natural. A scientific critic, moreover, never reflects that the poet is
dealing with an unexampled situation--heroes wakened and called into
the cold air in a night of dread, but not called to battle. Thus Reichel
says: "The poet knows so little about true heroic costume that he drapes
the princes in skins of lions and panthers, like giants.... But about a
corslet he never thinks." [Footnote: Reichel, p.70.]
The simple explanation is that the poet has not hitherto had to tell
us about men who are called up, not to fight, on a night that must have
been chilly. In war they do not wear skins, though Paris, in archer's
equipment, wears a pard's skin (III. 17). Naturally, the men throw over
themselves their fur coverlets; but Nestor, a chilly veteran, prefers a
_chiton_ and a wide, double-folded, fleecy purple cloak. The cloak lay
ready to his hand, for such cloaks were used as blankets (XXIV.
646; Odyssey, III. 349, 351; IV. 299; II. 189). We hear more of such
bed-coverings in the Odyssey than in the merely because in the _ODYSSEY_
we have more references to beds and to people in bed. That a sportsman
may have (as many folk have now) a fur coverlet, and may throw it over
him as a kind of dressing-gown or "bed-gown," is a simple circumstance
which bewilders the critical mind and perplexed Reichel.
If the poet knew so little as Reichel supposed his omission of corslets
is explained. Living in an age of corslets (seventh century), he, being
a literary man, knew nothing about corslets, or, as he is also an acute
archaeologist, he knew too much; he knew that they were not worn in
the Mycenaean prime, so he did not introduce them. The science of this
remarkable ignoramus, in _this_ view, accounts for his being aware that
pelts of animals were in vogue as coverlets, just as fur dressing-gowns
were worn in the sixteenth century, and he introduces them precisely as
he leaves corslets out, because he knows that pelts of fur were in use,
and that, in the Mycenaean prime, corslets were not worn.
In speaking to Nestor, Agamemnon awakens sympathy: "Me, of all the
Achaeans, Zeus has set in toil and labour ceaselessly." They are almost
the very words of Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland: "Deus, Dist li
Reis, si peneuse est ma vie."_ The author of the _Doloneia_ consistently
conforms to the character of Agamemnon as drawn in the rest of the
_Iliad_. He is over-anxious; he is demoralising in his fits of gloom,
but all the burden of the host hangs on him--sipeneuse _est ma via_.
To turn to higher things. Menelaus, too, was awake, anxious about the
Argives, who risked their lives in his cause alone. He got up, put on a
pard's skin and a bronze helmet (here the poet forgets, what he ought
to have known, that no bronze helmets have been found in the Mycenaean
graves). Menelaus takes a spear, and goes to look for Agamemnon, whom he
finds arming himself beside his ship. He discovers that Agamemnon means
to get Nestor to go and speak to the advanced guard, as his son is their
commander, and they will obey Nestor. Agamemnon's pride has fallen very
low! He tells Menelaus to waken the other chief with all possible formal
courtesy, for, brutally rude when in high heart, at present Agamemnon
cowers to everybody. He himself finds Nestor in bed, his _shield_, two
spears, and helmet beside him, also his glittering _zoster_. His corslet
is not named; perhaps the poet knew that the _zoster_, or broad metallic
belt, had been evolved, but that the corslet had not been invented; or
perhaps he "knows so little about the costume of the heroes" that he
is unaware of the existence of corslets. Nestor asks Agamemnon what he
wants; and Agamemnon says that his is a toilsome life, that he cannot
sleep, that his knees tremble, and that he wants Nestor to come and
visit the outposts.
There is really nothing absurd in this. Napoleon often visited his
outposts in the night before Waterloo, and Cromwell rode along his lines
all through the night before Dunbar, biting his lips till the blood
dropped on his linen bands. In all three cases hostile armies were
arrayed within striking distance of each other, and the generals were
careworn.
Nestor admits that it is an anxious night, and rather blames Menelaus
for not rousing the other chiefs; but Agamemnon explains and defends his
brother. Nestor then puts on the comfortable cloak already described,
and picks up a spear, [blank space] _in HIS QUARTERS_.
As for Odysseus, he merely throws a shield over his shoulders. The
company of Diomede are sleeping with their heads on their shields.
Thence Reichel (see "The Shield") infers that the late poet of Book X.
gave them small Ionian round bucklers; but it has been shown that no
such inference is legitimate. Their spears were erect by their sides,
fixed in the ground by the _sauroter_, or butt-spike, used by the men of
the late "warrior vase" found at Mycenae. To arrange the spears thus,
we have seen, was a point of drill that, in Aristotle's time, survived
among the Illyrians. [Footnote: _Poetics_, XXV.] The practice is also
alluded to in _Iliad_, III 135. During a truce "the tall spears are
planted by their sides." The poet, whether ignorant or learned, knew
that point of war, later obsolete in Greece, but still extant in
Illyria.
Nestor aroused Diomede, whose night apparel was the pelt of a lion; he
took his spear, and they came to the outposts, where the men were awake,
and kept a keen watch on all movements among the Trojans. Nestor praised
them, and the princes, taking Nestor's son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones
with them, went out into the open in view of the Trojan camp, sat down,
and held a consultation.
Nestor asked if any one would volunteer to go as a spy among the Trojans
and pick up intelligence. His reward will be "a black ewe with her lamb
at her foot," from their chiefs--"nothing like her for value"--and he
will be remembered in songs at feasts, _or_ will be admitted to feasts
and wine parties of the chiefs. [Footnote: Leaf, Note on X. 215.] The
proposal is very odd; what do the princes want with black ewes, while
at feasts they always have honoured places? Can Nestor be thinking of
sending out any brave swift-footed young member of the outpost party, to
whom the reward would be appropriate?
After silence, Diomede volunteers to go, with a comrade, though this
kind of work is very seldom undertaken in any army of any age by a
chief, and by his remark about admission to wine parties it is clear
that Nestor was not thinking of a princely spy. Many others volunteer,
but Agamemnon bids Diomede choose his own companion, with a very broad
hint not to take Menelaus. _HIS_ death, Agamemnon knows, would mean the
disgraceful return of the host to Greece; besides he is, throughout the
_ILIAD_, deeply attached to his brother.
The poet of Book X., however late, knows the _ILIAD_ well, for he keeps
up the uniform treatment of the character of the Over-Lord. As he knows
the _ILIAD_ well, how can he be ignorant of the conditions of life
of the heroes? How can he dream of "introducing a note of heroic
simplicity" (Mr. Leaf's phrase), when he must be as well aware as we are
of the way in which the heroes lived? We cannot explain the black ewes,
if meant as a princely reward, but we do not know everything about
Homeric life.
Diomede chooses Odysseus, "whom Pallas Athene loveth"; she was also the
patroness of Diomede himself, in Books V., VI.
As they are unarmed--all of the chiefs hastily aroused were unarmed,
save for a spear there or a sword here--Thrasymedes gives to Diomede his
two-edged sword, _his_ shield, and "a helm of bull's hide, without horns
or crest, that is called a skull-cap (knap-skull), and keeps the heads
of strong young men." All the advanced guard were young men, as we saw
in Book IX. 77. Obviously, Thrasymedes must then send back to camp,
though we are not told it, for another shield, sword, and helmet, as he
is to lie all night under arms. We shall hear of the shield later.
Meriones, who is an archer (XIII. 650), lends to Odysseus his bow and
quiver and a sword. He also gives him "a helm made of leather; and with
many a thong it was stiffly wrought within, while without the white
teeth of a boar of flashing tusks were arrayed, thick set on either side
well and cunningly... ." Here Reichel perceives that the ignorant poet
is describing a piece of ancient headgear represented in Mycenaean art,
while the boars' teeth were found by Schliemann, to the number of
sixty, in Grave IV. at Mycenae. Each of them had "the reverse side
cut perfectly flat, and with the borings to attach them to some other
object." They were "in a veritable funereal armoury." The manner of
setting the tusks on the cap is shown on an ivory head of a warrior from
Mycenae. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, 196-197.]
Reichel recognises that the poet's description in Book X. is excellent,
"_ebenso klar als eingehend_." He publishes another ivory head from
Spata, with the same helmet set with boars' tusks. [Footnote: Reichel,
pp. 102-104] Mr. Leaf decides that this description by the poet, wholly
ignorant of heroic costume, as Reichel thinks him, must be "another
instance of the archaic and archaeologising tendency so notable in Book
X." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 629.]
At the same time, according to Reichel and Mr. Leaf, the poet of Book
X. introduces the small round Ionian buckler, thus showing his utter
ignorance of the great Mycenaean shield. The ignorance was most unusual
and quite inexcusable, for any one who reads the rest of the _Iliad_
(which the poet of Book X. knew well) is aware that the Homeric shields
were huge, often covering body and legs. This fact the poet of Book X.
did not know, in Reichel's opinion. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
575]
How are we to understand this poet? He is such an erudite archaeologist
that, in the seventh century, he knows and carefully describes a helmet
of the Mycenaean prime. Did he excavate it? and had the leather interior
lasted with the felt cap through seven centuries? Or did he see a sample
in an old temple of the Mycenaean prime, or in a museum of his own
period? Or had he heard of it in a lost Mycenaean poem? Yet, careful
as he was, so pedantic that he must have puzzled his seventh-century
audience, who never saw such caps, the poet knew nothing of the shields
and costumes of the heroes, though he might have found out all that is
known about them in the then existing Iliadic lays with which he was
perfectly familiar--see his portrait of Agamemnon. He was well aware
that corslets were, in Homeric poetry, anachronisms, for he gave
Nestor none; yet he fully believed, in his ignorance, that small Ionian
bucklers loveth; (which need the aid of corslets badly) were the only
wear among the heroes!
Criticism has, as we often observe, no right to throw the first stone
at the inconsistencies of Homer. As we cannot possibly believe that one
poet knew so much which his contemporaries did not know (and how, in the
seventh century, could he know it?), and that he also knew so little,
knew nothing in fact, we take our own view. The poet of Book X. sings
of _a_ fresh topic, a confused night of dread; of young men wearing the
headgear which, he says, young men _do_ wear; of pelts of fur such as
suddenly wakened men, roused, but not roused for battle, would be likely
to throw over their bodies against the chill air. He describes things of
his own day; things with which he is familiar. He is said to "take quite
a peculiar delight in the minute description of dress and weapons."
[Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 423.] We do not observe that he
does describe weapons or shields minutely; but Homer always loves to
describe weapons and costume--scores of examples prove it--and here he
happens to be describing such costume as he nowhere else has occasion to
mention. By an accident of archaeological discovery, we find that
there were such caps set with boars' tusks as he introduces. They had
survived, for young men on night duty, into the poet's age. We really
cannot believe that a poet of the seventh century had made excavations
in Mycenaean graves. If he did and put the results into his lay, his
audience--not wearing boars' tusks--would have asked, "What nonsense is
the man talking?"
Erhardt, remarking on the furs which the heroes throw over their
shoulders when aroused, says that this kind of wrap is very late. It
was Peisander who, in the second half of the seventh century, clothed
Herakles in a lion's skin. Peisander brought this costume into
poetry, and the author of the _Doloneia_ knew no better than to follow
Peisander. [Footnote: _Die Enstehung der Homerischen Gedichte_, pp.
163-164.] The poet of the _Doloneia_ was thus much better acquainted
with Peisander than with the Homeric lays, which could have taught
him that a hero would never wear a fur coverlet when aroused--not to
fight--from slumber. Yet he knew about leathern caps set with boars'
tusks. He must have been an erudite excavator, but, in literature, a
reader only of recent minor poetry.
Having procured arms, without corslets (_with_ corslets, according to
Carl Robert)--whether, if they had none, because the poet knew that
corslets were anachronisms, or because spies usually go as lightly
burdened as possible--Odysseus and Diomede approach the Trojan camp. The
hour is the darkest hour before dawn. They hear, but do not see, a heron
sent by Athene as an omen, and pray to the goddess, with promise of
sacrifice.
In the Trojan camp Hector has called a council, and asked for a
volunteer spy to seek intelligence among the Achaeans. He offers no
black ewes as a reward, but the best horses of the enemy. This allures
Dolon, son of a rich Trojan, "an only son among five sisters," a
poltroon, a weak lad, ugly, but swift of foot, and an enthusiastic lover
of horses. He asks for the steeds of Achilles, which Hector swears to
give him; and to be lightly clad he takes merely spear and bow and a cap
of ferret skin, with the pelt of a wolf for covering. Odysseus sees him
approach; he and Diomede lie down among the dead till Dolon passes, then
they chase him towards the Achaean camp and catch him. He offers ransom,
which before these last days of the war was often accepted. Odysseus
replies evasively, and asks for information. Dolon, thinking that
the bitterness of death is past, explains that only the Trojans have
watch-fires; the allies, more careless, have none. At the extreme flank
of the host sleep the newly arrived Thracians, under their king, Rhesus,
who has golden armour, and "the fairest horses that ever I beheld" (the
ruling passion for horses is strong in Dolon), "and the greatest, whiter
than snow, and for speed like the winds."
Having learned all that he needs to know, Diomede ruthlessly slays
Dolon. Odysseus thanks Athene, and hides the poor spoils of the dead,
marking the place. They then creep into the dark camp of the sleeping
Thracians, and as Diomede slays them Odysseus drags each body aside, to
leave a clear path for the horses, that they may not plunge and tremble
when they are led forth, "for they were not yet used to dead men." No
line in Homer shows more intimate knowledge and realisation of horses
and of war. Odysseus drives the horses of Rhesus out of the camp with
the bow of Meriones; he has forgotten to take the whip from the chariot.
Diomede, having slain King Rhesus asleep, thinks whether he shall lift
out the chariot (war chariots were very light) or drag it by the pole;
but Athene warns him to be going. He "springs upon the steeds," and they
make for their camp. It is not clearly indicated whether they ride or
drive (X., 5 I 3, 527-528, 541); but, suppose that they ride, are we
to conclude that the fact proves "lateness"? The heroes always drive
in Homer, but it is inconceivable that they could not ride in cases of
necessity, as here, if Diomede has thought it wiser not to bring out the
chariot and harness the horses. Riding is mentioned in _Iliad_, XV.
679, in a simile; again, in a simile, _Odyssey_, V. 37 I. It is not the
custom for heroes to ride; the chariot is used in war and in travelling,
but, when there are horses and no chariot, men could not be so imbecile
as not to mount the horses, nor could the poet be so pedantic as not to
make them do so.
The shields would cause no difficulty; they would be slung sideways,
like the shields of knights in the early Middle Ages. The pair, picking
up Dolon's spoils as they pass, hurry back to the chiefs, where Nestor
welcomes them. The others laugh and are encouraged (to encourage them
and his audience is the aim of the poet); while the pair go to Diomede's
quarters, wash off the blood and sweat from their limbs in the sea, and
then "enter the polished baths," common in the _Odyssey_, unnamed in
the Iliad. But on no other occasion in the Iliad are we admitted to view
this part of heroic toilette. Nowhere else, in fact, do we accompany a
hero to his quarters and his tub after the day's work is over. Achilles,
however, refuses to wash, after fighting, in his grief for Patroclus,
though plenty of water was being heated for the purpose, and it is to be
presumed that a bath was ready for the water (_Iliad_, XXIII. 40). See,
too, for Hector's bath, XXII. 444.
The two heroes then refresh themselves; breakfast, in fact, and drink,
as is natural. By this time the dawn must have been in the sky, and in
Book XI. men are stirring with the dawn. Such is the story of Book X.
The reader may decide as to whether it is "_Very_ late; barely
Homeric," or a late and deliberate piece of burlesque, [Footnote: Henry,
_Classical Review_. March 1906.] or whether it is very Homeric, though
the whole set of situations--a night of terror, an anxious chief, a
nocturnal adventure--are unexampled in the poem.
The poet's audience of warriors must have been familiar with such
situations, and must have appreciated the humorous, ruthless treatment
of Dolon, the spoiled only brother of five sisters. Mr. Monro admitted
that Dolon is Shakespearian, but added, "too Shakespearian for Homer."
One may as well say that Agincourt, in Henry V., is "too Homeric for
Shakespeare."
Mr. Monro argued that "the Tenth Book comes in awkwardly after the
Ninth." Nitzsche thinks just the reverse. The patriotic warrior audience
would delight in the _Doloneia_ after the anguish of Book IX.; would
laugh with Odysseus at the close of his adventure, and rejoice with the
other Achaeans (X. 505).
"The introductory part of the Book is cumbrous," says Mr. Monro. To
us it is, if we wish to get straight to the adventure, just as the
customary delays in Book XIX., before Achilles is allowed to fight, are
tedious to us. But the poet's audience did not necessarily share our
tastes, and might take pleasure (as I do) in the curious details of the
opening of Book X. The poet was thinking of his audience, not of modern
professors.
"We hear no more of Rhesus and his Thracians." Of Rhesus there was
no more to hear, and his people probably went home, like Glenbuckie's
Stewarts after the mysterious death of their chief in Amprior's house of
Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled
in the night. "The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad ... It
is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." But it was time for
"comic relief." If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the
practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure
and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle under the
sunlight. Is the poet not to be allowed to be various, and is the scene
of the Porter in _Macbeth_, "in style and tone," like the rest of the
drama? (_Macbeth_, Act ii. sc. 3). Here, of course, Shakespeare indulges
infinitely more in "comedy of a rough practical kind" than does the
author of the _Doloneia_.
The humour and the cruelty do not exceed what is exhibited in many of
the _gabes_, or insulting boasts of heroes over dead foes in other parts
of the _Iliad_; such as the taunting comparison of a warrior falling
from his chariot to a diver after oysters, or as "one of the Argives
hath caught the spear in his flesh, and leaning thereon for a staff,
methinks that he will go down within the house of Hades" (XIV. 455-457).
The _Iliad_, like the sagas, is rich in this extremely practical humour.
Mr. Leaf says that the Book "must have been composed before the _Iliad_
had reached its present form, for it cannot have been meant to follow
on Book IX. It is rather another case of a parallel rival to that Book,
coupled with it only in the final literary redaction," which Mr. Leaf
dates in the middle of the sixth century. "The Book must have been
composed before the _Iliad_ had reached its present form," [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] It is not easy to understand this decision;
for, as Mr. Leaf had previously written, about Book IX. 60-68, "the
posting of the watch is at least not necessary to the story, and it has
a suspicious air of being merely a preparation for the next Book, which
is much later, and which turns entirely upon a visit to the sentinels."
[Footnote: _Companion,_ p.174.]
Now a military audience would not have pardoned the poet of Book IX. if,
in the circumstances of defeat, with a confident enemy encamped within
striking distance, he had not made the Achaeans throw forth their
outposts. The thing was inevitable and is not suspicious; but the poet
purposely makes the advanced guard consist of young men under Nestor's
son and Meriones. He needs them for Book X. Therefore the poet of Book
IX. is the poet of Book X. preparing his effect in advance; or the poet
of Book X. is a man who cleverly takes advantage of Book IX., or he
composed his poem of "a night of terror and adventure," "in the air,"
and the editor of 540 B.C., having heard it recited and copied it out,
went back to Book IX. and inserted the advanced guard, under Thrasymedes
and Meriones, to lead up to Book X.
On Mr. Leafs present theory, [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p.424.] Book X.,
we presume, was meant, not to follow Book IX., but to follow the end of
Book VII, being an alternative to Book VIII. (composed, he says, to
lead up to Book IX.) and Book IX. But Book VII. closes with the Achaean
refusal of the compromise offered by Paris--the restoration of the
property but not of the wife of Menelaus. The Trojans and Achaeans feast
all night; the Trojans feast in the city. There is therefore no place
here for Book X. after Book VII, and the Achaeans cannot roam about
all night, as they are feasting; nor can Agamemnon be in the state of
anxiety exhibited by him in Book X.
Book X. could not exist without Book IX., and _must_ have been "meant
to follow on it." Mr. Leaf sees that, in his preface to Book IX.,
[Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 371.] "The placing of sentinels" (in Book
IX. 80, 84) "is needed as an introduction to Book X. but has nothing to
do with this Book" (IX.). But, we have said, it was inevitable, given
the new situation in Book IX. (an Achaean repulse, and the enemy camped
in front), that an advanced guard must be placed, even if there proved
to be no need of their services. We presume that Mr. Leaf's literary
editor, finding that Book X. existed and that the advanced guard was
a necessity of its action, went back to Book IX. and introduced
an advanced guard of young men, with its captains, Thrasymedes and
Meriones. Even after this the editor had much to do, if Book IX.
originally exhibited Agamemnon as not in terror and despair, as it now
does.
We need not throw the burden of all this work on the editor. As Mr.
Leaf elsewhere writes, in a different mind, the Tenth Book "is obviously
adapted to its present place in the _Iliad_, for it assumes a moment
when Achilles is absent from the field, and when the Greeks are in deep
dejection from a recent defeat. These conditions are exactly fulfilled
by the situation at the end of Book IX." [Footnote: _Companion_, p.
190.]
This is certainly the case. The Tenth Book could not exist without the
Ninth; yet Mr. Leaf's new opinion is that it "cannot have been meant to
follow on Book IX." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] He was better
inspired when he held the precisely opposite opinion.
Dr. Adolf Kiene [Footnote: Die _Epen des Homer, Zweiter Theil,_ pp.
90-94. Hanover, 1884.] accepts Book XI. as originally composed to fill
its present place in the _Iliad._ He points out the despondency of the
chiefs after receiving the reply of Achilles, and supposes that even
Diomede (IX. 708) only urges Agamemnon to "array before the ships thy
folk and horsemen," for defensive battle. But, encouraged by the success
of the night adventure, Agamemnon next day assumes the offensive. To
consider thus is perhaps to consider too curiously. But it is clear
that the Achaeans have been much encouraged by the events of Book X.,
especially Agamemnon, whose character, as Kiene observes, is very subtly
and consistently treated, and "lies near the poet's heart." This is the
point which we keep urging. Agamemnon's care for Menelaus is strictly
preserved in Book X.
Nitzsche (I 897) writes, "Between Book IX. and Book XI there is a gap;
that gap the _Doloneia_ fills: it must have been composed to be part of
the _ILIAD_." But he thinks that the _Doloneia_ has taken the place
of an earlier lay which filled the gap. [Footnote: Die _Echtheit der
Doloneia,_ p. 32. Programme des K. K. Staats Gymnasium zu Marburg,
1877.] That the Book is never referred to later in the _Iliad_, even
if it be true, is no great argument against its authenticity. For when
later references are made to Book IX., they are dismissed as clever late
interpolations. If the horses of Rhesus took part, as they do not, in
the sports at the funeral of Patroclus, the passage would be called a
clever interpolation: in fact, Diomede had better horses, divine horses
to run. However, it is certainly remarkable that the interpolation was
not made by one of the interpolators of critical theory.
Meanwhile there is, we think, a reference to Book X. in Book XIV.
[Footnote: This was pointed out to me by Mr. Shewan, to whose great
knowledge of Homer I am here much indebted.]
In _Iliad_, XIV. 9-11, we read that Nestor, in his quarters with the
wounded Machaon, on the day following the night of Dolon's death, hears
the cry of battle and goes out to see what is happening. "He took the
well-wrought shield of his son, horse-taming Thrasymedes, which was
lying in the hut, all glistening with bronze, but _the son had the
shield of his father_."
Why had Thrasymedes the shield of his father? At about 3 A.M. before
dawn the shield of Nestor was lying beside him in his own bedroom (Book
X. 76), and at the same moment his son Thrasymedes _was_ on outpost
duty, and had his own shield with him (Book IX. 81).
When, then, did father and son exchange shields, and why? Mr. Leaf says,
"It is useless to inquire why father and son had thus changed shields,
as the scholiasts of course do."
The scholiasts merely babble. Homer, of course, meant _something_ by
this exchange of shields, which occurred late in the night of Book IX.
or very early in the following day, that of Books XI-XVI.
Let us follow again the sequence of events. On the night before the
day when Nestor had Thrasymedes' shield and Thrasymedes had Nestor's,
Thrasymedes was sent out, with shield and all, in command of one of the
seven companies of an advanced guard, posted between fosse and wall, in
case of a camisade by the Trojans, who were encamped on the plain (IX.
81). With him in command were Meriones and five other young men less
notable. They had supplies with them and whatever was needed: they
cooked supper in bivouac.
In the _Doloneia_ the wakeful princes, after inspecting the advanced
guard, go forward within view of the Trojan ranks and consult. With
them they take Nestor's son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones (X. 196). The
two young men, being on active service, are armed; the princes are not.
Diomede, having been suddenly roused out of sleep, with no intention to
fight, merely threw on his dressing-gown, a lion's skin. Nestor wore a
thick, double, purple dressing-gown. Odysseus had cast his shield about
his shoulders. It was decided that Odysseus and Diomede should enter the
Trojan camp and "prove a jeopardy." Diomede had no weapon but his spear;
so Thrasymedes, who is armed as we saw, lends him his bull's-hide
cap, "that keeps the heads of stalwart youths," his sword (for that of
Diomede "was left at the ships"), and his shield.
Diomede and Odysseus successfully achieve their adventure and return to
the chiefs, where they talk with Nestor; and then they go to Diomede's
hut and drink. The outposts remain, of course, at their stations.
Meanwhile, Thrasymedes, having lent his shield to Diomede, has none of
his own. Naturally, as he was to pass the night under arms, he would
send to his father's quarters for the old man's shield, a sword, and a
helmet. He would remain at his post (his men had provisions) till the
general _reveillez_ at dawn, and would then breakfast at his post and go
into the fray. Nestor, therefore, missing his shield, would send round
to Diomede's quarters for the shield of Thrasymedes, which had been lent
overnight to Diomede, would take it into the fight, and would bring it
back to his own hut when he carried the wounded Machaon thither out of
the battle. When he arms to go out and seek for information, he picks up
the shield of Thrasymedes.
Nothing can be more obvious; the poet, being a man of imagination, not
a professor, sees it all, and casually mentions that the son had the
father's and the father had the son's shield. His audience, men of the
sword, see the case as clearly as the poet does: only we moderns and the
scholiasts, almost as modern as ourselves, are puzzled.
It may also be argued, though we lay no stress on it, that in Book XI.
312, when Agamemnon has been wounded, we find Odysseus and Diomede alone
together, without their contingents, because they have not separated
since they breakfasted together, after returning from the adventure of
Book X., and thus they have come rather late to the field. They find
the Achaeans demoralised by the wounding of Agamemnon, and they make
a stand. "What ails us," asks Odysseus, "that we forget our impetuous
valour?" The passage appears to take up the companionship of Odysseus
and Diomede, who were left breakfasting together at the end of Book X.
and are not mentioned till we meet them again in this scene of Book XI.,
as if they had just come on the field.
As to the linguistic tests of lateness "there are exceptionally
numerous traces of later formation," says Mr. Monro; while Fick, tout
_contraire,_ writes, "clumsy Ionisms are not common, and, as a rule,
occur in these parts which on older grounds show themselves to be late
interpolations." "The cases of agreement" (between Fick and Mr. Monro),
"are few, and the passages thus condemned are not more numerous in the
_Doloneia_ than in any average book." [Footnote: Jevons, _Journal of
Hellenic Studies_, vii. p. 302.] The six examples of "a post-Homeric
use of the article" do not seem so very post-Homeric to an ordinary
intelligence--parallels occur in Book I.--and "Perfects in [Greek: ka]
from derivative verbs" do not destroy the impression of antiquity and
unity which is left by the treatment of character; by the celebrated
cap with boars' tusks, which no human being could archaeologically
reconstruct in the seventh century; and by the Homeric vigour in such
touches as the horses unused to dead men. As the _Iliad_ certainly
passed through centuries in which its language could not but be affected
by linguistic changes, as it could not escape from _remaniements_,
consciously or unconsciously introduced by reciters and copyists, the
linguistic objections are not strongly felt by us. An unphilological
reader of Homer notes that Duntzer thinks the _Doloneia_ "older than the
oldest portion of the Odyssey," while Gemoll thinks that the author of
the _Doloneia_. was familiar with the _Odyssey_. [Footnote: Duntzer,
_Homer. Abhanglungen_, p. 324. Gemoll, _Hermes_, xv. 557 ff.]
Meanwhile, one thing seems plain to us: when the author of Book IX.
posted the guards under Thrasymedes, he was deliberately leading up
to Book X.; while the casual remark in Book XIV. about the exchange of
shields between father and son, Nestor and Thrasymedes, glances back at
Book X. and possibly refers to some lost and more explicit statement.
It is not always remembered that, if things could drop into the
interpolations, things could also drop out of the _ILIAD,_ causing
_lacunae_, during the dark backward of its early existence.
If the _Doloneia_ be "barely Homeric," as Father Browne holds, this
opinion was not shared by the listeners or readers of the sixth century.
The vase painters often illustrate the _Doloneia;_ but it does not
follow that "the story was fresh" because it was "popular," as Mr.
Leaf suggests, and "was treated as public property in a different way"
(namely, in a comic way) "from the consecrated early legends" (_Iliad,_
II 424, 425). The sixth century vase painters illustrated many passages
in Homer, not the _Doloneia_ alone. The "comic way" was the ruthless
humour of two strong warriors capturing one weak coward. Much later,
wild caricature was applied in vase painting to the most romantic scenes
in the Odyssey, which were "consecrated" enough.
CHAPTER XIV
THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR
That several of the passages in which Nestor speaks are very late
interpolations, meant to glorify Pisistratus, himself of Nestor's line,
is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. The first
example is in _Iliad,_ II. 530-568. This passage "is meant at once
to present Nestor as the leading counsellor of the Greek army, and to
introduce the coming _Catalogue_." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad,_ vol. i. p.
70.] Now the _Catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole
Cycle." [Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 87.] But, to repeat an earlier
observation, surely the whole Cycle was much later than the period of
Pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the Homeric and
Cyclic poems into one body of verse, named "The Cycle," is believed to
have been much later.
It is objected that Nestor's advice in this passage, "Separate thy
warriors by tribes and clans" ([Greek: phyla, phraetras]), "is out of
place in the last year of the war"; but this suggestion for military
reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective,
like Helen's description of the Achaean chiefs in Book III, or Nestor
may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. The
Athenians had "tribes" and "clans," political institutions, and Nestor's
advice is noted as a touch of late Attic influence; but about the nature
and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain
to argue about them. The advice of Nestor is an appeal to the clan
spirit--a very serviceable military spirit, as the Highlanders have
often proved--but we have no information as to whether it existed in
Achaean times. Nestor speaks as the aged Lochiel spoke to Claverhouse
before Killiecrankie. Did the Athenian army of the sixth century
fight in clan regiments? The device seems to belong to an earlier
civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century Athens or not. It is,
of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flourishing among
the most backward people, though they were welded into the constitution
of Athens. The passage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be
dismissed as very late, for the words for "tribe" and "clan" could
not be novel Athenian inventions, the institutions designated being of
prehistoric origin.
Nestor shows his tactics again in IV. 303-309, offers his "inopportune
tactical lucubrations, doubtless under Athenian (Pisistratean)
influence." The poet is here denied a sense of humour. That a veteran
military Polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as Dugald
Dalgetty does about the sconce of Drumsnab is an essential part of the
humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor's critics do
not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point
of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, "that should
be." Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour
by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless
if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor's
speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He
arrays his Pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. In the
[blank space] the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots
following close behind them. [Footnote: _Iliad_, XI. 48-56.] In the same
way during the Hundred Years' War the English knights dismounted and
defeated the French chivalry till, under Jeanne d'Arc and La Hire, the
French learned the lesson, and imitated the English practice. On
the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry
advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor
these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way.
Nestor's advice in Book IV. is _not_ to dismount or break the line of
chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: "Even so is the far
better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and
walls." There was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no
dismounting. Nestor's were not the tactics of the heroes--they usually
dismount and do single valiances; but Nestor, commanding his local
contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, [Greek: hoi
pretoroi]. What can be more natural and characteristic?
The poet's meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus,
but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran.
It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed
before Nestor's speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory
of the composition of the _ILIAD_. In his first edition Mr. Leaf
regarded the interpolations as intended "to glorify Nestor" without
reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the
master of a sycophantic editor. The passages are really meant to display
the old man's habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus
could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as
a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest
that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was
said in a spirit of mockery.
Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the
unlearned world, merely because Nestor's is a "character part," very
broadly drawn.
The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of
Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept
the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms
himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a
warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses
to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes
them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory
of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion,
Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when "no man
plucked up heart" to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never
been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and
wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak.
Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!"
and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details
about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage
is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the
history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an
ancient jade _patu_. An objection is now taken to Nestor's geography: he
is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks
of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of
Pheia. Pheia "is no doubt the same as Pheai" [Footnote: Monro, Note on
Odyssey, XV. 297.] (Odyssey, XV. 297), "but that was a maritime town not
near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere
near it." Now Didymus (Schol. A) "is said to have read [Greek: Phaeraes]
for [Greek: Pheias]," following Pherekydes. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_,
vol. i. 308.] M. Victor Berard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian
topography, says that "Pheia is a cape, not a town," and adopts the
reading "Phera," the [Greek: Pherae] of the journey of Telemachus,
in the Odyssey. He thinks that the [Greek: Pherae] of Nestor is the
Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of
the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or
burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha.
Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough
and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf
thinks it Semitic--"_Yarden_, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did
not give the _Yar_ to the _Yarrow_ nor to the Australian _Yarra Yarra_.
The country, says M. Berard, is a network of rivers, burns, and
rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same
river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; [Footnote:
Berard, _Les Pheniciens et L'Odyssee,_ 108-113, 1902] many of them, in
England, are plainly prae-Celtic.
While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we
cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale
about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of
the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called
because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron _casse-tete,_
as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary
history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or
grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece,
it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name,
and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no
chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if
Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic
narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a
late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the
Maceman and his _casse-tete_ from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he
must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.
Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to
the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun
a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of
similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero
of his own story. His brag, or _gabe,_ about "he was the tallest and
strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and
reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest
emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not
flattering Pisistratus.
The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus,
who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI.
604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely,
that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under
Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to
provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the
return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he
makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own
early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border
law; the Eleians had driven a _creagh_ of cattle from the Pylians, who
pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is
an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair
Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular
and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own
sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in
upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the
narrative of the ballad would be impossible. [Footnote: In fact both
sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the
ballad-maker, not with Scott.]
The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "No doubt he was
an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus." [Footnote:
_Iliad_. Note to XI. 756, and to the _Catalogue_, II. 615-617.] It
is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his
editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!
Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the
_Catalogue_. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf's opinions as to the
date and historical merits of the _Catalogue_ have widely varied, while
M. Berard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the
_Catalogue_ Mr. Allen writes, "As a table, according to regions, of
Agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing
"a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no
one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." He
makes a vigorous defence of the _Catalogue,_ as regards the dominion of
Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. [Footnote: _Classical Review,_ May 1906, pp.
x94-201.] Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of
Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the
humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic
mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his
statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary
discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of
Nestor.
CHAPTER XV
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY EPICS
Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the
national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and
decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb
touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of
Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and _SAGA,_
decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true
parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be
studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to
the comparative method." [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 135.] Part of this
conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard
had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry
at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr.
Saintsbury's Short History of _FRENCH LITERATURE_ (sixteen pages on
this topic), and a work unknown to me, by "M. Paul"; for Iceland he only
quoted _THE Encyclopedia BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany,
Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish _Kalewala,_ the _ENCYCLOPEDIA
BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a _PRIMER OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE_ by Mr. Stopford Brooke.
These sources appear less than adequate, and Celtic heroic romance is
entirely omitted. A much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early
heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that
the study cannot aid our critical examination of the Homeric problem.
Many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to
that of Achaean society as described in the _Iliad_ and Odyssey. Every
society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient
legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs.
The similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain
that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of
societies separated in time and space but practically identical in
culture. It is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic
so rich and interesting has been, at least in England, almost entirely
neglected by Homeric scholars.
Meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as Sir Richard observes, that
"we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems,"
for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great
poet--the greatest of all poets--except in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.
But, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_ we possess the heroic Achaean legends handled by
one great poet. They find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and
of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the
poems are ascribed to a late _litterateur_. Now to that supposed state
of things we do find several "true parallels," in Germany, in Finland,
in Ireland. But the results of work by these many hands in many ages are
anything but "a true parallel" to the results which lie before us in
the _Iliad_ and _ODYSSEY_. Where the processes of composite authorship
throughout many _AGES_ certainly occur, as in Germany and Ireland, there
we find no true parallel to the Homeric poems. It follows that, in all
probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the
_Iliad_ and Odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they
failed egregiously to produce the results.
Sir Richard's argument would have been logical if many efforts by many
hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany
did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not,
and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the
other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the
heroic society, the Court minstrels, all--except the great poet. In
all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military
aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the
minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and
_Maerchen_, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the
production of an English, German, or Irish _ILIAD_ or _ODYSSEY_, or even
of a true artistic equivalent in France.
We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been
unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence
of the _ILIAD_ and _ODYSSEY_. Now we see that, where such conditions of
production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic
genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus
breaks down at both ends.
It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek
society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic
listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers
duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems.
They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic
songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took
any notice of the old heroic poems at all.
One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early
civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with
"unity of impression," says Sir Richard Jebb. [Footnote: Homer, p. 37.]
Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this
"harmonious picture" in the epics of Germany and England or in the
early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of
_Beowulf_; but we know that _Beowulf_, a long heroic poem, is a mass of
anachronisms--a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that
great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions
and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian
England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends
evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no "painful
anxiety," like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems
(when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve
harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely
modern.
If we take the _Nibelungenlied_, [Footnote: See chapter on the
_Nibelungenlied_ in Homer _AND the Epic_, pp. 382-404.] we find that
it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For
example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the
Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is
written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is
retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the _Nibelungenlied_
is of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the
Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in
preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga,
the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian
prose author of the _Volsunga_ been a great poet, we might find in
his work a true parallel to the _Iliad_. But, though he preserves the
harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the
savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel
to the Greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. In the
German _Nibelungenlied_ all is modernised; the characters are Christian,
the manners are chivalrous, and _Maerchen_ older than Homer are forced
into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no
early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel
to _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. The mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed
of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed Ionian continuators are
sometimes said to have done, any more than did the French and late Welsh
handlers of the ancient Celtic Arthurian materials. The late
German _bearbeiter_ of the _Nibelungenlied_ has no idea of unity of
plot--_enfin_, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material
for an epic, but producing no parallel to _ILIAD_ and Odyssey, only
proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics.
"If any inference could properly be drawn from the Edda" (the Icelandic
collection of heroic lays), says Sir Richard Jebb, "it would be that
short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection
_without_ coalescing into such an artistic whole as the Iliad or the
Odyssey." [Footnote: Homer, p. 33.]
It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems
on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they
cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long
epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the _ILIAD_ or
Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius
must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper
and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small
poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a
very inharmonious whole, as in the _Nibelungenlied_, but a controlling
poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that
feat.
Where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence,
as Dr. Loennrot (1835-1849) did in the case of the peasant, not courtly,
lays of Finland, he "fails to prove that mere combining and editing can
form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though
concerned with closely related themes," says Sir Richard Jebb.
[Footnote: Homer, p. 134-135.]
This is perfectly true; much as Loennrot botched and vamped the Finnish
lays he made no epic out of them. But, as it is true, how did the late
Athenian drudge of Pisistratus succeed where Loennrot failed? "In the
dovetailing of the _ODYSSEY_ we see the work of one mind," says Sir
Richard. [Footnote: Homer, p. 129.] This mind cannot have been the
property of any one but a great poet, obviously, as the _Odyssey_ is
confessedly "an artistic whole." Consequently the disintegrators of the
Odyssey, when they are logical, are reduced to averring that the poem is
an exceedingly inartistic whole, a whole not artistic at all. While Mr.
Leaf calls it "a model of skilful construction," Wilamowitz Mollendorff
denounces it as the work of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," of about 650
B.C., a century previous to Mr. Leaf's Athenian editor.
Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation
is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. The Odyssey is
an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse.
Blass, Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare
that the composition is excellent. A crowd of German critics and Father
Browne, S.J., hold that the composition is feeble. The criterion is the
literary taste of each party to the dispute. Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz
Moellendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard
Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of
excellent construction. The world has judged: the _Odyssey_ is a
marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of
disparate materials, but of a great early poet. Yet Sir Richard Jebb,
while recognising the _Odyssey_ as "an artistic whole" and an harmonious
picture, and recognising Loennrot's failure "to prove that mere combining
and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct
songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," thinks that
Kirchhoff has made the essence of his theory of late combination of
distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods,
in the _Odyssey_, "in the highest degree probable." [Footnote: Homer, p.
131.]
It is, of course, possible that Mr. Leaf, who has not edited the
_Odyssey,_ may now, in deference to his belief in the Pisistratean
editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. If the
_Odyssey,_ like the _Iliad_, was, till about 540 B.C., a chaos of
lays of all ages, variously known in various _repertoires_ of the
rhapsodists, and patched up by the Pisistratean editor, then of two
things one--either Mr. Leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the
excellency of the composition, or he does not. If he does still believe
that the composition of the _Odyssey_ is a masterpiece, then the
Pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. If he now, on
the other hand, agrees with Wilamowitz Moellendorff that the _Odyssey_ is
cobbler's work, then his literary opinions are unstable.
CHAPTER XVI
HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS
Sir Richard Jebb remarks, with truth, that "before any definite solution
of the Homeric problem could derive scientific support from such
analogies" (with epics of other peoples), "it would be necessary to show
that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appear in
early Greece had been reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere."
[Footnote: Homer, pp. 131, 132.] Now we can show that the particular
conditions under which the Homeric poems confessedly arose were
"reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere," except that no really
great poet was elsewhere present.
This occurred among the Germanic aristocracy, "the Franks of France,"
in the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries of our era. The
closeness of the whole parallel, allowing for the admitted absence in
France of a very great and truly artistic poet, is astonishing.
We have first, in France, answering to the Achaean aristocracy, the
Frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong
castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful
fealty to an Over-Lord, the King, passing their days in the chace, in
private war, or in revolt against the Over-Lord, and, for all
literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by
_jongleurs_, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors
of the poems which they recite.
"This national poetry," says M. Gaston Paris, "was born and mainly
developed among the warlike class, princes, lords, and their courts....
At first, no doubt, some of these men of the sword themselves composed
and chanted lays" (like Achilles), "but soon there arose a special class
of poets ... They went from court to court, from castle ... Later,
when the townsfolk began to be interested in their chants, they sank
a degree, and took their stand in public open places ..." [Footnote:
_Literature Francaise au Moyen Age_, pp. 36, 37. 1898.]
In the _Iliad_ we hear of no minstrels in camp: in the _Odyssey_ a
prince has a minstrel among his retainers--Demodocus, at the court of
Phaeacia; Phemius, in the house of Odysseus. In Ionia, when princes had
passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs.
The parallel with France is so far complete.
The French national epics, like those of the Achaeans, deal mainly
with legends of a long past legendary age. To the French authors the
greatness and the fortunes of the Emperor Charles and other heroic heads
of great Houses provide a theme. The topics of song are his wars, and
the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the Emperor and among
themselves. These are seen magnified through a mist of legend; Saracens
are substituted for Gascon foes, and the great Charles, so nobly
venerable a figure in the oldest French epic (the _Chanson de Roland,
circ._ 1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in
the later epics, than Agamemnon himself. The "machinery" of the gods
in Homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery
of dreams is in vogue, as in the Iliad and _Odyssey_. The sources are
traditional and legendary.
We know that brief early lays of Charles and other heroes had existed,
and they may have been familiar to the French epic poets, but they were
not merely patched into the epics. The form of verse is not ballad-like,
but a series of _laisses_ of decasyllabic lines, each _laisse_
presenting one assonance, not rhyme. As time went on, rhyme and
Alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded,
altered, condensed, _remanies_, with progressive changes in taste,
metre, language, manners, and ways of life.
Finally, an age of Cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom
they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted
the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the Cyclic poet
who sang of the son of Odysseus by Circe. All these conditions are
undeniably "true parallels" to "the conditions under which the Homeric
poems appeared." The only obvious point of difference vanishes if we
admit, with Sir Richard Jebb and M. Salomon Reinach, the possibility of
the existence of written texts in the Greece of the early iron age.
We do not mean texts prepared for a _reading_ public. In France such a
public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of
the epic. The oldest French texts of their epics are small volumes,
each page containing some thirty lines in one column. Such volumes were
carried about by the _jongleurs_, who chanted their own or other men's
verses. They were not in the hands of readers. [Footnote: _Epopees
Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.]
An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker
of the first version of the _Bataille Loquifer_, twelfth century) is
instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that "he wrote the poem,
kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in
Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." Similar
statements are made in _Renaus de Montauban_ (the existing late version
is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not
part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other
poets. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises, Leon Gautier_, vol. i. p. 215,
Note I.]
These early _jongleurs_ were men of position and distinction; their
theme was the _gestes_ of princes; they were not under the ban
with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek
rhapsodists. Pindar's story that Homer wrote the _Cypria_ [Footnote:
_Pindari Opera_, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.] and gave the copy, as the
dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have
arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie.
Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he
died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in
an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source
of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist,
either when there were no written texts or when such texts were
multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public.
Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his
Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In
later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad,
into circulation.
Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school"
of _jongleurs_ at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession,
so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn _cantilenae_, new
lays. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174,
175.] But by that time the epic was decadent and dying?
The audiences of the _jongleurs_, too, were no longer, by that time,
what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the
epics; not small _jongleurs'_ copies, but folios, richly illuminated
and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. [Footnote:
Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated,
double-columned library copy in _La Chancun de Willame_., London, 1903.]
The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or
ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of
the _jongleur_ who was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright
in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is
regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early
Greece. He thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings
by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth
century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the
seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and
earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man
might commit his poems to writing. "Wolf allows that some men did, as
early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody
except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed
them" (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end
would have been gained." [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 113.]
Recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non-Phoenician
writing in Crete of course increase the probability of this opinion,
which is corroborated by the story of the _Cypria_, given as a dowry
with the author's daughter. Thus "the particular conditions under which
the Homeric poems appeared" "been reproduced with sufficient closeness"
in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the France of the
eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The social conditions are the same;
the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of
publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in
both cases, the _monomanie cyclique_. In the Greece of Homer we have the
four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Leon Gautier in
mediaeval France. We have:--
(1) An uncritical age confusing history by legend.
(2) We have a national _milieu_ with religious uniformity.
(3) We have poems dealing with--
"Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago."
(4) We have representative heroes, the Over-Lord, and his peers or
paladins. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. i. pp.
6-9]
It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the
adventures of their heroes world-old _Maerchen_, as in the Odyssey, and
in the cycle of the parents of Charles.
In the French, as in the Greek epics, we have such early traits
of poetry as the textual repetition of speeches, and the recurring
epithets, "swift-footed Achilles," "Charles of the white beard,"
"blameless heroes" (however blamable). Ladies, however old, are always
"of the clear face." Thus the technical manners of the French and Greek
epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of
Homer, to which no approach is made by the French poets.
The French authors of epic, even more than Homer, abound in episodes
much more distracting than those of the _Iliad_. Of blood and wounds, of
course, both the French and the Greek are profuse: they were writing for
men of the sword, not for modern critics. Indeed, the battle pieces of
France almost translate those of Homer. The Achaean "does on his goodly
corslet"; the French knight "_sur ses espalles son halberc li colad_."
The Achaean, with his great sword, shears off an arm at the shoulder.
The French knight--
"_Trenchad le braz, Parmi leschine sun grant espee li passe_."
The huge shield of Aias becomes _cele grant targe duble_ in France, and
the warriors boast over their slain in France, as in the _Iliad_. In
France, as in Greece, a favourite epic theme was "The Wrath" of a hero,
of Achilles, of Roland, of Ganelon, of Odysseus and Achilles wrangling
at a feast to the joy of Agamemnon, "glad that the bravest of his peers
were at strife." [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 75-7s [sic].]
Of all the many parallels between the Greek and French epics, the most
extraordinary is the coincidence between Charles with his peers and
Agamemnon with his princes. The same historical conditions occurred, at
an interval of more than two thousand years. Agamemnon is the Bretwalda,
the Over-Lord, as Mr. Freeman used to say, of the Achaeans: he is the
suzerain. Charles in the French epics holds the same position, but the
French poets regard him in different lights. In the earliest epic, the
_Chanson_ de Roland, a divinity doth hedge the famous Emperor, whom
Jeanne d'Arc styled "St. Charlemagne." He was, in fact, a man of
thirty-seven at the date of the disaster of Roncesvaux, where Roland
fell (778 A.D.). But in the tradition that has reached the poet of the
_chanson_ he is a white-bearded warrior, as vigorous as he is venerable.
As he rules by advice of his council, he bids them deliberate on the
proposals of the Paynim King, Marsile--to accept or refuse them. Roland,
the counterpart of Achilles in all respects (Oliver is his Patroclus),
is for refusing: Ganelon appears to have the rest with him when he
speaks in favour of peace and return to France out of Spain. So, in
the _Iliad_ (II.), the Achaeans lend a ready ear to Agamemnon when he
proposes the abandonment of the siege of Troy. Each host, French and
Achaean, is heartily homesick.
Ganelon's advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the
Saracen court. It is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent
and been murdered. The Peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the
aged Naismes, the Nestor of the Franks. His offer is not accepted,
nor are those of Oliver, Roland, and Turpin. Roland then proposes that
Ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the Wrath of Ganelon, which was
the ruin of Roland and the peers who stood by him. The warriors attack
each other in speeches of Homeric fury. Charles preserves his dignity,
and Ganelon departs on his mission. He deliberately sells himself,
and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the
rearguard under Roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of Charles
make up the rest of the poem. Not even in victory is Charles allowed
repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. He is of those whom Heaven
has called to endless combat--
"Their whole lives long to be winding
Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of them perish,"
in the words of Diomede.
Such is the picture of the imperial Charles in one of the oldest of the
French epics. The heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and
truly imperial, figure of St. Charlemagne--wise, just, and brave, a true
"shepherd of the people," regarded as the conqueror of all the known
kingdoms of the world. He is, among his fierce paladins, like "the
conscience of a knight among his warring members." "The greatness of
Charlemagne has entered even into his name;" but as time went on and
the feudal princes began the long struggle against the French king, the
poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the Emperor.
They created a second type of Charles, and it is the second type that on
the whole most resembles the Agamemnon of the _Iliad._
We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully
and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his
office, but detestable, on the whole, in character?
The answer is that just as the second type of Charles is the result of
feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of Agamemnon reflects
the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of Greece. The
masterly portrait of Agamemnon could only have been designed to win
the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an Over-Lord whom they
cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence,
but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and
character some of them can barely tolerate.
[blank space] _an historical unity._ The poem deals with
what may be called a feudal society, and the attitudes of the Achaean
Bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the _Iliad_ and
in every Book of it, those of the peers and king in the later _Chansons
de Geste_.
Returning to the decadent Charles of the French epics, we lay no stress
on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang
Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by
even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal
about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his
knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the
reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those
which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the Nestor of
the French epics, cries: "It is for you that we have left our lands and
fiefs, our fair wives and our children ... But, by the Apostle to whom
they pray in Rome, were it not that we should be guilty before God we
would go back to sweet France, and thin would be your host." [Footnote:
_Chevalerie Ogier_, 1510-1529. _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol.
iii. pp. 156-157.] In the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the
angered Achilles: "We came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless
one, but to please thee! But now go I back to Phthia with my ships--the
better part." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 158-169.]
Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry
Naismes admits that duty to God demands obedience to Charles. There
cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born
at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born
in similar historical conditions.
In Guide _Bourgogne,_ a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, "They
say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is
Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and
myself. As to Charles, he eats." Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, "Thou,
heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou
dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 227,
228. _Gui de Bourgogne_, pp. 37-41.] It is Achilles or Roland who stakes
his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who
camps by the wine. Charles, in the _Chanson de Saisnes_, abases himself
before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of
atonement to Achilles. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier,
vol. iii. p. 158.] Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes
Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses
heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when
he rues his arrogance. [Footnote: _Entree en Espagne_.]
The poet of the _Iliad_ is a great and sober artist. He does not make
Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets
heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon
and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of
feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical
conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not
of the Ionians in Asia.
The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It
is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St.
Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_, and in the "later" parts of the
_Iliad_ were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the
decadent _Chanson de Geste_. In the _Iliad_ Agamemnon's character is
consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it
could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe.
The Ionians--"democratic to the core," says Mr. Leaf--would either have
taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly
degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest _Chansons_. Or
the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented
a wavering and worthless portrait.
The conditions under which the _Chansons_ arose were truly parallel
to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems,
French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The
French have no Homer: _cared vate sacro_. It follows that a Homer was
necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.
It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our _Iliad_ is only
a very late _remaniement_, like the fourteenth century _Chansons de
Geste_, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age
of _remaniement_, even the versification had changed from assonance to
rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence,
while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful
adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war.
Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his
Paladins in _gauloiseries_ of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language
has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are
of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the _Iliad_ is maintained
throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the
versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are
present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are
uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state
of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our
parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears
as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great
point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence
of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the
composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later
poets of the _Iliad_.
CHAPTER XVII
CONCLUSION
The conclusion at which we arrive is that the _Iliad_, as a whole, is
the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and
_lacunae_ and _remaniements_ perhaps no person of ordinary sense will
allege. But that the mass of the Epic is of one age appears to be a
natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to
explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite
apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that
the _Iliad_ presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of
customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must
have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved.
If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic
was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns
of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zunis, and other
peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and
teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns--the care
of a priesthood--are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests
will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It
cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the
whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite
new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember,
which they alter at pleasure.
We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not
intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the
poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this
has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and
preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the
French Chansons _de Geste_. Unhappily, the argument that what was done
in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based
on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of
different schools. All seems to depend on each individual's sense
of what is "likely." In that case science has nothing to make in the
matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of
Homer. Mr. Monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known
at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes." [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. xxxv.] Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more
favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon
Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and
from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there
may have existed whole "Minoan" libraries--manuscripts executed on
perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. [Footnote:
_L'Anthropologie_, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.] Mr. Leaf, while admitting
that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic
development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it
was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of
it.... At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the
poems which were especially popular ..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i.
pp. xvi., xvii.] Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the
preservation of the Epic "from the sixth century onwards." [Footnote:
_Handbook of Homeric Study_, p. 134.] He also says that "it is difficult
to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this
form of writing" (the Cretan linear), "should not have used it much
more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting." He then
mentions the Knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in
pen and ink ... The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but
that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." [Footnote:
_Ibid_., pp. 258, 259.]
Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with
writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that
even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while
West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious.
Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean
age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used
writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to
see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing.
Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used "ordinary
writing," and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written,
he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that "the
Finnish epic" existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus,
first collected it from oral recitation. [Footnote: _Grundfragen der
Homerkritik_, p. 94.] But there is not, and never was, any "Finnish
epic." There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zunis--songs
of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of
weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the
legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of
burial and feast, and of labour. Loennrot collected these, and tried by
interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti
has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a mass of
_Volkslieder._ Cauer's other argument, that the German popular tales,
Grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at
issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of _Maerchen._
As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the _Iliad_ a
patchwork of metrical _Maerchen_ or is it an epic nobly constructed? If
it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the
absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its
preservation.
It is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what
is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan
linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd
and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an
epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific
imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of
unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed
by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world
was unknown.
Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age
when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied
their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained.
Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written
in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet,
probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.
That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer,
Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote
undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be
correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs.
[Footnote: Cretan _Pictographs_ and _Prae-Phoenician_ Script. London,
1905. Annual of British _School_ of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of
_Hellenic Studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.]
M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition
joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan
Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that
the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them
and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the
Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did
not [blank space] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms
of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus
letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" [Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v.
74. _L'Anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] In fact, the alphabet is
a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion.
[Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp.
634-645]
Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem
to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the
question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's
sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used
for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now
assert.
My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean
script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the "Phoenician letters,"
which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at
the beginning of the ninth century," says Professor Bury. [Footnote:
_History of Greece_, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.] This may seem an audaciously
early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries
bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and
writing was reasonably common. When such a humble class of hirelings
or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their
signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common
accomplishments among the more fortunate classes.
If Mr. Gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on
early pottery at Naucratis before the middle of the seventh century,
we reach the same conclusion. In fact, if these inscriptions be of a
century earlier than the Abu Simbel inscriptions, of date 590 B.C., we
reach 690 B.C. Wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment,
it must have existed in the eighth century B.C. We are not dealing here
with a special learned class, but with ordinary persons who could write.
[Footnote: _The Early Ionic Alphabet: Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol.
vii. pp. 220-239. Roberts, _Introduction to Greek Epigraphy_, pp. 31,
151, 159, 164, 165-167]
Interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a Dipylon vase,
found at Athens in 1880. It is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a
neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. On the neck, within a zigzag
"geometrical" pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. On the
shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique Attic characters
running from right to left, [Greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata
pais ei, tou tode]. "This is the jug of him who is the most delicately
sportive of all dancers of our time." The jug is attributed to the
eighth century. [Footnote: Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol.
ii. p, 243; Kretschmer, _Griechischen Vasen inschriften_, p. 110, 1894,
of the seventh century. H. von Rohden, _Denkmaler_, iii. pp. 1945, 1946:
"Probably dating from the seventh century." Roberts, op. cit., vol. i.
p. 74, "at least as far back as the seventh century," p. 75.]
Taking the vase, with Mr. Walters, as of the eighth century, I do not
suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the
hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. The vase may
have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a _new_ vase; it is
improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and
given by amateurs to artists. The inscription proves that, in the eighth
to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the Alpha is
lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and
a stroke across the middle, and the Iota is curved at each end), people
could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. The general
accomplishment of reading is taken for granted.
Reading is also taken for granted by the Gortyn (Cretan) inscription of
twelve columns long, _boustro-phedon_ (running alternately from left to
right, and from right to left). In this inscribed code of laws, incised
on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and
prices are calculated in "chalders" and "bolls" ([Greek: lebaetes] and
[Greek: tripodes]), as in Scotland when coin was scarce indeed. Whether
the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in
Scotland, of their contents in grain, I know not. The later inscriptions
deal with coined money. If coin came in about 650 B.C., the older parts
of the inscription may easily be of 700 B.C.
The Gortyn inscription implies the power of writing out a long code
of laws, and it implies that persons about to go to law could read the
public inscription, as we can read a proclamation posted up on a wall,
or could have it read to them. [Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. pp. 52-55.]
The alphabets inscribed on vases of the seventh century (Abecedaria),
with "the archaic Greek forms of every one of the twenty-two Phoenician
letters arranged precisely in the received Semitic order," were, one
supposes, gifts for boys and girls who were learning to read, just like
our English alphabets on gingerbread. [Footnote: For Abecedaria, cf.
Roberts, vol. i. pp. 16-21.]
Among inscriptions on tombstones of the end of the seventh century,
there is the epitaph of a daughter of a potter. [Footnote: Roberts, vol.
i. p. 76.] These writings testify to the general knowledge of reading,
just as much as our epitaphs testify to the same state of education. The
Athenian potter's daughter of the seventh century B.C. had her epitaph,
but the grave-stones of highlanders, chiefs or commoners, were usually
uninscribed till about the end of the eighteenth century, in deference
to custom, itself arising from the illiteracy of the highlanders in
times past. [Footnote: Ramsay, _Scotland and Scotsmen_, ii. p. 426.
1888.] I find no difficulty, therefore, in supposing that there were
some Greek readers and writers in the eighth century, and that primary
education was common in the seventh. In these circumstances my sense of
the probable is not revolted by the idea of a written epic, in [blank
space] characters, even in the eighth century, but the notion that there
was no such thing till the middle of the sixth century seems highly
improbable. All the conditions were present which make for the
composition and preservation of literary works in written texts. That
there were many early written copies of Homer in the eighth century I am
not inclined to believe. The Greeks were early a people who could read,
but were not a reading people. Setting newspapers aside, there is no
such thing as a reading _people_.
The Greeks preferred to listen to recitations, but my hypothesis is that
the rhapsodists who recited had texts, like the _jongleurs_' books
of their epics in France, and that they occasionally, for definite
purposes, interpolated matter into their texts. There were also texts,
known in later times as "city texts" ([Greek: ai kata poleis]), which
Aristarchus knew, but he did not adopt the various readings. [Footnote:
Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p, 435.]
Athens had a text in Solon's time, if he entered the decree that the
whole Epic should be recited in due order, every five years, at the
Panathenaic festival. [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii. p. 395.] "This
implies the possession of a complete text." [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii.
p. 403.]
Cauer remarks that the possibility of "interpolation" "began only after
the fixing of the text by Pisistratus." [Footnote: _Grundfragen_, p.
205.] But surely if every poet and reciter could thrust any new lines
which he chose to make into any old lays which he happened to know, that
was interpolation, whether he had a book of the words or had none. Such
interpolations would fill the orally recited lays which the supposed
Pisistratean editor must have written down from recitation before he
began his colossal task of making the _Iliad_ out of them. If, on the
other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at
pleasure into _them_, and such books may have been among the materials
used in the construction of a text for the Athenian book market. But if
our theory be right, there must always have been a few copies of better
texts than those of the late reciters' books, and the effort of the
editors for the book market would be to keep the parts in which most
manuscripts were agreed.
But how did Athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? One
can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been
texts--copied out in successive generations--in the hands of the
curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our
_Iliad_ as the late French Cyclic poets knew the earlier _Chansons de
Geste_. They certainly knew it, for they avoided interference with
it; they worked at epics which led up to it, as in the _Cypria;_ they
borrowed _motifs_ from hints and references in the _Iliad_, [Footnote:
Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 350, 351.] and they carried on the story
from the death of Hector, in the _AEthiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus.
This epic ended with the death of Achilles, when _The Little Iliad_
produced the tale to the bringing in of the wooden horse. Arctinus goes
on with his _Sack_ of _Ilios_, others wrote of _The Return_ of _the
Heroes,_ and the _Telegonia_ is a sequel to the Odyssey. The authors of
these poems knew the _Iliad_, then, as a whole, and how could they have
known it thus if it only existed in the casual _repertoire_ of strolling
reciters? The Cyclic poets more probably had texts of Homer, and
themselves wrote their own poems--how it paid, whether they recited them
and collected rewards or not, is, of course, unknown.
The Cyclic poems, to quote Sir Richard Jebb, "help to fix the lowest
limit for the age of the Homeric poems. [Footnote: _Homer_, pp. 151,
154.] The earliest Cyclic poems, dating from about 776 B.C., presuppose
the _Iliad_, being planned to introduce or continue it.... It would
appear, then, that the _Iliad_ must have existed in something like its
present compass as early as 800 B.C.; indeed a considerably earlier date
will seem probable, if due time is allowed for the poem to have grown
into such fame as would incite the effort to continue it and to prelude
to it."
Sir Richard then takes the point on which we have already insisted,
namely, that the Cyclic poets of the eighth century B.C. live in an
age of ideas, religions, ritual, and so forth which are absent from the
_Iliad_ [Footnote: Homer, pp. 154, 155.]
Thus the _Iliad_ existed with its characteristics that are prior to 800
B.C., and in its present compass, and was renowned before 800 B.C. As
it could not possibly have thus existed in the _repertoire_ of
irresponsible strolling minstrels and reciters, and as there is no
evidence for a college, school, or guild which preserved the Epic by
a system of mnemonic teaching, while no one can deny at least the
possibility of written texts, we are driven to the hypothesis that
written texts there were, whence descended, for example, the text of
Athens.
We can scarcely suppose, however, that such texts were perfect in all
respects, for we know how, several centuries later, in a reading age,
papyrus fragments of the _Iliad_ display unwarrantable interpolation.
[Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426.] But Plato's frequent
quotations, of course made at an earlier date, show that "whatever
interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which
Plato quoted was not one of them." [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 429] Plato had
something much better.
When a reading public for Homer arose--and, from the evidences of the
widespread early knowledge of reading, such a small public may have come
into existence sooner than is commonly supposed--Athens was the centre
of the book trade. To Athens must be due the prae-Alexandrian Vulgate,
or prevalent text, practically the same as our own. Some person or
persons must have made that text--not by taking down from recitation
all the lays which they could collect, as Herd, Scott, Mrs. Brown,
and others collected much of the _Border Minstrelsy_, and not by then
tacking the lays into a newly-composed whole. They must have done their
best with such texts as were accessible to them, and among these were
probably the copies used by reciters and rhapsodists, answering to the
MS. books of the mediaeval _jongleurs._
Mr. Jevons has justly and acutely remarked that "we do not know, and
there is no external evidence of any description which leads us to
suppose, that the _Iliad_ was ever expanded" (_J. H. S_, vii. 291-308).
That it was expanded is a mere hypothesis based on the idea that "if
there was an _Iliad_ at all in the ninth century, its length must
have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral
delivery,"--"a poem or poems short enough to be recited at a single
sitting."
But we have proved, with Mr. Jevons and Blass, and by the analogy of the
Chansons that, given a court audience (and a court audience is granted),
there were no such narrow limits imposed on the length of a poem orally
recited from night to night.
The length of the _Iliad_ yields, therefore, no argument for expansions
throughout several centuries. That theory, suggested by the notion
that the original poem _MUST_ have been short, is next supposed to be
warranted by the inconsistencies and discrepancies. But we argue that
these are only visible, as a rule, to "the analytical reader," for whom
the poet certainly was not composing; that they occur in all long
works of fictitious narrative; that the discrepancies often are not
discrepancies; and, finally, that they are not nearly so glaring as the
inconsistencies in the theories of each separatist critic. A theory,
in such matter as this, is itself an explanatory myth, or the plot of
a story which the critic invents to account for the facts in the case.
These critical plots, we have shown, do not account for the facts of the
case, for the critics do not excel in constructing plots. They wander
into unperceived self-contradictions which they would not pardon in the
poet. These contradictions are visible to "the analytical reader," who
concludes that a very early poet may have been, though Homer seldom is,
as inconsistent as a modern critic.
Meanwhile, though we have no external evidence that the _Iliad_ was
ever expanded--that it was expanded is an explanatory myth of the
critics--"we do know, on good evidence," says Mr. Jevons, "that the
_Iliad_ was rhapsodised." The rhapsodists were men, as a rule, of one
day recitations, though at a prolonged festival at Athens there was time
for the whole _Iliad_ to be recited. "They chose for recitation such
incidents as could be readily detached, were interesting in themselves,
and did not take too long to recite." Mr. Jevons suggests that the many
brief poems collected in the Homeric hymns are invocations which the
rhapsodists preluded to their recitals. The practice seems to have been
for the rhapsodist first to pay his reverence to the god, "to begin from
the god," at whose festival the recitation was being given (the short
proems collected in the Hymns pay this reverence), "and then proceed
with his rhapsody"--with his selected passage from the _Iliad_,
"Beginning with thee" (the god of the festival), "I will go on
to another lay," that is, to his selection from the Epic. Another
conclusion of the proem often is, "I will be mindful both of thee and
of another lay," meaning, says Mr. Jevons, that "the local deity will
figure in the recitation from Homer which the rhapsodist is about to
deliver."
These explanations, at all events, yield good sense. The invocation of
Athene (Hymns, XI., XXVIII.) would serve as the proem of invocation to
the recital of _Iliad_, V., VI. 1-311, the day of valour of Diomede,
spurred on by the wanton rebuke of Agamemnon, and aided by Athene. The
invocation of Hephaestus (Hymn XX.), would prelude to a recital of the
_Making of the Awns of Achilles_, and so on.
But the rhapsodist may be reciting at a festival of Dionysus, about whom
there is practically nothing said in the _Iliad_; for it is a proof of
the antiquity of the _Iliad_ that, when it was composed, Dionysus had
not been raised to the Olympian peerage, being still a folk-god only.
The rhapsodist, at a feast of Dionysus in later times, has to introduce
the god into his recitation. The god is not in his text, but he adds
him. [Footnote:_Ibid_., VI. 130-141]
Why should any mortal have made this interpolation? Mr. Jevons's theory
supplies the answer. The rhapsodist added the passages to suit the
Dionysus feast, at which he was reciting.
The same explanation is offered for the long story of the _Birth_
of [blank space] which Agamemnon tells in his speech of apology and
reconciliation. [Footnote:_Ibid_., XIX. 136.] There is an invocation to
Heracles (Hymns, XV.), and the author may have added this speech to his
rhapsody of the Reconciliation, recited at a feast of Heracles. Perhaps
the remark of Mr. Leaf offers the real explanation of the presence of
this long story in the speech of Agamemnon: "Many speakers with a bad
case take refuge in telling stories." Agamemnon shows, says Mr. Leaf,
"the peevish nervousness of a man who feels that he has been in the
wrong," and who follows a frank speaker like Achilles, only eager for
Agamemnon to give the word to form and charge. So Agamemnon takes refuge
in a long story, throwing the blame of his conduct on Destiny.
We do not need, then, the theory of a rhapsodist's interpolation, but it
is quite plausible in itself.
Local heroes, as well as gods, had their feasts in post-Homeric times,
and a reciter at a feast of AEneas, or of his mother, Aphrodite, may
have foisted in the very futile discourse of Achilles and AEneas,
[Footnote:_Ibid_., XX. 213-250.] with its reference to Erichthonius, an
Athenian hero.
In other cases the rhapsodist rounded off his selected passage by a few
lines, as in _Iliad_, XIII. 656-659, where a hero is brought to follow
his son's dead body to the grave, though the father had been killed
in _V. 576_. "It is really such a slip as is often made by authors who
write," says Mr. Leaf; and, in _Esmond_, Thackeray makes similar
errors. The passage in XVI. 69-80, about which so much is said, as if it
contradicted Book IX. (_The Embassy to Achilles_), is also, Mr. Jevons
thinks, to be explained as "inserted by a rhapsodist wishing to make
his extract complete in itself." Another example--the confusion in the
beginning of Book II.--we have already discussed (see Chapter IV.), and
do not think that any explanation is needed, when we understand that
Agamemnon, once wide-awake, had no confidence in his dream. However, Mr.
Jevons thinks that rhapsodists, anxious to recite straight on from the
dream to the battle, added II. 35-41, "the only lines which represent
Agamemnon as believing confidently in his dream." We have argued that he
only believed _till he awoke_, and then, as always, wavered.
Thus, in our way of looking at these things, interpolations by
rhapsodists are not often needed as explanations of difficulties. Still,
granted that the rhapsodists, like the _jongleurs_, had texts, and that
these were studied by the makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and
errors might creep in by this way. As to changes in language, "a
poetical dialect... is liable to be gradually modified by the influence
of the ever-changing colloquial speech. And, in the early times, when
writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative."
[Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 461.]
To conclude, the hypothesis of a school of mnemonic teaching of the
_Iliad_ would account for the preservation of so long a poem in an age
destitute of writing, when memory would be well cultivated. There may
have been such schools. We only lack evidence for their existence. But
against the hypothesis of the existence of early texts, there is nothing
except the feeling of some critics that it is not likely. "They are
dangerous guides, the feelings."
In any case the opinion that the _Iliad_ was a whole, centuries before
Pisistratus, is the hypothesis which is by far the least fertile in
difficulties, and, consequently, in inconsistent solutions of the
problems which the theory of expansion first raises, and then, like an
unskilled magician, fails to lay.