run. Apparently they had not done so in the age of the poet, but iron
had certainly ceased to be "a precious metal"; knives and woodcutters'
axes are never made of a metal that is precious and rare. I am thus led,
on a general view, to suppose that the poems took shape when iron was
very well known, but was not yet, as in the "Dipylon" period in Crete,
commonly used by sword-smiths.
The ideas here stated are not unlike those of Paul Cauer. [Footnote:
_Grundfrager des Homerkritik,_ pp. 183-187. Leipsic, 1895.] I do not,
however, find the mentions of iron useful as a test of "early" and
"late" lays, which it is his theory that they are. Thus he says:--
(1) Iron is often mentioned as part of a man's personal property, while
we are not told how he means to use it. It is named with bronze, gold,
and girls. The poet has no definite picture before his eyes; he is vague
about iron. But, we reply, his picture of iron in these passages is
neither more nor less definite than his mental picture of the other
commodities. He calls iron "hard to smithy," "grey," "dark-hued"; he
knows, in fact, all about it. He does not tell us what the owner is
going to do with the gold and the bronze and the girls, any more than he
tells us what is to be done with the iron. Such information was rather
in the nature of a luxury than a necessity. Every hearer knew the uses
of all four commodities. This does not seem to have occurred to Cauer.
(2) Iron is spoken of as an emblem of hard things, as, to take a modern
example, in Mr. Swinburne's "armed and iron maidenhood "--said of
Atalanta. Hearts are "iron," strength is "iron," flesh is not "iron," an
"iron" noise goes up to the heaven of bronze. It may not follow, Cauer
thinks, from these phrases that iron was used in any way. Men are
supposed to marvel at its strange properties; it was "new and rare." I
see no ground for this inference.
(3) We have the "iron gates" of Tartarus, and the "iron bonds" in which
Odysseus was possibly lying; it does not follow that chains or gates
were made of iron any more than that gates were of chrysoprase in the
days of St. John.
(4) Next, we have mention of implements, not weapons, of iron--a
remarkable trait of culture. Greek ploughs and axes were made of iron
before spears and swords were of iron.
(5) We have mention of iron weapons, namely, the unique iron mace of
Areithous and the solitary iron arrow-head of Pandarus, and what Cauer
calls the iron swords (more probably knives) of Achilles and others. It
is objected to the "iron" of Achilles that Antilochus fears he will cut
his throat with it on hearing of the death of Patroclus, while there
is no other mention of suicide in the _Iliad_. It does not follow that
suicide was unheard of; indeed, Achilles may be thinking of suicide
presently, in XIII. 98, when he says to his mother: "Let me die at once,
since it was not my lot to succour my comrade."
(6) We have the iron-making spoken of in Book IX. 393 of the _Odyssey_.
It does not appear to us that the use of iron as an epithet bespeaks
an age when iron was a mysterious thing, known mainly by reputation,
"a costly possession." The epithets "iron strength," and so on, may as
readily be used in our own age or any other. If iron were at first a
"precious" metal, it is odd that Homeric men first used it, as Cauer
sees that they did, to make points to ploughshares and "tools of
agriculture and handiwork." "Then people took to working iron for
weapons." Just so, but we cannot divide the _Iliad_ into earlier and
later portions in proportion to the various mentions of iron in various
Books. These statistics are of no value for separatist purposes. It is
impossible to believe that men when they spoke of "iron strength," "iron
hearts," "grey iron," "iron hard to smithy," did so because iron was,
first, an almost unknown legendary mineral, next, "a precious metal,"
then the metal of drudgery, and finally the metal of weapons.
The real point of interest is, as Cauer sees, that domestic preceded
military uses of iron among the Achaeans. He seems, however, to think
that the confinement of the use of bronze to weapons is a matter of
traditional style. [Footnote: "Nur die Sprache der Dichter hielt an dem
Gebrauch der Bronze fest, die in den Jahrhunderten, waehrend deren der
Epische Stil erwachsen war, allein geherrscht hatte."] But, in the early
days of the waxing epics, tools as well as weapons were, as in Homer
they occasionally are, of bronze. Why, then, do the supposed late
continuators represent tools, not weapons, as of iron? Why do they not
cleave to the traditional term--bronze--in the case of tools, as the
same men do in the case of weapons?
Helbig offers an apparently untenable explanation of this fact. He has
proposed an interpretation of the uses of bronze and iron in the poems
entirely different from that which I offer. [Footnote: _Sur la Question
Mycenienne_. 1896.] Unfortunately, one can scarcely criticise his theory
without entering again into the whole question of the construction
of the Epics. He thinks that the origin of the poems dates from "the
Mycenaean period," and that the later continuators of the poems retained
the traditions of that remote age. Thus they thrice call Mycenae
"golden," though, in the changed economic conditions of their own
period, Mycenae could no longer be "golden"; and I presume that, if
possible, the city would have issued a papyrus currency without a
metallic basis. However this may be, "in the description of customs
the epic poets did their best to avoid everything modern." Here we
have again that unprecedented phenomenon--early poets who are
archaeologically precise.
We have first to suppose that the kernel of the _Iliad_ originated in
the Mycenaean age, the age of bronze. We are next to believe that this
kernel was expanded into the actual Epic in later and changed times,
but that the later poets adhered in their descriptions to the Mycenaean
standard, avoiding "everything modern." That poets of an uncritical
period, when treating of the themes of ancient legend or song, carefully
avoid everything modern is an opinion not warranted by the usage of
the authors of the _Chansons de Geste_, of _Beowulf_, and of the
_Nibelungenlied_. These poets, we must repeat, invariably introduce
in their chants concerning ancient days the customs, costume, armour,
religion, and weapons of their own time. Dr. Helbig supposes that the
late Greek poets, however, who added to the _Iliad_, carefully avoided
doing what other poets of uncritical ages have always done. [Footnote:
_La Question Mycenienne_, p. 50.]
This is his position in his text (p. 50). In his note 1 to page 50,
however, he occupies the precisely contrary position. "The epic poems
were chanted, as a rule, in the houses of more or less warlike chiefs.
It is, then, _a priori_ probable that the later poets took into account
the _contemporary_ military state of things. Their audience would have
been much perturbed (_bien cheques_) if they had heard the poet mention
nothing but arms and forms of attack and defence to which they were
unaccustomed." If so, when iron weapons came in the poets would
substitute iron for bronze, in lays new and old, but they never do.
However, this is Helbig's opinion in his note. But in his text he says
that the poets, carefully avoiding the contemporary, "the modern," make
the heroes fight, not on horseback, but from chariots. Their listeners,
according to his note, must have been _bien cheques_, for there came a
time when _they_ were not accustomed to war chariots.
Thus the poets who, in Dr. Helbig's text, "avoid as far as possible all
that is modern," in his note, on the same page, "take account of the
contemporary state of things," and are as modern as possible where
weapons _are_ concerned. Their audience would be sadly put out (_bien
cheques_) "if they heard talk only of arms ... to which they were
unaccustomed"; talk of large suspended shields, of uncorsleted heroes,
and of bronze weapons. They had to endure it, whether they liked it or
not, _teste_ Reichel. Dr. Helbig seems to speak correctly in his note;
in his text his contradictory opinion appears to be wrong. Experience
teaches us that the poets of an uncritical age--Shakespeare, for
example--introduce the weapons of their own period into works dealing
with remote ages. Hamlet uses the Elizabethan rapier.
In his argument on bronze and iron, unluckily, Dr. Helbig deserts the
judicious opinions of his note for the opposite theory of his text.
His late poets, in the age of iron, always say that the weapons of the
heroes are made of bronze. [Footnote: _Op. laud_., p. 51.] They thus,
"as far as possible avoid what is modern." But, of course, warriors
of the age of iron, when they heard the poet talk only of weapons of
bronze, "_aurient ete bien choques_" (as Dr. Helbig truly says in his
note), on hearing of nothing but "_armes auxquels ils n'etaient pas
habitues,_"--arms always of bronze.
Though Dr. Helbig in his text is of the opposite opinion, I must agree
entirely with the view which he states so clearly in his note. It
follows that if a poet speaks invariably of weapons of bronze, he is
living in an age when weapons are made of no other material. In his
text, however, Dr. Helbig maintains that the poets of later ages "as far
as possible avoid everything modern," and, therefore, mention none but
bronze weapons. But, as he has pointed out, they do mention iron tools
and implements. Why do they desert the traditional bronze? Because "it
occasionally happened that a poet, when thinking of an entirely new
subject, wholly emancipated himself from traditional forms," [Footnote:
_Op. laud_., pp. 51, 52]
The examples given in proof are the offer by Achilles of a lump of iron
as the prize for archery--the iron, as we saw, being destined for the
manufacture of pastoral and agricultural implements, in which Dr. Helbig
includes the lances of shepherds and ploughmen, though the poet never
says that they were of iron. [Footnote: _Iliad_, XXIII. 826, 835;
Odyssey, XIV. 531; XIII. 225.] There are also the axes through which
Odysseus shoots his arrow. [Footnote: _Odyssey_, XIX. 587; XXI. 3, X,
97, 114, 127, 138; XXIV. 168, 177; cf. XXI. 61.] "The poet here treated
an entirely new subject, in the development of which he had perfect
liberty." So he speaks freely of iron. "But," we exclaim, "tools and
implements, axes and knives, are not a perfectly new subject!" They were
extremely familiar to the age of bronze, the Mycenaean age. Examples of
bronze tools, arrow-heads, and implements are discovered in excavations
on Mycenaean sites. There was nothing new about bronze tools and
implements. Men had bronze tips to their ploughshares, bronze knives,
bronze axes, bronze arrow-heads before they used iron.
Perhaps we are to understand that feats of archery, non-military
contests in bowmanship, are _un sujet a fait nouveau_: a theme so very
modern that a poet, in singing of it, could let himself go, and dare to
speak of iron implements. But where was the novelty? All peoples who use
the bow in war practise archery in time of peace. The poet, moreover,
speaks of bronze tools, axes and knives, in other parts of the _Iliad_;
neither tools nor bronze tools constitute _un sujet tout a fait
nouveau_. There was nothing new in shooting with a bow and nothing new
in the existence of axes. Bows and axes were as familiar to the age
of stone and to the age of bronze as to the age of iron. Dr. Helbig's
explanation, therefore, explains nothing, and, unless a better
explanation is offered, we return to the theory, rejected by Dr. Helbig,
that implements and tools were often, not always, of iron, while weapons
were of bronze in the age of the poet. Dr. Helbig rejects this opinion.
He writes: "We cannot in any way admit that, at a period when the socks
of the plough, the lance points of shepherds" (which the poet never
describes as of iron), "and axe-heads were of iron, warriors still used
weapons of bronze." [Footnote: op. _laud._, p. 53.] But it is logically
possible to admit that this was the real state of affairs, while it is
logically impossible to admit that bows and tools were "new subjects";
and that late poets, when they sang of military gear, "_tenaient
compte de l'armement contemporain,_" carefully avoiding the peril of
bewildering their hearers by speaking of antiquated arms, and, at the
same time, spoke of nothing but antiquated arms--weapons of bronze--and
of war chariots, to fighting men who did not use war chariots and did
use weapons of iron.
These logical contradictions beset all arguments in which it is
maintained that "the late poets" are anxious archaisers, and at the same
time are eagerly introducing the armour and equipment of their own age.
The critics are in the same quandary as to iron and bronze as traps them
in the case of large shields, small bucklers, greaves, and corslets.
They are obliged to assign contradictory attitudes to their "late
poets." It does not seem possible to admit that a poet, who often
describes axes as of iron in various passages, does so in his account of
a peaceful contest in bowmanship, because contests in bowmanship are _UN
sujet TOUT a FAIT NOUVEAU;_ and so he feels at liberty to describe axes
as of iron, while he adheres to bronze as the metal for weapons. He, or
one of the Odyssean poets, had already asserted (Odyssey, IX. 391) that
iron _was_ the metal for adzes and axes.
Dr. Helbig's argument [Footnote: _La Question Mycenienne_, p. 54.] does
not explain the facts. The bow of Eurytus and the uses to which Odysseus
is to put it have been in the poet's mind all through the conduct of his
plot, and there is nothing to suggest that the exploit of bowmanship is
a very new lay, tacked on to the Odyssey.
After writing this chapter, I observed that my opinion had been
anticipated by S. H. Naber. [Footnote: _Quaestiones Homericae_, p.
60. Amsterdam. Van der Post, 1897.] "Quod Herodoti diserto testimonio
novimus, Homeri restate ferruminatio nondum inventa erat necdum bene
noverant mortales, uti opinor, _acuere_ ferrum. Hinc pauperes homines
ubi possunt, ferro utuntur; sed in plerisque rebus turn domi turn
militiae imprimis coguntur uti aere...."
The theory of Mr. Ridgeway as to the relative uses of iron and bronze is
not, by myself, very easily to be understood. "The Homeric warrior ...
has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron." [Footnote:
_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. p. 301.] As no spear or sword of iron is
ever mentioned in the _Iliad_ or Odyssey, as both weapons are always
of bronze when the metal is specified, I have not "seen" that they are
"regularly," or ever, of iron. In proof, Mr. Ridgeway cites the axes
and knives already mentioned--which are not spears or swords, and are
sometimes of bronze. He also quotes the line in the Odyssey, "Iron of
itself doth attract a man." But if this line is genuine and original,
it does not apply to the state of things in the _Iliad_, while it
contradicts the whole Odyssey, in which swords and spears are _ALWAYS_
of bronze when their metal is mentioned. If the line reveals the true
state of things, then throughout the Odyssey, if not throughout the
_Iliad_, the poets when they invariably speak of bronze swords and
spears invariably say what they do not mean. If they do this, how are
we to know when they mean what they say, and of what value can their
evidence on points of culture be reckoned? They may always be retaining
traditional terms as to usages and customs in an age when these are
obsolete.
If the Achaeans were, as in Mr. Ridgeway's theory, a northern
people--"Celts"--who conquered with iron weapons a Pelasgian
bronze-using Mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that Achaean or
Pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional Pelasgian term for the
metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who
had won their triumph with iron. The traditional phrase of a conquered
bronze-using race could not thus survive and flourish in the poetry of
an outlandish iron-using race of conquerors.
Mr. Ridgeway cites the Odyssey, wherein we are told that "Euryalus,
the Phaeacian, presented to Odysseus a bronze sword, though, as we have
seen" (Mr. Ridgeway has seen), "the usual material for all such weapons
is iron. But the Phoeacians both belonged to the older race and lived in
a remote island, and therefore swords of bronze may well have continued
in use in such out-of-the-world places long after iron swords were in
use everywhere else in Greece. The man who could not afford iron had to
be satisfied with bronze." [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, p. 305.]
Here the poet is allowed to mean what he says. The Phaeacian sword is
really of bronze, with silver studs, probably on the hilt (Odyssey,
VIII. 401-407), which was of ivory. The "out-of-the-world" islanders
could afford ivory, not iron. But when the same poet tells us that
the sword which Odysseus brought from Troy was "a great silver-studded
bronze sword" (Odyssey, X. 261, 262), then Mr. Ridgeway does not allow
the poet to mean what he says. The poet is now using an epic formula
older than the age of iron swords.
That Mr. Ridgeway adopts Helbig's theory--the poet says "bronze," by a
survival of the diction of the bronze age, when he means iron--I infer
from the following passage: "_Chalkos_ is the name for the older metal,
of which cutting weapons were made, and it thus lingered in many phrases
of the Epic dialect; 'to smite with the _chalkos_' was equivalent to our
phrase 'to smite with the steel.'" [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, i.
295.] But we certainly do smite with the steel, while the question is,
"_DID_ Homer's men smite with the iron?" Homer says not; he does not
merely use "an epic phrase" "to smite with the _CHALKOS_," but he
carefully describes swords, spears, and usually arrow-heads as being
of bronze (_CHALKOS_), while axes, adzes, and knives are frequently
described by him as of iron.
Mr. Ridgeway has an illustrative argument with some one, who says: "The
dress and weapons of the Saxons given in the lay of _Beowulf_ fitted
exactly the bronze weapons in England, for they had shields, and spears,
and battle-axes, and swords." If you pointed out to him that the Saxon
poem spoke of these weapons as made of iron, he would say, "I admit
that it is a difficulty, but the resemblances are so many that the
discrepancies may be jettisoned." [Footnote: _Ridgeway,_ i. 83, 84.]
Now, if the supposed controversialist were a Homeric critic, he would
not admit any difficulty. He would say, "Yes; in _Beowulf_ the
weapons are said to be of iron, but that is the work of the Christian
_remanieur,_ or _bearbeiter,_ who introduced all the Christian morality
into the old heathen lay, and who also, not to puzzle his iron-using
audience, changed the bronze into iron weapons."
We may prove anything if we argue, now that the poets retain the
tradition of obsolete things, now that they modernise as much as they
please. Into this method of reasoning, after duly considering it, I
am unable to come with enthusiasm, being wedded to the belief that the
poets say what they mean. Were it otherwise, did they not mean what
they say, their evidence would be of no value; they might be dealing
throughout in terms for things which were unrepresented in their own
age. To prove this possible, it would be necessary to adduce convincing
and sufficient examples of early national poets who habitually use
the terminology of an age long prior to their own in descriptions of
objects, customs, and usages. Meanwhile, it is obvious that my whole
argument has no archaeological support. We may find "Mycenaean" corslets
and greaves, but they are not in cremation burials. No Homeric cairn
with Homeric contents has ever been discovered; and if we did find
examples of Homeric cairns, it appears, from the poems, that they would
very seldom contain the arms of the dead.
Nowhere, again, do we find graves containing bronze swords and iron axes
and adzes. I know nothing nearer in discoveries to my supposed age
of bronze weapons and iron tools than a grave of the early iron and
geometrical ornament age of Crete--a _tholos_ tomb, with a bronze
spear-head and a set of iron tools, among others a double axe and a
pick of iron. But these were in company with iron swords? To myself the
crowning mystery is, what has become of the Homeric tumuli with their
contents? One can but say that only within the last thirty years have we
found, or, finding, have recognised Mycenaean burial records. As to the
badness of the iron of the North for military purposes, and the probable
badness of all early iron weapons, we have testimony two thousand years
later than Homer and some twelve hundred years later than Polybius.
In the Eyrbyggja Saga (Morris and Maguusson, chap, xxiv.) we read that
Steinthor "was girt with a sword that was cunningly wrought; the hilts
were white with silver, and the grip wrapped round with the same, but
the strings thereof were gilded." This was a splendid sword, described
with the Homeric delight in such things; but the battle-cry arises, and
then "the fair-wrought sword bit not when it smote armour, and Steinthor
must _straighten it under_ his _foot._" Messrs. Morris and Maguusson add
in a note: "This is a very common experience in Scandinavian weapons,
and for the first time heard of at the battle of Aquae Sextiae between
Marius and the Teutons." [Footnote: The reference is erroneous.] "In the
North weapon-smiths who knew how to forge tempered or steel-laminated
weapons were, if not unknown, at least very rare." When such skill was
unknown or rare in Homer's time, nothing was more natural than that
bronze should hold its own, as the metal for swords and spears, after
iron was commonly used for axes and ploughshares.
CHAPTER X
THE HOMERIC HOUSE
If the Homeric poems be, as we maintain, the work of a peculiar age, the
Homeric house will also, in all likelihood, be peculiar. It will not
be the Hellenic house of classical times. Manifestly the dwelling of a
military-prince in the heroic age would be evolved to meet his needs,
which were not the needs of later Hellenic citizens. In time of peace
the later Greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining
throngs of armed retainers, like the Homeric chief. The women of later
Greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's
chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. The Homeric women also,
at least in the house of Odysseus, have their separate chambers, which
the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely
honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. The circumstances,
however, were peculiar--Penelope being unprotected in the absence of her
lord.
The whole domestic situation in the Homeric poems--the free equality
of the women, the military conditions, the life of the chiefs and
retainers--closely resembles, allowing for differences of climate, that
of the rich landowners of early Iceland as described in the sagas. There
can be no doubt that the house of the Icelandic chief was analogous to
the house of the Homeric prince. Societies remarkably similar in mode
of life were accommodated in dwellings similarly arranged. Though
the Icelanders owned no Over-Lord, and, indeed, left their native
Scandinavia to escape the sway of Harold Fairhair, yet each wealthy and
powerful chief lived in the manner of a Homeric "king." His lands and
thralls, horses and cattle, occupied his attention when he did not
chance to be on Viking adventure--"bearing bane to alien men." He
always carried sword and spear, and often had occasion to use them.
He entertained many guests, and needed a large hall and ample sleeping
accommodation for strangers and servants. His women were as free and as
much respected as the ladies in Homer; and for a husband to slap a wife
was to run the risk of her deadly feud. Thus, far away in the frosts of
the north, the life of the chief was like that of the Homeric prince,
and their houses were alike.
It is our intention to use this parallel in the discussion of the
Homeric house. All Icelandic chiefs' houses in the tenth and eleventh
centuries were not precisely uniform in structure and accommodation,
and saga writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living
more comfortably than their forefathers, sometimes confuse matters by
introducing the arrangements of their own into the tale of past times.
But, in any case, one Icelandic house of the tenth or eleventh century
might differ from another in certain details. It is not safe, therefore,
to argue that difference of detail in Homer's accounts of various houses
means that the varying descriptions were composed in different ages. In
the _Odyssey_ the plot demands that the poet must enter into domestic
details much more freely than he ever has occasion to do in the Iliad.
He may mention upper chambers freely, for example; it will not follow
that in the _Iliad_ upper chambers do not exist because they are only
mentioned twice in that Epic.
It is even more important to note that in the house of Odysseus we have
an unparalleled domestic situation. The lady of the house is beset by
more than a hundred wooers--"sorning" on her, in the old Scots legal
phrase--making it impossible for her to inhabit her own hall, and
desirable to keep the women as much as possible apart from the men. Thus
the Homeric house of which we know most, that of Odysseus, is a house in
a most abnormal condition.
For the sake of brevity we omit the old theory that the Homeric
house was practically that of historical Greece, with the men's hall
approached by a door from the courtyard; while a door at the upper end
of the men's hall yields direct access to the quarters where the women
dwelt apart, at the rear of the men's hall.
That opinion has not survived the essay by Mr. J. L. Myres on the "Plan
of the Homeric House." [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol.
XX, 128-150.] Quite apart from arguments that rest on the ground plans
of palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns, Mr. Myres has proved, by an exact
reading of the poet's words, that the descriptions in the _Odyssey_
cannot be made intelligible on the theory that the poet has in his mind
a house of the Hellenic pattern. But in his essay he hardly touches on
any Homeric house except that of Odysseus, in which the circumstances
were unusual. A later critic, Ferdinand Noack, has demonstrated that
we must take other Homeric houses into consideration. [Footnote:
_Homerische Palaeste_. Teubner. Leipzig, 1903.] The prae-Mycenaean
house is, according to Mr. Myres, on the whole of the same plan as the
Hellenic house of historic days; between these comes the Mycenaean and
Homeric house; "so that the Mycenaean house stands out _as an intrusive
phenomenon_, of comparatively late arrival _and short of duration_..."
[Footnote: Myres, _Journal_ of _Hellenic_ Studies, vol. xx. p. 149.]
Noack goes further; he draws a line between the Mycenaean houses on one
hand and the houses described by Homer on the other; while he thinks
that the "_late_ Homeric house," that of the closing Books of the
Odyssey, is widely sundered from the Homeric house of the _Iliad_
and from the houses of Menelaus and Alcinous in earlier Books of the
_Odyssey._ [Footnote: Noack, p. 73.]
In this case the Iliadic and earlier Odyssean houses are those of a
single definite age, neither Mycenaean of the prime, nor Hellenic--a
fact which entirely suits our argument. But it is not so certain, that
the house of Odysseus is severed from the other Homeric houses by the
later addition of an upper storey, as Noack supposes, and of women's
quarters, and of separate sleeping chambers for the heads of the family.
The _Iliad,_ save in two passages, and earlier Books of the _Odyssey_
may not mention upper storeys because they have no occasion, or only
rare occasion, to do so; and some houses may have had upper sleeping
chambers while others of the same period had not, as we shall prove from
the Icelandic parallel.
Mr. Myres's idea of the Homeric house, or, at least, of the house of
Odysseus, is that the women had a _meguron,_ or common hall, apart from
that of the men, with other chambers. These did not lie to the direct
rear of the men's hall, nor were they entered by a door that opened in
the back wall of the men's hall. Penelope has a chamber, in which
she sleeps and does woman's work, upstairs; her connubial chamber,
unoccupied during her lord's absence, is certainly on the ground floor.
The women's rooms are severed from the men's hall by a courtyard; in
the courtyard are chambers. Telemachus has his [Greek: Thalamos], or
chamber, in the men's courtyard. All this appears plain from the poet's
words; and Mr. Myres corroborates, by the ground plans of the palaces
of Tiryns and Mycenae, a point on which Mr. Monro had doubts, as regards
Tiryns, while he accepted it for Mycenae. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii.
497; _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xx. 136.]
Noack [Footnote: Noack, p. 39.] does not, however, agree.
There appears to be no doubt that in the centre of the great halls of
Tiryns and of Mycenae, as of the houses in Homer, was the hearth, with
two tall pillars on each side, supporting a _louvre_ higher than the
rest of the roof, and permitting some, at least, of the smoke of
the fire to escape. Beside the fire were the seats of the master and
mistress of the house, of the minstrel, and of honoured guests. The
place of honour was not on a dais at the inmost end of the hall, like
the high table in college halls. Mr. Myres holds that in the Homeric
house the [Greek: prodomos], or "forehouse," was a chamber, and was not
identical with the [Greek: aethousa], or portico, though he admits that
the two words "are used indifferently to describe the sleeping place of
a guest." [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xx. 144, 155.] This
was the case at Tiryns; and in the house of the father of Phoenix,
in the _Iliad_, the _prodomos_, or forehouse, and the _aethousa_, or
portico, are certainly separate things (Iliad, IX. 473). Noack does not
accept the Tiryns evidence for the Homeric house.
On Mr. Myres's showing, the women in the house of Odysseus had distinct
and separate quarters into which no man goes uninvited. Odysseus when at
home has, with his wife, a separate bedroom; and in his absence Penelope
sleeps upstairs, where there are several chambers for various purposes.
Granting that all this is so, how do the pictures of the house given in
the final part of the _Odyssey_ compare with those in the [Blank space]
and with the accounts of the dwellings of Menelaus and Alcinous in the
Odyssey? Noack argues that the house of Odysseus is unlike the other
Homeric houses, because in these, he reasons, the women have no separate
quarters, and the lord and lady of the house sleep in the great hall,
and have no other bedroom, while there are no upper chambers in the
houses of the _Iliad_, except in two passages dismissed as "late."
If all this be so, then the Homeric period, as regards houses and
domestic life, belongs to an age apart, not truly Mycenaean, and still
less later Hellenic.
It must be remembered that Noack regards the Odyssey as a composite and
in parts very late mosaic (a view on which I have said what I think
in _Homer and the Epic_). According to this theory (Kirchhoff is the
exponent of a popular form thereof) the first Book of the Odyssey
belongs to "the latest stratum," and is the "copy" of the general
"worker-up," whether he was the editor employed by Pisistratus or a
laborious amateur. This theory is opposed by Sittl, who makes his point
by cutting out, as interpolations, whatever passages do not suit his
ideas, and do suit Kirchhoff's--this is the regular method of Homeric
criticism. The whole cruise of Telemachus (Book IV.) is also regarded
as a late addition: on this point English scholars hitherto have been
of the opposite opinion. [Footnote: Cf. Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii.
313-317.]
The method of all parties is to regard repetitions of phrases as
examples of borrowing, except, of course, in the case of the earliest
poet from whom the others pilfer, and in other cases of prae-Homeric
surviving epic formulae. Critics then dispute as to which recurrent
passage is the earlier, deciding, of course, as may happen to suit
their own general theory. In our opinion these passages are traditional
formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the _Chansons de Geste_, and
Noack also takes this view every now and then. They may well be older,
in many cases, than _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_; or the poet, having found
his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circumstances
occurred. Such passages, so considered, are no tests of earlier
composition in one place, of later composition in another.
We now look into Noack's theory of the Homeric house. Where do the
lord and lady sleep? _Not_, he says, as Odysseus and Penelope do (when
Odysseus is at home), in a separate chamber (_thalamos_) on the ground
floor, nor, like Gunnar and Halgerda (Njal's Saga), in an upper chamber.
They sleep _mucho domou_; that is, not in a separate recess in the
_house_, but in a recess of the great hall or _megaron_. Thus, in
the hall of Alcinous, the whole space runs from the threshold to the
_muchos_, the innermost part (_Odyssey_, VII. 87-96). In the hall of
Odysseus, the Wooers retreat to the _muchos_, "the innermost part of the
hall" (_Odyssey_, XXII. 270). "The _muchos_, in Homer, never denotes
a separate chamber." [Footnote: Noack, p. 45. _Cf_. Monro, Note to
Odyssey, XXII. 270.]
In Odyssey, XI. 373, Alcinous says it is not yet time to sleep _ev
megaro_, "in the hall." Alcinous and Arete, his wife, sleep "in the
recess of the lofty _domos_," that is, in the recess of the _hall_, not
of "the house" (Odyssey, VII. 346). The same words are used of Helen and
Menelaus (Odyssey, IV. 304). But when Menelaus goes forth next morning,
he goes _ek thalamoio_, "out of his _chamber_" (_Odyssey_, IV. 310). But
this, says Noack, is a mere borrowing of Odyssey, II 2-5, where the same
words are used of Telemachus, leaving his chamber, which undeniably was
a separate chamber in the court: Eurycleia lighted him thither at night
(Odyssey, I. 428). In Odyssey, IV. 121, Helen enters the hall "from her
fragrant, lofty chamber," so she _had_ a chamber, not in the hall. But,
says Noack, this verse "is not original." The late poet of _Odyssey_,
IV. has cribbed it from the early poet who composed _Odyssey, XIX. 53._
In that passage Penelope "comes from her chamber, like Artemis or golden
Aphrodite." Penelope _had_ a chamber--being "a lone lorn woman," who
could not sleep in a hall where the Wooers sat up late drinking--and
the latest poet transfers this chamber to Helen. But however late and
larcenous he may have been, the poet of IV. 121 certainly did not crib
the words of the poet of XIX. 53, for he says, "Helen came out of
her _fragrant, high-roofed_ chamber." The _hall_ was not precisely
"fragrant"! However, Noack supposes that the late poet of Book IV. let
Helen have a chamber apart, to lead up to the striking scene of her
entry to the hall where her guests are sitting. May Helen not even have
a boudoir? In _Odyssey_, IV. 263, Helen speaks remorsefully of having
abandoned her "chamber," and husband, and child, with Paris; but the
late poet says this, according to Noack, because he finds that he is
in for a chamber, so to speak, at all events, as a result of his having
previously cribbed the word "chamber" from Odyssey, XIX. 53. Otherwise,
we presume Helen would have said that she regretted having left "the
recess of the lofty hall" where she really did sleep. [Footnote: Noack,
pp. 47-48]
The merit of this method of arguing may be left to the judgment of the
reader, who will remark that wedded pairs are not described as leaving
the hall when they go to bed; they sleep in "a recess of the lofty
house," the innermost part. Is this the same as the "recess of the
_hall_" or is it an innermost part of the _house?_ Who can be certain?
The bridal chamber, built so cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the
support of the bed, by Odysseus (odyssey, XXIII. 177-204), is, according
to Noack, an exception, a solitary freak of Odysseus. But we may reply
that the _thalamos_, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by
knowledge of which Odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree
in the construction of the bed. [blank space] was highly original.
That separate chambers are needed for grown-up children, _BECAUSE_ the
parents sleep in the hall, is no strong argument. If the parents had a
separate chamber, the young people, unless they slept in the hall, would
still need their own. The girls, of course, could not sleep in the hall;
and, in the absence of both Penelope and Odysseus from the hall, ever
since Telemachus was a baby, Telemachus could have slept there. But it
will be replied that the Wooers did not beset the hall, and Penelope
did not retire to a separate chamber, till Telemachus was a big boy of
sixteen. Noack argues that he had a separate chamber, though the hall
was free, _tradition_. [Footnote: Noack, p. 49.]
Where does Noack think that, in a normal Homeric house, the girls of
the family slept? _They_ could not sleep in the hall, and on the two
occasions when the _Iliad_ has to mention the chambers of the young
ladies they are "upper chambers," as is natural. But as Noack wants
to prove the house of Odysseus, with its upper chambers, to be a late
peculiar house, he, of course, expunges the two mentions of girls' upper
chambers in the _Odyssey_. The process is simple and easy.
We find (_Iliad_, XVII. 36) that a son, wedding in his father's and
mother's life-time, has a _thalamos_ built for him, and a _muchos_
in the _THALAMOS_, where he leaves his wife when he goes to war. This
dwelling of grown-up married children, as in the case of the sons of
Priam, has a _thalamos_, or _doma_, and a courtyard--is a house, in fact
(_Iliad_, VI. 3 16). Here we seem to distinguish the bed-chamber
from the _doma_, which is the hall. Noack objects that when Odysseus
fumigates his house, after slaying the Wooers, he thus treats the
_megaron_, _AND_ the _doma_, _AND_ the courtyard. Therefore, Noack
argues, the _megaron_, or hall, is one thing; the _doma_ is another. Mr.
Monro writes, "_doma_ usually means _megaron_," and he supposes a
slip from another reading, _thalamon_ for _megaron_, which is not
satisfactory. But if _doma_ here be not equivalent to _megaron_, what
room can it possibly be? Who was killed in another place? what place
therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? No other
places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the
lines which cannot be used in the argument.
Noack, in any case, maintains that Paris has but one place to live in
by day and to sleep in by night--his [Greek: talamos]. There he sleeps,
eats, and polishes his weapons and armour. There Hector finds him
looking to his gear; Helen and the maids are all there (_Iliad,_ VI.
321-323). Is this quite certain? Are Helen and the maids in the [Greek:
talamos], where Paris is polishing his corslet and looking to his bow,
or in an adjacent room? If not in another room, why, when Hector is in
the room talking to Paris, does Helen ask him to "come in"? (_Iliad,_
VI. 354). He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?
The minuteness of these inquiries is tedious!
In _Iliad,_ III. 125, Iris finds Helen "in the hall" weaving. She
summons her to come to Priam on the gate. Helen dresses in outdoor
costume, and goes forth "from the chamber," [Greek: talamos] (III.
141-142). Are hall and chamber the same room, or did not Helen dress "in
the chamber"? In the same Book (III. 174) she repents having left
the [Greek: talamos] of Menelaus, not his hall: the passage is not a
repetition in words of her speech in the Odyssey.
The gods, of course, are lodged like men. When we find that Zeus has
really a separate sleeping chamber, built by Hephaestus, as Odysseus has
(_Iliad,_ XIV. 166-167), we are told that this is a late interpolation.
Mr. Leaf, who has a high opinion of this scene, "the Beguiling of
Zeus," places it in the "second expansions"; he finds no "late Odyssean"
elements in the language. In _Iliad,_ I. 608-611, Zeus "departed to his
couch"; he seems not to have stayed and slept in the hall.
Here a quaint problem occurs. Of all late things in the Odyssey the
latest is said to be the song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares
and Aphrodite in the house of Hephaestus. [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII.
266-300.] We shall show that this opinion is far from certainly correct.
Hephaestus sets a snare round the bed in his [Greek: talamos] and
catches the guilty lovers. _Now_, was his [Greek: talamos] or bedroom,
also his dining-room? If so, the author of the song, though so "late,"
knows what Noack knows, and what the poets who assign sleeping chambers
to wedded folks do not know, namely, that neither married gods nor
married men have separate bedrooms. This is plain, for he makes
Hephaestus stand at the front door of his house, and shout to the gods
to come and see the sinful lovers. [Footnote: Ibid., VI. 304-305] They
all come and look on _from the front door_ (_Odyssey_, VII. 325), which
leads into the [Greek: megaron], the hall. If the lovers are in bed in
the hall, then hall and bedroom are all one, and the terribly late poet
who made this lay knows it, though the late poets of the _Odyssey_ and
_Iliad_ do not.
It would appear that the author of the lay is not "late," as we shall
prove in another case.
Noack, then, will not allow man or god to have a separate wedding
chamber, nor women, before the late parts of the _Odyssey_, to have
separate quarters, except in the house of Odysseus. Women's chambers
do not exist in the Homeric house. [Footnote: Noack, p. 50.] If so, how
remote is the true Homeric house from the house of historical Greece!
As for upper chambers, those of the daughter of the house (_Iliad,_ II.
514; XVI. 184), both passages are "late," as we saw (Noack, p.[blank
space]). In the _Odyssey_ Penelope both sleeps and works at the shroud
in an upper chamber. But the whole arrangement of upper chambers as
women's apartments is as late, says Noack, as the time of the poets and
"redactors" (whoever they may have been) of the Odyssey, XXI., XXII.,
XXIII. [Footnote: Noack, p. 68.] At the earliest these Books are said to
be of the eighth century B.C. Here the late poets have their innings at
last, and do modernise the Homeric house.
To prove the absence of upper rooms in the _Iliad_ we have to abolish
II. 514, where Astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and
XVI. 184, where Polymele celebrates her amour with Hermes "in the upper
chambers." The places where these two passages occur, _Catalogue_ (Book
II.) and the _Catalogue_ of the _Myrmidons_ (Book XVI.) are, indeed,
both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of
bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors of "late"
passages in the Odyssey (XVI. 190).
Stated briefly, such are the ideas of Noack. They leave us, at least,
with permission to hold that the whole of the Epics, except Books XXI.,
XXII., and XXIII. of the Odyssey, bear, as regards the house, the marks
of a distinct peculiar age, coming between the period of Mycenae and
Tiryns on one hand and the eighth century B.C. on the other.
This is the point for which we have contended, and this suits our
argument very well, though we are sorry to see that Odyssey, Books XXI.,
XXII., and XXIII., are no older than the eighth century B.C. But we have
not been quite convinced that Helen had not her separate chamber, that
Zeus had not his separate chamber, and that the upper chambers of the
daughters of the house in the Iliad are "late." Where, if not in upper
chambers, did the young princesses repose? Again, the marked separation
of the women in the house of Odysseus may be the result of Penelope's
care in unusual circumstances, though she certainly would not build
a separate hall for them. There are over a hundred handsome young
scoundrels in her house all day long and deep into the night; she would,
vainly, do her best to keep her girls apart.
It stands to reason that young girls of princely families would have
bedrooms in the house, not in the courtyard-bedrooms out of the way of
enterprising young men. What safer place could be found for them than in
upper chambers, as in the Iliad? But, if their lovers were gods, we
know that none "can see a god coming or going against his will." The
arrangements of houses may and do vary in different cases in the same
age.
As examples we turn to the parallel afforded by the Icelandic sagas and
their pictures of houses of the eleventh century B.C. The present author
long ago pointed out the parallel of the houses in the sagas and in
Homer. [Footnote: _The_ House. Butcher and Lang. Translation of the
Odyssey.] He took his facts from Dasent's translation of the Njal Saga
(1861, vol. i. pp. xcviii., ciii., with diagrams). As far as he is
aware, no critic looked into the matter till Mr. Monro (1901), being
apparently unacquainted with Dasent's researches, found similar lore in
works by Dr. Valtyr Gudmundsson [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii.
pp. 491-495; _cf_. Gudmundsson, _Der Islandske Bottg i Fristats Tiden_,
1894; _cf_. Dasent, _Oxford_ Essays, 1858.] The roof of the hall is
supported by four rows of columns, the two inner rows are taller, and
between them is the hearth, with seats of honour for the chief guests
and the lord. The fire was in a kind of trench down the hall; and in
very cold weather, we learn from Dasent, long fires could be lit through
the extent of the hall. The chief had a raised seat; the guests sat on
benches. The high seats were at the centre; not till later times on the
dais, as in a college hall. The tables were relatively small, and, as in
Homer, could be removed after a meal. The part of the hall with the
dais in later days was partitioned off as a _stofa_ or parlour. In early
times cooking was done in the hall.
Dr. Gudmundsson, if I understand him, varies from Dasent in some
respects. I quote an abstract of his statement.
"About the year 1000 houses generally consisted of, at least, four
rooms; often a fifth was added, the so-called bath-room. The oldest form
for houses was that of one long line or row of separate rooms united by
wooden or clay corridors or partitions, and each covered with a roof.
Later, this was considered unpractical, and they began building some of
the houses or rooms behind the others, which facilitated the access from
one to another, and diminished the number of outer doors and corridors."
"Towards the latter part of the tenth century the _skaal_ was used as
common sleeping-room for the whole family, including servants and serfs;
it was fitted up in the same way as the hall. Like this, it was divided
in three naves by rows of wooden pillars; the middle floor was lower
than that of the two side naves. In these were placed the so-called
_saet_ or bed-places, not running the whole length of the [blank space]
from gable to gable, but sideways, filling about a third part. Each
_saet_ was enclosed by broad, strong planks joined into the pillars, but
not nailed on, so they might easily be taken out. These planks, called
_SATTESTOKKE_, could also be turned sideways and used as benches during
the day; they were often beautifully carved, and consequently highly
valued."
"When settling abroad the people took away with them these planks, and
put them up in their new home as a symbol of domestic happiness. The
_saet_ was occupied by the servants of the farm as sleeping-rooms;
generally it was screened by hangings and low panels, which partitioned
it off like huge separate boxes, used as beds."
"All beds were filled with hay or straw; servants and serfs slept on
this without any bedclothes, sometimes a sleeping-bag was used, or
they covered themselves with deerskins or a mantle. The family had
bed-clothes, but only in very wealthy houses were they also provided
for the servants. Moveable beds were extremely rare, but are sometimes
mentioned. Generally two people slept in each bed."
"In the further end of the _skaal_, facing the door, opened out one or
several small bedrooms, destined for the husband with wife and children,
besides other members of the family, including guests of a higher
standing. These small dormitories were separated by partitions of planks
into bedrooms with one or several beds, and shut away from the outer
_SKAAL_ either by a sliding-door in the wall or by an ordinary door
shutting with a hasp. Sometimes only a hanging covered the opening."
"In some farms were found underground passages, leading from the
master's bedside to an outside house, or even as far as a wood or
another sheltered place in the neighbourhood, to enable the inhabitants
to save themselves during a night attack. For the same reason each man
had his arms suspended over his bed."
"_Ildhus_ or fire-house was the kitchen, often used besides as a
sleeping-room when the farms were very small. This was quite abolished
after the year 1000."
"_Buret_ was the provision house."
"The bathroom was heated from a stone oven; the stones were heated
red-hot and cold water thrown upon them, which developed a quantity
of vapour. As the heat and the steam mounted, the people--men and
women--crawled up to a shelf under the roof and remained there as in a
Turkish bath."
"In large and wealthy houses there was also a women's room, with a
fireplace built low down in the middle, as in the hall, where the women
used to sit with their handiwork all day. The men were allowed to come
in and talk to them, also beggar-women and other vagabonds, who brought
them the news from other places. Towards evening and for meals all
assembled together in the hall."
On this showing, people did not sleep in cabins partitioned off the
dining-hall, but in the _skaale_; and two similar and similarly situated
rooms, one the common dining-hall, the other the common sleeping-hall,
have been confused by writers on the sagas. [Footnote: Gudmundsson, p,
14, Note I.] Can there be a similar confusion in the uses of _megaron_,
_doma_, and _domos_?
In the Eyrbyggja Saga we have descriptions of the "fire-hall," _skali_
or _eldhus_. "The fire-hall was the common sleeping-room in Icelandic
homesteads." Guests and strangers slept there; not in the portico, as in
Homer. "Here were the lock-beds." There were butteries; one of these
was reached by a ladder. The walls were panelled. [Footnote: _The Ere
Dwellers_, p. 145.] Thorgunna had a "berth," apparently partitioned
off, in the hall. [Footnote: _Ibid_., 137-140.] As in Homer the hall was
entered from the courtyard, in which were separate rooms for stores
and other purposes. In the courtyard also, in the houses of Gunnar of
Lithend and Gisli at Hawkdale, and doubtless in other cases, were the
_dyngfur_, or ladies' chambers, their "bowers" (_Thalamos_, like that of
Telemachus in the courtyard), where they sat spinning and gossiping. The
_dyngja_ was originally called _bur_, our "bower"; the ballads say "in
bower and hall." In the ballad of _MARGARET_, her parents are said to
put her in the way of deadly sin by building her a bower, apparently
separate from the main building; she would have been safer in an upper
chamber, though, even there, not safe--at least, if a god wooed her! It
does not appear that all houses had these chambers for ladies apart from
the main building. You did not enter the main hall in Iceland from
the court directly in front, but by the "man's door" at the west
side, whence you walked through the porch or outer hall (_prodomos_,
_aithonsa_), in the centre of which, to the right, were the doors of the
hall. The women entered by the women's door, at the eastern extremity.
Guests did not sleep, as in Homer, in the _prodomos_, or the
portico--the climate did not permit it--but in one or other hall. The
hall was wainscotted; the walls were hung with shields and weapons,
like the hall of Odysseus. The heads of the family usually slept in the
aisles, in chambers entered through the wainscot of the hall. Such a
chamber might be called _muchos_; it was private from the hall though
under the same roof. It appears not improbable that some Homeric halls
had sleeping places of this kind; such a _muchos_ in Iceland seems to
have had windows. [Footnote: Story of Burnt _Njal_, i. 242.]
Gunnar himself, however, slept with his wife, Halegerda, in an
upper chamber; his mother, who lived with him, also had a room upstairs.
In Njal's house, too, there was an upper chamber, wherein the foes of
Njal threw fire. [Footnote:_Ibid_., ii. 173.] But Njal and Bergthora,
his wife, when all hope was ended, went into their own bride-chamber
in the separate aisle of the hall "and gave over their souls into God's
hand." Under a hide they lay; and when men raised up the hide, after the
fire had done its work, "they were unburnt under it. All praised God for
that, and thought it was a _GREAT_ token." In this house was a weaving
room for the women. [Footnote:_Ibid_, ii. 195.]
It thus appears that Icelandic houses of the heroic age, as regards
structural arrangements, were practically identical with the house of
Odysseus, allowing for a separate sleeping-hall, while the differences
between that and other Homeric houses may be no more than the
differences between various Icelandic dwellings. The parents might sleep
in bedchambers off the hall or in upper chambers. Ladies might have
bowers in the courtyard or might have none. The [Greek: laurae]--each
passage outside the hall--yielded sleeping rooms for servants; and there
were store-rooms behind the passage at the top end of the hall, as well
as separate chambers for stores in the courtyard. Mr. Leaf judiciously
reconstructs the Homeric house in its "public rooms," of which we hear
most, while he leaves the residential portion with "details and limits
probably very variable." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. 586-589, with
diagram based on the palace of Tiryns.]
Given variability, which is natural and to be expected, and given the
absence of detail about the "residential portion" of other houses than
that of Odysseus in the poems, it does not seem to us that this house
is conspicuously "late," still less that it is the house of historical
Greece. Manifestly, in all respects it more resembles the houses of Njal
and Gunnar of Lithend in the heroic age of Iceland.
In the house, as in the uses of iron and bronze, the weapons, armour,
relations of the sexes, customary laws, and everything else, Homer
gives us an harmonious picture of a single and peculiar age. We find no
stronger mark of change than in the Odyssean house, if that be changed,
which we show reason to doubt.
CHAPTER XI
NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"
If the Homeric descriptions of details of life contain anachronisms,
points of detail inserted in later progressive ages, these must be
peculiarly conspicuous in the Odyssey. Longinus regarded it as the work
of Homer's advanced life, the sunset of his genius, and nobody denies
that it assumes the existence of the _Iliad_ and is posterior to that
epic. In the Odyssey, then, we are to look, if anywhere, for indications
of a changed society. That the language of the _Odyssey_, and of four
Books of the _Iliad_ (IX., X., XXIII., XXIV.), exhibits signs of change
is a critical commonplace, but the language is matter for a separate
discussion; we are here concerned with the ideas, manners, customary
laws, weapons, implements, and so forth of the Epics.
Taking as a text Mr. Monro's essay, _The Relation of the Odyssey to the
Iliad_, [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, _seqq_.] we examine
the notes of difference which he finds between the twin Epics. As to
the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of
passages" in the _Iliad_ by the poet of the _Odyssey_, we shall not
dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating
the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise
Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might
arrive at some curious results. For example, we could show that the
_Klothes_, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born
child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier
than "the simple _Aisa_ of the _Iliad_." [Footnote: _Odyssey_, VII. 197;
_Iliad_, xx. 127.] But our proof would require an excursion into
the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their _Klothes_,
spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed
the idea of _Aisa_ or Fate.
We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is
not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded
to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued,
fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the _Odyssey_ borrowed
the forward fall from a passage in the _Iliad_, where the fall is in
keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a
human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. [Footnote: Monro,
odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.]
The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the
weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy.
They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a
_cento_--making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in
the _Odyssey_ which do not occur in the _Iliad_ was not constrained to
borrow from any predecessor.
It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which
were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of
war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The
poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all.
Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original
_Achilleis_--"the kernel"--the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro
takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the
Odyssey!
In the original oldest part of the _Iliad_, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods
show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which
control mankind from heaven.... Their interference is such as becomes
the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." [Footnote: Leaf,
_Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.] It is the later poets of the _Iliad_,
in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and
extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the _Iliad_
had the nobler religious conceptions.
In that case--the _Odyssey_ being later than the original kernel of the
Iliad--the _Odyssey_ ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy
as those exhibited by the later continuators of the _Iliad_.
But the reverse is the case. The gods behave fairly well in Book XXIV.
of the _Iliad_, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the
latest, portion. They are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of
Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As
for the _Odyssey_, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods
are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original
kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like
a moral government of the world. It is very different in the _Iliad_...."
[Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, ii. 335.]
But it was not very different; it was just the same, in Mr. Leaf's
genuine old original germ of the _Iliad_. In fact, the gods are "very
much like you and me." When their _ichor_ is up, they misbehave as we
do when our blood is up, during the fury of war. When Hector is dead and
when the war is over, the gods give play to their higher nature, as
men do. There is no difference of religious conception to sever the
_Odyssey_ from the later but not from the original parts of the _Iliad_.
It is all an affair of the circumstances in each case.
The _Odyssey_ is calmer, more reflective, more _religious_ than the
_Iliad_, being a poem of peace. The _Iliad_, a poem of war, is more
_mythological_ than the _Odyssey_: the gods in the _Iliad_ are excited,
like the men, by the great war and behave accordingly. That neither
gods nor men show any real sense of the moral weakness of Agamemnon
or Achilles, or of the moral superiority of Hector, is an unacceptable
statement. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.] Even Achilles
and Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own
standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on
this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of
Olympus--a mountain in Thessaly in the _Iliad_; a snowless, windless,
supra-mundane place in _Odyssey_, V. 41-47. [Footnote: _Ibid_., ii.
396.] Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual
description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of
Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary,
with the variations which are essential to and inseparable from all
mythological ideas. As Mr. Leaf says, [Footnote: Note to _Iliad_, V.
750.] "heaven, _ouranos_ and Olympus, if not identical, are at least
closely connected." In V. 753, the poet "regarded the summit of Olympus
as a half-way stage between heaven and earth," thus "departing from the
oldest Homeric tradition, which made the earthly mountain Olympus, and
not any aerial region, the dwelling of the gods." But precisely the same
confusion of mythical ideas occurs among a people so backward as the
Australian south-eastern tribes, whose All Father is now seated on a
hill-top and now "above the sky." In _ILIAD_, VIII. 25, 26, the poet is
again said to have "entirely lost the real Epic conception of Olympus
as a mountain in Thessaly," and to "follow the later conception, which
removed it from earth to heaven." In _Iliad_, XI. 184, "from heaven"
means "from the summit of Olympus, which, though Homer does not identify
it with _oupavos_, still, as a mountain, reached into heaven" (Leaf).
The poet of Iliad, XI. 184, says plainly that Zeus descended "_from_
heaven" to Mount Ida. In fact, all that is said of Olympus, of heaven,
of the home of the gods, is poetical, is mythical, and so is necessarily
subject to the variations of conception inseparable from mythology. This
is certain if there be any certainty in mythological science, and here
no hard and fast line can be drawn between _ODYSSEY_ and _Iliad_.
(3) The next point of difference is that, "we hear no more of Iris as
the messenger of Zeus;" in the Odyssey, "the agent of the will of Zeus
is now Hermes, as in the Twenty-fourth Book of the _Iliad_," a late
"Odyssean" Book. But what does that matter, seeing that _ILIAD_, Book
VIII, is declared to be one of the latest additions; yet in Book VIII.
Iris, not Hermes, is the messenger (VIII. 409-425). If in late times
Hermes, not Iris, is the messenger, why, in a very "late" Book (VIII.)
is Iris the messenger, not Hermes? _Iliad_, Book XXIII., is also a late
"Odyssean" Book, but here Iris goes on her messages (XXIII. 199) moved
merely by the prayers of Achilles. In the late Odyssean Book (XXIV.)
of the _Iliad_, Iris runs on messages from Zeus both to Priam and to
Achilles. If Iris, in "Odyssean" times, had resigned office and been
succeeded by Hermes, why did Achilles pray, not to Hermes, but to Iris?
There is nothing in the argument about Hermes and Iris. There is nothing
in the facts but the variability of mythical and poetical conceptions.
Moreover, the conception of Iris as the messenger certainly existed
through the age of the Odyssey, and later. In the Odyssey the beggar
man is called "Irus," a male Iris, because he carries messages; and Iris
does her usual duty as messenger in the Homeric Hymns, as well as in the
so-called late Odyssean Books of the _Iliad_. The poet of the Odyssey
knew all about Iris; there had arisen no change of belief; he merely
employed Hermes as messenger, not of the one god, but of the divine
Assembly.
(4) Another difference is that in the _Iliad_ the wife of Hephaestus is
one of the Graces; in the Odyssey she is Aphrodite. [Footnote: Monro,
_Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 336.] This is one of the inconsistencies which
are the essence of mythology. Mr. Leaf points out that when Hephaestus
is about exercising his craft, in making arms for Achilles, Charis "is
made wife of Hephaestus by a more transparent allegory than we find
elsewhere in Homer," whereas, when Aphrodite appears in a comic song
by Demodocus (Odyssey, VIII. 266-366), "that passage is later and
un-Homeric." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 246.]
Of this we do not accept the doctrine that the lay is un-Homeric. The
difference comes to no more than _that;_ the accustomed discrepancy
of mythology, of story-telling about the gods. But as to the lay of
Demodocus being un-Homeric and late, the poet at least knows the regular
Homeric practice of the bride-price, and its return by the bride's
father to the husband of an adulterous wife (Odyssey, VIII. 318, 319).
The poet of this lay, which Mr. Merry defends as Homeric, was intimately
familiar with Homeric customary law. Now, according to Paul Cauer, as we
shall see, other "Odyssean" poets were living in an age of changed
law, later than that of the author of the lay of Demodocus. All these
so-called differences between _Iliad_ and Odyssey do not point to the
fact that the _Odyssey_ belongs to a late and changed period of culture,
of belief and customs. There is nothing in the evidence to prove that
contention.
There (5) are two references to local oracles in the _Odyssey,_ that of
Dodona (XIV. 327; XIX. 296) and that of Pytho (VIII. 80). This is the
old name of Delphi. Pytho occurs in _Iliad,_ IX. 404, as a very rich
temple of Apollo--the oracle is not named, but the oracle brought in the
treasures. Achilles (XVI. 233) prays to Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona, whose
priests were thickly tabued, but says nothing of the oracle of Dodona.
Neither when in leaguer round Troy, nor when wandering in fairy lands
forlorn, had the Achaeans or Odysseus much to do with the local oracles
of Greece; perhaps not, in Homer's time, so important as they were
later, and little indeed is said about them in either Epic.
(6) "The geographical knowledge shown in the Odyssey goes beyond that of
the _Iliad_ ... especially in regard to Egypt and Sicily." But a poet
of a widely wandering hero of Western Greece has naturally more occasion
than the poet of a fixed army in Asia to show geographical knowledge.
Egyptian Thebes is named, in _ILIAD_, IX., as a city very rich,
especially in chariots; while in the _ODYSSEY_ the poet has occasion
to show more knowledge of the way to Egypt and of Viking descents from
Crete on the coast (Odyssey, III. 300; IV. 351; XIV. 257; XVII. 426).
Archaeology shows that the Mycenaean age was in close commercial
relation with Egypt, and that the Mycenaean civilisation extended
to most Mediterranean lands and islands, and to Italy and Sicily.
[Footnote: Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, i. 69.] There is nothing
suspicious, as "late," in the mention of Sicily by Odysseus in Ithaca
(Odyssey, XX. 383; XXIV. 307). In the same way, if the poet of a western
poem does not dilate on the Troad and the people of Asia Minor as
the poet of the _ILIAD_ does, that is simply because the scene of the
_ILIAD_ is in Asia and the scene of the Odyssey is in the west, when it
is not in No Man's land. From the same cause the poet of sea-faring has
more occasion to speak of the Phoenicians, great sea-farers, than the
poet of the Trojan leaguer.
(7) We know so little about land tenure in Homeric times--and, indeed,
early land tenure is a subject so complex and obscure that it is not
easy to prove advance towards separate property in the _Odyssey_--beyond
what was the rule in the time of the _ILIAD_. In the Making of the Arms
(XVIII. 541-549) we find many men ploughing a field, and this may have
been a common field. But in what sense? Many ploughs were at work at
once on a Scottish runrig field, and each farmer had his own strip on
several common fields, but each farmer held by rent, or by rent and
services, from the laird. These common fields were not common property.
In XII. 422 we have "a common field," and men measuring a strip and
quarrelling about the marking-stones, across the "baulk," but it does
not follow that they are owners; they may be tenants. Such quarrels were
common in Scotland when the runrig system of common fields, each man
with his strip, prevailed. [Footnote: Grey Graham, _Social Life in
Scotland in the Eighteenth Century_, i. 157.]
A man had a [Greek: klaeros] or lot (_ILIAD_, XV. 448), but what was
a "lot"? At first, probably, a share in land periodically shifted-&
_partage noir_ of the Russian peasants. Kings and men who deserve
public gratitude receive a [Greek: temenos] a piece of public land, as
Bellerophon did from the Lycians (VI. 194). In the case of Melager such
an estate is offered to him, but by whom? Not by the people at large,
but by the [Greek: gerontes] (IX. 574).
Who are the [Greek: gerontes]? They are not ordinary men of the people;
they are, in fact, the gentry. In an age so advanced from tribal
conditions as is the Homeric time--far advanced beyond ancient tribal
Scotland or Ireland--we conceive that, as in these countries during the
tribal period, the [Greek: gerontes] (in Celtic, the _Flaith_) held
in POSSESSION, if not in accordance with the letter of the law, as
property, much more land than a single "lot." The Irish tribal freeman
had a right to a "lot," redistributed by rotation. Wealth consisted of
cattle; and a _bogire_, a man of many kine, let _them_ out to tenants.
Such a rich man, a _flatha_, would, in accordance with human nature, use
his influence with kineless dependents to acquire in possession several
lots, avoid the partition, and keep the lots in possession though not
legally in property. Such men were the Irish _flaith_, gentry under the
_RI_, or king, his [Greek: gerontes], each with his _ciniod_, or near
kinsmen, to back his cause.
"_Flaith_ seems clearly to mean land-owners," or squires, says Sir James
Ramsay. [Footnote: _Foundations of England_, i. 16, Note 4.] If land,
contrary to the tribal ideal, came into private hands in early Ireland,
we can hardly suppose that, in the more advanced and settled Homeric
society, no man but the king held land equivalent in extent to a
number of "lots." The [Greek: gerontes], the gentry, the chariot-owning
warriors, of whom there are hundreds not of kingly rank in Homer (as in
Ireland there were many _flaith_ to one _Ri_) probably, in an informal
but tight grip, held considerable lands. When we note their position in
the _Iliad_, high above the nameless host, can we imagine that they
did not hold more land than the simple, perhaps periodically shifting,
"lot"? There were "lotless" men (Odyssey, XL 490), lotless _freemen_,
and what had become of their lots? Had they not fallen into the hands of
the [Greek: gerontes] or the _flaith_?
Mr. Ridgeway in a very able essay [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic
Studies_, vi. 319-339.] holds different opinions. He points out that
among a man's possessions, in the _Iliad_, we hear only of personal
property and live stock. It is in one passage only in the Odyssey (XIV.
211) that we meet with men holding several lots of land; but _they_, we
remark, occur in Cretean isle, as we know, of very advanced civilisation
from of old.
Mr. Ridgeway also asks whether the lotless men may not be "outsiders,"
such as are attached to certain villages of Central and Southern India;
[Footnote: Maine, _Village Communities_, P. 127.] or they may answer to
the _Fuidhir_, or "broken men," of early Ireland, fugitives from one
to another tribe. They would be "settled on the waste lands of a
community." If so, they would not be lotless; they would have new lots.
[Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vi. 322, 323.]
Laertes, though a king, is supposed to have won his farm by his own
labours from the waste (Odyssey, XXIV. 207). Mr. Monro says, "the land
having thus been won from the wastes (the [Greek: gae aklaeros te
kai aktitos] of _H., Ven._ 123), was a [Greek: temenos] or separate
possession of Laertes." The passage is in the rejected conclusion of the
Odyssey; and if any man might go and squat in the waste, any man might
have a lot, or better than one lot. In _Iliad_, XXIII. 832-835, Achilles
says that his offered prize of iron will be useful to a man "whose rich
fields are very remote from any town," Teucer and Meriones compete for
the prize: probably they had such rich remote fields, not each a mere
lot in a common field. These remote fields they are supposed to hold in
perpetuity, apart from the _temenos_, which, in Mr. Ridgeway's opinion,
reverted, on the death of each holder, to the community, save where
kingship was hereditary. Now, if [Greek: klaeros] had come to mean "a
lot of land," as we say "a building lot," obviously men like Teucer and
Meriones had many lots, rich fields, which at death might sometimes pass
to their heirs. Thus there was separate landed property in the _Iliad_;
but the passage is denounced, though not by Mr. Ridgeway, as "late."
The absence of enclosures ([Greek: herkos arouraes]) proves nothing
about absence of several property in land. In Scotland the laird's lands
were unenclosed till deep in the eighteenth century.
My own case for land in private possession, in Homeric times, rests
mainly on human nature in such an advanced society. Such possession as
I plead for is in accordance with human nature, in a society so
distinguished by degrees of wealth as is the Homeric.
Unless we are able to suppose that all the gentry of the _Iliad_ held
no "rich fields remote from towns," each having but one rotatory lot
apiece, there is no difference in Iliadic and Odyssean land tenure,
though we get clearer lights on it in the _Odyssey_.
The position of the man of several lots may have been indefensible,
if the ideal of tribal law were ever made real, but wealth in growing
societies universally tends to override such law. Mr. Keller [Footnote:
Homeric Society, p. 192. 1902.] justly warns us against the attempt
"to apply universally certain fixed rules of property development. The
passages in Homer upon which opinions diverge most are isolated ones,
occurring in similes and fragmentary descriptions. Under such conditions
the formulation of theories or the attempt rigorously to classify can be
little more than an intellectual exercise."
We have not the materials for a scientific knowledge of Homeric real
property; and, with all our materials in Irish law books, how hard it
is for us to understand the early state of such affairs in Ireland! But
does any one seriously suppose that the knightly class of the _Iliad_,
the chariot-driving gentlemen, held no more land--legally or by
permitted custom--than the two Homeric swains who vituperate each other
across a baulk about the right to a few feet of a strip of a runrig
field? Whosoever can believe that may also believe that the practice
of adding "lot" to "lot" began in the period between the finished
composition of the _Iliad_ (or of the parts of it which allude to land
tenure) and the beginning of the _Odyssey_ (or of the parts of it which
refer to land tenure). The inference is that, though the fact is not
explicitly stated in the _Iliad_, there were men who held more "lots"
than one in Iliadic times as well as in the Odyssean times, when, in a
solitary passage of the Odyssey, we do hear of such men in Crete. But
whosoever has pored over early European land tenures knows how dim our
knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating
between the date of the _Iliad_ and the date of the Odyssey.
Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean
times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price
of Penelope. The rule in both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is that the wooer
gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. This was the rule
known even to that painfully late and un-Homeric poet who made the Song
of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. In that song the
injured husband, Hephaestus, claims back the bride-price which he had
paid to the father of his wife, Zeus. [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 318.]
This is the accepted custom throughout the _Odyssey_ (VI. 159; XVI. 77;
XX. 335; XXI. 162; XV. 17, &c.). So far there is no change of manners,
no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride,
in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. But
Penelope was neither maid, wife, nor widow; her husband's fate, alive
or dead, was uncertain, and her son was so anxious to get her out of the
house that he says he offered gifts _with_ her (XX. 342). In the same
way, to buy back the goodwill of Achilles, Agamemnon offers to give him
his daughter without bride-price, and to add great gifts (_Iliad_, IX.
l47)--the term for the gifts is [Greek: mailia]. People, of course,
could make their own bargain; take as much for their daughter as they
could get, or let the gifts go from husband to bride, and then return
to the husband's home with her (as in Germany in the time of Tacitus,
_Germania_, 18), or do that, and throw in more gifts. But in Odyssey,
II. 53, Telemachus says that the Wooers shrink from going to the house
of Penelope's father, Icarius, who would endow (?) his daughter ([Greek:
eednoosaito]) And again (_Odyssey_, I. 277; II. 196), her father's folk
will furnish a bridal feast, and "array the [Greek: heedna], many, such
as should accompany a dear daughter." Some critics think that the gifts
here are _dowry_, a later institution than bride-price; others, that the
father of the dear daughter merely chose to be generous, and returned
the bride-price, or its equivalent, in whole or part. [Footnote: Merry,
Odyssey, vol. i. p. 50. Note to Book I 277.] If the former view
be correct, these passages in Odyssey, I., II. are later than the
exceedingly "late" song of Demodocus. If the latter theory be correct
the father is merely showing goodwill, and doing as the Germans did when
they were in a stage of culture much earlier than the Homeric.
The position of Penelope is very unstable and legally perplexing. Has
her father her marriage? has her son her marriage? is she not perhaps
still a married woman with a living husband? Telemachus would give much
to have her off his hands, but he refuses to send her to her father's
house, where the old man might be ready enough to return the bride-price
to her new husband, and get rid of her with honour. For if Telemachus
sends his mother away against her will he will have to pay a heavy fine
to her father, and to thole his mother's curse, and lose his character
among men (odyssey, II. 130-138). The Icelanders of the saga period gave
dowries with their daughters. But when Njal wanted Hildigunna for his
foster-son, Hauskuld, he offered to give [Greek: hedna]. "I will lay
down as much money as will seem fitting to thy niece and thyself," he
says to Flosi, "if thou wilt think of making this match." [Footnote:
Story of _Burnt Njal_, ii. p. 81.]
Circumstances alter cases, and we must be hard pressed to discover signs
of change of manners in the Odyssey as compared with the _Iliad_ if we
have to rely on a solitary mention of "men of many lots" in Crete,
and on the perplexed proposals for the second marriage of Penelope.
[Footnote: For the alleged "alteration of old customs" see Cauer,
_Grundfragen der Homerkritik_, pp. 193-194.] We must not be told that
the many other supposed signs of change, Iris, Olympus, and the rest,
have "cumulative weight." If we have disposed of each individual
supposed note of change in beliefs and manners in its turn, then these
proofs have, in each case, no individual weight and, cumulatively, are
not more ponderous than a feather.
CHAPTER XII
LINGUISTIC PROOFS OF VARIOUS DATES
The great strength of the theory that the poems are the work of several
ages is the existence in them of various strata of languages, earlier
and later.
Not to speak of differences of vocabulary, Mr. Monro and Mr. Leaf, with
many scholars, detect two strata of earlier and later _grammar_ in Iliad
and Odyssey. In the _Iliad_ four or five Books are infected by "the
later grammar," while the Odyssey in general seems to be contaminated.
Mr. Leafs words are: "When we regard the Epos in large masses, we see
that we can roughly arrange the inconsistent elements towards one end or
the other of a line of development both linguistic and historical. The
main division, that of _Iliad_ and Odyssey, shows a distinct advance
along this line; and the distinction is still more marked if we group
with the _Odyssey_ four Books of the _Iliad_ whose Odyssean physiognomy
is well marked. Taking as our main guide the dissection of the plot as
shown in its episodes, we find that marks of lateness, though nowhere
entirely absent, group themselves most numerously in the later additions
..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. X.] We are here concerned with
_linguistic_ examples of "lateness." The "four Books whose Odyssean
physiognomy" and language seem "well marked," are IX., X., XXIII., XXIV.
Here Mr. Leaf, Mr. Monro, and many authorities are agreed. But to these
four Odyssean Books of the _Iliad_ Mr. Leaf adds _Iliad_, XI. 664-772:
"probably a later addition," says Mr. Monro. "It is notably Odyssean in
character," says Mr. Leaf; and the author "is ignorant of the geography
of the Western Peloponnesus. No doubt the author was an Asiatic Greek."
[Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. 465-466. Note on Book XI. 756.] The
value of this discovery is elsewhere discussed (see _The Interpolations
of Nestor_).
The Odyssean notes in this passage of a hundred lines (_Iliad_, XI.
670-762) are the occurrence of "a purely Odyssean word" (677), an Attic
form of an epic word, and a "forbidden trochaic caesura in the fourth
foot"; an Odyssean word for carving meat, applied in a _non_-Odyssean
sense (688), a verb for "insulting," not elsewhere found in the _Iliad_
(though the noun is in the _Iliad_) (695), an Odyssean epithet of the
sun, "four times in the _Odyssey_" (735). It is also possible that there
is an allusion to a four-horse chariot (699).
These are the proofs of Odyssean lateness.
The real difficulty about Odyssean words and grammar in the _Iliad_
is that, if they were in vigorous poetic existence down to the time of
Pisistratus (as the Odysseanism of the Asiatic editor proves that they
were), and if every rhapsodist could add to and alter the materials at
the disposal of the Pisistratean editor at will, we are not told how the
fashionable Odysseanisms were kept, on the whole, out of twenty Books of
the Iliad.
This is a point on which we cannot insist too strongly, as an argument
against the theory that, till the middle of the sixth century B.C., the
_Iliad_ scarcely survived save in the memory of strolling rhapsodists.
If that were so, all the Books of the _Iliad_ would, in the course
of recitation of old and composition of new passages, be equally
contaminated with late Odyssean linguistic style. It could not be
otherwise; all the Books would be equally modified in passing through
the lips of modern reciters and composers. Therefore, if twenty out
of twenty-four Books are pure, or pure in the main, from Odysseanisms,
while four are deeply stained with them, the twenty must not only be
earlier than the four, but must have been specially preserved, and kept
uncontaminated, in some manner inconsistent with the theory that all
alike scarcely existed save in the memory or invention of late strolling
reciters.
How the twenty Books relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax,
and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written
texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at
the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with
"the defining article"--and, indeed, an employment of the article which
startles grammarians, appears even in the eleventh line of the First
Book of the _Iliad_? [Footnote (exact placing uncertain): Cf. Monro and
Leaf, on Iliad, I. 11-12.]
Left merely to human memory and the human voice, the twenty more
or less innocent Books would have abounded, like the Odyssey, in
[Greek: amphi] with the dative meaning "about," and with [Greek: ex] "in
consequence of," and "the extension of the use of [Greek: ei] clauses
as final and objective clauses," and similar marks of lateness, so
interesting to grammarians. [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, ii. pp.
331-333.] But the twenty Books are almost, or quite, inoffensive in
these respects.
Now, even in ages of writing, it has been found difficult or impossible
to keep linguistic novelties and novelties of metre out of old epics. We
later refer (_Archaeology of the Epic_) to the _Chancun de Willame_,
of which an unknown benefactor printed two hundred copies in 1903.
Mr. Raymond Weeks, in _Romania_, describes _Willame_ as taking a place
beside the _Chanson de Roland_ in the earliest rank of _Chansons de
Geste_. If the text can be entirely restored, the poem will appear
as "the most primitive" of French epics of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. But it has passed from copy to copy in the course of
generations. The methods of versification change, and, after line 2647,
"there are traces of change in the language. The word _co_, followed
by a vowel, hitherto frequent, never again reappears. The vowel _i_,
of _li_, nominative masculine of the article" (_li Reis_, "the king"),
"never occurs in the text after line 2647. Up to that point it is elided
or not at pleasure.... There is a progressive tendency towards hiatus.
After line 1980 the system of assonance changes. _An_ and en have
been kept distinct hitherto; this ceases to be the case." [Footnote:
_Romania_, xxxiv. pp. 240-246.]
The poem is also notable, like the _Iliad_, for textual repetition of
passages, but that is common to all early poetry, which many Homeric
critics appear not to understand. In this example we see how apt
novelties in grammar and metre are to steal into even written copies of
epics, composed in and handed down through uncritical ages; and we are
confirmed in the opinion that the relatively pure and orthodox grammar
and metre of the twenty Books must have been preserved by written texts
carefully 'executed. The other four Books, if equally old, were less
fortunate. Their grammar and metre, we learn, belong to a later stratum
of language.
These opinions of grammarians are not compatible with the hypothesis
that _all_ of the _Iliad_, even the "earliest" parts, are loaded with
interpolations, forced in at different places and in any age from 1000
B.C. to 540 B.C.; for if that theory were true, the whole of the _Iliad_
would equally be infected with the later Odyssean grammar. According to
Mr. Monro and Sir Richard Jebb, it is not.
But suppose, on the other hand, that the later Odyssean grammar abounds
all through the whole _Iliad_, then that grammar is not more Odyssean
than it is Iliadic. The alleged distinction of early Iliadic grammar,
late Odyssean grammar, in that case vanishes. Mr. Leaf is more keen than
Mr. Monro and Sir Richard Jebb in detecting late grammar in the _Iliad_
beyond the bounds of Books IX., X., XXIII., XXIV. But he does not carry
these discoveries so far as to make the late grammar no less Iliadic
than Odyssean. In Book VIII. of the _Iliad_, which he thinks was only
made for the purpose of introducing Book IX., [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol.
i. p. 332. 1900.] we ought to find the late Odyssean grammar just as
much as we do in Book IX., for it is of the very same date, and probably
by one or more of the same authors as Book IX. But we do not find the
Odyssean grammar in Book VIII.
Mr. Leaf says, "The peculiar character" of Book VIII. "is easily
understood, when we recognise the fact that Book VIII. is intended to
serve only as a means for the introduction of Book IX...." which is
"late" and "Odyssean." Then Book VIII., intended to introduce Book IX.,
must be at least as late as Book IX. and might be expected to be at
least as Odyssean, indeed one would think it could not be otherwise. Yet
it is not so.
Mr. Leaf's theory has thus to face the difficulty that while the whole
_Iliad_, by his view, for more than four centuries, was stuffed with
late interpolations, in the course of oral recital through all
Greek lands, and was crammed with original "copy" by a sycophant of
Pisistratus about 540 B.C., the late grammar concentrated itself in
only some four Books. Till some reasonable answer is given to this
question--how did twenty Books of the Iliad preserve so creditably
the ancient grammar through centuries of change, and of recitation by
rhapsodists who used the Odyssean grammar, which infected the four other
Books, and the whole of the _Odyssey?_--it seems hardly worth while to
discuss this linguistic test.
Any scholar who looks at these pages knows all about the proofs of
grammar of a late date in the _Odyssey_ and the four contaminated Books
of the _Iliad_. But it may be well to give a few specimens, for the
enlightenment of less learned readers of Homer.
The use of [Greek: amfi], with the dative, meaning "about," when
_thinking_ or _speaking_ "about" Odysseus or anything else, is peculiar
to the _Odyssey_. But how has it not crept into the four Odyssean
contaminated Books of the _Iliad_?
[Greek: peri], with the genitive, "follows verbs meaning to speak
or know _about_ a person," but only in the _Odyssey_. What preposition
follows such verbs in the _Iliad_?
Here, again, we ask: how did the contaminated Books of the _Iliad_
escape the stain of [Greek: peri], with the genitive, after verbs
meaning to speak or know? What phrase do they use in the _Iliad_ for
speaking or asking _about_ anybody? [Footnote (exact placing uncertain):
Monro, Homeric _Grammar_. See Index, under _Iliad_, p. 339.]
[Greek: meta], with the genitive, meaning "among" or "with,"
comes twice in the Odyssey (X. 320; XVI. 140) and thrice in the _Iliad_
(XIII. 700; XXI. 458; XXIV. 400); but all these passages in the _Iliad_
are disposed of as "late" parts of the poem.
[Greek: epi], with the accusative, meaning _towards_ a
person, comes often in the _Iliad_; once in the Odyssey. But it comes
four times in _Iliad_, Book X., which almost every critic scouts as very
"late" indeed. If so, why does the "late" _Odyssey_ not deal in this
grammatical usage so common in the "late" Book X. of the _Iliad_?
[Greek: epi], with the accusative, "meaning _extent_
(without _motion_)," is chiefly found in the _Odyssey_, and in the
Iliad, IX., X., XXIV. On consulting grammarians one thinks that there is
not much in this.
[Greek: proti] with the dative, meaning "in addition to," occurs
only once (_Odyssey, X. 68_). If it occurs only once, there is little to
be learned from the circumstance.
[Greek: ana] with the genitive, is only in _Odyssey_, only
thrice, always of going on board a ship. There are not many ship-farings
in the _Iliad_. Odysseus and his men are not described as going on board
their ship, in so many words, in _Iliad_, Book I. The usage occurs in
the poem where the incidents of seafaring occur frequently, as is to be
expected? It is not worth while to persevere with these tithes of mint
and cummin. If "Neglect of Position" be commoner--like "Hiatus in the
Bucolic Diaeresis"--in the _Odyssey_ and in _Iliad_, XXIII., XXIV., why
do the failings not beset _Iliad_, IX., X., these being such extremely
"late" books? As to the later use of the Article in the _Odyssey_ and
the Odyssean Books of the _Iliad_, it appears to us that Book I. of the
_Iliad_ uses the article as it is used in Book X.; but on this topic we
must refer to a special treatise on the language of _Iliad_, Book X.,
which is promised.
Turning to the vocabulary: "words expressive of civilisation" are bound
to be more frequent, as they are, in the Odyssey, a poem of peaceful
life, than in a poem about an army in action, like the _Iliad_. Out of
all this no clue to the distance of years dividing the two poems can be
found. As to words concerning religion, the same holds good. The Odyssey
is more frequently _religious_ (see the case of Eumaeus) than the
_Iliad_.
In morals the term [Greek: dikaios] is more used in the _Odyssey_, also
[Greek: atemistos] ("just" and "lawless"). But that is partly because
the Odyssey has to contrast civilised ("just") with wild outlandish
people--Cyclopes and Laestrygons, who are "lawless." The _Iliad_ has no
occasion to touch on savages; but, as the [Greek: hybris] of the Wooers
is a standing topic in the Odyssey (an ethical poem, says Aristotle),
the word [Greek: hybris] is of frequent occurrence in the _Odyssey_,
in just the same sense as it bears in _Iliad_, I 214--the insolence
of Agamemnon. Yet when Achilles has occasion to speak of Agamemnon's
insolence in _Iliad_, Book IX., he does not use the _word_ [Greek:
hybris], though Book IX. is so very "late" and "Odyssean." It would be
easy to go through the words for moral ideas in the _Odyssey_, and
to show that they occur in the numerous moral situations which do not
arise, or arise much less frequently, in the _Iliad_. There is not
difference enough in the moral standard of the two poems to justify us
in assuming that centuries of ethical progress had intervened between
their dates of composition. If the _Iliad_, again, were really, like the
_Odyssey_, a thing of growth through several centuries, which overlapped
the centuries in which the _Odyssey_ grew, the moral ideas of the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ would necessarily be much the same, would be
indistinguishable. But, as a matter of fact, it would be easy to show
that the moral standard of the _Iliad_ is higher, in many places,
than the moral standard of the _Odyssey_; and that, therefore, by the
critical hypothesis, the _Iliad_ is the later poem of the twain. For
example, the behaviour of Achilles is most obnoxious to the moralist in
_Iliad_, Book IX., where he refuses gifts of conciliation. But by the
critical hypothesis this is not the fault of the _Iliad_, for Book IX.
is declared to be "late," and of the same date as late parts of the
_Odyssey_. Achilles is not less open to moral reproach in his abominable
cruelty and impiety, as shown in his sacrifice of prisoners of war and
his treatment of dead Hector, in _Iliad_, XXIII., XXIV. But these Books
also are said to be as late as the _Odyssey_.
The solitary "realistic" or "naturalistic" passage in Homer, with which
a lover of modern "problem novels" feels happy and at home, is the story
of Phoenix, about his seduction of his father's mistress at the
request of his mother. What a charming situation! But that occurs in an
"Odyssean" Book of the _Iliad_, Book IX.; and thus Odyssean seems lower,
not more advanced, than Iliadic taste in morals. To be sure, the poet
disapproves of all these immoralities.
In the Odyssey the hero, to the delight of Athene, lies often and freely
and with glee. The Achilles of the _Iliad_ hates a liar "like the gates
of Hades"; but he says so in an "Odyssean" Book (Book IX.), so there
were obviously different standards in Odyssean ethics.
As to the Odyssey being the work of "a milder age," consider the hanging
of Penelope's maids and the abominable torture of Melanthius. There is
no torturing in the [blank space] for the _Iliad_ happens not to deal
with treacherous thralls.
_Enfin_, there is no appreciable moral advance in the _ODYSSEY_ on the
moral standard of the _ILIAD_. It is rather the other way. Odysseus, in
the _ODYSSEY_, tries to procure poison for his arrow-heads. The person
to whom he applies is too moral to oblige him. We never learn that
a hero of the _Iliad_ would use poisoned arrows. The poet himself
obviously disapproves; in both poems the poet is always on the side of
morality and of the highest ethical standard of his age. The standard in
both Epics is the same; in both some heroes fall short of the standard.
To return to linguistic tests, it is hard indeed to discover what Mr.
Leaf's opinion of the value of linguistic tests of lateness really is.
"It is on such fundamental discrepancies"--as he has found in Books IX.,
XVI.--"that we can depend, _AND ON THESE ALONE_, when we come to dissect
the _ILIAD_ ... Some critics have attempted to base their analysis on
evidences from language, but I do not think they are sufficient to
bear the super-structure which has been raised on them." [Footnote:
_Companion,_ p. 25.]
He goes on, still placing a low value on linguistic tests alone, to say:
"It is on the broad grounds of the construction and motives of the poem,
_AND NOT ON ANY MERELY linguistic CONSIDERATIONS_, that a decision must
be sought." [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. x.]
But he contradicts these comfortable words when he comes to "the latest
expansions," such as Books XXIII., XXIV. "The latest expansions are
thoroughly in the spirit of those which precede, _them ON ACCOUNT OF
linguistic EVIDENCE,_ which definitely classes them with the _ODYSSEY_
rather than the rest of the _ILIAD_." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p.
xiv.]
Now as Mr. Leaf has told us that we must depend on "fundamental
discrepancies," "on these alone," when we want to dissect the _ILIAD;_
as he has told us that linguistic tests alone are "not sufficient to
bear the superstructure," &c., how can we lop off two Books "only on
account of linguistic evidence"? It would appear that on this point,
as on others, Mr. Leaf has entirely changed his mind. But, even in the
_Companion_ (p. 388), he had amputated Book XXIV. for no "fundamental
discrepancy," but because of "its close kinship to the _ODYSSEY_, as in
the whole language of the Book."
Here, as in many other passages, if we are to account for discrepancies
by the theory of multiplex authorship, we must decide that Mr. Leaf's
books are the work of several critics, not of one critic only. But there
is excellent evidence to prove that here we would be mistaken.
Confessedly and regretfully no grammarian, I remain unable, in face of
what seem contradictory assertions about the value of linguistic tests,
to ascertain what they are really worth, and what, if anything, they
really prove.
Mr. Monro allows much for "the long insensible influence of Attic
recitation upon the Homeric text;" ... "many Attic peculiarities may
be noted" (so much so that Aristarchus thought Homer must have been
an Athenian!). "The poems suffered a gradual and unsystematic because
generally unconscious process of modernising, the chief agents in
which were the rhapsodists" (reciters in a later democratic age), "who
wandered over all parts of Greece, and were likely to be influenced by
all the chief forms of literature." [Footnote: Monro, _Homeric Grammar_,
pp 394-396. 1891]
Then, wherefore insist so much on tests of language?
Mr. Monro was not only a great grammarian; he had a keen appreciation
of poetry. Thus he was conspicuously uneasy in his hypothesis, based on
words and grammar, that the two last Books of the _Iliad_ are by a late
hand. After quoting Shelley's remark that, in these two Books, "Homer
truly begins to be himself," Mr. Monro writes, "in face of such
testimony can we say that the Book in which the climax is reached, in
which the last discords of the _Iliad_ are dissolved in chivalrous pity
and regret, is not the work of the original poet, but of some Homerid or
rhapsodist?"
Mr. Monro, with a struggle, finally voted for grammar, and other
indications of lateness, against Shelley and against his own sense of
poetry. In a letter to me of May 1905, Mr. Monro sketched a theory that
Book IX. (without which he said that he deemed an _Achilleis_ hardly
possible) might be a _remanie_ representative of an earlier lay to the
same general effect. Some Greek Shakespeare, then, treated an older poem
on the theme of Book IX. as Shakespeare treated old plays, namely, as a
canvas to work over with a master's hand. Probably Mr. Monro would
not have gone _so_ far in the case of Book XXIV., _The Repentance_ of
Achilles. He thought it in too keen contrast with the brutality of Book
XXII. (obviously forgetting that in Book XXIV. Achilles is infinitely
more brutal than in Book XXII.), and thought it inconsistent with the
refusal of Achilles to grant burial at the prayer of the dying Hector,
and with his criminal treatment of the dead body of his chivalrous
enemy. But in Book XXIV. his ferocity is increased. Mr. Leaf shares
Mr. Monro's view; but Mr. Leaf thinks that a Greek audience forgave
Achilles, because he was doing "the will of heaven," and "fighting the
great fight of Hellenism against barbarism." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad,_
vol.-ii. p. 429. 1902.] But the Achzeans were not Puritans of the
sixteenth century! Moreover, the Trojans are as "Hellenic" as the
Achzeans. They converse, clearly, in the same language. They worship
the same gods. The Achzeans cannot regard them (unless on account of the
breach of truce, by no Trojan, but an ally) as the Covenanters regarded
"malignants," their name for loyal cavaliers, whom they also styled
"Amalekites," and treated as Samuel treated Agag. The Achaeans to whom
Homer sang had none of this sanguinary Pharisaism.
Others must decide on the exact value and import of Odyssean grammar
as a test of lateness, and must estimate the probable amount of time
required for the development of such linguistic differences as they find
in the _Odyssey_ and _Iliad_. In undertaking this task they may compare
the literary language of America as it was before 1860 and as it is now.
The language of English literature has also been greatly modified in
the last forty years, but our times are actively progressive in many
directions; linguistic variations might arise more slowly in the Greece
of the Epics. We have already shown, in the more appropriate instance
of the _Chancun de Willame_, that considerable varieties in diction and
metre occur in a single MS. of that poem, a MS. written probably within
less than a century of the date of the poem's composition.
We can also trace, in _remaniements_ of the _Chanson DE ROLAND_,
comparatively rapid and quite revolutionary variations from the
oldest--the Oxford--manuscript. Rhyme is substituted for assonance;
the process entails frequent modernisations, and yet the basis of
thirteenth-century texts continues to be the version of the eleventh
century. It may be worth the while of scholars to consider these
parallels carefully, as regards the language and prosody of the Odyssean
Books of the _Iliad_, and to ask themselves whether the processes of
alteration in the course of transmission, which we know to have occurred
in the history of the Old French, may not also have affected the
_ILIAD_, though why the effect is mainly confined to four Books remains
a puzzle. It is enough for us to have shown that if Odyssean varies from
Iliadic language, in all other respects the two poems bear the marks
of the same age. Meanwhile, a Homeric scholar so eminent as Mr. T. W.
Allen, says that "the linguistic attack upon their age" (that of the
Homeric poems) "may be said to have at last definitely failed, and
archaeology has erected an apparently indestructible buttress for their
defence." [Footnote: _Classical Review, May_ 1906, p. 194.]
CHAPTER XIII
THE "DOLONEIA"
"ILIAD," BOOK X.
Of all Books in the [blank space] Book X., called the _Doloneia_,
is most generally scouted and rejected. The Book, in fact, could be
omitted, and only a minutely analytic reader would perceive the lacuna.
He would remark that in Iliad, IX. 65-84, certain military preparations
are made which, if we suppress Book X., lead up to nothing, and that
in _Iliad_, XIV. 9-11, we find Nestor with the shield of his son,
Thrasymedes, while Thrasymedes has his father's shield, a fact not
explained, though the poet certainly meant something by it. The
explanation in both cases is found in Book X., which may also be thought
to explain why the Achaeans, so disconsolate in Book IX., and why
Agamemnon, so demoralised, so gaily assume the offensive in Book
XI. Some ancient critics, Scholiast T and Eustathius, attributed the
_DOLONEIA_ to Homer, but supposed it to have been a separate composition
of his added to the _Iliad_ by Pisistratus. This merely proves that
they did not find any necessity for the existence of the _DOLONEIA_. Mr.
Allen, who thinks that "it always held its present place," says, "the
_DOLONEIA_ is persistently written down." [Footnote: _Classical Review_,
May 1906, p. 194]
To understand the problem of the _DOLONEIA_, we must make a summary of
its contents. In Book IX. 65-84, at the end of the disastrous fighting
of Book VIII, the Achaeans, by Nestor's advice, station an advanced
guard of "_the young men_" between the fosse and wall; 700 youths are
posted there, under Meriones, the squire of Idomeneus, and Thrasymedes,
the son of Nestor. All this is preparation for Book X., as Mr. Leaf
remarks, [Footnote: _Companion_, p. 174.] though in any case an advanced
guard was needed. Their business is to remain awake, under arms, in case
the Trojans, who are encamped on the plain, attempt a night attack. At
their station the young men will be under arms till dawn; they light
fires and cook their provisions; the Trojans also surround their own
watchfires.
The Achaean chiefs then hold council, and Agamemnon sends the embassy
to Achilles. The envoys bring back his bitter answer; and all men go to
sleep in their huts, deeply discouraged, as even Odysseus avowed.
Here the Tenth Book begins, and it is manifest that the poet is
thoroughly well acquainted with the Ninth Book. Without the arrangements
made in the Ninth Book, and without the despairing situation of that
Book, his lay is impossible. It will be seen that critics suppose him,
alternately, to have "quite failed to realise the conditions of life of
the heroes of whom he sang" (that is, if certain lines are genuine), and
also to be a peculiarly learned archaeologist and a valuable authority
on weapons. He is addicted to introducing fanciful "touches of heroic
simplicity," says Mr. Leaf, and is altogether a puzzling personage to
the critics.
The Book opens with the picture of Agamemnon, sleepless from anxiety,
while the other chiefs, save Menelaus, are sleeping. He "hears the music
of the joyous Trojan pipes and flutes" and sees the reflected glow
of their camp-fires, we must suppose, for he could not see the fires
themselves through the new wall of his own camp, as critics very wisely
remark. He tears out his hair before Zeus; no one else does so, in the
_Iliad_, but no one else is Agamemnon, alone and in despair.
He rises to consult Nestor, throwing a lion's skin over his _chiton_,
and grasping a spear. Much noise is made about the furs, such as this
lion's pelt, which the heroes, in Book X., throw about their shoulders
when suddenly aroused. That sportsmen like the heroes should keep the
pelts of animals slain by them for use as coverlets, and should throw on
one of the pelts when aroused in a hurry, is a marvellous thing to the
critics. They know that fleeces were used for coverlets of beds (IX.
661), and pelts of wild animals, slain by Anchises, cover his bed in the
Hymn to Aphrodite.