_The declension of the great Homeric Characters in the later
Tradition[1046]._
[1046] See note p. 500. sup.
~_Physical conditions of the Greek Theatre._~
One legitimate mode of measuring the true greatness of Homer is, by
observing what has become of the materials and instruments he worked
with, upon their passing into other hands. Acting on this principle,
let us now pass on to consider the murderous maltreatment, which the
most remarkable of all the Homeric characters have had to endure in
the later tradition; partly, as I have already observed, from general,
and partly from special causes. On the more general influence of this
kind I have already touched. Among the special causes, we should place
the declension in the fundamental ideas of morals and of politics
between the time of Homer and the historic age. With this we may
reckon one which, though it may appear to be technical, must, in all
likelihood, have been most important, namely, the physical necessities
imposed by the fixed conditions of dramatic representation among the
Greeks[1047]. Their theatres were constructed on a scale, which may be
called colossal as compared with ours. Both polity and religion entered
into the institution of the stage. The intense nationality of their
life required a similar character in their plays, and likewise in the
places where they were to be represented. Not therefore a particular
company of auditors, but rather the whole public of the city, where the
representation took place, was to be accommodated. In consequence, the
dimensions of the buildings exceeded the usual powers of the human eye
and ear; so that the figure was heightened by buskins, the countenance
thrown into bolder and coarser outline by masks, and the voice endowed
with a great increase of power by acoustic contrivances within the
masks, as well as aided by the construction of the buildings. All this
was the more strictly requisite, because the plays were acted in the
open air.
[1047] Schlegel, Lect. iii. vol. i. p. 81; Donaldson, Greek Theatre,
sect. ii.
Now this general exaggeration of feature beyond the standard of
nature had an irresistible tendency to affect the mode in which
characters were modelled for representation; to cause them to be laid
out morally as well as physically in strong outline, in masses large
and comparatively coarse. The fine and careful finishing of Homer
required that those, who were to recite him, should retain an entire
and unfettered command over the measure in which the bodily organs were
to be employed. The τύνη δ’ ὠμοΐιν of Achilles to Patroclus might bear
to be spoken in a voice of thunder, and would absolutely require the
bard to use considerable exertion of the lungs; but the scenes of Helen
with Priam in the Third Book, of Hector with Andromache in the Sixth,
of Priam with Achilles in the Twenty-fourth, would admit of no such
treatment; and as these passages could not themselves be rendered, so
neither could anything bearing a true analogy to Homer be given, unless
the actor had enjoyed full liberty to contract as well as expand his
own volume of sound, or unless he had enjoyed both easy access, on any
terms he pleased, to the ears of his audience, and the full benefit of
that most important assistance, which the eye renders to the ear by
observing the play of countenance that accompanies delivery. King Lear,
King John, or Othello, could not have been represented more truly and
adequately in a Greek theatre, than the Achilles, or than the Helen,
of Homer. Those who have ever happened to discuss with a deaf person
a critical subject, requiring circumspect and tender handling, will
know how much the necessity for constant tension of the voice restrains
freedom in the expression of thought, and mars its perfectness. The
Greek actors lay under a somewhat similar necessity, and to their
necessities of course the diction of the tragedians was, whether
consciously or unconsciously, adapted.
Let it, however, be borne in mind, that when we criticize the
conceptions of the Homeric characters by the later Greek writers,
it need not be with the supposition that we have eyes to discern in
Homer what they did not see. Their reproductions must be taken to
represent not so much the free dictates of the mind and judgment of
the later poets, as the conditions of representation to which they
were compelled to conform, and the popular sentiments and opinions
which, in the character of popular writers, they could not but take
for their standard. The invention of printing has given a liberty and
independence to thought, at least in conjunction with poetry and the
drama, such as it could not possess while the poet, in Athens for
example, could sing in no other way but one, namely, to the nation
collected in a mass. The poet of modern times may write for a minority
of the public, nay, for a mere handful of admirers, which is destined,
yet only in after-years, to grow like the mustard-seed of the parable.
But the Athenian dramatist was compelled to be the poet of the majority
at the moment, and to be carried on the stream of its sympathies,
however adverse its direction might be to that in which, if at liberty
to choose, he would himself have moved.
~_Obliteration of the finer distinctions._~
Accordingly, when we come to survey the literary history of those great
characters which the Poet gave as a perpetual possession to the world,
we find, naturally enough, that the flood of the more recent traditions
has long ago come in upon the Homeric narrative, like the inundation
brought by Neptune and Apollo over the wall and trench of the Greeks.
Like every other deluge, in sweeping away the softer materials, which
give the more refined lines to the picture, it leaves the comparatively
hard and sharp ones harder and sharper than ever. Thus it is with the
Homeric characters, transplanted into the later tradition. The broader
distinctions of his personages one from another have been not only
retained, but exaggerated: all the finer ones have disappeared. No
one, deriving his ideas from Homer only, could confound Diomed with
Ajax, or either with Agamemnon, or any of the three with Menelaus, or
any of the four with Achilles; but when we come down to the age of
the tragedians, what remains to mark them, except only for Agamemnon
his office, and for Achilles his superiority in physical strength? In
the Homeric poems, the strong and towering intellectual qualities even
outweigh the great physical and animal forces of his chief hero: by
the usual predominance in man of what is gross over what is fine, the
principal and higher parts of his character are afterwards suppressed,
and it becomes comparatively vulgarized. In the Ulysses of Homer,
again, the intellectual element predominates in such a manner, that not
even the most superficial reader can fail to perceive it. He and Helen
stand out in the Iliad from among others with whom they might have
been confounded; the first by virtue of his self-mastery and sagacity,
the second, not only by her beauty and her fall, but by the singularly
tender and ethereal shading of her character. The later tradition,
laying rude hands upon the subtler distinctions thus established, has
degraded these two great characters, the one into little better than a
stage rogue, the other into little more than a stage voluptuary, who
adds to the guilt of that character the further and coarse enormities
of faithlessness, and even of bloodthirstiness.
Even so soon as in the time of the Cyclical writers the character of
Helen had begun to be altered. In Homer she is the victim of Paris,
carried off from her home and country, and only then yielding to his
lust. In the Κύπρια ἔπη, as we have that poem reported by Proclus, she
begins by receiving his gifts, that is to say, his bribes; she is an
adulteress under her husband’s roof; and she joins in plundering him,
in order to escape with her paramour.
It is in Euripides that we find the largest and most diversified
reproduction of the old Homeric characters, and to him, therefore,
among the three tragedians, we should give our chief attention. When we
consider them as a whole, according to his representation of them, we
find that their entire primitive and patriarchal colouring has gone.
The manners are not those of any age in particular; least of all are
they the manners of a very early age. And, as the entire company has
lost its distinctive type, so have the members of it when taken singly.
In the Troades, for example, Menelaus is simply the injured and
exasperated husband; Helen is the faithless wife; and she is kept up to
a certain standard of dramatic importance in the eye of the world only
by another departure from the Homeric picture, for she is armed with
an enormous power of argument and sophistry. By a similar appendage of
ingenious disquisition, the essentially plain and matronly qualities of
Hecuba have been overlaid and hidden. Achilles, in the Iphigenia, is
a gallant and a generous warrior; but we have neither the grandeur of
his tempestuous emotions as in Homer, nor, on the other hand, any of
that peculiar refinement with which they are in so admirable a manner
both blended and set in contrast. Agamemnon has lost, in Euripides,
his vacillation and misgivings, and is the average and, so to speak,
rounded king and warrior, instead of the mixed and particoloured, but
in no sense common-place, character that Homer has made him. Though
Andromache is a passionately fond mother, she has nothing whatever
that identifies her as the original Andromache. Indeed, of the Homeric
women, it may be said that in Euripides they have ceased to be womanly;
they have in general nothing of that adjective character (if the phrase
may be allowed), that ever leaning and clinging attitude, to which
support from without is a moral necessity, and which so profoundly
marks them all in Homer. Again, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Polyxena, who are
either scarcely or not at all Homeric, have now become grand heroines,
with unbounded stage-effect; but there is no stage-effect at all in
Homer’s Helen, or in his Andromache. Andromache, for example, is not
elaborately drawn. She is rather a product of Homer’s character and
feeling, than of his art. She is simply what Tennyson in his ‘Isabel’
calls ‘the stately flower of perfect wifehood.’ In her simplicity,
the true idea of her might easily have been preserved by the later
literature, had the conception of woman as such remained morally the
same. But the Andromache of Homer was doomed to deteriorate, on account
of her purity, as his Achilles, his Ulysses, his Helen degenerated,
because the flights of such high genius could not be sustained, and
weaker wings drooped down to a lower level. As Hecuba was the aged
matron of the Iliad, and Helen its mixed type of woman, so Andromache
was the young mother and the wife. Her one only thought lay in her
husband and her child; but in the Troades, wordy and diffuse, she
discusses, in a most business-like manner, the question whether she
shall or shall not transfer her affections to the new lord, whose
property she has become. She ends, indeed, by deciding the question
rightly; but it is one that the Homeric Andromache never could have
entertained.
Three, however, among the Homeric characters, have been mangled by
the later tradition much more cruelly than any others; they are those
prime efforts of his mighty genius, Helen, Achilles, and Ulysses.
The first, most probably, on account of the wonderful delicacy with
which in Homer it is moulded: the others on account of their singular
comprehensiveness and breadth of scope. Each of these three cases well
deserves particular consideration.
~_Mutilation of the Helen of Homer._~
In the case of Helen, the extreme tenderness of the colouring, that
Homer has employed, multiplied infinitely the chances against its
preservation. Among all the women of antiquity, she is by nature the
most feminine, the finest in grain, though, as in many other instances,
a certain slightness of texture is essentially connected with this
fineness. Her natural softness is very greatly deepened by the double
effect of her affliction and her repentance. A quiet and settled
sadness broods over her whole image, and comes out not only when she
weeps by the body of Hector, or when her husband’s presence reminds her
of her offence, but even under the genial smiles and soothing words
of old Priam on the wall. Vehement and agonizing passion draws deep
strong lines, which, even in copies, may be easily caught and easily
preserved; it is quite different with the profound though low-toned
suffering, of which the passive influence, the penetrating tint,
circulates as it were in every vein, and issues into view at every pore.
~_Helen of Euripides, Isocrates, Virgil._~
Let us now consider how the character of Helen reappears in Euripides,
in Isocrates, and in Virgil.
In the Agamemnon, Æschylus had designated her under the form of a
pun, as ἑλέναυς ἑλεπτόλις; and these phrases, as they stand, cannot
be said in any manner to force us beyond the limits of the Homeric
tradition. But in the Hecuba she is cursed outright by the Chorus,
and represented by Hecuba herself as having been the great agent,
instead of the passive occasion and the suffering instrument, in the
calamitous fall of Troy[1048]. In the Troades she is the shame of the
country, the slayer of Priam, the willing fugitive from Sparta[1049].
Andromache denounces her in the fiercest manner, and gives her for her
ancestors not Jupiter, but Death, Slaughter, Vengeance, Jealousy, and
all the evils upon earth[1050]. Menelaus is furiously enraged, calls on
his attendants to drag her in by her blood-guilty hair, will not give
her the name of wife, will send her to Lacedæmon[1051], there herself
to die as a satisfaction to those whose death she has guiltily brought
about. When she asks whether she may be heard in defence of herself, he
answers summarily, no:
[1048] Hecuba, 429, 924-31.
[1049] Troades, 132, 377.
[1050] Ver. 770.
[1051] Ver. 855-78.
οὐκ ἐς λόγους ἐλήλυθ’, ἀλλά σε κτενῶν[1052].
[1052] Ver. 900.
She then delivers a sophistical speech[1053], and pleads, that she
could not be guilty in yielding to a passion which even Jupiter
could not resist, while she retaliates abuse on Menelaus for leaving
her exposed to temptation. _Quantum mutata!_ As respects Deiphobus,
however, she declares that she only yielded to force, and that she was
often detected, after the death of Paris, in endeavours to escape over
the wall to the Greeks.
[1053] Ver. 909-60.
We have moreover an example, in the Helen painted by Euripides, of
the rude manner in which characters not understood, and taken to be
inconsistent by an age which had failed to understand them, were torn
in pieces, and how the several fragments started anew, each for itself,
on the stream of tradition. In Homer we have the touching contrast
between the chastity of Helen’s mind, and the unlawful condition in
which she lived. The latter, taken separately, was presumed to imply
an unchaste soul; the former a lawful condition. Instead therefore of
the one narrative, we have two; a shade or counterfeit of Helen plays
the part of the adulteress with Paris, while the true and living Helen
remains concealed in Egypt, keeping pure her husband’s bed, so that,
though her name has become infamous, her body may remain untainted.
This latter tradition is chiefly valuable, because it marks the mode of
transition from the Homeric to the spurious representations, and the
consciousness of the early poets, that they were not preserving the
image drawn by Homer. No scheme, however, constructed of such flimsy
materials, could live; and, naturally enough, the character of Helen
the wife was forgotten, that of Helen the voluptuary was preserved.
From the vituperation and disgrace of Helen in most of the plays
of Euripides, we pass to the elaborate panegyric handed down to us
in the Ἐγκώμιον of Isocrates. The falsehood eulogistic is not less
unsatisfying than the falsehood damnatory. For now, with the lapse
of time, we find a further depression of the moral standard. We have
here, in its most absolute form, the deification of beauty[1054]; ὃ
σεμνότατον, καὶ τιμιώτατον, καὶ θειότατον τῶν ὄντων ἔστιν[1055]. But it
is totally disjoined from purity. He does not warrant and support his
eulogy upon Helen, by recurring to the true Homeric representation of
her; but he boldly declares the high value of sensual enjoyment[1056],
commends the ambition of Paris to acquire an unrivalled possession and
thereby a close affinity with the gods, and sees in the war only a
proof of the immense and just estimation in which both parties held so
great a treasure[1057], without the smallest scruple as to the means by
which it was to be acquired or held. From this picture we may pass on
to the Helen of Virgil, which represents the destructive process in its
last stage of exaggeration, and leaves nothing more for the spirit of
havoc to devise.
[1054] I do not remember to have seen the principles of Isocrates
rigorously applied in modern literature, excepting in the Adrienne de
la Cardonnaye of M. Eugène Sue’s _Le Juif Errant_.
[1055] Hel. Enc. 61.
[1056] Ibid. 47.
[1057] Ibid. 54.
In Æn. i. 650, Helen is declared to have _sought_ Troy and unlawful
nuptials, instead of having been carried off from home against her
will. In Æn. vi. 513, she is represented as having made use of the
religious orgies on the fatal night, to invite the Greeks into Troy;
and, after first carefully removing all weapons for defence, she is
said to have opened the apartment of her sleeping husband Deiphobus
to Menelaus, in the hope that, by becoming accessory to a treacherous
murder, she might disarm the resentment of one whom she had so deeply
wronged. But even this passage has probably done less towards occupying
the modern mind with the falsified idea of Helen, than one of most
extraordinary scenic grandeur in the second Æneid; where Æneas relates
how he saw her, the common curse of her own country and of Troy,
crouching beside the altar of Vesta, amidst the lurid flames of the
final conflagration, in order to escape the wrath of Menelaus.
Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros
Et pœnas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras
Præmetuens, Trojæ et patriæ communis Erynnis,
Abdiderat sese, atque aris invisa sedebat.
ÆN. ii. 571-4.
And then, in language, the glowing magnificence of which serves to hide
the very paltry character of the sentiment, Æneas proceeds to announce
that he was about to slay the woman who, according to himself, had
lived for ten years as a friend among his friends; when, at the right
moment, his mother Venus appeared, and reminded him that on the whole
he might do rather better to think about saving, if possible, his own
father, wife, and boy.
Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined
with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features.
She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy,
willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing
her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness
and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in
the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and
Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. But
let us pass on.
~_Achilles and Ulysses._~
Among the many proofs of the vast scope of Homer’s mind, one of the
most remarkable is to be found in the twin characters of his prime
heroes or protagonists. It seems as if he had taken a survey of human
nature in its utmost breadth and depth, and, finding that he had not
the means to establish a perfect equilibrium between its highest powers
when all in full development, had determined to represent them, with
reference to the two great functions of intellect and passion, in two
immortal figures. In each of the two, each of these elements has been
represented with an extraordinary power, yet so, that the sovereignty
should rest in Achilles as to the one, and in Ulysses as to the other.
But the depth of emotion in Ulysses is greater than in any other male
character of the poems, except Achilles; only it is withdrawn from view
because so much under the mastery of his wisdom. And in like manner
on the other hand, a far greater power, directed to the purpose of
self-command and self-repression, is shown us in Achilles than in any
other character except Ulysses; but this also is under partial eclipse,
because the injustice, ingratitude, scorn, and meanness which Agamemnon
concentrates in the robbery of a beloved object from him, appeal so
irresistibly to the passionate side of his nature as to bring it out in
overpowering proportions.
These being the leading ideas of the two characters, Homer has equipped
each of them with the apparatus of a full-furnished man; and in
apportioning to each his share of other qualities and accomplishments,
he has made such a distribution as on the whole would give the best
balance and the most satisfactory general result. Thus it is plain that
the character of Achilles, covering as it did volcanic passions, was
in danger of degenerating into phrensy. Homer has, therefore, assigned
to him a peculiar refinement. His leisure is beguiled with song,
consecrated to the achievements of ancient heroes; he has the finest
tact, and is by far the greatest gentleman, of all the warriors of the
poems; even personal ornaments to set off his transcendent beauty[1058]
are not beneath his notice, a trait which would have been misplaced in
Ulysses, ludicrous in Ajax, and which is in Paris contemptible, but
which has its advantage in Achilles, because it is a simple accessory
subordinate to greater matters, and because, so far as it goes, it
is a weight placed in the scale opposite to that which threatens to
preponderate, and to mar by the strong vein of violence the general
harmony of the character.
[1058] Il. ii. 875.
In the same way, as Ulysses is distinguished by a never-failing
presence of mind, forethought, and mastery over emotion, so the danger
for him lies on the side of an undue predominance of the calculating
element, which threatens to reduce him from the heroic standard to
the low level of a vulgar utilitarianism. Here, as before, Homer has
been ready with his remedies. He exhibits to us this great prince and
statesman as bearing also a character of patriarchal simplicity, and
makes him, the profoundest and most astute man of the world, represent
the very childhood of the human race in his readiness to ply the
sickle or to drive the plough[1059]. Above all--and this is the prime
safeguard of his character--he makes Ulysses a model for Greece of
steady unvarying brightness in the domestic affections. The emotion of
Hector in the Sixth Iliad, and of Priam in the Twenty-fourth, are not
capable of comparison with those of Ulysses, because theirs constitute
the central points of the characters, and likewise are the products
of great junctures of danger and affliction respectively, while his
exhibit and indeed compose a settled and standing bent of his soul.
He alone, of all the chieftains who were beneath the walls of Troy,
is full of the near recollection of his son, his Telemachus[1060];
his desire and ambition never pass indeed beyond barren Ithaca, and
his daily thought through long years of wandering and detention is
to return there[1061], to see the very smoke curling upward from its
chimneys, so that the charms of a goddess are a pain to him, because
they keep him from Penelope[1062].
[1059] Od. xviii. 366-75.
[1060] Il. ii. 260.
[1061] Od. i. 58.
[1062] Od. v. 215-20.
Such was the care with which, in each of these great and wonderful
characters, Homer provided against an exclusive predominance of their
leading trait. But in vain. Achilles too, more slowly however than
his rival, passed, with later authors, into the wild beast; Ulysses
descended at a leap into the mere shopman of politics and war; and it
is singular to see how, when once the basis of the character had been
vulgarized, and the key to its movements lost, it came to be drawn in
attitudes the most opposed to even the broadest and most undeniable of
the Homeric traits.
~_Mutilation of the Ulysses of Homer._~
There is nothing in the political character of Ulysses more remarkable,
than his power of setting himself in sole action against a multitude;
whether we take him in the government of his refractory crew during
his wanderings; or in the body of the Horse, when a sound would have
ruined the enterprize of the Greeks, so that he had to lay his strong
hand over the jaws of the babbler Anticlus[1063]; or in the stern
preliminaries to his final revenge upon the Suitors; or in his war with
his rebellious subjects; or, above all, in the desperate crisis of the
Second Iliad, when by his fearless courage, decision, and activity he
saves the Greek army from total and shameful failure. And yet, much as
the Mahometans[1064] were railed at by the poets of Italy, indeed of
England, in the character of image-worshippers, so Ulysses is held up
to scorn in Euripides as a mere waiter upon popular favour. Thus in the
Hecuba he is
[1063] Od. iv. 285-8.
[1064] In proof of the establishment of this curious usage in our
literature, (which attracted the notice of Selden,) see Mawmet,
Maumetry in Richardson’s Dictionary, with the illustrative passages.
ὁ ποικιλόφρων,
κόπις, ἡδύλογος, δημοχαρίστης.
Now, when the most glaring and characteristic facts of the narrative
of Homer can be thus boldly traversed, there is scarcely room for
astonishment at any other kind of misrepresentation. As when Hecuba
laments, in the Troades[1065], that her lot is to be the captive of the
base, faithless, malignant, all-stinging maker of mischief. Such is the
standing type of Ulysses in the after-tradition. Whenever anything bad,
cruel, and above all mean, is to be done, he is the ever-ready, and
indeed thoroughly Satanic, instrument.
[1065] Tro. 285-9, 1216.
The Second Epistle of the First Book of Horace is full of interest with
reference to this subject, because in it he gives us the result of his
recent re-perusal of the Homeric poems at Præneste. And, accordingly,
we find here a great improvement upon the Ulysses of the Greek drama.
He seems to have struck Horace at this time more forcibly, or more
favourably, than any other Homeric character; for, after describing in
strong terms what was amiss both within and without the walls of Troy,
he makes this transition[1066];
[1066] Hor. Ep. I. ii. 18.
Rursus, quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen.
He considers this hero as the conqueror of Troy, and notices his
self-restraint and indomitable courage in adversity. Such was the
advantage of an impression fresh from the Homeric text, instead of
those drawn from the muddy source of the current traditions. It does
not diminish but enhances the compliment, when the acute but Epicurean
writer goes on to intimate, in more than half-earnest, that these
virtues of Ulysses were too high for imitation, and that he himself was
content rather to emulate the suitors of Penelope, and the easy life of
the youths about Alcinous[1067].
[1067] Hor. Epist. I. ii. 1-31.
But if some small instalment of justice was thus done by Horace to
the Homeric Ulysses, Virgil withdrew the boon, and was careful to
reproduce, without mitigation or relief, the worst features of the
worst form of the character. With him it is Ulysses who is chosen to
play the slayer of Palamedes and the betrayer of Sinon[1068], and to
lead the party which, conducted by Helen, was to massacre Deiphobus in
his chamber[1069]. On account of his fierce cruelty, even the ‘ground
is cursed for his sake;’ poor Ithaca is loaded with imprecations by
Æneas as he passes near it. Once he is called _infelix_, the greatest
compliment that he anywhere receives; but his name in few cases escapes
the affix of some abusive epithet, drawn alike from inhumanity or from
cunning, it seems to matter little from which[1070].
[1068] Æn. ii. 90. et seqq.
[1069] Æn. vi. 628.
[1070] Æn. iii. 272. sup. p. 522.
~_Of the Achilles of Homer._~
The character of Achilles was more fortunate, in the handling it
experienced from the Greek drama, than that of Ulysses. In the
Iphigenia of Euripides, the hero of the Iliad appears as a faithful
lover, and as a gallant and chivalrous warrior. At the same time, it
has lost altogether the breadth of touch and largeness of scope, with
which it is drawn in Homer. We miss entirely that unfathomable power
of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in
one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human
example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits
of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of
Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression
borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been
perfectly suitable to other warriors; for example, to the Diomed of
Homer. He falls back into a class, and becomes a simple member of it,
instead of being a creation paramount and alone; alone, like Olympus
amidst the mountains of Greece; alone for ever in his sublimity, amidst
the famous memories of other heroes, no less truly than he was alone in
his solitary encampment during the continuance of the Wrath.
With Pindar Achilles appears in a different dress. He is here conceived
without mind, as a youth marvellous in strength, hardihood, and
swiftness of foot, growing up into a mighty warrior[1071]. The Achilles
of Pindar is but as a pebble broken away from the mountain-mass of
Homer.
[1071] Pind. Nem. iii. 43-64.
Catullus, in his beautiful poem on the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis,
had a rare opportunity of setting forth the glories of Achilles. And
he is in fact made the main subject of the nuptial song, properly so
called; yet nothing of him is really celebrated by the poet[1072],
except his valour and his swiftness; all the rest is simple
amplification and embellishment. It seems by this time to have been
wholly forgotten, that the Homeric Achilles had a soul.
[1072] Epithal. Pel. and Thet. 339-372.
The discernment of Horace did not here enable him, as it had enabled
him before, to escape from the popular delusions,
Scriptor honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,
Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,
Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis[1073].
[1073] Hor. A. P. 120. It will be remembered that the ruthless Bentley
struck out even the _honoratum_ of the text, and, with an audacity
surpassing his great ingenuity, put in _Homereum_.
The character is exhibited here in a light at once feeble and
misleading, for its cardinal point is made to be the supremacy of
force over right. Now in Homer it is a sense that right has been
deeply violated, which serves for the very groundwork out of which his
exasperation rises. He does not view the question as one of _meum_ and
_tuum_ only, or even mainly. His eye is first upon the gross wrong
done, and only then upon himself as the subject of it. He resists
Agamemnon’s claim[1074] for a compensation at the very first, when it
is urged, not against him, but against the Greeks at large[1075]; and
he bursts out into indignant vituperation of the greedy king before
Agamemnon has threatened to take Briseis, and when he has only insisted
that, if the Greeks do not compensate him, he will then help himself to
the prize _either_ of Achilles or of Ajax or of Ulysses. In truth he
is the assertor of the supremacy of law over will, much more than of
force over law; and there is the greatest difference between pushing a
sound and true principle even to gross excess, and proceeding from the
outset upon a false one. The former, not the latter, is the case of the
Achilles of the Iliad.
[1074] Il. i. 122.
[1075] Ib. 149.
~_The Achilles of Statius._~
The poet Statius observed, with sagacity enough, that the Achilles of
Homer was but a _torso_; that the Iliad had only allowed him to be
exhibited in one light, as it were, and at a single juncture of his
career. So he resolved to profit by the ungotten mine, and to found
a poem on the whole Achilles, child and man, in his rising, at his
zenith, and in his setting blaze;
Nos ire per omnem
(Sic amor est) heroa velis ...
... sed totâ juvenem deducere Trojâ[1076].
[1076] Stat. Achill. i.
We are therefore perhaps entitled to expect from him a fuller and more
comprehensive grasp of the character than was usual, even although the
narrative is broken off. The five books which remain of this work do
not bring him so far as to the plains of Troy; but we leave him on the
voyage from Scyros to Troas. They are chiefly occupied, therefore, with
his residence there in the disguise of a maiden, and with the incidents
of his sojourn.
Now the story of Achilles at Scyros, and of his connexion with
Deidamia, harmonizes with one side of his character as it is drawn in
Homer. It is evident that his personal beauty was not less graceful
than manful; and he alone of the Greek chieftains is related to have
worn ornaments of gold. Therefore that in the days of his boyhood
he should wear the dress of maidens, and pass for one of them, is
at any rate in accordance with a particular point of the Homeric
tradition, though little adequate to its lofty tone as a whole. But
this particular point is just what Statius contrives wholly to let
drop. He shows us Achilles like the sham Anne Page, in the Merry Wives
of Windsor[1077], ‘as a great lubberly boy,’ neither careful nor able
to give any grace to the movement of his limbs. For, in the dance, he
would break the heart of any rightminded master of the ceremonies:
[1077] Act v. sc. 5.
Nec servare vices, nec jungere brachia, curat:
Tunc molles gressus, tunc aspernatur amictus
Plus solito, rumpitque choros, et plurima turbat.
Nor does this writer appear at all to have apprehended the main
ideas of the Homeric character. In the Iliad, the education which
Achilles receives is the ordinary education of men of his rank, and
his transcendent powers in after-life are due to a just, yet no more
than a just, development of his extraordinary original gifts. But in
Statius he is represented as having owed everything to the peculiar
training of Chiron; whose semiferine life he shared, so that his diet
in childhood consisted of the raw entrails of lions, and the marrow of
half-dead she-wolves! His mind, indeed, was not overlooked amidst these
brutalities, for he exhausts a long catalogue of acquirements; but
Statius, as might be expected, completely drops out of his political
education what is its one grand element in Homer, namely, the art of
government over man by speech. Instead of this, Chiron the Centaur
merely teaches him those abstract rules of right, by which he had
himself been wont to govern Centaurs[1078].
[1078] Achilleis, v. 163.
To the same age with the _Achilleis_ of Statius belongs the _Troades_
of Seneca. However this play may be criticized, as a study, like the
others of the same author, for the closet only, and however it may
betray the choice of Euripides for a model, it seems to be by some
degrees better, in the conception and use of some famous Homeric
characters, than any production since the time of Æschylus. The
delineation of Andromache, if it has not ceased to be theatrical, is
full at least of intense affection, all still centring in Hector.
Ulysses, though reviled by that matron in her passionate grief, at
least does the humane action of allowing her a little time to weep
before the sentence of Calchas is executed upon Astyanax, and shows
something too of the intellect of his antitype[1079]. Helen is
exhibited not as vicious, but as wanting in firmness of character. She
is driven by solicitation into the offence of alluring Polyxena to her
immolation, under the name of a bridal with Neoptolemus; commences the
performance of this false part with self-reproach, and then, challenged
by Andromache, quits it and avows the truth[1080].
[1079] Seneca, Troades, 765. Ibid. 609 _et seqq._
[1080] Act iv.
But here we find a new form of departure from the ancient and genuine
tradition. The principal motive, assigned by Seneca to the Greeks
for putting Astyanax to death, is a terrified recollection of his
father Hector, and a dread lest, upon attaining to manhood, he should
avenge his own country against Greece. Again, Andromache, as it were,
intimidates Ulysses, by invoking the shade of her husband:
Rumpe fatorum moras;
Molire terras, Hector, ut Ulyssen domes!
Vel umbra satis es[1081].
[1081] Ibid. 685.
A strange inversion of the relations drawn by Homer.
During all the time, however, in which we moved among the Greeks and
among the earlier Romans, the corrupting process acted only upon each
of the Homeric creations by itself, and there was no cause at work,
which went to alter and pervert wholesale their collective relations to
one another.
~_New relative position of Trojans and Greeks._~
But from the period when the Æneid appeared, or at least so soon as
it became the normal poem of the Roman literature, a new cause was
in operation which, without mitigating in any degree the previous
depraving agencies, introduced a new set of them, and began to disturb
the positions of the two grand sets of characters, Greek and Trojan,
relatively to one another.
Virgil had sought to give to the Cæsars the advantage of a hold upon
royal antiquity by fabulous descent. He had before him the choice
between Greece and Troy, which alike and alone enjoyed a world-wide
honour. He could not hesitate which to select. The Greek histories were
too near and too well known. Besides, the Greek dynasties generally
had dwindled before they disappeared. The splendour of the Pelopids
in particular had been quenched in calamity and crime, and no other
of the Homeric lines had attained to greatness in political influence
or historic fame. But the family of Priam had fallen gloriously in
fighting for hearth and altar: it had disappeared from history in its
full renown, ‘_Magna_ mei sub terras ibat imago.’ Virgil chose too the
house which was most ancient, and which traced link by link, as that of
Agamemnon did not, a known and a named lineage up to Jupiter.
From this cause, both in the Æneid itself and afterwards, the Trojan
characters were set upon stilts, and the Greeks were left to take their
chance. Besides the loss of equilibrium, and the allowed predominance
of coarser elements, which we have to lament in the Greek handling of
them, we now see them pass, with the Romans, even into insignificance.
The Diomed of Arpi is a person wholly unmarked; and he, like all the
rest of his countrymen, is treated by Virgil simply as an instrument
for obtaining enhanced effect, in the interest that he endeavours to
concentrate on his Trojan characters; whereas the key to all Homer’s
dispositions in the Iliad is to be found in the recollection, that he
dealt with everything Trojan in the manner which was recommended and
required by his Greek nationality. From this time forward, we find the
palm both of valour and of wisdom clean carried over from the Greek
to the Trojan side: the heroes of Homer remain, like unhewn boulders
on the plain, crude, gross, and reciprocally almost indistinguishable
masses of cunning or ferocity.
Virgil gave the tone in this respect, not only to the literature of
ancient Rome, but to that of Christian Italy. For this reason, we may
presume, among others, Orlando, the prime hero of the Italian romance,
is, as I have before observed, modelled upon Hector. He is in many
respects a very grand conception. Pulci, in describing his death, rises
even to the sublime when he says there is
‘Un Dio, ed una Fede, ed uno Orlando.’
Which we may render in prose ‘One God, one way to God, one true type
of manhood.’ Still it is remarkable that in Bojardo, as well as in
Ariosto, the purer traces of the Homeric arrangement thus far at
least remain, that Orlando, although he is the type of the Christian
chivalry, yet, as he resembles Hector in piety and virtue, so likewise
retains his likeness in this respect, that he is not the most
formidable or valiant warrior of the poems. In Ariosto particularly,
he is made inferior to Mandricardo, to Rodomonte, and most of all, but
this for personal and prudential reasons, to Ruggiero. These three
perhaps may be considered as being respectively the Ajax, the Diomed,
and the Achilles of the _Orlando Furioso_.
And now the fancy for derivation from a Trojan stock, of which Virgil
had set the fashion, was fully developed. Ariosto, at great length and
in the most formal manner, establishes this lineage for his patrons,
the family of Este. Others followed him. The humour passed even beyond
the limits of Italy, into these then remote isles. A Trojan origin
was ascribed to the English nation, and the authority of Homer, as to
characters and history, was openly renounced by Dryden.
‘My faithful scene from true records shall tell
How Trojan valour did the Greek excel:
Your great forefathers shall their fame regain,
And Homer’s angry ghost repine in vain[1082].’
[1082] Prologue to Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida; and again in the
Epilogue spoken by Thersites:
‘You British fools, of the old Trojan stock.’
In Oxford, at the revival of classical letters, the name of _Trojans_
was assumed by those who were adverse to the new Greek studies, and
who, having nothing but a name to rely on, doubtless chose the best
they could.
~_The Imitations by Tasso._~
Throughout the ‘Jerusalem’ of Tasso, we find imitations which are
invested with greater interest than the remote copies commonly
in circulation, because, from the large infusion of many leading
arrangements, copied from Homer, into the plot of the poem, we may
conclude with reason that they were in all likelihood drawn immediately
from the original. Some of these personages, too, are in so far closely
imitated from Homer, that Tasso has spent little or nothing of his own
upon them, but has simply equipped them with as much of the Homeric
idea as he thought available.
The most successful among them is Godfrey, modelled, but also perhaps
improved, upon Agamemnon, who is by no means in my view one of the
greater characters of the Iliad, though he has been incautiously called
by Mitford ‘ambitious, active, brave, generous, and humane[1083].’
Agamemnon has indeed that primary and fundamental qualification for
his office, the political spirit, so to term it, and the sense of
responsibility, which are so well developed in Godfrey; but it is
doubtful whether he is entitled to be called either thoroughly brave,
or at all generous or humane. Agamemnon’s character is admirably
adapted to its place and purpose in the Iliad; in any more general
view, Godfrey’s both stands higher in the moral sphere, and perhaps
forms by itself a better poetic whole.
[1083] Hist. Greece, ch. i. sect. iv.
While the action of Achilles in the Iliad is apparently assigned to
Rinaldo, there is room to doubt whether Tasso meant the person or
character of his hero to carry corresponding marks of resemblance.
In what may be called a by-place of his poem, he has made a passing
attempt to reproduce both Achilles and Ulysses under the names of
Argante and Alete, who appear as envoys from the Sultan of Egypt to the
Frankish camp. For the benefit of the former, Tasso has translated the
two lines that describe Achilles in Horace, and has added a spice of
the Virgilian Mezentius:
Impaziente, inesorabil, fero,
Nell’ arme infaticabil ed invitto,
D’ ogni Dio sprezzatore, e chi ripone
Nella spada sua legge e sua ragione[1084].
[1084] Gerus. ii. 59.
Accordingly, Argante proves to be the prime warrior on the Pagan side,
and his character, described in these lines, is consistently carried
through.
It is perhaps not to be regretted, that Tasso has left on record no
other mark that Achilles was in his mind; for it is only the most
debased edition of Achilles to whom Argante bears the slightest
resemblance. The same is the case with Alete. Of humble origin, he
rises to high honours by his powers of invention and of speech, and by
the pliability of his character. Prompt in fiction, adroit in laying
snares, a master of the disguised calumnies ‘_che sono accuse, e pajon
lodi_[1085],’ he evidently recalls the caricatures, which for two
thousand years had circulated under the name of the Homeric Ulysses.
Thus Tasso’s acquaintance with the text, whatever it may have been,
did not avail to open his eyes, darkened by corrupt tradition, or to
bring him nearer to the truth as regarded those sovereign creations of
the genius of Homer. So sure it is, both in this and in other matters,
that when long-established falsehoods have had habitual and undisturbed
possession of the public mind, they form an atmosphere which we inhale
long before consciousness begins. Hence the spurious colours with which
we have thus been surreptitiously imbued, long survive the power,
or even the act, of recurrence to the original standards. For that
recurrence rarely takes place with such a concentration of the mind as
is necessary in order to the double process, first, of disentangling
itself from the snares of a false conception, and secondly, of building
up for itself, and this too from the very ground, a true one.
[1085] Gerus. ii. 58.
~_Shakespeare and Chaucer._~
In the Troilus and Cressida, of which Shakespeare had at least a share,
we see, perhaps, one of the lowest and latest pictures of mere mediæval
Homerism. The sun of the ancient criticism had set; that of the modern
had not risen. It must be admitted that, in this play, although it
shows the clear handiwork of Shakespeare in some splendid passages,
and much of beautiful and of characteristic diction, we scarcely
find one single living trait of the father of all bards preserved.
Our incomparable dramatist, by no fault of his own, came in at the
very end of that depraved lineage of copyists, for which progressive
degeneracy is the necessary law. As is said[1086], he followed Lydgate;
Lydgate drew from a Guido of Messina, who in the thirteenth century
founded himself on Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.
[1086] Stevens on Troilus and Cressida.
Before his time Chaucer, we may presume, had drawn from the same
sources. Yet his poem of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ bears a token of the
familiarity of the English mind with free institutions under the
Plantagenets. The fidelity with which traditions are preserved, and
also the facility with which they are revived, no doubt often depends
more upon moral sympathies, than upon any cause operating simply
through the intellect of man. Though dealing with un-Homeric persons,
or events, or both, and copying again from copies probably very
corrupt, yet Chaucer, as an Englishman accustomed to English ideas of
government, brings out with much more freshness and freedom the notion
of public deliberation in Troy, (nay, even the very word parliament is
not wanting,) than do the poets of the literary age of Greece.
For which delibered was by Parliment
For Antenor to yielden out Cresside,
And it pronounced by the President
Though that Hector may full oft praid;
And finally, what wight that it withsaid
It was for nought, it must ben, and should,
For substaunce of the parliment it would[1087].
[1087] Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, book iv.
But let us return to the so-called Shakespeare.
Thersites is converted into the modern fool. Diomed struts upon his
toes, while in Homer his modesty among the Greeks is the peculiar
ornament of his valour. Ajax, whom Homer has made lumpish and
goodnatured, is full of haughty follies, the coxcomb of warriors; while
the mere bulk which, combined with bravery and bluntness, formed his
peculiar note, is made the distinctive characteristic of Achilles. It
is still more grievous to find the relation of this hero to Patroclus
degraded by foul insinuations, entirely foreign to the Iliad, to its
author, and even to its age. Agamemnon is a mere stage king; and
it can be no wonder that Nestor’s character, which requires a fine
appreciation from its gently rounded construction, should have become
thoroughly commonplace and vapid. The same lot befalls Ulysses, who is
made to play quite a secondary part. Paris, without any mending of his
moral qualities, is allowed to present a much more respectable figure:
the Helen of Homer reproaches his cowardice; but here he says, ‘I
would fain have armed to-day, but my Nell would not have it so[1088].’
She appears as the mere adulteress; and those, who remember how she
is treated in Homer, will be able to measure the declension that time
and unskilled hands had wrought, when they read the speech of Diomed
describing her as follows:
[1088] Act iii. sc. 1.
She’s bitter to her country: hear me, Paris!
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian’s life hath sunk: for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As, for her, Greeks and Trojans suffered death[1089].
[1089] Act iv. sc. 1.
The palm of pure heroism is now become so entirely Hector’s property,
that Achilles only slays him by means of the swords of his Myrmidons,
not by his own proper might; and that, too, does not happen
until, wearied and disarmed, he applies to Achilles to forego his
vantage[1090]: so that Ajax says with very great propriety indeed,
[1090] Troilus and Cressida, v. 9.
Great Hector was as good a man as he[1091].
[1091] Ibid. v. 10.
Shirley’s ‘Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,’ independently of other
merits, deserves notice for a partial return towards just conception
of the Homeric characters. Yet even here the claim of Ajax to the arms
of Achilles is founded principally on the impeachment of Ulysses as a
coward; and the reply of that chieftain rests much too exclusively on
setting up his political merits and achievements, as if he were strong
in no other title.
The description of Ajax may deserve to be quoted:
And now I look on Ajax Telamon,
I may compare him to some spacious building;
His body holds vast rooms of entertainment,
And lower parts maintain the offices;
Only the garret, his exalted head,
Useless for wise receipt, is fill’d with lumber.
Dryden followed Shakespeare in the portion of this field which he had
selected; and cast afresh the subject of Troilus and Cressida. He
departed alike from Shakespeare and from Chaucer by making Cressida
prove innocent, a supposition, says Scott, no more endurable in the
preceding age, than one ‘which should have exhibited Helen chaste, or
Hector a coward.’ All the incongruities of Shakespeare’s play are here
reproduced, including the mixture of the modern element of love with
the Greek and Trojan chivalry; Ajax and Achilles are depressed to one
and the same low level.
Ajax and Achilles! two mudwalls of fool,
That differ only in degrees of thickness[1092],
[1092] Dryden’s Troil. and Cress., act ii. sc. 3.
says Thersites; and Ulysses answers in a similar strain. Troilus fairly
slays Diomed in single combat, and is then himself slain by Achilles in
the crowd. Hector is dispatched, behind the scenes, under the swords of
a multitude of men[1093].
[1093] Act v. sc. 2.
~_Racine’s Andromaque and Iphigénie._~
A short time before this play of Dryden’s, Racine had taken the
characters of the Trojan war in hand. His ‘Andromaque’ and ‘Iphigénie,’
however, afford us no new lights, and might very well have been
conceived by a person who had never read a line of Homer, though in
various passages there are imitations which must have filtered from
the Homeric text. He was content in general to copy the traditions as
given by Euripides; and it may provoke a smile to read an apology of
one of his editors, Boisjermain, for the manner in which Ulysses is
handled in the ‘Iphigénie.’ Appearing, near the outset of the piece, as
a personage of very high importance, he notwithstanding plays in the
plot a part wholly insignificant, instead of assuming, as he does in
Euripides, the important function of urging the slaughter of Iphigenia
for the honour and benefit of Greece. Speaking of the critics who
blame this arrangement, the editor says, they have failed to observe
that Racine has adopted the jealousy and intrigues of Hermione as the
prime movers against Iphigenia, and that these produce the same result
as might otherwise (forsooth) have been brought about by the reasonings
of Ulysses. The work of literary profanation could hardly be carried
further: it was not to be thus capriciously bandied about from pillar
to post, that Homer constructed his deathless masterpieces. In the
‘Andromaque,’ much as it is praised, we miss, still more egregiously
than in the ‘Iphigénie,’ all the simplicity and grandeur of the Greek
heroic age, and find ourselves environed by the infinite littleness of
merely passionate personal intrigues, which have self only for their
pole and centre. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than to see these
archaic Grecian characters dressed in the very last Parisian fashions,
with speech and action accordingly. The total want of breadth and
depth of character, and of earnestness and resolution, as opposed to
mere violence, is such that at parts of the ‘Andromaque’ we are almost
compelled to ask, whether we are reading a tragedy or a burlesque? As,
for instance, when, with the Sixth Iliad yet lingering upon our mental
vision, we hear Andromache say to her confidante,
Tu vois le pouvoir de mes yeux[1094];
[1094] Acte iii. sc. 5.
and when Hermione threatens her _pis-aller_ lover, Orestes, with
respect to Pyrrhus,
S’il ne meurt aujourd’hui--je puis l’aimer demain[1095].
[1095] Acte iv. sc. iii.
It is here, too, that we see carried perhaps to the very highest
point of exaggeration the misstatement of the relative martial merits
and performances of Hector and his adversaries. The Greeks Hermione,
herself a Spartan, describes as
Des peuples qui dix ans ont fui devant Hector;
Qui cent fois, effrayés de l’absence de l’Achille,
Dans leur vaisseaux brûlants ont cherché leur asyle;
Et qu’on verroit encore, sans l’appui de son fils,
Redemander Hélène aux Troyens impunis[1096].
[1096] Acte iii. sc. 3.
It was well that the handling of Homer should cease altogether for
a time, when the characters and scenes belonging to his subject had
become so thoroughly anti-Homeric, that they only falsified what
they ought to have assisted to perpetuate. An interval has followed,
during which they have been allowed to repose. It would be hazardous
to conjecture, after the failures of so many ages, how far they
can hereafter be satisfactorily reproduced. It has been reserved
for Goethe, with his vigorous grasp of classical antiquity, to
tread regions bordering upon that of the Iliad and Odyssey with the
consciousness of a master’s power. In his ‘Iphigenie,’ for example, he
has given to his scenes, events, and characters the tone and colouring,
with which alone they ought to be invested. And, if the study and
investigation of Homer shall henceforward be carried on with a zeal
at all proportioned to the advantages of the present age, they cannot
fail to accumulate materials, which it may be permitted us to hope that
future genius will mould into such forms as, if only they are faithful
to the spirit of their original, must alike abound in beauty, truth,
and grandeur, and alike avail for the delight and the instruction of
mankind.
* * * * *
~_Conclusion._~
We have now walked, in the train and in the light of the great Poet
of antiquity, through a long, yet, so far at least as he is a party,
not a barren circuit. We have begun with his earliest legends, faintly
glimmering upon us from the distance of an hundred generations. We have
seen the creations of his mind live and move, breathe and almost burn
before us, under the power and magic of his art. We have found him
to have shaped a great and noble mould of humanity, separate indeed
from our experience, but allied through a thousand channels with our
sympathies. We have seen the greatness of our race at one and the same
time adorned with the simplicity of its childhood, and built up in
the strength of its maturity. We have seen it unfold itself in the
relations of society and sex, in peace and in war, in things human
and things divine; and have examined it under the varied lights of
comparison and contrast. We have seen how the memory of that great age,
and of its yet greater Poet, has been cherished: how the trust which he
bequeathed to mankind has been acknowledged, and yet how imperfectly it
has been discharged. We have striven to trace the fate of some among
his greatest creations; and having accompanied them down the stream of
years even to our own day, it is full time to part. Nemesis must not
find me[1097],
[1097] Il. i. 27.
ἢ νῦν δηθύνοντ’, ἢ ὕστερον αὖθις ἰόντα.
To pass from the study of Homer to the ordinary business of the world
is to step out of a palace of enchantments into the cold grey light
of a polar day. But the spells, in which this sorcerer deals, have no
affinity with that drug from Egypt[1098], which drowns the spirit in
effeminate indifference: rather they are like the φάρμακον ἐσθλὸν,
the remedial specific[1099], which, freshening the understanding by
contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve
its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and
resolution for the discharge of duty.
[1098] Od. iv. 220-6.
[1099] Od. x. 287.