Homer, the bard of the Mediterranean

Tigris, Euphrates, Nile all these sisters abound around the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Reared between the cradling arms of the two rivers rose and fell the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations. The heaving of the Nile still keeps the beat for the steps of the Egypt however much it may be in a low key. Peeping beyond 4000 BCE all these have poured their fertility into the rise of the Achean, mingled with the Dorian to shape the wonder Greece. Another strain of undulating richness was Crete, from 3000 BCE, beaten down and blossoming up before spreading out to the Argos and towards North into the Troy. All these riches and pains transform themselves into the rarefied realms of literary expression in Homer. Why did he sing that long song? Why does the cock crow at the break of dawn? When Nature brings together certain things, teleology becomes our pet faith. May be we can say, Troy was a sore in the trade links across the Black sea, putting a toll-gate and taxing the plyers dear. And so the Achean confederation joined hands and jumped on the pretext of Helen abducted to put the Troy in its place or if possible, out of the picture. May be it was the reason and may be not. But Homer sings of the trade between the divine and the human, the prehistoric and the historic, the civilisation and the culture or the unconsciuos civilisation and the conscious civilisation. He stands at the juncture and raises his song, the poetic statement at once abysmal and commonplace, ethereal and everyday, superhuman and streetly. I am at an epic in Tamil about Man and hence sojourns with the masters of the word.