‘How can men find their way to war but not find their way home?’ asks Penelope (Juliette Binoche) of Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) in The Return. ‘For some,’ replies Odysseus, ‘war becomes home.’ Uberto Pasolini’s quietly intelligent 2024 film – which will be followed by Christopher Nolan’s new take on the same tale when The Odyssey hits multiplexes in 2026 – takes us back to a world in which the spoken word was everything. Penelope had been confident that Odysseus was alive – rumour had spread across the royal courts of Greece – but the reasons for his delay in returning to her from the Trojan War remained garbled and ambiguous.
As a man of many epithets – ‘multi-skilled’ was just one – Odysseus had the power to make amends after 10 years of travelling and dallying with other women. For Homer’s first audiences (if not Penelope), it was only right that his eloquence should prevail, for eloquence was the quality upon which contemporary society was built. Storytelling, as epitomised by Homer’s poems, brought people together, instilling the civil and martial values by which they lived. Without stories, there was no civilisation.
Spoken word: repetition and the human memory
In pre-Archaic Age Greece, prior to the invention of long-form writing, poets performed the Homeric epics and other poems in public. It would have taken about three days to put on the Iliad or the Odyssey in full, so people must have attended in long sittings with breaks and sleep in between. If the audience required stamina, the performers faced an even stiffer challenge, for they had to rely upon memory to relay the stories. The repetition of passages and phrases offered modern scholars the first clue that the poems were first composed and passed down orally.
Within the ‘Oral Tradition’, each bard who took up the works had some freedom to adapt and add to them as he sang, but the stories themselves had to remain recognisable. Many critics have expressed doubt over how closely one bard could imitate another, owing to the limitations of human memory. Was it truly possible to recall and replay 15,000 lines of verse? This is, on the face of it, a strange question to ask, given that oral performances thrived even under the Roman Empire, long after the rise of literacy. It would appear that is rather our memories that are at fault.
The human brain once possessed a great aptitude for learning by rote and retaining information. The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor gained an insight into the rarity of this in the 20th century while researching his book Roumeli. Rural inhabitants of the mountains of Crete, Leigh Fermor discovered, knew a long, early 17th-century poem by heart. The Erotókritos was of a similar length to the Odyssey.
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Homeric hope?
Much has been written in recent years about the deleterious impact of the internet and micro forms of writing, such as those on social media channels including X, on our concentration spans. But with Homer’s works again back in fashion, it seems a good moment to ask whether we might yet rediscover our ancient ability for memorising and listening. Might the explosion of podcasts and audiobooks, for example, provide some renewed hope for the future of the spoken word? By absorbing information with our ears, as opposed to relying predominantly upon the eyes, we could be said to be partway towards reviving the ancient practice.
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There is speculation in publishing houses that the growth of the podcast has come at the expense of the physical book. There is apparently a large audience who prefer to get their information from listening, even passively, to actively reading. Rote-learning and the memorisation of texts, meanwhile, remain out of favour in schools and beyond. While this is certainly bad news for the traditional writer (although the sale of audiobooks is welcome), the listener might at least try to justify their preference by thinking of Homer and aspiring to the same levels of concentration and retention as the poet’s first audiences. In an ideal world, the listener’s mind would expand – in spite of the pervasiveness of social media ‘brain rot’. Although the two Homeric blockbusters on the silver screen last year and next are inherently visual as well as aural, they might give renewed vigour to the eloquence of Odysseus, thousands of years after Homer first gave it life.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 96. Click here to subscribe
