The idea of Homer is significantly tied up with the idea of Europe, which is not to say that there is one thing which is Europe and that it has some pure ideal beginning. It is to say that concepts like ‘Europe’ have origins and histories, and that some ways of thinking about origin and history are particularly influential. Though Homer is associated with the beginning of Europe, the word ‘Europe’ does not appear in the two epics, and the same applies for ‘Asia’.
The ambiguities around identity, history, and origin, are very apparent in relation to the name ‘Homer’, which may or many not be the real name of an ‘author’ of The Iliad and The Odyssey which may or may not have had a single author, and which certainly build on a very old tradition of recitation and singing of poetic narratives.
‘Homer’ (last time I am using scare quotes, let it be assumed from this point that my use of the name, is in a very nominalistic spirit bearing in mind the issues just mentioned) might be taken as the beginning of Europe, because it is at the beginning of any literary tradition, which might be described as European, and presents a kind of whole world view of what it was like to be a late Bronze Age European, as far as the historical layers added to the poem until the Archaic Age in Greece, along with the nature of literary and mythical conventions allow, as well as the geographical and social focus of the poetry.
The word ‘Europe’ comes from Ancient Greek (I’ll put aside any issues of possible non-Greek origins for the Greek word) and exists in contrast with ‘Asia’. To a large degree Europe meant the Greek communities in lands which are now part of the Hellenic Republic, as opposed to other peoples in ‘Asia’, most notably Persians in the Classical Age. The Trojans are a kind of precedent for the Persians.
Some complications come up round this simply in relation to how Troy corresponds to Asia. In The Iliad, the Trojans have allies from a broad geographical area, and Troy seems to be an imperial city, though the empire looks more like a loose association between Troy and allied or tributary states, rather than an administrative or legal unity. The Trojan allies include peoples of Lycia, the southwest of ‘Asia’ and Thrace, which is part of the landmass of Greece and the Balkans. Only western Thrace is part of the modern Greek state, easter Thrace is Turkish, incorporating the hinterland of Istanbul on the western side of the Bosphorus, and some other urban centres like Edirne and Tekirdağ.
If we take Europe to mean the lands west of the Bosphorus, the Sea or Marmara, and the Dardanelles and Asia to mean the lands to the east, and the ancient Greeks certainly did, then Troy was an Asian and European power. The Greeks are of course referred to as Dardanians or Achaeans, rather than Hellenes. In that case, the Trojans might be regarded as aggressors against Europe, but there is nothing in Homer to suggest outrage at a Trojan influence in Thrace.
In any case, my understanding of the Mycenaean Greeks is that they had colonies in western ‘Asia’, so that some part of ‘Asia’ was ‘Greek’ or ‘European’ even before the Greeks used the words ‘Europe’, ‘Asia’, or ‘Hellas’ (‘Greece’ comes from the Latin translation or equivalent). The Greeks in Homer do not have a presence in ‘Asia’, so maybe the story of the Trojan war gave a mythical poetic explanation of how Greeks happened to be the other side of the Aegean.
The Greek usage of ‘Europe’ once it did enter the language appears to have applied to some degree to anywhere Greeks lived, so could mean Greek colonies in ‘Asia’ as opposed to the non-Hellenic peoples around and among them. Later antique Greek usage anyway distinguishes the main body of Asia from the first Asia, which became ‘Mikra Asia’, or Asia Minor in Latin, or what is now known as Anatolia, though for whatever reason some people like to keep using the Latin phrase.
The consequences of the above is that Anatolia, was in some part Europe, and in any case not the same as Asia as a whole continent. It continued to be very Hellenic influenced through Roman times, and even more so after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, meant that Rome continued as a Hellenic empire focused first on Constantinople and then Anatolia at least as much it was focused on the lands which are now Greece. So if Europe was the land of the Greeks, then Anatolia was the heart of Europe. In that case the entry of Turks into Anatolia, most easily located in time through the victory in 1071 of the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan over the Romans (as the ‘Byzantines’ thought themselves to be) at Manzikert, near Lake Van.
The continuing self-identification of the Hellenic dominated Empire centred on the New Rome, Constantinople, as Romans, which for some reason scholars decided to label Byzantium some time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the east in 1453, brings up another Homeric ambiguity. That is an ambiguity in the way Homer was used for establishing identity. The Romans made claim to be Trojan in origin, a claim turned into epic poetry by Virgil in The Aeneid. The Romans claimed to be from the city of Priam, Hector, Hecuba, Andromache, and Aeneas, which they only knew about from the Greeks. This Trojan identity to some degree reflected a wish to be distinguished from the Greeks, but only reinforces the degree to which the Romans used and absorbed Greek culture. So ‘Rome’ which is often regarded as a version of Europe, going back at least to Charlemagne who both claimed to be a Roman Emperor, as recognised by the Pope in Rome and to be Father of Europe, a claim at least recognised in his own court, is Troy, the Asian enemy of Europe-Greece, just one way of expressing the ambiguities. The idea of a Trojan origin parallel to Rome’s Trojan origin became influential in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, so is very much part of the history of European national state sovereignty claims. A version of it can be found, for example, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain.
If Homer stands at the beginning of European identity, then that beginning is the beginning of the ambiguous status of Anatolia, now expressed in the relationship of Turkey with European institutions, and the ambiguous ways in which sovereignty and state tradition have been articulated in Europe as essentially Greek, but also as essentially Roman so implicitly Trojan and not Greek-European. Of course the Trojan reference is not often brought up, but the importance at various points of Greece versus Rome, recently in some discussions of republican political theory for example, shows the uncertainties around unifying Greece and Rome as Europe, an uncertainty that was certainly significant for the Romans. Of course many other ambiguities can be found in Homer, in the history of European identity, and in the justifications of state sovereignty, but the ways in which these three themes intertwine is particularly significant.
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