Whose Dead White Man?
Homer’s Return to Egypt
It was a momentous event when the first translation of Homer’s Iliad was published. Not because it was previously an unknown text — an educated person spotting a copy in the book shop for the first time knew exactly what they were looking at. Not because it exploded onto the scene and changed literature in one fell swoop — other books were trendier, more exciting, more of the time. What really made this publication important is what it signaled: a culture’s concerned effort to remember its past, even those parts that had long been repressed. After an occlusion of centuries, Homer had finally returned.
In his introduction, the translator argued that there had been three great obstacles before his time: the issue of religion; the difficulty of Homeric Greek; and the inability of previous translators to write suitably good verse. But in his time and for his abilities, they were no longer insurmountable. The return of Homer is the symbol of a new era, one in which studying the past does not mean emulating whatever your predecessors did but critically reviewing all the contradictory aspects of your heritage. Such a period deserves to be called a rebirth, a Renaissance. But natively, it’s called the Nahḍah (النهضة), the “Awakening.”
There are many first translations of the Iliad. The one I’m talking about is the first Arabic translation, which was accomplished by Sulaiman Al-Bustani and published in Egypt in 1904: “The unprecedented celebration, held in Cairo, in June 14th, 1904, attended by men of letters, religious men, and statesmen from Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria: Muslims, Christians, and Jews, attested the high esteem attributed to both the original creation of Homeros, and the trans-creation of Al-Bustani.” Depending on how you date the Iliad, this celebration came around 2600 years after Homer. But the first complete English translation, completed by George Chapman in 1615, is only three centuries closer to the original. Its language is still easy to follow:
Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that imposed
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls losed
From breasts heroic; sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave;
To all which Jove’s will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis’ godlike son.
What god gave Eris their command, and oped that fighting vein?
(Yes, that’s a singular they in the last line.)
Previously, you would have had to know Greek or (more likely) Latin or (most likely) French to read the Iliad, and a slightly earlier partial translation, by Arthur Hall, had actually been translated from a French adaptation of a Latin version. The first translation of the Qur’an, interestingly, was also done from French, only a few decades after Chapman’s Iliad. Consider which of these two texts would have been easier for an ordinary person to understand:
In the Name of God, gracious and merciful;
Praised be God, gracious and merciful;
King of the Day of Judgment.
It is thee whom we adore;
it is from thee we require help.
Guide us in the right way,
in the way of them that thou hast gratified;
against whom thou hast not been displeased,
and we shall not be misled.
Around two centuries after the first Latin Qur’an, the first Latin Iliad was finished in the fourteenth century by Leontius Pilatus, an Italian Greek, around two thousand years after Homer. This means that for almost an entire millennium from around the time of the fall of the Western Roman empire, the readers of Homer were overwhelmingly native Greek speakers living in the Byzantine empire. From the perspective of Greek nationalism, this only makes sense: of course the Greeks were continuing to maintain and study their cultural legacy.
In English, however, you’re more likely to hear that Greek texts were “preserved” or “copied” in Byzantium. This is because the Byzantines, like Modern Greeks, disrupt the logic of Western European classicism, which holds that the Greeks belong in the past, because they are our ancestors. Those other Greeks aren’t like us, and they are also not like the ancient Greeks. That they exist at all is a kind of embarrassment, and so we all too often fall silent about who those thousands of Greek manuscripts copied in the Byzantine period were for. It does not make sense, after all, for texts that had been “lost” and which were waiting to be “rediscovered” in the Renaissance to have had plenty of readers all along.
This problem goes far beyond scholarship. A few years ago, when German media were constantly reporting on the economic crisis in Greece, I heard a dispiriting number of Germans say that Greece should be kicked out of the European Union. The Greeks were described as sneaky, corrupt, lazy, and too dependent on “us.” This kind of racist attitude distances the Greeks from our self-image of the enlightened Europeans. Instead, stereotypes about “Orientals” are attached to them: thieving, conniving, but too ineffectual to produce anything of value on their own.
The idealized ancient Greeks are the exact opposite. They were bold, creative and critical, democratic yet independent. This is how we like to imagine ourselves, or what we hope to be. And I do agree that they are good ideals to aspire to. But when we forget that they are ideals and begin to build our identity on the vain assumption that, because we are Westerners, we are inherently progressive and open and democratically-minded and so on, there can be very nasty consequences. Firstly, if all these qualities come with being a Westerner, then implicitly, being non-Western must mean lacking them. Secondly, because none of us are quite so noble as we would like to be, a sense of self based on already having such good qualities rather than striving for them is an extremely fragile one. It’s no accident that the ideologues of the far right have been so successful at tapping into this white fragility by styling themselves as defenders of democracy and openness. They use these liberal values as ammunition against people who fall outside some ethnic dividing line, without any interest in actually upholding them.
The refrain of right-wing trolls is that any white person making criticisms of European exceptionalism hates themselves or has cynically bought into an anti-white ideology to “virtue signal.” But of course I don’t hate people with pale skin. I only hate that I have to see depictions of the ancient Greeks — noble and intellectual! — with ivory white skin, and newspaper caricatures of (modern) Greeks — lazy and old-fashioned! — as brownish.
I understand that these are only myths. The Greeks did not actually regress intellectually from an unparalleled height to a “pre-Greek” level after antiquity. Skin color does not really correlate with intelligence or moral character. This awareness means I can tell different myths. Stories that point to a future where Germans and English and Anglo-Americans stand in solidarity with those they have historically oppressed and from whose continued oppression they still benefit, rather than defending every inch of privilege.
One possible myth is that of Homer’s return to Egypt. But to explain why Al-Bustani’s translation was a homecoming for Homer, and not a journey abroad from Europe, I have to tell you about yet another first translation. This was the very, very first one, made by Homer, from Egyptian to Greek. The original Iliad and Odyssey, you see, were written by an Egyptian philosopher’s daughter, Phantasia, and deposited by her in a Memphite temple library. Homer, either a Greek visiting Memphis or himself Egyptian, found these texts and appropriated them.
You can probably guess that someone named Phantasia did not have an ordinary human birth but sprang from some Hellenized Egyptian writer’s imagination fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’ head. Nevertheless, her myth is suggestive. Why was anyone in antiquity interested in giving the Iliad, a story about Greeks winning a great war, an Egyptian origin? Another question may serve as a half-answer: why did the poet Meleager suggest that, like himself, Homer must have been Syrian? (Because, in keeping with Syrian custom, he never has his heroes eat fish.)
A fuller answer is that, like modern Westerners, these Hellenized non-Greeks saw themselves as part of an imagined community, and while their understanding of what it meant to belong to that community centered Greek literature, their attitude to Greek ethnicity was ambiguous. In the story from Egypt, the foreign Homer is made to depend on native lore, yet this amounts to an attack on Homer’s reputation only, not on his cultural importance. In fact, while Egyptian culture is valorized, its value becomes dependent on its ability to bring forth Greek literature.
Leaving the realm of the fantastical, it’s worth making another comparison with Britain, where the ancient period of Greco-Roman culture lasted only some four centuries (in later centuries, only Latin books remained continuously available). Meanwhile Egyptians, both Hellenized natives and Greek settlers, made Homer the basis of their education from soon after the conquest of Alexander (332 BCE) until the first few generations after the Arab conquest (in 642 CE). Ignoring the several centuries that Greek mercenaries and merchants had had a presence even before Alexander, that still makes over a thousand years of Homeric studies in Egypt. I know this is simplistic and a little silly, but I think that numbers like this can sometimes upset our prejudices more powerfully than a long and nuanced argument: Britain has had some kind of Homeric literacy for around four hundred years in antiquity and five hundred in modernity, a total of nine hundred, while Egypt had over a thousand in the ancient period and more than a hundred in modern times.
You might still not be convinced. After all, modern Egypt overall could be argued to have a stronger cultural continuity with the Arabian Peninsula than with pre-Islamic Egypt. But of course modern Britain has been shaped by centuries of English domination, and Old English was the language of Germanic invaders that had never been Romanized. Arabs, on the other hand, had been well known to Greeks and Romans since Herodotus devoted a series of passages in his Histories to them, and while multiple Roman emperors were bestowed the title “Britannicus” for their conquests in Britain, the emperor Philip the Arab (reigned 244–249 CE) was called that because he was one.
My myth of Homer’s return isn’t intended to be believed uncritically. Instead, it’s a counter-myth that is supposed to dislodge other myths that we’ve come to accept as fact. Homer is the great European poet — No, Homer is the great Egyptian poet. Born in a European Greece, after a detour in an Oriental Greece, he returned to Europe proper — No, born in Egypt, after a detour in Europe, he returned to Egypt. Neither story is invented out of whole cloth, but neither story is true. After a while, we may abandon both, but we should not imagine that the next step (or any step) will be the final, non-mythical story. We always have to remain open to being challenged.
As Johanna Hanink notes elsewhere in this journal, the distinction we make between Western Europeans who produce “scholarship” about antiquity and the rest of the world, which only “receives” ancient texts, is spurious. If we accept her judgment—and I think we have to reimagine what diversity means for Classics. It must mean more than inviting others into an institution of White Men and allowing them to twist our narratives a little. Instead, I think that, to grow beyond itself, Classics will need to reevaluate its own importance in the wider field of the reception and scholarship of antiquity. Our myths about antiquity and what it means to study it have to be placed on a level playing field with those that obtain in other regions and disciplines. We must come together to evaluate how they relate to each other, rather than judging everything by our own standards.
—This means reading Arabic translations of Greek medical texts for their own sake, and for their (limited) contributions to Tibetan medicine, rather than just as sources about Greek antiquity.
—Rather than always figuring as the origin or culmination, it means seeing Greek as only the mediator of, for example, astrological knowledge between a starting point in Mesopotamia and an eventual reception in Japanese Buddhism.
—It means learning to historicize Plato and Aristotle as a scholar in seventeenth-century Mughal India would have done it, to see how parochial your own understanding of the history of philosophy had been.
—And it means teaching about the Ottoman interest in Homer and Troy, not just about Schliemann’s excavations.
—We also have to learn to see encounters from the other perspective: were the Jesuits converting Chinese officials to a Western worldview, or did these Confucians take up Euclid and other Western texts for their own purposes?
—Taking reception as seriously as scholarship, you are going to want to look into the most passionate readers of ancient texts and secondary literature: Neopagans. A handful of polytheists have actually played important roles in the history of Classics, from the Byzantine polymath Gemistos Plethon to the English philosopher-translator Thomas Taylor, and more recently, Proclus specialist Edward Butler.
—If you’re writing a literature review about an ancient philosopher, put in a little effort to find out if philosophers in Africa have written about him — at the very least, check if there are English-language open access articles. When was the last time you discussed a Yoruba-centric article in a seminar?
—Invite scholars who never write in English (or French, or German) to your conferences, even if it’s via Skype and you have to pay an interpreter. You’re doing yourselves a favor, not them.
To combat Eurocentrism, it’s not enough to criticize it, or to wait until something from other regions becomes popular on its own. I have just mentioned Yoruba-centrism as an alternative viewpoint, but the only Yoruba author who has become well-known to classicists is Wole Soyinka. What if his adaption of Euripides’ Bacchae were as great as it is, but written in an African language? What if, although written in English, it had been published by the University of Ibadan’s Classics department? Like the fascinating comparative studies of Greek and Yoruba culture produced there, it would almost certainly have remained unread outside of Nigeria.
It is important to stress that these materials do not languish forgotten, waiting for European discoverers. They are already being taught and read — just not by Western classicists. If all we can think to do is “retrieve” them from their current context and integrate them into the mainstream, they are better off without this new interest. After all, Nigerian, Turkish or Japanese scholars are already reading the mainstream books and taking them up from their own perspectives. They are not lacking the Western perspective as the West is lacking theirs. There are structural reasons why the information is only flowing in one direction; why it is easy to ignore the margins, and difficult to treat them as so many other centers. Classicists cannot overcome global economic injustice by themselves, but they can take practical steps — one at a time — to undo epistemic injustice in academia.
L.K.M. Maisel is a B.A. in Classics and a Master’s student at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is currently in the process of personally divesting from the institution of White Men by gender transition.
