Victor Davis Hanson: What Critics Get Wrong About Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:35)
There are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of bardic transmission, there's a lot of dark age things. And then there's the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60 percent, Homer being a unique genius. We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of The Odyssey.
And a lot of people have criticized it, a lot of people like it. I'm going to talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink and I have talked variously about it. But I wanted to today just talk about The Odyssey as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions. We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan War probably occurred somewhere between 1200 BC and 1100 BC in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece. Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers. But their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians. In other words, they had palaces that in sort of a totalitarian fashion, parceled out food and shelter and land, and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearing house, all recorded on linear B tablets, the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not been invented yet. So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable centrally located palaces in Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Glaw or Thebes or Mycenae or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction. There was not a lot of independent autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy. And when they get back, what they find is not good. Odysseus comes back, suitors are in his house. Agamemnon comes back, he's killed. Ajax doesn't come back. I could go on and that might reflect the oral poetry's attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Mycenaean event. So what's happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw a one-tenth of the population survive, and there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building.
None of the signs of the Mycenaean prosperity and security. It was a dark age, a small scattered, decentralized population, more herd goat, sheep, cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek Peninsula itself, rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people.
During this depression area, I guess we would call it analogous to the European dark ages, roughly from the 6th century AD to 900 AD.
All writing of the Mycenaeans was lost. People lost all knowledge of what had gone on, and after, oh, we could say 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect. This was the era of Greek myth-making. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace and ruins, he said the Cyclopes must have built it. Or if he fell into a Tholos tomb, he'd say there were great demagogues who built this. And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputedly was, but they kept the stories alive. Now, we only have two of them. The Odyssey about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War and the Iliad, four or five day snapshot of the ten year long war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamemnon, etc, etc.