T H E M I N D O F I L I A D
75
brother, Deiphobus. Trusting in him as his second, Hector challenges Achilles, demands of Deiphobus another spear, and turns to find nothing is there. We would say he has had an hallucination. So has Achilles. The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.
The Bicameral Mind
The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not
'see' what to do by himself.
The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have just proposed is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad. It is rather that the Iliad suggests the hypothesis that in later chapters I shall attempt to prove or refute by examining the remains of other civilizations of antiquity. Nevertheless, it would be persuasive at this time to bring up certain objections to the preceding which will help clarify some of the issues before going on.
Objection: Is it not true that some scholars have considered the poem to be entirely the invention of one man, Homer, with no historical basis whatever, even doubting whether Troy evei: ex-
76
The Mind of Man
isted at all, in spite of Schliemann's famous discoveries in the nineteenth century?
Reply: This doubt has recently been put to rest by the discovery of Hittite tablets, dating from 1300 B.C., which clearly refer to the land of the Achaeans and their king, Agamemnon. The catalogue of Greek places that send ships to Troy in Book 2
corresponds remarkably closely to the pattern of settlement which archaeology has discovered. The treasures of Mycenae, once thought to be fairy tales in the imagination of a poet, have been dug out of the silted ruins of the city. Other details mentioned in the Iliad, the manners of burial, the kinds of armor, such as the precisely described boars'-tusk helmet, have been unearthed in sites relevant to the poem. There is thus no question of its historical substrate. The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history, webbed into the Mycenaean Aegean, to be examined by psychohistorical scientists.
The problem of single or multiple authorship of the poem has been endlessly debated by classical scholars for at least a century.
But this establishment of an historical basis, even of artifacts mentioned in the poem, must indicate that there were many intermediaries who verbally transmitted whatever happened in the thirteenth century to succeeding ages. It is thus more plausible to think of the creation of the poem as part of this verbal transmission than as the work of a single man named Homer in the ninth century B.C. Homer, if he existed, may simply have been the first aoidos to be transcribed.
Objection: Even if this is so, what basis is there to suppose that an epic poem, whose earliest manuscript that we know of is a recension from Alexandrian scholars of the fourth or third century B.C., which obviously must have existed in many forms, and as we read it today was put together out of them, how can a poem of this sort be regarded as indicative of what the actual Mycenaeans of the thirteenth century B.C. were like?
T H E M I N D O F I L I A D
77
Reply: This very serious objection is made even stronger by certain discrepancies between the descriptions in the poem and plausibility. The disappointing mounds of grassy rubble identified today by archaeologists as the city of Priam cover but a few acres, while the Iliad counts its defenders at 50,000 men. Even the trivial is sometimes moved up by hyperbole into impossibility: the shield of Ajax, if it were made of seven oxhides and a layer of metal, would have weighed almost 300 pounds. History has definitely been altered. The siege lasts ten years, an absolutely impossible duration given the problems of supply on both sides.
There are two general periods during which such alterations of the original history could have occurred: the verbal transmission period from the Trojan War to the ninth century B.C., when the Greek alphabet comes into existence and the epic is written down, and the literate period thereafter up to the time of the scholars of Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. whose put-together recension is the version we have today. As to the second period, there can be no doubt that there would be differences among various copies, and that extra parts and variations, even events belonging to different times and places, could have been drawn into the vortex of this one furious story. But all these additions were probably kept in check both by the transcribers'
reverence for the poem at this time, as is indicated in all other Greek literature, and by the requirements of public performances. These were held at various sites, but particularly at the Panathenaea every four years at Athens, where the Iliad was devoutly chanted along with the Odyssey to vast audiences by the so-called rhapsodes. It is probable therefore that with the exception of some episodes which contemporary scholars believe are late additions (such as the ambushing of Dolon and the references to Hades), the Iliad as we have it is very similar to what was first written down in the ninth century B.C.
But further back in the dim obscurities of earlier time stand the shadowy aoidoi. And it is they certainly who successively
78
The Mind of Man
altered the original history. Oral poetry is a very different species from written poetry.6 The way we read it and judge it must be completely different. Composition and performance are not separate; they are simultaneous. And each new composing of the Iliad down the swift generations was on the basis of auditory memory and traditional bardic formulae, each aoidos with set phrases of varying lengths filling out the unremembered hexameters and with set turns of plot filling out unremembered action.
And this was over the three or four centuries following the actual war. The Iliad, then, is not so much a reflection of the social life of Troy as it is of several stages of social development from that time up to the literate period. Treated as a socio-logical document, the objection is sustained.
But as a psychological document, the case is quite different.
Whence these gods? And why their particular relationship to the individuals? My argument has stressed two things, the lack of mental language and the initiation of action by the gods.
These are not archaeological matters. Nor are they matters likely to have been invented by the aoidoi. And any theory about them has to be a psychological theory about man himself. The only other alternative is the following.
Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might be merely literary style? That the gods are mere poetic devices of the aoidoi to make the action vivid, devices which may indeed go back to the earliest bards of Mycenae?
Reply: This is the well-known problem of the gods and their overdetermination of the action. The gods seem to us quite unnecessary. W h y are they there? And the common solution is as above, that they are a poetic device. The divine machinery duplicates natural conscious causations simply to present them in concrete pictorial form, because the aoidoi were without the refine-ments of language to express psychological matters.