CONCLUSIONS
As much of this treatise is occupied with criticism of the views of
the most modern representatives of the Wolfian school, I ought, in
fairness, to state my own general conclusions. I am led to suppose that
the _Iliad_ is a work of one brief period, because, as has been shown,
it bears all the notes of one age; and is absolutely free from the
most marked traits of religion, rites, society, and superstition that
characterise the preceding Aegean, and the later "Dipylon," Ionian,
Archaic, and historic periods in Greek life and art.
Again, I believe that the _Iliad_ is, in the main, the work of a
single poet. To that conclusion I am led partly by the unity of the
thought, temper, character, and _ethos_ of both epics; partly by the
perfect consistency in the drawing, throughout, of multitudes of
characters, all conceived with as much delicacy as firmness. It is to
me inconceivable that a number of poets should have developed, with
such perfect consistency and with such fine _nuances_, the character,
for example, of Achilles, who has been called "a splendid savage!"
If our critics studied him as Shakespearian students examine Hamlet or
Macbeth, it is improbable that they could think the wrath of Achilles
"a second-rate subject." It does not appear to me that his wrath about
"a personal slight"--the loss of Briseis, is a fit of the sulks; that
Achilles, as was said of Byron in one of his portraits, looks like "a
great sulky schoolboy whom somebody has deprived of a plum-cake."
Consider what Achilles is; the son of a goddess: himself, in extreme
youth, the recognised hero and _nonpareil_ of the whole Achaean array.
His one over-mastering passion is desire of renown:
"One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
He might live long, happy, and honoured at home with the father whom
he so tenderly loves and pities, but he sets forth to Ilios, knowing
surely that there he must inevitably perish in the flower of his youth.
He chooses to pay with his life for immortal renown. In Hades he says
that he would liefer be on earth the hind of a landless man, than king
over the Dead, so fast is the hold of this earth upon his heart. But he
could not love his life so much
"Loved he not honour more."
Now, in the opening of the _Iliad_ he is to lose life and the sunlight,
and also to lose honour. This is no mere personal slight; loss of the
honour which he is buying with his life is no unworthy cause of anger
in such a hero. He complains, again and again, that Agamemnon has, _on
every occasion_, dishonoured him. The seizure of Briseis, his special
"mead of honour," is only the last straw, the culminating insult. "In
like honour," he says, "are held both the coward and the brave." He
has toiled most hardly of all. "Even as a bird bringeth her unfledged
chickens each morsel as she winneth it, and with herself it goeth
hard, even so was I wont to watch out many a sleepless night, and
pass through many days of battle, warring with folk for their women's
sake." There is here, in Book ix., that tenderness of reference to the
devotion of the maternal instinct which characterises Achilles in his
relations with his own mother, a goddess of many sorrows, for the sake
of him who has chosen his doom. To her, in the first Book, as on the
death of Patroclus, he cries, in the spirit of the little child of whom
he speaks so touchingly in Book xvi.: "a fond little maid that runs by
her mother's side, and bids her mother take her up, snatching at her
skirts, and tearfully looks at her." Homer puts such words in the mouth
of none but the slayer of men, Achilles.
"Mother," he cries by the grey sea, in Book i., "seeing thou didst of
a truth bear me to so brief a span of life, _honour at least ought the
Olympian to have granted me._"
Is it not plain that "the personal slight" to Achilles--being what he
is, saying, like the great Montrose in a note scribbled on his pocket
Bible, "_Honour is my life,_" is it not plain that the insult is deadly
both to life and honour?
In this sense Homer understands the wrath of Achilles. He had _fond_
of tenderness,--he ransomed his captives, while Agamemnon slew the
prisoners to whom Menelaus was giving quarter. Again, as we shall see
("The Supposed Expurgation of Homer"), it was far from unusual, in
Homeric warfare, for the slayer to mutilate the slain, cutting off his
head, putting it on a stake, or even carrying it home as a trophy.
But Achilles did not even, as usual, despoil Eetion of his armour,
"for his soul had shame of that; but he buried him in his inlaid
armour, and raised a barrow over him." In contrast with his natural
clemency, the wrath of Achilles for Patroclus's sake is all the more
monstrous; he far transcends the customary ferocities of dishonour to
the dead. Achilles says (xxi. pp. 100-105): "Until Patroclus met his
day of destiny, dearer was it to my heart to spare the Trojans; and
many I took alive and sold over sea." But when once his honour, his
life-price, is taken from him, his wrath will be sated by nothing--not
by prayers or gifts of atonement, but by the slaughter of his comrades
among their ships--_then_, indeed, they will know his worth. It is this
moral tragedy, _corruptio optimi_, that inspires Homer in the _Iliad_.
Achilles is, of all the men in Homer, the most passionately
affectionate. His love of Patroclus, like that of Jonathan for David,
"passeth the love of women"; an affection for his elder, the playmate
of his childhood, so pure and so strong that poets of historic Greece
could not understand it. But when he is smitten to the heart by the
loss of Patroclus his wrath again breaks, as in the ninth Book of the
_Iliad_, through all measure; and he does cruel and evil deeds, his
revenge is hateful to Gods and men. This is the moral tragedy of the
_Iliad_; and that which wrecks the heart and soul of Hamlet, or that
which brings to shame the honour and courage of Macbeth, does not go
deeper.
Having fashioned such a character as Achilles, no poet equal to the
task could leave him in the course of cruelty and shame which is his
in the opening of the last Book of the _Iliad_. No hand but that which
created the Achilles of the first Book could so restore him to himself
that the Achaeans might again "see the great Achilles whom they knew."
Only that one genius could conceive and achieve the immortal scene
wherein Priam kisses "the hands of Achilles, terrible, manslaying, that
slew so many of his sons."
"Fear thou the gods, Achilles, and have compassion on me, even me,
bethinking thee of thy father. Lo, I am more piteous yet than he, and
have braved what none other man on earth hath braved before, to stretch
forth my hand toward the face of the slayer of my sons." There follows
the lament of Achilles, for the father whom he, in search of honour,
"may not tend as he groweth old, since very far from my own country I
am dwelling in Troyland, to vex thee and thy children."
Even here, Achilles feels that he dares hardly trust himself, so
strong is the wild beast of passion within him. So consistent, so
delicate, so strong a delineation of character, I cannot conceive to be
the work of more hands than one, it is the work of the hand of Homer.
Throughout the whole poem every person is drawn with equal firmness,
delicacy, and consistency. The study of Agamemnon is the most complex
(see _Homer and his Age,_ pp. 50-81). The foil to Agamemnon, the good
Menelaus, the kindest and most chivalrously honourable of men, always
conscious of his debt to the Achaeans, always eager to dare beyond his
strength, is a worthy pendant. Odysseus throughout the poem is the
poet's most admired hero; the wisest and most steadfast, here as in
the _Odyssey_. It is so with the rest, with all of them; and this with
the unity of _ethos_, of temper, of thought on human destinies, is the
great argument for the unity and single authorship of the _Iliad_ in
the main. To others, probably, as to Wolf, this consistency is apparent
when they read the _Iliad_, as alone it was meant to be read or heard,
"for human pleasure," without constantly dwelling on "oppositions of
science falsely so called," and hunting for discrepancies which often
are not discrepant.
It is not an article of my faith that there is no non-original matter
in the _Iliad_. In another book, _Homer and the Epic_, I mentioned the
passages which, to me, seem probably alien, for one reason or another.
About the authorship of the Catalogue I do not know enough to be able
to form an opinion. In the dream of Agamemnon and what follows, in Book
ii., I might guess that two or three lines have been omitted, though
on the whole the waverings of Agamemnon are thoroughly consistent with
his character, and are meant to throw into light the steadfastness of
Odysseus. I think that Phoenix is not properly introduced in Book ix.,
but there he is a necessary character; his warning to Achilles, not to
fight before receiving atonement, has an influence throughout, backed
as it is later by the counsels of Odysseus. The battles between Troy
and the Ships, in Books xii.-xv., might be more lucid; but so might
Napier's account of the battle of Salamanca, and Lord Roberts's of the
Siege of Delhi. I understand Homer better than I do either of these
military historians; but I have taken more pains to understand him. I
would rather believe the _Aristeia_ of Idomeneus to be by another hand;
it is perfunctory; and the proceedings of Poseidon are perplexing,
like the doings of Ares and Athene in the first fifty lines of Book v.
The Gods always, by the infinite inconsistencies of mythology, cause
confusion, but the text itself has an air of dislocation. The arming of
Agamemnon in the opening of Book xi., seems to me non-authentic, as far
as our knowledge of Homeric armature goes. The whole passage about the
destruction of the Achaean wall by the Gods, in the after time, reads
to me like a pedantic later explanation of the absence of traces of the
works.
The meeting of Aeneas and Achilles in Book xx. would seem more
suspicious than, to me, it does, if Aeneas were not, throughout, a
special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan,
because of Priam's suspicion of "the Orleans branch." I am inclined
to think that the poet knows, all through, a "saga" of Aeneas as
preserving the seed of the Royal House of Troy. In Book v., and
elsewhere, he is always under divine protection, that of Apollo or of
Aphrodite, "only Zeus shielded thee, and other gods," says Achilles.
"It is appointed for him to escape that the race of Dardanus perish
not," says Poseidon in Book xx.; and were the passage solitary, I
should think it all an interpolation. But the poet always, probably for
traditional reasons, takes very good care of Aeneas. The last bouts in
the Funeral Games seem unlike Homer.
In the _Odyssey_, the passages about the concealing of the arms (xvi.,
xix.) are dislocated, to say the least; and all the close of the
poem, especially the second Nekyia, has always lain under suspicion in
critical times. Sainte-Beuve would not abandon, but admired it; I only
feel that, if all this be later, it has taken the place of lost earlier
material, for the poem could not conceivably close till the blood feud
of Odysseus and the kin of the Wooers was appeased. An Achaean like
a Scandinavian audience understood the rules, and insisted that the
settlement of the blood-feud must be explained.
These are the main points at which, as far as I can judge, something
has gone wrong. There are others: the interchange of shields between
Nestor and Thrasymedes in the opening of Book xiv. had probably some
lines of explanation given to it, though, as Mr. She wan was the
first to perceive, the exchange was the necessary consequence of the
manoeuvres in Book x. Here Thrasymedes lent his shield to Diomede for
his night _reconnaissance_, Thrasymedes would then send for and use
Nestor's shield, while Nestor would obtain the shield of Thrasymedes
next morning from Diomede.[1]
Nothing can be more simple and natural; but the thing was so obvious as
to escape attention till Mr. She wan read Homer in a Homeric spirit. No
doubt there are other passages with which I am dissatisfied, but the
curious may refer for them to my earlier book, _Homer and the Epic_.
It is not so strange that there are dislocations ill patched up, as
that far more of extraneous matter, especially of Ionian matter, has
not found an entry into the Epics. How the text has been so well
guarded I cannot explain; Mr. Murray's theory of expurgation of certain
beliefs, ways and manners, is examined in Appendix B.
As to how the Epic was evolved, I am unable to say anything precise for
want of evidence. Analogy from other early national epic poetry fails
us here, because nowhere is there any early national poetry of the same
scope and the same consistency. Again, in such epics as the _Chanson
de Roland_, and even in _Beowulf_, mythical as it is, there are actual
traces of historic events. We know that, because we have chronicles
and official annals corroborating parts of the _Chanson de Roland_, or
proving the historic existence of a few characters in the _Volsunga
Saga_, and _Beowulf_; but in the case of the Homeric poems we have no
evidence of the actual existence of any personage.
As for the _chansons de geste_, we know, or at least the most eminent
French scholars believe, that these, or the earliest of them, are the
final poetic results of actual reminiscences, recorded in lays or
ballads, popular or military, of the reign of Charlemagne. But Homer
is far in advance of the age of ballads on actual events in the remote
past.
M. Gaston Paris says: "The _Chanson de Roland_ is not a work composed
_d'un seul jet à un moment donné_, it contains elements of very
different dates and different sources"--there is a basis of popular or
military ballads; there are additions invented by professional poets
to increase the interest. "The author of the Chanson is Legion."[2] I
entirely agree, and Legion is the author of _Paradise Lost_, and the
author of _King Lear_, or _Hamlet_, or _Macbeth_. Legion is the name of
the myth-makers from an age of savagery onwards; of the Greek and Roman
and Celtic poets and historians, of the Christian theologians, and
Anglo-Saxon minstrels and low Latin versifiers, and heavy Dutch poets,
and gay Italian poets, who have contributed the ideas and material to
_Paradise Lost_. But the Epic is Milton's though Homer and Virgil are
among the authors: without their lives it had not been what it is. The
_form_ is Milton's, and the form of the _Iliad_ is Homer's.
These things are manifest. All poetry, down to a lyric like "Bonnie
Dundee," has, in one sense, a multiplicity of authors. The poet
selects, combines, and gives form to a mass of pre-existing materials.
In _Lear_, Shakespeare works on a _Märchen_ still current in rural
England. That _Märchen_ he takes in the pseudo-historic form given to
it by the chroniclers. Shakespeare combines with it--for Gloucester
and Edmund--a French story which he finds in Sidney's _Arcadia_. He
has before him an earlier drama on King Lear; he selects, arranges,
composes, he adds what is his own, the poetry, and the fatal
conclusion; and even so the author of our _Iliad_ treated _his_
materials. Of all poetry, and especially of all epic poetry, the
author's name is Legion. Legion supplies the materials, and examples of
different methods of dealing with them, and the stock of ballad or epic
formulae. The final poet makes his selections, his combinations, and
fuses all into a new form.
It may be said that I mean by "Legion" something which M. Gaston Paris
did not mean. But what _did_ he mean? Did he mean that a different
_laisses_, or strings of verses on one assonance in the _Chanson de
Roland_, were by different poets, and were tacked together by one man,
who, perhaps, made omissions and additions? If this was what M. Gaston
Paris meant, I do not agree with him, nor with any one who may hold the
same opinion about the evolution of our _Iliad_. I know perfectly well
what I mean, when I say that Legion provided Homer's materials, and
showed various methods of treating them.
What these materials were we cannot exactly know. There must have been
much heroic poetry in hexameter verse; in Homer the form has reached
perfection. The style retains some peculiarities of popular poetry, of
ballads, as in stereotyped formulae descriptive of habitual actions
of every kind. Like our ballads, the poet never avoids a formula, if
he can find one current; if he invents a new one, he clings to it.
This recurrence of formulae is no less marked in _Iliad_ viii. than in
Child's four hundred _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, or in _La
Chancun de Willame_, one of the oldest _chansons de geste_.
Homer's chief heroes need no introduction to his audience, as Roland
and Oliver, Ganelon and Naismes needed none. All his characters were
familiar figures in an ancient legend of an expedition against the
Northern shore of Asia. About that we have no historic knowledge,
and it is rare indeed that chronicles record any "facts" given in
early _chansons de geste_. The rear-guard action at Roncevaux is an
exception; it is a historical fact.
Homer surveyed the whole, selected some situations, invented others,
combined and fused all in the furnace of his genius, just as did Milton
and Shakespeare. But how Legion made the _Iliad_, with no Homer, no
one great genius, but in some incomprehensible manner of combination,
I have never understood. I have never seen any description of the
processes which was clear, coherent, intelligible, and corroborated
by an example historically known. Theories of "redactors," "editors,"
literary committees, are all in the air; we cannot say, with Mrs.
Quickly, "You, or any man, knows where to have them." No theory
shows us "where to have" the _Dichter_, where, or when, or in what
circumstances he did whatever he is supposed to have done.
[1] _Homer and his Age_, pp. 276-278.
[2] _Légendes du Moyen Age_, pp. 46-47.
APPENDIX A
THE CATALOGUE
The date, purpose, and historical value of the Catalogue are matters
vigorously disputed, and critics not only vary among themselves,
but change their own minds, as is natural, when new facts accrue.
Topographical study of the Greek mainland, and new discoveries of
prehistoric sites that had been overlooked, necessarily throw new light
on Homer's conception of prehistoric Greece. Thus M. Bérard appears to
have found again what learned late Greek geographers had lost, the site
of Nestor's city of Pylos.
Nestor, in _Iliad_, xi. 664-762,[1] telling a long story about his
early prowess, gives many topographical details. But he "is clearly
ignorant of the geography of the western Peloponnesus," says a critic.
Here the theory is that Nestor's story is by a late editor of the
Iliad, who had read the Catalogue, picked out some places named at
random, and thrown them in anywhere.[2] But M. Bérard studies the
topography on the spot, and finds sites which, he thinks, coincide
perfectly with the topography of Nestor, and also, with that of the
journey of Telemachus, in the _Odyssey_, to Pylos, the home of Nestor,
and on to Menelaus in Sparta. It is strong corroboration that M.
Bérard's location of Pherae, where Telemachus passes the night on his
way to Sparta, and of Pylos itself, makes the topography of Homer
intelligible.[3]
But we must remember that people who deem the _Iliad_ a thing of rags
and patches, stitched on, in this case, by some ignoramus of about 540
B.C., are eager to find discrepancies everywhere; while the learned and
minute French geographer was equally anxious to find proofs of Homer's
accuracy. At all events, if he is right, Nestor does not talk ignorant
nonsense.
Geographical and archaeological research produce modifications of
opinion, but the critical weathercock veers, less necessarily, with
every wind of theory that blows from Germany. Thus Mr. Leaf, in the
first edition of his _Iliad_ (vol. i. p. 73), found nothing to prove
that the Catalogue "is of late origin." "It was considered a classical
work--The Doomsday Book of Greece, at a very early date.... There
seems to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with
the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor."
Nothing new has been discovered since Mr. Leaf wrote in this orthodox
fashion, nothing new has arisen except the studies of M. Bérard, which,
if we accept his view, confirm the accuracy of the Catalogue. But, in
1900, Mr. Leaf abandoned his earlier position.
"The whole perspective of the Catalogue," he says, "is entirely
different from that of the _Iliad_." Heroes, as Niese remarks, appear
in the _Iliad_ who do nothing in that poem; but play their parts
"in other portions of the Epic Cycle." The conclusion is that "the
Catalogue originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle, and was
composed for that portion of it which, as worked up into a separate
poem, was called the _Cypria_, and relates the beginning of the tale of
Troy, and the mustering of the fleet at Aulis."[4] This contains much
debatable matter. What the cycle was before it was "worked up into"
separate poems, or whether such a nebulous cycle existed at all, we
know not. I must refer the reader to Mr. Allen's essay on the whole
subject, which is too condensed to be summarised in briefer space.[5]
"The Catalogue was taken by Homer from its time and place in saga to
his second Book and to the Troad." I do not quite understand how a long
passage in hexameters could be taken from "saga." Mr. Allen's critical
remarks on prehistoric Greek topography and territorial divisions,
are most valuable; and so is his account of the Dorian and other
pretensions which wrought confusion in topographical designations. He
has proved, I think, that the Catalogue is a very archaic document,
which no later persons were interested in inventing, or would have been
able to invent. Beyond that I am unable to go, and we must await the
results of excavation on prehistoric sites in Greece. Our information
as to the _Cypria_ credits it with no Catalogue of the Achaean ships
and men; but it is easy to reply that our accounts are wrong, that the
authors spoke of a _Cypria_ made up after the Catalogue was placed in
the _Iliad_.
[1] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. 465, 466.
[2] Leaf, Note to _Iliad_, xi. 756; _Iliad_, ii. 615, 617.
[3] Bérard, _Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée_, pp. 108-113.
[4] Leaf, vol. i. p. 86.
[5] _Classical Quarterly_, April 1909.
APPENDIX B
The argument of my book is that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ represent
the usages and ideas of a prehistoric society. They are not the ideas
and usages of proto-historic and historic Hellas, but of the Achaean
invaders, or, at least, of the high-born men and women to whom Homer
sang. On the other hand, Mr. Murray, if I succeed in understanding his
position, holds that the ideas and usages of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
are a kind of mosaic, the result of a long process of "expurgation
of Homer." If this view be correct, my whole argument, of course, is
builded on the sand. Homer does not represent the ethical and religious
beliefs and usages of a moment in the past.
It is therefore necessary to state, with textual citations as full as
possible, Mr. Murray's presentation of his case, given, first, in his
_Rise of the Greek Epic_, and, later, in one of the Oxford Lectures
by several authors, published in _Anthropology and the Classics_. Mr.
Murray has very kindly assisted me by explaining points in which I
was unable to follow his reasoning. But these explanations prove that
we start from assumptions so opposed in their nature that community
in conclusions is impossible. Perhaps even mutual intelligence cannot
be perfect. Thus my reading of the Epics leads me to the conviction
that they were composed in an age which knew nothing of coined money;
an age when cattle were the standard of values:--this or that object
was worth so many cows. But in Mr. Murray's opinion this standard was
preserved in the epics, after it was obsolete in practice, for reasons
of stylistic convention. While I suppose our two epics to have been
epics at a period very remote, when Achaean society was in its bloom;
he holds that there were no epics till the Achaeans and the conquered
peoples were intermingled. Earlier, there were only lays, and the
silence of our epics as to coined money, for example, is a convention
derived from the lays of a time when cows were the measure of value.
Each of us, it seems to me, has to assume a kind of miracle. I have to
think, and do think, that our epics were composed by a poet to amuse
the leisure of an Achaean Court, and also that they were miraculously
preserved, whether by writing or in memory, through several changeful
centuries. I believe that this occurred because the poems are great
harmonious structures, such as only a poet could produce; and because
the many changes in society, costume, law, belief, and usage which the
successive ages evolved, do not appear in the poems.
Mr. Murray, I think, has also to postulate another kind of miracle.
Evolution, in some way which I do not understand, produced our epics
out of a mass of floating poetical material. It appears that men are
born to hold one view or the other, to believe in one or the other
prodigy.
However, in the view which is not mine, stylistic conventions in the
later poetry were based on a following of what was no convention in
the older poetry, say as to the use of coined money or of cavalry. Now
I know no other early national poetry, and no literary epics of the
critical ages of Greek and Roman literature, where such convention is
employed. Virgil was learned; Virgil knew Homer intimately; yet his
Greeks and Trojans use iron weapons, not weapons of bronze; and the
Roman buckler, not the Homeric shield.
To take another case, as soon as armorial bearings came into
mediaeval Europe, the singers of the _chansons de geste_ introduced
them,--regardless of their absence in the earlier lays, which knew no
such blazons. No convention of silence arose.
There is only one mention of writing in Homer. The Greek tragedians
knew well that writing was, as far as Homer shows, very rare in the
heroic age. But some of the heroes and heroines write whenever they
have occasion. There is no archaistic convention. As I have shown
in _Homer and his Age_, ancient poets and artists had, no more than
Shakespeare, our modern habit of attending to "local colour" as
historically known to us by research.
Perhaps it may be urged in reply, that early mediaeval epic poets were
much less conservative than early Greeks. They altered, for example,
the assonant _laisses_ of the early _chansons_, and did them into
rhyme, while Greece for epic purposes never deserted the hexameter. But
I can give a fair parallel to the Greek non-observance of a convention
in the Irish epic cycles.
The poets of the ancient Irish cycle of Fian ought, by the theory of
convention, to have made their heroes use war-chariots like the heroes
of the elder saga of Cuchullin. But they follow no such convention;
their heroes ride or fight on foot, because such was the nature of war
in their own later time.
The same reasoning applies throughout. I cannot believe that the makers
of our epics, working in the early historic age, omitted mention of
cavalry, coined money, periodical games, or anything else known to
them, because they found no such matter in more ancient lays concerning
and composed in a previous age. We have seen that the old "non-Homeric"
epics were, as their fragments prove, full of non-Homeric usages. No
"stylistic convention" forbade mention of these usages.
Thus no such stylistic convention--maintained in our _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, neglected in the _Cypria, Aethiopis,_ and the rest--can be
accepted. In fact, another and a special cause for many of Homer's
silences has to be suggested, as we shall see. Once more it is my
assumption that our epics were made in the main as we have them, for a
peculiar audience, a courtly and knightly audience, known to themselves
and their poet as "Achaeans." That they were of unmixed race I do not
suppose; these Northern invaders, their chiefs at least, would marry
the daughters of the princes of the land. But I assume that our epics
were made for them, _while they retained their Northern ideas_; on
many points very like the ideas, usages, and beliefs of the heathen
Scandinavian settlers in Iceland. It is maintained by Mr. Murray that
the ideas of "the conquered races" were very different, and that, as
the two peoples mingled, the ideas of the conquered races re-emerged.
This is manifestly true. But my view is that Achaean society, courtly
society at least, had not adopted the beliefs and usages of the
conquered races at the time when our epics, which ignore them, were
composed. But these usages and ideas are usual in the fragments of the
Cyclic epics on Trojan affairs. No stylistic convention interfered
and kept them out. Mr. Murray has to discover a special cause for the
presence in the "Cyclic" of much that is absent from our two epics.
The ideas of Mr. Murray, in some passages of his work, appear to be
precisely the opposite of my own. In other passages we seem to be on
the very point of agreement.
When we are told, in passages to be quoted, that there was in the
formation of the _Iliad_, and to a less extent in that of the
_Odyssey_, a strong element of reform and expurgation, we ask
ourselves--who, in what age, and from what motives, were the reformers
and purgers of _what_ pre-existing poetic and legendary materials? Were
those materials the property of the "Achaean or Northern" conquerors,
or of the pre-existing "conquered races" (to use Mr. Murray's terms);
or were the materials a medley derived from both sources? Were the
purgers Achaean poets working on materials, at least in part the
property of the conquered races? Or was the purgation mainly done by
Ionians, that is, by the mixed Greek peoples settled in Asia; peoples
certainly retaining many of the ideas of the conquered races which our
Homer ignores? Or did "the Achaean or Northern spirit" purge away some
things distasteful to that spirit, while the Ionians purged away other
things? What the elements more or less purged away are supposed to be,
we shall see later. In the passage to which I have referred[1] we find
the following statements:--
"The epic tradition of Greece, vast and tangled in its wealth of varied
beauty and ugliness, was left by the Homeric poets a much cleaner and
colder thing than they found it. In the result, two influences were
mainly at work. First, a general humanising of the imagination, the
progress of a spirit which, as it loved beauty, hated cruelty and
uncleanness. Secondly, a race prejudice. The relation of the Northern
and the aboriginal elements in the Homeric poems are involved, when
you come to details, in inextricable confusion, but in general the
'Homeric' tone of mind represents more of the Achaean or Northern
spirit; the spirit of those scattered strong men who in their various
settlements were leading and shaping the Aegean world. The special
myths, beliefs, and rites that were characteristic of the conquered
races are pruned away or ignored; the hero-worship, the oracles, the
magic and witchcraft, the hocus-pocus of purification, all that savours
of 'the monstrous regiment of women, the uncanny prowess of dead men,
and the baleful confusion between man and God.'
Here I should absolutely agree with Mr. Murray, if I were convinced
that "the Northern or Achaean spirit" of Achaean poets was dealing
mainly with "the epic tradition" of præ-Achaean Greece. If they were,
they would certainly "ignore or prune away" manners and beliefs which
were not their own. But I have shown, I think, that between Achaean
and Athenian early "Saga" a great gulf was fixed in Homeric times.
The Homeric poet dealt with Achaean legend, which could not contain
ghost-worship, "hocus-pocus of purification," and so on. Let me here
remark that no known later Greek taste objected to the _märchenhaft_,
the preposterous element in "Saga." Pindar and the dramatists do not
reject it, I have shown, but Homer does in the _Iliad_. Had Homer
revelled in it, later Greek taste saw nothing out of keeping here; had
no temptation to expurgate Pegasus, or the soul-box of Meleager, or the
magical invulnerability of Achilles, or his medicinal spear, or that
magical property, the Luck of Troy, the palladium, and so forth. The
genius of Homer, not later expurgation, accounts for his reticence.
Next, I seem to discern that "the progress of a spirit which hated
cruelty and uncleanness" refers to a period when "Achaeans" and
"Pelasgians," long intermingled, were becoming what is called
"Hellenic," the people of early historic Greece in the sixth century.
What this Hellenic spirit might, if it could, purge away is just the
ferocity which is _not_ purged away; the ferocity which mutilates, and,
when the deed is not executed, has threatened to mutilate foes slain in
open fight; and which denies, or wishes to deny, honourable burial to
the dead. On the dead "unseemly things" are wrought, with little or no
rebuke from the poet, except in the case of the extreme ferocities of
Achilles against Hector and the twelve Trojan captives. Thus Agamemnon
"smote Hippolochus to earth, and cut off his arms and neck with the
sword, then tossed him like a ball of stone to roll through the
throng"; or rather "like the trunk of a tree."[2] In the same way the
minor Aias cuts off the head of Imbrios, and throws it like a football
"into the scrum."[3] Hector is keen to cut off the head of Patroclus,
and stick it on a stake, like the head of the great Montrose.[4]
Peneleus decapitates Ilioneus, and waves the head at the Trojans.[5]
Manifestly these ferocities were _de bonne guerre_ in the society to
which Homer sang. I conceive that they were hateful to the taste of the
historic Hellenic spirit. Could it have expurgated these ferocities it
would have done so. But it could not. Other examples might be given.
Thus Euphorbus,[6] who dealt the first wound to Patroclus, threatens
to cut off and carry home the head of Menelaus. Euphorbus was avenging
his brother, slain by Menelaus. Peneleus was avenging Antimachus, his
friend. The ferocities are sometimes prompted by personal vengeance.
Euphorbus would have kept his word, but the spear of Menelaus pierced
his throat. We cannot find expurgation in failure to accomplish a
purpose. Hector meant to fix the head of Patroclus on a stake, so Iris
tells Achilles,[7] and to give his body to the dogs to devour. Such was
warfare as known to Homer; and the intellect of later Greece, which
probably abhorred such deeds, expurgated nothing.
Mr. Murray writes[8] that "no other corpse" (except Hector's) "is
maltreated in the Iliad." Such treatment was quite deliberately planned
by men of both armies, and was also executed in hot blood. I have given
examples enough of such maltreatment.
To cruelty we return, and to refusal of burial. It seems to have been
quite usual. The notable exception in clemency is Achilles; before his
passion came on him he ransomed his captives, and "his soul had shame
to despoil the dead Eëtion"; but he burned him in his inlaid armour,
and raised a barrow over him.[9]
In the Iliad ferocity runs high, in these particulars; the historic
hatred of such doings is growing but slowly. "The spirit that
hated cruelty" has left the facts where it found them; there is no
expurgation of them. As to the Hellenic historic spirit and its
hatred of "uncleanness"--_autres temps, autres moeurs_! Homer has no
allusions to the survival of savage vices detested by "the Northern
spirit." But, granting that the waxing spirit of Hellenism expurgated
atrocities committed on the dead (though they stand staring upon us
in the _Iliad_), "the Northern or Achaean spirit" is credited by Mr.
Murray with "pruning away or ignoring" the characteristic rites,
beliefs, and usages of the conquered races.
The earlier the period, the more drastic would be the purification.
Achaeans, not yet leavened with "Pelasgian" blood and beliefs, could
not celebrate what they confessedly did not practise. In their work no
later expurgation could cleanse away that which their work could not
contain.
Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by
blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth,
these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in
barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the
most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different
races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas,
most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were
believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were,
a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with
the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling
match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of
the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.
There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and
Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by
aspersions of swine's blood I can remember no Northern example.
The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw
the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but
the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the
ghost. "Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied
soul," in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of
purification by blood.
The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels,
originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they
once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear
to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic
sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great
disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are
somewhat shadowy and remote.
As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had
possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of
his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland,
his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about
hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood,
sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of
Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in the
_Odyssey._ The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess,
Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, in _Beowulf_,
with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam,
would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in the _Iliad_ we have only
the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to
but slightly.
Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions "characteristic
of the conquered races" in Greece[10] (and characteristic of the
historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed
Scandinavian epic would be as pure as the _Iliad_. The absence of
mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals,
purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries,
would be quite natural and unaffected.
The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the
manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer
scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages.
Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these
things in their manners.
As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from
the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or
Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually
persecuted,[11] we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs
and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as
we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems,
are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise
purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the
things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in
their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old
poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I
understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example,
was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps
for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the
_Iliad_. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could
not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric
society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away
or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find
nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself
was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide.
So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from
Apolline expurgation.
I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray's writings.
EXPURGATION
"The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets ... were mainly
responsible for the work of expurgation."
"Homer has cut out" certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism,
and "mutilations of the Hesiodic gods" "for their revoltingness" (p.
122).
"Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing
tone of the _Iliad_" (p. 131).
So far the "expurgations" appear to have been done mainly by the
Homeric poets themselves "in the middle and later generations." Yet, as
to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been
the purest of all.
It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way "expurgate" the
"Cyclic" epics.
"If the educational use of the _Iliad_ began in Ionia as early as the
eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing
that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we
have been dealing" (p. 133).
Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, the _Iliad_
was a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of
purification from which the _Cypria_, for example, and other "Cyclic"
poems escaped.
"The Epos" has "its prevailing Achaean tone," owing to "the prestige
of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of
the Saga and the Bard," and "the partial return to the migratory life"
(p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low
superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent,
the "Cyclic" poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and
equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the
superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations
of Homeric poems leave _them_ alone? Because already selected for
recitation?
If the Achaean or Northern spirit, "the clean and lordly Northern
spirit," made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of
historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to
do in the way of purification?
It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became
mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and
the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. "As the population
became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the
result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion,
re-emerged" (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is
un-Homeric and un-Achaean.
Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the
pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the
conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be
purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions
were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic
populations inserted the superstitions into the _Iliad_ where they had
not been previously, and then cut them out again.
It is not easy to understand how stories "far too primitive and
monstrous for Homer" "had been expurgated from Homer centuries back"
(p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the
mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in his _Prometheus_. If Homer or the
Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have
dealt at all in a story "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer," or
for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory
of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If
later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are
they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions,
why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?
Then the old questions re-arise, why were the "Cyclic" poems of the
heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what
is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two
or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the
expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric
recitations at Athens (see "The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer").
Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with
it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: "The recitation was established
about the end of the sixth century ... so much seems historically
clear." (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!)
"It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this
recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three
almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever
it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell
somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants." Now, as our
authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the
date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain
that they had no good authority. "The Solonian laws and constitution
were promulgated in 594 B.C.," says Grote; that was at least eighty
years before a date "about the end of the sixth century." The men are
far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in the
thirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody,
not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.
All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was
slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric
vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died "not easily," if
he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of
Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if
they found such matter in Homer.
Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth
century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know
nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at
the Panathenaic festival.
How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations
contributed to the expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, must be
stated in Mr. Murray's own words. I may first observe that, in his
opinion, "the body of the poem" (the _Iliad_), "even in the latest
parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else,
something older and more Northern."[12] How, if this be true, the
Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but
perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!
A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted:
"In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a
striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, 'Homer presents to the
anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to
do with anthropology.' By Homer, of course, Mr. Lang means the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic
tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later
literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or
Olympian.
"But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum,
of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of
the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those
'beastly devices of the heathen' which are dear to the heart of
us anthropologists--if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class
himself among even amateur anthropologists; ceremonies of magic
and purification, beast-worship, stone-xvorship, ghosts, and
anthropomorphic (theriomorphic?) gods, traces of the peculiar powers
of women both as 'good medicine' and as titular heads of the family,
and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human
Sacrifice.
"This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics,--I mean
those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for
recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the
Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect,--by the Orphic
literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly, perhaps, by
the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile
comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.
"Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this
non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same
thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be
taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started
from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic
degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently
show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite
signs of presupposing the _Iliad_, just as the _Iliad_ here and there
shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that
we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of
composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that
point in detail here. Even supposing that the _Cypria,_ as a poem,
could definitely be called 'later' than the _Iliad_, it is enough to
say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or
a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric
saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.
"Two arguments will suffice: First, the argument from analogy. Few
anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the
high, austere, knightly atmosphere of the _Iliad_ as primitive when
compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion
of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric
Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and
the ouranian birds; the great mother goddess of Anatolia, the human
sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction
from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems
that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or
even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain
places, to have no bridge.
"Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of
thought, the earlier religion.
"Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is
not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are
various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory
of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I
tried to say about this in my _Rise of the Greek Epic_, I will restate
it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to
be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on;
and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its
semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some
early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of
"all Ionians,"[13] and afterwards of "all Athenians." The poems were
demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece
was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period
of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a
land of semi-savages to the Hellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of
Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal
past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped
their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the
uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits
both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it
serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing
more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere
slough out of which Hellas rose."
* * * * *
I agree that the "non-Homeric sagas" represent more faithfully the
primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought. Homer was not concerned
with pre-Hellenic habits of thought; he represents the Hellenes who
"possessed Hellas, the land of fair women, and followed Achilles."
I also entirely agree that "the later literary whole" (by which I at
least mean Hesiod, the "Cyclic" fragment, and much of Greek tragedy,
not to speak of antiquarian learning) "contains the more primitive
modes of thought, the earlier religion." But the theory that these
things were once in, but were purged out of, the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_
still baffles me. If they were usages peculiar to the conquered races,
how could they appear in the poetry of the uncontaminated Northern or
Achaean conquerors?
How, again, can we say that "the great mass of saga poetry began to
be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century"?
Notoriously the "Cyclic" poems, or the legends which were given in
those poems, were greatly preferred as subjects of art by the Athenian
vase-painters of the sixth century, and by Polygnotus when he decorated
the Lesche at Delphi. The stories, I have shown, reached the Middle
Ages through Rome and through Graeco-Roman literature, and eclipsed our
Homer. To them we owe the unhappy _Troilus and Cressida_ of Shakespeare.
We have no evidence known to me that proves the selection, "at some
early time for public recitation," of "two poems," at the solemn
four-yearly meeting of "All Ionians" and afterwards of "all Athenians."
Mr. Verrall supposes the "Cyclic" poems, as well as our Homer, to have
been recited at the Panathenaea. I know no evidence that they were, and
none proving that they were not. I am unaware of any reason for which
our _Iliad_ should have been specially selected for education in the
Ionia of the eighth century, and for public recitation. The reason is
the further to seek if the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, when thus selected,
"were demonstrably still in a fluid condition"; indeed, while they were
still in a fluid condition, I do not know how they could have been
deemed so much more choiceworthy than other poems still (I presume)
fluidic.
If "the intellect of Greece was focussed upon" _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
while they were still fluidic, but already selected, then the
expurgation was due, not to Achaean poets who ignored and pruned
away the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, but to _les
intellectuels_ of Greece, who (whatever their private opinions might
be) saw hero-worship in daily practice; and if they killed any
one, were purified by pigs' blood. Hesiod stood high in universal
knowledge, was a consecrated authority; if he could be purged, why
was he not purged? Because he was not recited? Yet he was part of
education, and needed a Bowdler much more than Homer.
The practices and beliefs expurgated from Homer were not "done in a
corner" in historic Greece.
So "primitive," so barbaric was the intellect of historic Greece even
in the sixth century and in the age of Pericles, and later, in regard
to heroic tombs, for example, that the heroic ghosts were supposed to
inhabit their sepulchres in the shape of rather harmless snakes, like
the _Idhlozi_ of the Zulus. "In Snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb,"
says Miss Harrison.[14]
Miss Harrison publishes reproductions of works of Greek art from
the sixth century (when all ugly things of this kind, we are told,
were drastically rejected from the _Odyssey_ and _Iliad_) to the
fourth century. We see the dead, a male and a female ghost, receiving
offerings. The artist is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind
the chairs of the holy heroes is a huge snake with a man's beard. He is
a _human_ snake, the incarnation of the dead man's ghost. This is the
belief of the Baronga of Delagoa and of the Zulus.[15]
In a vase, a _lecythus_, of the fifth century, the worshippers surround
a tumulus with a phallus-shaped pillar on top. A huge snake occupies
the tumulus; he is the ghost's incarnation.[16]
Not in glens of mountainous Arcadia, or in recesses of rural chapels
alone, were these things done. The theatre showed sacred tombs; each
place of periodical games had its presiding hero; relics were in high
request, living men, conquerors or athletes, came to be divinised; at
the Eleusinia the initiates saw rites of savage origin; oracles of the
dead were publicly consulted; the purification rites went on as law
demanded--all publicly, all unrebuked.
Does any one suppose that priapic images like those of the Admiralty
Islands were features in Homer's conception of a street in Mycenae or
Ilios? These images were sacred in the Athens of Pericles, the Hermae
were not like Homer's Hermes. Is it likely that, if the managers of
Delian or Athenian recitations found such things as these in Homer,
they would cut them out as too naughty to be mentioned, or for some
other reason not to be mentioned, at a public festival of men and women
familiar with all these things, and seeing in them nothing but good?
It seems unlikely. Moreover, if the Northern or Achaean spirit had
ignored or pruned away these things, they could give no trouble to the
managers of Delian or Athenian recitations.
When we come to consider examples of expurgation, we may prefer to pass
by the odious vices reprobated by the code of Australian savages, but
highly popular in historic Greece. They do not occur in our Homer, and
I know but one allusion to them in the Icelandic sagas, and that is in
a mere impossible taunt about a Bogle. But no one can say that Homer
never heard of such things; we might as well say that, because nobody
coughs in Homer, no Achaean ever condescended to cough. The profession
of Rahab cannot have been unknown, though Homer never mentions it. In
short, a high ideal tone is preserved, Homer is not Monsieur Zola; an
epic is not a "naturalistic" novel.
When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to
adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among
the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation
might be later inserted. Thus, in _Odyssey_, vii. 54, Alcinous and
Arete are "of the self-same parents." Later, a genealogy makes them
uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative
interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-known
_Märchen,_ a tale of No Man's Land, as in his mention of the adelphic
marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are
capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose
that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less
depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of
Theocritus.[17]
I am following Mr. Murray's examples of expurgation. The spirit of the
battles in the _Iliad_ "is chivalrous," he says. "No enemy is ever
tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors
of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in
fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the
melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles
make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer
makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18]
One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians.
If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay,
Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles
and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever
_they_ were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians.
I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be
of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer.
In the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his
chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly,
on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on
this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred
a more horrible story--not, of course, because they approved of such
proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his
sources, in _Märchen_ and chronicles. He followed a French story in
Sidney's _Arcadia_, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings"
Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit
of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some
unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a
living enemy.
There is a passage in the _Iliad_ (xiii. 573) in which a man, speared
from behind through the bowels, "where a wound is most baneful to
wretched mortals, writhes about the spear ... for a moment, not for
long"; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant
picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the
line which he renders "he struggled quite a little while, not at all
long," to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the
same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying
struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so,
or may not; the fact that the line _is_ a formula, like those of our
ballads, makes me incline to think it ancient. The point is not of
much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on
the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in the _Odyssey_, is a proof that
Homer's men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could
the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the
Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many
must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In the _Iliad_ there is
no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been
treated like Melanthius.
I understand Mr. Murray to argue that the _Iliad_ has been expurgated,
but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while
the _Odyssey_ (l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for
arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a
marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the
gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is
not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that
arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray's
arguments that such words as _ἄφυκτος_, not "to be escaped," applied to
arrows in the _Iliad_, and "bitter" (πικρός) and "groanful" and "not
long to be supported" as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows,
I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary. _Πικρός_
means "sharp," according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause
groans enough; the heroes "do not long support" flesh-wounds from
_spears_, but "retire hurt." That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die
(iv. 134) when arrow--smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus
would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him
through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh
arrow, "unused before," "whose poison has not been rubbed off." I reply
that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh
arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim
and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would
use a new spear in a tournament.
In the _Iliad_, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points.
People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of
races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone,
corrupt human bones by preference.
As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the
Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think
that it was expurgated from the _Iliad_ by men who let it stand in the
Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In
the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned
are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas of _Iliad_, i. 74-83,
who dare not name the cause of Apollo's wrath unless Achilles will
guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice
his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord's three
daughters, in the Iliad.
Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens "would have
been rejected from the _Iliad_, not only because human sacrifice was
a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an
interest in women."[19] As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba
and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to
Mr. Murray's theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated
intervals,[20] the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do
not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere,
and I am surprised at the remark, "We have no tradition of Minos's
death."[21]
The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is
a world-wide _Märchen_, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous
cannibalism.
Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards
Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of
a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.[22] It was
customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went
too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, "a man mad
with grief, a man starving and sleepless," a man who knows that Hector
intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But
these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage,
or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not.
There was no ritual for such a slaughter, 'and, as a matter of fact, it
is crowded into a shamefaced line and a half.' You would expect this
sacrifice to have at the very least twenty."[23]
You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual
for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we
may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have
expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.
Much of this theory of expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ seems
to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from
ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is
impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to
the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established
cult of heroes, should be deemed "ill-omened" at the recitations, in no
way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed "well-omened" in
the performances of Athenian tragedy.
If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the
conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they
were not there, _les intellectuels_ of Athens could not expurgate them.
[1] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[2] _Iliad_, xi. 145-147.
[3] xiii. 202-204.
[4] xviii. 176-177.
[5] xiv. 496-505.
[6] xvii. 39.
[7] xviii. 175-177, xvii. 126.
[8] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
[9] _Iliad_, vi. 416-419.
[10] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[11] _R. G. E._ pp. 245-246.
[12] _R. G. E._ p. 173.
[13] This archetype, Mr. Murray has just said, is "unknown."
[14] _Prolegg. to Study of Greek Religion_, 1903, p. 329.
[15] _Ibid_. pp. 327, 328.
[16] _Ibid_. p. 329.
[17] _R. G. E._ pp. 116, 117.
[18] Ajax, 1031. Andromache, 399.
[19] _R. G. E._ p. 123.
[20] _Ibid_. p. 127.
[21] See Roscher's _Lexikon_, s.v. Minos.
[22] _R. G. E._ pp. 130, 131.
[23] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
THE ALLEGED ATHENIAN RECENSION OF HOMER
Wolf could not but confess that the _Iliad_, as we possess it, is an
unity, better or worse; is a literary structure. How, then, did it come
to be what it is, if it were the work of several authors in several
ages? Wolf replies, "History speaks! The voice of all antiquity, and,
on the whole, the consent of all report bears witness that Pisistratus
was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and
brought into that order in which we now possess them."[1]
This amazing statement shows that there are classical scholars who
mean, when they speak of "History," something that no historical
student means when he uses the same term. About any dealings by
Pisistratus with Homer, history is mute as the grave. Not only is there
no record--that is, no contemporary public inscription--testifying
that Pisistratus or any other person "first had the Homeric poems
arranged and committed to writing," there is not even a hint of a
reference to any tradition of this event, in the great Historians of
the following century, Herodotus and Thucydides, none in Aristotle,
none in Ephorus (in the fourth century B.C.), none in the remains of
Aristarchus and other famous Alexandrian grammarians. History is silent
even as to a rumour. We know that Dieuchidas, a Megarian historian of
the fourth century, said something about its being Solon rather than
Pisistratus who did something in connection with Homer. We know this
from a mutilated passage in an author of the third century, Diogenes
Laertius. That is all.[2] Tradition from the time of Pisistratus
himself to that of Cicero speaks no articulate and intelligible word as
to what, according to Wolf, the voice of all antiquity declares. When
we come after five centuries of historic silence to Cicero, we do not
find him agreeing with Wolf that Pisistratus first had the poems of
Homer committed to writing, but saying that "he is said" (by whom?) "to
have been the first to have arranged, in their present order, the books
of Homer, previously in disarray?"[3]
Cicero speaks only of what "is said." The unvouched for report
mentioned by Cicero half a milennium after the date of Pisistratus is
not history, of course; is not evidence. Long before Cicero, in the
fourth century, Ephorus and Heraclides Ponticus told other stories
about the coming of Homer to Sparta, stories equally unhistorical. The
author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue, _Hipparchus_, represented the
second son of Pisistratus as the first to bring Homer to Attica, and to
regulate Homeric recitations. None of these writers stands for History,
none of them agrees with another; they had no historical knowledge of
whatever facts there may have been.
We are in presence (1) of variants of a tradition doubtless founded
on fact, namely, that at an unknown date an Act was passed in Athens
regulating the recitations of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic
festival; by some accounts an Act limiting the recitations to "Homeric"
poetry alone; and (2) of a legend that Pisistratus, or his second
son, collected and arranged in a certain order the Homeric poems. The
earliest and only good evidence, says Mr. Monro, with regard to the
recitation of Homer at Athens, is that of two orators two centuries
later than Pisistratus, Lycurgus and Isocrates. The former said in
a speech "Our fathers thought Homer such a good poet that they made
a law for him alone among poets that his poems should be recited by
rhapsodists at every quinquennial holding of the Panathenaea."[4] No
date is given, but Lycurgus must apparently be thinking of a date prior
to Tyrtaeus, as we shall see later. When Lycurgus says that the poems
of Homer alone were to be recited at the festival, he is of so late
a date that he probably means the Iliad and Odyssey. If the Act were
made in Solon's time, "Homer" may conceivably include all heroic epic
poetry. We know nothing about it.
Isocrates[5] says that the ancestors of the Athenians "desired to make
Homer's art honoured, both in contests of music (i.e. of the reciters)
and in the education of the young" (Monro, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 15).
Still later, in a passage with an important lacuna, Diogenes Laertius
says that Solon passed a law regulating the recitations,[6] the very
law which is attributed to Hipparchus by the author of the Dialogue
of that name.[7] In Sicyon also, in the sixth century, there were
recitations of Homer by competing rhapsodists; they were put down by
the tyrant Cleisthenes.[8]
Mr. Monro says that for the existence of an Athenian law about
Homeric recitations, whatever the date of that law may have been, we
have historical testimony. Indeed, if there were no such law, even
rhetoricans of the fourth century could scarcely tell the Athenians
that such a law existed. But as to its date and scope, and the name
of the statesman who passed it, if any exact information had existed,
perhaps there might have been some agreement among the persons who
speak of it. If nothing like a History of Literature existed before
the fourth century, we can expect no information. If it did exist,
it was of no value to Ephorus, Heracleides, and the author of the
_Hipparchus_. They are all at odds.
Mr. Monro says, as every man trained in historical criticism must say,
"modern scholars have tried to harmonise these notices, and to assign
to (the Spartan) Lycurgus (named by Ephorus), Solon (named by Diogenes
Laertius)," Pisistratus, and Hipparchus their several shares in the
service done to Homer. "This would be legitimate if there were reason
to regard any of the notices as historical. But, in fact, they are
merely mythical anecdotes, supplemented by the guesses of scholars."[9]
Whatever Homeric critics may think, they will find no trained historian
to dissent from Mr. Munro on those points.
_Historia silet_! History is mute. We only know that from an uncertain
period there were quinquennial recitations of "Homer," and Homer alone,
at Athens, and that "Homer" was used in education. Beyond that all is
"guesses of scholars." These guesses vary according to the taste and
fancy of the learned.
In this conclusion every one who is accustomed to historical
criticism will agree with Mr. Monro. Nothing can be made out of late
and contradictory statements; nothing beyond the fact that "Homer"
(whatever may be meant by "Homer") was quinquennially recited, under
regulations, at Athens, and entered into public education.
Mr. A. W. Verrall, however, says: "In general, the very last thing that
we get from disputants on either side is an exact construction and
estimation of what, truly or falsely, is recorded about the history of
Homer." Mr. Verrall writes thus in a _Quarterly_ review of Mr. Murray's
_Rise of the Greek Epic_, and of my _Homer and his Age_.
The questions as to what is "recorded" about "the history of Homer," I
had treated in my _Homer and the Epic_ (pp. 35, 38, 67-70), examining
the evidence, such as it is, and the opinions of Wolf, Ritschl, and
others; and siding with Mr. Monro (I may add, with Blass, Meyer,
Nutzhorn, Mr. T. W. Allen, and many others). In _Homer and his Age_
(pp. 46-50), I again went over the old ground, in reference to Mr.
Leaf's changes of opinion.
Mr. Verrall writes:[10] "The texts, as we have said, are not treated
fairly." Now really the texts are treated as the historian treats all
texts that come into his province. The dates of the alleged events
are set beside the dates of the texts concerning them; the texts are
remote, contradictory, and unevidential; the best historians, and the
historian who most carefully examined the popular traditions concerning
Pisistratus and his sons, namely, Thucydides, say nothing about the
alleged events.
Mr. Verrall also writes: "The record, such as it is, is hardly ever
correctly represented. The most punctilious of scholars (Grote, for
example) are in this matter not to be trusted."[11]
These are severe reproaches! Mr. Monro is not mentioned: are any of
his remarks unfair and untrust-worthy?
Mr. Verrall says: "We cannot but think that the ancient record about
the origin of Homer suffers unfairly from certain prepossessions
which all would disclaim, but which are more easily disclaimed than
abandoned."
For me, I frankly confess my own prepossessions, but consciousness of
his bias is the safeguard of the historian; it compels him to make
certain that he adds nothing to and takes nothing from what Mr. Verrall
calls "the ancient record," and _I_ call "the various ancient legends."
Mr. Verrall insists that "internal evidence about the history of a
book, if not controlled by record, is liable to infinitely elastic
interpretation." Certainly, but there is no possibility of "control by
record" in the case of the history of the Homeric poems.