Homer's myths. Literature of ancient greece. Myths of Homeric Greece

Homer Homer is the legendary epic poet of Ancient Greece. There is time for everything: your hour for conversation, your hour for rest. One should be talked about, and the other should be kept silent. Completed works are pleasant. I - you, you -

"The widespread fashion for black glasses that everyonewants to be at least a little Homer. "

Andrey Voznesensky

It is well known that myths are ancient legends about gods and legendary heroes, about the origin of the world and life on earth. But, most often, a myth is understood as something fantastic, implausible, unreal and invented. In fact, this is not the case, because a person, as a product of Nature, is not able to come up with something that has never been, or will not be.

For a long time it was believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were a fiction of Homer, without historical truth, and Homer himself was not considered the author, because he did not sign any of his works with his own name, and he did not even sign a single real biography of him. there was. Do not be surprised, but the fact that we today attribute these epics to Homer is justified only by the fact that they were read every time in the Panathenes at the beginning of the 6th century. BC as his works. This was the state of affairs until the publication in 1795 of the study of the famous German philologist F. A. Wolff "Prolegomena ad Homerum". Relying on the principle of contradictions and noting, in his opinion, the numerous compositionally weak places in the epics, Wolf tried to prove that: The Iliad and Odyssey could not belong to one poet, but were the fruit of the work of many singers and poets; the unification of individual songs into two great epics took place many centuries after the time of composing the songs; few outstanding personalities were involved in the compilation and editing of songs; the final edition belonged to 602 602 editors at the court of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus at the beginning of the 6th century. BC. Thus, the foundations of the "Homeric question" were laid: did Homer exist in reality?

But, as the Gospel says: “Faith is the fulfillment of the expected and the assurance of the invisible” (Heb. 11.1). As soon as Heinrich Schliemann believed in the veracity of Homer's description of the location of Troy in the Iliad, a lover of archeology found a city where no one was looking for it. And along with this, as a reward for perseverance, I found Priam's treasure. Then G. Schliemann found Agamemnon's treasure in Mycenae. The only pity is that we are not able to date all archaeological finds. Nevertheless, the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann put on the agenda the question of Homer as a real historical figure who described quite real historical events. Our wonderful philosopher and encyclopedist A.F. Losev, summarizing the results of two centuries of research on world Homer studies, came to the conclusion that Homer lived at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. and, like most of the world's writers, is an immanent author. This means that he wrote about most of the real events that are directly related to his own life. This, it turns out, is why G. Schliemann was not mistaken in his trust in Homer! But, the specific dates of the events, like the time of Homer's life, still remain unclear. Therefore, today in all encyclopedias it is assumed that Homer lived in the 9th century. BC, and the events of the Trojan War date back to the 12th century. BC. In this regard, the question arises: do not Homer's texts contain indications of specific dates of events and details of his biography? And, if they do, then how to carry out "archaeological excavations" of the text in order to get to the bottom of the truth hidden by the author thousands of years ago by an irrefutable way?

Let us ask ourselves the question: what is the minimal structure of the text of such epics as The Iliad and The Odyssey, apart from letters and words? Probably, this is, following them, a poetic line called a hexameter. We will not go into the historical details, recorded by the ancient Greeks themselves, that they were taught to compose hexameters by the Hyperboreans, i.e. Cimmerians and Scythians. Note that the hexameter is the key structure of the text that allows you to break up the text written continuously, and also makes it possible to check the safety and even the quality of the Homeric text. The loss of one hexameter can also be noticed when analyzing the content of the epic.

Another, larger structure is the breakdown of each of the epics into songs. It is believed that this work, ostensibly for Homer, was carried out by Alexandrian scholars. In fact, it turned out that we got the original texts with the author's breakdown. Another structural division of the narrative text by day was proposed by V.A. Zhukovsky, using the formulaic phrases of Homer indicating the beginning of the day, for example, such as "She rose from the darkness young with purple fingers Eos." With this in mind, he broke the entire story of the Odyssey into 40 days, although there were other points of view on this score. With a detailed analysis, it turned out that the entire story of the 10-year voyage of Odysseus (the allegorical meaning of the name “Odysseus” is “This is me”), Homer put in 58 days, which ended with his 58th birthday and the words “I was born in Alibante”, placed in the last, 24th, song, in 304 hexameter, with the serial number of the name Alibant in this song - 119. The question arises: how, then, could Homer encrypt these key years and dates for the future?

Before answering this question, you need to turn to the chronology that could then exist. Of course, Homer did not yet know anything about the Nativity of Christ and the new era associated with it. It is believed that in the IV century. BC. it was customary to keep track of the years from the 1st Olympiad, when the names of its winners were first recorded, this happened in 776 BC. So, all subsequent years were counted already by the number of the Olympics and the number of years before or after it. It is possible that it was Homer who proposed to keep the chronology from 776 BC. This is evidenced by the attention he paid to the description of sports games in the Iliad and Odyssey. Probably, it was the Olympics that pushed Homer to break each epic into 24 songs, and together into 48 songs, which symbolize 48 months or 4 years, which corresponds to the period of the Olympics. But, apparently, Homer himself kept a simple account of the years, starting from the year of the first Olympics. So, after all, the account from the dates of the Olympics did not appear in the IV century. BC, and after the Panathenaic Games, i.e. at the beginning of the VI century. BC.

We will not go into the complicated counting of the months of ancient Greek chronology, there were 12 of them since ancient times, and talk about how it was possible to close the year if the months were alternately divided into 30 and 29 days. There were no weeks then, and the month was divided into three decades. I will only note that, probably, after a seven-year stay in Egypt, Homer developed his own calendar for internal use, very close to ours. Its year was divided into 12 months with alternation in each of the months called Ides and dedicated to certain gods and events, while the odd-numbered months contained 31 days, and the even-numbered ones - 30. Ides, called the "Month of Mutual Treats" and falling on our 15 February-15 (16) March, in ordinary years had 28 days, and in leap years - 29, i.e. one more day was added as a "treat". Moreover, Homer's leap years fell not on the years of the Olympics (as is customary here today), but on even years between them. As for the beginning of the year, it was different in different policies of Ancient Greece. Homer was guided by Athens, where the year began after the summer solstice (around the beginning of August), which is June 22 according to our calendar. Therefore, the first day of the month of their new year corresponded approximately to the 2nd half of our July and the 1st half of August, i.e. it is conventionally accepted to consider according to our calendar the first day of the ancient Greek year, July 16.

If you now put yourself in Homer's place and take into account the complexity of calculating the years and days, then the question is: how simpler and most reliable of all, and in what way, could the number of years and days from the first Olympics be encrypted? Probably, the first thing that suggested itself could be taking into account the number of hexameters from the beginning of the poem to the key words, like the number of years following each other and the number of days after the new year, without specifying the month. In this case, even a partial loss of the text threatened at most the loss of the number of days, not years. But to do this, they had to be written down as one number, i.e. 10 years and 250 days should be 10,250 hexameters. Or it must be 102 years and 50 days. When this idea came to my mind, I began to look for keywords at the end of the Odyssey, which would indicate Odyssey's birthday, i.e. Homer, taking into account immanence. It is clear that this is probably what caused the creation of epics in such a large volume. That's what came out of it.

In total, the ancient Greek text of the Odyssey, which I had, contained 12,106 hexameters. In the last XXIV canto there is a phrase in the 304th verse: "I was born in Alibante". The counting of the number of hexameters showed that this key phrase falls on the 11862nd hexameter. Since the figure 862 is too large for 365 days a year, then you need to count the number of years since the 1st Olympiad equal to 118, and the number of days equal to 62 after the new year (from July 16 according to our calendar) and as a result you can get Homer's birthday - September 15, 657 BC. But that is not all. Homer was well aware that it was necessary to fix the date in a more reliable way than counting the total number of hexameters, the loss of which was more likely than, for example, the names mentioned within the text of one song. It was then that I had to pay attention to the aforementioned numbers with the name Alibant: 304th hexameter and 119th serial number of the name. As a result, the date was specified by the fact that we had to subtract 304 from 365 days of the 119th year, and we will get the exact birthday after the end of the 118th year: i.e. 365-304 = 61st day or according to our chronology it will be September 14, 657 BC. Since this calculation is a priori more accurate, it can be argued that an extra hexameter appeared in one of the surviving copies of the ancient Greek text of the Odyssey, but clearly not in the 24th canto. These calculations serve as vivid evidence of the reverent attention with which the texts of Homer were rewritten. I can rightly say that my pathos is not justified here, since these are just two cases. I hasten to reassure you, today there are already several dozen confirmations of this date, and not only from the texts on papyrus and parchment, but also in the epigraphic record on the so-called Mastor stone. This stone was found on the island of Berezan in 1900 by Skadovsky and the text on it was mostly deciphered by the famous epiographer V.P. Yaylenko. Deciphering was continued by me only in 3 letters out of 45, and only in those that could not be read. As a result, it turned out that it was an epitaph dedicated to Homer. It is clear that the epitaph was not read in plain text. The details of identifying the acrotelestik on the Mastor stone, as well as the identification of all the places of Odyssey's travel with real objects, can be found in my book “Homer. An immanent biography ”(Nikolaev, 2001). From the reading of the acrotelestikh of the epitaph, the date of Homer's birth was confirmed, obtained from a completely different material - the text of the Odyssey, and the exact date of Homer's death was revealed - August 14, 581. BC. The most striking thing is that, according to the myth of the death of Odysseus, he was buried on the island of Ee (Berezan), where Circe lived, and this was confirmed! The question is, what could be more real after that than a myth ?!

Similarly, you can determine the time of arrival of Homer's sister, Helen, in Ilion and the beginning of the Trojan War. In the Iliad, the key segment is Elena's lament for Hector, starting from verse 765 of the XXIVth canto: “Now is the twentieth year of circular times flowing / Since then, as I came to Ilion, ..” and to the words at the end of the monologue: “ … I am equally hateful to all ”in verse 775. Here the beginning of this segment of the text differs from the end by 10 hexameters, which simultaneously indicate the difference in the number of days and years between the arrival of Elena in Ilion and the beginning of the Trojan War. The total number of verses up to the last verse of this monologue by Elena, which falls on the 775th line, varies for 4 versions of the text of the Iliad in the range from 15659 to 15664 hexameters. This means that Helen arrived in Ilion on September 2-7, 629 BC, and the Trojan War began on September 12-17, 619 BC. From this it immediately became clear that the prototype of the Trojan War to Homer was the war of Miletus with Lydia, known to historians, which he waged over the passage to the Black Sea. Historians believe that the successor of Ardis, Sadiatt (late 7th century BC) began the last, 12-year war with Miletus, which ended in peace around 600 BC. In fact, the war was started by Ardis (in Homer - Paris), lasted about 10 years and ended in 609 under Sadiatta. And this means that Schliemann (the learned world reproached him for having found a later Troy) found exactly the Troy that Homer described. Note that the later date of Homer's life solves many problems of the "Homeric question", starting with the answer to the most important question of how the most ancient texts were preserved.

From the myths about the Trojan War (see, for example, Robert Graves, Myths of Ancient Greece. Transl. From English. Ed. And with afterwords. A.A. twice assembled the Greek fleet in Aulis for a campaign in Ilion. For the first time, immediately after the abduction of Elena, but this campaign ended with the storm scattering the ships and they returned home. The second time Agamemnon gathered a fleet after 10 years, but according to the prediction of Kalhant, he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek fleet could reach Troy without hindrance. An immanent reading of the Iliad made it possible to find out that the land siege of Troy was preceded by a 10-year naval war unknown to historians, during which a Greek squadron of 415 ships led by Achilles and Agamemnon destroyed 800 Trojan ships. In this naval war, Achilles rammed Trojan ships, destroyed them from afar with stones released from a sling, and set them on fire with sulfur bombs. Moreover, he fought not only in the Aegean and Marmara, but also in the Black Sea, i.e. at home. For all this, he gained enormous fame in Greece as an invincible admiral. Only after that, the Greeks, without fear of attacks from the sea, were able to pull their ships ashore near Troy. Homer did not take part in this war, since he was in Egypt for 7 years in the service of Psammetichus I and for 1 year in Phenicia with his relatives.

If in the "Odyssey" Homer described 10 years from his life, then in the "Iliad" the last 10 years are described, or rather, the text is structurally fit into the description of the last 49 days in the life of his twin brother Achilles, who died on October 8, 609 BC. .NS. at the 49th year of his life. Thus, the text by day covers the time from August 21 to October 8. Canto 19 of the Iliad describes Achilles' birthday on September 15, 657 BC. Pay attention to hexameters 243-247 in this song, which lists the gifts presented to Achilles on this day: 7 tripods + 20 tubs + 12 horses + 8 wives with Briseis + 1 gold of Odysseus = 48 years! In the same place Homer humorously noted his seniority over Achilles (in one day!) In hexameter 219. Homer described the family composition and friendship with his twin brother in the myths about Leda, the Dioscuri brothers, and in the exploits of Hercules about his life from 15 to 27 years ...

Thus, as it follows from the above, the determination of just a few dates makes it possible to restore from epics, myths and hymns a more or less real biography of Homer, as well as his Cimmerian-Greek origin, which we will talk about another time. I, after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, will repeat: "My job is to tell the truth, and not to make you believe in it."

From the very beginning of world literature to the present day, genuine literature relied on both internal (hidden - insideout) and external - sign and symbolism (metametaphor). So, the metametaphor and insideout discovered by the poet and philosopher K. Kedrov constitute the essence of all world literature, in which the choice between Myths or Reality remains with K. Kedrov's “OR”.

Anatoly Zolotukhin,

Odysseus in Homer's poem tells about the island of Crete. Today the island of Crete, which is part of Greece, is inhabited by about half a million people. The residents are mainly engaged in agriculture. The industry is underdeveloped, railways no. In a word, the abundance that Homer reports about is not present on the island of Crete and in
trace. Until the 70s of the XIX century, the inhabitants of Crete did not even know that under their feet in the ground rests in ruins oldest civilization, which was once the pearl of the Mediterranean.

A certain Cretan merchant named Minos Chalokerinos, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, the namesake of the famous king Minos, came across the ruins of an ancient building, found ancient utensils. Reports of this discovery spread around the world, interested the famous G. Schliemann, but the excavations began to be carried out by the Englishman Arthur Evans in 1900, who became the discoverer of Cretan culture. Evans saw the magnificent palace of Minos (as Evans called it), multi-storey, with a huge number of rooms, corridors, baths, storerooms, with running water, sewerage. In the palace halls, the walls were painted with frescoes. Together with huge vessels (pithos), weapons, ornaments, tablets with inscriptions were found. Homer did not lie, Crete was indeed the center of the riches and arts of antiquity.

The apparently richest Cretan-Mycenaean culture, which had perished, undoubtedly had its own literature. However, nothing remained of it, except for the inscriptions on clay tablets, which the Englishmen Ventris and Chadwig managed to decipher only in 1953. However, the Cretan-Mycenaean culture cannot be ignored in the history of literature. It is the link between the culture of Ancient Egypt and the Hellenic culture.

Until the 20th century, science, in essence, knew nothing about the antiquities of Crete, except for the testimonies of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Diodorus, which were perceived as legendary, fabulous material.

The heyday of the Cretan culture falls, apparently, in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. NS. Legends associate it with the name of King Minos. “Minos was the first, as we know from legend, to acquire a fleet for himself, having seized a large part of the sea, which is now called Hellenic,” wrote the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Herodotus called Minos "the lord of the sea." Cretan cities had no fortifications. Apparently, Crete had an excellent fleet, which fully ensured the safety of its cities. Thucydides and Diodorus considered Minos to be a Greek. Homer called him "Cronion's interlocutor."

... Homeric epic and all mythology - this is the main legacy that the Greeks transferred from barbarism to civilization.
F. Engels

Homer is so great, so significant both for the spiritual history of the ancient world, and for subsequent epochs in the history of all mankind, that an entire culture should rightfully be named after him.

Homer was a Greek, apparently from the Ionians from the shores of Asia Minor.

Today, in the five billionth family of humanity, Greeks are relatively few: something about 12 million, and one third of them live outside Greece. Once they were a huge cultural force in the world, spreading their influence far beyond the borders of the metropolis.

The ancient Greek tribes, of course, were not a single people, and they did not call themselves Greeks either. This is what the Romans later called them after one of the small tribes in southern Italy. They themselves called themselves Hellenes. The ancestry of the Hellenes is lost in the 12th century BC. NS. The indigenous population at that time, apparently, were Pelazgs; tribes who came from Asia Minor and from the north of the Balkan Peninsula merged with them.

What were the Greeks like in those distant times? Today they are relatively short (165-170 cm), with dark wavy hair, dark skin and dark eyes. In those days, the height of men, judging by archaeological excavations, reached 180 cm.

Homer calls the Achaeans "curly", Menelaus "light-haired" or "golden-haired." Agameda, the ancient healer, who "knew all the healing herbs, how much the earth gives birth to them, was also light-haired." Odysseus was also light-haired and, presumably, most of the Greeks. Homer paints the outward appearance of his characters. Agamemnon is tall, thin, Odysseus is shorter and stockier. Standing next to Menelaus, he was somewhat inferior to him, but sitting looked "more mature". Menelaus spoke little, fluently, but weighty, "striking", speaking bluntly, "neocularly." The portrait of Odysseus is magnificent in the Iliad. So he got up, lowered his eyes, fixed them on the ground, stood quietly, motionless, as if he was looking for and could not find words and did not know what to say, "like a simple man." What is it, or has he lost the power of speech out of anger, or is he completely stupid, unspoken, "stupid"? But then a voice escaped from his mighty chest, and speech, "like a strong blizzard, rushed out of his mouth" - "No, no one would have dared to compete with Odysseus with words."

Homer captured the details of the lives of his contemporaries. Sometimes they are no different from what we have observed in our day. Here he tells how a playing boy builds something on the seashore from wet sand and then “scatters with his hand and foot, frolicking,” or how “jugular meshes” (mules) “pull a rough-hilly bar of a ship or a huge mast from a high mountain along the road ... ", or how a working person rests:

... the lumberjack husband begins to cook his dinner,
Sitting under a shady mountain, when he had already filled his hands,
Throwing the forest high, and finds languor in the soul,
His feelings are overwhelmed by the craving for sweet food.

Homer is very circumstantial - from his descriptions one can vividly imagine the labor process of a man of his day. The poet, apparently, was close to the common people, perhaps in his youth he built rafts and ships and sailed on them on the "boundless sea." This is felt in the way he describes in detail and, perhaps, lovingly the work of Odysseus, who was building his raft:

He began to cut trees and soon finished work,
He cut twenty logs, peeled them, with sharp brass
I scraped it out smoothly, then leveled it, trimming it along the cord.
Sometimes Calypso returned to him with a drill.
He began to drill the beams and, having drilled everything, rallied them,
Sewing with long bolts and pushing in with large thorns.

Etc. (V). Using Homer's detailed and loving description, the carpenter of our day will freely build the structure made by Odysseus.

Homer accurately and in detail described the cities in which his contemporaries and compatriots lived. The city of his days appears to our imagination quite realistically and visibly with streets and squares, temples and houses of townspeople, and even with outbuildings:

... With loopholes, the walls surround it;
The pier is deep on both sides: the entrance is
The pier is cramped by ships, which on the right and left
The shore is lined, and each of them is under a protective roof;
There is also a trading square around the Posidonov temple,
Standing firmly on the hewn stones; tackle
All the ships there, the supply of sails and ropes in spacious
Buildings are kept, oars are also prepared smooth there.

The city walls are of "wonderful beauty," Homer does not forget to insert, for the townspeople of his time thought not only about the inaccessibility and strength of the walls, but also about their beauty.

We learn, though in general terms, about the existence of medicine in Homer's day. In the army of the Achaeans there was a doctor, a certain Machaon, the son of Asclepius, the god of healing. He examined Menelaus's wound, squeezed out the blood and showered it with "doctors." What these means were, accurate and detailed Homer does not say. It's a secret. It was discovered by Asclepius the centaur Chiron, the kindest creature with the face of a man and the body of a horse, the educator of many heroes - Hercules, Achilles, Jason.

Healing is done not only by specially trained people, "the sons of Asclepius", or healers like the light-haired Agameda, but also by individual warriors who have learned certain recipes. The hero Achilles knew them from the centaur Chiron, and Patroclus, who recognized them from Achilles.

Homer even described the surgery:

Spread the hero, with a knife he stings
Carved with a bitter feathered, washed from it with warm water
Black blood and sprinkled with a worn root
Bitter, healing pain, which he completely
The pain relieves: the blood has subsided, and the ulcer has dried up.

The Greeks considered Homer to be their first and greatest poet. However, his poetry was already crowned with a great culture, created by more than one generation. It would be naive to think that it, like a miracle, arose on uncultivated soil. We do not know much about what preceded it, but the very system of poetic thinking of the great old man, the world of his moral and aesthetic ideas, suggests that this is the pinnacle of a centuries-old cultural process, a brilliant generalization of the spiritual interests and ideals of a society that has already traveled a long way of historical formation. Historians believe that Greece in Homer's time was no longer as rich and highly developed as in the preceding Cretan-Mycenaean era. Affected, apparently, inter-tribal wars and the invasion of new, less developed tribes, which delayed and even somewhat pushed Greece back. But we will use the poems of Homer, and in them the picture is different. (Maybe these are only poetic memories of times long past?) Judging by the descriptions of Homer, the peoples who inhabited the shores of Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the entire Eastern
Mediterranean, they lived richly, Troy was already a well-built city with wide squares.

Household items described by Homer testify to the height of culture.

The lyre, on which Achilles played, was "luxuriant, exquisitely decorated", with a "silver cap on top."

In his tent are chairs and luxurious purple rugs. On the table there are "beautiful baskets" for bread.

Speaking of Elena sitting at the loom, Homer will not fail to glance at the canvas: it turns out to be a "light, two-fold cover", something like an antique tapestry depicting scenes from the Trojan War ("battles, exploits of trojan horses and danaev "). Presumably, during Homer's time, episodes of the Trojan War were the subject of not only oral legends, songs, but also pictorial and plastic creations.

The beauty of the goddess Hera, colorfully described by the poet, also testifies to the height of the general material culture of the world of the era of Homer. The poet describes in detail, with delight the decoration of the goddess, all the tricks of the women's dress, her beauty:

In the ears - beautiful earrings with triple suspensions,
They played brightly: the beauty around from the goddess shone.
The sovereign Hera overshadowed the head with a light cover.
Lush, new, which, like the sun, shone with whiteness.
Tied the beauties of a magnificent mold to her bright legs,
So for the eyes a delightful body adorned with decoration,
Hera came out of the falsehood ...

The poet loves to dwell on military armor, clothing, chariots, drawing in detail every detail of them. Using his descriptions, you can accurately recreate the household items that were used by his contemporaries. Hera's chariot had two copper wheels with eight spokes on an iron axle. The wheels had gold rims, with copper spikes tightly placed, the hubs are rounded in silver. The body was secured with straps lavishly trimmed with silver and gold. Two braces towered above him, the drawbar was trimmed with silver, and the harness was trimmed with gold. "Wonderful for the gaze!"

And here is a description of the warrior's vestments: Paris, going to battle with Menelaus, puts on “lush” leggings on his “white legs”, fastening them with silver buckles, put copper armor on his chest, threw a belt on his shoulder and a silver-nail sword with a copper blade, put it on his head a shiny helmet with a crest and a horse's mane, he took a heavy spear in his hands.

Such weapons, of course, were cumbersome and heavy, and Homer, reporting the death of one or another warrior, usually ends the scene with the phrase: "He fell to the ground with a noise, and armor thundered on the fallen one." Armor was the pride of a warrior, his property, and quite expensive, so the winner hurried to take them off the loser, it was a trophy and honorable and rich.

The state apparatus does not yet exist in Homer's days; peoples live in patriarchal simplicity, producing everything on their own kleros (allotment). But the beginnings of tax levies are already outlined. “I rewarded myself for the loss with a rich collection from the people,” says Alkina in the poem. Class stratification was already quite sharply marked in Greek society in the days of Homer. The poet colorfully depicts the life of the top of the people, the luxury of its dwellings, clothes, and a comfortable life. It is unlikely that the house of Odysseus was very luxurious, but even here there are “rich, elaborate armchairs”, they are covered with “patterned fabric”, a bench is placed under the feet, a “silver tub”, for washing hands, a “golden washstand”. The "smooth table", apparently, was light, it was pushed by a slave. Slaves and youths serve food, the housekeeper manages the supplies, gives them out. Here, too, the herald makes sure that the cups are not empty.

The house of Nestor was also rich, where the son of Odysseus, Telemachus, arrived, received by the elder as an honored guest. He puts Telemachus in "ringing-space rest" on a "slit" bed.

The youngest daughter of Nestor took Telemachus to a cool bath, washed him and rubbed him with "pure oil." In a tunic and a rich chlamyd, the young son of Odysseus emerged from the bath, "like a god with a radiant face."

Homer also described the rich feasts of the Greeks, to which, presumably, all free citizens of the city were invited, as, for example, on Pylos during the feast of Poseidon ("the azure-haired god"):

There were nine benches: on benches, five hundred on each,
The people were sitting, and there were nine bulls in front of each.
Having tasted sweet wombs, they already burned Thigh before God ...

Homer described in detail how, during the feast, the youths carry the "light drink" around the guests, "starting from the right according to custom," how the tongues of sacrificial animals are thrown into the fire, etc.

At the feasts, they ate meat (fish was not included in the range of delicacies), abundantly sprinkling it with grains of barley. After the feast, the young men sang a hymn to God ("loud pian").

The fate of the poor is sad. You can judge this by the way Penelope's suitors and even slaves treated the unrecognized Odysseus, who came to his house in the rags of a beggar, what amusement they made for themselves from the argument and fight of two beggars, one of whom was Odysseus in disguise (“the suitors, clasping their hands, everyone was dying of laughter "):

Wait, I'll deal with you, you dirty tramp:
You are daring in the presence of noble gentlemen and you are not timid in soul.

Odyssey is threatened by one of the suitors. The threat to an old beggar man is even more terrible:

I'll throw you into a black-sided ship and send you instantly
To the mainland to Ekhet the king, the slayer of mortals.
He will cut off your ears and nose with merciless copper,
Will rip up the shame and give it raw to the dogs to eat.

Homer's poetry, of course, was already the pinnacle of some very large artistic culture that did not come down to us. She brought him up, shaped his artistic taste, taught him to understand physical and moral beauty. He embodied the highest achievements of this culture in poetry as a genius son of his people. In ancient Greece, there was a cult of beauty, and above all the physical beauty of a person. Homer captured this cult in poetry, the great sculptors of Greece, somewhat later, in marble.

All the gods, except, perhaps, the lame Hephaestus, were beautiful. Homer constantly talks about the beauty of his heroes.
Elena, the daughter of Leda, was so beautiful that all her suitors, and these were the rulers of the city-states, in order to avoid mutual resentment and strife, agreed to recognize and protect her chosen one among themselves, and when Elena, already Menelaus's wife, was kidnapped by Paris and taken from Mycenae to Troy, the treaty entered into force. All Greece went to Troy. Thus began the great war described by Homer in the Iliad. Paris, according to Homer's descriptions, "shone with beauty and clothing," he has "lush curls and charm." He received "the gracious gift of the golden Aphrodite" - beauty.

Everything in Homer is beautiful: the gods, and people, and all of Hellas, "glorious wives with beauty."

Homer describes Elena's appearance with heartfelt tenderness. So she got up, overshadowed with silvery fabrics. She went, "tender tears are streaming down her face." The elders saw her. It would seem that they should all be inflamed with hatred and indignation, because it has stirred up so many peoples, brought so many troubles to the inhabitants of Troy. But the elders cannot hold back their admiration: she is so beautiful, so beautiful - this "lily-framed" Elena:

The elders, as soon as they saw Elena walking to the tower,
Silent among themselves winged speeches spoke;
No, it is impossible to condemn that the Troy sons and Achaeans
Scolding for such a wife and suffering so long:
Verily, she is like the eternal goddesses!

For Homer, there are no guilty ones in the world, everything is done according to the will of the gods, however, and they are subject to the great moiras - fate. Elena is also innocent, her escape from Mycenae is the will of Aphrodite. Elder Priam, the ruler of besieged Troy, treats the young woman with paternal care. Seeing Elena, he friendly called her: "Walk, my dear child! .. You are innocent before me: the same gods are guilty."

Painting the scene of Menelaus's injury, Homer here pays tribute to beauty: "the thighs of the steep, beautiful legs are stained with purple blood" - and compares them to ivory "stained with purple". He likens the Trojan to the "young" Simonisy, who was defeated in battle, to a felled poplar, "a wet meadow to a pet" that is "even and clean." God Hermes appeared before Priam, "like a noble young man, with the appearance of the first brada, whose youth is charming."

Priam, complaining about fate and foreseeing his violent death, fears most of all what will appear to the eyes of people in an obscene form, with a body distorted by old age:

... Oh, the young man is glorious,
No matter how he lies, fallen in battle and torn to pieces by copper, -
Everything with him, and with the dead, whatever is open, is wonderful!
If, then, a gray-haired band and a gray-haired head of a man,
If the dogs desecrate the shame of a slain old man, -
There is no more woeful fate for unhappy people.

Talking about Ajax, Homer will not fail to note the "beauty of the face", he will talk about the "beautiful Achaean wives." About Ermia: "He had a captivating image of a young man with virgin down on fresh cheeks, in a beautiful youthful color." Megapeid "captivated young beauty." Etc.

Homer also glorifies the beauty of things. They are created by artists. He glorifies both his fellows, “singers who comfort the soul with the divine word,” and skilled jewelers. So, in the most pathetic part of the narrative, Homer fixes his gaze on a skillfully crafted badge, he cannot help but stop and describe it in detail:

Gold, lovely, with double hooks
The mantle was held by the plate: the master on the plate is skillfully
A formidable dog and in its mighty claws he has a young
The doe sculpted: as if alive, she trembled; and scary
The dog looked at her furiously, and
To get out, she kicked: in amazement that badge
I brought everyone.

Myths of Homeric Greece

Myths are the first form of poetic consciousness of the people. They contain his philosophy, his history, his morals, customs, his anxiety, worries, dreams, ideals and, in the end, the whole complex of his spiritual life.

The daily life of the ancient Greek took place in constant communication with the gods. This communication was, of course, not in reality, but in imagination, but from this it did not lose the power of reality for him. The whole world around him was inhabited by gods. In the sky and the stars, in the seas and rivers, in the forests and mountains - everywhere he saw the gods. Reading Homer these days, we cannot perceive his narration as a realistic depiction of true events. For us, this is a wonderful poetic fiction. For the ancient Greek, contemporary of the poet, it was an undeniable truth.

When we read in Homer: "She rose from the darkness young with purple fingers Eos", we understand that morning has come, and not just morning, but a bright, southern, sunny morning, a beautiful morning, fanned by the fresh breath of the sea, a morning like a young goddess , because the Eos named here is "young" and she has "purple fingers". The ancient Greek perceived this phrase in the same emotional coloring, but if for us Eos is a poetic image, then for the ancient Greek it was a real being - a goddess. The name Eos spoke to his heart a lot. He knew both wonderful and tragic stories about her. This is the goddess of the morning, sister of Helios, the sun god, and Selena, the moon goddess. She gave birth to stars and winds - cold, harsh Boreas and soft, gentle Zephyr. The ancient Greek imagined her to be the most beautiful young woman. Like real, ordinary women, she lived the life of the heart, she fell in love and suffered, enjoyed and grieved. She could not resist the courageous beauty of the god of war Ares and thus aroused the anger of Aphrodite, who was in love with him. The goddess of love, as punishment, instilled in her a constant and insatiable desire. Eos fell in love with the handsome Orion and kidnapped him. Orion's name brought with it a string of new legends. He was the son of the sea god Poseidon. His father gave him the ability to walk on the sea surface. He was a strong and courageous hunter, but also daring and arrogant. He dishonored young Merope, and the girl's father blinded him. Then, in order to receive his sight, he went to Helios himself, and he, with his life-giving rays, returned his sight. Orion was killed by the arrow of Artemis and was carried away to heaven. There he became one of the constellations.

The Greek knew another sad tale about the morning goddess. She once saw the young Trojan Titon, Priam's brother, and, subdued by his beauty, carried him away and became his beloved, giving birth to his son Memnon. Her love was so strong that she begged Zeus to give him immortality, but forgot to ask him for eternal youth. Handsome Titon became immortal, but every day something was lost in him. Life faded away, but did not go away at all. In the end, he became decrepit: he could no longer even move. The unfortunate goddess could only bitterly mourn her fatal mistake.

They say that Titon personified for the ancient Greeks the passing day, the fading, but not yet extinguished light. Perhaps! But what a wonderful and exciting legend about this natural phenomenon was created by the poetic fantasy of a genius people!
So, pink-fingered Eos! Morning! Morning and youth! Morning and beauty! Morning and love! All this merged in the minds of the ancient Greek, woven into amazingly beautiful legends.

We read in Homer the following phrase: "A heavy night has descended from the formidable sky."

Night (in Greek, Nikta) is also a goddess, but her name is already associated with other images - gloomy. She is the daughter of Chaos and the sister of Erebus (darkness) and, as Homer writes, "the queen of the immortals and mortals." She lives somewhere in the depths of Tartarus, where she meets her antipode and her brother Day, in order to replace him in the eternal change of day.

The Night has children and grandchildren. Her daughter Eris (strife) gave birth to Strife, Sorrow, Battle, Hunger, Murder. This evil, insidious goddess threw an apple of discord at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis and led entire nations - Greeks and Trojans - to war.

From the Night was born the formidable goddess of retribution, Nemesis. Her judgment is fair and swift. She punishes for the evil done by man. The sculptors portrayed her as the most beautiful (the Greeks could not otherwise) woman with a sword, wings and scales (sword - retribution, punishment, punishment; wings - the speed of retribution; scales - balancing guilt and punishment).

Night gave birth to the nymphs of the Hesperides. They live in the extreme west, by the Ocean River, in a beautiful garden, and they guard the apples, which give eternal youth. The Son of the Night was the mocking god Mom, the great mockingbird and bully. He is malicious, he laughs even at the gods themselves, and an angry Zeus expelled him from the kingdom of the gods of Olympus.

The Son of Night was Thanatos - the merciless god of death. Once Sisyphus managed to put Thanatos in chains, and people stopped dying, but this did not last long, and Thanatos, freed, again began to destroy the human race.

The Night had three terrible daughters: the moirae, the goddesses of fate. One of them was called Lachetis (drawing lots). Even before the birth of a person, she determined his life's fate. The second is Clotho (spinning). She spun the thread of a man's life. And the third is Atropos (inevitable). She broke this thread. Homer's Russian translators Gnedich and Zhukovsky called moir parks in their translations. The Greeks did not know such a word, "parks" is a Latin word, as the ancient Romans called moir, transferring them to their pantheon.

Perhaps the most beautiful son of the Night was Hymnos, the god of sleep. He is always beneficent, he heals people's sorrows, gives relief from heavy worries and thoughts. Homer paints a cute scene: Penelope yearns in her chambers for her missing husband, for her son Telemachus, who is threatened by both the "evil sea" and "treacherous killers", but now ... ...

Homer calls him "the sweeter." He, too, is a living being, a beautiful youth living on the island of Lemnos, at the spring of oblivion. He also has quite human feelings. He is in love with one of the Harits, Pazifaya, in love for a long time and hopelessly. But Hera needed his service, it was necessary to put Zeus to sleep. Gymnos hesitates, afraid of the wrath of the strongest of the gods. But Hera promises him the love of Pazifai:

You will finally cuff, you will call your wife
That Pazifai, for which you have been sighing for a long time.

And Gymnos is delighted, only asks Hera to swear by the "Styx with water" that she will fulfill her promise.

The Greek saw gods everywhere, and they were beautiful in their not divine, but human feelings, he elevated people to the ideal of deity, reduced the gods to people, and this was the attractive force of his mythology.

However, Greek mythology has undergone a certain evolution.

The first, most ancient gods were terrible. They could only inspire fear by their appearance and their actions. The man was still very weak and timid before the incomprehensible and formidable forces of nature. The raging sea, storms, huge waves, the whole infinity of the sea space frightened. A sudden, inexplicable movement of the earth's surface, which seemed so unshakable before, is an earthquake; explosions of a fire-breathing mountain, red-hot stones flying to the sky, a column of smoke and fire and a fiery river flowing down the slopes of the mountain; terrible storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, turning everything into chaos - all this shook the soul and demanded an explanation. Nature seemed hostile, ready to bring death or suffering to man at any moment. The forces of nature seemed like living things, and they were terrifying. The gods of the first generation are fierce. Uranus (sky) dropped his children into Tartarus. One of the Titans (sons of Uranus and Gaia) (earth) emasculated his father. From the blood spilled from the wound, monstrous giants with thick hair and beards and serpentine legs grew. They were destroyed by the Olympian gods. A fragment of the frieze of the altar in Pergamum (2nd century BC) has survived, where the sculpture depicts gigantomachy - the battle of the Olympian gods with giants. But the sculptor, obeying the reigning cult of beauty, depicted a giant with huge serpentine rings instead of legs, but also with a beautiful torso and a face similar to that of Apollo.

Cronus, who overthrew his father, devoured his children. To save Zeus, his mother Rhea threw a huge cobblestone into the mouth of the father-god instead of the child, which he calmly swallowed. The world was inhabited by terrible monsters, and with these monsters man bravely entered the fight.

The third generation of gods - Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades - Homeric gods. They carried bright humanistic ideals.

The Olympian gods invite people to participate in their battles with terrible giants, with all the monsters that Gaia has spawned. This is how people-heroes appeared. Russian word"Hero" of Greek origin (heros). The first generation of Greeks fought monsters. Hercules, while still a youth, killed the Kytheron lion, then the Nemean lion, taking possession of his skin, invulnerable to arrows, killed the Lernaean hydra with nine heads, cleared the stables of Augeus, and killed the monster-bull in Crete. So he performed twelve labors, cleansing the world from filth and monsters. The hero Cadmus, the son of the Phoenician king, killed the monster dragon and founded the city of Thebes. The hero Theseus killed a monster-minotaur in Crete. Minos's daughter, in love with Theseus, helped him to get out of the labyrinth, holding on to the thread (Ariadne's thread). Heroes go on long hikes. The Argonauts, led by Jason, go to distant Colchis and extract the golden fleece.

The next generation of heroes fights at the Scamander River - these are already characters from Homer's poems.

The history of the Greek gods went from chaos to order, from ugliness to beauty, from gods to man. The world of the gods is patriarchal. They live on Olympus. Each of them has his own house, built "according to the designs of the creative" blacksmith, artist and architect lame Hephaestus. They argue and quarrel, feast and enjoy the singing of the Muses and the "sounds of the beautiful lyre that clattered in the hands of Apollo," and, like people, taste the "sweet dream." "Blessed inhabitants of the sky!"

Olympus, where they say they founded their abode
Gods, where the winds do not blow, where the cold rain does not rustle,
Where blizzards do not rise in winter, where the air is cloudless
It is poured with light azure and permeated with the sweetest radiance;
There, for the gods in unspeakable joys, all the days go by.

The gods, although they live on high Olympus, are in constant communication with people, almost like a friend, almost like a neighbor. Achilles' mother Thetis informs her son that yesterday Zeus with all the gods, "with the host of immortals," went to the distant waters of the Ocean to visit, to a feast to the "immaculate Ethiopians." Apparently, the feast should be many days, for Zeus returned to Olympus only on the twelfth day. The idea of ​​the country of the Ethiopians is still rather vague, they live somewhere on the edge of an inhabited land, near the distant waters of the Ocean.

The gods flew, they put on golden sandals with wings, as Hermes did, or ascended in the form of a cloud. Thetis rose "from the frothy sea" with "early fog". She appeared before crying son"Like a light cloud."
The gods for the ancient Greek were always near him, they helped or hindered him, they appeared to him in the form of his relatives or people known to him. Most often they came to him in a dream. So, Athena entered Penelope's bedroom through the keyhole, "blowing the air with a light", appeared before her in the guise of her sister Iftima, "the beautiful daughter of the Elder Ikaria", the wife of "the mighty Efmel", and began to admonish her, dwelling in a "sweet slumber in the silent gates of dreams ”, do not be sad. "The gods, who live an easy life, forbid you to cry and lament: your Telemachus will return unharmed."

The gods send their signs to people. It was usually a flight of birds, most often an eagle (on the right - good luck, on the left - bad luck).
Whatever serious action the Greek planned, his first concern was to appease the gods so that they would help him. For this he made a sacrifice to them.

Homer described in great detail the act of sacrifice in honor of the goddess Athena. They brought the best heifer from the flock, bound her horns with gold, the sons of Nestor washed their hands in a tub lined with flowers, brought a box of barley. Nestor, having washed his hands, took a handful of barley and showered them on the head of the heifer, the sons did the same, then they threw the wool from the head of the heifer into the fire, praying to Athena, and then Frazimed thrust an ax into her body. The heifer fell down. The women cried out - Nestor's daughters, daughters-in-law and his "meek-hearted" wife. This detail is beautiful: how humane were the women of Homer's time!

The Greeks asked the gods, begged, but in their hearts they scolded. So, in the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the first, when his sword broke into pieces from hitting Paris's helmet, "cried out, looking at the vast sky:" Zeus, not one of the immortals, like you, is evil! "

Elena speaks with Aphrodite just as harshly and abusively when she calls her to the bedchamber, where Paris is waiting for her “on a bed chiseled with beauty and clothes”. “Oh, cruel! Seduce me again, are you burning? Do you appear to me with an evil deceit in your heart? Walk to your pet yourself ... always with him languishing as a spouse or a worker. "
Even the chief of the gods is sometimes not spared. One of Homer's characters turns to the sky in this way: "Zeus is an Olympian, and you have already become an obvious false lover." The gods, of course, respect their supreme leader. When he enters the palace (on Olympus), everyone gets up, no one dares to sit in his presence, but his wife, Hera, greets him quite unkindly (she does not forgive him for his sympathy for the Trojans): ? "

Zeus has black eyebrows. When he “bathes them” as a sign of consent, his “fragrant” hair rises and the many-hill Olympus is shaken.

No matter how formidable Zeus is, he is clearly afraid of his wife. She argues with him, and "yells", and can "embitter him with an insulting speech." When the nymph Thetis, the mother of Achilles, turned to him for help, he "sighing deeply," replies: "A mournful matter, you are hating me haughty Hera", promises to help, but so that his wife does not know about it: "Get out now , but Hera will not see you on Olympus. "

The gods, of course, are on guard of justice. (It should be so.) And Zeus, "seeing our deeds and punishing our atrocities," and all the other inhabitants of Olympus.

The blessed gods do not like dishonest deeds,
They value good actions in people, justice.

But this, as they say, is ideal. In fact, they suffer from all the vices of people. They are both deceitful and insidious and vicious. Hera and Athena hate and persecute all Trojans only because one of them, the shepherd boy Paris, called not them the most beautiful, but Aphrodite. This latter protects both Paris and all the Trojans, not at all caring about justice.

The Greeks were afraid of the wrath of the gods and tried in every possible way to appease them. However, sometimes they dared to raise a hand against them. Thus, in the Iliad, Homer tells how, on the battlefield, the frantic Diomedes, in the heat of anger, throws his spear towards Aphrodite, who was here trying to save her son Aeneas, and wounded her “tender hand”. "The immortal blood" of the goddess began to flow. It was not blood (after all, the gods are "bloodless, and they call them immortals"), but a special moisture, "which flows from the happy inhabitants of heaven." But the goddess was in pain ("In the darkness of feelings the beautiful body has darkened from suffering") - "she is leaving, vague, with deep sorrow." Zeus, learning about her trouble, told her with a fatherly smile:

Dear daughter! Noisy battle is commanded not to you.
You are busy with the affairs of pleasant sweet marriages.

It seems that the heroes of Homer do not do a single more or less serious deed without advice or direct orders from the gods: Agamemnon grievously insulted Achilles, an ardent warrior flared up in anger, a hand reached out to the sword, but then Athena, sent by the Hero, appeared, visible only him and no one else, and stopped him, saying: "With evil words, an ulcer, but do not touch the sword with your hand." And he obeyed, “squeezing his mighty hand,” remembering the truth that was instilled in the Greeks from childhood: from the gods everything comes to man: both love and death, crowning life. Moira predetermines it. Some die from a "slow illness" which, "tore apart the body", expels "an exhausted soul" from it, others suddenly from the "quiet arrow" of Artemis (woman) or Apollo (man).

The Greeks believed in an afterlife, but it was the existence of shadows that preserved all human feelings: as soon as "the hot life leaves the cold bones, having flown away like a dream, their soul disappears."

Homer also described Hades, the region of the dead. It must be assumed that someone still in those distant times visited the northern latitudes, because the description of Hades is very similar to the description of the north during the polar night: Helios (the sun) there “never shows a radiant face to the eyes of people”, “Night the gloomy one there from time immemorial surrounds the living ":

… Everything here terrifies the living; running noisily here
Terrible rivers, great streams; here oceans
Deep waters flow, no one can swim across them.
And Odysseus, who got there, is seized with "pale horror."

All the dead, both the righteous and the evildoers, fall into Hades. This is the lot of all mortals. Odysseus saw there the mother of the “joyless sufferer” Oedipus, Jocasta, who “opened the doors of Hades herself” (committed suicide), and his own mother Anticlea, who “ruined the sweet life,” yearning for him, Odysseus. He saw there his friend and associate Achilles. The conversation that took place between them has a deep meaning, in it - the glorification of life, the one and only ("joyful light", "sweet sweet life"!). In Hades, Achilles reigns over the dead, and Odysseus reproaches his friend for his murmur:

And so he answered, sighing heavily:
- Oh, Odysseus, do not hope to give me consolation in death;
I wish I was alive, like a day laborer, working in the field,
Serving a poor plowman to get his daily bread,
Is it not possible to reign here over the soulless dead, dead.

Such is Hades, the abode of the dead. But there is an even more terrible place - "Deep Tartarus", the very "last limit of land and sea." He is gloomier than Hades, where Odysseus visited, there is eternal darkness:

A distant abyss, where the deepest abyss is underground:
Where is the copper platform and iron gates, Tartarus.
As far from hell as the bright sky is from home.

The defeated gods languish there - the father of Zeus Cronus, once the supreme god, there is the father of Prometheus the titan Iapetus, they "can never enjoy the wind or the light of the high-setting sun for ever."

The ancient Greek believed in the existence somewhere on Earth of the beautiful Champs Elysees, where "the light, carefree days of man run through." The lucky ones live there. Who specifically, Homer does not tell, he only draws this eternal, alluring dream of mankind. There:

“There are no snowstorms, no showers, no coldness of winter”, and “Zephyr, flying sweetly and noisily, is sent there to the blessed people as an Ocean with a slight coolness”.

Homer's personality

Don't try to find out where Homer was born and who he was.
All cities proudly consider themselves his homeland;
The spirit is important, not the place. Fatherland of the poet -
The brilliance of the Iliad itself, the Odyssey itself is a story.
Unknown Greek poet. II century. BC NS.

So in the end, the ancient Greeks decided the dispute about where the great poet was born, although seven cities claimed the role of the birthplace of the author of famous poems. Modern times have already ceased to be interested in this issue, but disputes in science have flared up on another occasion, whether there was Homer at all, whether this is a collective image of the poet, and whether poems existed in the form in which we know them now. It was suggested that each song of theirs was formed separately by different aedami, and then only they were combined and made up a single narrative. However, the inner unity of the poem, which we feel, now reading it, the unity and harmony of the narrative, all the unified logic of its general concept, the figurative system convince us that we are faced with one creator, a brilliant author, who, perhaps, using some of the already available with small songs about various episodes of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus, he composed the poem as a whole, permeating its entire fabric with a single poetic breath.

Homer brought up the ancient world. The ancient Greek studied him from childhood and all his life carried in himself the ideas, images, feelings generated in his imagination by the poems of the great old man. Homer shaped the views, tastes, and morals of the ancient Greeks. The most educated, the most refined minds of the ancient world bowed before the authority of the patriarch of Hellenic culture.

He is, of course, the son of his age, of his people. From childhood he absorbed the morality and ideals of his compatriots, therefore his moral world is the moral world of the Greeks of his time. But this does not in the least detract from his personal individual qualities. His inner spiritual world, which he revealed with such exciting poetic power in his poems, has become the world of all his readers for millennia, and even we, remote from him both for centuries and space, experience the beneficial influence of his personality, perceive his ideas, the concept of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Who among us will not be thrilled by the picture of Agamemnon's return to his homeland and then his vile treacherous murder?

He began to kiss his sweet fatherland; seeing again

What troubles could Agamemnon expect at this moment?
What suspicions do you have of anyone?

Meanwhile, it was at this hour that his death awaited, and from the people closest to him - the wife of Clytemnestra and a relative
Egista. The latter, with a "tender call", introduced him, "to the suspicion of a stranger," into the house and killed him "at a merry feast." Together with Agamemnon's brother Menelaus, we are shocked by the betrayal and such a tragic ending of the hero's joyful return to his homeland:

... a sweet heart was torn to pieces in me:
Crying bitterly, I fell to the ground, I became disgusted
Life, and I didn't want to look at the sunlight, and for a long time
He cried and lay on the ground for a long time, sobbing inconsolably.

Homer made me feel the abomination of betrayal, because he himself felt hatred and disgust for all cruel and treacherous acts, that he was humane and noble, and this personal quality of his is felt in every verse, in every epithet.

The ancient poet unknown to us is right when he said that it is not important where the poet was born, but what he put into his poems - his thought, his soul.

Reading the Iliad and Odyssey, we constantly feel the presence of the poet, his moral, political and aesthetic ideals, we look at the world through his eyes, and this world is beautiful, because that is how he seemed to the poet.

Homer's story is far from biased, but he is not dispassionate, he is agitated. His heroes rage, passions play with their souls, often pushing them to madness, the poet does not judge them. His narrative is imbued with humane tolerance. His position in relation to the events taking place in his poems and to the characters is similar to the position of the chorus in the ancient theater. The choir rejoices, saddens, but never gets angry, does not condemn and does not interfere with events.

Homer cannot hide his constant admiration for both the world and man. The world is immense, great, it is beautiful, it can be formidable, it can bring death to a person, but it does not suppress a person. Man obeys inevitability, for the gods also obey it, but he never shows slavish self-abasement towards the gods. He argues, protests and even swings at the gods. The world is beautiful in all its manifestations: in good, and in evil, and in joy, and in tragedy.

And this is the position of the poet himself, these are the signs of his personality.

In his poems, Homer also expresses his own political judgments. He is for a single ruler ("there is no good in the power of many"). The ruler holds power from God (he is given by Zeus and the "Scepter and Laws"). He is "obliged to both say the word and listen." The great quality of a ruler is the ability to listen. The ability to listen to opinions, advice, take into account the situation, events, circumstances, be flexible, as we would say in our time, is the most valuable thing a ruler can have, and the wisest Homer understood this well. Through the lips of Elder Nestor, he teaches the ruler: "Fulfill the thought of another, if someone, inspired by the heart, says good." At the same time, Homer reminds us that “in the aggregate, one person cannot recognize everything”. One is endowed by the gods with "the ability to fight", the other with a "light mind", the fruits of which both "the cities stand" and "the tribes prosper mortals."

Homer praises the good ruler. His Odysseus was a kind, wise king and loved his people "like a benevolent father." The poet repeats this more than once. Homer admires nature:

Night…
In the sky for about a month of a clear host
The stars seem beautiful if the air is calm;
Everything opens up around - hills, high mountains,
Dales; the celestial ether opens up all boundless;
All the stars are visible; and the shepherd, amazed, rejoices in his soul.

And here is the winter picture:

Snow, rushing, falls in flakes of frequent
In winter… snow is continuous;
The highest mountains and cliffs covering the tops,
And the flowering steppes, and the fat plowmen of the cornfield;
Snow is falling on the shore and on the dock of the gray sea;
Waves, having come running, absorb it; but everything else
It covers.

Speaking, for example, about the journey of Telemachus in search of his father, he speaks of the coming morning.

It would seem a simple, unassuming and local picture. The sun rose, its rays began to play ... but Homer gave it a cosmic and universal character:

Helios rose from the beautiful sea and appeared on the copper
The vault of heaven to shine for the immortal gods and for the mortals,
Rock of people who live on fertile land.

Homer's attitude to events, to the world, to a person is expressed by epithets, comparisons, and they are graphic, picturesque and emotionally colored. He is kind, infinitely and wisely kind. Thus, he says that Athena removes the arrow shot in Menelaus's chest, "like a tender mother drives a fly away from her son, who has dozed off sweetly."

Together with Odysseus and his comrades, we find ourselves on the shores of the warm southern sea. We are captivated by the charm of the world and life, painted with such wonderful power by the genius poet: “the divinely languid night has come. We all fell asleep under the sound of waves hitting the shore ”; together with Homer we admire the beautiful Penelope, the personification of eternal femininity, when she dwells "in the silent gates of dreams", "full of sweet slumber."

In every word of Homer - his soul, his thoughts, his joy or sorrow, it is colored by his feeling, and this feeling is always moral, sublime.
ill
Here he shows us Odysseus, who is in deep sorrow, far from his native Ithaca:

He sat alone on a rocky shore, and his eyes
Were in tears; flowed away slowly, drop by drop,
Life for him is in constant longing for a distant homeland.

And we believe that for the sake of his homeland, he could, like his singer Homer, renounce both immortality and the "eternal blossoming youth" that the nymph Calypso offered him.

Homer loves broad pictorial comparisons. They become, as it were, plug-in novellas, full of drama and dynamics. Talking about how Odysseus cried while listening to the aeda of Demodoc, Homer suddenly stops and distracts us to another human misfortune: after a stubborn battle, a warrior fell in front of the besieged city. He fought to the last, "trying to save fellow citizens and family from the fateful day." Seeing how he shuddered “in mortal struggle,” his spouse bows to him. She is near, she is with him. Now, clinging to his chest, she stands, crying in sorrow, already a widow, and the enemies beat her with spear shafts, tear her away from her dear body and "the poor (Homer is beautiful in his all-pervading compassion) is carried away into slavery and long grief." Slavery and long grief! Homer will not forget to add that there, in captivity, slavery, her cheeks will fade from sadness and crying.

Homer's poems glorify the life, youth and beauty of man. He applies the most tender epithets to the words "life" and "youth." We see in this the features of wise old age. Homer was undoubtedly old, knew a lot, saw a lot, thought about a lot. He can already talk about "beautiful youth" and about the fact that youth is careless, arrogant, that "youth is rarely reasonable." He can, on the basis of his great life experience and deep reflections, make sad conclusions about a person, about his general fate:

The gods were omnipotent judged us, unhappy people,
To live on earth in grief: the gods alone are carefree.

And from here comes his wise tolerance. He looked into the souls of men and described the seething passions, either raising a person to the heavens of the most lofty ideals, then casting him into the abyss of monstrous atrocities. Homer did not idealize either his gods, who were like people in everything, or his heroes, who were like their gods in both vices and valor. The wise old man did not allow himself to judge either one or the other. They were taller than him. For him, in essence, there were no guilty ones in the world. Everything - both evil and good - everything is from the gods, and for the gods (they are also not omnipotent) - from the great and omnipotent Destiny.

We don't know anything about Homer the human. Who is this brilliant creator? Where was he born, in what family, where did he die and was buried? Only a sculptural portrait of a blind old man has come down to us. Is this Homer? - Unlikely. But he is alive, he is with us, we feel his closeness. He is in his poems. Here is his world, his soul. He could have said about himself in those distant times, like a Russian poet: "No, I will not all die, my soul in the cherished lyre will survive my ashes and flee decay ..."

Iliad

Anger, oh goddess, sing ...
Homer

This is how the Iliad begins. We understand the word "sing" as a call to praise. But the poet turns to the muse not at all in order to glorify anger. He asks her to help him truthfully (certainly truthfully, because only in truth did he see the dignity of the story) to tell about the deeds of distant antiquity, about battles and carnage and about what troubles a person's unrestrained angry impulse can do if this person holds power in his hands and strength.

Anger, anger and anger! The theme of anger permeates the entire poem. One can only marvel at the unity of design and execution.
Let's trace the history of anger, how it began, how it manifested itself and how it ended.

The protagonist of the Iliad and the main bearer of anger is Achilles, the son of the Myrmidon king Peleus, the grandson of Aacus and the daughter of the river god Asopa. So, Achilles is descended from the gods, he is the great-grandson of Zeus. His mother is also not a mere mortal. She is the nymph Thetis. According to the mythology of the Greeks, forests, mountains and rivers are inhabited by beautiful and young creatures - nymphs, “living in beautiful groves and in light springs, and in valleys with golden flowers”. In the mountains these are Oreads, in the seas - Nereids, in the forests - Dryads, in rivers - Naiads. One of these Nereids was the mother of Achilles Thetis. She, of course, cannot claim equality with the Olympic goddesses, but she is always close to Zeus, and he accepts her in a friendly and affectionate manner.

The domain of Achilles is somewhere in the east of the northern part of Greece, in Thessaly. Subject to his father Peleus, and therefore to him, the Myrmidons trace their origin from ants, as indicated by their very name. The Greek word for ant is myrmex. The myth says that during the reign of Achilles' grandfather Aacus, the goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, sent a disease to his people, and he died out. Then Eak raised his prayers to the main god, his father, and he gave him new subjects - ants, turning them into people.

A chain of events connects Achilles with Troy. The tragedy that eventually led Troy and all its inhabitants to death began at the wedding of his parents, Thetis and Peleus. All gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding, except for one - the goddess of Strife. The offended goddess insidiously threw the so-called "apple of discord" on which it was written - "for the most beautiful." Three goddesses immediately declared their claims to him - Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them considered herself the most beautiful. Zeus, although he was the most formidable of the gods, knowing the nature of the goddesses,
prudently evaded the decision and sent them to the Trojan shepherd boy, Paris, let him judge as an outsider and impartial person. Paris was, of course, not a simple shepherd, but a young prince, the son of Priam and Hecuba. At his birth, Hecuba had a terrible dream, as if she had given birth not to a boy, but to a burning brand that burned Troy. The frightened queen removed the born son from the palace, and he grew up and matured on the wooded slopes of Ida, grazing
livestock. The beautiful inhabitants of Olympus turned to him. Each promised her gifts: Hera - power, Athena - wisdom, Aphrodite - the love of the most beautiful woman in Hellas. The last gift seemed to young Paris the most attractive, and he gave the apple to Aphrodite, winning her constant favor and the same constant hatred of the other two. This was followed by his journey, staying with the hospitable and innocent Menelaus, from whom he stole a beautiful wife and untold treasures with the connivance of Aphrodite. Because of them, the warlike Achaeans and their allies ended up at the walls of Troy, in number, judging by the description of Homer, something about a hundred thousand, on the multi-oared ships from 50 to 120 warriors in each. Fifty ships of them were commanded by the leader
Myrmidonian is the mighty Achilles, whom we see in the Iliad as young, full of strength, courage and anger.

Two more circumstances should be pointed out from the background. At his birth, Thetis was predicted that her son would not live long if he wanted to fight and achieve military glory. If he agrees to obscurity, then he will live to a ripe old age in peace and well-being. Thetis, like any mother, preferred the latter for her son. When they began to collect an army for a campaign on Troy, she hid him in women's clothing on the island of Skyros, believing that among the daughters of King Lycomedes he would remain unrecognized. But she did not know the tricks of Odysseus. This latter, wishing to captivate the hero on a campaign, came to Skyros with gifts. Of course, it was difficult to distinguish young Achilles, whose fluff had not yet appeared over upper lip, from the girls around him. And Odysseus offered a choice of women's jewelry, and among them swords and spears. The girls chose jewelry, while Achilles grabbed a sword and was recognized.

So, Thetis failed to provide his son with a long and calm life, he preferred a short life, but full of storms, anxieties, and glory. Achilles knew about his early death, others also knew about it, and above all his mother, whom we see constantly sad, trembling for his fate.

A halo of tragedy surrounds the young head of Achilles. “Your age is short, and its limit is close! ..” - Thetis tells him. "In an evil time, my son, I gave birth to you in the house." Homer reminds us of this more than once in the poem, and this shadow of imminent death, which constantly follows Achilles, softens our attitude towards the young hero. It also softens the good heart of Homer, who, not considering himself entitled to judge the deeds of the gods and heroes of antiquity, cannot describe the acts of the cruel ferocity of Achilles without an inner shudder. And they are truly ferocious.

Achilles is quick-tempered ("quick-tempered") and indomitable in anger, wild, angry, long-remembered.

His friend Patroclus in his hearts reprimands him:

Unmerciful! Your parent was not complacent Peleus,
Mother is not Thetis; but the blue sea, gloomy rocks
you were born, stern-hearted, like yourself!

The whole poem, as a single core, is permeated with the theme of this anger. And Homer does not sympathize with this essentially selfish, unjustly ambitious feeling of his hero. What caused this anger? Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the troops of all the Achaeans, took the captured Briseis from Achilles after the division of the war booty. He did this because he himself had to part with his prey Chryseis, returned to his father at the behest of Apollo. Agamemnon, as the poet described him, is both brave and mighty, like all warriors, and fierce in battle, but not stable in decisions, susceptible to panic and, perhaps, not smart. He took the spoils of war from Achilles, without thinking about the consequences. Then he will deeply regret it and will offer the soldier both rich gifts and the taken away maiden. But Achilles will proudly reject them. His fighters, and there are more than two thousand of them, and he himself remain aloof from the battles, and the Achaeans suffer one defeat after another. Now the Trojans, led by Hector, came close to the camp of the besiegers, getting close to the ships in order to burn them and doom all the aliens to death. Many of them died, recent associates of Achilles, but he only gloats over their failures and thanks Zeus for this.

And only at the last minute, when the danger of general death hung over everyone, he allowed his soldiers under the leadership of Patroclus to go to the aid of the Achaeans. Patroclus died in this battle. Hector killed him. Homer described in detail and colorfully the dispute and battle around the body of Patroclus, because he was armed with Achilles; "The immortal armor of a strong husband." Patroclus! Homer calls him meek ("meek-hearted"). As a child, he had to experience a terrible tragedy that left an indelible mark on his soul. In a child's play and argument, he accidentally killed his peer, the son of Amphidamus. And he could no longer stay at home. Menetius, his father, took the boy to Pelias. He, “accepting him favorably,” gently raised him together with his son Achilles. Since then, an inextricable friendship has tied the two heroes.

In the social hierarchy, which already existed in Greece at the time of Homer, Patroclus was placed below Achilles both by birth and by state, and Menetius instructed his son to obey a friend, although he was younger than him for years.

Patroclus, a gentle and complaisant by nature, was not difficult, and Achilles loved him dearly. What Patroclus meant to him, he understood with all his might after his death. Grief, like all the feelings of the passionate, temperamental leader of the Myrmidons, was fierce. He tore his hair, rolled on the ground, screamed, screamed. And now new wave anger gripped him - anger against the Trojans and especially Hector, who had killed his friend.
There was a reconciliation with Agamemnon.

Achilles became convinced that his insult, his proud removal from his fellows brought many troubles not only to them, his comrades, but also to himself. Now he rushed into battle against the Trojans with ferocity, with a fierce passion to take revenge, torment, kill (“a black bloody field streamed ... under the divine Pelid, hard-hoofed horses crushed corpses, shields and helmets, the whole copper axis and the high semicircle of the chariot were splattered with blood from below ... … I stained my unrestrained hands in blood ”).

Homer recounts all this with heartfelt trepidation. He cannot afford to blame the hero, because he is a demigod, the grandson of Zeus, and it is not for him, the poor singer, to judge who is right and who is to blame in this terrible battle of peoples. But, reading the poem, we feel how the elder shudders internally, depicting the cruel fury of Achilles.

The Trojans flee in panic, seeking salvation. Here is a terrible stream of Scamander in front of them. They try to hide off its rocky shores. In vain, Achilles overtakes them. “Tired of killing his hands,” he chooses from them twelve young men who were mad with fear “like young ales”, knits their hands and sends them to the camp of the Myrmidons, in order to then throw Patroclus into the fire as a sacrifice. Here he sees the young Lycaon, the youngest of the sons of Priam, and does not believe his eyes, because quite recently he captured him, attacked at night, and sold him into slavery on the island of Lemnos, having received a "hundred-calf price." By what miracle did this youth escape? Lycaon fled from Lemnos and, happy, rejoiced at his newfound freedom and home, but not for long. "At home he had fun with his friends for eleven days" and on the twelfth ... he was again at the feet of Achilles, unarmed, without a shield, without a helm and even without a dart:

Lycaon approached half-dead,
Pelida's legs ready to hug, he inexpressibly wished
A terrible death to avoid and close black rock.
The javelin meanwhile, the long-bodied Achilles, the swift-footed,
Ready to burst, and he ran up and hugged his legs,
Crouching down to the bottom; and a spear, whistling over his back,
A shivering, human blood-greedy stuck into the ground.
The young man embraced his knees with his left hand, begging,
He grabbed the right spear and, not letting it out of his hand,
So Achilles prayed, directing winged speeches:
- I will embrace your legs, have mercy, Achilles, and have mercy!
I stand before you as a prayer worthy of mercy!

But Achilles did not spare. He told him that in the old days, before the death of Patroclus, he sometimes liked to have mercy on the Trojans and set them free by taking a ransom, but now - to all Trojans, death, and especially to the children of Priam! He also told him that there was no need to weep, that death befalls those who are better than him, Lycaon, that Patroclus also died, that he himself, Achilles, would also perish, and meanwhile:

You see how I am myself, and beautiful and majestic in appearance,
The son of a famous father, my mother is a goddess!
But even on earth I cannot escape from a mighty fate.

"Consolation" did not calm Lycaon, he only realized that there would be no mercy, and submitted. Homer paints a brutal murder scene with startling truth:

“… The young man's legs and heart trembled.
He dropped the terrible dart and, trembling, spreading his arms,
He sat down, Achilles, swiftly ripping out a double sword,
I stuck it in the neck at the shoulder, and to the very hilt
The sword plunged into the insides, prostrate over the black dust
He lay down, stretched out, blood gushed and flooded the earth.
Taking the dead by the leg, he threw him into the river Achilles,
And, mocking him, he broadcast feathered speeches:
“There you lie, between the fish! Greedy fish around the ulcer
Your blood will be licked carelessly! Not a mother on the bed
Your body will lay down to mourn, but Xanthus is fleeting
In a stormy wave it will carry you into the boundless bosom of the sea ...
So perish, Trojans, until we destroy Troy. "

The kind and wise Homer, of course, pity the young Lycaon, but he does not dare to judge the actions of Achilles himself and hands him over to the judgment of the river god Xanthus. And "Xanthus was cruelly irritated at him", "in the form of a mortal god exclaimed from the deep abyss:" ... The corpses of the dead are full of light-jet waters ... Oh, refrain. " And after that:

A terrible stormy excitement around Achilles arose,
Shafts swell the hero, falling on the shield; on his feet he
Bole could not resist; grabbed the elm,
Thick, sprawling, and an elm, tipped over by the roots,
The shore brought down with itself, blocked the fast-flowing waters
Its branches are thick and, like a bridge, stretched along the river,
All overturned on her. Hero, leaping out of the depths,
Threw himself in fear to fly down the valley on the feet of his fast ones,
The furious god did not lag behind; but, rising behind him, he struck
Shaft black-headed, grief to bridle Achilles
In the exploits of the abusive and Troy, to protect the sons from murder.

And if it were not for Poseidon and Athena, who came to the call for help and, "taking the form of people", did not give him a hand and save him, mighty Achilles would have died "an inglorious death ... like a young swineherd."

Achilles' story of anger culminated in his duel with Hector. A great human tragedy is unfolding before us. Homer prepared us for it, often prophesying the death of the protagonist of the Trojans. We already know in advance that Achilles will win, that Hector will fall under his hand, but until the last minute we are still waiting for a miracle - the heart cannot accept that this glorious man, the only true defender of Troy, will fall, slain by the alien's spear.

Homer treats Achilles with spiritual trepidation and, perhaps, fear, he endows him with the highest military virtues, but he loves Hector. The Trojan Hero is human. He never once cast a sidelong glance at Elena, but she was the culprit of all the misfortunes of the Trojans, did not reproach her with a bitter word. And to his brother Paris, and from him all the troubles went, did not harbor unkind feelings. It happened to him, in annoyance at the effeminacy, carelessness and laziness of his brother, to throw angry reproaches, because he should have understood that the city was under siege, that the enemy was about to destroy the walls and destroy everyone. But as soon as Paris admits him, Hector, the rightness and obedience, and Hector's anger cools down, and he is ready to forgive him everything:

"Friend! You are a brave warrior, often only slow, reluctant to work, ”he says, and torments his soul for him, and would like to protect his careless brother from blasphemy and reproach. The most sublime poetry of conjugal and paternal feelings is the poems of Homer, depicting the scene of Hector's meeting with Andromache and his son, still a child, Astianax. This scene is famous. For two millennia, it has moved the hearts of readers, and no one who writes about Homer and his poems has passed it in silence. She entered all the books in the world.

Andromache worries about her husband. For her, he is everything ("You are everything to me now - both a father and a kind mother, you and my only brother, you and my beloved husband"), for all her relatives were killed by Achilles, who attacked her hometown, and her father, an elder Etiopes, and her seven brothers. The mother was released for a large ransom, but she too soon died. And now all the hopes, all the joys and worries of Andromache are directed to the two beings dear to her - to her husband and son. The son is still a "dumb baby" - "adorable, like a radiant star."

Homer expresses his feelings with vivid epithets, metaphors, comparisons. Hector named his son Scamandrius after the river Scamandra (Xanthus), while the Trojans called him Astianax, which meant "ruler of the city." Hector wanted to take the boy in his arms, hug him, but the boy, frightened by his sparkling helmet and "shaggy crest," shouted to the chest of the "splendid nurse," and the happy father smiled, took off his "magnificent" helmet (Homer cannot do without a picture epithet himself to think of descriptions of neither a person nor an object), puts him on the ground, taking his son, “kisses, shakes”. Andromache smiles at them through her tears, and Hector is “touched spiritually”: “Good! Do not break your heart with immoderate grief. "

The scene is full of tragedy, because Hector knows about the imminent death of Troy (“I know for sure myself, convinced by both thought and heart”), Andromache also knows this.

Hector is not just a strong and brave warrior, he is a citizen, and Homer emphasizes this all the time. When Elena asks him to enter the house, sit with them, calm "his painful soul", he replies that he cannot accept a welcome invitation, that they are waiting for him there, on the battlefields, that he is "carried away by his soul to protect his fellow citizens." When one of the fighters pointed to the eagle flying from the left as an unkind omen (flying to the left was considered a bad sign), Hector threateningly told him that he despised omens and did not care about where the birds were flying from, to the left or to the right. "The banner is the best of all - to fight bravely for the fatherland!"

This is Hector. And now his last hour. The Trojans fled in panic to the city, in a hurry they closed the gates, forgetting about Hector. He was left alone outside the walls of the city, alone in front of a host of enemies. Hector's heart trembled, and he was afraid of Achilles. They ran around Troy three times. All the gods looked at them, and the Trojans from the city walls, and the weeping Priam, his father. The good-natured Zeus took pity on the hero and was already ready to help him, to rescue him from trouble, but Athena intervened, reminding her "black-cloud" father that from ancient times fate had inscribed a "sad death" for people. And Zeus allowed her to speed up the bloody denouement. The goddess's actions were cruel and insidious. She appeared before Hector, assuming the form of Deyphobe. Hector was delighted, he was touched by his brother's self-sacrifice, because Deyphob dared to come to his aid, while others remain in the city and look at his suffering indifferently. “Oh Deyphob! And you, from infancy, have always been nice to me. " Athena, in the guise of Deyphobe, goes to great deceit, says that both his mother and father begged him (Deyphoba) to stay, and his friends begged him not to leave the city, but why did he, "lamenting longing" about him, came to him for help. Now there is no need, de hesitate, there is nothing to spare the spears and forward, into battle, together.
“So prophetic, Pallas stepped forward cunningly,” Homer writes. And Hector went into battle. Achilles threw a spear at him and missed. Athena, invisibly from Hector, raised her spear and gave it to her favorite. Then Hector threw his spear towards Achilles, the spear hit the shield and bounced off, because the shield was forged by Hephaestus himself. Hector calls Deyphobe, asks for a second spear, looks around - no one! He understood the evil betrayal of the goddess. He, unarmed, remained before his mortal enemy:

Woe! .. I thought that my brother was with me ...
He is within the walls of Ilion: I was seduced by Pallas,
There is only death near me!

This is how the fate of the glorious defender of the city came true. Already dying, he asks Achilles not to mock his body, to return to the house for a worthy burial. But Achilles, blazing with anger and hatred, throws him:

“It’s in vain, you dog, to hug my legs and pray to my relatives!
I myself, if I would listen to anger, would tear you to pieces,
I would devour your raw body. "

With this, Hector dies - "quietly, the soul, having flown out of the mouth, descends to Hades." Achilles, "drenched in blood," began to tear off his armor. The Achaeans who ran up again and again pierced the already lifeless body of the hero with their lances, but both defeated and dead, he was beautiful, "everyone was amazed, looked at the growth and at the wonderful image."

Achilles, however, had not yet quenched his anger and "plotted an unworthy deed", he pierced his leg tendons, threaded belts and tied Hector's body to the chariot, drove the horses, dragging the body along the dusty road. The hero's beautiful head was beating along the road, his black curls were widely dispersed and covered with dust. The inhabitants of Troy looked at everyone from the city walls, old Priam was crying, tearing his gray hair, Hecuba was sobbing, Andromache's grief was immeasurable. But even this did not quench Achilles' thirst for revenge, bringing Hector's body to his camp, he continued his "unworthy deed" there, dragging his body around the grave of Patroclus, "so he swore at the divine Hector in his anger." Looking at that from Olympus, Apollo "the silver-lined" could not stand it. He threw down a grave accusation to the gods of malice, ingratitude towards Hector and unfair favor towards his murderer:

You decided to be supportive of Achilles the robber,
To the husband who banished justice from his thoughts, from his heart
He rejected all pity and, like a lion, only thinks about ferocity ...
So this Pelid destroyed all pity, and he lost his shame ...
The land, the land of the mute, a violent husband offends.

Homer never mentions the famous heel of Achilles, the only weak spot of the hero's body. And, apparently, not by chance, then his duel with Hector would have looked like a monstrous murder, for the Trojan would appear to him unarmed (vulnerable).

What is Achilles' fault? And he carries, no doubt, tragic guilt. What is Homer tacitly condemning him for? And the condemnation is almost obvious. Loss of a sense of proportion. Here we have one of the greatest commandments of the ancient Greeks in life and in art - a sense of proportion. Any exaggeration, any way out of the norm is fraught with trouble.

Achilles, on the other hand, is constantly breaking boundaries. He is overly loving, overly hating, overly angry, vengeful, touchy. And this is his tragic fault. He is intolerant, quick-tempered, intemperate in irritation. Even his beloved Patroclus is afraid of him: “He is quick-tempered” (quick-tempered) and can accuse an innocent in anger, he says about a friend. How much more human does Patroclus himself look. When Briseyda, because of which the fatal anger of Achilles arose, returned to him, she saw the dead Patroclus. He was not her lover, and she did not love him. But he was kind to her, attentive, he consoled her in grief, was responsive to her, a captive woman whom Achilles barely noticed. And, perhaps, she experienced the greatest pity for the deceased. Her grief was genuine and so unexpected in the poem. Homer did nothing to prepare us for this:

Oh, my Patroclus! O friend, ill-fated for me, priceless ...
You fell! I mourn you forever, dear youth.

The poem ends with a scene of redemption of Hector's body. This is also the famous scene where Homer showed the greatest psychological insight. Old Priam, accompanied by a charioteer, entered the guarded camp of Achilles, bringing him a rich ransom for his son's body. Zeus decided to help him in this and sent Hermes to him, who appeared before the old man, "like a young man, whose first hair was pubescent, youth is charming," and escorted him unharmed to Achilles.

The meeting and conversation between Achilles and Priam, in essence, is the denouement of the whole knot of events and feelings that were tied up at the very beginning of the poem in the word “anger”. This is Achilles' moral defeat! He was defeated by Priam by the power of human love:

The old man, unnoticed by anyone, enters into rest and, Pelida,
Falling at his feet, clasps his knees and kisses his hands, -
Terrible hands that have killed many of his children!
Terrible hands!

Homer has truly outdone himself. How much mind, heart, talent is needed to understand this! What an abyss of the human soul had to be explored to find this amazing psychological argument!

Brave! Almost you are gods! Take pity on my ill-luck,
Remember your father Peleus: I am incomparably more pitiful than Peleus!
I will experience what a mortal has not experienced on earth:
I press my husband, the murderer of my children, hands to lips.

And Achilles is defeated. For the first time, pity for a person penetrated into his heart, he regained his sight, he understood the pain of another person and wept along with Priam. Miracle! These tears turned out to be sweet, "and the noble Pelidas enjoyed tears." How wonderful, it turns out, the feeling of mercy, how joyful it is to forgive, forget about evil and cruel revenge and love a person! Priam and Achilles, as if renewed; cannot find in themselves a recent feeling of bitterness, enmity towards each other:

For a long time Priam Dardanides wondered at the king Achilles,
His sight and majesty: he seemed to see God.
King Achilles wondered equal to Priam Dardanides,
Looking at the image of the venerable and listening to the elders' speeches.
They both enjoyed, looking at one another.

This is the finale of the great all-human drama of all times and peoples.

There was a legend that a competition took place between Homer and Hesiod and preference was allegedly given to Hesiod as a singer of peaceful labor (the poem "Works and Days"). But Homer did not glorify war. He, of course, admired the courage, strength, courage and beauty of his heroes, but he also bitterly grieved for them. The gods were to blame for everything, and among them the god of war, the "man-killer", "the destroyer of the peoples, the destroyer of the walls, covered with blood" Ares and his sister - "the rage raging". This person, judging by the descriptions of Homer, at the very beginning is very small in stature and crawls and crawls, but then grows, expands and becomes so huge that her head rests against the sky, and her feet against the ground. She sows rage among people, "for mutual death, prowling around the paths, multiplying the dying groan."

The god of war Ares is wounded by Diomedes, a mortal, a warrior from the camp of the Achaeans. Ares complains to his father, "showing immortal blood, pumped by the wound." And what about Zeus?

Looking menacingly at him, the thunderer Kronion proclaimed:
“Shut up, oh you, peremetnik! Do not howl, who sits near me!
You are the most hated of the gods that inhabit the sky!
Only you are pleased with enmity, and strife, and battles!
You have a mother's spirit, unbridled, eternally obstinate,
Hera, whom I myself can hardly tame with words!

Homer describes the fight, perhaps with some degree of surprise and horror. What does hardening do to people! “Like wolves, the warriors rushed one to the other; man and man grappled. " And he mourns the death of the soldiers, "young, blooming with life," with paternal grief. He compares Simois, who was slain with a spear, to a young poplar. Here it is, the poplar is "even and clean", "a pet of a wet meadow", it was cut down in order to bend the wheel for the chariot out of it, now it dries, lying "on the bank of the native stream." So lay Simois, young and naked (without armor), killed by the "powerful Ajax".

Homer filled his poem with many names and historical information, brought together hundreds of destinies, provided it with the most vivid realistic pictures of the life and life of his fellow tribesmen, colored poetic comparisons, epithets - but put Achilles in the center. He did not add to the portrait of his hero a single implausible, elevating feature. His hero is monumental, but he is alive, we hear his heart beating, how his anger distorts him Beautiful face, we hear his hot breath. He laughs and cries, he screams and scolds, at times he is monstrously cruel, at times he is gentle and kind - and he is always alive. His portrait is faithful, we will not see a single fake, invented, drawn feature in it. Homer's realism is here at the highest level, satisfying the highest requirements of modern realistic poetics.

Homer's heart is filled with horror and pity, but he does not judge his hero. The gods are guilty. Zeus allowed it.
Before us comes life in its tragic apotheosis. A picture stunning in its drama! But there is no depressing humiliation of man before the forces of the world beyond his control. Man is great and beautiful both in death and in tragedy.

This is what determined the aesthetic charm of the tragedy itself, when “sadness” becomes “delight”.

There will be no day, and sacred Troy will perish,
Priam and the spear-bearing people of Priam will perish with her.
Homer

This prophecy is repeated several times in the Iliad. It came true. Sacred Troy died. The spear-bearing Priam and all those who lived, loved, suffered and rejoiced with him perished. The shining helmet Hector, the fleet-footed Achilles, and the curly-headed Danaans perished. Only the "rattling, deeply abyssal Scamander" still poured its stormy waters into the waves of the sea and the wooded Ida, from which the cloud-exterminator Kronion once looked at the magnificent city, as of old, towered over the surroundings. But neither human voices nor the melodic sounds of the ringing lyre were heard here anymore.

Only birds and dust storms and snowstorms swept over the hill on which palaces and temples once stood proudly. Time covered the remains of the fortress walls and burnt dwellings dense, multi-meter layer land. It also became difficult to recognize the place where the heroes of Homer acted.

But Homer's poem remained. They read and reread it, admired the beauty of the verse, the intelligence and talent of their creator, although they could hardly believe in the truth of the story, in the reality of the events described in it, and even in the fact that "sacred Troy" ever existed. Only one enthusiastic man in the 19th century believed Homer (it cannot be that everything told with such convincing truth was not true!) And began his search for the legendary Troy. It was Heinrich Schliemann. His biographer describes the minute of the first meeting of Schliemann with the places where he was supposed to excavate Troy and show it to the world of civilized humanity: “… his attention was drawn again and again by the hill towering fifty meters above the Scamander valley.

This is Hisarlik, effendi, says the guide. This word in Turkish means "palace" ... (more precisely - a fortress, a fortification - "khysar" - S. A.). Behind the Hissarlik hill rises the wooded mountain Ida, the throne of the father of the gods. And between Ida and the sea, bathed in the evening sun, stretches the Trojan plain, where for ten years two heroic peoples opposed each other. Schliemann thinks that through a light haze of fog that has descended to the ground, he sees the prows of ships, the camp of the Greeks, fluttering sultans of helmets and the glitter of weapons, troops scurrying to and fro, hears the cries of war and the cry of the gods. And behind are the walls and towers of the glorious city. "

It was in the summer of 1868. Schliemann began excavations with a volume of the poet Homer in his hands. This is how Homeric Greece was discovered.

Exact and rigorous science made its own adjustments to the romantic conclusions of Schliemann, established the boundaries and the level of occurrence of urban strata, determined the time of the emergence and destruction of cities that were built one above the other for centuries and millennia. The dream of Troy faded somewhat in the light of the dry facts of historical realities, but Homer's world was open.

Homer "helped" Schliemann to continue excavations and find new sensational finds. Homer's epithet "gold-rich" ("gold-rich Mycenae") prompted him to search and eventually acquire the richest gold objects of Ancient Greece, which he called "the gold of Agamemnon."

You talked with Homer for a long time alone,
We've been waiting for you for a long time
And you descended from the mysterious peaks bright,
And he brought us his tablets.
A.S. Pushkin

This is how Pushkin met Gnedich's translation of Homer's Iliad. This was an event in Russian culture. The greatest poet of Greece spoke Russian.

The target language is somewhat archaic. We no longer say "dondeje" ("how long"), "paki" ("again") or "vyya" ("neck"). Neither Gnedich himself nor his contemporaries in Russia said so. These words, having left the colloquial everyday language, remained for solemn occasions, woven into the hymn of prayer, creating a feeling of the unusualness of what was happening, something important, non-daily, sublime. This was precisely the language of Homeric poems for his listeners in Ancient Greece. The ancient Greek listened to the measured speech of the Aeda and trembled and was imbued with awe: the gods themselves spoke to him, as it were. Gnedich, with great tact, resorted to old Russian words in order to convey similar feelings to the Russian reader. The archaic nature of the language, of course, complicates the understanding of the text, but at the same time gives it a high artistic coloration. In addition, there are not so many outdated words - within a hundred.

The Russian people transferred a lot into their language from the Greek language. Gnedich, translating the Iliad, created verbose epithets based on the Greek model, which are unusual for our eyes and ears, but they also create the effect of elevation of speech. The poet (and scientist at the same time) worked on the translation for over 20 years, publishing it in 1829. Pushkin responded enthusiastically about him ("I hear the silenced voice of the divine Hellenic speech, the great old man I sense the shadow of an embarrassed soul").

Gnedich's lifelong work. Nowadays, in St. Petersburg, at the memorial cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, you can find a burial mound with a marble tombstone. It reads:

"To Gnedich, who enriched Russian literature with Omir's translation - from friends and admirers." And then - a quote from the Iliad:

"Speeches from the mouth of his prophetic sweetest honey flowed."

By the way, Pushkin also resorted to the "high syllable", to pathetic archaisms, when this required the content of the work:

But what am I seeing? A hero with a smile of reconciliation
Coming with a golden olive.

Or from the same poem ("Memories in Tsarskoe Selo"):

Take comfort, mother of the cities of Russia,
Behold the death of the alien.
Weighed down the day on their haughty necks
Right hand of the avenging creator.

Odyssey

For six hours, the boat maneuvered against the wind, until it reached
Ithaca. It was already night, velvet black, July night,
naya with the scents of the Ionian Islands ... Schliemann thanks
gods that they allowed him to finally land in the kingdom of Odysseus.
G. Stoll

The island, praised by Homer, is still called Ithaca. It is one of the seven islands in the Ionian Sea off the southwestern coast of Greece. Heinrich Schliemann undertook archaeological excavations on the island, hoping to find material evidence of the advanced culture that Homer described. But nothing was found. Science has so far established only that approximately in the 5th century. BC NS. a small settlement existed there. In a word, neither Odysseus, nor Penelope, nor their son Telemachus, nor their rich house, nor the city on the seashore - nothing that Homer described so vividly and vividly never existed on Ithaca. Is it possible?

Is it all the fruit of the artistic fantasy of the ancient Greeks? It's hard to believe this: the poem depicts in great detail, truly documentary, the appearance of the island and everything that was on it:

This is Eumeus, only the beautiful house of Odysseus!
Even among many others, it is not at all difficult to recognize him.
Everything here is one to one. Jagged wall artfully
The courtyard is surrounded, the double-leaf gates are amazingly strong ...

Everything is alive, everything is visible, we are introduced into everyday life, we are there together with the heroes of Homer. Then "the black night ... has come," "all went home," and "Telemachus himself retired to his high palace." Before him Eureklea, "the faithful housekeeper", carried a torch. Homer, of course, also reported that Telemachus's palace was facing the courtyard, "that there was a vast view in front of the windows." Here Telemachus enters into the "rich bedroom", sits on the bed, takes off his thin shirt. The caring old woman "carefully" takes the lordly attire, folds it into folds, smoothes it with her hands. Homer says about the bed - it is "skillfully chiseled", and the door handles - they are "silver", there are also latches - they are tightened with a belt.

Homer misses nothing. He also describes the pantry in the house of Odysseus:
The building is spacious; heaps of gold and copper lay there;
A lot of clothes in chests and fragrant oil were kept;
Kufas made of clay with perennial and sweet wine stood
Near the walls, enclosing a divinely pure drink.

Of course, the doors to the pantry are special, "double doors, double closed." The storeroom was kept in order with the "highly experienced, keen diligence" of Eurekleia, the "intelligent" housekeeper.

In modern science, there is no consensus about the origin of the Homeric poems. Many suggestions have been made; in particular, that the Odyssey was created a hundred years later than the Iliad. It is quite possible. However, the author of the Iliad more than once calls Odysseus "cunning", "clever", "a famous sufferer." The poems in the Iliad dedicated to Odysseus, as it were, anticipate everything that will be told about him in the Odyssey. "Brave, his heart always dared in danger", "enterprising", "firm in labors and in troubles", "loved by Pallas Athena", is able to emerge from the "burning fire" unharmed, "so his mind is abundant in inventions" ... All these qualities of Odysseus will be vividly and picturesquely revealed by the second poem of the great Homer.

Marx called ancient Greek society the childhood of mankind. Homer's Odyssey, perhaps more than any other poetic work, illustrates this famous saying. The poem is dedicated, if you think about its main philosophical plan, the discovery of the world by man. Indeed, what is the meaning of the wanderings of Odysseus, Menelaus and other warriors who returned home after the destruction of Troy? Cognition of the Ecumene - the inhabited part of the Earth, then known to Greece. The boundaries of this area were quite small. The Greek imagined that the entire Earth was surrounded by the Ocean, the river that feeds all the lakes, seas, streams and rivulets that were inside. No one dared to go beyond the Ocean. Homer knew countries close to the Mediterranean coast to the west, no further than Gibraltar. The island of Euboea seemed to him a border, "beyond which there is nothing more," and yet this island was in the Aegean Sea. Sailing to the island of Euboea seemed to be the work of especially brave sailors.

In the days of Homer, the Greeks mastered new lands in the western and eastern limits of the then Oycumene. Homer calls those living from the eastern and western sides of the Ecumene - "extreme people", "settled in two ways": "one, where the Light-bearing God descends," others - where he ascends.

Menelaus saw a lot in his wanderings, who, like Odysseus, did not immediately reach his native shores. After taking Troy for seven years, he wandered around the then world, before returning to his native Argos:

I saw Cyprus, visited the Phoenicians, reaching Egypt,
Ethiopians penetrated the blacks, stayed with the Sidonians, Erembians,
In Libya was finally where the horned lambs would be born.
In that side and fields the lord and the shepherd of lack
In cheese and meat, and fatty milk do not have,
Cows are milked abundantly there year round.

Even longer (10 years) was the path of Odysseus. His wanderings have already been described in detail. His enemy and friend, the sea, is also described in detail.

It became one of the main characters of the poem. It is beautiful, like its ruler Poseidon, the "azure-haired" god, it is both terrible and destructive. Before this formidable element, a person is insignificant and miserable, like Odysseus in the raging waves during a storm. In everything, of course, Poseidon is guilty, he "raised a wave from the abyss ... terrible, heavy, huge mountainous." “The waves boiled and howled, rushing fiercely to the coast high from the sea ... Cliffs and reefs stuck out. Odysseus was horrified. " But then the "azure-curly Eos" appeared, and everything was transformed, the storm calmed down, "the sea all brightened in quiet calmness."

Most of all the epithets, the most diverse and sometimes opposite, are accompanied in the poem by the word "sea". When it threatens with an unknown danger, then it is "foggy" or even "dark foggy", sometimes it is "evil", "poor", "terrible" and always "abundant", "great", "sacred" - then "fishy" and " multi-fish ", and now" barren-salty ", now" noisy "or even" wide-noise ", and now" deserted "or" infinitely deserted ".

For the inhabitants of Greece, with its rugged coastline and its numerous islands, the sea was an important element of economic and cultural activity. By virtue of things, the Greeks became brave and skillful seafarers, so Homer's word for "sea" acquires the epithet "many tested."

Odysseus is truly a typical representative of the Greeks, or rather, of all mankind, with his thirst for knowledge, with his indomitable strength to fight, with great courage in troubles and misfortunes. In the Iliad, he is only a warrior - brave, strong and, moreover, cunning, clever, eloquent, "wise in advice." Here, in the poem "The Odyssey", he appeared in all his human greatness.

His patroness is Athena, the wisest and most active goddess. Here she is harsh, but not cruel. When one of her favorites, Theideus, whom she wanted to make immortal, showed ferocity, she turned away from him in disgust. (According to myth, he killed one of his opponents, split his skull and sucked his brain in a wild frenzy.) She kills the gorgon Medusa, helps Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus, personifies the art of craft, so valued in Greece, and patronizes Odysseus, admires him: “You kindly accept every advice, you are understanding, you are brave in execution”, but sometimes he reproaches him for cunning - “an intriguer, impudent for insidious inventions”.

In the execution of his plans, Odysseus is stubborn and persistent, this is not always pleasant to his companions. But their censure sounds like a great praise to him:

“You, Odysseus, are adamantly cruel, you are endowed with a great Power; there is no fatigue for you, you are bound of iron. "

Odysseus is a faithful husband, a loving father, a wise ruler, for which the people of Ithaca appreciate and extol him, but he was not created for home peace and quiet family joys. His element is struggle, overcoming obstacles, cognition of the unknown. He, as Homer reports about him, did not like either "field work" or "quiet domestic life." He was attracted by "battle and winged arrows", "copper-shining spears" ("formidable, trembling great and fearing many").

When the sorceress Circe warns him against the terrible Scylla, he is not going to retreat, but wants to "fight back by force":

"O! Unbridled, he again conceived of the exploits of the abusive,
You dream about a fight again; you are glad to fight with the gods ”.

Odysseus is brave, courageous, sharp-witted ("cunning"). But, perhaps, his most characteristic feature is curiosity. He wants to see everything, hear everything, learn, experience. Often this involves him in the most serious troubles, from which he always finds a way out.

He is assured that the bird-maidens are sirens dangerous, that they have already killed many with "sweet singing", "enchanting." He seeks to hear them and orders each of the team to cover their ears tightly with wax, while he himself left them open and, tied with strong ropes to the mast pole, experienced the power of the singing of wonderful and terrible maidens-birds.

Why is he doing this? To know.

Homer informs that, and after Odysseus returns to his native Ithaca, he will not calm down and will again go in search of adventure. Nothing stops him. “The thought of death was never in my heart,” he says about himself. He visited where no mortal ever returned - in the kingdom of shadows, in Hades, and in the fabulous land of happiness and peacefulness, where the complacent Alkina rules ...

This is Odysseus and his main features. But, besides them, he also has a great, cherished feeling - this is an unquenchable love for his homeland. He rushes to her, sheds tears about her, refuses eternal youth and immortality, which the nymph Calypso offers him, just to be back where he was born and raised. And the eternal feelings, close to everyone and everyone at all times, were expressed by the ancient poet with an amazing, sometimes tragic truth.

"Our homeland is sweet, where we were born and flourished."

"There is nothing sweeter for us from our homeland and our relatives", -

Homer sings, and his "Odyssey" becomes a national anthem.

Not only Odysseus, but also other heroes love their homeland to self-forgetfulness:

Joyfully the leader Agamemnon stepped onto the parental shore.
He began to kiss the sweet fatherland, seeing again
The desired land, he shed abundantly warm tears.

Homer showed insidious human cruelty, with indignation, contempt (the murder of Agamemnon), and tenderly and reverently - family feelings: conjugal, filial and parental love (Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus). He kind of opposed two destinies, two moral categories - loyalty to Penelope and betrayal, the crime of Clytemnestra and "Aegistus despicable."

Homer tenderly and tenderly draws the image of Penelope. She is a faithful spouse, in constant thought about her absent husband, she is a mother, and her worries about her son are described with heartfelt warmth. For her, he is "a youth who has not seen the need, who is not used to talking to people." Telemachus is twenty years old, he is quite independent and sometimes declares himself to be the eldest in the house and can even order his mother to retire to her chambers:

But we succeeded: do as you should, the order of the economy,
Yarn, weaving; watch that slaves are diligent at work
Were our own; talking is not a woman's business, but a business
Husband, and now it is mine: I am one master.

The subordinate position of women in Ancient Greece, as we see, is presented here very clearly. For the first time Penelope heard such a speech of her son and was amazed and, perhaps, filled with pride for him, but, like for any mother, he will forever remain a child for her. Learning that stealthily from her, he went in search of his father - and furtively because he did not want to disturb her, so that sadness did not fade her face, - as Homer, who always glorifies beauty, explains, she worries. "The heart trembles for him, so that any misfortune that does not happen to him at sea by evil or in a foreign country with a foreign people."

Homer everywhere emphasizes the youthful modesty and shyness of Telemachus. When the Mentor sends him to ask about his father from the "horses of the bridle" Nestor, Telemachus hesitates: is it proper for the younger to ask the elders?

The Greeks believed that each person has his own demon, a special patron, a kind of spirit that will prompt him in time to the right thought, and the right word, and the right deed (hence the expression “his genius” in our speech):

Much yourself, Telemachus, you will guess with your mind,
The demon will reveal a lot to you ...

To some extent, Homer's Odyssey is also a utopia, man's great dream of happiness. Odysseus visited the land of the Faecians. The Phaeakians are a fabulous, happy people. Their country is truly ancient Eldorado. Their king Alkina confesses:

The ships of the Feak know neither the helmsman nor the rudder, “dressed in haze and fog,” they fly over the waves, obeying only the thoughts of their shipmen. They are not afraid of storms or fogs. They are invulnerable. An amazing dream of the ancient Greek: to control mechanisms directly with just one thought! Autokinesis is what they call it these days.

But the wonderful, fabulous city of the Phaeacians will become inaccessible. Angry Poseidon will close it with a mountain, and access to it will be forever and for all barred, and the Theacians, protected from the world of troubles, worries and sorrows, will be alone in eternal blissful existence. This is how tales of dazzlingly alluring and unrealizable happiness always end.

Homer sang a song about heroic natures, he glorified their strength and courage. The heroes left, died, but their life became a song, and therefore their fate is wonderful:

In the Iliad, Homer does not speak of the Aeds. He reports on the songs and dances of young men at feasts and during the grape harvest, but there is no talk of specialist singers yet. True, in the second song he mentions a certain Famir from Thrace, who decided to compete in singing with the muses themselves and as punishment for such insolence was blinded and deprived of "the divine gift sweet to songs and the art of clanging on cithara."

Songs, epic legends about heroes to the accompaniment of a lyre were performed in the Iliad not by professional specialists, but by ordinary amateurs.

We, I will say, are not different neither in fistfight nor in wrestling;
Quick feet but unspeakably the first in the sea;
We love luxurious dinners, singing, music, dancing,
Fresh clothes, voluptuous baths and a soft bed.
For this they were sent down both death and a pernicious lot
Gods, so that they are a glorious song for posterity.

Homer's art

All singers are highly honored, she taught them
Singing Muse; she is a noble tribe of singers.
Homer

Achilles in his luxurious tent during the calm hours from the battle played the lyre and sang ("he delighted the spirit with the lyre, singing the glory of heroes").

The Iliad was apparently created much earlier than the Odyssey. During this time, there have been some changes in the life of society. Special performers of epic tales appeared. The Odyssey says a lot about them.

Moreover, there has already been talk about storytellers-charlatans, "boastful deceivers", "many vagabonds who go around the earth, scattering lies everywhere in ridiculous stories about what they have seen." The personality of Homer himself, his belonging to professional singers in the "Odyssey" is quite noticeable, and his professional interests, and professional pride, and his aesthetic program.

The ancient Greeks, Homer's contemporaries, saw divine inspiration in poetry (the poet is "like the high inspired gods"). From this stemmed the deepest respect for poetry and recognition of creative freedom.

If all the thoughts and actions of people, according to the ancient Greek, depended on the will and instigation of the gods, then all the more this applied to the Aedam. Therefore, young Telemachus objected when his mother Penelope wanted to interrupt the singer Femiya, who sang about the "sad return from Troy":

Sweet mother, objected the sensible son of Odysseus,
How do you want to ban the singer for our pleasure
To chant that his heart awakens? Guilty
This is not the singer, but Zeus, who sends from above
People of high spirit, according to their will, inspiration.
No, don't hinder the singer about the sad return of the Danes
To sing - with the praise of the great people heed that song,
Every time she, as if new, admiring her soul;
You yourself will find in her not sorrow, but delight in sorrow.

Freedom of creativity was already becoming the aesthetic principle of the ancient poet. Let us recall the Pushkin sorcerer from "Song of prophetic Oleg":" Truthful and free their prophetic language and friendly with the will of heaven. "

The ancient man, whose spiritual life took place in the sphere of myth and legends, did not accept fiction. He was childishly trusting, was ready to believe everything, but any invention must be presented to him as truth, as an undeniable reality. Therefore, the truthfulness of the story also became an aesthetic principle.

Odysseus praised the singer Demodocus at the feast of the king Alcinoes primarily for the reliability of his story. “You might think that you yourself was a participant in everything, or you learned from all the faithful eyewitnesses,” he said to him, but Odysseus was an eyewitness and participant in precisely those events about which Demodoc sang.

And finally, the third principle is that the art of singing should bring people joy, or, as we would say now, aesthetic pleasure. He speaks about this more than once in the poem (“captivating our hearing,” “for our pleasure,” “delighting our soul,” etc.). It is surprising that Homer's observation that a work of art does not lose its charm upon repeated reading - every time we perceive it as new. And then (this already refers to the most complex riddle of art), drawing the most tragic collisions, it brings an incomprehensible pacification to the soul and, if it causes tears, then tears are “sweet”, “pacifying”. That is why Telemachus tells his mother that Demodoc will bring her "delight of sorrow" with his song.

The ancient Greek, and Homer was its most glorious representative, had the greatest respect for the masters of art, whoever this master was - a potter, a foundryman, an engraver, a sculptor, a builder, a gunsmith. In Homer's poem, we constantly find a word of praise for such a master-artist. The singer has a special place. After all, he calls Femiya "a famous singer", a "divine husband", a man of a "high spirit" who, "captivating our ears, is like the high inspired gods." The singer Demodok is also glorified by Homer. "Above all mortal people, I put you, Demodoc," - says Odysseus.

Who were they, these singers, or the Aedes, as the Greeks called them? As you can see, both Femius and Demodoc are deeply revered, but, in essence, they are beggars. They are treated like Odysseus Demodoca, who sent him from his plate "the spine of a sharp-toothed boar full of fat," and "the singer gratefully accepted the gift," they are invited to a feast in order to listen to their inspired singing after a meal and libations. But, in essence, their fate was sad, just as the fate of Demodoc was sad: "His muse at birth rewarded him with evil and good," bestowed upon him "sweet drunkenness," but also "darkened his eyes," that is, he was blind. Tradition has brought to us the image of the most blind Homer. So he remained in the minds of the peoples for three millennia.

Homer amazes with the versatility of his talent. He embodied in his poems truly the entire spiritual arsenal of antiquity. His poems caressed the delicate musical ear of the ancient Greek and the charm of the rhythmic structure of speech, he filled them with pictures of the ancient life of the Greek population, vivid in their picturesqueness, in poetic expressiveness. His story is accurate. The information provided by him has a documentary, invaluable for historians. Suffice it to say that Heinrich Schliemann, undertaking excavations of Troy and Mycenae, used Homer's poems as a geographical and topographic map. This accuracy, sometimes downright documentary, is striking. The enumeration of the military units that besieged Troy, which we find in the Iliad, seems even tedious, but when the poet concludes this enumeration with a verse: “like leaves on trees, like sands on the seas, armies are uncountable”, we involuntarily believe this hyperbolic comparison.

Engels, referring to military history, uses the poem of Homer. In his work "Camp", describing the system of building military fortifications and defenses among the ancients, he uses Homer's information.

Homer does not forget to name all the characters in his poem, even the most distant ones in relation to the main plot: the sleeping bag of King Menelaus "agile Asphaleon", his second sleeping bag "Etheon the Revered", not forgetting to mention his father "Etheon, son of Voets".

The impression of complete reliability of the story is achieved by the extraordinary, sometimes even pedantic accuracy of the details. In the second song of the Iliad, Homer lists the names of the leaders of the ships and squads that arrived at the walls of Troy. He does not forget to remember the most insignificant details. Calling Protesilaya, he says not only that this warrior died when he was the first to jump off the ship, but also that he was replaced by a “one-blooded” brother, “the youngest in years”, that in his homeland the hero was left with a wife “with a torn soul”, a house “half-finished ". And this last detail (unfinished house), which might not have been mentioned at all, turns out to be very important for the overall credibility of the entire story.

It gives the individual characteristics of the listed warriors and the places where they came from. In one case, "the harsh fields of Olison", there is the "bright lake" Bebendskoe, "the magnificent castle of Izolk" or "rocky Pythos", "high-cliff Ifoma", "Larissa hilly", etc. Warriors are almost always "famous", "armored ”, But in one case they are excellent spearmen, in the other they are excellent arrows.

Homer's contemporaries took his stories about the adventures of Odysseus with all the seriousness of their naive worldview. We know that there was not and there is no Scylla or Charybdis, there was and could not be the cruel Circe, turning people into animals, there was and could not be the beautiful nymph Calypso, who offered Odysseus "both immortality and eternal youth." And yet, reading Homer, we constantly catch ourselves on the fact that, despite the skeptical consciousness of a man of the 20th century, we are irresistibly drawn into the world of the naive faith of the Greek poet. By what force, by what means does he achieve such an influence on us? What is the effect of the credibility of his story? Perhaps mainly in the scrupulous details of the story. They, by chance, eliminate the sense of fantasy bias. It would seem that these few accidental details might not have been, and the story in the plot plan would not have suffered in the least, but, it turns out, the general mood of credibility would have suffered.

For example, why did Homer need the figure of Elpenor, who quite unexpectedly appeared when telling about the misadventures of Odysseus? This companion of Odysseus, "indistinguishable in boldness in battles, not generously gifted from the gods," in other words, cowardly and stupid, went to sleep "for coolness" on the roof of Circe's house and fell from there, "broke the vertebral bone, and the soul flew into region of Hades ". This sad event did not have any influence on the fate of Odysseus and his comrades, and if you adhere to the strict logic of the narrative, then it could not have been reported, but Homer told about him in detail, and how then Odysseus met the shadow of Elpenor in Hades and how they buried him, erecting a hill over his grave, and hoisting his oar on it. And the entire narration of the poet acquired the reliability of a diary entry. And we involuntarily believe everything (it was so! Everything is accurately described to the smallest detail!).

Homer's detailed and detailed story is bright and dramatic. It is as if we, together with Odysseus, are fighting the raging sea element, we see the surging waves, we hear a violent roar and desperately fight together with him to save our lives:

At that moment, a large wave rose and broke
All over his head; swiftly the raft spun,
Seized from the deck into the sea, he fell headlong, missing
The steering wheel is out of hand; the mast fell asya silt, breaking under a heavy
Opposite winds, blowing against each other.
... A swift wave rushed him to the rocky shore;
If he was instructed in time by the light goddess Athena
I was not, I grabbed the cliff with my hands; and clinging to it,
He waited with a groan, hanging on a stone, for the wave to run
Past; she ran, but suddenly, reflecting, on the return
She knocked him off the cliff and threw him into the dark sea.

The ancient poet also paints the state of Odysseus in the same picturesque and dramatic way, his constant conversation with his “great heart” and his prayer addressed to the gods, until the “azure-haired” Poseidon, having quenched his anger, finally took pity on him, taming the sea and calming the waves ... Miserable, exhausted, Odysseus was carried ashore:

… Knees buckled under him, mighty hands hung; his heart was worn out in the sea;
His whole body was swollen; spewing with both mouth and nostrils
An ode to the sea, he fell at last, breathless, voiceless.

Painted portraits of heroes. They are shown in action in the poem. Their feelings, passions are reflected in their appearance. Here is a warrior on the battlefield:

Hector raged terribly, with gloomy eyes under his brows
They glowed with fire; over the head, rising with a crest,
Terribly rocked his shell at Hector, who flew by the storm in the battle!

The portrait of another man, one of Penelope's suitors, is painted with the same expression:

Antinous - seething with anger - his chest rose,
Squeezed by black malice, and his eyes, like a flaming fire, glowed.

The woman's feelings manifested themselves in a different way, here the restraint of movements, a deep concealment of suffering. Penelope, having learned that the suitors were going to destroy her son, "was speechless for a long time," "her eyes were darkened with tears, and her voice did not subdue her."

It has already become a commonplace to talk about constant epithets in Homer's poems. But is it only in Homer's poems?

We will find constant epithets and special, tightly welded phrases among the poets of all peoples of antiquity. "Red girl", "good fellow", "white light", "damp earth". These and similar epithets are found in every Russian fairy tale, epic, song. And what is remarkable, they do not age, do not lose their original freshness. An amazing aesthetic secret! As if the people perfected them forever, and they, like diamonds, sparkle and shimmer with an eternal, enchanting brilliance.

Apparently, the point is not in the novelty of the epithet, but in its truth. "I remember a wonderful moment ..." "Wonderful!" - an ordinary, ordinary epithet. We often repeat it in our everyday speech.

Why, in Pushkin's line, is it so fresh and, as it were, primordial? Because it is infinitely faithful, because it conveys the truth of feelings, because the moment was really wonderful.

Homer's epithets are constant, but at the same time they are diverse and amazingly picturesque, that is, in a word, they recreate the situation. They are always appropriate, extremely expressive and emotional.

When the sad Telemachus, full of doom about the missing father, he goes to the sea in order to "wet his hands with salt water", then the sea is "sandy". The epithet paints us a picture of the sea coast. When it came to going to Telemachus in search of his father, the epithet is already different - the sea "foggy". This is no longer a visual image, but a psychological one, talking about the difficulties ahead, about the path full of surprises ... In the third case, the sea is already "terrible" when Eureklea, worried about the fate of Telemachus, dissuades him from going to Pylos. When at dawn Telemachus sailed from Ithaca, the sea again acquired the picturesque epithet “dark” (“fresh marshmallow breathed, roaring the dark sea”). But then the dawn broke, Homer, with one epithet, designated the picture of the morning - "purple waves".

Sometimes the sea is "dark and foggy", that is, full of threats and troubles, "abundant", "great".

Waves in a storm are "mighty, heavy, mountainous." The sea is "fishy", "wide noise", "sacred". When Penelope imagines what troubles her son can meet in the sea, it already becomes an "evil" sea, full of anxieties and dangers, "anxiety of the foggy sea."

To give his listener a visible idea of ​​winter, Homer reports that the shields of the warriors "were covered with thin crystal from frost." The poet picturesquely and even, perhaps, somewhat naturalistically, draws the episodes of the battles. So, the spear of Diomedes hit
Pandara in the nose near the eyes: flew through white teeth,
Flexible tongue with crushing copper at the root
And, with a spear sparkling through and through, it froze in the chin.

Another warrior stabbed a spear into his right side, "right into the bladder, under the pubic bone", "with a cry he fell to his knees, and death overshadowed the fallen one." Etc.

Homer is not always dispassionate. Sometimes his attitude towards people and events is expressed quite clearly. Listing the allies of the Trojan king Priam, he calls a certain Amfimachus, apparently a hefty fanfaron and lover to show off, so that “he even went to battle, dressing up in gold, like a virgin. Pathetic! " Homer exclaims contemptuously.

Homer is a poet, and, as a poet, he appreciates that main element of poetic creativity, that brick that makes up a single verse, song, poem - the word. And he feels the immense expanse of words, he literally bathes in speech expanse, where everything is subject to him:

Human language is flexible; speeches for him abound
Anyone, the field for words here and there is endless.

Summing up, it is necessary to outline the main, in my opinion, features of Homer's poems. They are different in their themes. The Iliad is a work of historical character. She tells about events of not only national, but also for that time of international importance. The tribes and nationalities of a huge region collided in a great confrontation, and this confrontation, which was remembered for a long time by subsequent generations (it took place, as it is believed, in the 12th century BC), is described with the accuracy required for historical science.

This work reflected with an encyclopedic breadth the entire spiritual world of Ancient Greece - its beliefs (myths), its social, political and moral norms. It captured her material culture with plastic clarity. Conceived as a historical narrative, it recreated with great artistic expressiveness the physical and spiritual appearance of the participants in the event - it showed specific people, their individual traits, their psychology.

The poet singled out the main moral problem of his story, subordinating to it, in essence, the entire course of the story - the influence of human passions on the life of society (the anger of Achilles). This was reflected in his own moral position. He opposed anger and bitterness with the idea of ​​humanity and goodness, ambition and the pursuit of glory (Achilles) - high civic valor (Hector).

"Odyssey" has absorbed the civil and family and everyday ideals of ancient Greek society - love for the homeland, family hearth, feelings of marital fidelity, filial and paternal affection. Basically, however, this is the story of the "discovery of the world." A man, in this case Odysseus, looks with curiosity at the mysterious, unknown, concealing many secrets, the world... His inquisitive gaze seeks to penetrate his secrets, to know, to taste everything. An irrepressible craving for comprehending the unknown is the main ideological core of Odyssey's wanderings and adventures. To some extent, this is also an ancient utopian novel. Odysseus visited the "afterlife", in Hades, and in the land of social justice, general prosperity - on the island of Feak. He looked into the future of human technological progress - he was sailing on a ship driven by thought.

Nothing stopped his curiosity. He wanted to endure everything, to experience everything, no matter what troubles threatened him, in order to learn, to comprehend the still untested, unknown.

The Iliad shows the cunning and cunning of Odysseus, as his main and, perhaps, not always attractive features, in the Odyssey - curiosity, inquisitiveness of the mind. True, even here his spirit of guile does not leave, helping him in the most difficult situations.

So, two poems that covered the life of the ancient Greek people. The first illuminated the entire society in all the diversity of its historical existence, the second - an individual in its relationship with people and mainly with nature. Odysseus acts as a representative of all mankind, discovering, knowing the world.

Greek lyrics

Homer is the shining pinnacle of Greek culture. Below, if we adhere to the metaphorical form of speech, stretched the vast fragrant plains of classical Greece with its lyrics, drama, historical, rhetorical and philosophical prose. Athens was its geographical center, the 5th century - its most flourishing at times.

Homer completes an era in ancient world culture - its initial nationwide stage, when it was still created by the entire people. Some of its brilliant representatives only generalized and synthesized the achievements of their fellow tribesmen. The memory of the people did not always retain their names. Sometimes she, keeping us the name of one of them, especially distinguished and especially revered, ascribed to him the best creations of other authors. It happened with Homer. And since the ancient peoples saw divine inspiration in creativity, the individual author's originality was not appreciated. The authors continued the established traditions, their own personality seemed to be effaced. This was an epic stage in the history of culture. Everything I have told about the ancient literatures of China, India, the countries of the Middle and Near East and Homeric Greece refers to this epic period of world culture, when
the personality of the author has not yet claimed an individual creative handwriting. ("... In my songs, nothing belongs to me, but everything belongs to my muses," the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in the 7th century BC.)

Literature is usually divided into three main kinds: epic, lyric and drama. This division, of course, is conditional, because in the epic you can find elements of the lyrics and in the lyrics - the elements of the epic, but it is convenient, as it indicates the main distinguishing features of each of these types of literature.

In the most distant times, an epic poem could not yet arise, it was still too difficult for a person of the prehistoric era, while an unpretentious song with a clear rhythm was quite accessible to him. Initially, these were labor songs and prayers. Prayer expressed the emotions of a person - fear, admiration, delight. The lyrics were still nameless and expressed the emotions not of an individual, but of a collective (clan, tribe), it retained the established, as it were, frozen forms and was passed on from generation to generation. Songs of this type have already been described by Homer:

In a circle, their beautiful youth by the ringing lyre
Jangled sweetly, singing beautifully to the linen strings
In a thin voice ...

Then legends appeared, epic stories about events in the world of deities, about heroes. They were folded and performed by aedy, passed down orally from generation to generation, "polishing", improving them. From these songs (in Greece they were called Homeric hymns) poems began to be composed. Such compilers in Greece were called rhapsodists (collectors, "stitchers" of songs). One such rhapsode was apparently Homer. The lyrics remain at the level of traditional ritual forms (festivities, sacrifices, funeral rites, lamentation). But later she pushed aside the epic and came out on top, and has already acquired a new quality. In the field of art, this was a real revolution, due, of course, to social factors. The personality began to isolate itself, stand out from society, sometimes even came into conflict with society. Now the lyrics began to express the individual world of the individual.

The lyric poet was significantly different from the epic poet, who recreated external world- people, nature, the lyricist turned his gaze on himself. The epic poet strove for the truth of the picture, the lyric poet - for the truth of feeling. He looked "in himself", he was busy with himself, analyzed his inner world, his feelings, his thoughts:

I love and as if I do not love
And crazy, and in the mind ... -

wrote the poet-lyricist Anacreon. Passions are boiling in my soul - a kind of madness, but somewhere in the corners of my consciousness a cold, skeptical thought nests: is it so? Am I kidding myself? The poet is trying to sort out his own feelings. The epic poet did not allow himself this, not attaching importance to his personality.

Homer turned to the muses to help him tell the world about the anger of Achilles and all the tragic consequences of this anger, the poet-lyricist would ask the muses about something else: may they help him (the poet) tell about his (the poet's) feelings - sufferings and joys, doubts and hopes. In the epic the pronouns "he", "she", "they", in the lyrics - "I", "we".

“My lot is to be in the sunshine and in love with the beauty,” sang the poetess Sappho. Here in the foreground is not beauty and the sun, but the attitude of the poetess towards them.

So, the majestic and luxurious epic poetry of Homer was replaced by an agitated, passionate and languid, caustic and harsh poetry, lyrical in its personal quality. Alas, she came to us truly in fragments. We can only guess what kind of wealth it was. We know the names of Tirtheus, Archilochus, Solon, Sappho, Alkeus, Anacreon and others, but little has survived from their poetry.

The lyric poet showed his bleeding heart, sometimes, driving away despair, he called himself to patience, to courage. Archilochus:

Heart, heart! Troubles arose before you in a formidable formation:
Cheer up and meet them with your chest ...

The person became her own biographer, she talked about the dramas of her life, she was her own portrait painter and a sadden. The poet Hipponactus, with a bitter smile, addressing the gods, spoke of the pitiful state of his wardrobe:

Hermes of Killen, Maya's son, dear Hermes!
Hear the poet. My cloak is full of holes - I will tremble.
Give the clothes to Hipponact, give the shoes ...

Lyric poets glorify civic feelings, praise military glory, patriotism:

It is sweet to lose your life, among the valiant warriors who have fallen,
To a brave husband in battle for the sake of his homeland, -

sings Tirtaeus. "And it is praiseworthy and glorious for a husband to fight for his homeland," - echoes Callin. However, the moral foundations were noticeably shaken: the poet Archilochus does not hesitate to admit that he threw his shield on the battlefield (a serious crime in the eyes of the ancient Greek).

Now the saian wears my flawless shield,
Willy-nilly, I had to throw it to me in the bushes.
But I myself have escaped death. And let it disappear
My shield! I can get a new one just as well.

His only excuse was that he was in a mercenary army. But the Spartans did not forgive him for his poetic recognition, and when he once found himself on the territory of their country, he was offered to retire.

Poets cared about the beauty of their verse, but the main thing that they asked the muses was excitement, emotions, passion, the ability to kindle hearts:

O Kaliopa! Give us a lovely
Light the song and passion that conquers
Our anthem and make the choir enjoyable.
Alkman

Perhaps the main theme of lyric poetry was, and is, and, apparently, will always be - love. Even in ancient times, a legend arose about Sappho's unrequited love for the beautiful young man Phaon. Rejected by him, she allegedly threw herself off a cliff and died. The poetic legend was dispelled by the latest scientists, but the Greeks were sweet, giving tragic charm to the whole appearance of their beloved poetess.

Sappho kept a school for girls on the island of Lesvos, taught them singing, dancing, music, sciences. The theme of her songs is love, beauty, beautiful nature. She sang feminine beauty, the charm of feminine bashfulness, tenderness, youthful beauty of a girl's appearance. Of the celestials, the closest to her was the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Her hymn to Aphrodite, which has survived to us, reveals all the charm of her poetry. We present it in full in the translation of Vyacheslav Ivanov:

Rainbow Throne Aphrodite! Zeus is an immortal daughter, a witch!
Do not break my hearts with anguish-torpor!
Have mercy, goddess!
Rush from the heights of the mountains, - as before:
You heard my voice from afar:
I called - you came to me, leaving the Father's sky!
She stood on a red chariot;
Like a whirlwind, carried her on a fast flight
Strong-winged above the dark land
A flock of doves.
You rushed, you were before the eyes,
She smiled at me with an unspeakable face ...
"Sappho!" - I hear: - Here I am! What are you praying for?
What are you sick with?
What makes you sad and what makes you mad?
Tell me everything! Does the heart languish with love?
Who is he, your offender? Whom will I bend
Sweet under the yoke?
A recent fugitive will become inseparable;
Whoever has not received the gift will come with the gifts,
Who does not love will soon fall in love
And unrequited ... "
Oh, appear again - through a secret prayer,
Free the heart from the new misfortune!
Become, armed, in gentle warfare
Help me.
Eros never lets me breathe.
He flies from Cypride,
All around you plunging into darkness,
Like a lightning sparkling northern
Thracian wind and soul
Powerfully shakes to the very bottom
Burning madness.

The name of a contemporary and compatriot Sappho Alkeia is associated with political events on the island of Lesvos. He was an aristocrat. Usually in those days in the Greek city-states, in these small city-states, there were several eminent families who considered themselves "the best" from the word "aristos" ("best"), so the word "aristocracy" ("the power of the best") appeared.

Usually they traced their ancestry from some god or hero, were proud of this relationship and were brought up in the spirit of ancestral pride. This gave a certain charm to the myths and allowed them to be retained in memory, and sometimes enriched with new poetic details, flattering for the representatives of the family. The myths morally nourished the aristocratic youth. It was a moral principle for every young man to imitate heroic ancestors, not to lose their honor by any unworthy act. This inspired respect for the aristocratic family.

But times have changed. Aristocratic families became poorer, wealthy townspeople were promoted to the political arena, class conflicts arose, and in a number of cases significant social movements took place. People who previously stood at the top of society were left behind. Such was the fate of the poet Alcaeus, an aristocrat thrown out of his usual rut of life, who became an exile after the tyrant Pittacus ascended to Mytilene.

Alcaeus created in poetry the image of a ship-state, thrown from side to side by a raging sea and a stormy wind.

Understand who can, a furious revolt of the winds.
The shafts are rolling - this one is from here, that one
From there ... In their rebellious dump
We are rushing with a tarry ship,
Barely resisting the onslaught of angry waves.
The deck was already flooded with water;
The sail is already shining through
All perforated. The clamps have loosened.

This poetic image of the state, shaken by political storms, appeared more than once in world poetry.

In political and philosophical lyrics, the poet and politician Solon is interesting. His reforms, carried out in the 6th century, went down in history. BC NS. Aristotle called him the first defender of the people. His reforms took into account the interests of the poorest strata of Athens. Solon did not share his feelings with the reader, it was rather a moral and political mentor ("Instructions to the Athenians", "Instructions to oneself"), who inspired feelings of patriotism and civic consciousness. Known for his poem "The Weeks of Human Life", which characterizes in general the view of the ancient Greek on human life, on its time boundaries, age characteristics of a person. We give it in full:

The little boy, still foolish and weak, is losing
There are a number of first teeth of his, just seven years old;
If God completes the second seven-year period, -
The boy is already showing signs of maturity to us.
In the third, the young man hides quickly with the growth of all members
A gentle downy beard, skin color changes.
Everyone in the fourth week is already in full bloom
The strength of the body, and in it the sign of valor is seen by everyone.
Fifth, it's time to think about marriage to the desired man.
To continue his family in a number of flowering children.
The human mind in the sixth week is fully ripe
And no longer strives for impracticable deeds.
Reason and speech in seven weeks are already in full bloom,
Likewise, at eight - in total fourteen years old.
The man is still powerful in the ninth, but weaken
For all-glorious deeds, his word and mind.
If God brings the tenth to the end of the seven years, -
Then the mortal end for people will not be early.

In modern times, the name of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, a cheerful old man who glorified life, youth and the joys of love, enjoyed special love. In 1815, the sixteen-year-old lyceum student Pushkin, in playful verses, called him his teacher:

Let the fun come running
Waving a playful toy
And it will make us laugh from the heart
For a full foamy mug ...
When will the east get rich
In the darkness of a young woman
And the white poplar will light up
Covered in the morning dew
Serve bunches of Anacreon:
He was my teacher ...
"My testament"

Youth is beautiful for its bright perception of the world. Such was the youth of Pushkin, and it is not surprising that the distant, long-standing poet who lived twenty-five centuries before him so delighted him with his cheerful, cheerful, mischievous poetry. Pushkin made several translations from Anacreon, amazing in beauty and faithfulness to the spirit of the original.

Unfortunately, little has come down to us from the poetry of Anacreon, and his fame is perhaps more based in modern times on numerous imitations of him and the charm of the legend that developed about him in antiquity. In the 16th century, the famous French publisher Etienne published a collection of Anacreon's poems based on the manuscript of the 10th - 11th centuries, but most of them did not belong to the poet, but were talented pastiches (imitations). There is rich Anacreontic poetry. In Russia, Anacreon was especially fond of in the 18th century. MV Lomonosov's ode "The skies were covered with darkness at night" even became a popular romance.

The name of the poet Pindar is associated with an amazing in scale, beauty, moral nobility phenomenon in the public life of Ancient Greece - the Olympic Games. Pindar was truly their singer. The poet lived an ordinary human age, something within seventy years (518-442), the Olympic Games lasted more than a millennium, but his poetry painted this millennium with the rainbow colors of youth, health, beauty.

For the first time sports events took place in Olympia in 776 BC. NS. in a quiet valley near Mount Kronos and two rivers - Alphea and its tributary Kladeya - and repeated every four years until 426 AD, when fanatics of Christianity, destroying the old pagan culture of antiquity, destroyed the Olympic Altis (temples, altars, porticoes, statues of the gods and athletes).

For a thousand two hundred years, Altis was the focus of all the beauty that the ancient world contained. Here the "father of history" Herodotus read his books, the philosopher Socrates came here on foot, Plato was here, the great orator Demosthenes made his speeches, here was the workshop of the famous sculptor Phidias, who sculpted the statue of Olympian Zeus.

The Olympic Games became the moral center of ancient Greece, they united all Greeks as an ethnic whole, they reconciled the warring tribes. During the games, the roads became safe for travelers, a truce was established among the belligerent parties. Throughout the then world known to the Greeks, special messengers (theorists - "sacred messengers") circulated with the news of the upcoming games, they were received by "proxenes" - local representatives of the Olympic Games, persons who enjoyed special honor. Crowds of pilgrims then rushed to Olympia. They came from Syria and Egypt, from the Italic lands, from the south of Gaul, from Taurida and Colchis. Only morally impeccable persons, never convicted, not convicted of any unworthy actions, were allowed to play games. The spirit of the times, of course, manifested itself here too: women, as well as slaves and non-Greeks, were not allowed (on pain of death).

Pindar composed solemn choral chants in honor of the winners in competitions (epicia). The hero himself, his ancestors and the city in which the hero lived were glorified in the mighty sound of the choir. Unfortunately, the musical part of the chants has not survived. The poet, of course, was not limited only to the pathos of praise, he weaved philosophical reflections on the role of fate in a person's life, on the will, sometimes unjust, of the gods, on the need to remember the limits of human capabilities, on the sacred for the ancient Greek sense of proportion, into his song.

In ancient times, poems were chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre or flute. There were poems and songs. The poet not only composed the text of the verse, but also invented a melody and even composed a dance. It was melodic poetry, consisting of three elements: "words, harmony and rhythm" (Plato).

Music played a significant role in Everyday life ancient Greek, it is a pity that crumbs have come down to us from her.
The term "lyrics" - from the word lyre, a musical instrument used as an accompaniment, appeared relatively late, around the 3rd century. BC e., when the center of Greek culture moved to Alexandria. The Alexandrian philologists, who were engaged in the classification and commenting of the literary heritage of classical Greece, combined under this name all poetic genres that differ from the epic with its hexameter (six-foot) by other rhythmic forms.

Flood, Deucalion, Ellin. People who lived in ancient times passed on a tragic tradition from fathers to children. As if many thousands of years ago there was a worldwide flood on Earth: for several days a terrible downpour went on without interruption, raging streams flooded fields, forests, roads, villages, cities. Everything disappeared under the water. People died. The only person who was named Deucalion managed to escape. He had a son, who received the beautiful and sonorous name Ellen. It was he who chose the stony land for settlement in those parts where the country of Greece is now located. By the name of its first inhabitant, it was called Hellas, and its population was called Hellenes.

Hellas. It was an amazing country. A lot of work had to be spent on growing bread in its fields, olives in the gardens, and grapes on the mountain slopes. Every piece of land was watered with sweat by grandfathers and great-grandfathers. A clear blue sky stretched over Hellas, the whole country was crossed from end to end by mountain ranges. The tops of the mountains were lost in the clouds, and how could you not believe that in the heights, hidden from human eyes, eternal spring reigns and immortal gods live!

On all sides, the beautiful country was surrounded by the sea, and there was no place in Hellas from which it would be impossible to reach its shores in one day's journey. The sea was visible from everywhere - one had only to climb some hill. The sea attracted the Hellenes, and even more attracted their unknown overseas countries. Wonderful stories were born from the stories of the brave sailors who visited there. The ancient Greeks were very fond of listening to them, having gathered after a day's labors by a hot fire.

Homer, Hesiod and Myths. This is how myths and legends were born in ancient times, into the fascinating world of which you and I entered. The Greeks were cheerful, brave, knew how to find good in every day, knew how to cry and laugh, get angry and admire. All this was reflected in their myths, which, fortunately, have not been lost for centuries. Ancient writers in their works beautifully presented ancient legends - some in poetry, some in prose. The first to retell myths was the wise blind poet Homer, who lived almost three thousand years ago. His famous poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" tell about the Greek heroes, their battles and victories, as well as about the Greek gods, their life on the top of the impregnable Mount Olympus, feasts and adventures, quarrels and reconciliations.

And the poet Hesiod, who lived a little later than Homer, wrote beautifully about where the world itself and all the gods came from. His poem is called "Theogony", which means "The Origin of the Gods." The ancient Greeks loved to watch plays about the life of gods and heroes. They were written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Until now, these plays (the Greeks called them "tragedies") are performed in many theaters around the world. Of course, they have long been translated from ancient Greek into modern languages, including Russian. From them, you can also learn a lot of interesting things about the heroes of Greek myths.

The myths of ancient Greece are as beautiful as the country itself; the gods of Greek myths are in many ways similar to humans, but only more powerful. They are beautiful and forever young, for them there is no hard work and disease ...

Many ancient sculptures depicting gods and heroes are found on the land of ancient Hellas. Look at them in the illustrations of the book - they are as if they were alive. True, not all statues are intact, because they have lain for many centuries in the ground, and therefore they may have a broken arm or leg, sometimes even their heads are beaten off, sometimes only one body remains, but still they are beautiful, like the immortal gods of Hellenic myths themselves.

Ancient Hellas lives in works of art. And it is connected with mythology by many threads. The gods of the ancient Greeks:

Ancient Hellas. Homer, Hesiod and the myths

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