much in vogue at the time, that there had never been a poet called Homer and that the Iliad and the Odyssey were instead a patchwork of a great number of popular ballads cobbled together from different poets over many different periods. For him, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by a single poet of transcendental genius: “I find in the plot of the Iliad enough beauty, order, and structure to bear an independent testimony to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”
Even more distasteful to his critics was Gladstone’s insistence that the story of the Iliad was based on at least a core of historical fact. To the enlightened academics of 1858, it seemed childishly credulous to assign any historical value to a story of a ten-year Greek siege of a town called Ilios or Troia, following the abduction of a Greek queen by the Trojan prince Paris, also known as Alexandros. As the Times put it, these tales were “accepted by all mankind as fictions of very nearly the same order as the romances of Arthur.” Needless to say, all this was twelve years before Heinrich Schliemann actually found Troy on a mound overlooking the Dardanelles; before he excavated the palace of Mycenae, homeland of the Greek overlord Agamemnon; before it became clear that both Troy and Mycenae were rich and powerful cities at the same period in the late second millennium BC; before later excavations showed that Troy was destroyed in a great conflagration soon after 1200 BC; before sling stones and other weapons were found on the site, proving that the destruction was caused by an enemy siege; before a clay document was unearthed that turned out to be a treaty between a Hittite king and the land of Wilusa; before the same Wilusa was securely identified as none other than Homer’s Ilios; before a ruler of Wilusa whom the treaty calls Alaksandu could thus be related to Homer’s Alexandros, prince of Troy; before-in short-Gladstone’s feeling that the Iliad was more than just a quilt of groundless myths turned out to have been rather less foolish than his contemporaries imagined.
There is one area, however, where it is difficult to be much kinder to Gladstone today than his contemporaries were at the time: his harping on about Homeric religion. Gladstone’s was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particularly unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer’s pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. Gladstone believed that at the beginning of mankind humanity had been granted a revelation of the true God, and while knowledge of this divine revelation later faded and was perverted by pagan heresies, traces of it could be detected in Greek mythology. He thus left no god unturned in his effort to detect Christian truth in the Homeric pantheon. As the Times put it, Gladstone “strained all his faculties to detect, in the Olympian Courts, the God of Abraham who came from Ur of the Chaldees, and the God of Melchezedek who dwelt in Salem.” Gladstone argued, for instance, that the tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead left its traces on the Greek mythology and is manifested in the three-way division of the world between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. He claimed that Apollo displays many of the qualities of Christ himself and even went so far as to suggest that Apollo’s mother, Leto, “represents the Blessed Virgin.” The Times was not amused: “Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half!”
Gladstone’s determination to baptize the ancient Greeks did his Studies on Homer a sterling disservice, since his religious errings and strayings made it all too easy to discount his many other ideas. This was most unfortunate, because when Gladstone was not calculating how many angels could dance on the tip of Achilles’ spear, it was exactly his other alleged great failing, that of taking Homer too seriously, that elevated him far above the intellectual horizon of most of his contemporaries. Gladstone did not believe that Homer’s story was an accurate depiction of historical events, but unlike his critics he understood that the poems held up a mirror to the knowledge, beliefs, and traditions of the time and were thus a historical source of the highest value, a treasure-house of data for the study of early Greek life and thought, an authority all the more trustworthy because an unconscious authority, addressing not posterity but Homer’s own contemporaries. Gladstone’s toothcombing analysis of what the poems said and-sometimes even more importantly-what they did not say thus led him to remarkable discoveries about the cultural world of the ancient Greeks. The most striking of these insights concerned Homer’s language of color.
For someone used to the doldrums and ditchwater of latter-day academic writing, reading Gladstone’s chapter on color comes as rather a shock-that of meeting an extraordinary mind. One is left in awe by the originality, the daring, the razor-sharp analysis, and that breathless feeling that however fast one is trying to run through the argument in one’s own mind, Gladstone is always two steps ahead, and, whatever objection one tries to raise, he has preempted several pages before one has even thought of it. It is therefore all the more startling that Gladstone’s tour de force comes to such a strange conclusion. To phrase it somewhat anachronistically, he argued that Homer and his contemporaries perceived the world in something closer to black and white than to full Technicolor.
In terms of its sheer implausibility, Gladstone’s claim that the Greeks’ sense of color differed from ours seems at first sight to come a close second to his notions of a Christlike Apollo or a Marian Leto. For how could such a basic aspect of human experience have changed? No one would deny, of course, that there is a wide gulf between Homer’s world and ours: in the millennia that separate us, empires have risen and fallen, religions and ideologies have come and gone, science and technology have transformed our intellectual horizons and almost every aspect of daily life beyond all recognition. But if in this great sea of change we could pick just one haven of stability, one aspect of life that must have remained exactly the same since Homer’s day-even since time immemorial-then it would surely be the pleasure in the rich colors of nature: the blue of sky and sea, the glowing red of dawn, the green of fresh leaves. If there is one phrase that represents a rock of stability in the flux of human experience, then surely it would be that timeless question “Daddy, why is the sky blue?”
Or would it? The mark of an exceptional mind is its ability to question the self-evident, and Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey left no room for doubt that there was something seriously amiss with Homer’s descriptions of color. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the way Homer talked about the color of the sea. Probably the single most famous phrase from the whole Iliad and Odyssey that is still in common currency today is that immortal color epithet, the “wine-dark sea.” But let’s consider this description with persnickety Gladstonian literal-mindedness for a moment. As it happens, “wine-dark” is already an act of redemptive interpretation in the translation, for what Homer actually says is oinops, which literally means “wine-looking” (oinos is “wine” and op- is the root “see”). But what does the color of the sea have to do with wine? As an answer to Gladstone’s simple question, scholars have suggested all manner of imaginable and unimaginable theories to wave away the difficulty. The most common answer was to suggest that Homer must have been referring to the deep purple-crimson shade, such as a troubled sea has at dawn or sunset. Alas, there is no indication that Homer used the epithet for the sea at dawn or sunset in particular. It has also been suggested, apparently in all earnestness, that the sea can sometimes look red because of certain types of algae. Another scholar, despairing of the possibility of painting the sea red, tried instead to turn wine blue and claimed that “blue and violet reflects are visible in certain wines of southern regions, and especially in the vinegar from home-made wines.”
There is no need to dwell on why all these theories hold neither wine nor water. But there was one other method for circumventing the difficulty, which was applied by many a self-respecting commentator and which does deserve some comment. This was to call upon that foolproof catchall of literary criticism: poetic license. One eminent classicist, for example, pooh-poohed Gladstone by claiming that “if any man should say that the minstrel was deficient in the organ of colour because he designated the sea by this vague word, I would meet him by saying that the critic is deficient in the organ of poetry.” But when all is said and sung, the elegant conceit of the critics’ animadversions does not bear up to Gladstone’s sophisticated literal-mindedness, for his surefooted analysis had all but eliminated the possibility that poetic license could be the explanation for the oddities in Homer’s color descriptions. Gladstone was not poetically tone-deaf, and he was well attuned to the artful effect of what he called “straining epithets of colour.” But he also understood that if the discrepancies were merely a bold exercise of the poet’s art, then the straining should be the exception rather than the rule, for otherwise the result is not license but confusion. And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of “a born Chancellor of the Exchequer,” that this vagueness in Homer’s color descriptions was the rule, not the exception. To prove it, Gladstone drew a circle of evidence consisting of five main points:
