FAMILIAR STUDIES IN HOMER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_FAMILIAR STUDIES_
IN
_HOMER_
BY
AGNES M. CLERKE
-------
AB HOMERO OMNE PRINCIPIUM
-------
LONDON
_LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO._
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16^{th} STREET
1892
All rights reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE.
HOMERIC archæology has, within the last few years, finally left the
groove of purely academic discussion to advance along the new route laid
down for it by practical methods of investigation. The results are full
of present interest, and of future promise. They already imply a
reconstruction of the Hellenic past; they vitalise the Homeric world,
bringing it into definite relations with what went before, and with what
came after, and transforming it from a poetical creation into an
historical reality. Excavations and explorations in Greece, Egypt, and
Asia Minor, have thus entirely changed the aspect of the perennial
Homeric problem, and afford reasonable hope of providing it with a
satisfactory solution.
These remarkable, and promptly-gathered fruits of an experimental system
of inquiry deserve the attention, not of scholars alone, but of every
educated person; nevertheless, their value has as yet been realised by a
very limited class. The following chapters may then, it is hoped,
usefully serve to illustrate some of them for the benefit of the general
reading public, while making no pretension to discuss, formally or
exhaustively, the wide subject of Homeric antiquities. For the proper
discharge of that task, indeed, qualifications would be needed to which
the writer lays no claim. The object of the present little work will be
attained if it contribute to stir a wider interest in the topics it
discusses; above all, should it in any degree help to promote a
non-erudite study of the noble poetical monuments it is concerned with.
Greek enough to read the Iliad and Odyssey in the original can be
learned with comparative ease; and what trouble there may be in its
acquisition meets an ample reward in mental profit and enjoyment of a
high order. These ancient epics have a unique freshness about them; they
are still open founts of animating pleasure for all who choose to apply
to them; one cannot, then, but regret that so few have intellectual
energy to do so.
The author’s best thanks are due to Messrs. Macmillan, and to Messrs.
Hodder and Stoughton, for their courteous permission to reprint the
chapters entitled ‘Homeric Astronomy,’ ‘Homer’s Magic Herbs,’ and ‘The
Dog in Homer,’ originally published in the pages of _Nature_,
_Macmillan’s Magazine_, and the _British Quarterly Review_ respectively.
In quoting illustrative passages from the Homeric poems, considerable
use has been made of the admirable prose version of the Iliad by Messrs.
Lang, Leaf, and Myers, and of the Odyssey by Messrs. Butcher and Lang.
With the object, however, of securing a certain variety of effect,
versified translations have also been resorted to, their authors being
duly specified in foot-notes. The citations of Helbig’s valuable work,
_Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmälern erläutert_, refer to the second
enlarged edition published in 1887.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HOMER AS A POET AND AS A PROBLEM 1
II. HOMERIC ASTRONOMY 30
III. THE DOG IN HOMER 58
IV. HOMERIC HORSES 84
V. HOMERIC ZOOLOGY 116
VI. TREES AND FLOWERS IN HOMER 150
VII. HOMERIC MEALS 176
VIII. HOMER’S MAGIC HERBS 207
IX. THE METALS IN HOMER 231
X. HOMERIC METALLURGY 258
XI. AMBER, IVORY, AND ULTRAMARINE 283
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAMILIAR STUDIES IN HOMER.
CHAPTER I.
HOMER AS A POET AND AS A PROBLEM.
THE perennial youth of the Homeric poems is without a parallel in the
history of art. No other imaginative works have so nearly succeeded in
bidding defiance to the ‘tooth of time.’ Like the golden watch-dogs of
Alcinous, they seem destined to be ‘deathless and ageless all their
days.’ Nor is theirs the faded immortality of Tithonus—the bare
preservation of a material form emptied of the glow of vitality, and
grown out of harmony with its environment. Their survival is not even
that of an ‘Attic shape’ whose undeniable beauty has, in our eyes,
assumed somewhat of a recondite coldness, very different from the
loveliness of old, when connoisseurship was not needed for appreciation.
The Iliad and Odyssey are still auroral. They have the charm of an
‘unpremeditated lay,’ springing from the very source of our own life;
they appeal alike to rude sensibilities and to cultivated tastes; their
splendour and pathos, their powerful vitality, the strength and
swiftness of their numbers, require to be accentuated by no critical
notes of admiration; they strike of themselves the least tutored native
perception. These vigorous growths out of the deep soil of humanity have
not yet been transported from the open air of indiscriminate enjoyment
into the greenhouse of æstheticism; delight in them lays hold of any
schoolboy capable of reading them fluently in the original as naturally
as enthralment with ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ commands the
unreflecting nursery. For they combine, as no other primitive poetry
does, imaginative energy with sobriety of thought and diction. The _ne
quid nimis_ regulates all their scenes. They are simple without being
archaic, fervid without extravagance, fanciful, yet never grotesque. The
strict proprieties of classic form effectually restrain in them the
exuberance of romantic invention. Not that any such distinctions in the
mode of composition had then begun to be thought of. The poet was
unconsciously a ‘law unto himself.’ Indeed the very potency of his
creative faculty prescribed retrenchment and moderation; the images
conjured up by it with much of the plastic reality of sculpture
subjecting themselves spontaneously to the laws of sculpturesque
fitness. Clear-cut and firm of outline, they move in the transparent
ether of definite thought. Projected into the vaporous atmosphere of a
riotous fancy, they might show vaster, but they could hardly be equally
impressive.
But these matchless productions are not merely the ‘wood-notes wild’ of
untrained inspiration. They imply a long course of free development
under favourable conditions. The vehicle of expression used in them
might alone well be the product of centuries of pre-literary culture.
Greek hexameter verse was by no means an obvious contrivance. It is an
exceedingly subtle structure, depending for its effect—nay, for its
existence—upon unvarying obedience to a complex set of metrical rules.
These could not have originated all at once, by the decree of some
poetical law-giver. They must have been arrived at more or less
tentatively by repeated experiments, the recognised success of which
led, in the slow course of time, to their general adoption.
Moreover, the legendary materials of the Epics were not dug straight out
of the mine of popular fancy and tradition. They had doubtless been
elaborated and manipulated, before Homer took them in hand, by
generations of singers and reciters. The ‘tale of Troy divine’ was
already a full-leaved tree when he plucked from it and planted the
branches destined to flourish through the ages. His verses display or
betray acquaintance with many ‘other stories’ of public notoriety
besides those completely unfolded in them. The fate of Agamemnon, the
death of Achilles, the madness of Ajax, the advent of Neoptolemus, the
slaying of Memnon, son of the Morning, the ambush in the Wooden Horse,
the mysterious wanderings of Helen, the last journey of Odysseus,
furnished themes of surpassing interest, all or most of which had been
made into songs for the pastime of lordly feasters and the solace of
noble dames, before the wrath of Achilles suggested a more adventurous
flight. Inexhaustible, indeed, was the store of romantic adventure
furnished by the famous ten years’ siege.
A castle built in cloudland, or at most
A crumbling clay-fort on a windy hill,
Where needy men might flee a robber-host,
This, this was Troy! and yet she holds us still.[1]
Footnote 1:
Lang’s _Helen of Troy_, vi. 21.
But the saga-literature of the Greeks did not begin with the mustering
of the fleet at Aulis. The ‘ante-Troica’ were not neglected. Many a
ballad was chanted about the doings of those ‘strong men’ who ‘lived
before Agamemnon,’ although it was not their fortune to be commemorated
by a supreme singer. That supreme singer, however, knew much concerning
the Argonauts, the War of Thebes, the Calydonian Boar-hunt, the sorrows
of Niobe, and the betrayal of Bellerophon; ante-Trojan lays served as
parables for the instruction of Clytemnestra, and the recreation of
Achilles in that disastrous interval when he doffed his armour and
strung his lyre. And a small but privileged class of the community was
devoted, under the presumed tuition of the Muses, to the perfecting and
perpetuation of these treasures of poetic lore.
Homer was accordingly no unprepared phenomenon. He rose in a sky already
luminous. The flowering of his genius, indeed, marked the close of an
epoch. His achievements were of the definitive and synthetic kind; they
summed up and surpassed what had previously been accomplished; they were
the outcome—although not the necessary outcome—of a multitude of minor
performances.
Now it is impossible to admit the prevalence of such sustained poetical
activity as the Homeric Epics by their very nature postulate, apart from
the existence of a tolerably widespread and well-regulated social
organisation. They besides describe a polity which was certainly not
imaginary, and thus lead us back to a pre-Hellenic world, different in
many ways from historical Greece, and separated from it by several blank
and silent centuries. The people who moved and suffered, and nurtured
their loves and grudges in it, were called ‘Achæans’—the ethnical title
given by Homer to his countrymen from all parts of the Greek peninsula
and its adjacent islands. Homer himself was evidently an Achæan;
Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus, Helen and Penelope, sprang from the
same race, which was an offshoot from the general Hellenic stock. They
were a seafaring people, but not much given to commerce; active,
energetic, sensitive, highly imaginative, they showed, nevertheless,
receptivity rather than inventiveness as regards the practical arts of
life. Their great national exploit was probably that bellicose
expedition to the Troad upon which the Ilian legend, with all its
mythical accretions, was founded; and some records of attacks by them on
Egypt have been deciphered on hieroglyphically-inscribed monuments; but
they can claim no assured place in history. As a nation, they ceased
indeed to exist before the dim epoch of fables came to an end; the
Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus brought about their political
annihilation and social disintegration, impelling them, nevertheless, to
establish new settlements in Asia Minor, and thus setting on foot the
long process by which Greek culture became cosmopolitan.
Homeric conditions do not then represent simply an initial stage in
classic Greek civilisation. There was no continuous progress from the
one state of things to the other. Development was interrupted by
revolution. Hence, much irretrievable loss and prolonged seething
confusion; until, out of the chaos, a renovated order emerged, and the
Greece of the Olympiads comes to view in the year 776 B.C.
For this reason Homeric Greece is strange to history; the relative
importance of the states included in it, the centre of gravity of its
political power, the modes of government and manners of men it displays,
are all very different from what they had become in the time of
Herodotus. But it is only of late that these differences have come to
have an intelligible meaning. Until expounded by archæological research,
they were a source of unmixed perplexity to the learned. The state of
society described by Homer could certainly not be regarded as
fictitious; yet it hung suspended, as it were, in the air, without
definite limitations of time or place. These uncertainties have now been
removed. The excavations at Mycenæ, undertaken by Dr. Schliemann in
1876, may be said to have had for their upshot the rediscovery of the
old Achæan civilisation, the material relics of which have been brought
to light from the ‘shaft-tombs’ of Agamemnon’s citadel, the ‘bee-hive
tombs’ of the lower city, in the palaces and other coeval buildings of
Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Orchomenos. The points of agreement between Homeric
delineations and Mycenæan antiquities are, in fact, too numerous to
permit the entertainment of any reasonable doubt that the poet’s
experience lay in the daily round of Mycenæan life—of life, that is to
say, governed by the same ideas and carried on under approximately the
same conditions with those prevailing through the ancient realm of the
sons of Atreus.
The detection of this close relationship has lent a totally new aspect
to what is called the Homeric Question, widening its scope at the same
time that it provides a sure basis for its discussion. For this can no
longer be disconnected from inquiries into the status and fortunes of
the great confederacy, out of the wreck of which the splendid fabric of
Hellenic society arose. The civilisation centred at Mycenæ covered a
wide range; how wide we do not yet fully know: the results of future
explorations must be awaited before its limits can be fixed. It
undoubtedly spread, however, beyond Greece proper through the Sporades
to Crete, Rhodes, the coasts of Asia Minor, and even to Egypt. The
traces left behind by it in Egypt are of particular importance.[2] From
the Mycenæan pottery discovered in the Fayûm, tangible proof has been
derived that the Græco-Libyan assaults upon that country were to some
extent effective, and that the seafaring people who took part in them
were no other than the Homeric Achæans, then in an early stage of their
career. The fact of their having secured a foothold in the Nile Valley
accounts, too, for the strong Egyptian element in Mycenæan art; and the
evidence of habitual intercourse is further curiously strengthened by
the presence of an ostrich egg amid the other antique remains in the
Myceneæan citadel graves.[3] Above all, the Egypto-Mycenæan pottery,
from its association with other objects of known dates, is determinable
as to time. And it appears, as the outcome of Mr. Flinders Petrie’s
careful comparisons, that one class of vases, adorned with linear
patterns, goes back to about 1400 B.C., while those exhibiting
naturalistic designs were freely manufactured in 1100. The culminating
period, however, of pre-Hellenic fictile art is placed considerably
earlier, in 1500-1400 B.C., and there are indications that its
development had occupied several previous centuries. Mr. Petrie, indeed,
finds himself compelled to believe that the Græco-Libyan league was
already active in or before the year 2000 B.C. Achæan predominance may,
then, very well have boasted a millennium of antiquity when the Dorians
crossed the Gulf of Corinth. Its subversion drove many of the leading
native families over the Ægean, where they found seats already doubtless
familiar to them through their own and their ancestors’ maritime and
piratical adventures, and the colonising impulse once given, did not
soon cease to promote the enlargement of the Greek domain. But the mass
of the Achæan people lived on in their old homes, in a state of
subjection resembling that of the Saxons in England after the Norman
Conquest. They were designated ‘Periœci’ by their Dorian rulers.
Footnote 2:
Flinders Petrie, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vols. xi. p. 271; xii.
p. 199.
Footnote 3:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 268.
Archæological discoveries have thus shown the largeness of the
historical issues embraced in the Homeric Question; they also afford the
possibility, and still more, the promise, of satisfactorily answering
it. The problem is threefold. It includes the consideration of where,
when, and how the great Epics were composed.
Seven cities—
Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ—
competed for the honour of having given birth to their author. Wherever,
in short, their study was localised by the foundation of a school of
‘Homerids,’ there was asserted to be the native place of the eponymous
bard. The truth is that no really authentic tradition regarding him
reached posterity. The very name of ‘Homer,’ or the ‘joiner together,’
is obviously rather typical than personal; and it gradually came to
aggregate round it all that was antique and unclaimed in the way of
verse. The aggregation, it is true, was presumably formed in Asiatic
Ionia; the ‘Cyclic Poems,’ supplementary to the Iliad, were mainly the
work of Ionic poets; and the Epic was substantially an Ionic dialect.
Yet the inference of an Asiatic origin thence naturally arising now
clearly appears to be invalid. The linguistic argument, to begin with,
has been completely disposed of by Fick’s remarkable demonstration that
the Iliad and Odyssey underwent an early process of Ionicisation.[4] So
far as metrical considerations permitted, they were actually translated
from the Æolic, or rather Achæan tongue, in which they were composed,
into the current idiom of Colophon and Miletus. Objections urged from
this side against their production in Europe have accordingly lost their
force; and the reasons favouring it, always strong, have of late grown
to be well-nigh irresistible. Some of the more cogent were briefly
stated by Mr. D. B. Monro in 1886;[5] and others might now be added. One
only, but one surely conclusive, need here be mentioned. It is this.
Homer could not have been an Asiatic Greek, because Asiatic Greece did
not exist in Homer’s time. He was aware of no Achæan settlements in Asia
Minor; not one of the twelve cities of the Ionian confederacy emerges in
the Catalogue, Miletus only excepted, and Miletus with a special note of
‘barbarian’ habitation attached to it.[6] The Ionian name is, in the
Iliad, once applied to the Athenians[7] (presumably), but does not occur
at all in the Odyssey; where, on the other hand, Dorians, unknown in the
Iliad, are casually named as forming an element in the mixed population
of Crete.[8] The reputed birthplaces of Homer, then, on the eastern
coast of the Ægean, were, when he had reached his singing prime, still
occupied by Carians and Mæonians; and we must accordingly look for his
origin in the West. There is no escape from this conclusion except by
the subterfuge of imagining the geography of the Epics to be
artificially archaic. They related to a past time, it might be said,
they should then reproduce the conditions of the past. But this is a
notion essentially modern. No primitive poet ever troubled himself about
such scruples of congruity. Nor if he did, could the requisite detailed
information by possibility be at his command, while his painful care to
avoid what we call anachronisms would cause nothing but perplexity to
his unsophisticated audience. Homer’s map of Greece must accordingly be
accepted as a true picture of what came under his personal observation.
It is, indeed, as Mr. Freeman says, ‘so different from the map of Greece
at any later time that it is inconceivable that it can have been
invented at any later time.’[9] Since, however, it affords the Greek
race no Asiatic standing ground, it follows of necessity that Homer was
a European.
Footnote 4:
_Die Homerische Odyssee in der ursprünglichen Sprachforme
wiedergestellt_, 1883.
Footnote 5:
_English Historical Review_, January, 1886.
Footnote 6:
_Iliad_, ii. 868.
Footnote 7:
_Ib._ xiii. 685.
Footnote 8:
_Od._ xix. 177.
Footnote 9:
_Historical Geography_, p. 25.
This same consideration helps to determine the age in which he lived.
Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any
such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Not a hint betrays acquaintance with the fact that the polity described
in them had, in the meantime, been overturned by external violence. A
silence so remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition
that when they were composed, the revolution in question had not yet
occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view. Practical explorations
have shown pre-Hellenic Greece to have been the seat of a rich,
enterprising, and cultivated nation. They have hence removed objections
on the score of savagery, inevitably to be encountered, formerly urged
against pushing the age of Homer very far back into the past. The life
carried on at Mycenæ, in fact, twelve or thirteen centuries before the
Christian era, was in many respects more refined than that depicted in
the poems. It was known to their author only after it had lost something
of its pristine splendour. But the Mycenæan civilisation of his
experience, if a trifle decayed, was complete and dominant; and this it
never was subsequently to the Dorian conquest. To have collected,
however, into an imaginary organic whole the fragments into which it had
been shattered by that catastrophe, would assuredly have been a task
beyond his powers. Nothing remains, then, but to admit that he lived in
the pre-Dorian Greece which he portrayed. Moreover, the state of
seething unrest ensuing upon the overthrow of the Mycenæan order must
have been absolutely inconsistent with the development of a great school
of poetry. If Homer, then, was a European—as appears certain—the
inference is irresistible that he flourished before the society to which
he belonged was thrown by foreign invaders into irredeemable
disarray—that is, at some section of the Mycenæan epoch.
There are many convincing reasons for holding that section to have been
a late one. One of the principal is the familiar use of iron in the
poems, although none has been met with in the old shaft-tombs within the
citadel of Mycenæ, and only small quantities in the less distinguished
graves below. It is, to be sure, conceivable that a substance introduced
as a vulgar novelty devoid of traditional or ancestral associations
might have been employed for the ordinary purposes of everyday life long
before it was allowed to form part of sepulchral equipments; a similar
motive prescribing its virtual exclusion from the Homeric Olympus.
Still, the discrepancy can hardly be explained away without the
concession of some lapse of time as well.
The Homeric and Mycenæan modes of burial, too, were different. Cremation
is practised throughout the Epics; the Mycenæan dead were preserved
intact. ‘The contrast,’ Dr. Leaf remarks,[10] ‘is a striking one; but it
is easy to lay too much stress upon it. It may well be that the
conditions of sepulture on a campaign were perforce different from those
usual in times of peace at home. The mummifying of the body and the
carrying of it to the ancestral burying-place in the royal citadel were
not operations such as could be easily effected amidst the hurry of
marches or the privations of a siege; least of all after the slaughter
of a pitched battle. It is therefore quite conceivable that two methods
of sepulture may of necessity have been in use at the same time. And for
this assumption the Iliad itself gives us positive grounds. One warrior
who falls is taken home to be buried; for to a dead son of Zeus means of
carriage and preservation can be supplied which are not for common men.
Sarpedon is cleansed by Apollo, and borne by Death and Sleep to his
distant home in Lycia, not that his body may be burnt, but that his
brethren and kinsfolk may _preserve_ it ‘with a tomb and gravestone, for
such is the due of the dead.’
Footnote 10:
Introduction to _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 26.
He said; obedient to his father’s words,
Down to the battle-field Apollo sped
From Ida’s height; and from amid the spears
Withdrawn, he bore Sarpedon far away,
And lav’d his body in the flowing stream;
Then with divine ambrosia all his limbs
Anointing, cloth’d him in immortal robes;
To two swift bearers gave him then in charge,
To Sleep and Death, twin brothers; in their arms
They bore him safe to Lycia’s widespread plains.[11]
Footnote 11:
_Iliad_, xvi. 676-88 (Lord Derby’s translation).
The Mycenæan custom of embalming corpses was not, then, strange to
Homer; and the Homeric custom of burning them has _perhaps_—for the
evidence is indecisive—left traces in the more recent graves of the
Mycenæan people. What is certain is that simple interment was everywhere
primitively in use, and that the pyre was a subsequent innovation, at
first only partially adopted, and perhaps nowhere exclusively in vogue.
The plastic art of Mycenæ seems to have been on the decline when the
‘sovran poet’ arose. This can be inferred from the wondering admiration
displayed in his verses for what must once have been its ordinary
performances, as well as from the marked superiority assigned in them to
foreign over native artists. They include besides no allusion to the
signet-rings so plentiful at Mycenæ, no notice, in any connexion, of the
art of gem-engraving, nor of the indispensable luxury—to ladies of high
degree—of toilet-mirrors. Active intercourse with Egypt, again, had
evidently ceased long prior to the Homeric age. The Nile is, in the
poems, not even known by name, but only as the ‘river of Egypt;’ and the
country is reached, not in the ordinary course of navigation, but
through recklessness or ill-luck, by adventurers or castaways.
We can now gather the following indications regarding the date of the
Homeric poems. They must have originated during the interval between the
Trojan War—which, in some shape, may be accepted as an historical
event—and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. They probably
originated not very long before the latter event, when the Mycenæan
monarchy was of itself tottering towards a fall precipitated by the
frequently repeated incursions of ruder tribes from the north. The
generally accepted date for the final event is eighty years after the
taking of Troy, or 1104 B.C. But this rests on no authentic
circumstance, and may very well be a century or more in error. A
preferable chronological arrangement would place Homer’s flourishing in
the eleventh century, and the overthrow of Mycenæ near its close.
Difficulties of sundry kinds can thus be, in a measure, evaded or
conciliated, without encroaching overmuch on the voiceless centuries
available for the unrecorded readjustment of the disturbed elements of
Greek polity.
As to the mode of origin of the two great poems which have come down to
us from so remote an age, much might be said; but a few words must here
suffice. It is a topic on which the utmost diversity of opinion has
prevailed since F. A. Wolf published, in 1795, his famous ‘Prolegomena,’
and as to which unity of views seems now for ever unattainable. For
demonstrative evidence is naturally out of the question, and estimates
of opposing probabilities are apt to be strongly tinctured with
‘personality.’ Prepossessions of all kinds warp the judgment, even in
purely literary matters, and, in this case especially, have led to the
learned advocacy of extreme opinions. Thus, partisans of destructive
criticism have carried the analysis of the Homeric poems to the verge of
annihilation; while ultra-conservatives insist upon a seamless whole,
and regard the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of Homer, in the same
sense and with the same implicit confidence that they hold the Æneid and
the Eclogues to be Virgilian, or ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’
to be Miltonic productions. Between these widely diverging paths,
however, there is a middle way laid down by common sense, which it is
tolerably safe to follow. A few simple considerations may help us to
find it.
We must remember, in the first place, that the Homeric poems were
composed, not to be privately read, but to be publicly recited. They
remained unwritten during at least a couple of centuries, flung on the
waves of unaided human memory. Oral tradition alone preserved them; and
not the punctilious oral tradition of a sacerdotal caste like the
Brahmins, but that of a bold and innovating class of ‘rhapsodes,’
themselves aspiring to some share in the Muse’s immediate favours, and
prompt to flatter the local vanities and immemorial susceptibilities of
their varied audiences. Within very wide limits, they were free to
‘improve’ what long training had enabled them to appropriate. Their
licence infringed no literary property; there was no authorised text to
be corrupted; one man’s version was as good as another’s. It is not,
then, surprising that the primitive order of the Epics became here and
there disarranged, or that interpolated and substituted passages usurped
positions from which they could not afterwards easily be expelled.
Expository efforts have, indeed, sometimes succeeded only in adding
fresh knots to the already tangled skein. Pisistratus, however, did good
service by for the first time _editing_ the Homeric poems.[12] Scattered
manuscripts of them had doubtless existed long previously; but it was
their collection and collation at Athens, and the disposal in a
determinate succession of the still disjointed materials they afforded,
which placed the Greek people in the earliest full possession of their
epical inheritance.
Footnote 12:
German critics doubt the fact. See Niese, _Die Entwickelung der
Homerischen Poesie_, p. 5.
As the general result of a century of Homeric controversy, instinctive
appreciation may be said broadly to have got the better of verbal
criticism. Not but that the latter has done valuable work; but it is now
pretty plainly seen to have been, in some quarters, carried considerably
too far. The triumphs enjoyed by German advocates of the
‘Kleinliedertheorie’—of the disjunction, that is to say, of the Epics
into numerous separate lays—are generally recognised to have been merely
temporary. A large body of opinion was, at the outset, captivated by
their arguments; it has of late tended to swing back towards some
approximation to the old orthodoxy. There is, indeed, much difficulty in
conceiving the profound and essential unity apparent to unprejudiced
readers of the Iliad and Odyssey to be illusory; nor should it be
forgotten that the evoking of a cosmos from a chaos implies a single
regulative intelligence. And a cosmos each poem might very well be
called; while the ‘embryon atoms’ from which they sprang, of legends,
stories, myths, and traditions, constituted scarcely less than an
Ocean without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,
And time, and place, are lost.
The Odyssey and the Iliad, however, stand in this respect by no means on
the same footing. In the former, fundamental unity is obvious; the
development of the plot is logical and continuous; there are no
considerable redundancies, no superfluous adventures, no oblivious
interludes; the sense of progress towards a purposed end pervades the
whole. Careful scrutiny, it is true, detects, in the details of the
narrative, some few trifling discrepancies; but attempts to remove them
by tampering with the general plan of its structure lead at once to
intolerable anomalies. So much cannot be said for the Iliad. Here the
component strata are manifestly dislocated, and some intruded masses can
be clearly identified. Thus the Tenth Book at once detaches itself both
in substance and style from the remaining cantos. It narrates an
adventure wholly disconnected from the main action unfolded in them, and
narrates it with a coolness and easy fluency very unlike the rush and
glow of genuine Iliadic verse. Few, accordingly, are the critics who
venture to claim the episode, brilliant and interesting though it be, as
an integral part of the original poem. Yet even when it has been set
aside, things do not go altogether straight. The basis of the story is
furnished by the wrath of Achilles and its direful consequences; but
while the hero sulks in his tent, a good deal of miscellaneous and
largely irrespective fighting proceeds, during which he sinks out of
sight, and is only transiently kept in mind. Zeus himself is allowed to
forget his solemn promise to Thetis of avenging, through the defeat of
the Greeks, the injury done to her son by Agamemnon; and the Olympian
machinery generally works in an ill-regulated and haphazard fashion.
Moreover, the embassy of conciliation in the Ninth Book is ignored later
on; while the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Books, devoted mainly to
the obsequies of Patroclus and Hector, have by some critics been deemed
superfluous, by others inconsistent with an exordium announcing—as Pope
has it—
The wrath that hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,
Whose limbs unburied by the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Through the weight of these objections, Mr. Grote felt compelled to
dissever the Iliad into a primitive part, which he called the Achilleid,
and a mass of accessional poetry, most likely of diverse origin and
date. And a similar view still prevails. Only that the Achilleid has
been cut down, by further retrenchments, to the compass of a somewhat
prolix Lay, treating, as its express subject, of the ‘Wrath’ of
Achilles. Dr. Leaf indeed accentuates the separation by upholding the
probable origin, on opposite sides of the Ægean, of the nuclear and
adventitious portions of the Epic.
The force of some of the arguments urging to this analysis cannot be
denied, yet there are others, perhaps of a higher order of importance,
which indicate the former predominance of a partially destroyed entirety
of design through by far the larger portion of this wonderful
prehistoric work. Speaking broadly, an identical spirit pervades the
whole. The Tenth Book, and a few notoriously interpolated passages, such
as the feeble and futile Theomachy, make the sole exceptions to this
rule of ethical homogeneity. Elsewhere, from beginning to end, we meet
the same spontaneous fervour of expression, the same magnificent energy
kept in hand like a spirited steed; an unfailing sense of the splendour
of heroic achievement, and a glowing joy in human existence, tempered by
the heart-thrilling remembrance of its pathetic mystery of sorrow. This
prevalent uniformity in manner and spirit is certainly unfavourable to
the hypothesis of divided authorship.
The marvellous beauty and power of those sections of the poem believed
to be adventitious is also a circumstance to be considered. They include
many of its most famous scenes—the parting of Hector and Andromache, the
arming of Athene, the meeting of Glaucus and Diomed, and the whole vivid
interlude of Diomed’s prowess, the orations in the tent of Achilles, the
chariot-race, the reception of Priam as his suppliant by the fierce
slayer of his son. To them exclusively, above all, belongs the personal
presentation of Helen; outside their limits, she has no place in the
Iliad.
These same accretions are not merely magnificent in themselves, and rich
in shining incidents, but they add incalculably to the general effect of
the Epic. They contribute, in fact, a great part of its dramatic force
and the whole of its moral purport. Without them it would be a bald and
unfinished performance—the abortive realisation of a sublime conception.
The arming of Agamemnon, for instance, and his feats of private valour,
could never have been designed as the immediate sequel to the Promise of
Zeus; while they constitute a most fitting climax to the series of the
baffled Greek efforts for victory. They are admirably prepared for by
the stories of the duel between Menelaus and Paris, of the broken pact,
of the prowess of Diomed, of the nocturnal embassy to Achilles.
Moreover, the irresistible might of Pelides is brought with tenfold
impressiveness on the scene after the fighting powers of each of the
other Achæan chiefs have been fully displayed, and proved fruitless.
Above all, the Achillean drama itself would lose its profound
significance by the retrenchment of the Ninth and two closing Books. For
it was the implacability of the ‘swift-footed’ hero that was justly
punished by the calamity of the death of Patroclus; and he showed
himself implacable only when he haughtily rejected a formal offer of
ample reparation.[13] At that point he became culpable; and might only
win revenge at the cost of the acutest anguish of which his nature was
capable. The Ninth Book, in short, constitutes the ethical crisis of the
Iliad; and the moralising at second-hand, to the innermost core of its
structure, of a work purporting to be already complete, is certainly a
unique, if not an impossible phenomenon.
Footnote 13:
Mr. A. Lang urges this point with great effect in an article on ‘Homer
and the Higher Criticism’ (_National Review_, Feb. 1892), published
after the present Chapter had been sent to press.
Nor is it easily credible that the ransom of the body of Hector made no
part of its fundamental plan. Greek feelings of propriety would have
been outraged—and outraged in the most distasteful way—by disregard of
the dying petition of so spotless and disinterested a champion, albeit
of a lost cause, and by the abandonment of his body as carrion to
unclean beasts and birds. And Achilles, without the elevating traits of
his courtesies in the Games, and his pity for Priam, would have remained
colossal only in brutality, a blind instrument of fury, an example of
the triumph of ignoble instincts. But such a presentation of his
character could never have been purposed by the author of the First
Iliad. Not of this base stamp was the hero whom Thetis rose from the sea
to comfort. For even in the first rush of his tremendous passion, he
still saw the radiant eyes and listened to the voice of Athene; he did
not wholly desert celestial wisdom; and celestial wisdom could never
have suffered the balance of his stormy soul to be finally overthrown.
But just the needed compensatory touches are supplied by his noble
bearing in the Patroclean celebration, and far more, by his chivalrous
compassion for the hapless old king of Troy. They could not have been
omitted by a poet of supreme genius—could not, since the imagination has
its logical necessities, among which may be reckoned that of
_equilibration_. There is accordingly no possibility of founding a truly
great poem, wholly, or mainly, on the crude brutalities of actual
warfare. Humanity revolts from them in the long run; and humanity
prescribes its laws to art. The slaughtering rage of Achilles demands a
corresponding height of generosity and depth of pity; it would else be
atrocious. His wrath, in fact, postulates his tenderness; and hence the
great difficulty in believing that the singer of the First Book failed
to insert the Ninth, or stopped short at the Twenty-second Book of the
Iliad.
The upshot of our little discussion, then, is to assign both to the
Iliad and Odyssey a European origin, in the pre-Dorian time, when Mycenæ
was the political centre of the Achæan world. Provisionally, they may be
said to date from the eleventh century B.C. Moreover, the Odyssey in its
essential integrity, and the Iliad in large part, are each the work of
one master-mind. The Iliad, none the less, can no longer be said to
present a poem ‘of one projection’; it shows seams, and junctures, and
discrepancies; its mass has, perhaps, been broken up and awkwardly
pieced together again; it is a building, in fact, which has suffered
extensive restoration.
The further question remains as to the united or divided authorship of
these antique monuments, regarded as separate wholes. Are they
twin-productions, or did they spring up independently, favoured by the
same prevailing climate, from a soil similarly prepared? The answer may
be left to the dispassionate judgment of any ordinary, uncritical
reader. Supposing his mind, _per impossibile_, a blank on the point, it
would certainly not occur to him to attribute the two poems to a single
individual. They are probably as unlike in style as, under the
circumstances, it was possible for them to be. A great deal, indeed,
belongs to them in common. They were rooted in the same traditions; they
arose under the same sky and in the same ideal atmosphere; the
inexhaustible storehouse of their legendary raw material was the same.
Strictly analogous conditions of politics and society are depicted in
them; they were addressed to similarly constituted audiences; their
verses were constructed on the same rhythmical model. Moreover, the
author of one was familiar with the grand example set him by the other.
Yet the temper and spirit of each are profoundly different. In the
Iliad, a magnificent ardour prevails; the singer is aflame with his
theme; his words glow; vivid impressions crowd upon his mind; it takes
all the power of his genius to restrain their riotous audacity and
marshal them into orderly succession. The author of the Odyssey, on the
other hand, is in no danger of being swept away by the impetuosity of
his thoughts. He is always collected and at leisure; he has even
_esprit_, which implies a low mental temperature; he can stand by with a
smile, and look on, while his characters unfold themselves; his passion
never blazes; it is smouldering and sustained, like that of his
protagonist.
Numerous small discrepancies, besides, seem to betray a personal
diversity of origin. So Iris, the frequent, indeed the all but
invariable messenger of the gods in the Iliad, drops into oblivion in
the Odyssey, and is replaced by Hermes; Charis is the wife of Hephæstus
in the Iliad, Aphrodite in the Odyssey; Neleus has twelve sons in the
Iliad, three in the Odyssey; Pylos is a district in the Iliad, a town in
the Odyssey; the oracle of the Dodonæan Zeus is located in Thessaly in
the Iliad, in Epirus in the Odyssey, and so on.[14] The Odyssey,
moreover, is obviously junior to the Iliad. It gives evidence of an
appreciable development of the arts of life relatively to their state in
the rival poem; the processes of verbal contraction have advanced in the
interval; the ethical standard has become more refined; while formulaic
and other expressions common to both are unmistakably ‘in place,’ as
geologists say, in the Iliad, ‘erratic,’ or ‘transported,’ in the
Odyssey.
Footnote 14:
See an article on the ‘Doctrine of the Chorizontes,’ in the _Edinburgh
Review_, vol. 133.
A difference in the place of origin, perhaps, helps to accentuate the
effect due to a difference of time. The thread of tradition regarding
these extraordinary works is indeed hopelessly broken. Their prehistoric
existence is divided from their historical visibility by the chasm
opened when the civilisation of which they were the choicest flowers was
subverted by the irrepressible Dorians. The Iliad, however, contains
strong internal evidence of owning Thessaly as its native region. The
vast pre-eminence of the local hero, the Olympian seat of the gods, the
partiality displayed for the horse, intimacy with Thessalian traditions
and topography, all suggest the relationship. The name of Thessaly, it
is true, does not occur either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey; nor had
the semi-barbarous Thessalians, when they were composed, as yet crossed
the mountains from Thesprotia to trample down the Achæan culture of the
land of Achilles. It thus became, after Homer’s time, the scene of a
revolution analogous in every respect to that which overwhelmed the
Peloponnesus.
The Homer of the Odyssey, who was not improbably of Peloponnesian birth,
must have travelled widely. He had undeniably some personal acquaintance
with Ithaca, his topographical indications, apart from the gross blunder
of planting the little island west, instead of east of Cephalonia,
corresponding on the whole quite closely with reality. And he knew
something besides of most parts of the mainland of Greece, of Crete,
Delos, Chios, and the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. The experience of the
Iliadic bard was doubtless somewhat, though not greatly, more limited.
Its range extended, at any rate, from ‘Pelasgic Argos’ to the Troad,
familiarity with which is shown in all sections of the Trojan epic. The
cosmopolitan character of both poets is only indeed what might have been
expected. The privileged members of an Achæan community must have
enjoyed wide opportunities of observation. For Mycenæan culture was
strongly eclectic. Elements from many quarters were amalgamated in it,
Asiatic influences, however, predominating. The men of genius who acted
as the interpreters of its typical ideas would hence have been unfit for
their task unless they had personally tried and proved all such elements
and influences. They were presumably to some extent adventurers by sea
and land. But, further than this, their individuality remains shrouded
in the impenetrable veil of their silence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------