Where’s the Gravy?
Barbara Graziosi
- Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer by Robin Lane Fox
Penguin, 528 pp, £10.99, September 2009, ISBN 978 0 14 024499 1
Homeric poetry is vivid and precise. We can smell the dust, hear the din of battle and follow the tip of a spear as it inflicts a wound ‘between the neck and the collarbone’. Even the gods – those obsolete pagan idols – seem familiar. Apollo kicks down the Achaean wall
like a child who piles sand by the seashore
and makes a tower to amuse himself in his innocence
and then, still playing, wrecks it with his hands and feet.
Athena deflects an arrow away from Menelaus ‘like a mother brushing a fly away from her sleeping baby’. And Hera, after quarrelling with Zeus, runs back home to Olympus
like an idea that flashes in the mind of a man
who has travelled far and wide, and thinks in his mind’s awareness,
‘I wish I were in that place, or this,’ and imagines many things;
so swiftly travelled Hera in her haste, a goddess.
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Vol. 31 No. 16 · 27 August 2009 » Barbara Graziosi » Where’s the Gravy? (print version)
pages 17-18 | 2579 words