Homer, I understand the terms in a sense much higher than that of mere
precision in the leading narration. We may, as I am disposed to think,
even if we should disbelieve the existence of Helen, of Agamemnon, or
of Troy, yet hold, in all that is most essential, by the historical
character of Homer. For myself, I ask to be permitted to believe in
these, and in much besides these; yet I also plead that the main
question is not whether he has correctly recorded a certain series
of transactions, but whether he has truly and faithfully represented
manners and characters, feelings and tastes, races and countries,
principles and institutions. Here lies the pith of history; these it
has for its soul, and fact for its body. It does not appear to me
reasonable to presume that Homer idealized his narration with anything
like the license which was permitted to the Carlovingian romance; yet
even that romance did not fail to retain in many of the most essential
particulars a true historic character; and it conveys to us, partly by
fact and partly through a vast parable, the inward life of a period
pregnant with forces that were to operate powerfully upon our own
characters and condition. Even those who would regard the cases as
parallel should, therefore, remember that they too must read Homer
otherwise than as a poet in the vulgar and more prevailing sense, which
divests poetry of its relation to reality. The more they read him in
that spirit the higher, I believe, they will raise their estimate of
his still unknown and unappreciated treasures.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, vol i. Appendix C.
[13] Od. i. 326, viii. 72-82, 266-366, 499-520.
[14] Il. xx. 213-41.
[15] Il. xx. 179-83.
[16] Il. xix. 148-50.
[17] Hor. A.P. v. 359.
[18] Od. iii. 266.
[19] Il. xxiii. 826.
[20] Ibid. 326-33.
[21] Il. v. 801.
[22] Il. xxiii. 409.
[23] Od. iv. 797.
[24] Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie, Einleitung, pp. 1-3.
[25] Scott has paid, however, a tribute to Shakespeare on this ground
in ‘The Fortunes of Nigel.’ Novels and Romances, vol. iii. p. 68, 8vo.
edition.
[26] Il. iv. 438.
[27] Strabo i. 2, p. 16.
[28] Strabo i. 2, p. 20.
SECT. 4.--_The probable Date of Homer._
In employing such a phrase as the date of Homer, I mean no reference to
any given number of years before the Olympiads, but simply his relation
in the order of history to the heroic age; to the events, and, above
all, to the living type of that age.
When asserting generally the historic aims and authority of the
poet, I do not presume to pronounce confidently upon the difficult
question of the period at which he lived. I prefer to dwell upon the
proposition that he is an original witness to manners, characters, and
ideas such as those of his poems. It is not necessary, to make good
this proposition, that we should determine a given number of years
as the maximum that could have passed between the Trojan war and the
composition of the Iliad or Odyssey. But the internal evidence seems to
me very strongly to support the belief, that he lived before the Dorian
conquest of the Peloponnesus. That he was not an eye-witness of the
war, we absolutely know from the Invocation before the Catalogue[29].
It also appears[30] that he must have seen the grandchildren of Æneas
reigning over the land of Priam. It is no extravagant supposition that
forty or fifty years after the siege, perhaps even less, might have
brought this to pass.
The single idea or form of expression in the poems, which at first
sight tends to suggest a very long interval, is that quoted by Velleius
Paterculus[31], the οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι[32]. But the question arises,
whether this is an historical land-mark, or a poetical embellishment?
In the former sense, as implying a great physical degeneracy of
mankind, it would require us to suppose nothing less than a lapse
of centuries between the Troica and the epoch of the poet. This
hypothesis, though Heyne speaks of the eighth or ninth generation[33],
general opinion has rejected. If it be dismissed, and if we adopt
the view of this formula as an ornament, it loses all definite
chronological significance. Thus it is lost in the phrase, common in
our own time with respect to the intellectual characters of men now
no more, but yet not removed from us, perhaps, by more than from a
quarter to half a century--‘there were giants in those days.’ Nay,
the observation of Paterculus, especially as he was an enthusiastic
admirer, itself exemplifies the little care with which these questions
have been treated. For the Iliad itself supplies a complete answer in
the speech of Nestor, who draws the very same contrast between the
heroes of the Troica and those of his own earlier days:
κείνοισι δ’ ἂν οὔτις
τῶν οἱ νῦν βροτοί εἰσιν ἐπιχθονίων μαχέοιτο[34].
And it is curious that we have in these words a measure, supplied by
Homer himself, of the real force of the phrase, which seems to fix it
at something under half a century, and thus makes it harmonise with
the indication afforded by the passage relating to the descendants of
Æneas. The argument of Mitford[35] on the age of Homer appears to me
to be of great value: and, while it is rejected, it is not answered
by Heyne[36]. Nor is it easy to conceive the answer to those who urge
that, so far as the poet’s testimony goes, the years from Pirithous
to the siege are as many as from the siege to his own day[37]. But
Pirithous was the father of Polypætes, who led a Thessalian division in
the war.[38]
If this view of Homer’s meaning in the particular case be correct,
we can the better understand why it is that the poet, who uses this
form of enhancement four times in the Iliad, does not employ it in the
Odyssey, though it is the later poem, and though he had opportunities
enough; such as the athletic exploits of Ulysses in Phæacia, and
especially the handling of the Bow in Ithaca. For in the Iliad a more
antique tone of colouring prevails, as it is demanded by the loftier
strain of the action.
There is one passage, and one only, which is just capable of being
construed as an allusion to the great Dorian conquest: it is that in
the Fourth Book of the Iliad, where Juno tells Jupiter that she well
knows he can destroy in spite of her, whensoever he may choose, her
three dearest cities, Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ[39]. It is probable
that the passage refers to sacking such as had been practised by
Hercules[40], and such as is pathetically described by Phœnix[41].
But, in the first place, we do not know that these cities were in any
sense destroyed by the Dorian conquest, more than they had been by
previous dynastic and territorial changes. If, on the other hand, it
be contended, that we need not construe the passage as implying more
than revolution independent of material destruction, then we need
not introduce the idea of the Dorian conquest at all to sustain the
propriety of the passage, for Homer already knew by tradition how those
cities, and the territory to which they belonged, had changed hands
from Danaïds to Perseids, and from Perseids to Pelopids.
But indications even far less equivocal from an isolated passage
would be many times outweighed, in a case like that of Homer, by any
conclusion justly drawn from features, whether positive or negative,
that are rooted in the general body of the poems. Now such a conclusion
arises from the admitted and total absence of any allusion in Homer
to the general incidents of the great Dorian conquest, and to the
consequent reconstruction of the old or European Greece, or to the
migrations eastward, or to the very existence of the new Asiatic Greece
which it is supposed to have called into being. Respecting the conquest
itself, he might by a sustained effort of deliberate intention have
kept silence: but is it possible that he could have avoided betraying
by reference to results, on a thousand occasions, his knowledge of a
change which had drawn anew the whole surface of society in Greece? It
would be more rational, were we driven to it (which is not the case),
even to suppose that the passage in question had been tampered with,
than to imagine that the poet could have forborne through twenty-eight
thousand lines, to make any other reference to, or further betray his
knowledge of, events which must on this supposition have occupied for
him so large a part of the whole horizon of life and experience.
Again, the allusions to the trumpet and the riding-horse found in
illustrative passages, but not as used in the war, are by far too
slight and doubtful, to sustain the theory that Homer saw around him a
system of warfare different from that which he recorded; and require
us to adopt no supposition for the explanation of them, beyond the
very natural one that the heroic poet, without essentially changing
manners, yet, within certain limits, insensibly projects himself and
his subject from the foreground of every-day life into the mellowness
of distance; and, therefore, that he may advisedly have excluded from
his poem certain objects or practices, which notwithstanding he knew
to have been more or less in use. Again, what are we to say to the
minute knowledge of Greece proper and the Peloponnesus, which Homer has
displayed? Why does he (apparently) know it so much better than he knew
Asia Minor? How among the rude Dorians, just emerged from comparative
barbarism, could he learn it at all? How strange, that Lycurgus
should have acquired the fame of having first introduced the poems to
the Peloponnesus, unless a great revolution and a substitution of one
dominant race for another had come between, to obliterate or greatly
weaken the recollection of them in the very country, which beyond all
others they covered with a blaze of glory.
Of the very small number of passages in the poems which contain a
reference to events later than the action, there are two, both relating
to the same subject, for which at first sight it appears difficult
to account. Why does Neptune obtrude upon the Olympian Court his
insignificant and rather absurd jealousy, lest the work of defence,
hastily thrown up by the Achæan army, should eclipse the wall built
around Troy by Apollo and himself? Evidently in order to obtain from
Jupiter the suggestion, that he should subsequently himself efface all
traces of it. But why does Homer show this anxiety to account for its
non-appearance? Why does he return subsequently to the subject, and
most carefully relate how Jupiter by raining, and Apollo by turning the
mouths of eight rivers, and Neptune with his trident, all cooperated to
destroy the work, and make the shore smooth and even again? Had Homer
lived many generations after the Trojan war, these passages would have
been entirely without purpose, for he need not then have given reasons
to show, why ages had left no trace still visible of the labour of
a day. But if he lived near the period of the war, the case is very
different. He might then be challenged by his maritime hearers, who,
if they frequented the passage into the Sea of Marmora, would have had
clear views of the camp of Agamemnon, and who would naturally require
him to assign a cause for the disappearance even of such a work as
a day’s labour of the army could produce, and as the Trojan soldiery
could make practicable for their chariots to drive over[42].
These particular indications appear to be worth considering: but the
great reasons for placing the date of Homer very near to that of the
War are, his visible identity with the age, the altering but not yet
vanished age, of which he sings, and the broad interval in tone and
feeling between himself, and the very nearest of all that follows him.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Il. ii. 486.
[30] Il. xx. 308.
[31] Hist. i. 5.
[32] Il. v. 304; xii. 383, 449; xx. 287.
[33] Exc. iii. ad Il. xxiv., vol. viii. p. 828.
[34] Il. i. 262-272.
[35] Hist. Greece, chap. iii. App.; vol. i. 169-74, 4to.
[36] Heyne, Exc. iii. ad Il. xxiv.; vol. viii. p. 226.
[37] Granville Penn on the Primary Arguments of the Iliad, p. 314.
[38] Il. ii. 740.
[39] Il. iv. 51.
[40] Il. ii. 660.
[41] Il. ix. 593.
SECT. 5.--_The Probable Trustworthiness of the Text of Homer._
Let us now proceed to consider the question, what assumption is it, on
the whole, safest to make, or what rule can we most judiciously follow,
as our guide in Homeric studies, with reference to the text of the
Poems?
Shall we adopt a given form of completely reconstructed text, like that
of Mr. Payne Knight?
Shall we, without such adherence to a particular pattern, assume it to
be either indisputable or, at least, most probable that an extensive
corruption of the text can hardly have been avoided[43]; and shall we,
in consequence, hold the received text provisionally, and subject to
excision or to amendment according to any particular theory concerning
Homer, his age, its manners and institutions, which we may ourselves
have thought fit to follow or construct?
Shall we admit as authoritative, the excisions of Aristarchus or the
Alexandrian critics, and the _obeli_ which he has placed against
verses which he suspected?
Or shall we proceed, as a general rule, upon the belief, that the
received text of Homer is in general sound and trustworthy, so far, at
least, as to be very greatly preferable to any reconstructed or altered
form whatever, in which it has hitherto been produced or proposed for
our acceptance?
My decided preference is for the fourth and last of these alternatives:
with the observation, however, in passing, that the third does not
essentially differ from it with respect to the great body of the Poems,
so far as we know what the Alexandrian text really was.
I prefer this course as by far the safest: as the only one which can be
entered upon with such an amount of preliminary assent, as to secure
a free and unbiassed consideration of Homeric questions upon a ground
held in common: and as, therefore, the only one, by means of which it
can be hoped to attain to solid and material results as the reward
of inquiry. In order fairly to raise the issue, the two following
propositions may be stated as fitting canons of Homeric study:--
1. That we should adopt the text itself as the basis of all Homeric
inquiry, and not any preconceived theory, nor any arbitrary standard of
criticism, referable to particular periods, schools, or persons.
2. That as we proceed in any work of construction by evidence drawn
from the text, we should avoid the temptation to solve difficulties
found to lie in our way, by denouncing particular portions of it as
corrupt or interpolated: should never set it aside except upon the
closest examination of the particular passage questioned; should use
sparingly the liberty even of arraying presumptions against it; and
should always let the reader understand both when and why it is
questioned.
Now, let us consider these rules, and the method which it is proposed
by means of them to apply,
_a._ With reference to the failure of other methods.
_b._ With reference to the antecedent probabilities for or against the
general soundness of the text.
_c._ With reference to the internal evidence of soundness or
unsoundness afforded by the text itself.
The first of the two rules has been brought more and more into
operation by the believers in Homer as the Poet of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, in self-defence against the sceptical theories: and it has
been both announced and acted upon by Mure with such breadth and
completeness, as to leave to those, who adopt it, simply the duty of
treading in his footsteps.
Again, as to the second, it may now be hoped that by the force of
circumstances it is gradually coming into vogue, though perhaps less,
as yet, by a distinct conviction of its reasonableness, than through
the utter failure and abortiveness of all other methods. First to
theorise rashly (with or without consciousness), and then rudely
to excise from the Homeric text whatever clashes with our crude
conceptions, is, after all, an essentially superficial and vulgar
method of proceeding: and if it was excusable before the evidence
touching the Poet and the text had been so greatly confirmed, as it
has recently been, by closer scrutiny, it can hardly be forgiven now.
The text of Homer cannot be faultless: but, in the first place, it is
plain, as far as general consent can make it so, that the poems, as
they stand, afford a far better and surer foundation than any other
form of them which has been proposed, whether curtailed in their
principal members, as by the destructive school, or only amended
by free handling in detail. All the recasting processes which have
yet been tried, have begotten ten solecisms, or another solecism of
tenfold magnitude, for every one that they did away. In fact, the end
of schemes, such as that of Lachmann[44], has been not to achieve any
thing like real progress in a continuous work, but simply to launch so
many distinct speculations, isolated, conflicting, each resting on its
author’s own hearty approval, and each drawing from the rest of the
world no other sign than the shrug or the smile, which seems to be the
proper reward of perverted ingenuity.
It would be presumptuous and unjust to treat the remarkable performance
of Mr. Payne Knight as one of what may be called--to borrow a phrase
from the commercial world--the Homeric bubble-schemes. It was
anticipated with eagerness by Heyne. It was hailed by the calm judgment
and refined taste of Lord Aberdeen. Yet this was not enough.
ἁμέραι δ’ ἐπίλοιποι
μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι[45].
The ordeal of time has not destroyed the value of Mr. Payne Knight’s
Prolegomena, but it has been decidedly unfavourable to his text as a
practical attempt at reconstruction. With the old text in the right
hand, and Mr. Knight’s in the left, who would doubt in which to look
for the nearest likeness to Homer? Or who will ever again venture to
publish an abridged or re-modelled Iliad?
Apart, however, from the unsatisfactoriness of the results of
attempts at reconstruction, have we reason to believe that the text
of Homer has, as a whole, been seriously vitiated by interpolation
or corruption? The difficulties attending its transmission from the
time of the poet are not to be denied. But I think we have scarcely
enough considered the amount of means which were available, and which
were actually employed, in order to neutralize those difficulties,
and achieve the task. Although writing of some description appears to
have existed at the epoch of the Poems, it can be probably proved,
and may at any rate be fully admitted, that Homer did not write, but
recited only. This is the first step: now for the second. I pass by
the argument with those, who deny that poems of this length could be
transmitted orally at all, as one already disposed of by the general
verdict of the world. So, likewise, I leave behind me, at the point
where Mure has placed them, all the reasonings of the _piecers_, who
say that there were originally a number of Iliadic and Odyssean songs,
afterwards made up into the poems such as we now have them: of the
_amplifiers_, who look upon them as expanded respectively by gradual
interpolations and additions from an original of small dimensions; of
the _separators_, who will have just two Homers and no more, one for
the Iliad, and one for the Odyssey. I assume for the present purpose
the contrary of all these three propositions: and simply invite those
who disbelieve them, but who also conceive that the text is generally
unsafe and untrustworthy in its detail, to some consideration of that
subject.
In attempting to weigh retrospectively the probable fortunes of the
Homeric text, I presume that we may establish as our point of departure
the judgment delivered by Heyne[46], that the manuscripts of Homer are
satisfactory: that we possess all, or nearly all, that the Alexandrian
critics possessed; and that by the advance of the critical art, we
have now probably, on the whole, a better and truer Homer than that of
Aristarchus, which is the basis of the modern text. The imperfect state
of notation when writing first began to be used, and the changes in
pronunciation, have not, we may also suppose with Heyne[47], done more
than trifling or secondary damage to the copies.
The first serious question is this; how far was Homer mutilated, first,
by the rhapsodists, or reciters, before he was put into writing, and
secondly, by those who, in order to bring the lays of the Iliad into
one body, must, it is assumed, have added and altered much, even if
they had no whims of their own, and only sought to do what was needful
_nexûs et juncturæ causâ_. It is, of course, admitted that these lays,
even though ideally one as they came from their framer, were in many
cases actually separated. And Heyne quotes the Scholiast of Pindar[48],
complaining by report that Cinæthus and his school had interpolated
largely, as well as the passage in which Josephus[49] (so he states)
gives it as his opinion that the Iliad, from having been pieced
together long after it was composed, presented many discrepancies.
Now, even if this were the opinion of Josephus, it would have no more
pretension to historical authority, than if it had been delivered
yesterday. But the fact is, that Josephus mentions it simply as a
current notion; φασὶν οὐδὲ τοῦτον ... ἀλλὰ διαμνημονευομένην ... καὶ
διὰ τοῦτο πολλὰς ἐν αὐτῇ σχεῖν τὰς διαφωνίας. Indeed, it cannot be too
carefully borne in mind, that if the positive notices of Homer in early
times are slight, so as to throw us back very much upon the poems for
their own vindication, yet, on the other hand, all the authorities
cited on the sceptical side, are chronologically so remote from the
question in debate, that they are but opinions and not proofs, and that
we may canvass and question them without the smallest scruple, or fear
that we are pitting mere theory against legitimate evidence.
It is not to be denied that the condition of the Homeric poems,
before they were committed to writing, was one of great danger. But
the question may well be asked, how came poems of such length to
be preserved at all by mere oral transmission through a period of
undefined, and possibly of very great, length? It is plain that nothing
but an extraordinary celebrity, and a passionate attachment on the part
of the people, could have kept them alive. Now, if we suppose this
celebrity and this attachment, let us inquire further, whether they
may not have supplied the means of neutralizing and counteracting, in
the main, the dangers to which the poems were exposed; and whether
it is unreasonable to say, That which _could_ have preserved them in
their unity at all, _must_, in all likelihood, have preserved them
in a tolerably genuine state. Fully admitting that the evidence in
the case is imperfect, and can only lead to disputable conclusions, I
nevertheless ask, What is the most probable supposition respecting the
condition of the Homeric poems in the pre-historic times of Greece?
Is it not this--that, with due allowance for a different state of
circumstances, they were then, what they were in later times; the
broad basis of mental culture; the great monument of the glory of the
nation, and of each particular State or race; the prime entertainment
of those prolonged festive gatherings which were so characteristic of
early Greece; that they were not only the special charge and pride
of particular poetical schools, but distinct objects of the care of
legislators and statesmen; that in this manner they were recognised as
among the institutions of the country, and that they had thus to depend
for their transmission, not only on the fire of national and poetic
feeling, but upon a jealous custody much resembling that which even a
comparatively rude people gives to its laws?
I shall attempt a summary of the arguments and testimonies which appear
to me to recommend, if they do not compel, the adoption of these
conclusions.