In B. R.’s Elizabethan translation of the two first books of Herodotus
a marginal note to a startling statement about Egyptian manners begs
us to ‘Observe ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen’. Though Anthropology,
as its name indicates, takes all that is human for its province, it
certainly pays most attention to ‘Ye Devices’--beastly or not--of the
savage or barbarian, and to their survival in civilized societies,
ancient and modern. Now, as far as these primaeval devices go, Homer
has wonderfully little to tell us. Though he is by far the most ancient
Greek author extant, it is in all the literature which follows after
him that we find most survivals of the barbarian and the savage.
Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets (800-650
B.C.?), and in the sketches of the plots of the Cyclic poems
which have reached us, there are survivals of barbaric customs--for
example, of human sacrifice, and the belief in phantasms of the dead,
even when the dead have been properly burned and buried--which do not
appear in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The tragedians, the lyric
poets, and the rest, all allude to vices which Homer never mentions--to
amours of the gods in bestial forms (in all probability a survival
of Totemism in myth), to a revolting rite of sanguinary purification
from the guilt of homicide, and to many other distressing vestiges of
savagery and barbarism in the society of ancient Greece. We do not find
these things in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.
It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these
things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age.
But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience.
No incest or cannibalism, in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is reported
concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to
use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth
wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine
cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse.
Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends,
almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod
does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent.
Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece
attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only
of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. I wish I could keep clear of the complex
‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that,
since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to the _Iliad_, at
the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite
opinions as to the origin of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Poets, and
almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human
pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand,
and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority
of scholars and special students who have written on the subject
maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ had their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’,
and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed
by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful
centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even
Wolf recognized as their _unus color_, the harmony of their picture
of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously
explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out
proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms,
and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly,
have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature,
of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research
finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as
burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied
other early poetic literature--say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest
Irish romances--they would learn that minute variations in such matters
of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every
funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely
on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the
future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any
given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony, _unus
color_, prevails in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, which must therefore be
the product of one age.
But to this some adverse critics reply that harmony, indeed, there may
be, but that it results, first from the influence of tradition--each
new poet adhered to the old formulae without conscious effort--and,
next, that the later poets deliberately and learnedly _archaized_,
consciously studied the descriptions, and maintained the tone of their
predecessors, while at the same time they as deliberately introduced
the novelties of their own time. This is their logic. Their double
theory is untenable--first, because it is self-contradictory; next,
because in all known early art and literature the poet or painter,
treating ancient themes, dresses the past in the costume of the present
with which he is familiar. To archaize is a very modern effort in art,
as all early literature and every large picture-gallery prove. As for
unconscious adherence to tradition, it leads to the repetition of epic
formulae and standing epithets; but later poets, and uncritical ages,
when they describe a more ancient life, always copy the life of their
own time. We see too that late learned poets who archaized--Apollonius
Rhodius, Virgil, even Quintus Smyrnaeus--while they do their best to
imitate Homer, cannot keep up the _unus color_, but betray themselves
in a myriad details: for example, Virgil arms his Greeks and Trojans
with iron weapons, and Apollonius introduces the ritual purification of
blood with blood, ignored by Homer.
Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose
synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig
calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’,
of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice,
gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly
burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’,
so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct
bodies, such as _Iliad_, _Odyssey_, _Cypria_, _Aethiopis_, _Little
Iliad_, _Nostoi_, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned
Athenians, about 600-500 B.C., or if we suppose, with others,
that the Ionians, for educational purposes, Bowdlerized _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, at an earlier date, we ask, Why were _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
expurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by
‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic
poems? Was it because the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ alone were cut out
of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the
selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And
do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What
was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod
certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if
the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere,
why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in
matters which the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ omit? In no Greek literature
of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as
regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of
historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to
the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod
were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the
Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not
conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence,
with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There
is no inscription bearing witness to it--_that_, and that alone, would
be ‘record’--there is only a late and shifting tradition that, about
the time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something
indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For
all old epic poetry, or only for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_? If for them
alone, why for them alone?
I am thus constrained to suppose that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, on
the whole, are the fruit of a single age, a peculiar age, an age prior
to the earliest period of Greek life as historically known to us. If it
be not so, if these epics are mosaics of life in four or five centuries
of change, compiled for purposes of education by learned Athenians,
it seems that they are worthless to the anthropologist and to the
historical student of manners and institutions. If the poems contain
scores of archaized passages, in which the poets deliberately neglect
the life which they know (while at the same time in other passages they
deliberately innovate), then the poems are of no anthropological value.
The statements of the critics are self-contradictory, which I still
think proves them to be illogical; and in speaking of Homer I shall
treat him as a witness to a genuine stage of society in prehistoric
Greece and Asia.
As to date, the poems quite undeniably are derived from that late
stage of Mycenaean or Minoan civilization which has been revealed by
the excavations of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete, and Dr. Schliemann at
Mycenae, and of many other explorers of Homeric sites. The decoration
of the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus; the art of the goldsmith, the
use of chariots in war, the shape and size of the huge Homeric shield;
the cuirass, _zoster_, and _mitrê_ of the warriors, the weapons
of bronze described in Homer, all correspond with objects discovered
or delineated in works of art of the late Minoan period in Greece and
Crete. But Homeric customs of all sorts also vary much from the facts
of the Minoan archaeologist. The monuments of the late Minoan Age
reveal modes of burial wholly unlike the Homeric practice of cremation
and interment of the bones in lofty tumuli or barrows. They prove the
existence of sacrifice to the dead, which Homer ignores. They display
fashions of costume quite alien to the Homeric world. They yield none
of the iron tools of peaceful purpose with which Homer is perfectly
familiar. They furnish abundance of stone arrowheads, which are never
mentioned in the Epics.
The conclusion suggested is that Homer knew a people living on the
ancient Minoan sites, and retaining much of the Minoan art, much of
the military material, but advanced into a peculiar form of the Early
Bronze Age; clad in quite a new fashion, practising another form of
burial, entertaining other beliefs about death and the dead, but still
retaining the flowing locks often represented in pictures of men in
Minoan art.
The use of body armour too is in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ universal
in regular war; from the rarity of delineation thereof in Minoan art
this appears to be another innovation. Homer is quite conscious that
he is singing of events gathered from legends of a time long before
his day, a time with which he is in touch, which has bequeathed much
to his age, but which, we see, is in some respects less advanced
than and in many ways different from his own. He attributes to the
old legendary heroes, however, the institutions with which he
is familiar--institutions that are not those of any known period
of historic Greece. They are no figments of fancy. They closely
correspond, as far as form of government is concerned, with the
early feudalism described in the oldest Irish epical romances, and
in the French _chansons de geste_ of the eleventh to the thirteenth
century A.D. We find an Over Lord, like the Celtic _Ardrigh_, or the
_Bretwalda_ in early England, ruling over Princes (_Ri_), with an
acknowledged sway, limited by unwritten conventions. He holds, as Mr.
Freeman says of the Bretwalda, ‘an acknowledged, though probably not
very well defined, supremacy.’ His rule is hereditary; the sceptre is
handed down through the male line. Zeus has given him the sceptre, and
he confessedly rules, like Charlemagne even in the later _chansons de
geste_, by right divine. He has the Zeus-given sceptre, and he has the
_θέμιστες_, a knowledge of ‘a recognized body of principles and customs
which had grown up in practice’ (_Iliad_ ix. 99).
The origin of the Over Lord, as of all kingship, may be traced
to a combination of sagacity, courage, and experience in war, in
an individual, and to his consequent acquirement of property and
influence, _plus_ the survival of the prestige of the medicine man, to
whom the ruling supernormal Being of the tribe is supposed to speak.
A very low example is the Dieri medicine man inspired by Kutchi; an
elevated example is the Homeric Minos, who converses with Zeus. Even
the dream of Agamemnon is worthy of respect, says Nestor, ‘because
he has seen it who boasts himself to be the best of the Achaeans’;
another man’s dream might be disregarded (_Iliad_ ii. 80-83). However,
Agamemnon does not lay stress on such communications; Calchas is the
regular interpreter of omens and the will of the gods. A divinity doth
hedge Agamemnon, though Achilles half draws his sword against him. He
has the right to summon the whole host, and to exact fines for absence;
he has the lion’s share of all spoils of war; he is war leader, but
always consults his peers, the paladins of Charlemagne. From him much
that is not easily tolerable is endured, but, if he goes too far in his
arrogance, a prince or peer has the recognized right, like Achilles, to
throw up his allegiance. By due gifts of atonement, of which the rules
are ceremonially minute (_Iliad_ xix. 215-75), the Over Lord may place
himself within his right again, and he who refuses the atonement is
recognized to be in his wrong. The whole passage about the minutiae of
atonement in _Iliad_ xix delays the action, and is censured by critics
as ‘late’. But it cannot be late, it could only have been composed for
a noble audience keenly interested in the customary laws under which
they lived, laws unknown to historic Greece. We are accustomed to
similar prolixity and minuteness about points of law in the Icelandic
sagas.
It has been said that Homer, an Asiatic poet of the ninth century
B.C., lived imaginatively in, say, the thirteenth century, B.C. as Mr.
William Morris imaginatively ‘lived in’ the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries A.D. But Morris came after Sir Walter Scott, who introduced
the imaginative archaeological reconstruction of past ages by poets and
artists. Shakespeare did not ‘live in’ any age but his own. His Hamlet
fights with the Elizabethan long rapier, not with short sword and axe.
Homer, too, lives in his own sub-Minoan age, and in that alone.
The poets of this age of loose feudalism are always partial to the
princes rather than to the Over Lord. The Irish romance writers much
prefer the chivalrous Diarmaid, or Oscar, to Fionn, the Over Lord, and
the later writers of _chansons de geste_ in France utterly degrade
Charlemagne in favour of his paladins.
Greek, Irish, or French, the poets have a professional motive: there
are many courts of princes wherein they may sing, but only one court
of the Over Lord. In this partisanship Homer is relatively moderate;
his Agamemnon is perhaps the most subtle of all his portraits;
unsympathetic as is the Over Lord, his Zeus-given supremacy always
wins for him respect. The whole picture of Over Lord and princes is a
genuine historical document, a thing of a single age of culture, far
behind the condition of the Ionian colonists. The princes themselves
owe their position to birth, wealth, and courage. Except Aias and
Odysseus, chiefs of rocky isles, all own abundance of chariots. They
are surrounded by a class of gentry (the Irish _Flaith_) who are also
fighters from chariots, and stand out above the nameless members of the
host. It is they (_Iliad_ ix. 574) who promise to Meleager a demesne
out of the common land. I conceive that such a τέμενος, or demesne, was
much more than a κλῆρος, or ‘lot’; he was a very poor man who had no
lot (_Odyssey_ xi. 490). Probably the gentry, or γέροντες, had their
gift of a τέμενος, or demesne, ratified in the popular assembly, which,
I think, did no more than ratify their decisions.
The gentry held rich fields, ‘very remote from any town’ (_Iliad_
xxiii. 832-5). Society was feudal or chivalrous, not democratic. It is
true, as Mr. Ridgeway says (_J. H. S._, vi. 319-39) that we do not hear
of land in the lists of a man’s possessions, but of livestock, gold,
iron, and chariots and arms. On the other hand, the gentry certainly
held rich fields remote from the cities.
We have no clear light on Homeric land-tenure, but land was held by
individuals, in firm possession, if not in property; a prince like
Menelaus has whole cities to give away. If a prince lent stock to the
owner of a lot, and if the owner became bankrupt, the lot, legally or
illegally, would glide into the possession of the prince.
The people were free, like the lotless man who employs
labourers--_their_ situation is not clear--and like the
artisans--smiths, carpenters, workers in gold--and the slaves, men and
women, were captives in war, or persons kidnapped by pirates--though
they may have been of high rank at home, like the swineherd Eumaeus. In
war it was open to a man to kill a prisoner or to set him at ransom, as
in the Middle Ages. The various crafts had their regular professors,
though it pleased Odysseus to be a master of all of them, from
ploughing to shipbuilding.
It was a very tolerable state of society; slaves were well treated;
women, of course, held a position high above what was theirs in
historic Greece. True, they were usually purchased with a bride-price;
but the lofty level of their morality, infinitely above that of Europe
in the age of chivalry, suggests that men allowed a free choice to
their daughters.
No woman sells herself; there is not a harlot in Homer, common as they
are in the earliest records of Israel. No doubt they existed, but the
poet eschews mention of them. Here, as everywhere, the austerity of
his tone, though he is not a Puritan, makes him far from an exhaustive
authority on manners and customs. To him, as Mr. Gissing well observes,
the stability of the home, typified by the wedding bed of Odysseus,
made fast to a pillar of a living tree, is very sacred. In camp, and
in wanderings, the men live as they will; at home, as we learn from
the cases of Laertes and the father of Phoenix, a good man keeps no
mistress, and the wife soon gives a worse man cause to rue his laxity.
All this is very unlike the morals of historic Greece. The bride-price
is, indeed, a barbaric survival; but the purity of the morals of the
married women proves that it was modified in practice by the benignity
of fathers to ‘well-loved daughters’. The highest tender was not
necessarily accepted. We hear of no amours of maids and bachelors; the
girls do not sleep, like the young men and like fair Margaret of the
ballad of Clerk Saunders, in bowers in the court, but in rooms of the
upper story, where only a god can come unnoticed. Nausicaa is most
careful not to compromise herself by being seen in the company of a
stranger.
Naturally, in a society that carries arms always, the tone of courtesy,
where deliberate insult is not intended, is very high, and rude speech,
like that of Euryalus to Odysseus in Phaeacia, is atoned for with
an apology and the gift of a sword. Except the Over Lord, no man is
habitually rude.
As to warfare, as in the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, the Irish romance based
on the manners of the late Celtic period (200 B.C. to 200 A.D.), the
gentry fight from chariots, dismounting at will, while the host,
with spears, or with slings, bows and arrows, follows or exercises
its artillery from the flanks. Except when the rain of arrows does
execution, we hear next to nothing of the plebeian infantry. The age
of hoplites was as remote as the age of cavalry, and the phalanxes
are only mentioned when they are broken. The chariot age is familiar
in Assyrian, Egyptian, and Minoan art, as among the Britons and
Caledonians who fought with Rome. The chariot was extremely light; a
man could lift a chariot and carry it away (_Iliad_ x. 505). Probably
the chariot came into use for war, as Mr. Ridgeway supposes, in an
age when a pony was unequal to the weight of a man in armour; the
Highlanders, with their Celtic ponies, used chariots in Roman times;
never did they acquire a breed of horses fit for chargers, hence
they lost the battle of Harlaw. To judge by Homer’s description of
horses, the chariot survived the cause of its origin; steeds were
tall and strong enough for cavalry purposes, but human conservatism
retained the chariot. A speech of Nestor, in _Iliad_, Book iv. 303-9,
shows that Homer knew by tradition the Egyptian custom of charging
in serried squadrons of chariotry, while in his own day the lords of
chariots usually fought dismounted, and in the loosest order, or no
order. Nestor naturally prefers ‘the old way’; no late poet could have
made this interpolation, for, in the Greek age of cavalry, he could
have known nothing of chariotry tactics. The Egyptian chariotry used
the bow, while their adversaries, the Khita charioteers, fought with
spears, in loose order, as in Homer--and had the worst of the fight.
The Homeric retention of the huge body-covering shield, familiar in
Minoan art, was more or less of a survival of a time when archery was
all-important. The shield, as among the Iroquois and in mediaeval
Europe, was suspended by a belt. The same shields, among the Red
Indians, and in the Middle Ages (eleventh and twelfth centuries), were,
so to speak, umbrellas against a rain of arrows; as the bow became
more and more despised, the historic Greeks adopted the round parrying
buckler, good against spear- and sword-strokes. The body armour, as far
as greaves are concerned, was an advance on Minoan practice. In Minoan
art the warriors are usually naked under the huge shields; happily, one
or two seals found in Crete, and a pair of greaves in Cyprus, prove
that greaves, cuirass, _zoster_, and _mitrê_, the mailed kirtle of
Homer, were not unknown even before the earliest age at which one could
venture to place the Epic (see Note).
[Illustration]
The use of the metals, in war, is peculiar, but not unexampled. Weapons
are, when the metal is specified, always of bronze, save one arrow-head
of primitive form (_Iliad_ iv. 123), and a unique iron mace (_Iliad_
vii. 141). Implements, including knives, which were not used in war,
were of iron, as a rule, of bronze occasionally. The only battle-axe
mentioned is of bronze (_Iliad_ xiii. 611); axes, as implements, are
usually of iron, so are the implements of the ploughman and shepherd.
No man in Homer is said to be ‘smitten with the iron’, it is always
‘with the bronze’; but trees are felled ‘with the iron’ (_Iliad_ iv.
485).
Odysseus shoots ‘through the iron’, that is, through the open work of
the iron axe-heads, which were tools. This curious overlap of bronze
and iron, the iron being used for implements before it is used for
weapons, has no analogy, as far as I am aware, in Central and Northern
Europe. But Mr. Macalister has found it perfectly exemplified in
Palestine, in certain strata of the great mound of Gezer. Here all
weapons are of bronze, all tools of iron (_Palestine Exploration Fund_,
1903, p. 190).
This state of affairs--obviously caused by military distrust of iron
while ill-manufactured, when bronze was admirably tempered--is proved
by Mr. Macalister to have been an actual stage in culture, ‘about
the borders of the Grecian sea.’ We find no archaeological evidence
for this state of things in tombs of the period of overlap of bronze
and iron in Greek soil. But then we have never excavated a tumulus
of the kind described by Homer, and, if we did, the tumulus (which
necessarily attracts grave-robbers) is likely to have been plundered.
This is unlucky; we have only the poet’s evidence, in Greece, for the
uses of bronze and iron as they existed in Palestine. But I think it
improbable that the poet invented this rare stage of culture. Again, if
we believe, with most critics, that late poets introduced the iron, it
is to me inconceivable that they could abstain, in rigorous archaism,
or unconscious adherence to tradition, from occasionally making a
warrior ‘smite with the iron’, or from occasional mention of an iron
sword or iron-headed spear, while they did not archaize or follow
tradition when they spoke of iron knives, axes, tools, and so on.
In tradition of the bronze age, the tools, no less than the weapons,
must have been of bronze. Why, then, did late archaizing poets make
them of iron, while they never made the weapons of anything but bronze?
The great objection to my opinion is _Odyssey_ xvi. 294, xix. 13, the
repeated line in which occurs the proverbial saying, ‘iron of himself
draws a man to him.’ Here iron is synonymous with ‘weapon’, the weapons
in the hall of Odysseus are to be removed, on the pretence that ‘iron’
draws a man’s hands, and may draw those of the intoxicated wooers in
their cups.
I am opposed to regarding a line as ‘late’ merely because it
contradicts one’s theory. The critics have no such scruples, they
excise capriciously. But this line not only contradicts my theory, it
contradicts the uniform unbroken tenor of both epics. It is a saying
of the Iron Age, when ‘iron’ has become a synonym for ‘weapon’, as
in Thucydides and Shakespeare. But everywhere else in the epics the
metallic synonym for ‘weapon’ is ‘bronze’. The metallic synonym for
‘tool’ is ‘iron’. Men are ‘smitten with the bronze’, trees are ‘felled
with the iron’.
I think that, in these circumstances, it is not inconsistent to doubt
the line’s antiquity. If we accept it, we must suppose that one
solitary late minstrel out of hundreds (on the separatist theory) let
the cat out of the bag and enabled us to be sure that an indefinite
amount of the epics was composed in the full-blown Age of Iron, though
all the other later poets firmly kept the secret by invariably giving
to the heroes weapons of bronze. Mr. Ridgeway is against me. He writes:
‘The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and
sword of iron.’ He may see it so, but Homer saw it otherwise, and never
gives a warrior an iron sword or spear (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i,
p. 301).
No early poet, perhaps no poet, can avoid, in religion and myth,
barbaric and savage survivals, owing to the nature of the legendary
materials on which his works are based. Nobody, we may almost say,
invents a plot: all borrow from the huge store of world-wide primaeval
_Märchen_, or folk-tales. In the _Odyssey_, _Marmion_, and _Ivanhoe_,
the plot rests on the return of the husband or lover from unknown
wanderings, unrecognized, except in _Ivanhoe_ and the _Odyssey_, by
the faithful swineherd. This is a plot of _Märchen_ all over the
world. Gerland, and, recently, Mr. Crooke and others, have studied the
_Märchen_ embedded in Homer. One such story is that of the Shifty Lad
in Dasent’s _Tales from the Norse_, and the Shifty Lad is only a human
representative of the shifty beast, Brer Rabbit or another, who is so
common in savage folklore. Now Homer, in the character of Odysseus,
merely combines the Returned Husband with the Shifty Lad. It would
not be hard to show that Odysseus is really the hero of the _Iliad_,
as well as of the _Odyssey_, the man whom the poet admires most, and
_he_ is the real ‘stormer of the city’ of Ilios. He is the type of
sagacious, resolute, indomitable courage; the thoroughly well-balanced
man, the most tenacious in war. But, in the _Odyssey_, the nature of
the original _Märchen_, as in the encounter with the Cyclops, and the
necessity for preserving his disguise, when he returns to Ithaca,
compel the poet to make Odysseus foolhardy and an ingenious liar.
The sentiment of Homer’s audience and of Homer is with Achilles when
he says that he ‘hates a lie like the gates of hell’. But the given
material does not permit Odysseus to cherish this chivalrous disdain
of falsehood, and Athene, the most ethical of the Olympians, applauds
his craft. The materials of legend also yield the cruelty of Achilles;
like a hero of the Irish epic, the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, he drags a dead
man behind his chariot; and, ‘with evil in his heart, he slays twelve
Trojan prisoners with the bronze,’ at the funeral of Patroclus. This is
not, to the poet’s mind, a case of human sacrifice, nor does Achilles
intend the souls of the men to be thralls of Patroclus.
Homer regards Achilles as slaying the captives merely to glut his fury
with revenge, ‘anger for thy slaying’ (_Iliad_ xxiii. 23). This is the
explanation which he gives to himself of an incident which he finds
in his traditional materials, probably a memory of human sacrifice.
Historic Greece was familiar enough with such ritual; but it is a
marvel of evil to Homer; he clearly fails to understand it. He is most
embarrassed by his materials in matters of religion. Unlike Hesiod he
does not love to speak of what the gods did ‘in the morning of time’,
things derived from a remote past of savage mythology; the incest, the
amours in animal form, the cannibalism, the outrage of Cronos on his
father, the swallowing of Zeus. But he cannot get rid of the ancient
mythological element in the Olympians. Though the Zeus of Eumaeus is
ethical, just, benignant, a truly religious conception; though Homer
has almost a bitter sense of the dependence of men on the gods; though
‘all men yearn after the gods’; the Olympians, as they appear in the
story, are the freakish beings of myth, capricious partisans, amorous,
above all undignified. Only among the gods has married life its sad, if
humorous, aspect, as in the bickerings of Zeus and Hera; only among the
gods is adultery a joke. Among men it is the direst outrage of sanctity
of the home. So alien to Homer is the mythology which he inherits that
he finds it easiest to treat the gods humorously, save where they guard
the sacredness of the oath (_Iliad_ iii. 275), and are protectors of
strangers, suppliants, and of the poor. The mythological survivals are,
to Homer, inevitable, but distasteful. As to a belief in a future life,
in Homer there is a prevailing idea, but it is mixed with the other
ideas which, however contradictory, always exist in this mysterious
matter. The prevailing idea is that the dead, if they receive their due
rites of fire and interment, abide, powerless for good or evil, in a
shadowy _sheol_ in the House of Hades. If they do not get their dues
of fire they wander disconsolate, and may become ‘a cause of wrath’ to
men, may appear to them in dreams, or in
the margin grey,
’Twixt the soul’s night and day.
In the House of Hades is neither reward nor punishment (if we take
_Odyssey_ xi. 570-600 for a late interpolation), but mere lack of
vigour and of the sun. Only the prophet Tiresias, like Samuel in
_Sheol_, ‘keeps his wits’ and his faculty of precognition.
Yet, in the scene of the Oaths (_Iliad_ iii. 278-9), certain powers
are appealed to which ‘beneath the earth punish men outworn’. I do
not think this a late interpolation, because the formula of the
sacrifices connected with the oath is likely to be very ancient, to be
pre-Homeric, and to reflect an old belief no longer popular. In these
matters all contradictory notions may coexist, as when the hymn of the
Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales prays Baiame to admit the soul of
Erin into his paradise, Bullimah, while the myth says that Erin is now
incarnate in a little bird. Many of the lowest savages believe in a
future of rewards and punishments, but the doctrine of the efficacy of
fire has all but driven this faith out of Homer’s ken.
Cremation is the great _crux_ of Homeric anthropology, cremation,
and the consequent absence of ghost-feeding, and of hero-worship.
Archaeology shows that these practices went on unbroken in Greece,
and archaeology cannot show us a single example of the Homeric barrow
and method of interment. Yet the method is a genuine historic method
in Northern Europe of the Age of Bronze. Homer did not invent it; he
mentions no other mode of disposing of the dead, but we have never
found its traces in Greece. The shaft graves and tholos graves of
late Minoan times have left no vestige of tradition in the Epics,
and the cremation and barrow are equally absent from the view of the
archaeologist. I cannot venture on any guess at an explanation. We are
precluded from supposing that cremation arose in the wanderings after
the Dorian invasion, for the purpose of concealing the remains of the
dead from desecration by alien foes. The shaft grave might conceal
them, the tumulus and pillar above only advertise their whereabouts to
the ruthless foe.
It is plain that, on many points, Homer, with his austere taste, is
not a very rich source for the anthropologist in search of savage
survivals. In Homer no human beings work magic; a witch, like a
harlot, is not to be found in the Epics. Both are familiar in the
Old Testament. There is a second-sighted man, but his was a natural
faculty. Homer never alludes to the humbler necessities of our animal
nature; unlike Shakespeare, he never makes old Nestor cough and spit,
when roused, as in the _Doloneia_, by a night alarm. Nobody coughs in
Homer. He sings for an audience that has lived down the ape, though
the tiger has not wholly died. He knows nothing of our instruments of
torture, rack and boot and thumbscrews, which, in Scotland, outlasted
the seventeenth century. Historic Greece was not very successful in
expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece
were never so successful as Homer. I infer that the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_ are prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean
civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a
taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an
aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready
to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels
sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic
lays. It is the nature of the highest objective art, whether in epic or
ballad, to be clean: the Muses are maidens.