Homer's ABCs

Why don’t people in the Iliad and Odyssey write anything down?

Sing, goddess, of how Homer is all the rage right now.

My timelines have become streams of Nolan-inspired analyses, hot takes and fun facts. While there are many wrathful (and often untenable) criticisms and some complaints of Homeric fatigue to wade through, I nonetheless love to see the cultural moment. The simple fact that boatloads of people are newly disembarking onto the pages of the Iliad or setting sail into the Odyssey is very heartening for me.

That world is amply populated with protagonists and antagonists who continue to entertain and inspire audiences – Hector, Priam, Cassandra, Helen, Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and of course swift-footed Achilles. Yet, as a historical linguist and alphabetic investigator, I am just as interested, if not more so, by a large crew of characters who have also made an unquantifiable contribution to Greek and global culture, yet are nowhere to be found in the two Homeric epics. They are the 24-ish letters of the ancient Greek alphabet.

Despite being part of the medium through which the Iliad and Odyssey are readable and knowable at all, the alphabet is curiously absent from their narrative content. Well, I at least think the absence is curious, given how colourful our Homeric lives are. Achilles fights and weeps, Odysseus sails and schemes, but neither hero writes. No messengers bear urgent letters; no inscriptions are engraved to honour gods and kings; no bureaucrats dutifully make inventories of goods in the Greek camp. It’s an epic world, but apparently an illiterate one too.

We are confident that Homer composed and performed his masterpieces only orally, but it doesn’t follow that all the characters of his creation should be likewise linguistically limited to speech. Frankly, there are points in the stories when a carefully worded letter would come in handy.

So, where is the alphabet in the world of Achilles and Odysseus? Why don’t Homeric characters write things down? And is there something to be learned from this absence of writing? My answers in brief are: it’s intentionally not around; because they can’t; and yes, probably.

In what follows, I’ll give the same answers in less brief.

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First things first: do we really have no mention of the alphabet or writing in the Iliad and Odyssey? No, writing is indeed mentioned – but just once.

In all 48 books that constitute these two epics, only Book 6 of the Iliad makes a passing reference to informative symbols, namely in the story-within-a-story of the hero Bellerophon. Told by his grandson Glaucus, the tale requires writing to progress; Bellerophon carries a letter from King Proetus from the king of Lycia, in which the former instructs the latter to kill Bellerophon. The same ‘please kill this messenger’ stratagem is also employed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, though, Bellerophon survives the peril.

Here are the relevant lines with an unpolished translation by yours truly:

πέμπε δέ μιν Λυκίην δέ, πόρεν δ᾽ ὅ γε σήματα λυγρὰ

γράψας ἐν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοφθόρα πολλά

…

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ δεκάτη ἐφάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠὼς

καὶ τότε μιν ἐρέεινε καὶ ᾔτεε σῆμα ἰδέσθαι

‘ὅττί ῥά οἱ γαμβροῖο πάρα Προίτοιο φέροιτο.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ σῆμα κακὸν παρεδέξατο γαμβροῦ,

πρῶτον μέν ῥα Χίμαιραν ἀμαιμακέτην ἐκέλευσε

πεφνέμεν…

‘He sent him to Lycia, and gave him baneful signs,

Having scratched many such life-destroying signs in a folded tablet

…

But when the tenth rosy-fingered Dawn appeared,

He then questioned [Bellerophon] and asked to be shown

Whatever sign he might be carrying from his son-in-law Proetus.

But when he had received the son-in-law’s bad sign,

He firstly ordered [Bellerophon] to slay the ferocious Chimera…’

(Homer, Iliad 6:168-9, 175-9)

This rare gem of reference has been the subject of much scholarly debate, and with good reason.

Firstly, it’s as clear as mud what the poet meant by “σήματα λυγρὰ” (sḗmata lugrà), which I’ve seen translated as “sad signs” and “painful signs”. What we do know is that these σήματα were physical marks capable of transmitting a complex wish from one human to another over a great distance. This sure sounds like writing. What isn’t sure is the principle of writing through which the missive was devised. It could be alphabetic, syllabic, logographic. The word σήματα is not the usual word for the alphabet’s letters – that would be γράμματα (grámmata). We can hesitantly take this as a point in favour of non-alphabetic symbols, ones that conveyed whole meanings.

The act of creating these σήματα is also worthy of discussion. The verb is “γράψας” (grápsas), which might seem like a straightforward reference to writing; its verbal root is recognisably the origin of English writing-words like graphic, graphology, biography, calligraphy. Yet this Ancient Greek verb is semantically varied. It can mean ‘write’, but also ‘draw’ and the more basic action ‘scratch’. As a word, it’s distantly related to English carve. The point here is that this mark-making verb could be indicative of a fully-fledged culture of writing; so too could it point to no more than a crude drawing of one stick-man (the Lycian king) killing another stick-man (Bellerophon).

The mention of a folded tablet that contained Proetus’ baneful signs also demonstrates an awareness of the paraphernalia that accompanied writing

The single appearance of writing in the Homeric epics is therefore mysterious. We can’t match any of our historical writing systems to the little that the poet gives us. What model of writing Homer had in mind is unknowable.

The rest is absence; writing does not come up again, from the citadel of Troy to the island home of Circe. From this, can we then conclude that Homer imagined his heroes as illiterate inhabitants of an unlettered world? It’s possible, but hard to argue on the basis of a lack alone; the obvious objection would be that other opportunities to mention writing simply didn’t occur to the composer(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey. A much stronger argument is one built on presence, on instances in which we can reasonably expect writing to appear.

I know of one such instance. In Book 7 of the Iliad, there is a strange scene involving a challenge to single combat, a group of potential champions, and a system of lots. The challenger is Hector of the Trojans, and nine men from the Greeks’ side are in the running to answer his challenge, including Odysseus and King Agamemnon. The nine “κλῆρον ἐσημήναντο ἕκαστος” (‘each marked their lot’) and threw it into Agamemnon’s helmet, the shaking of which would make one of the lots jump out and designate the winner.

What’s strange is that a herald then takes the victorious lot and takes it around the men, who each deny that it’s theirs, except for its marker, Ajax. In other words, the marks made are specific to each warrior, not part of a system that other Greeks can read, so the herald has to go around the group and ask. If Homer sang of a world in which the/an alphabet was in common use, it would’ve been more natural for the men to write their names in that script and recognise each other’s lots without confusion.

On the basis of a weighty absence and a light case of presence, we can cautiously posit that Homer’s semi-historical setting was not thought to include writing. Other than in an interaction with faraway Lycia, writing does not appear in the epics, because it was not meant to be part of the world that underpins them.

Why is this a noteworthy thesis? Because writing was very much around during Homer’s day; this makes its absence from the epics seem like a conspicuous omission. Now, before you run to comment on the difficulty of dating Homer (chronologically or romantically), hear me out.

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Homer, whoever he/she/they were, knew about writing. It is implausible that the poet had no awareness of the business of encoding speech in the visual medium. True, the tradition goes that Homer was blind, so visual language may personally have been of limited interest or use, but knowledge of writing’s existence was readily accessible. The regional and historical context would’ve provided a Greek of Homer’s day with a far better understanding of writing than a vague rumour of σήματα like those in the Bellerophon story.

For one thing, Greece had already benefited from the technology. In the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean culture and its bureaucrats made use of the Linear B script, deciphered in the mid-20th century and found to spell an archaic kind of Greek. Linear B belonged to the second millennium BC, as did the actual Trojan War or somesuch military shenanigans that first inspired the legends.

Meanwhile, the consensus for the date of Homer’s composition – or at least as close as we come to a consensus – is the early 8th century BC. This means that Linear B long predates the Homeric era; Mycenaean civilisation had become distant and barely remembered history, and Linear B was no longer a living script. Yet it remains a romantic thought that a memory of them endured in poetry, or even that objects bearing Linear B were dug up by later Greeks. Comparing the alien Linear B with the new alphabet, a Greek might well call the former’s symbols σήματα.

“... it is not impossible that the poetic tradition in the Dark Ages had some familiarity with inscribed objects from the Mycenean period or earlier: for example, inscribed seals or other precious objects. There are, however, other possibilities…”

(Colvin 2014: 34)

Homer’s knowledge of writing is more likely to have come from scripts that were thriving around the eastern Mediterranean around that time. Our archaeological record bears witness to a flourishing of literacy. Not far east of Homer’s traditional region of Ionia, we have Anatolian hieroglyphs, used to write down the local Luwian language until c. 700 BC. It seems noteworthy that the single Homeric appearance of writing is tied to Lycia, also in Anatolia and not far from Luwian-writing areas. If the Greeks weren’t yet writers, their neighbours to the east were nonetheless well versed in the skill. Perhaps Anatolian hieroglyphs were behind the Bellerophon-borne σήματα.

South of Anatolia, we have Egypt, with its own venerable tradition of hieroglyphs. Heading east, we reach the Levant and Mesopotamia, where writing in both the upstart Phoenician alphabet (the ancestor of these very letters) and elderly cuneiform was booming. The Phoenicians were trading and settling throughout the Mediterranean in Homer’s day, and taking the alphabet along for the journey.

The awesome Nora Stele and its Phoenician inscription, found in southern Sardinia and dated to the 9th/8th century BC

Part of the Phoenicans’ travels involved interactions and exchanges with the post-Mycenaean Greeks. It was through these that the alphabet was handed over. It remains a convincing theory that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed or finalised at the same time as when the Phoenician alphabet was taking off and undergoing the process of becoming the Greek alphabet. These two momentous events in ancient history are both commonly dated to c. 800 BC. In fact, there is a further theory – not a very popular one – that the adoption of the alphabet was primarily motivated by a desire to preserve the Homeric verses.

The reasoning behind this date of the alphabetic acquisition comes from our oldest Greek texts in the new system, traditionally dated to the 700s BC. I’m personally sympathetic to the view that the arrival in fact happened centuries earlier. Regardless, if you agree with a Homeric date of c. 800 BC, then the alphabet is entering the Greek scene during his/her/their day.

If you instead prefer to place Homer later in time, then by then the alphabet is entrenched in Greece. If you would push the poet’s era back to the 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th century, then still, there is plenty of writing across the eastern Mediterranean. I’m happy to play with the dates of Homeric composition and the spread of writing in the region, but wherever you set the dials, there is overlap.

All this goes to say that Homer still seems to have been a poet (or group of poets) at work in an increasingly literate world, composing verses about an almost totally illiterate one. But why? What did the epics gain by this omission?

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What they gained was, I think, ye olde vibes. I hesitantly suggest that, by narrating stories without any mention of writing, Homer intentionally led the audience into an archaic time-period that contrasted with their present day. I am indebted to Prof. Philippa Steele of the VIEWS project for such thoughts.

If the 8th century is on the money for Homer, then an icon of the current age among the Greeks would’ve been the recently adopted alphabet. Any reference to the trendy γράμματα would break the spell – better call written symbols σήματα, or avoid them altogether. Lycians could have them, fine, but not the great Greeks of yore. By missing this marker of modernity, Homer convincingly located the Iliad and Odyssey in an epic yesteryear.

Brushing over the matter of Linear B, the super-humanity of Achilles and Odysseus drew substance from the hazy, ahistorical ‘Dark Ages’ that preceded the arrival of the alphabet – back when men were men, heroes were heroes, and we didn’t have or need this newfangled technology. Perhaps there was even a feeling that writing threatened the ancient oral tradition of poets like Homer, its fixed nature curtailing their creative freedoms to employ and embellish a fading past.

It’s funny to think of the alphabet as being brand new and shiny, provoking the same range of reactions that innovations tend to. I speculate that, in harkening back to the Greeks’ unlettered recent past, Homer may have built on a societal sense that a new and very different day was dawning: the era of the written word.

END.

A terracotta statuette of a girl or young woman holding a writing tablet, from Cyprus, dated 4th/3rd century BC, from the British Museum’s collection

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Resources

• Homer’s Iliad

• Homer’s Odyssey

Non-linked references

• Colvin, S. (2014). A Brief History of Ancient Greek. John Wiley & Sons.

• Fox, R. L. (2023). Homer and his Iliad. Penguin Random House.

• Goold, G. P. (1960). Homer and the Alphabet. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91, 272–291.

• Nagy, G. (1983). Sêma and Nóesis: Some Illustrations. Arethusa 16(1), 35–55.

• Vassilikou, D. (2026). Mycenaean Greece in Homer. Chapter in Evely, D. & MacDonald, C. (Trans.) Mycenaean Civilization. Cambridge University Press. 566–579.

• Woodard, R. D. (2014). The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge University Press.

Images my own, from Wikimedia Commons or from credited sources. Cover image: print of a bust of Homer, from the British Museum’s collection. Only human intelligence (or lack thereof) was used in the creation of this article.