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It's the twenty-first century. The Middle East is restless - Homer describes this war. Governments succeed each other - Homer writes about the insatiability of human nature. Kurds heroically defend their land - Homer tells how Odysseus is trying to regain the kingdom taken from him. We are afraid of environmental disasters - Homer describes the riot of nature and human madness. The events of the present find their lively response in these poems, or, to be more precise, any historical upheaval is just an echo of what Homer foresaw.

Opening the Iliad or the Odyssey is like opening an evening paper. And in this world newspaper, written a long time ago, it is said that there is nothing new under the Zeves sun: a person remains true to himself, being still the same majestic and hopeless animal, radiating light and exuding mediocrity. So thanks to Homer you can save on buying newspapers.

And then Odysseus appears. Who is this amazing person? He loves to travel, but loves to come home. Wants to discover the outside world, but misses home. Enjoys with the nymphs, but weeps for Penelope. Throws himself into the unknown and longs for a home. Odysseus, as ironically in his book “Adventure. Boredom. Seriousness" Vladimir Yankelevich, "a false traveler, this is a homebody by vocation and an adventurer by force of circumstances." This elusive cunning and strong man is torn apart by his own weaknesses. This is you, reader, this is me, all of us: this is our brother. Reading the Odyssey, it is as if we are looking into the mirror of our own soul. And this is the genius of Homer, who is able to sketch a portrait of a person in general in several songs. No one else has been able to do this.

Light and acceptance of the world shimmer in his poems, tenderness for animals and forests, in a word, a reverent attitude to life. When you open these books, you will hear the song of the surf. Of course, sometimes it will be drowned out by the clang of weapons. But this song of love, addressed to our earthly life, returns again and again. Homer is a musician. And we live in the echoes of his symphony.

These verses replenished my vital forces with their life-giving juices. Reading Homer is uplifting. This is an essential feature of all eternal creations. “The Greeks from time to time seemed to arrange holidays for all their passions and dark natural inclinations <…> this is the true paganism of their world,” Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human. Check out this holiday! It's still going on.

So, the book you are holding in front of you is a transcript of my radio broadcasts. Readers and listeners are treated differently. Speaking does not mean writing. On the recording in the studio, the word is more mobile, freer, not so is clamped . After all, talking about Homer into a microphone is purely ancient Greek history: it is sailing on radio waves. And deviations from the course are sometimes inevitable.

Quotations in the French edition are based on translations by Philippe Jacotet (Odyssey) and Philippe Brunet (Iliad) ^[2] . The latter is an example of a modern aed who adapted his translation for reading aloud and tried to restore the rhythm of Homer's verse with all its vocalizations, legato, staccato. Quotations from Homer are in blue ^[3] . Blue - like the sky and the sea. Blue - like a red-hot luminary and, perhaps, like the eyes of Homer, the only sighted blind man.

Secrets shrouded in darkness?

The proximity of eternal poems

The Iliad is a story about the Trojan War. "Odyssey" - about the return of the hero to his native Ithaca. It describes the war, here - the restoration of order. And both poems give a picture of the human lot. Under Troy - a crowd of angry masses manipulated by the gods. In The Odyssey, the hero wanders in a web of islands, but eventually finds a way out of it. These epics seem to echo each other: the curse of war is here, the possibility of an island is there; the era of heroes on the one hand, personal wanderings on the other.

These poems crystallize the myths that two thousand five hundred years ago were spread by the Aeds among the population of the Mycenaean Kingdom and Ancient Greece. Today they seem strange to us, sometimes monstrous. They are inhabited by ugly creatures as beautiful as death, sorceresses, fleeing armies, uncompromising friends, devoted wives, and fierce warriors. Storms rise, walls fall, gods copulate, princesses weep, soldiers wipe their tears with blood-stained tunics, men cut each other's throats. And then this mass bloodshed is interrupted by some touching scene and the manifestation of tender feelings keeps the heroes from revenge.

Prepare for all this. For we will sail the stormy seas and wander the battlefields. We will find ourselves in the heat of battle and we will sit on the council of the gods. Sea storms and showers of sunlight will fall upon us. We will be surrounded by fog. We will peer into curtained alcoves, dock at islands, and land on reefs.

Some will die in battle. Others will be saved. But the gods will relentlessly watch over everyone. And the sun will still stream its light and reveal beauty to us in half with tragedy. And everyone will go out of their way to realize their plans, but behind everyone's back some god will play his own game. Will a person be free in his choice or will he have to submit to fate? Will he be a mere pawn in the game of the gods, or the arbiter of his own destiny?

The scenery of these poems will be numerous islands, capes and kingdoms. In the 1920s, the geographer Victor Berard found an exact geographical match for all of them. Mare Nostrum , The Mediterranean is the ancestral home of our Europe, the daughter of Athens and Jerusalem.

Where, from what depths did these songs come, which shook eternity? Why are they so familiar to our ears? How to explain that some story, which is already two thousand five hundred years old, enters into resonance with a completely new era, with the sparkling ripples of our bays? Why, through these eternally young verses, can we reveal the mysteries of our future?

Why, finally, do all these heroes and gods seem so close to us?

The heroes of these poems continue to live in us. We marvel at their courage. We understand their passions. We use images and expressions generated by their adventures. These are our reckless brothers and sisters: Athena, Achilles, Ajax, Hector, Odysseus and Helen! Their adventures gave birth to what we Europeans are today, what we feel and what we think. “The Greeks gave the world civilization,” Chateaubriand wrote. Homer still helps us live.

There are two hypotheses about Homer himself.

Either the gods really existed and inspired him for their "life stories" by whispering their insights to him. And thus, the poems, thrown into the abyss of time, became prophecies, designed to tell about our era.

Either there is simply nothing new under the sun of Zeves, and the themes that appear in these poems: war and glory, greatness and meekness, fear and beauty, memory and death are the very fuel that feeds the blazing fire of eternal return.

I believe in the immutability of man. Modern sociologists convince each other that man is capable of improvement , that progress and science make him better. Nonsense! Homer's poems are incorruptible, because a person, even having changed his appearance, remains the same, the same insignificant and great, the same mediocre and sublime, no matter whether he rides, “shining with a helmet”, on a horse along the Trojan plain or waiting for a scheduled bus.

When the torment is over

Remember the time when we had to read these most boring epics. We were schoolchildren - Homer was in the program. We wanted to play outside. We were terribly bored and looked through the window at the sky, in which the divine chariot never once appeared. And what if now the time has come to feed on these golden verses, to enjoy these electrified lines, eternal, because unique, these noisy and furious songs, full of wisdom and such unbearable beauty that poets continue to mutter them through tears today?

Dadaists here would give this advice: put aside secondary tasks! Wash the dishes tomorrow! Turn off your computer screens! Let the children cry while you open the Iliad or the Odyssey without delay and read a few passages aloud, standing by the sea, on a mountaintop, or in front of your bedroom window. Let in these inhumanly beautiful songs. They will help you find your way through the turmoil of our times. Because terrible times are coming. Tomorrow, drones will watch us from carbon-polluted skies, robots will biometrically check our identity, and it will be forbidden to claim our cultural identity. Tomorrow ten billion people connected to each other will be able to constantly spy on each other. International corporations will give us the opportunity to live decades longer by introducing genetic engineering. Homer, our old comrade, is able to dispel this post-humanistic nightmare by offering us his model of behavior - the behavior of a person breathing deeply in a world shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, and not multiplying on a piece of land allotted to him.

Homer - Our Father

Fifteen thousand lines of the Iliad, twelve thousand lines of the Odyssey: why else should we write?!

The Lascaux cave paintings could put an end to fine arts, and the Iliad and the Odyssey could crown literary creativity. And our libraries would not break under the weight of wasted books! These poems open the era of literature and complete the cycle of modernity.

Everything unfolds within a few hexameters: greatness and humility, the hardships of existence, the question of fate and freedom, the dilemma of a serene life and eternal glory, the question of a sense of proportion and excess, the beauty of nature, the power of imagination, the greatness of virtue and the fragility of life . ..

The creator of these poetic bombs is still hidden from us by veils of secrecy!

Who was Homer? How could one person radiate so much energy? Nietzsche was already occupied with this question, and scientists are still arguing about it. This question haunts us in our glamorous time. Each century reduces the creations of genius to its current concerns. Our egalitarian age listens to the demands of the ego. The day is not far off when experts in antiquity will wonder whether Homer was transgender or not.

But Homer himself dismisses many questions. At the beginning of The Odyssey, he summons Mnemosyne. The goddess of memory will tell this story, and he, the poet, will sip the nectar of the melody. So why take off the mask from the singer, since the goddess narrates:

Muse, tell me about that experienced man who,
Wandering long since the day Saint Ilion was destroyed by him,
Visited many people of the city and saw customs, homeland of companions; vain
There were, however, worries, he did not save his companions:
they themselves brought death on themselves by sacrilege, madmen,
Having eaten the bulls of Helios, the god walking above us, —
He stole the day of return from them. Tell us about it
Something for us, O daughter of Zeus, benevolent Muse.

("Odyssey", I, 1-10)

Homer lived in the 8th century BC. “Four hundred years before me,” Herodotus claimed. And this means that he was not a war reporter at all, because the Trojan War, which is the plot of the Iliad, took place in 1200 BC. These datings are confirmed by archaeological excavations carried out in the steppes of Asia Minor by one eccentric German, who later inspired the exploits of the hero of Steven Spielberg's films - Indiana Jones. This German was Heinrich Schliemann. The Mycenaean culture existed between 1600 and 1200 BC, then disappeared, collapsed under its own weight. This means that we can talk about four centuries of the existence of the oral tradition of transmitting memories, legends, epics, before a certain person, whom we call Homer, began to bypass the coast and collect materials to create a poem. So we have three hypotheses.

Either one day a pure genius appeared, bearded and blind, who, four hundred years after the Trojan War, invented everything ex nihilo ^[4] . And it means that this incomparable creator, demiurge and monster in one person, invented literature, just as people once found fire.

Either Homer is the name given to a certain community of rhapsodists, bards or poets who, until recently, still roamed the shores of the Aegean Sea and the Balkans and were able to compose long epic poems on the go. Today, this tribe of storytellers would be called an "artistic group." From century to century, these collectors of oral traditions created their work, gradually lengthening it, patching, here and there supplementing with lyrical digressions and pictures of military prowess. If this were true, then the Iliad and the Odyssey would resemble the colorful quilted suit of the Harlequin and would be simple ordering oral heritage. And all these motley inserts could be considered as "interpolations".

Or - as the leading French Hellenistic historian Jacqueline de Romilly claims - the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Homer is a great compiler. He collected many traditional stories, kneaded them and thus created his own unique style, his own manner of narration. Remember Brahms, who inserted Hungarian folk dances into classical music. Homer is an alchemist who mixed in one retort many ingredients. Without hesitation, he mixed up the deeds and historical plots of different eras. Isn't inspiration similar to cooking ?

Whether there was one source or there were several, the text itself dates back to the 8th century BC, that is, to the time when the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and regained the written language lost during the “dark ages” that followed the decline of Mycenaean culture . Scientists argue about whether the Iliad and Odyssey societies belonged to the Mycenaean culture or whether they formed in the "dark ages", when the sprouts of the Indo-European civilization spread throughout the archipelagos of the Aegean Sea.

But these are all academic subtleties! Homer is, first of all, the name of a primordial miracle, the moment when humanity gained the opportunity to fix in its memory the reflection of its own existence.

Homer is first of all a voice, and only then is the hero of a biographical description (what a bore!). It gives people the opportunity to understand why they became the way they are. Is it necessary to know, opening The Human Comedy, that Balzac loved coffee? Do you need to know the GPS coordinates of the town of Combray in order to dream of Gilbert? O gods of Olympus! Specialists spend so much energy on investigating the plausibility of a fact that they eventually begin to forget about its content!

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Homer is a legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller, creator of the epic poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey". Approximately half of the ancient Greek literary papyri found are passages from Homer. Wikipedia

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Odyssey

Iliad

Iliad

Odyssey

4 Ancient Greek epic retelling by Sergei Nosov

Iliad (excerpts)

Iliad.

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