Battle Itself Was The Home Of The Greeks

It is true that they occasionally refer to the places they come from, but the psychological weight in those references is not to buildings or cities. The Greeks look back with longing and a sense of loss to their families, their distant fathers and their father’s fathers, their wives and children, the brotherhood of their clans, the hearths which are defined by the people who gather around them, not to any places. They love their land, which give them food and sustenance, its wheat-bearing fields and lovely orchards, but not the kind of deeply instituted fixity and built wealth they have come to get their hands on in Troy. What they miss, in a phrase that is repeated again and again, is “the loved earth of their fathers.” But in Greek there is no distinction between “fatherhood” and “fatherland.” The word for them is both patra, and it can apply in Homer to a shared descent, a cousinage, a sense of family or clan. Fatherhood is fatherland, and blood and heart are home. 

Even the loved earth of the fathers is trumped by something else in the Greek mind. When the great owl-eyed goddess Athene, terrifying in her power, carrying her magic aegis, or breastplate, move through the Greek army, putting a deep hunger for violence in their hearts, allowing them to fight without rest, home itself drops into insignificance.

And now sweeter to them than any return

In their hollow ships to the loved earth of their fathers

Was battle.

The word Homer use for the deliciousness of that violence in battle is glukus, “sugary,” even “sickly,” used of nectar and sweet wine, of the people you love. Battle, in many ways, is the Greek home. As the agents of severance, they are themselves severed from home. The most delicious thing they can imagine is a world of unrelenting violence. 

-excerpted from Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicholson

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