The Book of Lost Books Read Online Free Page A

tyrant Peisistratus was generally held to be an enlightened man, who reformed taxes and developed the Solonic legal systems. He was also a patron of the arts and the founder of the Dionysia festival; and he was concerned with establishing a standard text of the works of Homer. To this end, he employed a writer called Onomacritus, who undertook the task.
    On the surface, Onomacritus seemed to be an ideal choice; he had, after all, already edited the poems and oracles of Musaeus. But, Herodotus informs us, there was a less professional side to the man. Lasus of Hermione, who is credited with teaching the lyric poet Pindar, had accused Onomacritus of misattribution, and even forgery, in his edition of Musaeus—brazenly importing his own words.
    Onomacritus may have been acting under a direct political imperative to alter the text. Peisistratus had recently undertaken a military campaign and successfully captured the port of Salamis from the Megarans. After a halt in the offensive, the state of Sparta had agreed to arbitrate between Athens and Megara over the true ownership of Salamis, and the Athenians clinched their case by quoting Homer, specifically, verse 558 of book II, which described Salamis as traditionally being an Athenian dominion. The Megarans, outraged, later accused the Athenians of a brazen fabrication.
    So the preservation of the poems which occupy the apex of literary achievement in Europe was entrusted to someone of questionable integrity, on behalf of a tyrant with a vested interest about border disputes. Was Onomacritus so awed by his position that he carried out the work scrupulously? Or did the recidivist urge to tinker and tamper, meddle and fiddle get the better of him—did he
improve
the text? Is even part of Homer—the slightest line, the tiniest adjective—forged? The critic Zoilus was thrown over a cliff by irate Athenians who objected to his carping criticism of the divine Homer, his snags at odd words and niggles at images: would they have been so precipitate if he had questioned the phraseology of
Onomacritus
?
    In addition to
The Iliad, The Odyssey,
scraps of
The Cypria,
and the so-called
Homeric Hymns,
we learn of other epics composed by, or attributed to, Homer. In the pseudo-Herodotus’
Life of Homer,
we hear of a poem entitled
The Expedition of Amphiarus,
composed in a tanner’s yard.
The Taking of Oechalia
was mentioned by Eustathius; it was given to Creophylus or was actually written by Creophylus. We have one line, which is, unfortunately, identical to line 343 of book XIV of
The Odyssey.
There was a
Thebais,
which recounted the fate of Oedipus and the Seven Champions’ attack on Thebes—it was seven thousand lines long and began, “Goddess, sing of parched Argos whence kings”—as well as its sequel,
The Epigoni,
wherein the seven sons of the Seven Champions finish the job. Again, the poem was in seven thousand lines, and began: “And now, Muses, let us begin to sing of men of later days.”
    But most tantalizing of all is the
Margites.
In the fourth chapter of his
Art of Poetry,
Aristotle said:
    Homer was the supreme poet in the serious style . . . he was the first to indicate the forms that comedy was to assume, for his
Margites
bears the same relationship to our comedies as his
Iliad
and
Odyssey
bear to our tragedies.
    The
Margites,
it is claimed, was Homer’s first work. He began it while still a schoolteacher in Colophon (according to the Colophonians). The name of the hero, Margites, derives from the Greek µαργος, meaning madman. The Poet’s first work was a portrait of a fool.
    Alexander Pope, who never quite got over not being Homer, explained further:
    MARGITES was the name of this personage, whom Antiquity recordeth to have been
Dunce the First;
and surely from what we hear of him, not unworthy to be the root of so spreading a tree, and so numerous a posterity. The poem therefore celebrating him, was