and the beginning of the Trojan War. In the Iliad, the key segment is the segment of Helen’s lament for Hector, starting from verse 765 of the XXIVth canto: “Now the twentieth year of cyclical times has passed / Since I came to Ilion...” and to the words at the end of the monologue: “ ... I am equally hated by everyone” in verse 775. Here the beginning of this segment of text differs from the end by 10 hexameters, which simultaneously indicate the difference in the number of days and years between the arrival of Helen in Ilion and the beginning of the Trojan War. Total number of verses up to last verse This monologue of Helen, which falls on the 775th line, fluctuates for 4 versions of the text of the Iliad in the range from 15659 to 15664 hexameters. This means that Helen arrived in Ilion on September 2-7, 629 BC, and the Trojan War began on September 12-17, 619 BC. From here it immediately became clear that the prototype of the Trojan War for Homer was the war between Miletus and Lydia, known to historians, which he waged for passage to the Black Sea. Historians believe that Ardis' successor, Sadyattes (late 7th century BC), began a final, 12-year war with Miletus, which ended in peace around 600 BC. In fact, the war was started by Ardis (in Homer - by Paris), lasted about 10 years and ended in 609 under Sadiatta. This means that Schliemann ( scientific world reproached him for having found a later Troy) found exactly the Troy that Homer described. I note that the later date of Homer’s life solves many problems of the “Homeric question,” starting with the answer to the most important question of how the ancient texts were preserved.

From the myths about the Trojan War (see, for example, Robert Graves, Myths of Ancient Greece. Translated from English. Edited and with afterword by A.A. Tahoe-Godi, - M., Progress, 1992) it is known that Agamemnon twice assembled the Greek fleet in Aulis for a trip to Ilion. The first time, immediately after the abduction of Elena, but this trip ended with the storm scattering the ships and they returned home. The second time Agamemnon assembled a fleet 10 years later, but according to Calhant’s prediction, he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek fleet could easily reach Troy. An immanent reading of the Iliad made it possible to find out that the land siege of Troy was preceded by a 10-year naval war unknown to historians, during which a Greek squadron of 415 ships under the leadership of Achilles and Agamemnon destroyed 800 Trojan ships. In this naval war Achilles rammed the Trojan ships, destroyed them from afar with stones fired from a sling, and set them on fire with sulfur bombs. Moreover, he fought not only in the Aegean and Marmara, but also in the Black Sea, i.e. at home. For all this, he gained enormous fame in Greece as an invincible admiral. Only after this the Greeks, without fear of attacks from the sea, were able to pull their ships ashore at Troy. Homer did not take part in this war, since he spent 7 years in Egypt in the service of Psammetichus I and 1 year in Phenicia with his relatives.

If in the Odyssey Homer described 10 years of his life, then in the Iliad the last 10 years are described, or rather, structurally the text is laid out in a description of the last 49 days in the life of his twin brother Achilles, who died on October 8, 609 BC .e. in the 49th year of his life. Thus, the text by day covers the time from August 21 to October 8. The 19th song of the Iliad describes the birthday of Achilles, which falls on September 15, 657 BC. Pay attention to hexameters 243-247 in this song, which lists the gifts presented to Achilles on this day: 7 tripods + 20 tubs + 12 horses + 8 wives with Briseis + 1 gold of Odysseus = 48 years! There, Homer humorously noted his seniority over Achilles (on the same day!) in hexameter 219. Homer described the composition of the family and friendship with his twin brother in the myths about Leda, the Dioscuri brothers, and in the exploits of Hercules about his life from 15 to 27 years .

Thus, as follows from the above, the determination of just a few dates makes it possible to reconstruct, from the epics, myths and hymns, a more or less real biography of Homer, as well as his Cimmerian-Greek origin, which we will talk about another time. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I will repeat: “My business is to tell the truth, and not to force you to believe in it.”

From the very emergence of world literature to the present day, genuine literature has relied on both internal (hidden - insight) and external - iconicity and symbolism (meta-metaphor). So, meta-metaphor and insight, discovered by the poet and philosopher K. Kedrov, constitute the essence of all world literature, in which the choice between Myths or Reality remains with K. Kedrov’s “OR”.

Anatoly Zolotukhin,

SONG THIRTEEN.

So said Odysseus. And silence reigned for a long time.

Everyone in the shadowy hall was overwhelmed with admiration.

Again then Alcinous, answering, said to Odysseus:

"Once, noble Odysseus, you have come to the copper

5 Our house is high, - to myself, I’m sure, without new wanderings

You will return, no matter what suffering you endured before.

To you, elders, I make this proposal,

To you, who in my palace is the sparkling wine of honor

Delight your spirit and listen to beautiful songs:

10 The dress for the guest is folded in a polished chest, also

Gold in fine products and all other gifts,

What did you, advisers of the glorious Phaeacians, bring to him?

Here's what: let's give each one another large tripod

And about the boiler. And we will reward ourselves for the losses of the rich

15 By collecting from the people: it is beyond the strength of one person to give so generously.”

Alkinoi said so, and everyone liked the proposal.

They got up and went to their homes to sleep.

Only, however, rose-fingered Eos appeared from the darkness,

They hurried to the ship with strong copper utensils.

20 The sacred force began to bypass the ship of Alcinous.

He himself placed all the gifts of the Phaeacians under the benches,

So as not to disturb the rowers when they hit the oars.

Having come to Alcinous, they began a luxurious feast.

Alcinous was sacrificed to a bull by sacred power.

25 Clouds to the gatherer Zeus Kronid, lord over all,

They burned the thighs, and then sat down to a rich feast

And they enjoyed it. The divine singer sang under the forming, -

Demodocus, revered by all people. But my head is often

King Odysseus turned to the radiant sun - to the sunset

30 Hurrying him with thoughts; he really wanted to leave.

Just as the plowman greedily dreams of dinner,

With a plow all day he raised virgin soil on the wine-colored waves;

With a joyful heart he sees that the sun has descended to the earth,

That it’s already time for dinner for him to walk with tired steps.

35 So finally, to Odysseus’ joy, the sun descended.

He immediately said to the joyful men of Phaeacia,

Most of all, addressing his words to Alcinous:

“King Alcinous, the best among all the Phaeacian men!

Equip me for the journey by creating a libation for the immortals,

40 Well, goodbye yourself! Here everything is done as desired

My heart, both the departure and the gifts are dear. Let them in

Bless the immortal Uranids! May it be flawless

I will find my wife at home, healthy - all my dear ones!

You are to the delight of your legal spouses and beloved children

45 Stay here! May all kinds of blessings be sent to you

Gods, let no misfortune happen to the people!”

Having approved the word, everyone agreed that they would return to their homeland

He must be forwarded, for he said everything rightly.

Afterwards the power of Alcinous said to the messenger:

50 "Mix water and wine, Pontona, in the crater and immediately

Surround everyone with bowls, so that, having prayed to Zeus the Father,

We sent the guest to his dear homeland."

And Pontona immediately mixed honey-sweet wine,

He brought a cup to everyone, and everyone poured libations.

55 Became immortal gods who own the wide sky -

Sitting in their chairs. God-equal Odysseus rose

From his place, Arete handed the two-handed cup, then

"Rejoice in spirit, queen, all the time until they come

60 Old age and death inevitably come to all people.

I'll go to my place. And you in this high house

Be happy with the children, the people, and King Alcinous!"

Having said this, God-equal Odysseus stepped across the threshold,

The power of Alcinous sent a messenger to help him,

65 So that Odysseus can be led to the ship and to the seashore.

Queen Arete sent female slaves with Odysseus.

She instructed the first to carry the washed cloak and tunic,

A strong chest of excellent workmanship was carried by another,

The third carried bread with sparkling wine. When

70 Everyone approached the ship and the roaring sea,

The rowers immediately accepted the things they had brought and put them away

All of them are inside the ship - both drink and food for the road.

For Odysseus they are at the stern on the smooth deck

They spread a sheet and carpet across their ship,

75 So that he can sleep soundly. He boarded the ship and lay down

Silently. They sat down in pairs in order at the rowlocks

And they untied the rope from the stone with a drilled hole.

And the rowers bent down and struck the sea with their oars.

A refreshing sleep fell on Odysseus’s eyelids,

80 A sweet dream, undisturbed, closest to death.

Like four stallions in a chariot under a hail of blows,

They are continuously inflicted by the scourge on the wide plain

Crazily rushes forward, rising high above the ground,

So the bow of the ship rose, back and behind the stern,

85 The wave of the noisy sea hissed loudly, boiling.

The ship was rushing straight ahead. And I couldn't keep up

Even the falcon is behind him, the fastest bird among all.

The ship rushed quickly, cutting through the sea wave,

Taking my husband, whose intelligence is comparable only to the gods.

90 He had to endure a lot of suffering in his heart before

In fierce battles with men, in the waves of an angry sea.

He slept quietly now, forgetting about past suffering.

A shining star appeared in the night sky, people

Announcing the nearness of the early born dawn.

95 A fast-flying seaworthy ship approached the island.

There is an excellent bay in the Ithacan country

Elder of the Sea Forkin. They are given out at the entrance

Two steep capes, gently sloping down to the bay.

Capes protect the bay from the outside from storm-raised

100 Furious Waves. And the ship, strong-decked, came in from the sea

In this bay to the parking lot, without any leash he stands in it.

Where the bay ends, there is a long-leaved olive.

In it is a sanctuary of nymphs; They are called naiads.

105 There are many amphorae and craters in this cave

Stone. The bees collect their supplies there.

There are also many long stone looms on which naiads

They weave robes in the beautiful colors of sea purple.

The spring water is always gurgling there. There are two entrances to the cave:

110 Only one entrance, facing north, is accessible to people.

The entrance facing south is for the immortal gods. And darling

People do not walk this way, it is only open to the gods.

Knowing this all in advance, they entered the bay. Fast

Their ship ran halfway onto land with a running start:

115 The hands of mighty oarsmen propelled this ship with oars.

Their ship, built firmly, has just crashed into the shore,

First of all, they lifted Odysseus from the deck

Together with the shiny carpet, with the sheets on which he lay,

And they laid the conquered one on the coastal sand.

120 Afterwards they obtained riches, which he got through

The glorious Phaeacians gave high-spirited Athena.

They piled them all at the foot of a shady olive tree,

Get away from the road, so that one of the people passing

Before Odysseus himself awoke, he would not have done any harm.

125 They themselves immediately sailed home. But the Earth Shaker

Didn't forget about the threats he made to Odysseus

He used to threaten. He turned to Zeus so that he could decide the matter:

"Zeus, our parent! Now there is no one between the immortal gods

There will be no honor when people, the Phaeacians, are already mortal,

130 They do not honor me, but they descended from me!

For example, with Odysseus: I was waiting for him to return home

Only after many troubles. I didn’t deprive him of returning

Absolutely: you promised him this and nodded your head.

These, on a fast ship, took him, sleeping, by sea

135 And they planted them in Ithaca, giving countless gifts,

Plenty of gold, copper and beautiful woven clothing, -

As much as he probably couldn’t have brought from Troy,

If only he returned home with his share of the spoils."

Zeus, gathering clouds, answered him and said:

140 “What are you saying, Earth Shaker of great power!

The immortals respect you very much. Yes and is it possible

If a person insults you, then they are so insignificant

His strength is before you, that you will always be able to take revenge on him.

145 Now act as you wish and as you wanted in your heart.”

Poseidon, shaking the earth, immediately answered him:

"Everything would have happened immediately, Blackcloud, I did as you said,

Only I am afraid of your anger, I avoid it.

Well, now I intend to have a beautiful Phaeacian ship,

150 Walking back to his land along the hazy and foggy sea,

Break them into chips so that they finally stop returning to their homeland

Transport all the wanderers. And I will surround the city with a mountain."

Zeus, gathering clouds, objected to him and said:

“Here’s how, in my opinion, it would be best, my dear:

155 Just now in the city people, looking at the sea, will notice

Fast running ship, turn it into stone near land,

Preserving the appearance of the ship so that they would be amazed

Citizens. They wouldn’t need to surround cities with mountains.”

This is when Poseidon heard him shaking the earth,

160 He rushed to Scheria, where the Phaeacian people lived.

There he waited. A seaworthy ship was already approaching,

Swimming fast. The Earth Shaker came close to him,

He made it a rock and pressed the sea into its bottom,

Hitting it hard with your palm. And after that he left.

165 They were talking among themselves in great surprise

Glorious children of the seas, long-haired men of the Phaeacians.

More than one said this, looking at the person sitting next to him:

"Gods! But who is the fast-flying ship running to

Suddenly held him in the middle of the sea, when all of him was already visible?

170 Not only one said so. And they didn’t know how it all happened.

Alkina addressed them with a speech and said this:

"Woe to us! Today everything that my father once

He predicted it for me! He said: he is cruelly angry with the Phaeacians

God Poseidon, we take everyone home unharmed.

175 There will be a day, he asserted, when the Phaeacian ship is ours

When returning back across the hazy and foggy sea

God will break and surround our city with a high mountain.

That's what the old man told me. And now everything is coming true.

Here's what: let's do together everything that I say:

180 If from now on any mortal comes to our city,

We won't send him home anymore. Poseidon

We will sacrifice twelve chosen bulls, and perhaps

He will take pity and will not surround our city with a long mountain."

That's what he said. And in fear of the bulls they began to cook.

185 So to the shaker of the earth’s depths, Poseidon the ruler,

The leaders and advisers of the glorious Phaeacians prayed fervently,

Standing around the altar. Odysseus woke up lying

In his father's land. He didn't recognize him at all

Because I haven't been there for a long time. Moreover, the surrounding area was covered

190 In the foggy darkness Pallas Athena, so that he himself would not be

Recognized by no one, so that she had time to tell him everything in order,

So that neither his wife, nor friends, nor citizens would recognize him

Anyone before he takes revenge on the suitors for their shamelessness.

That is why everything seemed to Odysseus to others, -

195 Everything: paths in the mountains and the surface of calm bays,

Dark heads of dense trees and high rocks.

He quickly jumped up, stood and looked at his native land.

After that he burst into tears and hit his thighs with his hands.

And he turned to himself, overcome by uncontrollable fear:

200 “Woe! What country, what kind of people did I end up in?

Is it to the wild, arrogant in spirit and not wanting to know the truth,

Or to those who are hospitable and have a God-fearing heart?

All these treasures - where should we take them? Where here

Did I get caught myself? Why didn’t I stay there with the Phaeacians?

205 I, as a suppliant, could have resorted to someone from among the others

Powerful kings who would love me and send me to my homeland.

Right there - I don’t know where to hide it? And if on the spot

I’ll leave everything here, I’m afraid it will become the prey of someone else.

Woe! As I see, they are not so fair, not so reasonable

210 The leaders and advisers of the glorious Phaeacians were with me!

They took me to another land! Promised to the island

From a distance, a prominent Ithaca was taken, and they broke their word.

May Zeus, the patron of those who pray, who

He keeps a vigilant eye on people and takes revenge on everyone who has sinned!

215 Let me, however, look at my riches and count them -

Didn’t they carry anything away in their ship?”

Gold in fine products, beautiful woven dresses.

Everything turned out to be intact. In a cruel longing for the homeland

220 He began to wander along the sand near the incessantly rustling sea,

I am crushed by immeasurable sorrow. Athena came close to him,

The young man took the form of a sheep tending a flock,

Tender looking, like the children of rulers.

The double cloak on her shoulders was of excellent workmanship;

225 She had a spear, and her feet were shining in sandals.

Odysseus took joy at the sight of her, towards

He went to the virgin and loudly spoke inspired words:

“In this area, O friend, I was the first to meet you.

Hello! I ask you, do not accept me with an unkind heart,

230 But save this for me, save me too. I'm like God

I pray to you fervently and fall to your knees.

Also, tell me this quite frankly, so that I know:

What kind of land? What is this edge? What kind of people inhabit it?

Is it some kind of island, visible from afar, or in the sea

235 Does the fertile continent cut far into the cape here?”

"You are a fool, wanderer, or did you really come here to us?

from afar,

If you decided to ask about this land. Not really

She is so unknown. A lot of people know her

240 As among those who live facing the dawn and the sun,

So it is among those who live back, to the fogs and darkness.

It is very rocky, you can’t get through it in a cart,

But it’s not entirely poor, although it’s not very vast in space.

There will be plenty of bread on it, and plenty of wine will be born there,

245 For the rains fall often and the dew is abundant.

There are many wonderful pastures for goats and cows. And there are forests

All kinds. And there are many rich waterfalls on it.

The name of Ithaca, O wanderer, has probably reached Troy, -

But, as I heard, it is not close to the Achaean land."

250 So she said. And Odysseus, the steadfast one, came to joy.

He was glad that the fatherland was before him, as it told him

Zeus's daughter, Pallas Athena.

He addressed her loudly with winged words,

However, he didn’t tell her the truth, he kept his word to himself -

255 A lot of cunning always lurked in the chest of Odysseus:

"I heard about Ithaca in vast Crete, far away

Overseas. Today I myself have reached the borders of Ithaca,

Having taken these riches. Leaving the same amount to the children,

I ran away, killing the fleet-footed Orsilochus there,

260 Son of Idomeneus, in wide-spread Crete

All the hard-working people who won the race, -

Because he wanted to take away all my wealth,

Those obtained in Troy, for which I suffered so much

In fierce battles with men, in the waves of an angry sea;

265 Because I did not want to obey my father,

In Troy, I served with him, and formed my own separate detachment.

I killed him with copper when he was returning from the field,

Near the road, I set up an ambush with a faithful friend.

The impenetrable night covered the sky then, no one us

270 No one among the people could see, and the murder was secretly committed.

Nevertheless, as soon as I killed him with sharpened copper,

I immediately ran to the glorious Phoenicians on the ship and asked

He turned to them, offering rich booty as a gift.

I asked, having taken me to the ship, to take me or to Pylos,

275 Or to Elis, the divine land of the famous Epeans;

The force of the wind, however, drove them away from these edges -

Against their wishes: they did not want to deceive.

Having lost our way, we arrived here late at night.

With difficulty we rowed our ship into the bay, and although we

280 Everyone was hungry, but no one even remembered about dinner.

So, having left the ship, we lay down on the sand near it.

I was very tired, and a sweet sleep descended on me.

And the Phoenicians loaded my wealth from the ship

And they were piled on the sand near the place where I lay,

285 They themselves sailed to Sidonia, a well-populated region.

I was left alone on the shore with a torn heart."

That's what he said. The goddess Athena smiled in response

And Odysseus stroked her hand, taking on the image

A slender, beautiful wife, skilled in beautiful works.

290 Loudly and with inspiration she addressed him:

"Who would compete with you would be very thieving and cunning?

Could use all sorts of tricks; it would be difficult for God too.

Always the same: a cunning man, insatiable in deceit! Really?

Even when you find yourself in your native land, you cannot stop

295 False speeches and deceptions that you loved from childhood?

But let's stop talking about it. After all, both are with you

We are excellent at being cunning. Both in speech and in deed

You are superior to all mortals; and I am among all the gods

I am famous for my cunning and sharp mind. Didn't you really recognize

300 Daughters of Zeus, Pallas Athena? Always with you

I stand next to you in all kinds of work and protect you.

I did it so that all the Phaeacians liked you.

I came here today to think about the future with you.

And to hide the treasures that are on your way

305 The glorious Phaeacians gave according to my thought and advice,

Also, so that you know what troubles fate has in store for you.

In your house. You have to endure everything, whether you want it or not.

Don’t spill the beans, however, look, not to any of the women,

Neither of the men that you came home from your wanderings. All the torment

310 Carry it in silence, submitting to the violence of insolent people.”

So the wise Odysseus said to Athena in response:

"It is difficult, goddess, for a person to recognize you when they meet,

No matter how experienced he is: you are similar to everyone.

I remember strongly that you were supportive to me

315 Previously, when we, sons of the Achaeans, fought at Troy.

After we took the high city of Priam,

They sailed home by sea and God scattered all the Achaeans,

I didn’t see you anymore, Kronid’s daughter, I didn’t notice you,

So that when you board my ship, you protect me from harm.

320 With a broken heart in my chest I wandered for a long time, until

The gods finally decided to save me from misfortunes.

Only when I found myself in the region rich of the Phaeacians,

You encouraged me and took me to the city yourself.

Today, in the name of your father, I beg; I do not believe

325 I, so that I truly arrived in Ithaca; in another there is some

I'm in the country, and you laugh at me

She only wanted to tell me this to fool me!

Is it really true, tell me, that I have returned to my native land?”

This is how the owl-eyed maiden Athena answered him:

330 “The spirit in your chest is always the same, Odysseus.

That's why I can't leave you, you unfortunate man.

You are careful, smart, and do not lose your presence of mind.

With joy every other person, returning from long

Wandering, I would hurry home to see my children and wife.

335 You strive to quickly ask and find out about everyone.

First you want to test your wife, who steadfastly

And the house awaits you. In sadness, in continuous tears

She spends long days there and sleepless nights.

As for me, I never had any doubts,

340 I knew that you yourself would return, even if you lost all your companions,

But I didn’t want to fight with Poseidon the ruler,

My uncle on my father's side. He burns cruelly towards you

Anger, angry that you blinded his son.

Let me show you Ithaca so you can be convinced.

345 This is the old sea Forkin Bay in front of you.

Where it ends, do you see a long-leaved olive?

Near the olive tree there is a lovely cave, full of darkness.

There is a sanctuary of nymphs; They are called naiads.

In this spacious cave with a high vault, it is often

350 You sacrificed selected hecatombs to the nymphs.

This is Nerit Mountain, covered with dense forest."

The goddess dispersed the fog here. The surrounding area opened up.

Odysseus the steadfast one came to joy when he suddenly saw

Your native land. With a kiss he fell to the earth of life,

355 Then he raised his hands and began to pray to the naiads:

"Zeus' daughters, naiad nymphs, I will never

I didn't think I'd see it again! I greet you with prayer

Joyful! We will bring you gifts, as before,

If the daughter of Zeus, the spoiler, graciously allows,

360 So that I remain alive and so that my beloved son grows up."

The owl-eyed maiden Athena said to him again:

“Don’t worry! Now that’s not what you have to worry about.

We need it now, now, in the depths of the wonderful cave

Hide all the treasures so that they remain there safely.

365 We’ll think about how best to proceed further.”

So said the goddess and the caves went deep into the darkness,

I feel around in it, looking for nooks and crannies. Odysseus to the entrance

He began to offer gold and strong copper utensils,

Rich dresses - all that the Phaeacians gave him.

370 She laid them out carefully and blocked the entrance with a rock

Daughter of the aegis-power Zeus, Pallas Athena.

They both sat down at the foot of the sacred olive tree,

They began to think about how to destroy the insolent suitors.

The first to speak was the owl-eyed maiden Athena:

375 "God-born hero Laertides, Odysseus the many-cunning!

Think about how you can tame these shameless suitors.

They have been masters in your house for three years now,

Wooing Penelope, equal to the gods, and giving a ransom.

That one, waiting for you all the time in deep sadness,

380 Gives hope to everyone, promises to everyone separately,

He sends him news, but in his mind he wants something else.”

So the wise Odysseus said to the goddess in response:

“That’s how it is! I, too, had to die at home,

Having accepted the same evil fate as Atrid Agamemnon,

385 If only in advance, goddess, you had not told me.

Give me wise advice so that I know how to take revenge on them.

Stand close to me and inspire me with daring courage,

Just like at the time when we destroyed the stronghold of Troy.

If only you could help me now, Owl-eyed,

390 I would enter into battle alone with thirty men, -

Together with you, goddess, with your supportive help."

This is how the owl-eyed maiden Athena answered him:

"No, I will not leave you and I will not forget you as soon as

The time will come for us to start business. Not alone, I guess

395 Of the suitors who eat your wealth in the house,

He will sprinkle the wide earth with his blood and brain.

Let me, however, make sure that they don’t recognize you.

I will wrinkle your beautiful skin on your elastic members,

I'll strip the skull from its brown hair and slash the poor

400 I will cover my shoulders so that everyone will look at you with disgust.

The eyes, so beautiful before, will become cloudy,

So that you appear disgusting to all the suitors,

As well as the wife and son you left at home.

You yourself, first of all, go to the swineherd, who

405 He will guard your pigs. He is committed to you unfailingly.

He loves your child, he loves Penelope the wise.

You will find it near the pigs. And their flock grazes

Near Raven Mountain, near the Arethusa spring.

There they drink black water and eat in abundance

410 Oak acorns and everything that makes them fat.

Stay there. After sowing, ask the swineherd about everything,

I will go to Sparta, to the city of the most beautiful women,

To call Telemachus, who to King Menelaus

I went to Lacedaemon, glorious for its choir grounds.

415 Collect news about you - do you exist somewhere, don’t you?”

And, answering the goddess, the wise Odysseus said:

“Knowing the whole truth, why didn’t you tell him?

Is it not so that he too would suffer suffering while wandering

On the restless sea, did others eat it well?

420 The owl-eyed maiden Athena said to him again:

“Don’t let your concern for him worry you too much,

I saw him off myself for good fame.

He got it on this trip. Without any hardships, calmly

He sits in the house of Atrid and has everything in abundance.

425 Young men, however, are guarding him in a black-sided ship,

Preparing an evil death for him on the way back.

But nothing like that will happen. Earth into itself before

He will take many suitors, who will eat up your riches."

Having said this, Athena touched Odysseus with her rod.

430 The beautiful skin on the elastic members immediately wrinkled,

The skull was stripped of its brown hair; and his whole body

It immediately became like that of the most decrepit old man.

The eyes, so beautiful before, became cloudy.

She dressed his body with nasty sackcloth and a tunic -

435 Dirty, torn, thoroughly smoked and stinking.

She covered her shoulders with a large, peeling deerskin.

She gave Odysseus a stick and a pathetic bag,

It's all patched, full of holes, and the bandage for it is made of rope.

Having thus agreed, they parted ways. Athena in beautiful

440 Lacedaemon rushed to return Odysseus’ son.