Babylon 1?

Well, not quite. The object shown, however, might be labeled a Babylon 1 Prototype. The image is powerfully reminiscent of Babylon 5, once more proving that real scientific advances always begin in science fiction. This object, to be sure, is the design of an unmanned space probe, without an engine, yet, created by Icarus Interstellar, an organization of volunteer designers who, here, are building on the foundations laid by a British project (dating to the 1970s) called Daedalus. The image appeared in the New York Times Science Section today.

Great Poet, But Was He Babylonian?

Perhaps the greatest epic poet who ever lived wasn’t really a single individual. I think I know better, but I posses no more proof than the collective deposit of all human scholarship asserts. The person I have in mind is Homer. And his name came into my focus this time while thinking about an SF TV series, Babylon 5, whose creator is clearly known by name, J. Michael Straczynski. It occurred to me that in our own time the epic poem is still alive and well, here and there only, as television series. Further that Babylon 5 qualifies as such an epic in its temporal width, breath, scope, content, and indeed in its mythological framing.

Homer’s two great works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were performed at four-year intervals by rhapsodes (reciter-singers) at the Panathenaen Festival (where the Olympics where also held). Thus these works had performances before extensive audiences. To be sure: those were ages that came before anything like wide-spread literacy had yet taken root—much as Babylon 5 was being performed before vast audiences gradually once more losing those same roots (at least if recent statistical surveys are correct).

But when did our poet live? Certainly after the Trojan War (1194-1184 BC), but how long after? The earliest biographies of Homer appear to have been written some 800 years after the war. A man whom the Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) labels pseudo-Herodotus (the real one lived 484-425 BC) puts Homer’s birth at 1102 BC. The real Herodotus thought that Homer had lived “not more than 400 years before me,” which EB assumes meant 830 BC. So there you have the rough range.

In looking all this up—and realizing just how fuzzy and vaporous Homer’s origins really are—it delighted me to discover that a satirist of our own time notation, Lucian (125-180 AD) had suggested, in his True History, that Homer was actually a Babylonian and had been called Tigranes. How Lucian could have known that is not on record, but his argument was that Tigranes, having been taken captive by Greeks, assumed the name Homeros, which in Greek means “hostage.” (A Hostage for the Hinterland, as it were.) This gave me pleasure. It permits me to link a modern poet, Straczynski, and an ancient one. The first came from Babylon 1. The other created Babylon 5.

All things are possible—if the song has the right melody.

Cultural Atmospheres

Ages have an atmosphere formed by consensus. On Babylon 5, the SF saga, areas are set aside for aliens so that, in a jocular aside, Commander Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) tells a visitor to watch it: “Stay out of the methane toilets.” Breathing the public air is dangerous for unbelievers, as it were—for heretics to the common faith. But a corollary of this situation is that genuine participation in collective life is actually denied us—unless we share in the consensus. Oh, it’s possible—if difficult to speak through gas masks. One gets used to it. So much so that temporarily visiting another time, as in, say, reading European documents and letters produced eight hundred years ago, one is startled to find oneself in an era where quite another atmosphere prevailed. On Babylon 5 cultures whose members live in “special quarters” do not take much part in the action—although members of the station’s management sometimes visit them, donning masks to do so, when something is going haywire, as always seems to happen.