The Homerids were a society of bards who were descended from Homer, or used Homer as a collective pen name, or, possibly, they were priests who venerated Homer's ghost and sacrificed to it in hopes of inspiration. On this matter the classical authorities are in broad disagreement, though the issue is much taken up. The earliest and most famous reference is in Herodotus's Histories:
The Homerids of Chios48.1 are a sort of secret society of poets claiming descent from Homer who worship in a manner like that of the Eleusinians.48.2 They have a sacred book that, though it is said to be very short, is supposed to hold every possible variation of the Odyssey. I cannot say for certain whether this is true since they guard their book jealously and their initiates do not speak of the matter.
Aristotle's Poetics addresses the Homerids and their art but only to dismiss them. Aristotle writes that the Homerid book ignores climax and catharsis, the essentials of drama, and as such is fundamentally corrupt. To illustrate their desperation and low estate, he relates an episode in which a lean and hungry wanderer came to his door and claimed to be the last of the Homerids,48.3 exiled from his homeland and without hope. This relict Homerid offered to give him his people's secret book and the key to reading it in exchange for a talent of silver, but he, Aristotle, rejected the offer on the grounds that the true philosopher is above mere obscurantism.
Various other Greek and Roman authors (Philemon and Apollodorus of Rhodes, to name the two most prominent) also mention a book containing many, though not infinite, variations of Homer, but do not elaborate.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Homerids were known solely through the writers of antiquity, but in 1951 archaeologists excavated the remains of their school on Chios. The site, a high untenanted limestone meadow over a sea-cliff, yielded forty six unadorned buildings with low doors, many rooms and a grace that even centuries of interment in black de-oxygenated soil had not effaced. The bedrock underlying the settlement's ruins was found to be riddled with passages debouching in the cliff-face or in odd corners of the houses and temples--behind a statue of Aphrodite, at the bottom of a deep well, in a storage closet. Some of the tunnels had become the abode of bats but others had stayed sealed over the millennia and retained spectacular frescoes depicting lyre-players and flute girls, the gods disporting themselves around chess boards,48.4 or the shades of the dead wandering in a grey vale.
The strata show that the school was founded around the ninth century B.C. and repeatedly razed and rebuilt. The number and position of the buildings changed over the centuries but the underground passages were a constant. They may have been a refuge in times of war, or, in light of the frescoes, possibly a religious sanctuary. Sometime in the fourth century B.C. the settlement was destroyed by fire and conclusively abandoned--since then it has been inhabited only by sheep.
The first recorded accession of the Lost Books was into the Emperor Marcus Aurelius's library. Like many educated Romans he had an exaggerated respect for Greek learning, and, with the all the resources of Empire at his disposal, was able to compile the most complete collection of classical Greek texts then in existence. The library's catalog gives an abstract of each book--the Lost Books is described as, ``A code of great complexity, purported to be the Odyssey turned in on itself. A lock with many keys or many locks with a single key.'' Though the catalog survives, the library itself eroded rapidly in the years following Aurelius's death and was completely dispersed by the time the Western Empire fell--the fate of his copy of the Lost Books is unknown.
Thereafter the book turned up every few centuries in libraries and private collections. In 631 A.D. a Bavarian abbot wrote to a friend in Rome about the acquisition of the Lost Books, though he complained that it was locked within a cipher and that after many, many evenings of dedicated study he got no more for his pains than a headache. Jans Ohmon, a Dutch priest living on the island of Rhodes, put this bequest in his last will and testament, dated February 26, 1021 A.D.: ``The Reflections of Homer, or the Lost Books of the Odyssey, an ancient volume, in which much is said to be hidden for the true scholar, to my friend Gennadius Delphinus Diaphotismos, that the delightful memory of our countless afternoons at chess may linger a little while longer.''
Historical bibliographers note the Lost Books cropping up in other times and places (Knossos in 503 A.D., Salzburg in 729 A.D., etc.), usually in the hands of students of mysticism, but these references are typically uncorroborated and many are most likely apocryphal. The details of the trajectory of the Lost Books through time seems likely to remain a mystery.
The most famous owner of the Lost Books was the Kaballist and mathematician Raymond Lully of Catalonia, who had a historically noteworthy library of the algebraic, historical and occult. In 1303 he published Ars Magna, a book about anagrams and the fledgling science of combinatorics, although Lully was less interested in mathematics than in divination. Ars Magna contains the first description of any kind of a ``machine for thinking,'' and is, in some circles, considered the earliest precursor of Artificial Intelligence. The thinking machine in question took the form of a stack of coaxial wheels of decreasing diameter, the circumference of each inscribed with attributes of God--the divine, the good, the wise, the loving, and so on. Rotating the wheels produced new combinations of attributes that revealed, Lully argued, new facets of God's nature and of His plan.
In a coda to Ars Magna, Lully describes an application of his techniques to the terrestrial sphere, in which the wheels are labeled not with aspects of the divine but with more human concerns: Time, Memory, Desire, Revenge, The Gods, The Dead, Departures, Returns, Words, Deception and Doubles. The coda ends with the claim that his divinatory engine has allowed him to read the secret book of Homer. One is left with the sense that this interests him primarily as a proof of his method for reading the secret mind of God.
After Lully's note in Ars Magna there were no more references to the Lost Books until 1789 when it surfaced in the treasure house of Mahmud II, Sultan of Constantinople, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and Suzerain of the Sublime Porte. It is not known how the Sultan came by his copy. His court's record-keeping was spotty and the loot of most nations within a thousand miles of the Bosphorus lay within his trebly locked vaults. The book, classified under Geological Apparatus, Fossils, Minerals, Military Medals, Various Insignia, Irreligious Books & Representational Paintings, was kept in an unventilated subterranean storeroom in a secondary winter palace in a heap of ephemera not immediately convertible into specie. Between mold, damp and neglect its destruction would have been a near certainty (which would have been an irreparable loss, as the Porte codex seems to be the only copy to have survived from antiquity) had it not been for Lord Elgin.
Elgin, an aristocrat noteworthy both for his good breeding and his passion for antiquities, was appointed British ambassador to the Ottoman sultanate in 1801. Just before his appointment he had married Ms. Mary Nisbet, and, as a wedding present, was building her a new house. His architect, Thomas Harrison, urged him to use his position to obtain Greek statuary with which to grace the new residence--in particular, Harrison suggested that he acquire the marbles of the Parthenon.
At the time the Ottomans were using the Parthenon as a fortress. It had been bombarded when the Venetians besieged Athens in the eighteenth century and under the Ottomans its condition had only deteriorated. The temple was so grimy as to be almost unrecognizable--hovels filled its precincts and many of its plinths stood empty, their marble statuary having been burnt for lime. Elgin was horrified by the extent and the pace of the decay. He tried to buy the statues outright but was thwarted by the local authorities, who saw no reason to trouble the good Muslims living on the Acropolis for the sake of an infidel Englishman who wanted a few bits of rock. Elgin therefore went to the Sultan and requested the Parthenon marbles as a personal gift.
Nelson had recently had his victory at Trafalgar and Britain's star was high--it was by far the most valuable ally in Europe and the Sultan was happy to issue a firman entitling its ambassador to some worthless statues if it would help conciliate Britain's good will. So concerned was the Sultan to keep the invincible British navy set against his enemies rather than himself that he went on to make Elgin, evidently a Hellenophile, a present of a random assortment of the old Greek things gathering dust in his treasury--this included some exquisite red and black amphorae (now in the Frick Museum), a collection of ancient copper-pointed spears, an embossed silver chariot and perhaps as an afterthought the sole known copy of The Lost Books of the Odyssey. In his diary, Elgin writes that the strange book piqued his interest and he spent a day visiting the wisest professors of Constantinople with the volume under his arm, discovering that the binding and probably the paper were early Renaissance Milanese but learning nothing at all about the encoded, unreadable text.
Elgin's career soon took a turn for the worse. His Majesty's frigates were transporting the painstakingly boxed marbles back to England but, as a peace had been signed with France, Elgin, painfully susceptible to sea-sickness, decided to make the trip home overland. This was a poorly timed decision, as hostilities broke out again while he was in Paris and he was seized and held prisoner until 1811. When he got home he found that not only had his wife left him for another man but that public opinion, which had once hailed him as the savior of invaluable objets d'art, now regarded him as a despoiler. Disillusioned and in financial trouble, he washed his hands of the affair and sold the statues, along with the Sultan's other gifts, to the government for £34,981. According to his financial records he had spent £75,913 extracting them and transporting them to England.
The marbles were a cause celebre, and the other artifacts had a share in their glory. The Lost Books in particular was much taken up by the public--the connection with the Herodotus passage was quickly made and the general learned consensus was that they concealed a trove of Homeric literature unknown for the past thousand years. The contents of the book were published and became the pet study of many cryptographic hobbyists, none of whom made any progress. By 1823 public interest was essentially extinct.
The Lost Books re-entered the public eye in 1861, the same month that Darwin's Origin of Species came out, when Cyrus Maurer, an amateur philologist, published what he claimed was a complete decryption. Many letters of the period speak of the excitement surrounding these two books, some writers conflating details of the two. (In a letter dated July 7, 1861, Lionel Sackville-West writes his fiancée that, ``A new book of Homer's has been discovered, lost these long ages--it survived, though barely, in odd corners of the world as an oral tradition, forever undergoing changes and revisions, only the best variations surviving to be told again.'') In Maurer's decoded translation, based on elaborate mathematical principles whose details he declined to elaborate, the Lost Books relates the history of Telemachus and Odysseus's sons by the witch Circe, ending with Telemachus and Penelope going to Circe's island, Aiaia, where they are made immortal, Circe marrying Telemachus and Penelope marrying one of her late husband's sons by Circe.
Maurer's work won wide acclaim and offers of university chairs and patronage flowed in. He was a vigorous self-promoter--he used some of the first projection devices ever made to cast the image of his text on the walls of the Wren Library, and gave away cheaply bound copies in front of telegraph stations in London. This went on until Joseph Collins, a Oxford don best known for his work on vascular botany, revealed that the so-called translations were rife with anachronisms--words unknown in the Greek lexicon much before the New Testament being the most egregious example--and fraudulent beyond a doubt. Soon afterwards it came to light that Maurer had recited parts of his so-called translation at a literary salon in his time at St. Mary's college seventeen years before his alleged break-through.
Maurer stuck by his story even after these revelations, claiming that, anachronisms or no, he had extracted the true sense of the manuscript, but the public was fed up and he was ridiculed in the press. He later became deeply involved with spiritualism and published pamphlets in which he claimed to be Homer reincarnated and therefore perfectly entitled to do what was necessary to disseminate his work.48.5
Maurer's soi disant translation should not have fooled any serious student of the classics for more than a few minutes but it found an audience heartily willing to be deceived. It is occasionally reprinted even today, an elegant, internally complex and self-reflexive fraud that has more to do with the artistic climate of its time than with Homer. An outraged academy overlooked its literary merit for half a century--now that the sesquicentennial of its publication has passed, the righteous indignation has abated and the book has been drawing the intelligent scrutiny of critics.
In 1889 Maurer's mental health went into a precipitous decline. The details of his burgeoning madness are recorded in his voluminous and, as he approached the end, increasingly incoherent correspondence, primarily with other members of the Theosophical Society. He started refusing to enter buildings whose street numbers were prime,48.6 or, eventually, to read the prime-numbered pages of books, complaining that the primes haunted him and were secretly ruling his life. He also developed a morbid obsession with the Lost Books, which he had come to believe was a magical book that was somehow co-extensive with the universe. In a letter to spiritualist notable Henry Steel Olcott he wrote, ``It is a terrible generatrix, creating itself out of nothing and swallowing itself up again. Its roiling substance is composed of copies of itself. It is full of doors and dark passages, each leading back within it. It has undergone a final metastasis, like a great cancer, and swallowed all the world. And yet, it is suffered to sit on library shelves as though it were only an ordinary book." The signs of paranoid schizophrenia (which did not exist as a diagnostic category in the nineteenth century) are hard to miss. It is interesting to note that some of his remarks can be interpreted as an early prefiguration of the mathematical idea of fractals. Maurer died of acute pneumonia on November 29th, 1901.
A few years ago I went to Chios to see the ruins of the Homerid school. The last dig was in the late seventies--now it is an officially designated tourist site but one so inaccessible and rarely visited as to get little in the way of husbandry. I set out from the nearest paved road onto the steep five mile trail, all signs of modernity soon invisible behind the hills. I recall the strong smell of dry late summer grasses and an almost insuperable lassitude. The guard shack was deserted and I was the only visitor, indeed the only human being, though cicadas churred invisibly and swallows traced parabolae in the sky.
I sat in the thick grass at cliff's edge looking out at the sky and the many distant islands and thought of the young men of past ages watching for shipping and changes in the weather. I made a slow circuit of the cliff edge and the thickets around the dig, moved by an absurd conviction that among the root-entangled stones or on a sheer rock wall I would find water-stained petrographs in an ancient hand. I walked among the buildings, listening for echoes of voices long stilled.
All the tunnel mouths were boarded up and as a further deterrent Department of Tourism signs in Greek, German and English warned of the possibility of collapse. In the cellar of building thirty four the boards blocking the tunnel mouth had rotted--I pried them back and slipped into the tunnel's cool darkness. Outside it was a blinding mid-day but twenty paces in the blackness was absolute. The walls were rough but now and then my fingertips found smooth patches and what might have been incisions. Initially I dismissed the sign's warning but at fifty paces my courage ran out. I sat on the floor, very still, and listened. I saw nothing at all but orange and red lights flaring randomly on my retina. The solidity of the wall under my hands. A distant rushing that might have been the sea, or my blood. The chthonic smells of stone and water and below them, very faint, a waft as of old libraries, of dark books in a millennial sleep.