THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
Between the Greece of such legends as those which we have been
considering and the Greece of the earliest historic period there
has always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land
of seemingly fabulous Kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous
palaces and cities; on the other side. Greece as we know it in
the infant stages of its development, with a totally different
state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and
in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning
which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing
but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous
fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something
unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of
splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath
the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain section of
students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming isolation
of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to seek
any pre-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on
the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid
Hellenists in terms which implied that they hold it little else
than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local
influences of air and light, mountain and sea, they would have
Hellenism born into the world by a miracle of generation, like
its own Athena from the head of Zeus.'[*] But a great civilization
can never be accounted for in this miraculous fashion. The origins
of even Egyptian culture have begun to yield themselves to patient
research, and it is not permissible to believe that the Greek nation
was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that it derived
nothing from earlier ages and races.
[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]
Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of Hellas
bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek
history, there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very
high type, differing from, in some respects even superior to, that
which succeeded it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of
consideration in any attempt to describe the beginnings of Greek
culture. The Homeric poems shone like a beacon light across the
dark gulf which separated the Hellas of myth from the Hellas of
history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness,
and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness
had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the
magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to
the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty
of deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation
from a past which seemed to have no connection and no community of
character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different
stage of development of that same civilization which appears when
the first beginnings of what we are accustomed to call Hellenism
are presented to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects
more complex and more splendid.
From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground
when dealing with the history of Hellas and its culture. We know
something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political.
The chronicles of the more important cities are known with a
definiteness fairly comparable to what we might expect at such
a stage of development. But the Homeric poems take us away from
all that into a world in which a totally different state of things
prevails. The very geography is not that of the historical Hellenic
period. The names that are familiar to us as those of the chief
Greek cities and states are of comparatively minor importance in
the Homeric world; Athens is mentioned, but not with any prominence;
Corinth is merely a dependency of its neighbour Mycenæ; Sparta
only ranks along with other towns of Laconia; Delphi and Olympia
have not yet assumed anything like the place which they afterwards
occupy as religious centres during the historic period. The chief
cities of Hellas are Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Orchomenos. Crete, although
its chiefs, Idomeneus and Meriones, are only of secondary rank among
the heroes of the Iliad, is obviously one of the most important
of Grecian lands. It sends eighty ships to the Achæan fleet at
Troy, it is described both in the Iliad and the Odyssey as being
very populous (a hundred cities, Iliad II.; ninety cities, Odyssey
XIX.), and to its capital, Knossos, alone among Greek cities does
Homer apply the epithet 'great.' All which offers a striking contrast
to the comparative insignificance of the towns of the Argolid in
later Greek history, and to the uninfluential part played by Crete.
The centres of power, then, in the Homeric story are widely different
from those of the historic period. The same divergence from later
realities is manifest when we come to look at the social organization
contemplated in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric state of
society is, in some respects, rude enough. Piracy, for instance,
is recognized as, if not a laudable, at all events a quite ordinary
method of gaining a livelihood. 'Who are you?' says Nestor to
Telemachus. 'Whence do you come? Are you engaged in trade, or do
you rove at adventure as sea-robbers who wander at hazard of their
lives, bringing bane to strangers?' The same question is addressed
to Odysseus by Polyphemus, and was plainly the first thing thought of
when a seafaring stranger was encountered. As among the Highlanders
and Borderers of Scotland, cattle-lifting was looked upon as a
perfectly respectable form of employment, and stolen cattle were
considered a quite proper gift for a prospective bridegroom to
offer to his father-in-law. The power of the strong hand was, in
most respects, supreme, and the rights of a tribe or a city were
respected more on account of the ability of its men to defend them
than because of any moral obligation. 'We will sack a town for you,'
says Menelaus to Telemachus, as an inducement to him to settle in
Laconia.
Along with this primitive rudeness goes, on the other hand, a strongly
aristocratic constitution of society. The great leaders and chiefs,
the long-haired Achæans, are absolutely separated from the common
people, not in rank only, but to all appearance in race. They are
a superior caste, and of a different breed. Even to their King
their subjection is not much more than nominal, and he has to be
very careful of offending their susceptibilities or wounding their
sense of their own importance, while their treatment of the commons
beneath them is sufficiently disdainful. Though the commons are
summoned sometimes to the Council, their function there is merely a
passive one; they are called to hear what has been determined, and
to approve of it, if they so desire, but in no case have they any
alternative to accepting it, even should they disapprove. Altogether
the superiority of the Achæan nobles, and the haughtiness with
which they bear themselves, is such as to suggest that they hold
the position, not of tribal chieftains ruling over clansmen of the
same stock as themselves, but of a separate and conquering race
holding dominion over, and using the services of, the vanquished,
much after the manner of the Norman lordship in Sicily.
All this is sufficiently different from the state of things during
the historic period. It is not an undeveloped condition of the
same society that is in contemplation; it is a totally distinct
social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the
facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a
true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon
the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the
Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but
even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern
life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as
in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with
the other sex in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted
as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent, influence.
The very names of Andromache, Penelope, Nausicaa, stand as types
of all that is purest and sweetest in womanhood. The fact that a
wife is purchased by bride-gifts does not militate against the
respect in which she is held or the regard which is paid to her
rights. The contrast between this state of affairs and that prevailing
in later Greek society is sufficiently marked to render comment
unnecessary.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the setting of the Homeric
story is the type of material civilization which is described in
the poems. We are confronted with a society not by any means in a
primitive stage of development, but, on the contrary, far advanced
in the arts of peace, and capable of the highest achievements in
art and architecture. Some of the proofs of its advancement may
be briefly noticed. Into the vexed question of the Homeric palace,
its form, and the conditions of life thereby indicated, there is
no need to enter; for about the point which chiefly concerns our
immediate purpose there is no question at all. The Homeric palace,
described at some length in at least three instances, is a building
not merely large and commodious, but of somewhat imposing magnificence.
The palace of Alcinous, for example, is pictured for us as gleaming
with the splendour of the sun and moon, with walls of bronze, a
frieze of _kuanos_ (blue glass paste), and golden doors, with lintels
and door-posts of silver, while the approaches to it are guarded
by dogs wrought in silver. The whole reminds one rather of the
description of one of the vast Egyptian temples of the Eighteenth
or Nineteenth Dynasty than of what one would have imagined the
palace of an island chieftain. The Palaces of Priam at Troy, and
of Odysseus at Ithaca, less gorgeously adorned in detail, are not
less stately, and even the abode of Menelaus in comparatively
insignificant Sparta is described as 'gleaming with gold, amber,
silver, and ivory.' The minor appointments of these splendid homes
are in keeping with their structural magnificence. Great vessels
of gold, silver, and bronze are in common use, the richly dyed
and wrought robes of the chiefs and their wives and daughters are
stored in chests splendidly decorated and inlaid, and the adornments
of the women are of costly and beautiful fabric in gold and silver.
In the manners and customs of the inhabitants of these stately
houses there is a certain patriarchal simplicity. The Princess
Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, conducts the family washing as
a regular and expected part of her work, while the great chieftains
themselves are men of their hands not only on the battle-field,
but in the common labours of peace. Odysseus is a capable plough
man, carpenter, and shipwright, as well as a good soldier. But
the simplicity is by no means rudeness; it consists with a highly
developed code of manners, and even a considerable refinement.
Brutes like Penelope's suitors may, in half-drunken anger, fling
the furniture or an ox-hoof at the object of their scorn; but there
are brutes in every society, and the manners of the Achæans in
general are stately and dignified.
On the field of war there is still evidence of an advanced stage
of civilization. The whole question of the equipment of the Homeric
heroes has been the subject of perhaps even more dispute than that
of the Homeric house. Infinite pains have been spent in the effort
to show, on the one hand, that the equipment worn by the heroes
of the Iliad was of the more ancient type, consisting mainly of
a great shield of ox-hide large enough to cover the whole body,
behind which the warrior crouched, wearing for defensive armour
no more than a linen corselet and leathern cap and gaiters, and
on the other that the hero wore practically the complete panoply
of the later Hellenic hoplite, the small round shield, the bronze
helmet, with metal cuirass, belt, and greaves; while the question
of whether the offensive weapons were of iron or of bronze has been
debated with equal pertinacity. The discussion of such details
is beyond our purpose, and it is sufficient to say that the poems
seem to contemplate both forms of defensive equipment, the old
form of large shield and light body armour, and the later form of
small shield and metal panoply, as being in common use, while on
the question of iron versus bronze, the evidence seems to indicate
that the age contemplated by the bulk of the references is, in the
main, a bronze-using one, though the knowledge of the superiority
of iron is beginning to make itself evident.
But the point which is of importance for our present purpose is the
magnificence with which the arms of the Hellenic heroes, when of
metal, are wrought and decorated. The polished helmets, with their
horse-hair plumes of various colours, the in-wrought breastplates,
and the greaves with their silver fastenings, are not only weapons,
but works of art as well. The supreme instance is, of course, the
armour of Achilles, fabricated, according to the poet, by the hands
of Hephæstos, but none the less to be regarded as the ideal of
what the highly wrought armour of the time should be. The shield
of Achilles, with its gorgeous representations of various scenes
of peace and war, seems almost to transcend the possibilities of
actual metal work at such a period; yet we may believe that the
poet was not merely drawing upon his imagination, but giving a
heightened picture of what he had himself witnessed in the way
of the armourer's art. Chiefly to be noticed with regard to it
is the way in which he describes the method used by Hephæstos in
producing his effects--the inlaying of various metals to get the
colours desired, for instance, in the vineyard scene with its dangling
clusters of purple grapes, its poles, and ditch, and fence. Would
any poet have imagined this had he been entirely unacquainted with
similar products of the armourer's art? As we shall see, it is
precisely this use of the inlaying of metal with metal, to represent
the different colours of the various figures involved, which is
characteristic of the skilled armourer's work in the Mycenæan period.
Such, then, are a few of the outstanding features of the state
of society described for us in the Homeric poems. We are brought
by them face to face with a civilization which has very distinct
and pronounced characteristics of its own. It is certainly not the
civilization of the earliest historic period of Greece; political
organization, the relative importance of states and cities, social
life, art and warfare--all are different from anything we find in
the Hellas of history; in many respects this world of the poems
is at a higher stage of development than that which succeeded it;
but certainly it is different. Now, the question of importance for
us is--Had this poetic world of the Iliad and Odyssey any basis
in fact, or was it merely the creation of the poet or poets who
were responsible for the tales of Ilium and of Odysseus? Were they
describing things which they had seen, or of which the tradition
at least had been handed down to them by those who had seen them,
or were they telling of things which never had any existence save
in their own minds?
This question, of course, is plainly quite distinct from that of
whether the tales they tell are history or romance. The stories of
the flight of Helen, of the siege of Troy, the anger of Achilles,
the valour of Hector, and the love of Andromache, of the wanderings
of much-enduring Odysseus, and the trials of his faithful wife,
Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, more probably
perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction;
but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories
are set, the background of human life and society upon which they
are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance,
and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what
the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest
phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the
picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of
things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it,
extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the
product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders,
but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to
start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out
of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty
and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any
verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy,
or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have
no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life. But it is
exactly here that the realism of the Homeric world strikes the
student. It is not vague--on the contrary, the preciseness of its
detail is almost as striking, sometimes almost as prosaic, as the
detail which makes Robinson Crusoe the most realistic of all works
of fiction; and while its splendours are such as we look for in
vain in early historic Greece, and are certainly not borrowed from
the great civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, they are
such as we can perfectly well believe to have existed, and such
as can be perfectly well paralleled, though in widely different
styles, by Babylonia or by Thebes.
Was it not more likely that a picture so precise in its outlines,
and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous
details, should have had behind it something, probably a great
deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have
been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented
to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father
Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though
with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination
which we find in the subject of the poems as distinct from the
poems themselves. It may be that this effect is due to the art
of the bards, which well knew how to efface itself in order to
ravish the listener the more. But allowing much to the power of
art, the mind was not yet satisfied. We have said the poems seemed
to carry with them their own evidence that they were not undiluted
fiction, but contained at least an element of objective, perhaps
traditional, truth. It was a beautiful world they told of, and yet
it was a world apart. Agamemnon in the field and Achilles in his
tent; Priam in his palace; Odysseus in his travels; Alcinous with
his retainers, and Arete with her daughter; Penelope and Telemachus
in the midst of the wicked suitors, and the old swineherd and the
faithful nurse; the very shades of the Dead beyond the streams of
Oceanus--how could the bards describe all these wonders if they
had not lived in a world of their own, or at least acquired the
knowledge of it from their immediate predecessors? The gorgeous
palaces of the Kings, with their walls of bronze, their gold and
silver ewers and basins, and their carven bedsteads and chairs
of state and footstools; and all the glittering raiment and the
golden-studded sceptres, and golden-hilted swords, and silvern
ankle-bands, and the ivory and amber and inlaid metal-work, and
the iron-axled chariots with eight spokes to the wheel, and the
crimson-cheeked ships and the fair-cheeked maidens, and the stateliness
and grace amid the splendour of it all--why should we obstinately
refuse to believe that these bards knew more than we--that they
had seen the vision with their mortal eye before they took the
brush in hand to paint the picture?[*]
[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 242, 243.]
Two lines of evidence, then, if given their fair weight, seemed
to point in the same direction. On the one hand, there were the
legends of a prehistoric age of heroes, with their travels and
expeditions and wars, legends with which Greek literature teemed,
and which, however inextricably blended with fancy, and with details
obviously monstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to
have sprung into being without something behind them to account
for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange,
wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing,
it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost
absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the
imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom
of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the
Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living,
of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the
scanty surviving ruins and relics?
[Illustration IV: THE IRON GATE, MYCENÆ (_p_. 42)]
Here we have to recall two facts of importance. First, that universal
Greek tradition affirmed that before the birth of historic Greece
there lay a Dark Age, its darkness caused by the descent from the
North of the rude, iron-using Dorian tribes, who found in the lands
which they invaded a civilization of the Bronze Age, far more advanced
than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered
and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous
picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they
deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being
only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had
preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that
the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger,
wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on
'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' even as these were greater
than the men of the poet's own degenerate days. Does it not seem
as though we were being led towards the conclusion that the Homeric
civilization is itself the representation of a very real fact of
history, the picture of a state of things which was submerged and
swept away by the coming of the Dorians, or by whatever inrush of
wild northern tribes the Greeks may have called by that general
title, but which was itself only the last decadent stage of an
antecedent culture, still greater and more highly developed--that
of the legendary period? The answer to this question has come in
the most surprising and romantic fashion from the archæological
discoveries of the last forty years.