HOMERIC ZOOLOGY.
THE establishment of a clear distinction between men and beasts might
seem a slight effort of defining intellect, yet it has not been quite
easily made. In children the instinct of assimilation long survives the
experience of difference. A little boy of six, asked by the present
writer what profession he thought of adopting, replied with alacrity
that he ‘would like to be a bird,’ and it was only on being reminded of
the diet of grubs associated with that state of life, that he began to
waver as to its desirability. The same incapacity for drawing a
boundary-line between the realm of their own imperfect consciousness and
the mysterious encompassing region of animal life, is visible in the
grown-up children of the wilds. Hence the zoological speculations of
primitive man inevitably take the form of a sort of projection of human
faculties into animal natures. Now human faculties, released from the
control of actuality, spontaneously expand. In a vague and vaporous way,
they transcend the low level of hard fact, and become pleasantly
diffused in the ‘ampler ether’ of the unknown. Beasts thus transfigured
are incapable, it may be said, of simple rationality. The powers
transferred to them grow like Jack’s Beanstalk, beyond the range of
sight.
Universal folk-lore, in all its tangled ramifications, bears witness to
the truth of this remark. Tutelary animals, of the Puss in Boots type,
abound and expatiate there. They are all-contriving and infallible.
Their favour leads to fortune and power. They hold the clue to the
labyrinth of human destinies. Through their protection the oppressed are
rescued, the ragged are clothed in golden raiments, the outwardly
despicable win princely honours, and have their names inscribed in the
‘Almanach de Gotha’ of fairy-land. No wonder that such beneficent
potentates, albeit feathered or furry, should have been claimed as
ancestors and hereditary protectors by human beings full of untutored
yearnings for the unattainable. To our ideas, indeed, there seems little
comfort or credit to be got out of counting kinship with a beaver, a
bear, or an opossum; but things looked differently when the world was
young; nor has it yet everywhere grown old. In Australia, black bipeds
still own themselves the cousins and clients of kangaroos. American
Indians pay homage to ‘manitous’ personally, as well as to ‘totems’
tribally associated with them; and twilight tales are perhaps to this
hour whispered in Ireland, about a certain ‘Master of the Rats,’ whose
hostility it is eminently undesirable though lamentably easy to incur.
Even among Greeks and Romans of the classical age, to say nothing of
Aztecs and Alemanni, belief lurked in the preternatural wisdom of
certain animals. Their formal worship, most fully elaborated in Egypt,
but diffused over ‘Tellus’ orbed ground,’ sprang from the same stock of
ideas. To a remarkable extent, the Greeks were exempt from its degrading
associations. Their partial survival on Greek soil, as in the veneration
at Phigaleia, of the horse-headed Demeter, represented, without doubt,
an under-current of aboriginal tradition, reaching back to the Pelasgic
fore-time.
Now it might have been anticipated that the earliest literature would
have been the most deeply permeated by these primitive reminiscences.
But this is very far from being the case. Their influence is scarcely
perceptible in the two great epics of Troy and Ithaca; and indeed the
modes of thought from which they originated were completely alien to the
ethical sentiments pervading those marvellous first-fruits of Greek
genius. Neither poem includes the smallest remnant of zoolatry. The
Homeric divinities are absolutely anthropomorphic. They are men and
women, exempt from the limitations, unscathed by the ills of humanity,
and radiant with the infinite sunshine of immortal happiness. Of
infra-human relationships they exhibit no trace. They are far less
concerned with the animal kingdom than they grew to be in classical
times. Typical beasts or birds have not yet become attached to them. The
eagle, though once in the Iliad called the ‘swift messenger’ of Zeus, is
altogether detached from his throne and his thunder-bolt; Heré has not
developed her preference for the peacock—a bird introduced much later
from the East; Athene is without the companionship of her owl; no doves
flutter about the fair head of the ‘golden Aphrodite’; Artemis needs no
dogs to bring down her game. The Olympian menagerie, in short, has not
been constituted. On the ‘many-folded’ mountain of the gods, no beasts
are maintained save the half-dozen horses strictly necessary for the
purposes of divine locomotion.
Very significant, too, is Homer’s ignorance of the semi-bestial,
semi-divine beings who figure in subsequent Greek mythology. ‘Great Pan’
has no place in his verse; Satyrs and Tritons are equally unrecognised
by him; his Nereids are ‘silver-footed sea-nymphs,’ with no fishy
tendencies.
Mixed natures of any kind seem, in truth, to have been little to his
taste. Even if he could have apprehended the symbolical meanings
underlying them in dim Oriental imaginations, he could scarcely have
reconciled himself to the sacrifice of beauty which they involved. Men,
horses, bulls, lions, were all separately admirable in his eyes; but to
blend, he felt instinctively, was not to heighten their perfections.
Thus, the hybrid nature of the Centaurs, if present to his mind, was
left undefined as something ‘abominable, inutterable.’ The Harpies,
realised by Hesiod as half-human fowls, remained with him barely
personified tornadoes. Neither Pegasus nor the Minotaur, neither the
bird-women of Stymphalis, nor the Griffons of the Rhipæan mountains,
found mention in his song, and he admitted—and that in a
family-legend—but one true specimen of the dragon-kind in the ‘Chimæra
dire’ slain by Bellerophon. The monstrosity of Scylla is left purposely
vague. She is a fancy-compound defying classification. She lived, too,
in the outer world of the Odyssey, where ‘things strange and rare’
flourished in quiet disregard of laws binding elsewhere.
In the same region of wonderland occur the oxen of the Sun—the only
sacred animals recognised by our poet. They had their pasturing-ground
in the island of Thrinakie, whither Helios retired to divert himself
with their frolics after each hard day of steady Mediterranean shining;
and so keen was his indignation at their slaughter by the famished
comrades of Odysseus, that a cosmical strike would have ensued but for
the promise of Zeus to inflict condign punishment upon the delinquents.
From the shipwreck by which this promise was fulfilled, Odysseus, alone
exempt from guilt in the matter, was the solitary survivor.
The Homeric treatment of animals, compared with the extravagances
prevalent in other primitive literature, is eminently sane and rational.
Not through indifference to their perfections. A peculiar intensity of
sympathy with brute-nature is, on the contrary, one of the
distinguishing characteristics of the Homeric poems. But that sympathy
is based upon the appreciation of real, not upon the transference of
imaginary qualities. Beasts are, on the whole, kept strictly in their
proper places. The only genuine example of their sublimation into higher
ones is afforded by the horses of Achilles, and this during a transport
of epic excitement. Otherwise, the fabulous element admitted concerning
animals—and it is just in their regard that fable commonly runs riot—is
surprisingly small.
In its room, we find such a wealth of acute and accurate observation, as
no poet, before or since, has had the capacity to accumulate, or the
power to employ for purposes of illustration. It is unmistakably private
property. Details appropriated at second-hand could never have fitted in
so aptly with the needs of imaginative creation. Moreover, the
conventional types of animal character were of later establishment.
There was at that early time no recognised common stock of popular or
proverbial wisdom on the subject to draw upon. The lion had not yet been
raised to regal dignity; the fox was undistinguished for craft, as the
goose for folly. Beasts and birds had their careers in literature before
them. Their reputations were still to make. They carried about with them
no formal certificates of character. The poet was accordingly unfettered
in his dealings with them by preconceived notions; whence the delightful
freshness of Homer’s zoological vignettes. The dew of morning, so to
speak, is upon them. They are limned direct from his own vivid
impressions of pastoral, maritime, and hunting scenes.
As to the locality of those scenes, some hints, but scarcely more than
hints, can be derived. For in the course of nearly three thousand years,
the circumstances of animal distribution have been affected by changes
too considerable and too indeterminate to admit of confident argument
from the state of things now to the state of things then; while the
notices of the poet, incidental by their very nature, are of the utmost
value for what they tell, but warrant only very hesitating inferences
from what they leave untold. Thus, it does not follow that because Homer
nowhere mentions the cuckoo, he was therefore unfamiliar with its note,
which, from Hesiod’s time until now, has not failed to proclaim the
advent of spring among the olive-groves of Bœotia, and must have been
heard no less by Paris or Anchises than by the modern archæological
traveller, along the oak-clad and willow-fringed valley of Scamander.
Nor is the faintest presumption of a divided authorship supplied by the
fact that the nightingale sings in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad.
Nevertheless, analogous considerations should not be altogether
neglected in Homeric criticism. They may possibly help towards the
answering of questions both of time and place: of time, through
allusions to domesticated animals; of place, by a comparison of the
known range of wild species with the fauna of the two great epics. And,
first, as regards domesticated animals.
The list of these is a short one. The Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad
commanded the services of the horse in battle, of oxen and mules for
draught; dogs were their faithful allies in hunting and cattle driving,
and they kept flocks of sheep and goats. The ass appears only once, and
then indirectly, on the scene, when the lethargic obstinacy of his
behaviour serves to heighten the effect of Ajax’s stubbornness in fight.
Thus:
And as when a lazy ass going past a field hath the better of the
boys with him, an ass that hath had many a cudgel broken about
his sides, and he fareth into the deep crop, and wasteth it,
while the boys smite him with their cudgels, and feeble is the
force of them, but yet with might and main they drive him forth
when he hath had his fill of fodder; even so did the
high-hearted Trojans and allies, called from many lands, smite
great Aias, son of Telamon, with darts on the centre of his
shield, and ever followed after him.[136]
Footnote 136:
_Iliad_, xi. 557-64.
The creature’s ‘little ways’ were then already notorious, although all
mention of him or them is omitted from the Odyssey, as well as from the
Hesiodic poems. His existence is indeed implied by the parentage of the
mule. But mules were brought to the Troad _ready-made_ from
Paphlagonia.[137] It was not until later that they were systematically
bred by the Greeks.
Footnote 137:
Hehn and Stallybrass, _Wanderings of Plants and Animals_, pp. 110,
460.
The Semitic origin of the word ‘ass’ rightly indicates the introduction
of the species into Europe from Semitic Western Asia. As to the date of
its arrival, all that can be told is that it was subsequent to the
beginning of the bronze epoch. The pile-dwellers of Switzerland and
North Italy were unacquainted with an animal fundamentally Oriental in
its habitudes. Its reluctance, for instance, to cross the smallest
streamlet attests the physical tradition of a desert home; and the white
ass of Bagdad represents to this day, the fullest capabilities of the
race.[138] Yet neither the ass nor the camel was included in the
primitive Aryan fauna. For they could not have been known, still less
domesticated, without being named, and the only widespread appellations
borne by them are derived from Semitic sources. Evidently the loan of
the words accompanied the transmission of the species. It is very
difficult, in the face of this circumstance—as Dr. Schrader has
pertinently observed[139]—to locate the Aryan cradle-land anywhere to
the east of the Bosphorus.
Footnote 138:
Houghton, _Trans. Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. v. p. 49.
Footnote 139:
_Thier- und Pflanzen-Geographie_, p. 17.
Dr. Virchow was struck, on his visit to the Troad, in 1879, with the
similarity of the actual condition of the country to that described in
the Iliad.[140] The inhabitants seem, in fact, during the long interval,
to have halted in a transition-stage between pastoral and agricultural
life, by far the larger proportion of the land supplying pasturage for
ubiquitous multitudes of sheep, oxen, goats, horses, and asses. The
sheep, however, belong to a variety assuredly of post-Homeric
introduction, since the massive tails hampering their movements could
not well have escaped characterisation in some emphatic Homeric epithet.
Footnote 140:
_Beiträge zur Landeskunde der Troas_; Berlin. _Abhandlungen_, 1879, p.
59.
Both short and long-horned cattle, all of a dark-brown colour, may now
be seen grazing over the plain round Hissarlik, the latter probably
resembling more closely than the former those with which Homer was
acquainted. The oxen alike of the Iliad and Odyssey are ‘wine-coloured,’
‘straight-horned,’ ‘broad-browed,’ and ‘sinuous-footed’; it was above
all through the shuffle of their gait, indicated by the last adjective,
and due to the peculiar structure of the hip-joint in the whole species,
that the poet distinctively visualised them. ‘Lowing kine,’ and
‘bellowing bulls’ are occasionally heard of, chiefly—it is curious to
remark—in later, or suspected portions of the Iliad. Sheep and goats, on
the other hand, are often described as ‘bleating,’ and the cries of
birds are called up at opportune moments; but Homer’s horses neither
whinny nor neigh; his pigs refrain from grunting; his jackals do not
howl; the tremendous roar of the lion nowhere resounds through his
forests. Homeric wild beasts are, indeed, save in the vaguely-indicated
case of one indeterminate specimen,[141] wholly dumb.
Footnote 141:
_Iliad_, x. 184.
Singularly enough, a peculiar sensitiveness to sound is displayed in the
description of the Shield of Achilles. Yet plastic art is essentially
silent. Even the perpetuated cry of the Laocoön detracts somewhat from
the inherent serenity of marble. The metal-wrought creations of
Hephæstus, however, not only live and move, but make themselves audible
to a degree uncommon elsewhere in the poems. Thus, in one scene, or
compartment, a _lowing_ herd issues to the pasturing-grounds, where two
lions seize from their midst, and devour, a _loudly-bellowing_ bull,
while nine _barking_, though frightened dogs are, by the herdsmen,
vainly urged to a rescue. In the vintage-episode of the same series,
delight in melodious beauty is almost as apparent as in the so-called
‘Homeric’ hymn to Hermes. The ‘Linus-song,’ ‘sweet even as desire,’ sung
to the youthful grape-gatherers, sounds through the ages scarcely less
sweet than
The liquid voice
Of pipes, that filled the clear air thrillingly,
when the Muses gathered round Apollo long ago in the ethereal halls of
Olympus.
Among the animals now variously serviceable to man by the shores of the
Hellespont, are the camel, the buffalo, and the cat, none of them known,
even by name, to the primitive Achæans. The household cat, as is well
known, remained, during a millennium or two, exclusively Egyptian; then
all at once, perhaps owing to the exigency created by the migration
westward of the rat, spread with great rapidity in the first centuries
of the Christian era, over the civilised world. Saint Gregory Nazianzen
set the first recorded European example of attachment to a cat. His pet
was kept at Constantinople about the year 360 A.D.[142] No archæological
vestiges of the species, accordingly, have been found in Asia Minor.
Cats haunt the ruins of Hissarlik, but in no case lie buried beneath
them.
Footnote 142:
Houghton, _Trans. Society Biblical Archæology_, vol. v. p. 63.
The bones mixed up among the prehistoric _débris_ belong chiefly, as
might have been expected, to sheep, goats, and oxen, those of swine,
dogs, and horses being relatively scarce.[143] Hares and deer are also
represented, and of birds, mainly the goose, with scanty traces of the
swan and of a small falcon. These remains are of different epochs, yet
all without exception belong to animals mentioned in the Iliad, whether
as wild or tame. The Homeric condition of the pig and goose respectively
presents some points of interest.
Footnote 143:
Virchow, _loc. cit._ p. 63.
The pig was not one of the animals primitively domesticated in the East.
The absence of Vedic or Avestan mention of swine-culture makes it
practically certain that the species was known only in a wild state to
the early Aryan colonists of Iran and India. Nor had any more intimate
acquaintance with it been developed in Babylonia; although the Swiss
pile-dwellers, at first similarly behindhand, advanced, before the stone
age had terminated, to pig-keeping.[144] Dr. Schrader, indeed, bases
upon the occurrence only in European languages of the word porcus, the
conjecture that the subjugation of the ‘full-acorned boar’ was first
accomplished in Europe;[145] and if this were so, the operations of
swine-herding would naturally come in for a larger share of notice in
the Odyssey, as the more European of the two poems, than in the Iliad.
And in fact, the swineherd of Odysseus is an important personage, and
plays a leading part in the drama of his return—pigs, moreover, figuring
extensively among the agricultural riches of Ithaca, while there is no
sign that any were possessed by Priam or Anchises. Alone among the
Greeks of the Iliad, Achilles is stated to have placed before his guests
a ‘chine of well-fed hog’; and the very few Iliadic allusions to fatted
swine are all in immediate connexion with the same hero. If this be a
result of chance, it is a somewhat grotesque one.
Footnote 144:
Rütimeyer, _Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten_, pp. 120-21.
Footnote 145:
_Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 261.
The porcine proclivities of modern Greeks are especially strong.
Christian and Mahometan habitations were, in the days of Turkish
domination, easily distinguished by the sty-accommodation attached to
the former; while in certain villages of the Morea and the Cyclades, the
pigs no longer occupied a merely subordinate position, and odours not
Sabæan, wafted far on the breeze, announced to the still distant
traveller the nature of the harbourage in store for him.[146]
Footnote 146:
Gell, _A Journey in the Morea_, p. 63.
The most antique of domesticated birds is the goose, and Homer was
acquainted with no other. Penelope kept a flock of twenty,[147] mainly,
it would seem, for purposes of diversion, since the loss of them through
the devastations of an eagle is treated from a purely sentimental point
of view. They were fed on wheat, the ‘height of good living,’ in Homeric
back-premises. The court-yard, too, of the palace of Menelaus sheltered
a cackling flock,[148] the progenitors of which Helen might have brought
with her from Egypt, where geese were prehistorically reared for the
table. That the bird occurs _only_ tame in the Odyssey, and _only_ wild
in the Iliad, constitutes a distinction between the poems which can
scarcely be without real significance. The species employed, in the
Second Iliad, to illustrate, by the tumult of their alighting on the
marshy banks of the Cayster, the clangorous march-past of the Achæan
forces, has been identified as _Anser cinereus_, numerous specimens of
which fly south, in severe winters, from the valley of the Danube to
Greece and Asia Minor.
Footnote 147:
_Odyssey_, xix. 536.
Footnote 148:
_Ib._ xv. 161.
The familiar cocks and hens of our poultry-yards are, in the West,
post-Homeric. Their native home is in India; but through human agency
they were early transported to Iran, where the cock, as the bird that
first greets the light, acquired in the eyes of Zoroastrian devotees, a
pre-eminently sacred character. His introduction into Greece was a
result of the expansion westward of the Persian empire. No cocks are met
with on Egyptian monuments; the Old Testament leaves them unnoticed; and
the earliest mention of them in Greek literature is by Theognis of
Megara, in the middle of the sixth century B.C.[149] Pigeons, on the
other hand, are quite at home in Homeric verse. They are of two kinds.
One is the rock-pigeon, called from its slate-coloured plumage _peleia_
(πελόs = dusky), and described as finding shelter in rocky clefts, and
evading pursuit by a rapid, undulating flight.[150] Its frequent
recurrence in similes can surprise no traveller who has observed the
extreme abundance of _Columba livia_ all round the coasts of the
Ægean.[151] The second Homeric species of _Columba_ is the ring-dove,
once referred to as the habitual victim of the hawk. Tame pigeons are
ignored, and were, indeed, first seen in Greece after the wreck of the
Persian fleet at Mount Athos in 492 B.C.[152] Yet dove-culture was
practised as far back as the oldest records lead us in Egypt and Persia.
The dove was marked out as a ‘death-bird’ by our earliest Aryan
ancestors, and figures in the Vedas as a messenger of Yama. But Homer,
unconcerned, as usual, with animal symbolism, makes no account, if he
had ever heard, of its sinister associations.
Footnote 149:
Hehn and Stallybrass, _Wanderings of Plants and Animals_, pp. 241-43.
Footnote 150:
Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 120.
Footnote 151:
Lindermayer, _Die Vögel Griechenlands_, p. 120.
Footnote 152:
Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 257.
Among Homeric wild animals, the first place incontestably belongs to the
lion, and the Iliad, in especial, gives extraordinary prominence to the
king of beasts. In savage grandeur he stalks, as it were, through the
varied scenery of its similitudes, indomitable, fiercely-despoiling,
contemptuous of lesser brute-forces. His impressive qualities receive no
gratuitous enhancement; he rouses no myth-making fancies; there is no
fabulous ‘quality of mercy’ about him, nor of magnanimity, nor of
forbearance; he is simply a ‘gaunt and sanguine beast,’ a vivid
embodiment of the energy of untamed and unsparing nature.
He is not brought immediately upon the scene of action; the Homeric
poems nowhere provide for him a local habitation; it is only in the
comparatively late Hymn to Aphrodite that a place is specifically
assigned to him among the feral products of Mount Ida. His portraiture,
nevertheless, in the similes of the Iliad is too minute and faithful to
leave any shadow of doubt of its being based upon intimate personal
acquaintance. The poet must have witnessed with his own eyes the change
from majestic indifference to bellicose frenzy described in the
following passage; he must have caught the greenish glare of the oblique
feline eyes, noted the preparatory tail-lashings, and mentally
photographed the crouching attitude, and the yawn of deadly
significance, that preceded the fierce beast’s spring.
And on the other side, the son of Peleus rushed to meet him,
like a lion, a ravaging lion whom men desire to slay, a whole
tribe assembled; and first he goeth his way unheeding, but when
some warrior-youth hath smitten him with a spear, then he
gathereth himself open-mouthed, and foam cometh forth about his
teeth, and his stout spirit groaneth in his heart, and with his
tail he scourgeth either side his ribs and flanks and goadeth
himself on to fight, and glaring is borne straight on them by
his passion to try whether he shall slay some man of them, or
whether himself shall perish in the forefront of the
throng.[153]
Footnote 153:
_Iliad_, xx. 164-73.
Take, again, the picture of the lioness defending her young, while
Within her the storm of her might doth rise,
And the down-drawn skin of her brows over-gloometh the fire of her
eyes.[154]
Or this other, exemplifying, like the ‘hungry people’ simile in
‘Locksley Hall,’ the ‘imperious’ beast’s dread of fire:
And as when hounds and countryfolk drive a tawny lion from the
mid-fold of the kine, and suffer him not to carry away the
fattest of the herd, all night they watch, and he in great
desire for the flesh maketh his onset; but takes nothing
thereby, for thick the darts fly from strong hands against him,
and the burning brands, and these he dreads for all his fury,
and in the dawn he departeth with vexed heart.[155]
Footnote 154:
Way’s _Iliad_, xvii. 135-36. The feminine pronouns are here introduced
to avoid incongruity. The Homeric vocabulary did not include a word
equivalent to ‘lioness.’
Footnote 155:
_Iliad_, xx. 164-75.
Scenes of leonine ravage among cattle are frequently presented. As here:
And as when in the pride of his strength a lion mountain-reared
Hath snatched from the pasturing kine a heifer, the best of the herd,
And, gripping her neck with his strong teeth, bone from bone hath he
snapped,
And he rendeth her inwards and gorgeth her blood by his red tongue
lapped,
And around him gather the dogs and the shepherd-folk, and still
Cry long and loud from afar, howbeit they have no will
To face him in fight, for that pale dismay doth the hearts of them
fill.[156]
We seem, in reading these lines—and there are many more like them—to be
confronted with a vivified Assyrian or Lycian bas-relief. In the antique
sculptures of the valley of the Xanthus, above all, the incident of the
slaying of an ox by a lion is of such constant recurrence[157] as almost
to suggest, in confirmation of a conjecture by Mr. Gladstone,[158] a
similarity of origin between them and the corresponding passages of the
Iliad. The lion, indeed, occupies throughout the epic a position which
can now with difficulty be conceived as having been assigned to him on
the strength of European experience alone. Still, it must not be
forgotten that the facts of the matter have radically changed within the
last three thousand years.
Footnote 156:
Way’s _Iliad_, xvii. 61-67.
Footnote 157:
Fellows’ _Travels in Asia Minor_, p. 348, ed. 1852.
Footnote 158:
_Studies in Homer_, vol. i. p. 183.
In prehistoric times, the lion ranged all over Europe, from the Severn
to the Hellespont; for the _Felis spelæus_ of Britain[159] was
specifically identical with the grateful clients of Androclus and Sir
Iwain, no less than with the more savage than sagacious beasts now
haunting the Upper Nile valley, and the marshes of Guzerat and
Mesopotamia.
Footnote 159:
Boyd Dawkins and Sanford, _Pleistocene Mammalia_, p. 171.
Already, however, at the early epoch of the pile-built villages by the
lake of Constance, he had disappeared from Western Europe; yet he
lingered long in Greece. Of his presence in the Peloponnesus only
legendary traces remain, although he figures largely in Mycenæan art;
but in Thrace he can lay claim to an historically attested existence.
Herodotus[160] recounts with wonder how the baggage-camels of Xerxes’
army were attacked by lions on the march from Acanthus to Therma; and he
defines the region haunted by them as bounded towards the east by the
River Nestus, on the west by the Achelous. Some Chalcidicean coins, too,
are stamped with the favourite oriental device of a lion killing an ox;
and Xenophon _possibly_—for his expressions are dubious—includes the
lion among the wild fauna of Thrace. The statements, on the other hand,
of Polybius and Dio Chrysostom leave no doubt that he had finally
retreated from our continent before the beginning of the Christian
era.[161]
Footnote 160:
Lib. vii. caps. 125, 126.
Footnote 161:
Sir G. C. Lewis, _Notes and Queries_, vol. viii. ser. ii. p. 242.
A Thessalian Homer might, then, quite conceivably, have beheld an
occasional predatory lion descending the arbutus-clad slopes of Pelion
or Olympus; yet the continual allusions to leonine manners and customs
pervading the Iliad show an habitual acquaintance with the animal which
is certainly somewhat surprising. It corresponds, nevertheless, quite
closely with the perpetual recurrence of his form in the plastic
representations of Mycenæ.
The comparatively few Odyssean references to this animal can scarcely be
said to bear the stamp of visual directness unmistakably belonging to
those dispersed broadcast through the earlier epic. Yet it would
probably be a mistake to suppose them derived at second-hand. Without,
then, denying that the author of the Odyssey had actually ‘met the ravin
lion when he roared,’ we may express some wonder that he, like his
predecessor of the Iliad, left unrecorded the auditory part of the
resulting brain-impression. For the voice of the lion is assuredly the
most imposing sound of which animated nature seems capable. Casual
allusions to it in the Hymn to Aphrodite and in the (nominally) Hesiodic
‘Shield of Hercules,’ are, nevertheless, perhaps the earliest extant in
Greek literature.
The bear figures in the Iliad and Odyssey solely as a constellation,
except that a couple of verses interpolated into the latter accord him a
place among the embossed decorations of the belt of Hercules. The living
animal, however, is still reported to lurk in the ‘clov’n ravines’ of
‘many-fountain’d Ida,’ and, according to a local tradition, was only
banished from the Thessalian Olympus through the agency of Saint
Dionysius.[162] The panther or leopard, on the contrary, although
contemporaneously with the cave-lion an inmate of Britain, disappeared
from Europe at a dim and remote epoch, while plentifully met with in
Caria and Pamphylia during Cicero’s governorship of Cilicia. Even in the
present century, indeed, leopardskins formed part of the recognised
tribute of the Pasha of the Dardanelles. The life-like scene, then, in
which the animal emerges to view in the Iliad, bears a decidedly Asiatic
character. Mr. Conington’s version of the lines runs as follows:
As panther springs from a deep thicket’s shade
To meet the hunter, and her heart no fear
Nor terror knows, though barking loud she hear,
For though with weapon’s thrust or javelin’s throw
He wound her first, yet e’en about the spear
Writhing, her valour doth she not forego,
Till for offence she close, or in the shock lie low.[163]
Footnote 162:
Tozer, _Researches in the Highlands of Turkey_, vol. ii. p. 64.
Footnote 163:
_Iliad_, xxi. 573-78.
Thoroughly Oriental, too, is the vision conjured up in the Third Iliad
of Paris challenging
To mortal combat all the chiefs of Greece,[164]
armed with a bow and sword, poising ‘two brass-tipped javelins,’ a
panther skin flung round his magnificent form. Elate with the
consciousness of strength and beauty, unsuspicious of the betrayal in
store for him by his own weak and volatile spirit, the _gaietta pelle_
of the fierce beast might have encouraged, as it did in Dante, a
cheerful forecast of the issue; yet illusorily in each case. In the
Odyssey, the panther is only mentioned as one of the forms assumed by
Proteus.
Footnote 164:
_Iliad_, iii. 20 (Lord Derby’s trans.).
The Homeric wild boar is of quite Erymanthian powers and proportions;
with more valour than discretion, he does not shrink from encountering
the lion himself—
Being ireful, on the lion he will venture;
and the laying-low of a single specimen is reckoned no inadequate result
of a forest-campaign by dogs and men. Such an heroic brute, worthy to
have been the emissary of enraged Artemis, succumbed, no longer ago than
in 1850, to the joint efforts, during several toilsome days, of a band
of thirty hunters.[165] The ‘chafed boar’ in the Iliad either carries
everything before him, as Ajax scattered the Trojans fighting round the
body of Patroclus; or he dies, tracked to his lair, if die he must,
fearlessly facing his foes, incarnating rage with bristles erected,
blazing eyes, and gnashing tusks. Nor was the upshot for him inevitably
fatal. Idomeneus of Crete, we are told, awaiting the onset (which proved
but partially effective) of Æneas and Deiphobus,
Stood at bay, like a boar on the hills that trusteth to his
strength, and abides the great assailing throng of men, in a
lonely place, and he bristles up his back, and his eyes shine
with fire, while he whets his tusks, and is right eager to keep
at bay both men and hounds.[166]
Footnote 165:
Erhard, _Fauna der Cycladen_, p. 26.
Footnote 166:
_Iliad_, xiii. 471-75.
The boar is a solitary animal. Like Hal o’ the Wynd, he fights for his
own right hand; and he was accordingly appropriated by Homer to image
the valour of individual chiefs, while the rank and file figure as
wolves and jackals, hunting in packs, pinched with hunger, bloodthirsty
and desperately eager, but formidable only collectively. Jackals still
abound in the Troad and throughout the Cyclades, and their hideous wails
and barkings enhance the desolation of the Nauplian and Negropontine
swamps.[167] Neither have wolves disappeared from those regions; and the
old dread of the animal which was at once the symbol of darkness and of
light, survives obscurely to this day in the vampire-superstitions of
Eastern Europe. The closeness of the connexion between vampires and
were-wolves is shown by a comparison of the modern Greek word
_vrykolaka_, vampire, with the Zend and Sanskrit _vehrka_, a wolf.[168]
Nor were the Greeks of classical times exempt from the persuasion that
men and wolves might temporarily, or even permanently, exchange
semblances. Many stories of the kind were related in Arcadia in
connexion with the worship of the Lycæan Zeus; and Pausanias, while
critically sceptical as regards some of these, was not too advanced a
thinker to accept, as fully credible, the penal transformation of
Lycaon, son of Pelasgus.[169] Such notions belonged, however, to a
rustic mythology of which Homer took small cognisance. His thoughts
travelled of themselves out from the sylvan gloom of primeval haunts
into the open sunshine of unadulterated nature.
In wood or wilderness, forest or den,
he met with no bogey-animals. For him neither beast nor bird had any
mysterious significance. He attributed to encounters with particular
species no influence, malefic or beneficial, upon human destiny. Of
themselves, they had, in his view, no concern with it, although ordinary
animal instincts might, under certain conditions, be so directed as to
be expressive to man of the will of the gods. In the Homeric scheme,
birds and serpents exclusively are so employed, without, however, any
departure from the order of nature. Thus, by night near the sedgy
Simoeis, a heron, _Ardea nycticorax_, disturbed by the approach of
Odysseus and Diomed, assured them, by casually flapping its way
eastward, that their expedition had the sanction of their
guardian-goddess.[170] The choice of the bird was plainly dictated by
zoological considerations alone; it had certainly no such recondite
motive as that suggested by Ælian,[171] who, with almost grotesque
ingenuity, argued that the owl, as the fowl of Athene’s special
predilection, could only have been deprived of the privilege of acting
as her instrument on the occasion through Homer’s consciousness of its
reputation as a bird of sinister augury—
Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen—
the truth being that both kinds of association—the mythological and the
superstitious—were equally remote from the poet’s mind.
Footnote 167:
Von der Mühle, _Beiträge zur Ornithologie Griechenlands_, p. 123;
Buchholz, _Homerische Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 202.
Footnote 168:
Tozer, _Researches_, vol. ii. p. 82.
Footnote 169:
_Descriptio Græciæ_, lib. vi. cap. 8; viii. cap. ii.
Footnote 170:
_Iliad_, x. 274.
Footnote 171:
_De Naturâ Animalium_, lib. x. fr. 37.
Similarly, the portent of
An eagle and a serpent wreathed in fight
appeared such only by virtue of the critical nature of the conjuncture
at which it was displayed. Hector, relying upon what he took to be a
promise of divine help, aimed at nothing less than the capture, in the
rout of battle, of the Greek camp, and the conflagration of the Greek
ships. But every step in advance brought him nearer to the tent where
the irate epical hero lay inert, but ready to spring into action at the
last extremity; and it was fully recognised that the arming of Achilles
meant far more than the mere loss of the fruits of victory. The balance
of events, then, if the proposed _coup de main_ were persevered with,
hung upon a knife-edge of destiny; and pale fear might well invade the
eager, yet hesitating Trojan host when, just as the foremost warriors
were about to breach the Greek rampart, an eagle flying westward—that
is, towards the side of darkness and death—let fall among their ranks a
coiling and blood-stained snake.[172]
And adown the blasts of the wind he darted with one wild scream;
Then shuddered the Trojans, beholding the serpent’s writhing gleam
In the midst of them lying, the portent of Zeus the Ægis-lord,
And to Hector the valiant Polydamas spoke with a bodeful word.[173]
His vaticinations were defied. The Trojan leader met them with the
memorable protest:
But thou, thou wouldst have us obey the long-winged fowl of the air!
Go to, unto these have I not respect, and nought do I care
Whether to rightward they go to the sun and the dayspring sky,
Or whether to leftward away to the shadow-gloomed west they fly.
But for us, let us hearken the counsel of Zeus most high, and obey,
Who over the deathling race and the deathless beareth sway.
One omen of all is best, that we fight for our fatherland!
Footnote 172:
Shelley has adopted and developed the incident in the opening stanzas
of the _Revolt of Islam_.
Footnote 173:
_Iliad_, xii. 207-10 (Way’s trans.).
Magnificent, but, in the actual case, mistaken. The shabby counsel of
Polydamas really carried with it the safety of Troy.
The eagle is virtually the Homeric king of birds. He is in the Iliad
‘the most perfect,’ as well as ‘the strongest and swiftest of flying
things’; his appearances in both poems, often expressly ordained by
Zeus, are always momentous, and are, accordingly, eagerly watched and
solicitously interpreted; moreover, they never deceive; to disregard the
warning they convey is to rush spontaneously to destruction. It is only,
however, in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, usually regarded as subsequent, in
point of composition, to the cantos embodying the primitive legend of
the ‘Wrath of Achilles,’ that the eagle begins to be marked out as the
special envoy of Zeus. Later, the companionship became so close as to
justify Æschylus in implying that the bird was in lieu of a dog to the
‘father of gods and men.’ The position, on the other hand, assigned, in
one passage of the Odyssey, to the hawk as the ‘swift messenger’ of
Apollo, was not maintained. The Hellenic Phœbus eventually disclaimed
all relationship with the hawk-headed Horus of the Nile Valley. The
rapidity, however, of the hawk’s flight, and his agility in the pursuit
of his prey, furnish our poet, again and again, with terms of
comparison. Here is an example, taken from the description of the deadly
duel outside the Scæan gate.
As when a falcon, bird of swiftest flight,
From some high mountain top on tim’rous dove
Swoops fiercely down; she, from beneath, in fear,
Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake,
Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey;
So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew,
So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit,
Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[174]
Footnote 174:
_Iliad_, xxii. 139-44 (Lord Derby’s trans.).
In popular Russian parlance, too, ‘the hurricane in the field, and the
luminous hawk in the sky,’ are the favourite metaphors of
swiftness.[175] Only that Homer’s falcon has no direct relations with
light; and of those indirectly traceable in the one phrase connecting
him with Apollo, the poet himself was certainly not cognisant.
Footnote 175:
Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, vol. ii. p. 193.
Vultures always lurk behind the scenes, as it were, of the Homeric
battle-stage. The abandonment to their abhorrent offices of the bodies
of the slain formed one of the chief terrors of death in the field, and
presented a much-dreaded means of enhancing the penalties of defeat. The
carrion-feeding birds perpetually on the watch to descend from the
clouds upon the blood-stained plain of Ilium, are clearly
‘griffon-vultures,’ _Vultur fulvus_; but the ‘bearded vulture,’
_Gypaëtus barbatus_, the _Lämmergeier_ of the Germans, which, like the
eagle, pursues live prey, occasionally lends, in a figure, the swoop and
impetus of its flight to vivify some incident of extermination.[176]
Both species occur in modern Greece.[177]
Footnote 176:
_Odyssey_, xxii. 302; _Iliad_, xvi. 428, xvii. 460.
Footnote 177:
Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 134.
One of the few bits of primitive folk-lore enshrined in the Iliad
relates to the wars of the cranes and pygmies. The passage is curious in
many ways. It contains the first notice of bird-migrations, implies the
constancy with which the ‘annual voyage’ of the ‘prudent crane’ was
steered during three thousand years,[178] and records the dim wonder
early excited by the sight and sound of that
Aery caravan, high over seas
Flying, and over lands with mutual wing
Easing their flight.
Footnote 178:
Koerner, _Die Homerische Thierwelt_, pp. 62-65.
In the Iliadic lines, the clamour of the Trojan advance, in contrast to
the determined silence of their opponents, is somewhat disdainfully
accentuated:
When afar through the heaven cometh pealing before them the cry of the
cranes,
As they flee from the wintertide storms and the measureless deluging
rains.
Onward with screaming they fly to the streams of the ocean-flood,
Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and
blood.[179]
Footnote 179:
Way’s _Iliad_, iii. 3-7.
The simile is felicitously plagiarised by Virgil in his
Quales sub nubibus atris
Strymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranant
Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[180]
but with the omission of the pygmy-element, probably as too childish for
the mature taste of his Roman audience. Its origin may perhaps be sought
in obscure rumours concerning the stunted races encountered by modern
travellers in Central Africa. The association of ideas, however, by
which they were connected in a hostile sense with ‘fowls o’ the air’ is
of trackless antiquity. It partially survives in the notion, current in
Finland, that birds of passage spend their winters in dwarf-land, ‘a
dweller among birds’ meaning, in polite Finnish phrase, a dwarf; and
bird-footed mannikins have a well-marked place in German
folk-stories;[181] but the root from which these withered leaves of
fable once derived vitality has long ago perished. Aristotle described
the ‘small infantry warr’d on by cranes’ as cave-dwellers near the
sources of the Nile;[182] Pliny turned them into a kind of
pantomime-cavalry, mounted on rams and goats, locating them among the
Himalayas, and conjuring up a fantastic vision of their periodical
descents to the seacoast, to destroy the eggs and young of their winged
enemies, against whom they could no otherwise hope to make head.[183]
For such disinterested ravage as was committed on their behalf by Herzog
Ernst, a mediæval knight-errant smitten with compassion for the
miserable straits to which they were reduced by the secular feud imposed
upon them, could scarcely be of more than millennial recurrence.[184]
Footnote 180:
_Æneid_, x. 264-66.
Footnote 181:
Grimm and Stallybrass, _Teutonic Mythology_, pp. 1420, 1450.
Footnote 182:
_De Animal. Hist._ lib. vii. cap. ii.; lib. iii. cap. xii.
Footnote 183:
_Hist. Nat._ lib. vii. cap. 2.
Footnote 184:
_Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum_, Bd. vii. p. 232.
The Homeric wild swan is _Cycnus musicus_, great numbers of which yearly
exchange the frozen marshes of the North for the ‘silver lakes and
rivers’ of Greece and Asia Minor. But the swan of the Epics sings no
‘sad dirge of her certain ending.’ Unmelodiously exultant, she flutters
with the rest of the fluttering denizens of the Lydian water-meadows, in
a scene full of animation.
And as the many tribes of feathered birds, wild geese or cranes
or long-necked swans, on the Asian mead by Kaÿstros’ stream, fly
hither and thither joying in their plumage, and with loud cries
settle ever onwards, and the mead resounds; even so poured forth
the many tribes of warriors from ships and huts into the
Scamandrian plain.[185]
Nor do the
Smaller birds with song
Solace the woods
of Homeric landscapes; once only, the ‘solemn nightingale’ is permitted,
in the story of the waiting of Penelope, ‘to pour her soft lays.’ ‘Even
as when the daughter of Pandareus,’ the Ithacan queen tells the
disguised Odysseus, ‘the brown bright nightingale, sings sweet in the
first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the
trees; and with many a turn and thrill she pours forth her full-voiced
music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew with the
sword unwitting, Itylus the son of Zethus the prince; even as her song,
my troubled soul sways to and fro.’[186]
Footnote 185:
_Iliad_, ii. 459-63.
Footnote 186:
_Odyssey_, xix. 518-24.
Intense appreciation of the sentiment of sound is here unmistakable; yet
elsewhere in the Homeric poems we hear of the sharp cry of the swallow,
of the screams of contending vultures, the piercing shriek of the eagle,
the wild pæan of the hawk, the clamorous vociferations of his terrified
victims, but nothing of the tender notes of thrush, lark, or linnet,
though deliciously audible throughout Greece
In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides.
Even in the island of Calypso, where delights are imaginable at will,
the poplars and cypresses house only such harsh-voiced birds as owls,
hawks, and cormorants—perhaps in order to leave the uncontested palm for
sweet singing to the nymph herself. The power of song does not, indeed,
appear to be, in Homer’s view, ‘an excellent thing in woman.’ It is not
included among the gifts of Athene, or even among the graces of
Aphrodite. None of his noble or admirable heroines possess it. It is
reserved, as part of a baleful dower of fascination, for enchantresses
who lure men to oblivion or ruin—for Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens.
The Odyssey being essentially a sea-story, the prevalence in its fauna
of marine species is not surprising. Seals frequently present
themselves; coots and cormorants, laughing gulls and sea-mews, dive and
play amid the surges that beat upon its magic shores; ospreys call and
cry; a cuttle-fish is limned to the life; Scylla has been supposed to
represent a magnified and monstrous cephalopod. Dolphins are common to
the Iliad and Odyssey, and frequent the Ægean nowadays as of old.[187]
Their mythical associations in post-Homeric literature are, indeed,
forgotten; but the direction in which they travel, collected into
shoals, helps the fishermen of Syra and Melos to a rude forecast of the
set of impending winds.
Footnote 187:
Erhard, _Fauna der Cycladen_, p. 27.
The only significant zoological novelty, then, in the Odyssey may be
said to lie in its recognition of the goose as a domesticated bird. The
prominence given by it to swine-keeping, only incidentally mentioned in
the Iliad, is also noteworthy. A dissimilarity, on the other hand, in
the ethical sentiment towards animals displayed in the two poems—above
all, as regards the horse and dog—cannot fail to strike a dispassionate
reader; but this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in a separate chapter.
The remark need only here be added that the conception of the dog Argos
seems no less thoroughly European than that of the horses of Rhesus is
Asiatic. Both, it is true, may have had a local origin on the same side
of the Hellespont, but, from the point of view of moral geography, they
undoubtedly belong to different continents.
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