The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,60

sort of rarefied transcript of a particularly long and difficult game.

Unlike the ancient, mellow and caste-bound Indian culture in which chatarang originated, the Achaeans were, as a society, desperately concerned with the preeminence of the individual. This difference is reflected in their chess—in the original chatarang, the pieces represent types, interchangeable atoms of abstract ordnance, while in the Achaean game they are individual warriors with names, histories and idiosyncracies.

The Achaean chess primer was the record of a single long game that was believed to embody all that could usefully be said on the subject of chess. On Chios, journeymen who sought their chess master’s robes were required to recite the primer in its entirety before a panel of judges who would neither miss nor forgive the slightest error. In its earliest phase, the primer was a raw transcript of move, counter-move and counter’s counter, with little or no analysis or exposition. Occasionally, fragments of other classic games were given as a kind of aside, presumably to illustrate some principle of play, though to modern readers their significance can be obscure.

The purity of the primer eroded over time—formulaic descriptions were added as aides-mémoire (pieces were called swift-moving, versatile, valuable in the middle game, and so forth), and, most likely, to give the reciter a respite while he gathered his thoughts. Over the centuries, tactical commentary crept into what had once been a purely descriptive account.

By the eighth century B.C. the instructional character of the primer had largely atrophied and the recitation of the by then baroquely ornamented text had become an end in itself. From this time on, the manual, known as the Iliad, assumed an essentially literary character, although its original nature was still sometimes discernible in, say, its fixation on the exchange of casualties—Alpha slew Beta with this spear and Gamma slew Alpha with that stone and so on, a meaningless list of deaths unless one knows how to read it as a nuanced sequence of middle-game exchanges. Similarly, the Catalog of Ships* can be usefully read as a treatise on positional play in the opening.

Although the book became more complex over time, the pieces retained a characteristic geometric simplicity. Achilles is represented as a tall, spare warrior holding a shield and a spear, and carved, by preference, from white coral. Nestor is a stooped warrior with two parallel lines incised in the forehead of an otherwise featureless oval face. The stylistic exception is Odysseus, who is always depicted with a detailed, naturalistic countenance that suggests more self-awareness and humanity than the smooth, geometrically regular faces of his peers.

There is a second and most likely apocryphal manual of Achaean chess, the record of a long and bitter endgame played out on a board nearly stripped of pieces. It is even more difficult to associate this book with the practice of chess than the Iliad, probably due to the corruption of the text and many late interpolations. It has been speculated that the Odyssey is a sort of fantastic parody of a chess book, a treatise on tactics to be used after the game has ended and the board been abandoned by the players, the pieces left finally to their own devices and to entropy. One of the few surviving pieces is Odysseus, inching across the crumbling board toward his home square.

*Though written in credible Homeric Greek, the contents of this chapter cannot be dated much before the early Middle Ages. We can assume it is a late addition to the papyrus; in any event, it is the least intact of the papyrus’s texts—water damage has made many words and in some cases whole paragraphs matters of inference and conjecture.

*The Catalog of Ships is a section of the second book of the Iliad which consists almost entirely of a list of which cities sent how many ships to Troy.

ALEXANDER’S ODYSSEY

The instant the prow of his ship touched the shore, Achilles drew back his arm and cast his spear at the high walls of Troy,” recited Alexander as his ship ground on the sand and he cast his own spear in the same trajectory toward Troy’s crumbling ruins.* His Macedonians jumped down into the breakers, delighted to finally bring war to the empire on whose motions they and their fathers had for so long kept a weather eye.† That evening, Alexander and Hephaestion‡ raced around the tumulus of Achilles’ tomb, after which an augur crowned them with laurels and declared that they were Achilles and Patroclus reborn.

Dawn came to the long