HOMERIC LANDS AND PEOPLES
Homer conceives of his heroes as living in an age indefinitely remote:
their epoch "has won its way to the mythical." They are often sons
or grandsons of Gods: the Gods walk the earth among them, friendly,
amorous, or hostile. From this fact, more than from the degeneracy in
physical force which Homer often attributes to his contemporaries, we
see that the mist of time and the glamour of romance have closed over
the heroes.
But this might happen in the course of a pair of centuries. In the
French _Chansons de Geste_ of 1080-1300, Charlemagne (_circ_. 814), a
perfectly historical character to us,--has become almost as mythical
as Arthur to the poets. He conquers Saracens as Arthur conquers all
western Europe; he visits Constantinople; he is counselled by visible
angels, who to some degree play the part of the gods in Homer.
Perhaps two or three centuries may separate Homer from any actual
heroic princes of whom traditions have reached him. Modern research
holds that the Achaeans of Homer, by infiltration and by conquest, had
succeeded to more civilised owners of Greece.
But Homer has nothing to say about a conquest of Greece by the
Achaeans, Danaans, Argives, and the rest, from the north, except in
two cases. He speaks of combats with wild mountain-dwelling tribes in
Thessaly, in Nestor's youth. Nestor knew "the strongest of men who
warred with the strongest, the mountain-dwelling Pheres,"[1] shaggy
folk, says the _Catalogue_, whom Peirithous drove out of Pelion in
northern Thessaly, and forced back on the Aethices of Pindus in the
west.[2] It appears, from recent excavations, that the age of stone
lingered long in these regions, and the people were probably rude and
uncultivated, like the Centaurs.
The recent excavators of Zerelia, north-east of the Spercheios valley,
the home of Achilles, write that their discoveries in the soil "clearly
point to the fact that in prehistoric times the cultures of North
and South Greece were radically different. This probably indicates
an ethnological difference as well."[3] Before the period when "Late
Minoan III." pottery occurs in Thessaly, the people used stone tools
and weapons, and knew not the potter's wheel. It may not, therefore, be
too fanciful to regard Nestor's tales of fights with a wild mountain
race as shadowy memories of actual Achaean conquests in Thessaly, where
Aegean culture arrived very much later than in Southern Greece.
Secondly, Homer twice speaks of regions as "Pelasgian," in which
he represents the actual inhabitants as Hellenes and Achaeans, not
Pelasgic. These regions are the realm of Achilles in south-west
Thessaly; and Epirus.[4] But the actual Pelasgians whom Homer knows
are allies of Troy; they dwell on the North Aegean coasts (where
Herodotus found living Pelasgians), or reside, with Achaeans,
Dorians, True Cretans, and Cydonians, in Crete. These facts indicate
Homer's knowledge that, in some regions, Achaeans had dispossessed
"Pelasgians," whoever the Pelasgians may have been. Again, Homer makes
Achilles address the "Pelasgic Zeus" of Dodona in Epirus, in which he
locates Perhaebians and Eneienes.
It thus appears that he supposed the Achaeans to have driven out
Pelasgians from Epirus and Thessaly, at least, if not from southern
Greece. It may well seem to us strange that as the Achaean settlement
in Crete, or at least in parts of Crete, must have been comparatively
recent when Homer sang, he never mentions so great an event. But
reasons for and a parallel to his silence are not hard to find. If,
as many authorities hold, the great Cnossian palace had fallen, and
the Cretan civilisation had sunk into decadence before the Achaeans
_arrived in the island_,[5] they might meet with but slight resistance;
great feats of heroism might not claim record. Again, the Norman
Conquest gave rise to no Anglo-Norman epic. The invaders already
possessed their epic tradition, that of Charlemagne, borrowed from
"the Franks of France," while they presently, in the twelfth century,
took up and expanded the epic traditions of the Welsh and Bretons,
in the Arthurian cycles of romances. In the same way, for all that
we know, the Achaean epics may have a basis in the traditions of the
earlier and more civilised populations usually styled "Pelasgians."
The manners, however, of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are Achaean, as the
manners of the French romances of Arthur are not Celtic, but feudal and
chivalrous.[6] Homer, in any case, conceives of his own race as at home
in Greece and Crete, and he has nothing to say about Greek settlements
on the Asiatic coast. To him the inhabitants of Miletus are not the
Ionian colonists. "Carians uncouth of speech" dwelt by the banks of
the Meander, and the Asiatic allies of Priam are people "scattered, of
diverse tongues."[7] For purposes of convenience all parties to the
war understand each other's speech.[8]
In _Odyssey_, xix. 172-177, Homer gives an account of populous Crete,
with ninety cities, and a mingling of various tongues, "therein are
Achaeans, and True Cretans high of heart, and Cydonians, and Dorians
in their three divisions, and noble Pelasgians." Did they vary in
language, or in dialect and accent merely? We cannot know, we cannot be
sure that "True Cretans" were the pre-existing Aegeans. The Cydonians
dwelt beside the Jardanus; Jardanus is also a river-name in Elis. Mr.
Leaf thinks of the Semitic _yârad_, "to flow" (Jordan), but we have
other such river-names, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra Yarra; the
word may be onomatopoeic, expressing the murmur of the water.
Homer, in any case, does not despise the Asiatic allies of Troy as
"barbarous," does not think them alien wholly, as the poets of the
_Chansons de Geste_ regard the Saracens,--worshippers of Mahound and
Apollon. The Asians have the same gods and rites as his own people;
Glaucus and Sarpedon are as good knights and live in precisely the same
sort of polity as Aias or Achilles. Homer does not think of the strife
as between Hellenes and Barbarians, that is a far later idea never
interpolated into the Epics. All men are children of the Olympians.
It would appear that Homer sang before the northern invasion, usually
called "Dorian," caused the Achaean and Ionian migrations from the
Greek mainland, and the Greek settlements on the Asiatic coast (950-900
B.C.?). He never alludes to these events, but it may be said that he
deliberately conceals them.
The account which Homer gives of the Achaean heroes and their realms
is to be found in the Catalogue of the Ships in Book ii., a passage
of three hundred lines. It is, perhaps, not very probable that this
long list was usually recited at popular gatherings, and there is much
dispute as to its date and purpose. We relegate to an appendix some
remarks on the debated questions. Whether the Catalogue, or most of
it, was part of the original _Iliad_ or not, most of it was certainly
composed at a time when the condition of prehistoric Greece was
well known, when a lively tradition of its divisions still existed;
moreover, it is the work of a poet, and Milton deemed it worthy of
imitation in _Paradise Lost_.
The Catalogue was omitted from many manuscripts of the _Iliad_,
probably because it was thought tedious reading. But to us there is
poetry in the very names of "rocky Aulis," and "Mycalessus of the wide
lawns," and "dove-haunted Thisbe," and "Lacedaemon lying low among
the rifted hills." The author wrote "with his eye on the object,"
and the doves of Thisbe have survived many empires and religions,
still floating round their old domains and uttering their changeless
note.[9] "Pleasant Titaresius" still mingles his clear waters with the
chalk-stained Peneius, and Celadon brawls as when Nestor heard its
music.
The Catalogue enumerates all the Achaeans; Boeotians, Phocians,
Minyans; light-armed Locrian slingers; the Abantes of Euboea, fond of
close combat; the Arcadians, whose dialect was nearest akin to Homer's
own language, but who take no part in the action; the Epeians of Elis,
once foes of Nestor's Pylians; the far-off Aetolians, no longer led
by golden-haired Meleager; the Cretans of Cnossos, under Idomeneus,
grandson of Minos; his neighbour Tlepolemos of Rhodes, of the blood of
Heracles, and probably a Dorian, though the Dorian name is not uttered;
and some of the Sporades. There are, too, the south Thessalian Achaeans
and Hellenes, the Myrmidons under Achilles; the men of Philoctetes,
who lies sore hurt by a serpent's bite in the Isle of Lemnos; the
descendants in Thessaly (not a Homeric name) of the Lapithae; the
Pethraebians from "wintry Dodona"; the men of Argos and Tiryns of the
mighty walls, under Diomede; the men of Lacedaemon under Menelaus; the
Athenians (much suspected of interpolating their own mention), Odysseus
of the western and Aias of the eastern isles (Ithaca and Salamis); and
the host of Agamemnon, lord of Corinth, Sicyon, and Mycenae, himself
the Over Lord of all.
Taking the Catalogue as it stands, the princes of whom Agamemnon of
Mycenae was Over Lord come from the Greek mainland, from southern
Thessaly and Aetolia to the southernmost point of the Morea, and the
islands as far south and east as Crete, Carpathos, and Rhodes.
Now, as Agamemnon is the Over Lord, and Idomeneus of Cnossos in Crete
is one of his thanes, so to speak, the poet clearly regards the Greek
mainland as the centre of an Achaean dominion, of which Crete is a
great dependency. He shows no idea that Crete had been the centre of
another power, and the focus of another civilisation, held by a people
who, since the age of stone weapons and implements, had developed its
culture without interruption, and had sent its arts to the mainland of
Greece. To Homer, Mycenae is the centre; the prince of Cnossos is a
great feudatory of Agamemnon.
The poet is much interested in Crete; not only does the _Iliad_ dwell
on the prowess of Idomeneus the prince of Cnossos, and of Meriones;
but in the feigned tales of Odysseus, when he returns to Ithaca, he
represents himself as a Cretan adventurer. Homer avoids the Athenian
tales about Cretan tyranny, about the Minotaur, and the prowess
of Theseus in aid of the freedom of Athens. These things are not
touched upon, as they certainly would have been had Athenians freely
interpolated the poems. Homer entirely ignores all Athenian and Ionian
traditions.[10]
This is not the place to ask whether Achaeans from the mainland were
the men who took and sacked the palace of Cnossos in Crete about 1400
B.C., or whether the spoilers were "Pelasgians," that is, people
living on the mainland in Cretan conditions of culture, driven from
the mainland by the Achaean irruption; or whether the palace was
wrecked during an internal revolution before the Achaeans came to the
island.[11] Homer undeniably regards Idomeneus as an Achaean and a
descendant of Minos; and Minos as a son of Zeus.[12] Rhadamanthus of
his blood, is "the golden-haired," like Menelaus, Meleager, and some
other heroes.[13] We are not here concerned with discrepant traditions,
and with the idea that Minos is an Aegean as Pharaoh is an Egyptian
name of kings in general. That may be so; Minos may have been a figure
in Cretan legend before the Achaeans came thither; if so, they adopted
him as their own. We are only stating Homer's view of the relations
between Crete and the Achaean power on the mainland.
Homer's Catalogue of the Asian allies of Troy is brief, and contains
only about sixty lines. There was a Trojan Catalogue in the _Cypria_,
a lost Ionian epic poem of the eighth century, and as the Ionian
colonists in Asia knew the country of their settlement well, it is
likely to have been copious. Beginning, in Homer's Trojan Catalogue,
with the Dardanians under Aeneas, who may be said to represent "the
Orleans branch" of the Trojan royal family, we next hear of the Trojans
under Pandarus, who, in fact, broke the solemn oaths of truce, and
sealed the doom of Ilium (_Iliad_, iv.), but who somehow as "Sir
Pandarus of Troy" acquired another kind of ill fame among our mediaeval
poets. He dwelt by the Aesepus. "At the extreme north of the Troad,
where the Hellespont opens out into the Sea of Marmora," lived Adrastus
and Amphius. Asius led forces from Sestus and Abydus, on both sides,
European and Asian, of the Hellespont: there were also Pelasgians,
apparently from the European side. There were, from Europe, Thracians
and Cicones; the chief Thracian contingent arrived later (see _Iliad_,
Book x.). The Cicones, with whom Odysseus has trouble when first he
leaves Troy, in the _Odyssey,_ are also European, as were probably,
in origin, the people of Troy itself. European are the Paeonians,
the Paphlagonians, again, are Asiatic; the Alizonians are remote
and unrecognisable. Then we have Asiatic Mysians and Phrygians, and
Maeonians from near Sardis, and under Mount Tmolos inland. The Carians
of Miletus (later an Ionian city) follow, the Meander is their river;
last come the Lycians under Sarpedon (whom legend connects with Crete),
and Glaucus; another Glaucus was son of Sisyphus of Ephyre (Corinth),
in Argos, and was father of Bellerophon. Bellerophon, again, was sent
to his death in Lycia, by Proetus, who had married a Lycian princess.
The Lycian Glaucus of the _Iliad_ is a grandson of Bellerophon
(_Iliad_, vi.).
According to this story, Greeks freely passed to Lycia and intermarried
with Lycians. Only the Carians are described as "barbaric" in language.
Homer knows not, we said, the distinction of Hellenes and Barbarians;
the Greeks did not know it till the struggle of their Asiatic colonies
against Lydia and Persia produced the sense of "racial" repulsion. In
Homer any Greek prince going to Asia is courteously treated, perhaps
settles there like Bellerophon, or makes hereditary guest-friendships,
like the ancestors of Glaucus and Diomede.
The distinction which Homer does know is that between god-fearing
men, with cities, laws, and rulers, on one hand, and men who are like
the Cyclops, lonely, and lawless (_Od._ ix. 112-115). The Cyclops is
not so godless as he boasts himself to be; he does pray to his father
Poseidon, but he is wholly lawless, and each man is king in his own
family. The cannibal Laestrygones, even, have a king and a city, though
their manners are disgusting. Homer cannot easily, we see, conceive
of men whose polity and cities are not like those with which he is
familiar. He may have heard vaguely of far northern tribes abiding by
their fiords in the land of amber, the land of the nightless summer
and of the sunless winter. Such tales would come with the amber from
the Baltic coasts, for which merchants bartered the bronze swords and
vessels of their own civilisation. He had certainly heard of "the proud
Hippemolgoi," drinkers of mares' milk, nomad Scythians north of the
Danube, living like Tartars on koumiss.[14] If he has heard of any
empire in the Asian _hinterland_, he may speak of it as one of the two
Ethiopian realms; but here all is mythical.
Egypt, too, appears in the tales of Odysseus when he represents himself
as a Cretan adventurer, a raider in the lands by the river Aegyptus.
Helen has been in Egypt, and received the drug _nepenthes_ from the
wife of the king, just as she has been in Egyptian Thebes, and carried
treasures thence (_Od_. iv. 130 ff.). Achilles[15] knows the wealth
of Egyptian Thebes, and its hundred gates, and countless charioteers.
Sicily is known to the _Odyssey_, a poem of Ithaca and the west, and
of "perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn"; it is not mentioned in the
_Iliad_, a poem of the east and the Asian shore. The Phoenicians are
familiar as traders (_Iliad_, xxiii. 743), and are much better known,
as is natural, to the sea-poem, the _Odyssey_. The appearance of the
Phoenicians in the _Odyssey_, when they sell jewels to the women and
kidnap the child Eumaeus, has been spoken of as work of the seventh
century B.C.; a scene of contemporary life in that late age. But Mr.
H. R. Hall, writing on early relations between Greece and Egypt, as
depicted in Egyptian wall-paintings of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
represents commerce between the Aegean peoples of Greece and Crete as
filtering through "Phoenician channels." The Phoenicians were active
navigators and were merchants then and afterwards, that is, from the
sixteenth century B.C. onwards. A fresco in an Egyptian tomb of the
early date shows the arrival of "beaknosed" Phoenicians "in voluminous
and multi-coloured robes," one of them carrying "a small Mycenaean
amphora," at the Theban quays.[16] This being so, it is not so easy
to bring down the Phoenicians of the _Odyssey_ to the seventh century
B.C. The Sidonians make the goods which the Phoenicians transport, but
the Phoenician slave of the father of Eumaeus declares that she comes
from the town of Sidon, and the Phoenician sailor knows her parents
(_Odyssey_, xv. 415-433). No very clear distinction seems to have been
drawn between Phoenicians and Sidonians.
These Semitic peoples were persistently credited, till lately, with all
the finer works of art and craft which Homer mentions. The discovery
of the art of Minoan Crete has made this unqualified attribution
impossible.[17] Certainly Homer conceives of the Semites as doing a
large trade, and as kidnapping children in the Greek seas; but their
own art was imitative, and it is unlikely that, in Homer's time, the
characters of their alphabet had ousted those of Aegean civilisation.
It is curious that the place in which Phoenicians exercised most
influence, Cyprus, was also the place where the Phoenician alphabet
was so long in supplanting the native syllabary, akin to the unread
documents of Minoan Crete.
We may thus conceive Homer's ancestors, by 1400 B.C., as men far from
savage or barbarian,[18] who then succeeded to an Aegean civilisation
much more luxurious and artistic than their own; and, centuries later,
when Homer sang, the glow of the Aegean culture still flushed the sky:
its art was known to the poet.
[1] _Iliad_, i. 266-268.
[2] _Iliad_, ii. 741-744.
[3] _Proceedings, British School of Athens_, xiv., 1907, 1908, p. 223.
[4] _Iliad_, ii. 681-684, xvi. 233-235.
[5] Mackenzie, "Cretan Palaces," in _Brit. School of Athens_, xii. pp.
216-258.
[6] The parallel has been brought to my notice in detail by Mr. J. W.
Mackail; it had already occurred to me in a general way.
[7] _Iliad_, ii. 867, ii. 804.
[8] In the line just cited, and in the Carians Βαρβαροθώνω of _Iliad_,
ii. 867, we cannot positively know whether Homer is thinking of
different languages, or of differences in accent and dialect.
[9] Leaf, on _Iliad_, ii. 502.
[10] Save in the interpolated name of Theseus, twice, and in doubtful
parts of _Odyssey_, xi.
[11] These various views are held, or have been held, by Mr. Evans,
Mr. Ridgeway, Dr. Mackenzie, and others (_Monthly Review_, 1901, pp.
121-131; _Times_, Oct. 31, 1905; _Annuals, British School of Athens_,
xi. p. 14; _ibid._ xii. 216 _et seqq._, xiii. 423 _et seqq._). In Dr.
Mackenzie's ample arguments, cf. Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 32,
33, the Pelasgians were the sackers of Cnossos. The evidence is mainly
archaeological, and might be argued over endlessly.
[12] _Iliad_, xiii. 450.
[13] These views are suggested by Professor Ridgeway in a paper read to
the British Academy; see _Athenaeum_, June 5, 1909.
[14] _Iliad_, xiii. 5, 6, and Leaf's note.
[15] _Ibid._ ix. 381. Mr. Leaf attributes the lines to "some person
with a dull chronological mind," who remembered that Thebes in Greece
had been left in ruins by the war of the Epigonoi. "He forgot, however,
that Egypt is elsewhere unknown to the _Iliad_." If a place is unknown
because no one has occasion to mention it, unknown is Thebes to the
_Iliad_. But to say that a poet familiar with Crete never heard of
Egypt; that Egypt was rediscovered between the dates of composition
of _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is arbitrary. We might as well say that
Shakespeare, who never mentions tobacco, never heard of the weed, or
that no Biblical author ever saw a cat (out of the Apocrypha).
[16] B. S. A. viii. 174.
[17] See Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 83-86.
[18] _Ibid._ pp. 112-115.