LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
ALGONQUINS UNDER SHIELD
THE VASE OF ARISTONOTHOS
DAGGER WITH LION-HUNTERS
RINGS: SWORDS AND SHIELDS
FRAGMENTS OF WARRIOR VASE
FRAGMENT OF SIEGE VASE
ALGONQUIN CORSLET
GOLD CORSLET
CHAPTER I
THE HOMERIC AGE
The aim of this book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and
apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly
harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single
age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as
mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all,
cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will
follow that the poems themselves, as wholes, are the product of a single
age, not a mosaic of the work of several changeful centuries.
This must be the case--if the life drawn is harmonious, the picture
must be the work of a single epoch--for it is not in the nature of early
uncritical times that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere,
to the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses,
and so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set
of subjects. Even less are poets in uncritical times inclined to
"archaise," either by attempting to draw fancy pictures of the manners
of the past, or by making researches in graves, or among old votive
offerings in temples, for the purpose of "preserving local colour." The
idea of such archaising is peculiar to modern times. To take an instance
much to the point, Virgil was a learned poet, famous for his antiquarian
erudition, and professedly imitating and borrowing from Homer. Now, had
Virgil worked as a man of to-day would work on a poem of Trojan times,
he would have represented his heroes as using weapons of bronze.
[Footnote: Looking back at my own poem, _Helen of Troy_ (1883), I find
that when the metal of a weapon is mentioned the metal is bronze.] No
such idea of archaising occurred to the learned Virgil. It is "the iron"
that pierces the head of Remulus (_Aeneid_, IX. 633); it is "the iron"
that waxes warm in the breast of Antiphates (IX. 701). Virgil's men,
again, do not wear the great Homeric shield, suspended by a baldric:
AEneas holds up his buckler (_clipeus_), borne "on his left arm" (X. 26
i). Homer, familiar with no buckler worn on the left arm, has no such
description. When the hostile ranks are to be broken, in the _Aeneid_ it
is "with the iron" (X. 372), and so throughout.
The most erudite ancient poet, in a critical age of iron, does not
archaise in our modern fashion. He does not follow his model, Homer, in
his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. But, according to
most Homeric critics, the later continuators of the Greek Epics, about
800-540 B.C., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round
bucklers worn on the left arm. Yet, unlike Virgil, they always give
their heroes arms of bronze, and, unlike Virgil (as we shall see),
they do not introduce the buckler worn on the left arm. They adhere
conscientiously to the use of the vast Mycenaean shield, in their time
obsolete. Yet, by the theory, in many other respects they innovate
at will, introducing corslets and greaves, said to be unknown to the
beginners of the Greek Epics, just as Virgil innovates in bucklers and
iron weapons. All this theory seems inconsistent, and no ancient poet,
not even Virgil, is an archaiser of the modern sort.
All attempts to prove that the Homeric poems are the work of several
centuries appear to rest on a double hypothesis: first, that the later
contributors to the _ILIAD_ kept a steady eye on the traditions of the
remote Achaean age of bronze; next, that they innovated as much as they
pleased.
Poets of an uncritical age do not archaise. This rule is overlooked by
the critics who represent the Homeric poems as a complex of the work of
many singers in many ages. For example, Professor Percy Gardner, in his
very interesting _New chapters in Greek History_ (1892), carries neglect
of the rule so far as to suppose that the late Homeric poets, being
aware that the ancient heroes could not ride, or write, or eat boiled
meat, consciously and purposefully represented them as doing none of
these things. This they did "on the same principle on which a writer of
pastoral idylls in our own day would avoid the mention of the telegraph
or telephone." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 142.] "A writer of our own
day,"--there is the pervading fallacy! It is only writers of the last
century who practise this archaeological refinement. The authors of
_Beowulf_ and the _Nibelungenlied_, of the Chansons de _Geste_ and of
the Arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the
details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and
armour of their own much later ages.
But Mr. Leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of the
metal lead in the Epics, that it is mentioned in similes only, as though
the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic age. [Footnote:
_Iliad_, Note on, xi. 237.] Here the poet is assumed to be a careful
but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes to give an accurate
representation of the past. Lead, in fact, was perfectly familiar to the
Mycenaean prime. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 73.] The critical
usage of supposing that the ancients were like the most recent
moderns--in their archaeological preoccupations--is a survival of the
uncritical habit which invariably beset old poets and artists. Ancient
poets, of the uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a
writer in our day," as regards archaeological precision; at least we are
acquainted with no example of such accuracy.
Let us take another instance of the critical fallacy. The age of the
Achaean warriors, who dwelt in the glorious halls of Mycenae, was
followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics found in
the older tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, an age beginning,
probably, about 900-850 B.C. The culture of this "Dipylon age," a
time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of human figures drawn in
geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the
Achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use
of iron for weapons. Mr. H. R. Hall, in his learned book, _The Oldest
Civilisation of Greece_ (1901), supposes the culture described in the
Homeric poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon
period in Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.] He says, "The
Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there
is no attempt to archaise here...." They do not archaise as to the
details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently
archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece,"
in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate
description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. [Footnote: Op.
cit., pp. 223, 225.]
We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political and
social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it
is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. Mr.
Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological
precision of the Asiatic poets of the ninth century. Now to any one
who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind,
this theory seems not easily tenable. The difficulty of the theory is
increased, if we suppose that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors
of the Mycenaeans. Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr.
Ridgeway, victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or
whether, with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan
conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean
civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval
by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there would be little
thought of archaising among Achaean poets. [Footnote: Mr. Hall informs
me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.]
A distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other
artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase-painter
reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent
a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times
gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these
heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his
way, of what we call 'local colour....' Thus the Homeric poet is a more
conscientious historian than Virgil!" [Footnote: La _Grete de l'Epopee_,
Perrot et Chipiez, p. 230.]
Now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique
"local colour" than any other artists did. M. Perrot himself says with
truth, "the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_, and all the _Gestes_ of the same cycle
explain for us the Iliad and the Odyssey." [Footnote: op. cit., p. 5.]
But the poet of the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_ accoutres his heroes of old time
in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the
same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for
"local colour" in the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_. The very words "local colour"
are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of
ancient uncritical ages. The Homeric poets, like the painters of the
Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their
own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms"
before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for
they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction
of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really
exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour
and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to
archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic revival of the past in
its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal.
We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such
inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as
uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which
they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is,
the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric
poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of
several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his _Prolegomena_ to [blank space] (1795) there was
little opposition to the old belief that the _ILIAD_ and Odyssey were,
allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets.
After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have
maintained, generally speaking, that the _ILIAD_ is either a collection
of short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an
ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout
some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last
arranged by a literary redactor or editor.
The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the _Iliad_ is
a work of at least four centuries. Some of the objections to this theory
were obvious to Wolf himself--more obvious to him than to his followers.
He was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction between
reading the _ILIAD_ as all poetic literature is naturally read, and by
all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it in
the spirit of "the analytical reader." As often as he read for pleasure,
he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which
he invented for Homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running
stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the _harmony_
of _colour_ and of characters in the Epic, no man could be more angry
with his own destructive criticism than himself. Wolf ceased to be a
Wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader or
the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal.
But he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view,
that of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period
concerning whose history he could know nothing. "How could the thing
be possible?" he asked himself. "How could a long poem like the _Iliad_
come into existence in the historical circumstances?" [Footnote, exact
place in paragraph unknown: Preface to Homer, p, xxii., 1794.]. Wolf was
unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances were. We
know how little we know, but we do know more than Wolf. He invented the
historical circumstances of the supposed poet. They were, he said, like
those of a man who should build a large ship in an inland place, with no
sea to launch it upon. The _Iliad_ was the large ship; the sea was the
public. Homer could have no _readers_, Wolf said, in an age that, like
the old hermit of Prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no knowledge
of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied them
to literature. In such circumstances no man could have a motive for
composing a long poem. [Footnote: _Prolegomena to the Iliad_, p. xxvi.]
Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part of the
songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way
of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as
conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not take the circumstances
of the poet as described in the Odyssey. Here a king or prince has a
minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the ancient Irish
books of law. His duty is to entertain the prince and his family and
guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no reason why
his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity
that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing
a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age, in the
Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at
feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but
snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet without
readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship of song,
and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. To this
point we return; but when once critics, following Wolf, had convinced
themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon found
abundant evidence that it had never existed.
They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane poet
could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the poems had
not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (_unus color_). Each
age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own
colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition
of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot
in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary
law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house.
But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later
novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later
religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an advanced
stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language.
The usual position of critics in this matter is stated by Helbig; and
we are to contend that the theory is contradicted by all experience of
ancient literatures, and is in itself the reverse of consistent. "The
_artists_ of antiquity," says Helbig, with perfect truth, "had no idea
of archaeological studies.... They represented legendary scenes in
conformity with the spirit of their own age, and reproduced the arms and
implements and costume that they saw around them." [Footnote: _L'Epopee
Homerique_, p. 5; _Homerische Epos_, p. 4.]
Now a poet is an _artist_, like another, and he, too--no less than the
vase painter or engraver of gems--in dealing with legends of times past,
represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the
religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own
period. We shall later prove that this is true by examples from the
early mediaeval epic poetry of Europe.
It follows that if the _Iliad_ is absolutely consistent and harmonious
in its picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the _Iliad_
is the work of a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet
describing his own environment. But Helbig, on the other hand, citing
Wilamowitz Moellendorff, declares that the _Iliad_--the work of four
centuries, he says--maintains its unity of colour by virtue of
an uninterrupted poetical tradition. [Footnote: _Homerische
Untersuchungen_, p. 292; _Homerische Epos_, p. I.] If so, the poets must
have archaeologised, must have kept asking themselves, "Is this or that
detail true to the past?" which artists in uncritical ages never do,
as we have been told by Helbig. They must have carefully pondered the
surviving old Achaean lays, which "were born when the heroes could
not read, or boil flesh, or back a steed." By carefully observing the
earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid
anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea
of the epic heroes." Such is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He
appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old
way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig,
did not occur. The poets often wandered from the way. [Footnote: Helbig,
_Homerische Epos,_ pp. 2, 3.] Thus old Mycenaean lays, if any existed,
would describe the old Mycenaean mode of burial. The Homeric poet
describes something radically different. We vainly ask for proof that
in any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the
colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved,
and of which old minstrels sang. The thing is without example: of this
proofs shall be offered in abundance.
Meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the _Iliad_ as the work of
four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout
these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details
of a life remote from their own, and also did not.
For Helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. On the other
hand, he says that the later poets of the _Iliad_ did not cling to
tradition. "They allowed themselves to be influenced by their own
environment: _this influence betrays ITSELF IN THE descriptions of
DETAILS_.... The rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the
poems at will), "did not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements
into the oldest parts of the Epic." [Footnote: _Homerische Epos,_ p. 2.]
At this point comes in a complex inconsistency. The Tenth Book of the
_Iliad_, thinks Helbig--in common with almost all critics--"is one of
the most recent lays of the _Iliad_." But in this recent lay (say of
the eighth or seventh century) the poet describes the Thracians as on
a level of civilisation with the Achaeans, and, indeed, as even more
luxurious, wealthy, and refined in the matter of good horses, glorious
armour, and splendid chariots. But, by the time of the Persian
wars, says Helbig, the Thracians were regarded by the Greeks as rude
barbarians, and their military equipment was totally un-Greek. They did
not wear helmets, but caps of fox-skin. They had no body armour; their
shields were small round bucklers; their weapons were bows and daggers.
These customs could not, at the time of the Persian wars, be recent
innovations in Thrace. [Footnote: Herodotus, vii. 75.]
Had the poet of _ILIAD_, Book X., known the Thracians in _this_
condition, says Helbig, as he was fond of details of costume and arms,
he would have certainly described their fox-skin caps, bows, bucklers,
and so forth. He would not here have followed the Epic tradition, which
represented the Thracians as makers of great swords and as splendidly
armed charioteers. His audience had met the Thracians in peace and war,
and would contradict the poet's description of them as heavily armed
charioteers. It follows, therefore, that the latest poets, such as the
author of Book X., did not introduce recent details, those of their
own time, but we have just previously been told that to do so was their
custom in the description of details.
Now Studniczka [Footnote: _Homerische Epos, pp. 7-11, cf._ Note I;
_Zeitschrift fur die Oestern Gymnasien_, 1886, p. 195.] explains the
picture of the Thracians in _Iliad_, Book X., on Helbig's _other_
principle, namely, that the very late author of the Tenth Book merely
conforms to the conventional tradition of the Epic, adheres to the model
set in ancient Achaean, or rather ancient Ionian times, and scrupulously
preserved by the latest poets--that is, when the latest poets do not
bring in the new details of their own age. But Helbig will not accept
his own theory in this case, whence does it follow that the author of
the Tenth Book must, in his opinion, have lived in Achaean times, and
described the Thracians as they then were, charioteers, heavily armed,
not light-clad archers? If this is so, we ask how Helbig can aver that
the Tenth Book is one of the latest parts of the _Iliad?_
In studying the critics who hold that the _Iliad_ is the growth of
four centuries--say from the eleventh to the seventh century B.C.--no
consistency is to be discovered; the earth is never solid beneath our
feet. We find now that the poets are true to tradition in the details of
ancient life--now that the poets introduce whatever modern details they
please. The late poets have now a very exact knowledge of the past; now,
the late poets know nothing about the past, or, again, some of the poets
are fond of actual and very minute archaeological research! The theory
shifts its position as may suit the point to be made at the moment by
the critic. All is arbitrary, and it is certain that logic demands a
very different method of inquiry. If Helbig and other critics of his
way of thinking mean that in the _Iliad_ (1) there are parts of genuine
antiquity; other parts (2) by poets who, with stern accuracy, copied the
old modes; other parts (3) by poets who tried to copy but failed; with
passages (4) by poets who deliberately innovated; and passages (5)
by poets who drew fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner
consciousness," while, finally (6), some poets made minute antiquarian
researches; and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six
elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in critical
powers of discrimination. The critical standard becomes arbitrary and
subjective.
It is our effort, then, in the following pages to show that the _unus_
color of Wolf does pervade the Epics, that recent details are not often,
if ever, interpolated, that the poems harmoniously represent one
age, and that a brief age, of culture; that this effect cannot, in
a thoroughly uncritical period, have been deliberately aimed at and
produced by archaeological learning, or by sedulous copying of poetic
tradition, or by the scientific labours of an editor of the sixth
century B.C. We shall endeavour to prove, what we have already
indicated, that the hypotheses of expansion are not self-consistent,
or in accordance with what is known of the evolution of early national
poetry. The strongest part, perhaps, of our argument is to rest on our
interpretation of archaeological evidence, though we shall not
neglect the more disputable or less convincing contentions of literary
criticism.
CHAPTER II
HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four
changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to
how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much
of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner
of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the
evolution of the Epics. Mr. Leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages
of "expansion," answers that "the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are essentially,
and above all, Court poems. They were composed to be sung in the palaces
of a ruling aristocracy ... the poems are aristocratic and courtly, not
popular." [Footnote: Companion to the _Iliad_, pp. 2,8. 1892.] They are
not _Volkspoesie_; they are not ballads. "It is now generally recognised
that this conception is radically false."
These opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic--were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" _Iliad_ and
Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the _Iliad_, as
it stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe,
not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering
minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a
military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] The poems
were _begun_, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living
on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by
contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and
altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who
amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian
democracy. [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. II.]
We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old
land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to admit
this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of
Greece and under every form of society. The real question is, would the
modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries
old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic
age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the
most primitive _Iliad_ may have been actually sung by the court minstrel
in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." [Footnote:
Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xv.] But, by the expansionist theory, even
the oldest parts of our _Iliad_ are now full of what we may call quite
recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak,
of omissions of old parts.
Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who
could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body of
ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there, altering
everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change. The ancient
Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. The
old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the Dorian
conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and
barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality.
The very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt
on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in Europe,
fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part,
with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war chariot the
huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. The early
vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from
war chariots. They had lost touch with that method. Fighting men now
carried relatively small round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly
employed for swords, spears, and arrow points. Would the new poets,
in deference to tradition, abstain from mentioning cavalry, or small
bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or would they avoid puzzling their
hearers by speaking of obsolete and unfamiliar forms of tactics and of
military equipment? Would they therefore sing of things familiar--of
iron weapons, small round shields, hoplites, and cavalry? We shall see
that confused and self-contradictory answers are given by criticism
to all these questions by scholars who hold that the Epics are not the
product of one, but of many ages.
There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and
of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding
to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and courts had passed
away; old Ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the Homeric
poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early
philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to
be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from
recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians
"did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to
them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous Ionic
genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature
or mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at
Mycenas." [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. 7.]
Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none
of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets
into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of
belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in
the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the _ILIAD_, which
were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the _ILIAD_
itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic
poems--authors contemporary with the makers of much of the
_ILIAD_--_were_ eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. [Footnote:
_Cf_. Monro, _The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey_, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.] They
had ideas very different from those of the authors of the _Iliad_ and
_ODYSSEY_, as these ideas have reached us.
Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from
many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during
the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth.
[Footnote: _Homerische Epos_, p. 3.] Thus a signet ring was mentioned
in the _Ilias Puma_, and there are no rings in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_.
But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here
encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were
grouping themselves around the _Iliad and _Odyssey, we meet data
absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives
three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics
of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such
cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if
poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had
wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their
notions do not occur in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. By his theory these
poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions,
at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies
were flourishing. If so, how were the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, unlike the
Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new
romantic ideas?
Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh
centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic tradition; their poems
make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries
were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of
the _Iliad_. How did _they_ abstain from the new or revived ideas, and
from the new _genre_ of romance? Are we to believe that one set of late
Ionian poets--they who added to and altered the Iliad--were true
to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the
Cyclics--authors of new Epics on Homeric themes--are known to have quite
lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual? The reply will
perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new
poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as
I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it
will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general
editor of the latter date, thought, _we_ are continuing an old set of
lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and
beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes
had only bronze, no iron,--and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made
iron a common commodity in the _Iliad_. Again, the rhapsodists knew that
the ancient heroes had no corslets--the old lays, we learn, never
spoke of corslets--but they made them wear corslets of much splendour.
[Footnote: The reader must remember that the view of the late poets
as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains
_sometimes_; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision
is _not_ preserved, and that the Ionic continuators introduced, for
example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which
represents much older weapons and equipments.] This theory does not help
us. In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of
romance and religion was alien from that of Homer.
To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators
of the _Iliad_, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the
authors of the Cyclic poems. How "non-Homeric" the authors of these
Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from
examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings
off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of the Dioscuri, who in Homer
(_Iliad_, III. 243) are merely dead men (_Cypria_). (2) Story of
Iphigenia _Cypria_. (3) Story of Palamedes, who is killed when angling
by Odysseus and Diomede (Cypria).
Homer's heroes never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the
Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop
to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's
recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the
Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis,
and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms,
a Maerchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic Maerchen, Mr. Leaf
would say. There is nothing like this in the Iliad and Odyssey. (5) They
call the son of Achilles, not Neoptolemus, as Homer does, but Pyrrhus.
(6) They represent the Achaean army as obtaining supplies through three
magically gifted maidens, who produce corn, wine, and oil at will, as in
fairy tales. Another Ionic non-Achaean Maerchen! They bring in ghosts of
heroes dead and buried. Such ghosts, in Homer's opinion, were impossible
if the dead had been cremated. All these non-Homeric absurdities, save
the last, are from the Cypria, dated by Sir Richard Jebb about 776 B.C.,
long before the Odyssey was put into shape, namely, after 660 B. C.
in his opinion. Yet the alleged late compiler of the Odyssey, in the
seventh century, never wanders thus from the Homeric standard in taste.
What a skilled archaeologist he must have been! The author of the Cypria
knew the Iliad, [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 354.] but his
knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) In the AEthiopis
(about 776 B.C.) men are made immortal after death, and are worshipped
as heroes, an idea foreign to Iliad and Odyssey. (8) There is a savage
ritual of purification from blood shed by a homicide (compare Eumenides,
line 273). This is unheard of in Iliad and Odyssey, though familiar to
Aeschylus. (9) Achilles, after death, is carried to the isle of Leuke.
(10) The fate of Ilium, in the Cyclic Little _Iliad_, hangs on the
Palladium, of which nothing is known in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. The
_Little Iliad_ is dated about 700 B.C. (11) The _Nostoi_ mentions
Molossians, not named by Homer (which is a trifle); it also mentions
the Asiatic city of Colophon, an Ionian colony, which is not a trivial
self-betrayal on the part of the poet. He is dated about 750 B.C.
Thus, more than a century before the _Odyssey_ received its final form,
after 660 B.C., from the hands of one man (according to the theory),
the other Ionian poets who attempted Epic were betraying themselves as
non-Homeric on every hand. [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp.
347-383.]
Our examples are but a few derived from the brief notices of the Cyclic
poets' works, as mentioned in ancient literature; these poets probably,
in fact, betrayed themselves constantly. But their contemporaries, the
makers of late additions to the _Odyssey_, and the later mosaic worker
who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the
fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the Cyclic poets. How, if the
true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the
Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian poets or
rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner?
The best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the Cyclic
poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all men who
botched at the _Iliad_ were very learned, and very careful to maintain
harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they
introduced changes in burial, bride-price, houses, iron, greaves, and
corslets, all of them things, by the theory, modern, and when they sang
in modern grammar.
Yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many
authors of our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were, by the theory, strolling
irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later _jongleurs_ of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in mediaeval France. How could these strollers
keep their modern Ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases
of belief, out of their lays, as far as they _did_ keep them out, while
the contemporary authors of the _Cypria_, _The Sack of Ilios_, and other
Cyclic poets were full of new ideas, legends, and beliefs, or primitive
notions revived, and, save when revived, quite obviously late and quite
un-Homeric in any case?
The difficulty is the greater if the Cyclic poems were long poems, with
one author to each Epic. Such authors were obviously men of ambition;
they produced serious works _de longue haleine_. It is from them that
we should naturally expect conservative and studious adhesion to the
traditional models. From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and
chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. _They_ might be
expected to introduce great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to
speak--men of the nameless [Greek: laos], the host, the foot men--who
in Homer are occasionally said to perish of disease or to fall under the
rain of arrows, but are never distinguished by name. The strollers, it
might be thought, would also be the very men to introduce fairy tales,
freaks of primitive Ionian myth, discreditable anecdotes of the princely
heroes, and references to the Ionian colonies.
But it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long Cyclic
poems do such un-Homeric things as these; the gay, irresponsible
strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there--lays now incorporated
in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--scrupulously avoid such faults. They never
even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of
the _Iliad_ as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody
explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the
difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the
idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm
of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth
century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining
why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives--Illiad and
Odyssey--are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all
the others. The Cyclic poems are certainly the production of a late and
changed age? [Footnote: For what manner of audience, if not for readers,
the Cyclic poems were composed is a mysterious question.] The _Iliad_ is
not in any degree--save perhaps in a few interpolated passages--touched
by the influences of that late age. It is not a complex of the work
of four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned--the
point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic character.
CHAPTER III
HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION
Whosoever holds that the Homeric poems were evolved out of the lays of
many men, in many places, during many periods of culture, must present a
consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they attained their present
plots and forms. These could not come by accident, even if the plots
are not good--as all the world held that they were, till after Wolf's
day--but very bad, as some critics now assert. Still plot and form,
beyond the power of chance to produce, the poems do possess. Nobody goes
so far as to deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of
the fact that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel"
altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a
constructive whole. If the hypotheses fail to account for the fact, we
have the more reason to believe that the poems are the work of one age,
and, mainly, of one man.
In criticising Homeric criticism as it is to-day, we cannot do better
than begin by examining the theories of Mr. Leaf which are offered by
him merely as "a working hypothesis." His most erudite work is based on
a wide knowledge of German Homeric speculation, of the exact science of
Grammar, of archaeological discoveries, and of manuscripts. [Footnote:
The Iliad. Macmillan & Co. 1900, 1902.] His volumes are, I doubt not, as
they certainly deserve to be, on the shelves of every Homeric student,
old or young, and doubtless their contents reach the higher forms in
schools, though there is reason to suppose that, about the unity of
Homer, schoolboys remain conservative.
In this book of more than 1200 pages Mr. Leaf's space is mainly
devoted to textual criticism, philology, and pure scholarship, but his
Introductions, Notes, and Appendices also set forth his mature ideas
about the Homeric problem in general. He has altered some of his
opinions since the publication of his _Companion to the Iliad_(1892),
but the main lines of his old system are, except on one crucial point,
unchanged. His theory we shall try to state and criticise; in general
outline it is the current theory of separatist critics, and it may
fairly be treated as a good example of such theories.
The system is to the following effect: Greek tradition, in the classical
period, regarded the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ as the work of one man,
Homer, a native of one or other of the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor.
But the poems show few obvious signs of origin in Asia. They deal with
dwellers, before the Dorian invasion (which the poet never alludes to),
on the continent of Europe and in Crete. [Footnote: If the poet sang
after the tempest of war that came down with the Dorians from the
north, he would probably have sought a topic in the Achaean exploits and
sorrows of that period. The Dorians, not the Trojans, would have been
the foes. The epics of France of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
dwell, not on the real victories of the remote Charlemagne so much as
on the disasters of Aliscans and Roncesvaux--defeats at Saracen hands,
Saracens being the enemies of the twelfth-century poets. No Saracens,
in fact, fought at Roncesvaux.] The lays are concerned with "good old
times"; presumably between 1500 and 1100 B.C. Their pictures of the
details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that
period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with
what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the
so-called "Dipylon" period of "geometrical" ornament considerably later.
In the Dipylon age though the use of iron, even for swords (made on the
lines of the old bronze sword), was familiar, art was on a most barbaric
level, not much above the Bed Indian type, as far, at least, as painted
vases bear witness. The human figure is designed as in Tommy Traddles's
skeletons; there is, however, some crude but promising idea of
composition.
The picture of life in the Homeric poems, then, is more like that of,
say, 1500-1100 B.C. than of, say, 1000-850 B.C. in Mr. Leaf's opinion.
Certainly Homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an
Over-Lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden Mycenae." We hear of
no such potentate in Ionia. Homer's accounts of contemporary art seem to
be inspired by the rich art generally dated about 1500-1200. Yet there
are "many traces of apparent anachronism," of divergence from the more
antique picture of life. In these divergences are we to recognise the
picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500-1200
B.C.? Or have elements of the life of a much later age of Greece (say,
800-550 B.C.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late
poets? Here Mr. Leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted,
and must keep insisting, for it is of the first importance. "It is _a
priori_ the most probable" supposition that, "in an uncritical age,"
poets do _not_ "reproduce the circumstances of the old time," but
"only clothe the old tale in the garb of their own days." Poets in an
uncritical age always, in our experience, "clothe old tales with the
garb of their own time," but Mr. Leaf thinks that, in the case of the
Homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts."
In fact, Mr. Leaf's hypothesis, like Helbig's, exhibits a come-and-go
between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so
kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite
the reverse in many cases. Of this frequent examples will occur. He
writes, "The Homeric period is certainly later than the shaft tombs"
(discovered at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann), "but it does not necessarily
follow that it is post-Mycenaean. It is quite possible that certain
notable differences between the poems and the monuments" (of Mycenae)
"in burial, for instance, and in women's dress may be due to changes
which arose within the Mycenaean age itself, in that later part of it
of which our knowledge is defective--almost as defective as it is of
the subsequent 'Dipylon' period. On the whole, the resemblance to
the typical Mycenaean culture is more striking than the difference."
[Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xiii.-xv. 1900.]
So far Mr. Leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. The
Homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs--so
rich in relics--of the Mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs
of the Dipylon of Athens. The poems thus spring out of an age of which,
except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because,
as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent Homeric
descriptions have ever been discovered--so relics corroborating Homeric
descriptions are to seek. But the age attaches itself in many ways to
the age of the Mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite
apart from the post-Dorian culture.
Where we differ from Mr. Leaf is in believing that the poems, as wholes,
were composed in that late Mycenaean period of which, from material
remains, we know very little; that "much new" was not added, as he
thinks, in "the Ionian development" which lasted perhaps "from the ninth
century B.C. to the seventh." We cannot agree with Mr. Leaf, when he,
like Helbig, thinks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the
poems had early become so "stereotyped" that no continuator, however
late, dared "intentionally to sap" the type, "though he slipped from
time to time into involuntary anachronism." Some poets are also asserted
to indulge in _voluntary_ anachronism when, as Mr. Leaf supposes, they
equip the ancient warriors with corslets and greaves and other body
armour of bronze such as, in his opinion, the old heroes never knew,
such as never were mentioned in the oldest parts or "kernel" of the
poems. Thus the traditional details of Mycenaean life sometimes are
regarded as "stereotyped" in poetic tradition; sometimes as subject to
modern alterations of a sweeping and revolutionary kind.
As to deliberate adherence to tradition by the poets, we have proved
that the Cyclic epic poets of 800-660 B.C. wandered widely from the
ancient models. If, then, every minstrel or rhapsodist who, anywhere,
added at will to the old "kernel" of the _Achilles_ was, so far as he
was able, as conscientiously precise in his stereotyped archaeological
details as Mr. Leaf sometimes supposes, the fact is contrary to general
custom in such cases. When later poets in an uncritical age take up and
rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to
the stories "a new costume," as M. Gaston Paris remarks in reference to
thirteenth century dealings with French epics of the eleventh century.
But, in the critics' opinion, the late rehandlers of old Achaean lays
preserved the archaic modes of life, war, costume, weapons, and
so forth, with conscientious care, except in certain matters to be
considered later, when they deliberately did the very reverse. Sometimes
the late poets devoutly follow tradition. Sometimes they deliberately
innovate. Sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine,
but by their time forgotten, Mycenaean things, and criticism can detect
their doings in each case.
Though the late continuators of the _Iliad_ were able, despite
certain inadvertencies, to keep up for some four centuries in Asia
the harmonious picture of ancient Achaean life and society in Europe,
critics can distinguish four separate strata, the work of many different
ages, in the _Iliad_. Of the first stratum composed in Europe, say about
1300-1150 B.C. (I give a conjectural date under all reserves), the topic
was _THE Wrath of ACHILLES_. Of this poem, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, (a)
the First Book and fifty lines of the Second Book remain intact or,
perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) The _Valour of Agamemnon_ and
_Defeat of THE Achaeans_. Of this there are portions in Book XI., but
they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, "down to the
latest period," namely, the age of Pisistratus in Athens, the middle of
the sixth century B.C. (c) The fight in which, after their defeat, the
Achaeans try to save the ships from the torch of Hector, and the _Valour
of Patroclus_ (but some critics do not accept this), with his death
(XV., XVI. in parts). (d) Some eighty lines on the _ARMING OF ACHILLES_
(XIX.). (e) Perhaps an incident or two in Books XX., XXI. (f) The
_Slaying HECTOR_ by Achilles, in Books XXI., XXII. (but some of the learned
will not admit this, and we shall, unhappily, have to prove that, if Mr.
Leaf's principles be correct, we really know nothing about the _SLAYING
OF HECTOR_ in its original form).
Of these six elements only did the original poem consist, Mr. Leaf
thinks; a rigid critic will reject as original even the _Valour of
Patroclus_ and the _DEATH OF HECTOR_, but Mr. Leaf refuses to go so far
as that. The original poem, as detected by him, is really "the work of
a single poet, perhaps the greatest in all the world's history." If the
original poet did no more than is here allotted to him, especially if he
left out the purpose of Zeus and the person of Thetis in Book I., we
do not quite understand his unapproachable greatness. He must certainly
have drawn a rather commonplace Achilles, as we shall see, and we
confess to preferring the _Iliad_ as it stands.
The brief narrative cut out of the mass by Mr. Leaf, then, was the
genuine old original poem or "kernel." What we commonly call the
_ILIAD_, on the other hand, is, by his theory, a thing of shreds and
patches, combined in a manner to be later described. The blend,
we learn, has none of the masterly unity of the old original poem.
Meanwhile, as criticism of literary composition is a purely literary
question, critics who differ from Mr. Leaf have a right to hold that
the _Iliad_ as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of
masterly perfection. We need not attend here so closely to Mr. Leaf's
theory in the matter of the First Expansions, (2) and the Second
Expansions, (3) but the latest Expansions (4) give the account of _The
EMBASSY_ to _Achilles_ with his refusal of _Agamemnon's APOLOGY_(Book
IX.), the [blank space] (Book XXIV.), the _RECONCILIATION OF ACHILLES
AND Agamemnon, AND the FUNERAL Games_ of _Patroclus_ (XXIII.). In all
these parts of the poem there are, we learn, countless alterations,
additions, and expansions, with, last of all, many transitional
passages, "the work of the editor inspired by the statesman," that is,
of an hypothetical editor who really by the theory made our _ILIAD_,
being employed to that end by Pistratus about 540 B.C. [Footnote: Leaf,
_Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. x., xiv. 1900.].
Mr. Leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect
the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by
discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion
no one sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are
discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to
be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's
supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words
and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and
armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original
minstrel.
Thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite
recent, from the mass, evolved through many centuries, which is called
the _Iliad_.
If the existing _ILIAD_ is a mass of "expansions," added at all sorts of
dates, in any number of places, during very different stages of culture,
to a single short old poem of the Mycenaean age, science needs an
hypothesis which will account for the _ILIAD_ "as it stands." Everybody
sees the need of the hypothesis, How was the medley of new songs by many
generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to
be reckoned fine? How were the manners, customs, and characters, _unus
color_, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? How was the
whole Greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions
and incongruous lays must, by the theory, have been current, induced to
accept the version which has been bequeathed to us? Why, and for what
audience or what readers, did somebody, in a late age of brief lyrics
and of philosophic poems, take the trouble to harmonise the body of
discrepant wandering lays, and codify them in the _Iliad_?
An hypothesis which will answer all these questions is the first thing
needful, and hypotheses are produced.
Believers like Mr. Leaf in the development of the _Iliad_ through
the changing revolutionary centuries, between say 1200 and 600 B.C.,
consciously stand in need of a working hypothesis which will account,
above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of
the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious,
of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law (such as the
bride-price in marriage), and of the details as to weapons, implements,
dress, art, houses, and so forth, when these are not (according to the
theory) deliberately altered by late poets.
Next, the hypothesis must explain, in Mr. Leafs own words, how a single
version of the _Iliad_ came to be accepted, "where many rival versions
must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side."
[Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii. 1900.]
Three hypotheses have, in fact, been imagined: the first suggests the
preservation of the original poems in very early written texts; not,
of course, in "Homer's autograph." This view Mr. Leaf, we shall see,
discards. The second presents the notion of one old sacred college for
the maintenance of poetic uniformity. Mr. Leaf rejects this theory,
while supposing that there were schools for professional reciters.
Last, there is the old hypothesis of Wolf: "Pisistratus" (about 540
B.C.) "was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and
brought into that order in which we now possess them."
This hypothesis, now more than a century old, would, if it rested on
good evidence, explain how a single version of the various lays came to
be accepted and received as authorised. The Greek world, by the theory,
had only in various places various sets of incoherent chants _orally_
current on the Wrath of The public was everywhere a public of listeners,
who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or
whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two,
at a street corner. There was, by the theory, no reading public for the
Homeric poetry. But, by the time of Pisistratus, a reading public was
coming into existence. The tyrant had the poems collected, edited,
arranged into a continuous narrative, primarily for the purpose of
regulating the recitals at the Panathenaic festival. When once they
were written, copies were made, and the rest of Hellas adopted these for
their public purposes.
On a small scale we have a case analogous. The old songs of Scotland
existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered
broadsheets. The airs were good, but the words were often silly, more
often they were Fescennine--"more dirt than wit." Burns rewrote the
words, which were published in handsome volumes, with the old airs, or
with these airs altered, and his became the authorised versions, while
the ancient anonymous chants were almost entirely forgotten.
The parallel is fairly close, but there are points of difference. Burns
was a great lyric poet, whereas we hear of no great epic poet in the
age of Pisistratus. The old words which Burns's songs superseded were
wretched doggerel; not such were the ancient Greek heroic lays. The old
Scottish songs had no sacred historic character; they did not contain
the history of the various towns and districts of Scotland. The heroic
lays of Greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of
Domesday book of ancient principalities, and cities, and worshipped
heroes. Thus it was much easier for a great poet like Burns to supersede
with his songs a mass of unconsidered "sculdudery" old lays, in which no
man or set of men had any interest, than for a mere editor, in the age
of Pisistratus, to supersede a set of lays cherished, in one shape or
another, by every State in Greece. This holds good, even if, prior to
Pisistratus, there existed in Greece no written texts of Homer, and no
reading public, a point which we shall show reasons for declining to
concede.
The theory of the edition of Pisistratus, if it rested on valid
evidence, would explain "how a single version of the poems came to be
accepted," namely, because the poem was now _written_ for the first
time, and oral versions fell out of memory. But it would not, of course,
explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of
change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each
adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such
modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the Homeric
picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly
exists.
To take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal
armorial bearings of the heroes. They are unknown to or unnamed by
Homer, but are very familiar on the shields in seventh century and sixth
century vases, and AEschylus introduces them with great poetic effect
in [blank space]. How did late continuators, familiar with the serpents,
lions, bulls' heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary
shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new
rhapsodies? In mediaeval France, we shall show, the epics (eleventh to
thirteenth centuries) deal with Charlemagne and his peers of the eighth
century A.D. But they provide these heroes with the armorial bearings
which came in during the eleventh to twelfth century A.D. The late
Homeric rhapsodists avoided such tempting anachronisms.
Wolf's theory, then, explains "how a single version came to be
accepted." It was the first _WRITTEN_ version; the others died out, like
the old Scots orally repeated songs, when Burns published new words to
the airs. But Wolf's theory does not explain the harmony of the picture
of life, the absence of post-Homeric ideas and ways of living, in the
first written version, which, practically, is our own version.
In 1892 (_COMPANION TO THE Iliad_) Mr. Leaf adopted a different theory,
the hypothesis of a Homeric "school" "which busied itself with the
tradition of the Homeric poetry," for there must have been some central
authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in
writing. Were there no such body to maintain a fixed standard, the poems
must have ended by varying indefinitely, according to the caprice of
their various reciters. This is perfectly obvious.
Such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in
fact, the Maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of
society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in
purity. The older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim
rehearsal of all the ancient lore." Proceedings were sanctioned by human
sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were
produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case.
Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests
or _tohunga_ [Footnote: White, _THE Ancient HISTORY OF THE Maori, VOL._
i. pp. 8-13.]. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and
Zunis, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and
keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. If this were
so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language
in the Homeric poems is explained. But Mr. Leaf has now entirely
and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is
unsupported by evidence, he says.'
"The great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual
growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to
understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival
versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by
side. The assumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and
Mr. Leaf, in 1892, made the assumption himself: "as some such hypothesis
we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory"
(1892). [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad, pp. 20, 21._]
But now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the assumption of a school or
guild of singers," that "the rare mention of [Greek: Homeridai] in
Chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other
confirmation." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.] He therefore
now adopts the Wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of Homer was
made in Athens at the time of Solon or Pisistratus," from the rhapsodies
existing in the memory of reciters. [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.]
But Mr. Leaf had previously said [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad_,
p. 190.] that "the legend which connects his" (Pisistratus's) "name
with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of
late date." Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought
"conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an
hypothesis of a Pisistratean editor of the Iliad, while the evidence for
an Homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in
1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself
remains just what it used to be.
This is not very satisfactory, and the Pisistratean hypothesis is much
less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an Homeric
school, for the Pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of
the characters and the details in the _Iliad_, nor the absence of
such glaring anachronisms as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general
"pre-Odyssean" character of the language and grammar. By the
Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly
deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout
the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many
generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. The hypothesis of
a school _was_ really that which, of the two, best explained the facts,
and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing
out of our _Iliad_ under Pisistratus than for the existence of a Homeric
school.
The evidence for the _Iliad_ edited for Pisistratus is examined in a
Note at the close of this chapter. Meanwhile Mr. Leaf now revives Wolf's
old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version"
(of the Homeric poems) "came to be accepted." His present theory, if
admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the
poems, the first standard _written_ version, but fails to explain how
"the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into
every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing
a chaos which no editor of about 540 A.D. could force into its present
uniformity.
Such an editor is now postulated by Mr. Leaf. If his editor's edition,
as being _written_, was accepted by Greece, then we "understand how a
single version came to be accepted." But we do not understand how
the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have
characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there
was an Homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." But now such
harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without
any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists,
many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several
centuries,
"Rave, recite, and madden through the land,"
with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard."
Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early
tradition: _that_ we cannot expect from them.
Again, no editor of about 540 B.C. could possibly bring harmony of
manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took
down in writing.
Let us think out the supposed editor's situation. During three centuries
nine generations of strollers have worked their will on one ancient
short poem, _The Wrath_ of _Achilles_. This is, in itself, an unexampled
fact. Poets turn to new topics; they do not, as a rule, for centuries
embroider one single situation out of the myriads which heroic legend
affords. Strolling reciters are the least careful of men, each would
recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly
evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and
weapons of his time. When war chariots became obsolete, he would bring
in cavalry; when there was no Over-Lord, he would not trouble himself
to maintain correctly the character and situation of Agamemnon. He would
speak of coined money, in cases of buying and selling; his European
geography would often be wrong; he would not ignore the Ionian cities
of Asia; most weapons would be of iron, not bronze, in his lays. Ionian
religious ideas could not possibly be excluded, nor changes in customary
law, civil and criminal. Yet, we think, none of these things occurs in
Homer.
The editor of the theory had to correct all these anachronisms and
discrepancies. What a task in an uncritical age! The editor's materials
would be the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered,
in Athens, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival. The _repertoire_ of each
stroller would vary indefinitely from those of all the others. One man
knew this chant, as modified or made by himself; other men knew others,
equally unsatisfactory.
The editor must first have written down from recitation all the passages
that he could collect. Then he was obliged to construct a narrative
sequence containing a plot, which he fashioned by a process of selection
and rejection; and then he had to combine passages, alter them, add
as much as he thought fit, remove anachronisms, remove discrepancies,
accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave
transitional passages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too
manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the [blank
space]. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task,
and succeeded so well as to impose on Aristotle and all the later Greek
critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of
letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time.
The editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what Loennrot, in the
nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the Finnish _Kalewala_.
[Footnote: See Comparetti, _The Kalewala_.]
Centuries later than Pisistratus, in a critical age, Apollonius Rhodius
set about writing an epic of the Homeric times. We know how entirely he
failed, on all hands, to restore the manner of Homer. The editor of 540
B.C. was a more scientific man. Can any one who sets before himself the
nature of the editor's task believe in him and it? To the master-less
floating jellyfish of old poems and new, Mr. Leaf supposes that "but
small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth
century or thereabouts," especially as "the creative and imaginative
forces of the Ionian race turned to other forms of expression," to
lyrics and to philosophic poems. But the able Pisistratean editor, after
all, we find, introduced quantities of new matter into the poems--in the
middle of the sixth century; that kind of industry, then, did not cease
towards the end of the eighth century, as we have been told. On the
other hand, as we shall learn, the editor contributed to the _Iliad_,
among other things, Nestor's descriptions of his youthful adventures,
for the purpose of flattering Nestor's descendant, the tyrant
Pisistratus of Athens.
One hypothesis, the theory of an Homeric school--which would answer our
question, "How was the harmony of the picture of life in remote ages
preserved in poems composed in several succeeding ages, and in totally
altered conditions of life?"--Mr. Leaf, as we know, rejects. We might
suggest, again, that there were written texts handed down from an early
period, and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. Mr.
Leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. "The poems were
all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers
(_sic_), who used to wander over Greece reciting them at popular
festivals. Writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic
development" (some four centuries at least), "but it is in the highest
degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the
Epic or _ANY_ part of it. There can hardly have been any standard text;
at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems
which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable
asset to the professional reciter."
Now we would not contend for the existence of any [blank space] text
much before 600 B.C., and I understand Mr. Leaf not to deny, now, that
there may have been texts of the _ODYSSEY_ and _Iliad_ before, say,
600-540 B.C. If cities and reciters had any ancient texts, then texts
existed, though not "standard" texts: and by this means the harmony of
thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. We do
not think that it is "in the highest degree unlikely" that there were no
texts. Is this one of the many points on which every savant must rely on
his own sense of what is "likely"? To this essential point, the almost
certain existence of written texts, we return in our conclusion.
What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of
anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at
least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the _CHARACTERS_
in subtle details. Some of the characters will be dealt with later;
meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea
of written texts prior to 600-540 B.C., and also the idea of a school
charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a
terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which,
he says--if unpreserved by text or school--"must have ended by varying
infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters."
[Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad, p. 21._]
On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no
harmony, no _unus_ color, could have survived in the poems till the days
of the sixth century editor.
Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the
_Iliad_ is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to
understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker
it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many
absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to
prove that they do not exist.
NOTE
THE LEGEND OF THE MAKING OF THE "ILIAD" UNDER PISISTRATOS
It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story
about the making of the _Iliad_ under Pisistratus, a legend without
authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school
as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in
order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely
reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of
Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various
legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the
_Iliad_, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence
of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines
in the _Iliad_ which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a
political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments
have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition
of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known
the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle
writes (_Rhetoric_, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth
century, quoted _Iliad_, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis.
Aristarchus also discussed _Iliad_, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans
appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus,
vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached
us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said
by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus
(Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus"
never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the
_Iliad_. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of
argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written
out by order of Pisistratus.
It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus
said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can
never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about
Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter
of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf's conversion to belief in the
story that our _Iliad_ was practically edited and first committed to
writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that
Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no
proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in
fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He
had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for "Wilamowitz has shown that
Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i.
p. xix.] But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the
_Iliad_ was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century
B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas
said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.
The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of
the _Iliad_, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in
the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical
authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of
the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid
their differences before the Spartans (_cir._ 600-580 B.C.). Each party
quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale
(Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited _Iliad_,
II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the
Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far
as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians
had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it
inconsistent with _Iliad_, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ
from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with
the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain
occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian
interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in
support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has
reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in
the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek,
residing in Athens), on a fragmentary passage of Diogenes Laertius
(third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer's being cited
about 600-580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis.
In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about
Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really
said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.
The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): "He (Solon)
decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists [Greek
text: ex hypobolaes]" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first
reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather
Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ([Greek text:
ephotisen]), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his _Megarica_.
And _the lines_ were _especially these_: "They who held Athens," &c.
(_Iliad_, II. 546-558), the passage on which the Athenians rested in
their dispute with the Megarians.
And _what_ "lines were especially these"? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap
in the sense, after "Pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (Solon) "who
interpolated lines in the _Catalogue_, and not Pisistratus." He says:
"The natural sense of the passage as it stands" (in Diogenes Laertius)
"is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon
_who collected the scattered Homer_ of _his_ day, for he it was who
interpolated the lines in the _Catalogue of the Ships_".... But Diogenes
neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about
"collecting the scattered Homer of his day." That Pisistratus did so
is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting
anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the
gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who _collected_ the
Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But
Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." Then why does he
adopt, as "the natural sense of the passage," "it was not Peisistratos
but Solon who _collected_ the scattered Homer of his day?" [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii.] The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we
can see in the state of the text, "refers," as Mr. Monro says, "to
the _interpolation_ that has just been mentioned, and need not extend
further back." "Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in
which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if I understand
Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the
editor for Pisistratus. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410,
especially pp. 408-409.] Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the
Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." If,
so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of
any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of
the _Iliad_. [Footnote: Mr. Leaf adds that, except in one disputed
line (_Iliad_, II. 558) Aias "is not, in the _Iliad_, encamped next
the Athenians." His proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent
interpolator, who should have altered the line, are _Iliad_, IV. 327 ff,
and XII. 681 ff. In the former passage we find Odysseus stationed next
to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In
the second passage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians
and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The
arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he
was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with
"the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the
Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the passage.
The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian
interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them.
Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original,
as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the _Iliad_ is not
encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do
not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these passages. But
why argue at all about the Megarian story if it be a fiction? Mr. Leaf
takes the brief bald mention of Aias in _Iliad_, II. 558 as "a mocking
cry from Athens over the conquest of the island of the Aiakidai."
But as, in this same _Catalogue_, Aias is styled "by far the best of
warriors" after Achilles (II. 768), while there is no more honourable
mention made of Diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (II. 568),
or of Menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while Nestor, the
ancestor of Pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line
601), "the mocking cry from Athens" appears a vain imagination.]
The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the _Catalogue_, and, as
to the date and original purpose of the _Catalogue_, the most various
opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf's earlier edition of the _Iliad_ (vol. i.
p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that
the _Catalogue_ is "of late origin." We know, from the story of Solon
and the Megarians, that the _Catalogue_ "was considered a classical
work--the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date"--say 600-580
B.C. "It agrees with the poems in being pre-Dorian" (except in lines
653-670).
"There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like
the bulk of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, was composed in Achaean times,
and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor...."
In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the
_Catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle," the
compiling of "the whole Cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late
indeed, on any theory. The author "studiously preserves an ante-Dorian
standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of
the material, at least, is old."
These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in
1886. He cannot now give "even an approximate date for the composition
of the _Catalogue_" which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in
Homer, if it was composed "for that portion of the whole Cycle which, as
worked up in a separate poem, was called the _Kypria_" for the _Kypria_
is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the _Iliad_.
I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if
rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century
B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric
poems--in fact, made "a standard text."
The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but
in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf.
[Footnote: _Iliad_, i. p. XIX.]
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who,
with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd
legend." [Footnote: Blass, Die _Interpolationen_ in der _Odyssee_,
pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.] Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the
Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf
and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible
that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off
a Homer on them. [Footnote: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 390,
391. 1893.]
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean
editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a
fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds
him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together
the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which
Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about
Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric
mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are
on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the _Iliad_ before Homer.'" [Footnote:
_Classical Review_ xviii. 148.]
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no
importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and,
as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him
by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do
with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and
do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian
theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of
the first written text at Athens in the sixth century--a theory which
fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems,
and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks
evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or
Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens
was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters,
each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole
_Iliad_ in due sequence. "But the unity existed before the mangling.
That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit
to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless
and arbitrary theorising on the other!" We are not solitary sceptics
when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed
on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to
say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse
than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while
the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four
or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence,
the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence,
was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but
was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here
judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my
statement of Mr. Leaf's opinions. He and I both think an early Attic
"recension" probable, or almost certain. But (see' "Conclusion") I
regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of
Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the "edition" as having
"made" the _Iliad_; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods
of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of
our _Iliad_ as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf's Introduction
to _Iliad_, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the
first _written_ text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems
to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric "school" of
paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession,
there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the
nature of their teaching. The Beauvais "school" of _jongleurs_ in Lent
(fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of
strollers.
CHAPTER IV
LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
We now try to show that the Epics present an historical unity, a
complete and harmonious picture of an age, in its political, social,
legal, and religious aspects; in its customs, and in its military
equipment. A long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas
if it be the work of one age. Wandering minstrels, living through a
succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could
not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place,
of the poet of feudal princes towards an Over-Lord who rules them by
undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being
subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. Late poets
not living in feudal society, and unfamiliar alike with its customary
law, its jealousy of the Over-Lord, its conservative respect for his
consecrated function, would inevitably miss the proper tone, and fail in
some of the many [blank space] of the feudal situation. This is all the
more certain, if we accept Mr. Leaf's theory that each poet-rhapsodist's
_repertoire_ varied from the _repertoires_ of the rest. There could be
no unity of treatment in their handling of the character and position of
the Over-Lord and of the customary law that regulates his relations with
his peers. Again, no editor of 540 B.C. could construct an harmonious
picture of the Over-Lord in relation to the princes out of the
fragmentary _repertoires_ of strolling rhapsodists, which now lay before
him in written versions. If the editor could do this, he was a man of
Shakespearian genius, and had minute knowledge of a dead society.
This becomes evident when, in place of examining the _Iliad_ through
microscopes, looking out for discrepancies, we study it in its large
lines as a literary whole. The question being, Is the _Iliad_ a
literary whole or a mere literary mosaic? we must ask "What, taking it
provisionally as a literary whole, are the qualities of the poet as a
painter of what we may call feudal society?"
Choosing the part of the Over-Lord Agamemnon, we must not forget that he
is one of several analogous figures in the national poetry and romance
of other feudal ages. Of that great analogous figure, Charlemagne,
and of his relations with his peers in the earlier and later French
mediaeval epics we shall later speak. Another example is Arthur, in some
romances "the blameless king," in others _un roi faineant_.
The parallel Irish case is found in the Irish saga of Diarmaid and
Grainne. We read Mr. O'Grady's introduction on the position of Eionn Mac
Cumhail, the legendary Over-Lord of Ireland, the Agamemnon of the Celts.
"Fionn, like many men in power, is variable; he is at times magnanimous,
at other times tyrannical and petty. Diarmaid, Oisin, Oscar, and Caoilte
Mac Rohain are everywhere the [Greek: kaloi kachotoi] of the Fenians;
of them we never hear anything bad." [Footnote: _Transactions of the
Ossianic_ Society, vol. iii. p. 39.]
Human nature eternally repeats itself in similar conditions of society,
French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of
Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to
a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural
and pardonable in his circumstances.
The poet's view of Agamemnon is expressed in the speeches and conduct
of the peers. In Book I. we see the bullying truculence of Agamemnon,
wreaked first on the priest of Apollo, Chryses, then in threats against
the prophet Chalcas, then in menaces against any prince on whom he
chooses to avenge his loss of fair Chryseis, and, finally, in the
Seizure of Briseis from Achilles.
This part of the First Book of the _Iliad_ is confessedly original, and
there is no varying, throughout the Epic, from the strong and delicate
drawing of an historical situation, and of a complex character.
Agamemnon is truculent, and eager to assert his authority, but he is
also possessed of a heavy sense of his responsibilities, which often
unmans him. He has a legal right to a separate "prize of honour" (geras)
after each capture of spoil. Considering the wrath of Apollo for the
wrong done in refusing his priest's offered ransom for his daughter,
Agamemnon will give her back, "if that is better; rather would I see my
folks whole than perishing." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 115-117.]
Here we note points of feudal law and of kingly character. The giving
and taking of ransom exists as it did in the Middle Ages; ransom is
refused, death is dealt, as the war becomes more fierce towards its
close. Agamemnon has sense enough to waive his right to the girlish
prize, for the sake of his people, but is not so generous as to demand
no compensation. But there are no fresh spoils to apportion, and the
Over-Lord threatens to take the prize of one of his peers, even of
Achilles.
Thereon Achilles does what was frequently done in the feudal age of
western Europe, he "renounces his fealty," and will return to Phthia. He
adds insult, "thou dog-face!" The whole situation, we shall show, recurs
again and again in the epics of feudal France, the later epics of feudal
discontent. Agamemnon replies that Achilles may do as he pleases. "I
have others by my side that shall do me honour, and, above all, Zeus,
Lord of Counsel" (I. 175). He rules, literally, by divine right, and we
shall see that, in the French feudal epics, as in Homer, this claim of
divine right is granted, even in the case of an insolent and cowardly
Over-Lord. Achilles half draws "his great sword," one of the long,
ponderous cut-and-thrust bronze swords of which we have actual examples
from Mycenae and elsewhere. He is restrained by Athene, visible only to
him. "With words, indeed," she says, "revile him .... hereafter shall
goodly gifts come to thee, yea, in threefold measure...."
Gifts of atonement for "surquedry," like that of Agamemnon, are given
and received in the French epics, for example, in the [blank space].
The _Iliad_ throughout exhibits much interest in such gifts, and in the
customary law as to their acceptance, and other ritual or etiquette
of reconciliation. This fact, it will be shown, accounts for a passage
which critics reject, and which is tedious to our taste, as it probably
was tedious to the age of the supposed late poets themselves. (Book
XIX.). But the taste of a feudal audience, as of the audience of the
Saga men, delighted in "realistic" descriptions of their own customs
and customary law, as in descriptions of costume and armour. This is
fortunate for students of customary law and costume, but wearies hearers
and readers who desire the action to advance. Passages of this kind
would never be inserted by late poets, who had neither the knowledge of,
nor any interest in, the subjects.
To return to Achilles, he is now within his right; the moral goddess
assures him of that, and he is allowed to give the reins to his
tongue, as he does in passages to which the mediaeval epics offer many
parallels. In the mediaeval epics, as in Homer, there is no idea of
recourse to a duel between the Over-Lord and his peer. Achilles accuses
Agamemnon of drunkenness, greed, and poltroonery. He does not
return home, but swears by the sceptre that Agamemnon shall rue his
_outrecuidance_ when Hector slays the host. By the law of the age
Achilles remains within his right. His violent words are not resented by
the other peers. They tacitly admit, as Athene admits, that Achilles has
the right, being so grievously injured, to "renounce his fealty," till
Agamemnon makes apology and gives gifts of atonement. Such, plainly, is
the unwritten feudal law, which gives to the Over-Lord the lion's share
of booty, the initiative in war and council, and the right to command;
but limits him by the privilege of the peers to renounce their fealty
under insufferable provocation. In no Book is Agamemnon so direfully
insulted as in the First, which is admitted to be of the original
"kernel." Elsewhere the sympathy of the poet occasionally enables him to
feel the elements of pathos in the position of the over-tasked King of
Men.
As concerns the apology and the gifts of atonement, the poet has feudal
customary law and usage clearly before his eyes. He knows exactly what
is due, and the limits of the rights of Over-Lord and prince, matters
about which the late Ionian poets could only pick up information by
a course of study in constitutional history--the last thing they were
likely to attempt--unless we suppose that they all kept their eyes
on the "kernel," and that steadily, through centuries, generations of
strollers worked on the lines laid down in that brief poem.
Thus the poet of Book IX.--one of "the latest expansions,"--thoroughly
understands the legal and constitutional situation, as between Agamemnon
and Achilles. Or rather all the poets who collaborated in Book IX.,
which "had grown by a process of accretion," [Footnote: Leaf, Iliad,
vol. i. p. 371.] understood the legal situation.
Returning to the poet's conception of Agamemnon, we find in the
character of Agamemnon himself the key to the difficulties which critics
discover in the Second Book. The difficulty is that when Zeus, won over
to the cause of Achilles by Thetis, sends a false Dream to Agamemnon,
the Dream tells the prince that he shall at once take Troy, and bids him
summon the host to arms. But Agamemnon, far from doing that, summons
the host to a peaceful assembly, with the well-known results of
demoralisation.
Mr. Leaf explains the circumstances on his own theory of expansions
compiled into a confused whole by a late editor. He thinks that probably
there were two varying versions even of this earliest Book of the poem.
In one (A), the story went on from the quarrel between Agamemnon and
Achilles, to the holding of a general assembly "to consider the altered
state of affairs." This is the Assembly of Book H, but debate, in
version A, was opened by Thersites, not by Agamemnon, and Thersites
proposed instant flight! That was probably the earlier version.
In the other early version (B), after the quarrel between the chiefs,
the story did not, as in A, go on straight to the Assembly, but Achilles
appealed to his mother, the fair sea-goddess, as in our Iliad, and she
obtained from Zeus, as in the actual _Iliad_, his promise to honour
Achilles by giving victory, in his absence, to the Trojans. The poet of
version B, in fact, created the beautiful figure of Thetis, so essential
to the development of the tenderness that underlies the ferocity of
Achilles. The other and earliest poet, who treated of the Wrath of
the author of version A, neglected that opportunity with all that it
involved, and omitted the purpose of Zeus, which is mentioned in the
fifth line of the Epic. The editor of 540 B.C., seeing good in both
versions, A and B, "combined his information," and produced Books I. and
II. of the _ILIAD_ as they stand. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
47.]
Mr. Leaf suggests that "there is some ground for supposing that the
oldest version of the Wrath of Achilles did not contain the promise of
Zeus to Thetis; it was a tale played exclusively on the earthly stage."
[Footnote: _Ibid_, vol. i. p. xxiii.] In that case the author of the
oldest form (A) must have been a poet very inferior indeed to the later
author of B who took up and altered his work. In _his_ version, Book
I. does not end with the quarrel of the princes, but Achilles receives,
with all the courtesy of his character, the unwelcome heralds of
Agamemnon, and sends Briseis with them to the Over-Lord. He then with
tears appeals to his goddess-mother, Thetis of the Sea, who rose from
the grey mere like a mist, leaving the sea deeps where she dwelt beside
her father, the ancient one of the waters. Then sat she face to face
with her son as he let the tears down fall, and caressed him, saying,
"Child, wherefore weepest thou, for what sorrow of heart? Hide it
not, tell it to me; that I may know it as well as thou." Here the poet
strikes the keynote of the character of Achilles, the deadly in war, the
fierce in council, who weeps for his lost lady and his wounded honour,
and cries for help to his mother, as little children cry.
Such is the Achilles of the _Iliad_ throughout and consistently, but
such he was not to the mind of Mr. Leaf's probably elder poet, the
author of version A. Thetis, in version B, promises to persuade Zeus to
honour Achilles by making Agamemnon rue his absence, and, twelve days
after the quarrel, wins the god's consent.
In Book II. Zeus reflects on his promise, and sends a false Dream to
beguile Agamemnon, promising that now he shall take Troy. Agamemnon,
while asleep, is full of hope; but when he wakens he dresses in mufti,
in a soft doublet, a cloak, and sandals; takes his sword (swords were
then worn as part of civil costume), and the ancestral sceptre, which he
wields in peaceful assemblies. Day dawns, and "he bids the heralds...."
A break here occurs, according to the theory.
Here (_Iliad_, Book II., line 50) the kernel ceases, Mr. Leaf says, and
the editor of 540 B.C. plays his pranks for a while.
The kernel (or one of the _two_ kernels), we are to take up again at
Book II., 443-483, and thence "skip" to XI. 56, and now "we have a
narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution," [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. 47.] says Mr. Leaf. This kernel is kernel B,
probably the later kernel of the pair, that in which Achilles appeals to
his lady mother, who wins from Zeus the promise to cause Achaean defeat,
till Achilles is duly honoured. The whole Epic turns on this promise of
Zeus, as announced in the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines of the very
first Book. If kernel A is the first kernel, the poet left out the
essence of the plot he had announced. However, let us first examine
probable kernel B, reading, as advised, Book II. 1-50, [blank space];
XI. 56 ff.
We left Agamemnon (though the Dream bade him summon the host to arms)
dressed in _civil costume_. His ancestral sceptre in his hand, he is
going to hold a deliberative assembly of the unarmed host. His attire
proves that fact ([Greek: _prepodaes de ae stolae to epi Boulaen
exionti_], says the scholiast). Then if we skip, as advised, to II.
443-483 he bids the heralds call the host not to peaceful council, for
which his costume is appropriate, but to _war_! The host gathers, "and
in their midst the lord Agamemnon,"--still in civil costume, with his
sceptre (he has not changed his attire as far as we are told)--"in face
and eyes like Zeus; in waist like Ares" (god of war); "in breast like
Poseidon,"--yet, for all that we are told, entirely unarmed! The host,
however, were dressed "in innumerable bronze," "war was sweeter to them
than to depart in their ships to their dear native land,"--so much did
Athene encourage them.
But nobody had been speaking of flight, in THE KERNEL B: THAT proposal
was originally made by Thersites, in kernel A, and was attributed to
Agamemnon in the part of Book II. where the editor blends A and B.
This part, at present, Mr. Leaf throws aside as a very late piece of
compilation. Turning next, as directed, to XI. 56, we find the Trojans
deploying in arms, and the hosts encounter with fury--Agamemnon still,
for all that appears, in the raiment of peace, and with the sceptre of
constitutional monarchy. "In he rushed, first of all, and slew Bienor,"
and many other gentlemen of Troy, not with his sceptre!
Clearly all this is the reverse of "a narrative masterly in conception
and smooth in execution:" it is an impossible narrative.
Mr. Leaf has attempted to disengage one of two forms of the old original
poem from the parasitic later growths; he has promised to show us a
smooth and masterly narrative, and the result is a narrative on which
no Achasan poet could have ventured. In II. 50 the heralds are bidden
[Greek: _kurussein_], that is to summon the host--to _what_? To a
peaceful assembly, as Agamemnon's costume proves, says the next line
(II. 51), but that is excised by Mr. Leaf, and we go on to II. 443, and
the reunited passage now reads, "Agamemnon bade the loud heralds" (II.
50) "call the Achaeans to battle" (II. 443), and they came, in harness,
but their leader--when did he exchange chiton, cloak, and sceptre for
helmet, shield, and spear? A host appears in arms; a king who set out
with sceptre and doublet is found with a spear, in bronze armour: and
not another word is said about the Dream of Agamemnon.
It is perfectly obvious and certain that the two pieces of the broken
kernel B do not fit together at all. Nor is this strange, if the kernel
was really broken and endured the insertion of matter enough to fill
nine Books (IL-XL). If kernel B really contained Book II., line 50,
as Mr. Leaf avers, if Agamemnon, as in that line (50) "bade the
clear-voiced heralds do...." something--what he bade them do was,
necessarily, as his peaceful costume proves, to summon the peaceful
assembly which he was to moderate with his sceptre. At such an assembly,
or at a preliminary council of Chiefs, he would assuredly speak of his
Dream, as he does in the part excised. Mr. Leaf, if he will not have a
peaceful assembly as part of kernel B, must begin his excision at the
middle of line 42, in II., where Agamemnon wakens; and must make him
dress not in mufti but in armour, and call the host of the Achaeans to
arm, as the Dream bade him do, and as he does in II. 443. Perhaps we
should then excise II. 45 2, 45 3, with the reference to the plan of
retreat, for _THAT_ is part of kernel A where there was no promise of
Zeus, and no Dream sent to Agamemnon. Then from II. 483, the description
of the glorious armed aspect of Agamemnon, Mr. Leaf may pass to XI. 56,
the account of the Trojans under Hector, of the battle, of the prowess
of Agamemnon, inspired by the Dream which he, contrary to Homeric and
French epic custom, has very wisely mentioned to nobody--that is, in the
part not excised.
This appears to be the only method by which Mr. Leaf can restore the
continuity of his kernel B.
Though Mr. Leaf has failed to fit Book XI. to any point in Book II., of
course it does not follow that Book XI. cannot be a continuation of the
original _Wrath_ of _Achilles_ (version B). If so, we understand why
Agamemnon plucks up heart, in Book XI., and is the chief cause of a
temporary Trojan reverse. He relies on the Dream sent from Zeus in the
opening lines of Book II., the Dream which was not in kernel A; the
Dream which he communicated to nobody; the Dream conveying the promise
that he should at once take Troy. This is perhaps a tenable theory,
though Agamemnon had much reason to doubt whether the host would obey
his command to arm, but an alternative theory of why and wherefore
Agamemnon does great feats of valour, in Book XI., will later be
propounded. Note that the events of Books XL.-XVIII., by Mr. Leaf's
theory, all occur on the very day after Thetis (according to kernel
B)' [79] obtains from Zeus his promise to honour Achilles by the
discomfiture of the Achaeans; they have suffered nothing till that
moment, as far as we learn, from the absence of Achilles and his 2500
men: allowing for casualties, say 2000.
So far we have traced--from Books I. and II. to Book XI.--the fortunes
of kernel B, of the supposed later of two versions of the opening of the
_Iliad_. But there may have been a version (A) probably earlier, we have
been told, in which Achilles did not appeal to his mother, nor she to
Zeus, and Zeus did not promise victory to the Trojans, and sent no false
Dream of success to Agamemnon. What were the fortunes of that oldest
of all old kernels? In this version (A) Agamemnon, having had no Dream,
summoned a peaceful assembly to discuss the awkwardness caused by the
mutiny of Achilles. The host met (_Iliad,_ II. 87-99). Here we pass from
line 99 to 212-242: Thersites it is who opens the debate, (in version A)
insults Agamemnon, and advises flight. The army rushed off to launch the
ships, as in II. 142-210, and were brought back by Odysseus, who made a
stirring speech, and was well backed by Agamemnon, urging to battle.