Last week I started the daunting project of developing a lifetime reading list with some ancient historians. This week it’s time for ancient epics: the four great narrative poems of classical civilization that have echoed down the ages. My list includes the three ‘standard’ epics: the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. It also includes a fourth poem: Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
We often approach Great Cultural Monuments in a spirit of anxiety and anticipated boredom. We think culture is like spinach: good for you but not much fun.
But the truly great books aren’t like this at all. Books like these epics were handed down from classical antiquity at a time when each copy of a book had to be written out by hand. Enough copies were made so that they survived generations of pillage by barbarian hordes, the destruction of learning throughout most of Europe, the religious bigotry that sought to suppress non-Christian (and non-Islamic) literature and the natural disasters — earthquake, fire and flood — as well as the silent agents of destruction like mold, insects and rats that over time have destroyed the great majority of the literature of ancient times.
People kept copying these books and protecting them because they loved them. Generations of readers have been captivated by these books; they are great reads — and that is why they survived. The great books are the books that speak to generation after generation; the reputation of the greatest classics isn’t founded on cold and distant respect but on delight, discovery and pleasure.
Great books have their ups and downs. For almost 1,000 years after Alaric sacked Rome, Homer wasn’t well known in the West because knowledge of Greek faded away. The few people in the West who had the opportunity to study ancient history and culture saw it through Latin eyes. This still has consequences for us today; the most famous episode of the Trojan War (the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy) comes to us from Virgil rather than Homer. Similarly, Latin poems like Ovid’s Metamorphosis were the sources for the West’s knowledge of Greek mythology. But when scholars fleeing the collapse of Byzantium fled to Italy, the West began to regain its knowledge of Greek, Homer came storming back.
Despite these ups and downs, the great old books have shaped our culture, and to read the great books is a uniquely rich and complicated experience. At one level, it is just you and Homer sitting in a room as Homer tells you, as if for the very first time, about the insolence of Thersites, the wrath of Achilles, the pride of Agamemnon, the patriotism of Hector, the loyalty of Patrocles and the fears of Clytemnestra. You imagine the high walls of Troy, the Greek ships hauled up by the side of the sea, the campfires burning in the night and the clash of swords against armor.
But at another level, you read these books in the company of all the readers down through the millennia who have been there too. When you read the Aeneid, you read the same text that St. Augustine read. Like Aeneas, St. Augustine’s life involved a journey, and Augustine interpreted his journey from paganism to Christianity as analogous to Aeneas’ journey to fulfill God’s call by going to Italy. For Augustine, Aeneas’ journey to Italy was also like the journey of the Hebrews out of Egypt into the promised land. Both stories prefigured his own religious journey — and like Aeneas, his journey required the renunciation of a woman he loved.
And you read Virgil with Dante as well. The Aeneid was so important to Dante that he recreated Virgil as his guide through the Inferno in The Divine Comedy (another of the epics that belong on a lifetime list, but that is a subject for another post).
To read Homer and Virgil one after another is to see and feel the difference between a culture emerging fresh into the dawn of history and a settled culture with a thousand years behind it. Everything in Homer is startling and new; everything in Virgil is cultivated and polished. Homer is almost infinitely superior to Virgil in range, in reach, in daring imagination and vivid detail; yet Virgil (especially in the first six books of the Aeneid) gives us a vision of a kind of society and civilization that Homer didn’t know and probably could not have understood. The contrast between the apparently artless Homeric genius and Virgil’s polished artfulness that doesn’t match Homer has inspired generations of artists and thinkers to reflect on the differences between genius and talent, nature and culture.
Ovid is an even more polished and self conscious poet than Virgil. His Metamorphosis is not strictly an epic; it is more the poetic equivalent of a collection of short stories than a novel. Even so, I think it belongs on this list. If nothing else, just as Virgil served as the West’s channel to the story of Troy, Ovid was a primary source for western knowledge of Greek mythology. If you walk through the great art collections of Europe and North America you will see one great painting after another inspired by Ovid’s engaging and pictorial work. From stories like the fall of Icarus to the transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree (which inspired the famous Bernini statue) some of the most vivid images and illustrations in western cultural history are rooted in Ovid’s work.
There are many translations of all these poems and quite a few of them are good; I like Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. For Ovid, you might want to take a look at the Melville translation. I spent much more time with these books when I was in my teens and twenties than I do now; for one thing, vicious attack dog classics masters in my boarding school assigned these books for our nightly translation homework, and woe betide the unprepared. Yet even though nobody is grading me on my ability to translate them anymore, they are still with me and I keep coming back to them.
They are not at all like each other; even the two Homeric epics look at life from quite different angles. But for thousands of years millions of readers have found these books compelling, entertaining and, often, life changing. Every educator should work to ensure that students get a chance to encounter these books; every student, every reader and especially every aspiring should make sure to have these books at hand.