_THE WOMEN OF HOMER._
Helen of Troy--Her Eternal Youth.--Variety of Legends
connected with her.--Stesichorus.--Helen in the
_Iliad_.--Helen in the _Odyssey_.--The Treatment of Helen
by Æschylus.--Euripidean Handling of her Romance.--Helen
in Greek Art.--Quintus Smyrnæus.--Apollonius of
Tyana and the Ghost of Achilles.--Helen in the
Faust Legend.--Marlowe and Goethe.--Penelope--Her
Home-love.--Calypso and the Isle Ogygia.--Circe.--The
Homeric and the Modern Circe.--Nausicaa--Her Perfect
Girlishness.--Briseis and Andromache.--The Sense
of Proportion and of Relative Distance in Homer's
Pictures.--Andromache and Astyanax.--The Cult of Heroes
and Heroines in Greece.--Artistic Presentation of Homeric
Persons.--Philostratus.
For first of all the spherèd signs whereby
Love severs light from darkness, and most high
In the white front of January there glows
The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose.
Prelude to _Tristram and Iseult_, lines 91-94.
Helen of Troy is one of those ideal creatures of the fancy over which
time, space, and circumstance, and moral probability exert no sway. It
would be impossible to conceive of her except as inviolably beautiful
and young, in spite of all her wanderings and all she suffered at the
hands of Aphrodite and of men. She moves through Greek heroic legend
as the desired of all men and the possessed of many. Theseus bore her
away while yet a girl from Sparta. Her brethren, Castor and Polydeukes,
recovered her from Athens by force, and gave to her Æthra, the mother
of Theseus, for bondwoman. Then all the youths of Hellas wooed her
in the young world's prime. She was at last assigned in wedlock to
Menelaus, by whom she conceived her only earthly child, Hermione.
Paris, by aid of Aphrodite, won her love and fled with her to Egypt
and to Troy. In Troy she abode more than twenty years, and was the
mate of Deiphobus after the death of Paris. When the strife raised for
her sake was ended, Menelaus restored her with honor to his home in
Lacedæmon. There she received Telemachus and saw her daughter mated to
Neoptolemus. But even after death she rested not from the service of
love. The great Achilles, who in life had loved her by hearsay, but had
never seen her, clasped her among the shades upon the island Leuké, and
begat Euphorion. Through all these adventures Helen maintains an ideal
freshness, a mysterious virginity of soul. She is not touched by the
passion she inspires, or by the wreck of empires ruined in her cause.
Fate deflours her not, nor do years impair the magic of her charm.
Like beauty, she belongs alike to all and none. She is not judged as
wives or mothers are, though she is both; to her belong soul-wounding
blossoms of inexorable love, as well as pain-healing poppy-heads of
oblivion; all eyes are blinded by the adorable, incomparable grace
which Aphrodite sheds around her form.[17]
Whether Helen was the slave or the beloved of Aphrodite, or whether, as
Herodotus hinted, she was herself a kind of Aphrodite, we are hardly
told. At one time she appears the willing servant of the goddess; at
another she groans beneath her bondage. But always and on all occasions
she owes everything to the Cyprian queen. Her very body-gear preserved
the powerful charm with which she was invested at her birth. When the
Phocians robbed the Delphian treasure-house, the wife of one of their
captains took and wore Helen's necklace, whereupon she doted on a young
Epirot soldier and eloped with him.
Whose daughter was Helen? The oldest legend calls her the child of Leda
and of Zeus. We have all read the tale of the Swan who was her father
amid the rushes of Eurotas--the tale which Leonardo and Buonarroti
and Correggio thought worthy of their loveliest illustration. Another
story gives her for the offspring of Oceanus and Tethys, as though, in
fact, she were an Aphrodite risen from the waves. In yet a third, Zeus
is her sire and Nemesis her mother; and thus the lesson of the tale of
Troy was allegorized in Helen's pedigree. She is always god-begotten
and divinely fair. Was it possible that anything so exquisite should
have endured rough ravishment and borne the travail of the siege of
Troy? This doubt possessed the later poets of the legendary age. They
spun a myth according to which Helen reached the shore of Egypt on
the ship of Paris; but Paris had to leave her there in cedar-scented
chambers by the stream of Nile, when he went forth to plough the foam,
uncomforted save by her phantom. And for a phantom the Greeks strove
with the Trojans on the windy plains of Ilium. For a phantom's sake
brave Hector died, and the leonine swiftness of Achilles was tamed,
and Zeus bewailed Sarpedon, and Priam's towers were levelled with the
ground. Helen, meanwhile--the beautiful, the inviolable--sat all day
long among the palm-groves, twining lotus-flowers for her hair, and
learning how to weave rare Eastern patterns in the loom. This legend
hides a delicate satire upon human strife. For what do men disquiet
themselves in warfare to the death, and tossing on sea-waves? Even for
a phantom--for the shadow of their desire, the which remains secluded
in some unapproachable, far, sacred land. A wide application may thus
be given to Augustine's passionate outcry: "Quo vobis adhuc et adhuc
ambulare vias difficiles et laboriosas? Non est requies ubi quæritis
eam. Quærite quod quæritis; sed ibi non est ubi quæritis. Beatam vitam
quæritis in regione mortis; non est illic." Those who spake ill of
Helen suffered. Stesichorus had ventured in the #Iliou Persis# to lay
upon her shoulders all the guilt and suffering of Hellas and of Troy.
Whereupon he was smitten with blindness, nor could he recover his sight
till he had written the palinode which begins:
#ouk est' etymos logos houtos,
oud' ebas en nausin euselmois,
oud' hikeo pergama Troias.#[18]
Even Homer, as Plato hints, knew not that blindness had fallen on him
for like reason. To assail Helen with reproach was not less dangerous
than to touch the Ark of the Covenant, for with the Greeks beauty
was a holy thing. How perfectly beautiful she was we know from the
legend of the cups modelled upon her breasts suspended in the shrine
of Aphrodite. When Troy was taken, and the hungry soldiers of Odysseus
roamed through the burning palaces of Priam and his sons, their
swords fell beneath the vision of her loveliness. She had wrought all
the ruin, yet Menelaus could not touch her, when she sailed forth,
swan-like, fluttering white raiment, with the imperturbable sweet smile
of a goddess on her lips. It remained for a Roman poet to describe her
vile and shrinking:
Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros,
Et poenas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras
Permetuens, Troiæ et patriæ communis Erinnys,
Abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat.[19]
The morality of these lines belongs to a later age of reflection upon
Greek romance. In Homer there are no such epigrams. Between the Helen
of the _Iliad_, reverenced by the elders in the Scæan gate, and the
Helen of the _Odyssey_, queen-like among her Spartan maidens, there has
passed no agony of fear. The shame which she has truly felt has been
tempered to a silent sorrow, and she has poured her grief forth beside
Andromache over the corpse of Hector.
If we would fain see the ideal beauty of the early Greek imagination
in a form of flesh-and-blood reality, we must follow Helen through the
Homeric poems. She first appears when Iris summons her to watch the
duel of Paris and Menelaus. Husband and lover are to fight beneath the
walls of Troy. She, meanwhile, is weaving a purple peplus with the
deeds of war done and the woes endured for her sake far and wide:
She in a moment round her shoulders flings
Robe of white lawn, and from the threshold springs,
Yearning and pale, with many a tender tear.
Also two women in her train she brings,
The large-eyed Clymené and Æthra fair,
And at the western gates right speedily they were.[20]
English eyes know well how Helen looked as she left her chamber and
hastened to the gate; for has not Leighton painted her with just so
much of far-off sorrow in her gaze as may become a daughter of the
gods? In the gate sat Priam and his elders, and as they looked at Helen
no angry curses rose to their lips, but reverential admiration filled
them, together with an awful sense of the dread fate attending her:
These, seeing Helen at the tower arrive,
One to another wingèd words addressed:
"Well may the Trojans and Achæans strive,
And a long time bear sorrow and unrest,
For such a woman, in her cause and quest,
Who like immortal goddesses in face
Appeareth; yet 'twere even thus far best
In ships to send her back to her own place,
Lest a long curse she leave to us and all our race."
It is thus simply, and by no mythological suggestion of Aphrodite's
influence, that Homer describes the spirit of beauty which protected
Helen among the people she had brought to sore straits.
Priam accosts her tenderly; not hers the blame that the gods scourge
him in his old age with war. Then he bids her sit beside him and name
the Greek heroes as they march beneath. She obeys, and points out
Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Ajax, describing each, as she knew them of
old. But for her twin brothers she looks in vain; and the thought of
them touches her with the sorrow of her isolation and her shame. In the
same book, after Paris has been withdrawn, not without dishonor, from
the duel by Aphrodite, Helen is summoned by her liege-mistress to his
bed. Helen was standing on the walls, and the goddess, disguised as an
old spinning-woman, took her by the skirt, bidding her hie back to her
lover, whom she would find in his bedchamber, not as one arrayed for
war, but as a fair youth resting haply from the dance. Homer gives no
hint that Aphrodite is here the personified wish of Helen's own heart
going forth to Paris. On the contrary, the Cyprian queen appears in the
interests of the Phrygian youth, whom she would fain see comforted.
Under her disguise Helen recognized Aphrodite, the terrible queen,
whose bondwoman she was forced to be. For a moment she struggled
against her fate. "Art thou come again," she cried, "to bear me to
some son of earth beloved of thee, that I may serve his pleasure to my
own shame? Nay, rather, put off divinity and be thyself his odalisque."
"With _him_ remain,
_Him_ sit with, and from heaven thy feet refrain;
Weep, till his wife he make thee, or fond slave.
I go to him no more, to win new stain,
And scorn of Trojan women again outbrave,
Whelmed even now with grief's illimitable wave."
But go she must. Aphrodite is a hard taskmistress, and the mysterious
bond of beauty which chains Helen to her cannot be broken. It is
in vain, too, that Helen taunts Paris: he reminds her of the first
fruition of their love in the island Cranaë; and at the last she has to
lay her down at his side, not uncomplying, conquered, as it were, by
the reflex of the passion she herself excites. It is in the chamber of
Paris that Hector finds her. She has vainly striven to send Paris forth
to battle; and the sense of her own degradation, condemned to love a
man love-worthy only for the beauty of his limbs, overcomes her when
she sees the noble Hector clothed in panoply for war. Her passionate
outbreak of self-pity and self-reproach is, perhaps, the strongest
indication given in the _Iliad_ of a moral estimate of Helen's crime.
The most consummate art is shown by the poet in thus quickening the
conscience of Helen by contact with the nobility of Hector. Like
Guinevere, she for a moment seems to say: "Thou art the highest, and
most human too!" casting from her as worthless the allurements of the
baser love for whose sake she had left her home. In like manner, it was
not without the most exquisite artistic intention that Homer made the
parting scene between Andromache and Hector follow immediately upon
this meeting. For Andromache in the future there remained only sorrow
and servitude. Helen was destined to be tossed from man to man, always
desirable and always delicate, like the sea-foam that floats upon the
crests of waves. But there is no woman who, reading the _Iliad_, would
not choose to weep with Andromache in Hector's arms, rather than to
smile like Helen in the laps of lovers for whom she little cared. Helen
and Andromache meet together before Hector's corpse, and it is here
that we learn to love best what is womanly in Leda's daughter. The
mother and the wife have bewailed him in high thrilling threni. Then
Helen advances to the bier and cries:
Hector, of brethren dearest to my heart,
For I in sooth am Alexander's bride,
Who brought me hither: would I first had died!
For 'tis the twentieth year of doom deferred
Since Troyward from my fatherland I hied;
Yet never in those years mine ear hath heard
From thy most gracious lips one sharp accusing word;
Nay, if by other I haply were reviled,
Brother, or sister fair, or brother's bride,
Or mother (for the king was alway mild),
Thou with kind words the same hast pacified,
With gentle words, and mien like summer-tide.
Wherefore I mourn for thee and mine own ill,
Grieving at heart: for in Troy town so wide
Friend have I none, nor harborer of good-will,
But from my touch all shrink with deadly shuddering chill.
It would have been impossible to enhance more worthily than
thus the spirit of courtesy and knightly kindness which was in
Hector--qualities, in truth, which, together with his loyalty to
Andromache, endeared the champion of the Trojans to chivalry, and
placed Hector upon the list of worthies beside King Arthur and Godfrey
of Bouillon.
The character of Helen loses much of its charm and becomes more
conventional in the _Odyssey_. It is difficult to believe that the
poet who put into her lips the last lines of that threnos could have
ventured to display the same woman calm and innocent and queen-like in
the home of Menelaus:
While in his mind he sat revolving this,
Forth from her fragrant bower came Helen fair,
Bright as the golden-spindled Artemis.
Adraste set the couch; Alcippe there
The fine-spun carpet spread; and Phylo bare
The silver basket which Alcandra gave,
Consort of Polybus, who dwelt whilere
In Thebes of Egypt, whose great houses save
Wealth in their walls, large store, and pomp of treasure brave.
Helen shows her prudence and insight by at once declaring the stranger
guest to be Telemachus; busy with housewifely kindness, she prepares
for him a comfortable couch at night; nor does she shrink from telling
again the tales of Troy, and the craft which helped Odysseus in the
Wooden Horse. The blame of her elopement with Paris she throws on
Aphrodite, who had carried her across the sea:
Leaving my child an orphan far away,
And couch, and husband who had known no peer,
First in all grace of soul and beauty shining clear.
Such words, no doubt, fell with honey-sweet flattery from the lips
of Helen on the ears of Menelaus. Yet how could he forget the grief
of his bereavement, the taunts of Achilles and Thersites, and the
ten years' toil at Troy endured for her? Perhaps he remembered the
promise of Proteus, who had said, "Thee will the immortals send to the
Elysian plains and farthest verge of earth; where dwells yellow-haired
Rhadamanthus, and where the ways of life are easiest for men; snow
falls not there, nor storm, nor any rain, but Ocean ever breathes
forth delicate zephyr breezes to gladden men; since thou hast Helen
for thine own, and art the son-in-law of Zeus." Such future was full
recompense for sorrow in the past. Besides, Helen, as Homer tells, had
charms to soothe the soul and drown the memory of the saddest things.
Even at this time, when thought is troublesome, she mixes Egyptian
nepenthé with the wine--nepenthé "which, whoso drinks thereof when it
is mingled in the bowl, begets for him oblivion of all woe; through a
whole day he drops no tear adown his cheek, not even should his sire
or mother die, nay, should they slay his brother or dear son before
his face, and he behold it with his eyes. Such virtuous juices had the
child of Zeus, of potent charm, which Polydamna, wife of Thon, gave to
her, the Egyptian woman, where earth yields many medicines, some of
weal and some of bane." This nepenthé was the secret of Helen's power.
In the fifteenth book of the _Odyssey_ we have yet another glimpse
of Helen in the palace of Menelaus. She interprets an omen in favor
of Odysseus, which had puzzled Menelaus, and gives to Telemachus a
costly mantle, star-bright, the weft of her own loom, produced from the
very bottom of the chest in which she stored her treasures. The only
shadow cast upon Helen in the _Odyssey_ is to be found lurking in the
ominous name of Megapenthes, Menelaus's son by a slave-woman, who was
destined after his sire's death to expel her from fair Lacedæmon. We
may remember that it was on the occasion of the spousal of this son to
Alector's daughter, and of the sending of Hermione to be the bride of
Neoptolemus, that Telemachus first appeared before the eyes of Helen.
The charm of Helen in the Homeric poems is due in a great measure to
the _naïveté_ of the poet's art. The situations in which she appears
are never strained, nor is the ethical feeling, though indicated,
suffered to disturb the calm influence of her beauty. This is not the
case with Æschylus. Already, as before hinted, Stesichorus in his lyric
interludes had ventured to assail the character of Helen, applying
to her conduct the moral standard which Homer kept carefully out of
sight. Æschylus goes further. His object was to use Hellenic romance as
the subject-matter for a series of dramatic studies which should set
forth his conception of the divine government of the world. A genius
for tragedy which has never been surpassed was subordinated by him to a
sublime philosophy of human life. It was no longer possible for Helen
to escape judgment. Her very name supplied the keynote of reproach.
Rightly was she called Helen--#helenaus, helandros, heleptolis#--"a
hell of ships, hell of men, hell of cities," she sailed forth to Troy,
and the heedless Trojans sang marriage-songs in her praise, which soon
were turned to songs of mourning for her sake. She, whom they welcomed
as "a spirit of unruffled calm, a gentle ornament of wealth, a darter
of soft glances, a soul-wounding love-blossom," was found to be no
less a source of mischief than is a young lion nurtured in the palace
for the ruin of its heirs. Soon had the Trojans reason to revile her
as a "Fury bringing woe on wives." The choruses of the _Agamemnon_
are weighted with the burden of her sin. "#Iô iô paranous Helena#,"
it breaks forth: "thine is the blood-guilt of those many, many souls
slain beneath Troy walls!" She is incarnate Até, the soul-seducing,
crime-engendering, woe-begetting curse of two great nations. Zeus,
through her sin, wrought ruin for the house of Priam, wanton in its
wealth. In the dark came blinded Paris and stole her forth, and she
went lightly through her husband's doors, and dared a hateful deed.
Menelaus, meanwhile, gazed on the desecrated marriage-bed, and seemed
to see her floating through his halls; and the sight of beauteous
statues grew distasteful to his eyes, and he yearned for her across
the sea in dreams. Naught was left, when morning came, but vain
forth-stretchings of eager hands after the shapes that follow on the
paths of sleep. Then war awoke, and Ares, who barters the bodies of
men for gold, kept sending home to Hellas from Troy a little white
dust stored in brazen urns. It is thus that Æschylus places in the
foreground, not the witchery of Helen and the charms of Aphrodite, but
her lightness and her sin, the woe it wrought for her husband, and
the heavy griefs that through her fell on Troy and Hellas. It would
be impossible to moralize the consequences of the woman's crime with
greater sternness.
Unfortunately we have no means of stating how Sophocles dealt with the
romance of Helen. Judging by analogy, however, we may feel sure that in
this, as in other instances, he advanced beyond the ethical standpoint
of Æschylus, by treating the child of Leda, no longer as an incarnation
of dæmonic Até, but as a woman whose character deserved the most
profound analysis. Euripides, as usual, went a step further. The bloom
of unconscious innocence had been brushed by Æschylus from the flower
of Greek romance. It was impossible for any subsequent dramatist to
avoid in some way moralizing the character of Helen. The way selected
by Euripides was to bring her down to the level of common life. The
scene in the _Troades_ in which Helen stands up to plead for her life
against Hecuba before the angry Menelaus is one of the most complete
instances of the Euripidean sophistry. The tragic circumstances of Troy
in ruins and of injured husband face to face with guilty wife are all
forgotten, while Helen develops a very clever defence of her conduct in
a long rhetorical oration. The theatre is turned into a law-court, and
forensic eloquence is substituted for dramatic poetry. Hecuba replies
with an elaborate description of the lewdness, vanity, and guile of
Helen, which we may take to be a fair statement of the poet's own
conception of her character, since in the _Orestes_ he puts similar
charges into the mouth of Agamemnon's daughter. There is no doubt that
Hecuba has the best of the argument. She paints the beauty of her son
Paris and the barbaric pomp which he displayed at Sparta. Then turning
to Helen--
#ho sos d' idôn nin nous epoiêthê kypris;
ta môra gar pant' estin Aphroditê brotois,
kai tounom' orthôs aphrosynês archei theas.#[21]
Sententious epigrams like this, by which the myths were philosophized
to suit the occasions of daily life, exactly suited the temper of the
Athenian audience in the age of Euripides. But Hecuba proceeds: "You
played your husband off against your lover, and your lover against your
husband, hoping always to keep the one or the other by your artifice;
and when Troy fell, no one found you tying the halter or sharpening the
knife against your own throat, as any decent woman in your position
would have done." At the end of her speech she seems to have convinced
Menelaus, who orders the attendants to carry off Helen to the ships, in
order that she may be taken to Argos and killed there. Hecuba begs him
not to embark her on the same boat with himself. "Why?" he asks. "Is
she heavier than she used to be?" The answer is significant:
#ouk est' erastês hostis ouk aei philei.#
"Once a lover, always a lover." And so it turns out; for, at the
opening of the _Orestes_, Helen arrives in comfort at the side of
Menelaus. He now is afraid lest she should be seized and stoned by the
Argives, whose children had been slain for her sake in Troy. Nor is
the fear vain. Orestes and Pylades lay hold of her, and already the
knife is at her throat, when Phoebus descends and declares that Helen
has been caught up to heaven to reign with her brothers Castor and
Polydeukes. A more unethical termination to her adventures can hardly
be imagined; for Euripides, following hitherto upon the lines of the
Homeric story, has been at great pains to analyze her legend into a
common tale of adultery and female fascination. He now suddenly shifts
his ground and deifies the woman he had sedulously vilified before. His
true feeling about Helen is expressed in the lines spoken by Electra to
Clytemnestra (_Electra_, 1062):
#to men gar eidos ainon axion pherei
Helenês te kai sou, dyo d' ephyte syngonô,
amphô mataiô Kastoros t' ouk axiô.
hê men gar harpastheis' hekous' apôleto,
sy d' andr' ariston Hellados diôlesas.#
"You and your sister are a proper pair, and your beauty has brought you
the credit you deserve: both are light women and unworthy of Castor;
for Helen allowed herself to be ravished and undone, while you killed
the best man in Greece." Further illustrations of the Euripidean
conception of Helen as a worthless woman, who had the art to reconquer
a weak husband's affection, might be drawn from the tirade of Peleus
against Menelaus in the _Andromache_ (590, etc.).[22]
This Euripidean reading of the character of Helen was natural to a
sceptical and sophistical age, when the dimly moralized myths of
ancient Hellas had become the raw material for a poet's casuistry. Yet,
in the heart of the Greek people, Homer had still a deeper, firmer
place than even Euripides; and the thought of Helen, ever beautiful
and ever young, survived the rude analysis of the Athenian drama. Her
romance recovered from the prosaic rationalism to which it had been
subjected--thanks, no doubt, to the many sculptors and painters who
immortalized her beauty, without suggesting the woes that she had
brought upon the world. Those very woes, perhaps, may have added
pathos to her charm; for had not she too suffered in the strife of men?
How the artists dealt with the myth of Helen we only know by scattered
hints and fragments. One bass-relief, engraved by Millingen, reveals
her standing calm beneath the sword of Menelaus. That sword is lifted,
but it will not fall. Beauty, breathed around her like a spell, creates
a magic atmosphere through which no steel can pierce. In another
bass-relief, from the Campana Museum, she is entering Sparta on a
chariot, side by side with Menelaus, not like a captive, but with head
erect and haughty mien, and proud hand placed upon the horse's reins.
Philostratus, in his _Lives of the Sophists_, describes an exceedingly
beautiful young philosopher, whose mother bore a close resemblance to
the picture of Helen by Eumelus. If the lineaments of the mother were
repeated in the youth, the eyes of Helen in her picture must have been
large and voluptuous, her hair curled in clusters, and her teeth of
dazzling whiteness. It is probable that the later artists, in their
illustrations of the romance of Helen, used the poems of Lesches and
Arctinus, now lost, but of which the _Posthomerica_ of Quintus Smyrnæus
preserve to us a feeble reflection. This poet of the fourth century
after Christ does all in his power to rehabilitate the character of
Helen by laying the fault of her crime on Paris, and by describing at
length the charm which Venus shed around her sacred person. It was only
by thus insisting upon the dæmonic influence which controlled the fate
of Helen that the conclusions reached by the rationalizing process of
the dramatists could be avoided. The Cyclic poems thus preserved the
heroic character of Helen and her husband at the expense of Aphrodite,
while Euripides had said plainly: "What you call Aphrodite is your
own lust." Menelaus, in the _Posthomerica_, finds Helen hidden in the
palace of Deiphobus; astonishment takes possession of his soul before
the shining of her beauty, so that he stands immovable, like a dead
tree, which neither north nor south wind shakes. When the Greek heroes
leave Troy town, Agamemnon leads Cassandra captive, Neoptolemus is
followed by Andromache, and Hecuba weeps torrents of tears in the
strong grasp of Odysseus. A crowd of Trojan women fill the air with
shrill laments, tearing their tresses and strewing dust upon their
heads. Meanwhile, Helen is delayed by no desire to wail or weep; but
a comely shame sits on her black eyes and glowing cheeks. Her heart
leaps, and her whole form is as lovely as Aphrodite was when the gods
discovered her with Ares in the net of Hephæstus. Down to the ships
she comes with Menelaus hand in hand; and the people, "gazing on the
glory and the winning grace of the faultless woman, were astonished;
nor could they dare by whispers or aloud to humble her with insults;
but gladly they saw in her a goddess, for she seemed to all what each
desired." This is the apotheosis of Helen; and this reading of her
romance is far more true to the general current of Greek feeling than
that suggested by Euripides. Theocritus, in his exquisite marriage-song
of Helen, has not a word to say by hint or innuendo that she will bring
a curse upon her husband. Like dawn is the beauty of her face; like
the moon in the heaven of night, or the spring when winter is ended,
or like a cypress in the meadow, so is Helen among Spartan maids. When
Apollonius of Tyana, the most famous _medium_ of antiquity, evoked the
spirit of Achilles by the pillar on his barrow in the Troad, the great
ghost consented to answer five questions. One of these concerned Helen:
Did she really go to Troy? Achilles indignantly repudiated the notion.
She remained in Egypt; and this the heroes of Achaia soon knew well;
"but we fought for fame and Priam's wealth."
It is curious at the point of transition in the Roman world from
paganism to Christianity to find the name of Helen prominent. Helena,
the mother of Constantine, was famous with the early Church as
a pilgrim to Jerusalem, where she discovered the true cross, and
destroyed the temple of Venus. For one Helen, East and West had warred
together on the plains of Troy. Following the steps of another Helen,
West and East now disputed the possession of the Holy Sepulchre. Such
historical parallels are, however, little better than puns. It is far
more to the purpose to notice how the romance of Helen of Troy, after
lying dormant during the Middle Ages, shone forth again in the pregnant
myth of Faustus. The final achievement of Faust's magic was to evoke
Helen from the dead and hold her as his paramour. To the beauty of
Greek art the mediæval spirit stretched forth with yearning and begot
the modern world. Marlowe, than whom no poet of the North throbbed more
mightily with the passion of the Renaissance, makes his Faust exclaim:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and, for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sacked;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colors on my plumèd crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.
Marlowe, as was natural, contented himself with an external handling of
the Faust legend. Goethe allegorized the whole, and turned the episode
of Helen into a parable of modern poetry. When Lynkeus, the warder, is
reprimanded for not having duly asked Helen into the feudal castle, he
defends himself thus;
Harrend auf des Morgens Wonne,
Oestlich spähend ihren Lauf,
Ging auf einmal mir die Sonne
Wunderbar im Süden auf.
Zog den Blick nach jener Seite,
Statt der Schluchten, statt der Höh'n,
Statt der Erd-und Himmelsweite,
Sie, die Einzige, zu spähn.[23]
The new light that rose upon the Middle Ages came not from the East,
but from the South, no longer from Galilee, but from Greece.
Thus, after living her long life in Hellas as the ideal of beauty,
unqualified by moral attributes, Helen passed into modern mythology as
the ideal of the beauty of the pagan world. True to her old character,
she arrives to us across the waters of oblivion with the cestus of the
goddess round her waist, and the divine smile upon her lips. Age has
not impaired her charm, nor has she learned the lesson of the Fall.
Ever virginal and ever fair, she is still the slave of Aphrodite. In
Helen we welcome the indestructible Hellenic spirit.
Penelope is the exact opposite to Helen. The central point in her
character is intense love of her home, an almost cat-like attachment to
the house where she first enjoyed her husband's love and which is still
full of all the things that make her life worth having. Therefore, when
at last she thinks that she will have to yield to the suitors and leave
it, these words are always on her lips:
#dôma
kouridion mala kalon enipleion biotoio,
tou pote memnêsesthai oïomai enper oneirô.#[24]
We can scarcely think of Penelope except in the palace of Ithaca, so
firmly has this home-loving instinct been embedded in her by her maker.
Were it not that the passion for her home is controlled and determined
by a higher and more sacred feeling, this Haushälterischness of
Penelope would be prosaic. Not only, however, has Homer made it evident
in the _Odyssey_ that the love of Ithaca is subordinate in her soul
to the love of Odysseus, but a beautiful Greek legend teaches how in
girlhood she sacrificed the dearest ties that can bind a woman to her
love for the hero who had wooed and won her. Pausanias says that when
Odysseus was carrying her upon his chariot forth to his own land, her
father, Icarius, followed in their path and besought her to stay with
him. The young man was ready busked for the long journey. The old man
pointed to the hearth she had known from childhood. Penelope between
them answered not a word, but covered her face with her veil. This
action Odysseus interpreted rightly, and led his bride away, willing to
go where he would go, yet unwilling to abandon what she dearly loved.
No second Odysseus could cross the woman's path. Among the suitors
there was not one like him. Therefore she clung to her house-tree in
Ithaca, the olive around which Odysseus had built the nuptial chamber;
and none, till he appeared, by force or guile might win her thence.
It is precisely this tenacity in the character of Penelope which
distinguishes her from Helen, the daughter of adventure and the child
of change, to whom migration was no less natural than to the swan that
gave her life. Another characteristic of Penelope is her prudence.
Having to deal with the uproarious suitors camped in her son's halls,
she deceives them with fair words, and promises to choose a husband
from their number when she has woven a winding-sheet for Laertes. Three
years pass, and the work is still not finished. At last a maiden tells
the suitors that every night Penelope undoes by lamplight what she had
woven in the daytime. This ruse of the defenceless woman has passed
into a proverb; and has become so familiar that we forget, perhaps, how
true a parable it is of those who, in their weakness, do and undo daily
what they would fain never do at all, trifling and procrastinating with
tyrannous passions which they are unable to expel from the palace of
their souls. The prudence of Penelope sometimes assumes a form which
reminds us of the heroines of Hebrew story; as when, for example, she
spoils the suitors of rich gifts by subtle promises and engagements
carefully guarded. Odysseus, seated in disguise near the hall-door,
watches her success and secretly approves. The same quality of mind
makes her cautious in the reception of the husband she has waited for
in widowhood through twenty years. The dog Argus has no doubt. He sees
his master through the beggar's rags, and dies of joy. The handmaid
Eurycleia is convinced as soon as she has touched the wound upon the
hero's foot and felt the well-remembered scar. Not so Penelope. Though
the great bow has been bent and the suitors have been slain, and though
Eurycleia comes to tell her the whole truth, the queen has yet the
heart to seat herself opposite Odysseus by the fire, and to prove him
with cunningly devised tests. There is something provocative of anger
against Penelope in this cross-questioning. But our anger is dissolved
in tears, when at last, feeling sure that her husband and none other
is there verily before her eyes, she flings her arms around him in
that long and close embrace. Homer even in this supreme moment has
sustained her character by a trait which however delicate, can hardly
escape notice. Her lord is weary and would fain seek the solace of his
couch. But he has dropped a hint that still more labors are in store
for him. Then Penelope replies that his couch is ready at all times
and whensoever he may need; no hurry about that. Meanwhile, she would
like to hear the prophecy of Teiresias. Helen, the bondwoman of dame
Aphrodite, would not have waited thus upon the edge of love's delight,
long looked for with strained widow's eyes. Yet it would be unfair to
Penelope to dwell only on this prudent and somewhat frigid aspect of
her character. She is, perhaps, most amiable when she descends among
the suitors and prays Phemius to cease from singing of the heroes who
returned from Troy. It is more than she can bear to sit weaving in the
silent chamber mid her damsels, listening to the shrill sound of the
lyre and hearing how other men have reached their homes, while on the
waves Odysseus still wanders, and none knows whether he be alive or
dead. It may be noticed that just as Helen is a mate meet for easily
persuaded Menelaus and luxurious Paris, so Penelope matches the temper
of the astute, enduring, persevering Odysseus. As a creature of the
fancy, she is far less fascinating than Helen; and this the poet seems
to have felt, for side by side with Penelope in the _Odyssey_ he has
placed the attractive forms of Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa. The gain
is double. Not only are the hearers of the romance gladdened by the
contrast of these graceful women with the somewhat elegiac figure of
Penelope, but the character of Odysseus for constancy is greatly
enhanced. How fervent must the love of home have been in the man who
could quit Calypso, after seven years' sojourn, for the sake of a wife
grown gray with twenty widowed years! Odysseus tells Calypso to her
face that she is far fairer than his wife:
#oida kai autos
panta mal', houneka seio periphrôn Pênelopeia
eidos akidnoterê, megethos t', eis omma idesthai.#[25]
"As far as looks go, Penelope is nothing beside thee." But what
Odysseus leaves unsaid--the grace of the first woman who possessed
his soul--constrains him with a deeper, tenderer power than any of
Calypso's charms. Penelope, meanwhile, is pleading that her beauty in
the absence of her lord has perished:
#xein' êtoi men emên aretên eidos te demas te
ôlesan athanatoi hote Ilion eisanebainon
Argeioi.#[26]
These two meet at last together, he after his long wanderings, and she
having suffered the insistance of the suitors in her palace; and this
is the pathos of the _Odyssey_. The woman, in spite of her withered
youth and tearful years of widowhood, is still expectant of her lord.
He, unconquered by the pleasures cast across his path, unterrified by
all the dangers he endures, clings in thought to the bride whom he led
forth, a blushing maiden, from her father's halls. O just, subtle, and
mighty Homer!
There is nothing of Greek here more than of Hebrew, or of Latin, or of
German. It is pure humanity.
Calypso is not a woman, but a goddess. She feeds upon ambrosia and
nectar, while her maidens spread before Odysseus the food of mortals.
Between her and Hermes there is recognition at first sight; for god
knows god, however far apart their paths may lie. Yet the love that
Calypso bears Odysseus brings this daughter of Atlas down to earth;
and we may reckon her among the women of Homer. How mysterious, as
the Greek genius apprehended mystery, is her cavern, hidden far away
in the isle Ogygia, with the grove of forest-trees before it and the
thick vine flourishing around its mouth. Meadows of snow-flake and
close-flowering selinus gird it round; and on the branches brood all
kinds of birds. It is an island such as the Italian painters bring
before us in their rarest moments of artistic divination, where the
blue-green of the twilight mingles with the green-blue sea and the
overarching verdure of deep empurpled forest-shade. Under those trees,
gazing across the ocean, in the still light of the evening-star,
Odysseus wept for his far-distant home. Then, heavy at heart, he
gathered up his raiment, and climbed into Calypso's bed at night:
#epei ouketi hêndane nymphê.
all' êtoi nyktas men iauesken kai anankêi
en spessi glaphyroisi par' ouk ethelôn ethelousêi.#[27]
To him the message of Hermes recalling him to labor on the waves was
joy; but to the nymph herself it brought mere bitterness: "Hard are
ye, gods, and envious above all, who grudge that goddesses should
couch thus openly with mortal men, if one should make a dear bedfellow
for herself. For so the rosy-fingered morning chose Orion, till ye
gods that lead an easy life grew jealous, and in Ogygia him the
golden-throned maid Artemis slew with her kind arrows." This wail of
the immortal nymph Calypso for her roving spouse of seven short years
has a strange pathos in it. It seems to pass across the sea like a sigh
of winds awakened, none knows how, in summer midnight, that swells and
dies far off upon moon-silvered waves. The clear human activity of
Odysseus cuts the everlasting calm of Calypso like a knife, shredding
the veil that hides her from the eyes of mortals. Then he fares onward
to resume the toils of real existence in a land whereof she nothing
knows. There is a fragment of his last speech to Penelope, which sounds
like an echo of Calypso's lamentation. "Death," he says, "shall some
day rise for me, tranquil from the tranquil deep, and I shall die in
delicate old age." We seem to feel that in his last trance Odysseus
might have heard the far-off divine sweet voice of Calypso calling him
and have hastened to her cry.
Circe is by no means so mysterious as Calypso. Yet she belongs to
one of the most interesting families in Greek romance. Her mother
was Perse, daughter of Oceanus; her father was Helios; she is own
sister, therefore, to the Colchian Æetes, and aunt of the redoubtable
Medea. She lives in the isle of Ææa, not, like Calypso, deep embowered
in groves, but in a fair open valley sweeping downward to the sea,
whence her hearth-smoke may be clearly descried. Nor is her home an
ivy-curtained cavern of the rocks, but a house well built of polished
stone, protected from the sea-winds by oak-woods. Here she dwells in
grand style, with nymphs of the streams and forests to attend upon
her, and herds of wild beasts, human-hearted, roaming through her
park. Odysseus always speaks of her with respect as #potnia Kirkê ...
dia theaôn ... Kirkê e plokamos deinê theos audêessa#. Like Calypso,
she has a fair shrill voice that goes across the waters, and as her
fingers ply the shuttle, she keeps singing through the summer air. By
virtue of her birthright, as a daughter of the sun, she understands
the properties of plant and drug. Poppy and henbane and mandragora--all
herbs of subtle juice that draw soul-quelling poison from the fat
earth and the burning sun--are hers to use as she thinks fit. And the
use she makes of them is malicious; for, fairy-like and wanton, she
will have the men who visit her across the seas submit their reason to
her lure. Therefore she turns them to swine; and the lions and wolves
of the mountain she tames in like manner, so that they fawn and curl
their long tails and have no heart to ravin any more. This is how she
treats the comrades of Odysseus: "She drew them in and set them on
benches and on chairs, and put before them cheese and meat and yellow
honey, mixing therewith Pramnian wine; but with the food she mingled
baleful drugs, to make them quite forget their fatherland. But when
she had given them thereof and they had drunk, straightway she smote
them with a rod and shut them up in sties. Of swine they had the
head, the voice, the form, the bristles; but their mind stayed firm
as it had been before. So they then were penned up, weeping bitter
tears; but Circe threw before them acorns of the oak and ilex and
cornel-berries, food that the forest-ranging swine are wont to eat."
What is admirable in this description is its gravity. Circe is not made
out particularly wicked or malignant. She is acting only after her
kind, like some beautiful but baleful plant--a wreath, for instance,
of red briony-berries, whereof if children eat, they perish. Nor,
again, is there a touch of the burlesque in the narration. Therefore,
in the charming picture which Rivière has painted of Circe, we trace a
vein of modern feeling. Clasping her knees with girlish glee, she sits
upon the ground beneath a tangle of wild-vine, and watches the clumsy
hogs that tumble with half-comic, half-pathetic humanity expressed in
their pink eyes and grunting snouts before her. So, too, the solemn
picture by Burne Jones, a masterpiece of coloring, adds something
mediæval to the Homeric Circe. The tall sunflowers that remind us of
her father, the cringing panthers, black and lithe, the bending figure
of the saffron-vested witch, the jars of potent juices, and the distant
glimpse of sea and shore, suggest more of malignant intention than
belongs to the #potnia Kirkê#, the #Kirkê polypharmakos# of Homer's
tale. It was inevitable that modern art should infuse a deeper meaning
into the allegory. The world has lived long and suffered much and grown
greatly since the age of Homer. We cannot be so _naïf_ and childlike
any longer. Yet the true charm of Circe in the _Odyssey_, the spirit
that distinguishes her from Tannhaüser's Venus and Orlando's Fata
Morgana and Ruggiero's Alcina and Tancred's Armida, lies just in this,
that the poet has passed so lightly over all the dark and perilous
places of his subject. This delicacy of touch can never be regained
by art. It belonged to the conditions of the first Hellenic bloom of
fancy, to suggest without insistance and to realize without emphasis.
Impatient readers may complain of want of depth and character. They
would fain see the Circe of the _Odyssey_ as strongly moralized as the
Medea of Euripides. But in Homer only what is human attains to real
intensity. The marvellous falls off and shades away into soft air-tints
and delightful dreams. Still, it requires the interposition of the gods
to save Odysseus from the charms of the malicious maid. As Hermes came
to Priam on the path between Troy town and the Achaian ships, so now he
meets the hero:
#neêniêi andri eoikôs
prôton hypênêtêi; touper chariestatê hêbê.#[28]
A plant of moly is in his hand; and this will be the antidote to
Circe's philter. Odysseus's sword and strong will must do the rest.
When Circe has once found her match, we are astonished at the
_bonhomie_ which she displays. The game is over. There remains nothing
but graceful hospitality on her part--elegant banquets, delicious
baths, soft beds, the restoration of the ship's crew to their proper
shape, and a store of useful advice for the future. "There all the
days, for a whole year, we sat feasting and drinking honeyed wine; but
when the year was full, and the seasons had gone round, moon waning
after moon, and the long days were finished, my dear comrades called on
me by name, and spake once more of home."
One more female figure from the _Odyssey_ remains as yet untouched; and
this is the most beautiful of all. Nausicaa has no legendary charm; she
is neither mystic goddess nor weird woman, nor is hers the dignity of
wifehood. She is simply the most perfect maiden, the purest, freshest,
lightest-hearted girl of Greek romance. Odysseus passes straight
from the solitary island of Ogygia, where elm and poplar and cypress
overshadow Calypso's cavern, into the company of this real woman. It is
like coming from a land of dreams into a dewy garden when the sun has
risen: the waves through which he has fared upon his raft have wrought
for him, as it were, a rough reincarnation into the realities of human
life. For the sea-brine is the source of vigor; and into the deep he
has cast, together with Calypso's raiment, all memory of her.
Nausicaa was asleep in her Phæacian chamber when Athene, mindful of
Odysseus's need, came down and warned her in a dream that she should
bestir herself and wash her clothes against her marriage-day. When the
damsel woke, she went straight to her father, Alcinous, and begged him
to provide a horse and mules. Like a prudent girl, she said nothing
of her marriage, but spoke of the cares of the household. Her five
brothers, she said, the two wedded and the other three in the bloom
of youth, want shining raiment for the dance, and her duty it is to
see that the clothes are always ready. Alcinous knew in his heart what
she really meant, but he answered her with no unseemly jest. Only he
promised a cart and a pair of mules; and her mother gave her food to
eat, and wine in a skin, and a golden cruse of oil, that she and her
maidens might spend a pleasant morning by the sea-beach, and bathe and
anoint themselves, when their clothes-washing was finished.
A prettier picture cannot be conceived than that drawn by Homer of
Nausicaa with her handmaidens thronging together in the cart, which
jogs downward through the olive-gardens to the sea. The princess holds
the whip and drives; and when she reaches the stream's mouth by the
beach, she loosens the mules from the shafts, and turns them out to
graze in the deep meadow. Then the clothes are washed, and the luncheon
is taken from the basket, and the game of ball begins. How the ball
flew aside and fell into the water, and how the shrill cries of the
damsels woke Odysseus from his sleep, every one remembers. The girls
are fluttered by the sight of the great naked man, rugged with brine
and bruised with shipwreck. Nausicaa alone, as becomes a princess,
stands her ground and questions him. The simple delicacy with which
this situation is treated makes the whole episode one of the most
charming in Homer. Nothing can be prettier than the change from pity
to admiration, expressed by the damsel, when Odysseus has bathed in
running water, and rubbed himself with oil and put on goodly raiment
given him by the girls. Pallas sheds treble grace upon his form, and
makes his hair to fall in clusters like hyacinth-blossoms, so that an
artist who moulds figures of gilt silver could not shape a comelier
statue. The princess, with yesternight's dream still in her soul,
wishes he would stay and be her husband. The girlish simplicity of
Nausicaa is all the more attractive because the Phæacians are the
most luxurious race described by Homer. The palace in which she dwells
with her father is all of bronze and silver and gold; it shines like
the sun, and a blue line marks the brazen cornice of the walls. Dogs
of silver and gold, Hephæstus's work, which never can grow old through
length of days, protect the entrance. Richly woven robes are cast upon
the couches in the hall, and light is shed upon the banquet-tables
from blazing torches in the hands of golden boys. Outside the palace
grows the garden with well-divided orchard-rows, where pears and
figs and pomegranates and burnished apples and olives flourish all
the year long. The seasons change not in Phæacian land for winter
or for summer. The west wind is always blowing. Pear follows after
pear, and apple after apple, and grape-bunch after grape-bunch, in a
never-ending autumn dance. Vintage, too, is there; and there are the
trim flower-beds; and through the garden flow two fountains. The whole
pleasure-ground seems to have been laid out with geometrical Greek
taste. It is a paradise of neatness, sun-bright, clear to take in at
a glance. In this delightful palace dwells Alcinous, a kind old man,
among his sons; and much delight they take in dance and song and games
of strength. The young men, whose beards are but just growing, leap
in rhythmic movement to the flute; the elder and more muscular run or
wrestle, and much contempt do these goodly fellows, like English lads,
reserve for men who are not athletes. Odysseus has to rebuke one of
them, Euryalus, by reminding him that faultlessly fair bodies are not
always the temples of a godlike soul. Zeus gives not all of his good
gifts to all; for some men owe grace and favor to eloquence, others
to beauty, and a man may be like to the immortals in face and form,
and yet a fool. Alcinous well describes the temper of his people when
he says: "We are not faultless boxers, nor yet wrestlers; but with
our feet we race swiftly, and none can beat us in rowing; and we aye
love the banquet, and the lyre, and dancing, and gay raiment, and
warm baths, and joys of love." It is therefore not without propriety
that Demodocus, their blind bard, "whom the Muse loved much, and gave
him good and evil--for she reft him of his sight and gave him honeyed
song"--sings of Aphrodite tangled with Ares in the net of Hephæstus.
From this soft, luxurious, comely, pleasure-loving folk Nausicaa
springs up like a pure blossom--anemone or lily of the mountains. She
has all the sweetness of temper which distinguishes Alcinous; but the
voluptuous living of her people has not spoiled her. The maidenly
reserve which she displays in her first reception of Odysseus, her
prudent avoidance of being seen with him in the streets of the town
while he is yet a stranger, and the care she takes that he shall suffer
nothing by not coming with her to the palace, complete the portrait
of a girl who is as free from coquetry as she is from prudishness.
Perhaps she strikes our fancy with most clearness when, after bathing
and dressing, Odysseus passes her on his way through the hall to the
banquet. She leaned against the pillar of the roof and gazed upon
Odysseus, and said: "Hail, guest, and be thou mindful of me when
perchance thou art in thine own land again, for to me the first thou
dost owe the price of life." This is the last word spoken by Nausicaa
in the _Odyssey_. She is not mentioned among the Phæacians who took
leave of the hero the day he passed to Ithaca.
Before quitting the women of Homer, we must return to the _Iliad_; for
without Briseis and Andromache their company would be incomplete. As
the figures in a bass-relief are variously wrought, some projecting
like independent statues in sharp light and shadow, while others are
but half detached, and a third sort offer mere outlined profiles
scarcely embossed upon the marble background: even so the poet has
obeyed a law of relative proportion in his treatment of character.
The subordinate heroes, for example, in the _Iliad_ fall away from
the central figure of Achilles into more or less of slightness.
This does not mean that we can trace the least indecision in Homer's
touch, or that he has slurred his work by haste or incapacity. On
the contrary, there is no poet from whom deeper lessons in the art
of subordinating accessories to the main subject without impairing
their real value can be learned. A sculptor like Pheidias knows how
to give significance to the least indication of a form which he has
placed upon the second plane in his bass-relief. Just so Homer inspires
his minor characters with personality. To detach this personality in
each case is the task of the critic; yet his labor is no light one;
for the Homeric characters draw their life from incidents, motives,
action. To the singer's fancy they appeared, not as products of the
self-conscious imagination, but as living creatures; and to separate
them from their environment of circumstance is almost to destroy
them. This is the specific beauty of the art of Homer. In its origin
it must have been the outcome, not of reflection, but of inspired
instinct; for in the Homeric age psychological analysis was unknown,
and the very nomenclature of criticism had yet to be invented. We
can draw inexhaustible lessons in practical wisdom from the Homeric
poems; but we cannot with impunity subject those delicate creations to
the critical crucible. They delight both intellect and senses with a
many-toned harmony of exquisitely modulated parts; but the instant we
begin to dissect and theorize, we run a risk of attributing far more
method and deliberation than was natural to a poet in the early age
of Hellas. It is almost impossible to set forth the persons of Homer
except in his own way, and in close connection with the incidents
through which they are revealed; whereas the characters of a more
self-conscious artist--the Medea, for example, or the Phædra of
Euripides--can be described without much repetition of their speeches
or reconstruction of the dramas in which they play their parts.
Andromache offers a not inapt illustration to these remarks. She
is beautiful, as all heroic women are; and Homer tells us she is
"white-armed." We know no more about her person than this; and her
character is exhibited only in the famous parting scene and in the two
lamentations which she pours forth for her husband. Yet who has read
the _Iliad_ without carrying away a distinct conception of this, the
most lovable among the women of Homer? She owes her character far less
to what she does and what she says than to how she looks in that ideal
picture painted on our memory by Homer's verse. The affection of Hector
for his wife, no less distinguished than the passion of Achilles for
his friend, has made the Trojan prince rather than his Greek rival
the hero of modern romance. When he leaves Ilion to enter on the long
combat which ends in the death of Patroclus, the last thought of Hector
is for Andromache. He finds her, not in their home, but on the wall,
attended by her nurse, who carries in her arms his only son:
#Hektoridên agapêton alinkion asteri kalôi.#[29]
Her first words, after she has wept and clasped him, are: "Love, thy
stout heart will be thy death, nor hast thou pity of thy child or me,
who soon shall be a widow. My father and my mother and my brothers
are all slain; but, Hector, thou art father to me and mother and
brother, and thou too art the husband of my youth. Have pity, then,
and stay here in the tower, lest thy son be orphaned and thy wife a
widow." The answer is worthy of the hero. "Full well," he says, "know
I that Troy will fall, and I foresee the sorrow of my brethren and
the king; but for these I grieve not: to think of thee, a slave in
Argos, unmans me almost; yet even so I will not flinch or shirk the
fight. My duty calls, and I must away." He stretches out his mailed
arms to Astyanax, but the child is frightened by his nodding plumes.
So he lays aside his helmet, and takes the baby to his breast, and
prays for him. Andromache smiles through her tears, and down the
clanging causeway strides the prince. Poor Andromache has nothing left
to do but to return home and raise the dirge for a husband as good
as dead. When we see her again in the 22d _Iliad_, she is weaving,
and her damsels are heating a bath against Hector's return from the
fight. Then suddenly the cry of Hecuba's anguish thrills her ears.
Shuttle and thread drop from her hands; she gathers up her skirts,
and like a Mænad flies forth to the wall. She arrives in time to see
her husband's body dragged through dust at Achilles' chariot-wheels
away from Troy. She faints, and when she wakes it is to utter the most
piteous lament in Homer--not, however, for Hector so much, or for
herself, as for Astyanax. He who was reared upon a father's knees and
fed with marrow and the fat of lambs, and, when play tired him, slept
in soft beds among nursing-women, will now roam, an orphan, wronged and
unbefriended, hunted from the company of happier men, or fed by charity
with scanty scraps. The picture of an orphan's misery among cold
friends and hard oppressors is wrought with the pathos of exquisite
simplicity. And to the same theme Andromache returns in the _vocero_
which she pours forth over the body of Hector. "I shall be a widow and
a slave, and Astyanax will either be slaughtered by Greek soldiers or
set to base service in like bondage." Then the sight of the corpse
reminds her that the last words of her sorrow must be paid to Hector
himself. What touches her most deeply is the thought of death in battle:
#ou gar moi thnêskôn lecheôn ek cheiras orexas;
oude ti moi eipes pykinon epos, houte ken aiei
memnêmên nyktas te kai êmata dakrycheousa.#[30]
As far as studied delineation of character goes, Briseis is still
more a silhouette than Andromache. We know her as the fair-cheeked
damsel who was fain to stay with Achilles, and who loved Patroclus
because he kept for her a soothing word. In her threnos for Patroclus
she exclaims, "How one woe after another takes me! I saw my husband
slain before our city, and my three brethren; but you, Patroclus,
then comforted me, and said I should be Achilles' wife: you were ever
gentle." This is really all we know about her. Yet Briseis lives in
our memory by virtue of the great passions gathered round her, and the
weighty actions in which she plays her part.
In course of years the heroes of the Homeric romances came to be
worshipped, not exactly like gods with #thysiai#, but like the more
than mortal dead with #enagismata#. They had their chapels and their
hearths, distinct from the temples and the altars of the deities. These
were generally raised upon the supposed spot of their sepulture, or in
places which owed them special reverence as oekists or as ancestors.
In the case of Oedipus, the translation of the hero to the company of
gods secured for him a cultus in Colonos. It was supposed that heroes
exercised a kindly influence over the people among whom they dwelt;
haunting the neighborhood in semi-corporeal visitations, conferring
benefits upon the folk, and exhibiting signs of anger when neglected.
Thus Philostratus remarks that Protesilaus had a fane in Thessaly, "and
many humane and favorable dealings doth he show the men of Thessaly,
yea, and angerly also if he be neglected."[31] The same Philostratus,
whose works are a treasure-house of information respecting the latest
forms of Hellenic paganism, reports the actual form of prayer used by
Appollonius of Tyana at the tomb of Palamedes,[32] and makes the ghost
of Achilles complain: "The Thessalians for a long time have remitted
my offerings; still I am not yet minded to display my wrath against
them." Achilles, who has been evoked above his tomb in the Troad by the
prayers of Apollonius, proceeds to remark that even the Trojans revere
him more than his own people, but that he cannot restore the town of
Troy to its old prosperity. He hints, however, pretty broadly, that if
the Thessalians do not pay him more attention, he will reduce them to
the same state of misery as the Trojans. The dæmon, it may be said in
passing, vanishes, like a mediæval ghost, at cockcrow.[33]
This cultus of the Homeric heroes was, of course, inseparable from a
corresponding growth of artistic associations; and here it is not a
little curious to compare our own indefinite conceptions of the outward
form of the heroic personages with the very concrete incarnation
they received from Greek sculptors and painters. The first memorable
attempt to express the heroes of Homer in marble was upon the pediment
at Ægina; the first elaborate pictorial representation was that of
Polygnotus on the walls of the _Lesche_ at Delphi. A Greek _Lesche_ was
not unlike an Italian or Oriental café, extended to suffice for the
requirements of a whole city. What has been discovered at Pompeii, in
addition to the full description of the Delphian _Lesche_ by Pausanias,
inclines us to believe that the walls of these public places of resort
were not unfrequently decorated with Homeric pictures. The beautiful
frescos of Achilles among the daughters of Lycomedes, of Achilles
bathed by Thetis in the Styx, of Briseis led forth by Patroclus into
the company of the Achaian chiefs, and of Penelope questioning the
disguised Odysseus about her husband, which have been discovered in
various parts of Pompeii, sufficiently illustrate to modern minds
the style of this wall-painting. The treatise surnamed #Eikones# of
Philostratus is an elaborate critical catalogue of a picture-gallery
of this sort; and from many indications contained in it we learn
how thoroughly the heroes of Homer had acquired a fixed corporeal
personality. In describing, for example, a picture of the lamentation
for Antilochus, he says: "These things are Homer's paintings, but the
painter's action." Then he goes on to point out the chief persons:
"You can distinguish Odysseus at once by his severe and wideawake
appearance, Menelaus by his gentleness, Agamemnon by his inspired
look; while Tydeus is indicated by his freedom, the Telamonian Ajax
by his grimness, and the Locrian by his activity."[34] In another
place he tells us that Patroclus was of an olive-pale complexion
(#melichlôros#), with black eyes and rather thick eyebrows; his head
was erect upon the neck, like that of a man who excels in athletic
exercises, his nose straight, with wide nostrils, like an eager horse.
These descriptions occur in the _Heroic Dialogue_. They are supposed to
have been communicated by the dæmon Protesilaus to a vine-dresser who
frequented his tomb. Achilles, on the other hand, had abundant hair,
more pleasant to the sight in hue than gold, with a nose inclining to
the aquiline, angry brows, and eyes so bright and lively that the soul
seemed leaping from them in fire. Hector, again, had a terrible look
about him, and scorned to dress his hair, and his ears were crushed,
not indeed by wrestling, for barbarians do not wrestle, but by the
habit of struggling for mastery with wild bulls.[35]
Some of the women of Homeric story, Helen for example, and
Iphigenia, received divine honors, together with suitable artistic
personification. But women were not closely connected with the
genealogical and gentile foundations of the Greek cultus; only a few,
therefore, were thus distinguished. What has here been said about
the superstition that gave form and distinctness to the creatures of
Homeric fancy may be taken as applying in general to the attitude
assumed by ancient art. The persons of a poem or a mythus were not
subjected to critical analysis as we dissect the characters of
_Hamlet_ or of _Faust_. But they were not on that account the less
vividly apprehended. They tended more and more to become external
realities--beings with a definite form and a fixed character. In a
word, through sculpture, painting, and superstition, they underwent
the same personifying process as the saints of mediæval Italy. To what
extent the Attic drama exercised a disturbing influence and interrupted
this process has been touched upon with reference to the Euripidean
Helen.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] I take this occasion of calling attention to the essay on Helen
considered as an allegory of Greek Beauty, by Paul de St. Victor in his
_Hommes et Dieux_.
[18] "Not true is that tale; nor didst thou journey in benched ships,
or come to towers of Troy."
[19]
She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate,
Made frantic by their city's fate,
Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,
The vengeance of her injured lord:
She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend,
Sat cowering, by the altar screened.--_Conington._
[20] Worsley's _Iliad_, iii. 17. The other quotations are from the same
version.
[21] "Thy own soul, gazing at him, became Kupris; for Aphrodite, as her
name denotes, is all the folly of mortals."
[22] Quite another view of Helen's character is developed in the
_Helena_, where Euripides has followed the Stesichorean version of her
legend with singular disregard for consistency. Much might be said on
this point about the license in handling mythical material the Attic
dramatists allowed themselves.
[23]
Eastward was my glance directed,
Watching for the sun's first rays;
In the south--oh, sight of wonder!
Rose the bright orb's sudden blaze.
Thither was my eye attracted;
Vanished bay and mountain height,
Earth and heaven unseen and all things,
All but that enchanted light.--_Anster._
[24] "The home of my wedded years, exceeding fair, filled with all the
goods of life, which even in dreams methinks I shall remember."
[25] "I know well that Penelope is inferior to thee in form and
stature, to the eyes of men."
[26] "Of a truth my goodliness and beauty of person the gods destroyed
what time the Argives went up into Troy town."
[27] "For the nymph pleased him no longer. Nathless, as need was, he
slept the night in hollow caverns, beside her loving him who loved her
not."
[28] "Like to a young man when his beard has just begun to grow, whose
bloom is then most lovely."
[29] Hector's only son, like unto a fair star.
[30] "For, dying, thou didst not reach to me thy hand from the bed, nor
say to me words of wisdom, the which I might have aye remembered night
and day with tears."
[31] #Hêrôïkos#, 680.
[32] _Life of Apollonius_, 150.
[33] _Ibid._ 153, 154.
[34] #Eikones#, 820. (By Kayser, Zurich, 2d ed.)
[35] #Hêrôïkos#, 736, 733, 722. For the curious detail about Hector's
ears compare Theocr. 22, 45, where athletes are described #tethlagmenoi
ouata pygmais#. Statues of Hercules show this.