A Journey That's Hard to Take

TRAVELLING HEROES

In the Epic Age of Homer

By Robin Lane Fox

Knopf. 465 pp. $32.50

Over the years Robin Lane Fox -- a professor of ancient history at Oxford -- has brought out a number of scholarly yet exhilarating and reader- friendly books, including "The Search for Alexander," "Pagans & Christians" and "The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian." In his provocative "The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible," he dismantled many of the myths about the formation of the Hebrew Scriptures, approaching this culturally loaded material as a no-nonsense, non-believing historian. In nearly all his work, Lane Fox writes crisply about even complicated subjects, as befits a regular newspaper columnist: Besides being a noted classicist, he's also the gardening correspondent for the Financial Times.

So I looked forward to enjoying "Travelling Heroes." I was even prepped for it: A year or so back I had happened to reread the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" and had done some collateral research into ancient Greek history and myth. Consequently, I figured that I was as well prepared a common reader as one might expect for this new look at the Mediterranean and Near Eastern culture of the 8th century B.C.

Nonetheless, the book nearly defeated me.

Lane Fox's thesis, to quote from the dust jacket, is that "migrants from the Greek island of Euboea settled in specific places both in the Near East and in Italy and that what they found there helped shape their most distinctive myths." In particular, topographic features, misconstrued names and indigenous local rites led to the association of already existing Greek classical myths and figures with particular geographical places. For instance, when Phoenicians in Cilicia (part of modern-day Turkey) said the word "Mopsu" -- a reference to a ruling house of Muksas or Mopsu -- the Greeks naturally heard the word "Mopsus," the name of one of their own legendary seers. Hence Mopsus, like Kilroy, had been there at some earlier time. "The Greek visitors did not invent a new mythical hero Mopsus in order to fit this 'Mopsu' into their own past," Lane Fox writes. "In their Greek myths they had such a hero already, the Mopsus who came from Greece and Claros. The names were irresistibly similar and the connection did not require great learning." What's more, to the Greeks, "a verbal coincidence often seemed like a sign or an omen."

According to Lane Fox, these sailors from the island of Euboea, along with the Phoenicians, were the Mediterranean's greatest travelers and seem to have served as cultural Johnny Appleseeds. Much of "Travelling Heroes" focuses on archaeological digs and drinking cups, bowls and other bits of ancient dinnerware. Such physical evidence, as well as certain myths and fragments of poetry, suggests that Euboeans once lived in north Syria at a place called Al Mina, and also in east Sicily and in north Africa. These people were, according to one study, the mid-8th-century's "masters of the trade between the East Mediterranean and central Italy."

So far, so good. As Lane Fox insists, "Their travels included journeys eastwards and with them as they travelled went a baggage of specific myths which they already knew. As we shall discover, they encountered myths in foreign lands which they assimilated too. They then believed that they had found specific items in these very same myths as they continued to travel even further across the sea. Particular myths thus became located like a 'songline' across the entire span of their travels."

Lane Fox further explains that "we have followed the tracks of the Euboeans and their objects so closely because the trail of myths which they also laid will depend on their contacts with exactly located sites and landscapes." The point, if I've got this right, is that the Euboeans brought their myths with them, then happened to observe a distinctive rocky promontory or strangely shaped bay near some distant shore, or perhaps heard stories from the indigenous people of the East that recalled what they already knew. So they concluded, using myth-tinted imaginations, this must be the very place where Adonis, Heracles or the monstrous Typhon performed some marvel, or where the various ancient heroes tarried during their return from Troy. "If people in the west were well aware of Homer," argues Lane Fox, "surely they would want to locate some of his spellbinding stories in the 'new world' which they had found? In due course, most of the Homeric stories came to be placed on the east coast of Sicily or up by the Bay of Naples, along the very routes taken by Euboeans who traveled there from c. 800-780 BC onwards."

Throughout "Travelling Heroes," Lane Fox labors relentlessly to prove the connection of various myth sites with Euboean trading posts. Consequently, his book is not merely scholarly, but also detailed and repetitive. Each chapter brings one more bit of pottery, one more name similarity, some possible association with Euboeans. Everything is scrupulously presented, and yet the sum total for this reader was first information overload, then tedium.

One hungers for a clearer sense of why all this matters -- and for more of the charming facts that occasionally enliven these pages. Did you know that Dido, who killed herself out of love for Aeneas (see Virgil's "Aeneid"), was the niece of the Bible's Queen Jezebel? Or that Antony and Cleopatra's daughter married a learned King Juba, who traced his ancestry back to Heracles? The city of Lisbon was once called Olisippo, a name derived from that of Odysseus/Ulysses. The Greeks, we're told, "steered by the Great Bear, whereas Phoenicians more advisedly steered by the Little Bear" (that is, by the Big or Little Dipper). In a grave on Ischia there was discovered some pottery inscribed this way: "I am Nestor's cup, good to drink with, but whoever drinks from this cup, at once the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite will seize him." Lane Fox calls this Europe's earliest literary allusion, since it clearly refers to Homer's "Iliad": Nestor -- the elderly counselor to the Greeks at Troy -- is said to possess a similar drinking vessel heavily embossed with gold.

"Travelling Heroes" is unquestionably an important book, but its subject is too arcane, too specialized and too speculative for people with only a passing interest in classical antiquity. Why, I wonder, did a trade publisher bring it out? It should have been the ornament of some scholarly press's spring catalogue.

Dirda -- mdirda@gmail.com -- writes Thursdays in Style.