ان بالا سینه هایم را
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1881

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​E. A. RIPLEY.
No. 212
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GEAR
1381
LITERATURE PRIMERS,
Edited by J. R. GREEN, M. A.
HOMER.
Literature Primers. Edited by J. R. GREEN,


HOMER.
BY THE
wart
RIGHT HON. W
GLADSTONE,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem;
Nor is it Homer ncds, but we that dream.”—POPE.
NEW
YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
1, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET.
188 1.
Gift
Lef. F.IF Schornow
5-6-31
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. HOMER THE MAN
PAGE
5
II. THE HOMERIC QUESTION
17
SECTION I. PLOTS OF THE POEMS
•
17
II.—AGAINST THE SEPARATORS
III.-WOLF, AND THE TRANS-
29
MISSION BY MEMORY.
38
III. HISTORY.
IV.- COSMOLOGY
46
54
V.-GEOGRAPHY
VI.-MYTHOLOGY, OR THE OLYMPIAN SYSTEM
VII.-ETHNOLOGY
VIII. ETHICS OF THE ACHAIAN TIME.
57
65
94
104
IX.—POLITY
•
113
121
•
X.-EUROPE AND ASIA, OR TROJAN AND ACHAIAN
XI. CHARACTERS
•
XII.-ART, AND THE ARTS
127
134
XIII.--HOMER'S PLACE AND OFFICE AS A POET.
140
HOMER.
CHAPTER I.
HOMER THE MAN.
1. Homer's Unique Position.-The poems of
Homer do not constitute merely a great item of the
splendid literature of Greece; but they have a separate
position, to which none other can approach. They,
and the manners they describe, constitute a world of
their own; and are severed by a sea of time, whose
breadth has not been certainly measured, from the
firmly-set continent of recorded tradition and con-
tinuous fact. In this sea they lie, as a great island.
And in this island we find not merely details of events,
but a scheme of human life and character, complete
in all its parts. We are introduced to man in every
relation of which he is capable; in every one of his
arts, devices, institutions; in the entire circle of his
experience. There is no other author, whose case is
analogous to this, or of whom it can be said that the
study of him is not a mere matter of literary criticism,
but is a full study of life in every one of its depart-
ments. To rescue this circle of studies from inadequate
conceptions, and to lay the ground for a true idea of
them, I have proposed to term them Homerology. Of
this Homerology, I shall now endeavour to present
some of the first elements in their simplest form. And
at the threshold, postponing for the moment our notice
of the controversies involved in what is termed the
Homeric question, let us see how far we can acquire
an idea of the poet himself, and the conditions under
which he lived.
6
[CHAP.
HOMER.
2. Homer his own Witness.-When we use
the word Homer, we do not mean a person histori-
cally known to us, like Pope or Milton. We mean
in the main the author, whoever or whatever he was,
of the wonderful poems called respectively, not by
the author, but by the world, the Iliad and the
Odyssey. His name is conventional, and its sense in
etymology is not very different from that which would
be conveyed by our phrase, "the author."
"the author." This is a
Primer of Homer. That is to say, it aims at giving
elementary knowledge respecting him and the works.
with which his name is coupled. In such a design,
it is requisite above all to let the reader understand
that we know nothing either definite or certain respect-
ing Homer, unless in so far as it can be gathered
from the poems he composed. Yet they very
rarely use the first person, only once in a passage
of any importance; and exclusively in invocations to
the Muse (I. ii. 424-93); so that they convey no direct
information whatever about the bard. It does not
follow that our indirect knowledge must be small or
untrustworthy. Great artists may be knowable from
their works; and there is a singular transparency in
the mind, as there is also in the limpid language
of Homer. Old as he is, the comprehensive and
systematic study of him is still young. It had
hardly begun before the nineteenth century. With
the primary source of information found in his text,
we have to combine two others: (1) the scattered
notices supplied by ancient tradition, and (2) the
valuable and still growing illustrations furnished by
the study of language, and by the discoveries, and
learned study of ancient remains.
3. Our Earliest View of Him.-At the first
dawn of the historic period, we find the poems estab-
lished in popular renown; and so prominent, that a
school of minstrels takes the name of Homerida from
making it their business to preserve and to recite them.
I.]
7
HOMER THE MAN.
In
Still, the question whether the poems as we have them
can be trusted, whether they present substantially the
character of what may be termed original documents,
is one of great but gradually diminishing difficulty. It
is also of importance, because of the nature of their
contents. In the first place, they give a far greater
amount of information, than is to be found in any
other literary production of the same compass.
the second place, that information, speaking of it
generally, is to be had nowhere else. In the third
place, it is information of the utmost interest, and
even of great moment. It introduces to us, in the
very beginnings of their experience, the most gifted
people of the world, and enables us to judge how
they became such as in later times we know them;
how they began to be fitted to discharge the splendid
part, allotted to them in shaping the destinies of the
world. And this picture is exhibited with such a
fulness both of particulars and of vital force, that
perhaps never in any country has an age been so
completely placed upon record. Finally, amidst
the increase of archaic knowledge on all sides, we
begin to find a multitude of points of contact between
the Homeric poems and the primitive history of
the world, as it is gradually revealed by records,
monuments, and language; so that they are coming
more and more to constitute an important factor in
the formation of that history.
4. Subsidiary Testimony.-There are indeed.
traditions, and there are fragmentary remains in verse,
ascribed to his brethren in art or to himself, about
Homer and about the subjects of his poems. But
there is not one of these which we can trace with cer-
tainty to the date of the poems, still less of the occur-
rences set forth in them. They are such, in amount
and in consistency, as to warrant the belief that they
have a solid substratum of truth; but we cannot fix
precisely either their outline or their details.
We
8
[CHAP.
HOMER.
cannot trace them even orally, far less in a written
form, up to, or near to, such a point as to give them
anything like the character of contemporary evidence
about Homer, given from without. These traditions
and remains make their appearance, for the most part,
as already subsisting in the first beginnings of the
regular history of Greece; but Homer and Troy lie
far back in the prehistoric period, the period during
which men had not come to the use of certain, definite,
and continuous records.
5. Due Reserve in Judgment.-Much of what
the text contains is direct information, but much also
is only suggestive. It would be inconvenient, in a
work of this kind, to load every sentence with quali-
fications. Better that it should be understood from
the outset that, in what is called the Homeric ques-
tion, the propositions set forth cannot claim an historic
certainty, but are given as rationally deducible from the
study of the text, and from comparison with the studies
which former generations have bestowed upon it. The
authority of past generations, however, is not so high
in a case of this kind, as in many others. For, in
former times, Homer has been simply enjoyed as a
great poet, rather than examined. Even now the
work of extracting and methodising the contents of
the poems, so far as they are capable of being viewed
in the light of facts, has not been fully accomplished.
6. The Bard of the Heroic Age.-We learn
from the poems that, even before the war of Troy,
the profession of the minstrel had become an object
of general interest, and had thus early taken its place
in the public competitions, which were of high na-
tional importance among the later Greeks. For, in
the catalogue of the Greek or Achaian army, Homer
finds it convenient to mark the town of Dorion, part
of the dominions of Nestor, as the place where the
Muses punished Thamuris the Thracian, for having
boasted that he would beat them, goddesses though
1.]
9
HOMER THE MAN.
they were, if they entered the lists against him. For
this offence, as he was on his way to a match of this
kind, they deprived him of the gift of song. Nothing
could more clearly denote the high position of the
bard as such, than its having tempted Thamuris into
this presumption. The representation is sustained
by all the other notes in the poems. The Bard was an
essential member of the courts of princes, a trusted
friend and counsellor of their families. His person had
even a kind of sacredness attaching to it, apparently
beyond that of the seer or prophet. No priest, and no
minstrel, is ever engaged in the military service of the
Homeric age.
His office indeed implied more than
the possession of a mere human gift: he habitually
sang by an inspiration from on high. It was his
duty to descant upon the freshest and most interesting
subjects and the events at Troy were reckoned to
have pre-eminent attractions, even at the distant court
of Alkinoos, before Odusseus had reached his island
home. The profession of the Bard ranked among the
standing professions of the age. These collectively
supplied the social wants of man; but the special, dis-
tinctive office of the bard was to give delight. In
cases, again, of domestic mourning, the bards led the
laments over the dead: possibly gathering for such an
occasion from allied houses, for on the great celebra-
tion of the obsequies of Hector, and in this instance
only, bards are historically mentioned in the plural
number. It must be added that, besides supplying
song, the minstrel had the humbler yet joyful office of
accompanying the dance; and he appears before us in
this capacity upon the Shield of Achilles.
7. Probable Position of Homer.--This Bard
of the poems is commonly attached to a particular
reigning family. In the case of Thamuris (Ï. ii. 596)
such a connection, though not named, is implied. But
as we thus hear of the itinerancy of a stationary bard,
so there may well have been itinerants by profession.
ΤΟ
[CHAP.
HOMER.
This appears to be the life which we may reasonably
suppose Homer to have followed, on such grounds as
follow: (1) Both because his works have survived
the action of time and its revolutions, which have
obliterated every contemporary production, and on
account of the surpassing nature of the works, we
must assign to their author a decided pre-eminence
among the men of his class and time. This may
render it questionable whether he could have been
tied down as a family retainer to a narrow corner
of a narrow country. (2) A connection with a par-
ticular family would almost certainly have left signs of
it upon the face of the poems. But, while the poems
are intensely national, they are nowhere sectional.
(3) His works show an acquaintance with geography,
which was evidently for the most part founded on
personal inspection, and presumes his free movement
over the circle of Achaian experience. And he refers
specially to the effect of travel in enriching and quick-
ening the mind.
8. Tradition of his Blindness.-It is supposed
by many. that the poet was blind. In support of this
idea it is noticed that he touches with a peculiar
tenderness of sympathy the case of Demodokos, the
Bard of Alkinoos in the Odyssey; whom the Muse,
loving him right well, deprived of the sense of sight,
but endowed with the sweet gift of song. A tradition,
perhaps true, perhaps mythical, grew up, of Homer's
blindness; and
and it was handed on, in a passage of
singular pathos, forming part of one of the Hymns,
which is ascribed by Thucydides, but beyond doubt
wrongly ascribed, to the author of the poems himself.
What may be asserted with confidence is that Homer,
if blind at all, was only blind in later life. For, as
he is the most objective of all poets, so it is especially
the imagery of sight, which supplies him with a chief
part of his inexhaustible resources. His sense of light,
of form, and of motion was beyond anything vigorous
I.]
II
HOMER THE MAN.
and prolific; and though his perceptions of special
colour were very indeterminate, yet even colour has
supplied him with a number of effective touches,
largely in excess of what other poets generally have
been able to obtain from it.
9. Itinerant, but in his Country only.-We
are then probably to conceive of Homer as of a
Bard who went from place to place to earn his bread
by his profession, to exercise his knowledge in his gift
of song, and to enlarge it by an ever-active observation
of nature, and experience of men. There is no sign,
anywhere in the poems, of his having had living per-
sonal contact with foreigners, except individually, or of
his having visited foreign lands. Although it is plain
that he had busied himself with efforts to learn all he
could about these, he seems to anticipate and realise
in himself that later Hellenic spirit, which divided the
world into Greeks and barbarians, and to keep an
opaque curtain hung all round, or an indefinite
distance interposed, between his own dear people
and other races and empires, which at the time, as we
now know, bore the most conspicuous parts in the
drama of human history. It is plain that he lived,
and practised his art, within the limits of his country.
But what was his country?
IO. Was he an Asiatic Greek ?—On all hands
it will be admitted that Homer sang to Greeks. Nor
does any one suppose that he sang to Greeks of the
Italian, or other western, colonies. It has however
been extensively believed, that he was a Greek of Asia
Minor. And as there were no Greeks of Asia Minor
at the time of the Trojan war, nor until a wide and
searching revolution in the peninsula had substituted
Dorian manners for those of the earlier Achaian age,
which Homer sang, this belief involves the further
proposition that the poet was severed by a consider-
able interval of time from the subjects of his verse.
The last-named opinion depends very much upon
2
12
[CHAP.
HOMER.
the first; and the first chiefly, if not wholly, upon a
perfectly vague tradition, which has no pretence to an
historical character.
II. Why so Reputed.-The manners belonging
to the age of the Trojan War were swept violently out
of Greece by the Dorian revolution, after a period of
uncertain length, commonly taken at eighty years.
Long after this revolution, civilisation had to make a
new beginning in the Greek Peninsula. Homer if
known there before, yet during the troubled time, and
under a strong barbarising influence, must in all like-
lihood have been swept away by the flood. It is an
acknowledged proposition that the emigrants from
Greece who settled in Asia Minor, carried with them
the remains of the anterior civilisation, and became
for some ages, in their new seats, its main representa-
tives. If the poems of Homer existed at the time,
there can be no room for doubt that they shared the
destiny of the surrounding elements of culture. From
the period of the settlements in Asia civil and social
progress seem to have been continuous within them.
We now find ourselves upon the lines of established
polity, and, after a while, of regular record. It is
therefore from this era and this region, that we imme-
diately derive our Homer: it is from thence that he was
imported, or reimported, into Greece. Nothing then
can be more easy than to account for the belief that
Homer was an Asiatic Greek. For the Greeks of Asia
were those who could produce the oldest recorded title
to claim the poems as their own. It was disputed
indeed, as by Athens and by Argos: but on the whole
it vaguely prevailed; and it now awaits the judgment
of an age distinguished by increased care and enlarged
advantages in critical inquiry.
12. Reasons in Disproof.-The question then
has to be decided, in the absence of all really historic
testimony, by the internal evidence of the poems.
This evidence, I venture to say, strongly supports the
1.]
13
HOMER THE MAN.
belief that Homer was an European, and if an Euro-
pean, then certainly also an Achaian Greek: a Greek,
that is to say, of the pre-Doric period, when the
Achaian name prevailed, and principally distinguished
the race. Among the presumptions, which tend to
show that he was not of the Doric time or the Asiatic
region, are these :--
(1.) The Achaian name became insignificant in the
Doric time, and never found its way into Asia; but it
may justly be called the great national name through-
out the poems.
(2.) The Dorian name, if predominant in the Greek
peninsula at the period when the poems were com-
posed, would naturally find an important place in
them. It is, on the contrary, but twice used, and is
wholly insignificant.
(3.) A poet of Asia, or of the Dorian epoch, would
probably have called the pre-Doric Greeks by the
race-name of Hellenes, which must by that time have
been widely spread; but this name is hardly found in
the poems, and it has not yet arrived at an established
meaning.
(4.) The Ionians attained, in Asia Minor, to a very
high position, and traces of this fact would surely
have been found in a poet of their blood. But the
Ionians of the poems are entirely in the background,
and may even appear to be disparaged, as a soldiery, by
the epithet "tunic-trailing," which is the only one
applied to them.
(5.) At the period of the Greek migrations to Asia,
the Æolian name was soon established, and became
historical as a great race-name. There is no such name
in the poems; but only the name of Aiolid, a patrony-
mic. Aiolos is, in Achaian Greece, not the eponymist
of a tribe or race, but only the (real or mythical)
ancestor of a family.
(6.) In the Asiatic Aiolis was included the plain of
Troy. Had Homer sung in that region, to people
14
[CHAP.
HOMER,
familiar with the local features, he would have described
them with thorough accuracy.
But his account of the
plain, though full of characteristic points, has not as yet
been reduced to a complete consistency with those
features.
(7.) Athens hospitably entertained the fugitives from
the Dorian conquest, and would naturally stand
high with a bard belonging to their race. But the
place of Athens in the action of the Iliad is very
secondary and the single passage, in which it is pane-
gyrised, is one of the few widely held to be spurious.
:
(8.) The notes of personal and local colouring drawn
from the peninsula in the Greek Catalogue, both in-
land and along the coast, are numerous and vivid.
But, in the description of the Asiatic coast south of
Troas, and reaching to Lycia, there are but three
epithets belonging to natural features; these three all
refer to objects on the coast, not inland, and there is
only a single notice of a town or settlement. He
could hardly have been a native of the country, with
which he shows so inferior an acquaintance.
(9.) Mr. Wood, assuming that the Zephuros of
Homer corresponds with our west wind, defends
the declaration of the poet that it, with Boreas, blows
from Thrace, by saying it is a westerly wind as
respects Ionia. But the Zephuros of Homer is a
north-west, not a west wind, and the poet (77. ix. 5) is
describing its effect on the Ægean Sea: he therefore
requires no defence, and raises no presumption
respecting Ionia.
(10.) In 7. iv. 52, Hera is made to suppose the
possible destruction of Argos, Sparta, and Mukenai.
From this passage it is argued that the poet knew of
the Doric revolution, which transferred the seat of
power from Mukenai to Argos. But that revolution
elevated Sparta, left Argos as it was, and did not
destroy, if it depressed, Mukenai.
(11.) On the other hand, it is strange indeed if a
1.]
15
HOMER THE MAN.
poet, who had witnessed so vast a convulsion, com-
posed 27,700 lines with no other or clearer allusion
to it than this, which is most faint, and indeed very
equivocal.
(12.) The Hymn to Apollo, cited by Thucydides,
which represents Homer as dwelling in Chios, is
demonstrably not the work of Homer; and only
expresses that later tradition as to his birth and
habitat, which did beyond doubt come extensively
into vogue.
(13.) The twentieth Iliad contains a prophecy that
descendants of Aineias, yet unborn, should reign over
the Trojans. This is perfectly in harmony with the
supposition that the poet flourished between the
siege of Troy and the Dorian Revolution; and that
he may have seen more than one generation after
the war, born and reigning in Troas.
(14.) The traditions found in Homer, which relate
to Asia Minor, are such as might easily have been
gathered from report. For example, silver was found
in Chalubè near the Euxine (and it is still found
there); and the Phrygians, aided by Priam, had fought
with the Amazons on the River Sangarios. Even so
he knows the wealth of Egyptian Thebes, names for it
a king and a queen, and gives an account of the
trans-Egyptian Pygmæans, Compare with these
slight notices the wealth of his legends from within
the Greek peninsula.
(15.) In the later mythology of Greece, we find
copious legends, eg. those touching Kubelè and the
Kabeiroi, which were derived from Phrygia. This is
readily explained by the contact of the Asiatic Greeks
with that country. But there is no trace of these
legends in Homer. It is probable, then, that he did
not share that contact.
(16.) But the argument which is the strongest, and
which I cannot but deem in itself irrefragable, is one
that cannot be fully appreciated except upon a close
16
[CHAP.
HOMER.
and minute study of the poems. It is that the men,
the manners, the institutions that Homer sings of
with such an intimacy of living familiarity, such a
prevailing sense of nearness, were essentially Achaian,
ceased to exist, in their Achaian form, upon the Dorian
Revolution, and could hardly have been reproduced
by a poet remote from them in time, especially when
there were no aids of literary and historical record.
For it must be borne in mind that the poems are
undoubtedly anterior to the use of writing for any of
these purposes.
13. Conclusion. His Name.-It appears then
easy to understand why Homer should have been
widely (though not uniformly) supposed to belong to
that Hellenic region in which he first, so to speak, set
his foot on dry ground; in which, that is to say, his
poems had their earliest contact with palpable and
continuous history. But also not difficult to see that
he was a Greek of the Achaian mould, and therefore
of the Achaian period, and with his seat in the
peninsula.
And, this being so, it appears not unreasonable to
picture to ourselves the Father of all known poetry
traversing the hills and vales of Greece, from court to
court, from festival to festival, in free communion with
nature, in large observation of man, and in the con-
stant practice of the glorious art, which requited hos-
pitality with the delight of song.
It should however
be observed, that of his real name we have no record
whatever. Like to Poietes, the Maker or Poet, as
he was called, by way of homage to his paramount ex-
cellence, in later times, is Homeros, the Fitter. The
word may have been suggested by the single passage
of the Odyssey, in which we have the kindred verb
homereuein (Od. xvi. 468), used to describe the meet-
ing together of persons from a distance. There is pro-
bably no other instance of a name thus indisputably
unauthentic, which is now so inextricably welded into
11.]
17
THE HOMERIc question.
the mind and memory of man, that if by any accident
the true name could be discovered, it would scarcely
have a chance of displacing the fictive one.
CHAPTER II.
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
THE Controversies summed up under the name of the
"Homeric Question cannot be passed by even in
an elementary work; but I shall endeavour to be as
little technical as may be. They involve :
1. The unity of authorship for the Iliad.
2. The unity of authorship for the Odyssey.
3. The unity of authorship for the two jointly.
4. The general purity and soundness of the text.
Of these the first, as distinct from the others, carries
us over ground appropriate to my design; for the frame-
work cannot be severed from the substance and merits
of the work. The same may be said of the third.
The second, though it falls within the scope of the
sceptical argument, is so little contested that this point
need not be dwelt on at much length. Under the
fourth head I shall only notice the Wolfian attack,
and the subject of transmission by memory, it being
my purpose to give the reader as much of a living
Homer himself as possible, and as little of what is
only about Homer.
SECTION I.-PLOTS OF THE POEMS.
1. The Title of Iliad a Misnomer.-The plot
of the Iliad is one of the capital subjects, not yet
thoroughly explored, to which the attention of every
student should be directed. Much criticism aimed at
it has really been founded on the title, rather than on
the poem. It is hardly fortunate; for it draws off
18
[CHAP.
HOMER.
attention from the real subject, which is the Wrath of
Achilles. With the beginning of this wrath it begins,
and with the cessation it ends. The war is taken out
of its normal course by the demand of Chruses the
priest for the restoration of his daughter; it is replaced,
after the disturbance, with the close of the obsequies
of Hector. The poem is properly a personal poem;
but upon one stupendous character is hung a tissue of
action, which gives it the necessary breadth, and
stamps it as among all human productions perhaps
the most intensely national.
2. Opening of the Terrestrial Plot. In a
division of booty, such as regularly took place on the
capture of a town, Chruseis, the daughter of a priest.
of Apollo, has been appropriated to Agamemnon, the
leader of the host. The father demands restitution,
which is refused by the possessor of the prize.
Vengeance is invoked, and the god sends a plague
among the army. Achilles causes the general Assembly
to be summoned, and appeals to Calchas the augur
to declare the cause of the calamity. Calchas pro-
claims it to be the capture and detention of Chruseis.
After a fierce debate, Agamemnon the king announces
that he will restore the maid, but will appropriate
Briseis, the prize of Achilles, in her stead. Achilles
is warned from heaven not to lay hands on him; and
the double transference takes effect. Achilles then
betakes himself to his mother Thetis ; and she obtains
from Zeus an engagement, that the Trojans shall have
the upper hand in the war until justice shall be done,
and due honour paid to her son. Thus the terrestrial
scheme of the poem is fairly launched.
;;
3. The Celestial Plot.-But it has also a celestial
scheme. A persistent controversy in the council of
Olumpos accompanies the struggle upon earth, in
which the several deities take part, mainly according to
their ethnical affinities. Poseidon, who has suffered
wrong in Troy from Laomedon, Hera, the great
II.]
19
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
national divinity of the Greeks, Athenè, the personal
protectress of Achilles, of Odusseus, and of Diomed
(both these goddesses having also a private grudge) of
themselves suffice to give a preponderance against
Troy. But the cause is fundamentally righteous; and
Zeus, the supreme representative of deity, cannot.
contravene it, although he greatly regards the known
piety of Hector, leader of the Trojan forces. The
gross wrong done to Achilles is artfully made use of,
to place the Sire of gods and men for the time on the
other side and with him Apollo, who is the only
remaining deity of the first rank, and who invariably
reflects his will. Such is the point of departure for
the celestial, or Olympian plot; and, to mark it suffi
ciently, means are at once found to introduce us to a
remarkable scene, which exhibits the converse, ban-
quet, and course of daily life among the gods.
:
4. The Second Assembly and the Array.-
Agamemnon, receiving through a dream the promise
that he shall now take the city, determines neverthe-
less to test the spirit of the army, by formally pro-
posing to them that they shall go home. They take
him at his word, and rush to the ships. They are
only brought back by the decision, presence of mind,
and vigorous action of Odusseus, who rallies the dis-
persed assembly, and warms them with the recital of a
good omen. Nestor hereon advises a formal array of
the army, with a view to improved discipline, now
more needful in the absence of Achilles. Thus, after
a solemn sacrifice, is introduced the Catalogue, or
Domesday Book of Greece. Priam and Hector, hear-
ing of this muster, undertake a like operation, and a
less detailed "state" is exhibited of the Trojan host
with its allies.
5. The War in the Absence of Achilles.—
Nothing is ever placed in competition with the
colossal figure of Achilles; but, as he is now absent,
Homer obtains space for the exhibition of the other
20
[CHAP.
HOMER.
principal Achaian chieftains and their feats. The
whole of the Books, from the Third to the Fifteenth
inclusive, are so contrived that a real superiority, both
of honour and of force, is assigned all along to the
national side; while, to fulfil the aim of the poem, the
Trojans gain the upper hand by means of various
expedients, such as divine intervention, the use of the
bow, which entails no danger to the person employing
it, and the interference of the heralds to save Hector,
upon his combat with Aias, from utter defeat. The
operations commence with a single battle between
Menelaos and Paris, who owes his safety to being
carried off by Aphroditè. On the issue of this combat
the entire war was to depend; but Pandaros, under
the crafty suggestion of Athenè, breaks the compact
by treacherously wounding Menelaos with an arrow.
Meanwhile Helen had come forth to see the single com-
bat, moved without doubt by her interest in Menelaos,
and anticipation of his victory: and she is made to
apprise Priam of the names of several leading
Achaian chieftains, who are within view from the
walls.
6. The Achaian Fortunes at the lowest
Ebb.-Homer, by the means I have named, reduces
the Greeks to such a point that, in the Ninth Book,
Odusseus and Aias are sent on an embassy of re-
paration to Achilles. He remains however sternly
inexorable, and the fortune of the war continues
adverse, though spendid feats of arms have been and
are performed, especially by Agamemnon, by Aias, and
by Diomed, who has wounded two of the Trojan deities,
Arès and Aphroditè. A fosse and rampart, which the
Greeks have constructed, is assailed; Sarpedon drags.
down the battlement, Hector breaks open the gates;
Zeus restrains the action of the Hellenising divinities;
at length Hector lays hold of the vessel which brought
Portesilaos, and calls for fire to burn it. Aias, after
long resistance, is finally exhausted. The Trojans
II.]
21
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
set fire to the ship: this supreme honour being care-
fully withheld from the Trojan leader.
7. Patroclos fights, and dies by Contrivance.
-The moment has now arrived which Achilles had
fixed in his mind as the last, up to which he could
maintain his rigid abstention. He sends the Myrmi-
dons, under his bosom friend Patroclos, into battle.
The tide is at once turned. Sarpedon, perhaps the
first warrior on the side of Troy, is slain by Patroclos.
The victor is then slain himself, nominally by Hector,
but only after being disabled, and in great measure
disarmed by Apollo, and wounded by Euphorbos.
It is a cardinal rule with Homer, that no considerable
Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan.
The most noteworthy Greek, who falls in battle, is
Tlepolemos; and Sarpedon, who kills him, is leader
of the Lycians, a race with whom Homer betrays a
peculiar sympathy. The threadbare victory of Hector
is further reduced by the success of the Greeks in
recovering the body of Patroclos. In the meantime
Achilles is apprised of the catastrophe through
Antilochos, elder son of Nestor, and a favourite of
the great chief.
8. The Manifestation of Achilles.-The sun
of the Trojan fortunes has now set. In the last eight
Books of the twenty-four, the figure of Achilles towers
aloft, and overshadows every other. His grief is as
portentous, as his wrath. Through his mother Thetis,
the celestial artificer Hephaistos is put in motion to
furnish him with arms, in lieu of those which Patroclos
had borne, and Hector had appropriated. The scale,
so to speak, of the poem, is now raised, in order to
glorify its great hero; all the dimensions are every-
where colossal. The battle of the gods is announced.
When it takes effect, the Hellenising deities have a
marked superiority; but the poet, who always honours
Apollo and his mother Leto, has contrivances for
keeping them out of the fray. The Trojans fall in
22
[CHAP.
HOMER.
whole sheaves before Achilles; no Trojan chieftain
makes the smallest head against him. He slays Astcro-
paios, son of the River-god Axios, valiantly fighting,
but in vain. His only real opponent is the River-god
Scamandros, who endeavours to carry him away by
virtue of the strength of his deity in flood. Even
this, however, is not conclusive, until he has called in
the succour of his brother Simois. Hera then obtains
the aid of Hephaistos, who, as a superior god, checks
the flood with fire. Achilles is thus set free, and the
city is only saved from immediate capture, to follow on
his entering with the fugitives, through the stratagem
of Apollo, who, in the likeness of the Trojan prince
Agenor, entices him away.
9. Contrivances for the Battle with Hector.
We now approach the main issue; and there is nothing
more artful in the poem, than the way in which Hector,
who was of proved inferiority to other Achaian chiefs,
is brought beamingly into action with Achilles; in part
by his over-weening self-confidence, which prevents
him from taking refuge within the walls ; in part by his
fear that, if now he adopt the waiting game, he will be re-
proached by the prudent Ponludamas, who had advised
it long before; and finally, after he has taken to flight
and thrice made the circuit of the walls, by the strata-
gem of Athenè, who, under the figure of his brother
Deiphobos, exhorts and persuades him to stand, that
they may jointly contend with the terrible warrior.
So it is that the fight begins. But, after the first stage
of it, Hector finds that the personated Deiphobos
has disappeared. Now his case is desperate; and
from despair he becomes, perhaps it may be said for
the first time, a hero. Zeus and Apollo, he finds, no
more protect him. Destiny presses hard upon him.
"Let me not then die inert and inglorious, but do a
noble deed, which shall resound through all posterity"
(xxii. 304).
He falls, of course, in the unequal fight. The
II.]
23
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
Achaian soldiery, gathering round his body, admire its
beauty, but deface it with gashes. The fierceness,
which is so powerful a constituent of the character of
Achilles, is now drawn off from Agamemnon, and
concentrated on the remains of Hector, as the slayer
of his friend. These he ties from the ancles to his
chariot, and drags along the plain to his quarters,
while passionate laments are raised within the city for
the champion they have lost.
10. Reconciliation with the Living, and
Honour to the Dead.-To conclude the great
drama of the Wrath, it now remains to give emphasis
to the reconciliation with Agamemnon; to obtain the
release of the dead Hector from dishonour; and to
signalise by noble obsequies the demise of the man
who, by his character and his arms, had been the main
prop of Troy. The first is effected by the solemn
Games, in which Achilles exhibits in its perfection the
character of the liberal and courteous gentleman.
For the second and more difficult purpose, the agency
of his mother Thetis is employed to suppress the yet
smouldering fires within his bosom, and both Iris and
Hermes are at the same time despatched from the
Divine Assembly to set Priam in motion, and conduct
him to the camp as the suppliant of Achilles. In
the interview which follows, although the great chief
is still tempted towards wrath with even the aged
father of the man who slew his friend, yet pity and
sorrow obtain the mastery. They weep profusely
together. The body of Hector is delivered and re-
ceived with all pious care, a truce of eleven days
is granted for the obsequies, and on them the curtain
falls.
II. The Artful Balance of the Poem.-The
nicest art is exhibited throughout the poem, in a jealous
reservation to the chiefs on the Achaian side of a
marked military superiority, while their opponents are
maintained just at such a modified pitch of dignity
3
24
[CHAP.
HOMER.
and valour, as to leave entire and unimpaired the
glory, or credit, of worsting them.
12. Sustained Parallelism of the Divine
Action. But, together with this terrestrial action,
an Olympian or celestial plot moves on parallel lines,
from the exordium to the end. The sensible, though
not unlimited, difference of nationality between Trojan
and Achaian is accurately reflected in Olumpos. The
Trojan section of the Divine Court consists in part of
deities apparently not yet recognised in Greece: Arès,
Aphroditè, and lastly the Sun, to whom no active share
is allowed. Then there is Scamandros, a purely ele-
mental deity, and also purely local. Their inferiority
to the Hellenising deities is made up by the action of
Zeus through Apollo, until the termination of the
Wrath. From first to last the game is played above with
the keen interest of living men, and it is made visible
to our eyes at the interstices of the terrestrial action.
13. Moral Adjustment of the Poem.-While
such is the theurgy of the poem, the main lines of its
morality are strong and clear. Agamemnon, for his
greed and tyranny, is wounded in his most sensitive
part, namely, the feeling of a thoroughly politic
general and monarch for his people, and for his power.
Achilles, who is on the side of right in this quarrel, is
nevertheless punished, by a protracted agony of grief
over his lost friend, for the excess which he allows
to deform his sense of wrong. But neither of these
aims are so pursued as to neutralise that general
movement in the fortunes of the war, which is de-
manded by the moral order of the world. The
cause for which the Trojans fight is a bad cause, and
receives the defeat which it deserves.
14. National Aim and Feeling.-Hector, though
regarded for his personal qualities, fights in an evil
quarrel, and dies. Next to the ethical, the national
aim is with the poet the most essential; and the
absence of the Protagonist from the field gives him
II.]
25
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
an opportunity of glorifying the exploits of the other
chieftains, each of whom could not fail to be an object
of peculiar interest in his own proper part of Greece.
Moreover, these high exploits of the associated chiefs,
which required space and detail for their full exhibi-
tion, not only did honour to the nation generally
when measured against the Trojan performances, but
formed a scaffolding, as it were, on which to build
up the yet greater achievements of Achilles, and give
more marked elevation and prominence to their
really preterhuman scale.
15. The Plot an Argument not against the
Unity, but for it.—If these views be correct, the
plot of the Iliad is one of the most consummate works
known to literature. The objections which have been
founded on it to disprove the unity of the work are,
it may be said, objections of very small stature. And
not only is it not true that want of cohesion and pro-
portion in the Iliad betrays a plurality of authors, but
it is rather true that a structure so highly and deli-
cately organised constitutes in itself a powerful argu-
ment, to prove its unity of conception and execution.
16. Alleged Minor Discrepancies. With re-
gard to discrepancies in the text, every effort to show
them in mass may be declared to have failed. The
markings of time, by division into day and night, are
clear and consistent. The theory of some travellers,
which placed Troy at a distance of six or eight miles
from the sea, supplied a weapon against the poem,
which represents backward and forward movements of
the armies between the walls and the ships as repeated
on the same day. But that theory has been found
untenable. Moreover, the recent discoveries of Schlie-
mann have made it appear probable, that Troy was
seated on the hill of Hissarlik, at a distance from the
shore, even as it now is, of less than three miles,
which was probably shorter at the epoch of the poem.
Almost the only real discrepancy of the text is in the
26
[CHAP.
HOMER.
case of Pulaimenes, leader of the Paphlagones, who is
slain by Menelaos in the fifth Book, but weeps among
the mourners at the death of his son Harpalion in
the thirteenth.
In
17. The Destructive Theories.—A more serious
question is raised with reference to the general struc-
ture of the poem. Achilles is the protagonist, or hero
of the poem, as Odusseus is of the Odyssey.
the Odyssey, every book either produces or stands
directly related to the hero, whereas Achilles disap-
pears from the seven Books between the first and
ninth, and from the six between the ninth and the
sixteenth. This is, without doubt, a very peculiar
arrangement. It has tempted Grote to propound the
division of the poem into an Achilleis, which should
contain the Books where the great chief is active, and
an Ilias, composed of the Books when he is in eclipse.
But the very eminent historian has in this speculation
enlisted no disciples. And it may be observed gene-
rally, as a material, though not a decisive fact, that
while the destructive criticism bestowed upon Homer
has had, especially in Germany, very extensive support,
no particular scheme, set up to replace that of the
unity of the poems, has met with any degree of favour.
18. Plot of the Odyssey.-The beauties of the
Odyssey in characters and in detail cannot be exag-
gerated but there was nothing like the same amount of
mental effort required for the construction of the plot.
It begins with an Olympian Council, which determines
that Odusseus shall be brought home from the Island
of Kalupso, where he has been detained for many
years. At the same Athenè designs that while the
Suitors, who woo Penelopè, are engaged in riotous.
living at the palace, Telemachos, now come to man-
hood, shall pass over from Ithaca to the mainland,
and make inquiries about his father. In executing
this plan, he obtains much intelligence respecting the
return home of the chieftains, and the lengthened
II.]
27
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
tour of Menelaos on the south-east coast of the
Mediterranean. In the fifth Book, we have the
release of Odusseus from Kalupso, and his return
homewards as far as Scheriè, the land of shipmen; a
place described by Homer apparently upon the basis
of accounts, which had reference to the topography of
Corfu. Here he is hospitably entertained, and a vessel
is prepared to carry him to Ithaca. Before setting
out he describes, in Books ix.-xii., his own extended
wanderings to the coast of Africa, then into the far
west and north, then to the east and the Under-world,
and again, after he has made way on his journey
homewards, his being again driven out into the centre
of the great sea, northwards, where he became the
guest, the darling, and the prisoner of Kalupso.
After being deposited in Ithaca, he betakes himself
first to the cottage of the trusty swineherd Eumaios.
Here Telemachos meets him; and from hence, dis-
figured and thus disguised by Athenè, he ventures down
to the city, and makes full proof of the insolent
mind and purpose of the Suitors. The trial of the
bow is proposed to them by Penelopè; and the person
who draws it is to have the reward of her hand.
They all fail. Odusseus himself performs the feat:
and then comes the terrible slaughter of the guilty and
reckless men. It is followed by the disclosure of
himself to Penelopè, and his re-establishment in
power, after a scene of recognition with his father
Laertes, and a civil war in miniature against the party
who adhere to the Suitors. There is a curious realism
in the difficulties which beset the re-establishment of
Odusseus in his dominions. It seems to bear witness
to a truly historical character in the narrative.
19. Theurgy of the Poem.-The divine
action, parallel with the human, is maintained from
first to last. It may however be described as a mani-
festation of close providential superintendence, without
the marked interpositions of the Iliad. There is no
#
28
[CHAP.
HOMER.
division of parties in Olumpos. Only Poseidon per-
secutes the hero from a personal grudge; and the
Sun, Helios, becomes hostile from a like cause at a
particular point. On the other hand, the interests
of the hero, and those of his house, are sustained
by the ever-wakeful prudence and energy of Athenè.
20. The Two Plots Compared.-The two
plots may be briefly compared. In the plot of the
Odyssey, symmetry is obvious at first sight. In the
plot of the Iliad, it has to be sought out; and the
relevancy and proportion of the parts are only seen
in full when we bring into view, together with the
highly national character of the poem, the circum-
stances of the minstrel, itinerant among the courts,
festivals, and games of Greece, and naturally led to
give alternate prominence to the performances of the
respective chiefs, with whose names this or that part
of the country had a special connection. The plot
of the Iliad is in reality a far more subtle, far less
imitable work. Each poem hangs upon a man: the
Iliad upon the wrath of a man. Each poem is intensely
national; but the nationality of the Iliad is exhibited
in the struggle with an alien and offending power;
that of the Odyssey in the comparison and contrast
between Achaian life on the one side, and foreign and
partly fabulous scenes, manners, and institutions on
the other. The Odyssey is more strange in adven-
tures; but its ordinary tone within the Hellenic zone
is calmer and more subdued, and tends less, except
when near the crisis, to warm the blood of the reader.
There is in each a parallelism between the divine and
the human actions. It is but rarely, in the Iliad, that
grandeur and rapid force give way, to allow the exhibi-
tion of domestic affection: yet this exhibition is as
remarkable and unequivocal as the more splendid.
features of the poem. Conversely in the Odyssey, the
family life supplies the tissue upon and into which is
woven the action of the poem: yet upon occasion
II.]
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
29
The
it rises into a grandeur that is extraordinary.
scene of Hector and Andromachè equals the Odyssey
in tenderness; the slow preparations, moral as well
as physical, for the great Vengeance on the Suitors,
in their stern sublimity, perhaps may match with any-
thing in the Iliad: so that each poem, from base to
summit, has a somewhat similar largeness of range.
The Iliad is carefully finished to the end; and, if
it flags at all, flags in some of the middle parts,
while the great issue remains suspended: the last
Book of the Odyssey, while it carries a sufficiency of
identifying marks, exhibits a manifest decline in
force, as if the mind and hand of the master were
conscious that their work was done, and coveted
their rest.
SECTION II.-AGAINST THE SEPARATORS.
1. Objections of the Separators.--Many, who
firmly hold the separate unity of each poem, decline
to refer them to the same author. The controversy
with these Chorizontes, or Separators, forms the gravest
branch of the Homeric Question.
This school of disputants first appeared among the
Alexandrian critics about two centuries B.C. The
arguments, variously handled at different times, are
mainly as follows:-
(1.) There has been alleged a difference of gram-
matical forms indicative of a later date of composition
for the Odyssey.
(2.) Differences in the narrative.
(3.) Differences in the religious department.
(4.) Differences in the manners, the political and
social picture.
2. Reply to Objection (1).--As to the gram
matical forms, the reply has been, a, that the variance
is insignificant; b, that it tends to exhibit the use of
older and less expanded forms in the Odyssey rather
30
[CHAP.
HOMER.
than the reverse; c, that the use of such forms cannot
show the Odyssey to be later; d, that neither do they
show it to be earlier, for the amplitude of the less
archaic forms harmonises with, and may be accounted
for by, the greater majesty of style required for the
more majestic subject of the Iliad.
3. Reply to Objection (2).-As to the narrative,
without doubt the Odyssey makes additions to the
Iliad, but they relate to a period after the action of
the Iliad closes. It is however urged that, in the
Odyssey, there appears on the stage Neoptolemos, a
full-grown son of Achilles, about whom the Iliad, in
the ninth year of the war, is silent. It may be added
that Achilles speaks of Briseis as having been at least
in contemplation his wife: and that, even at this date,
he belongs to the younger rather than the elder group
of the Greek chieftains. But in Montenegro, men of or
under thirty-five often have a son able to bear arms.
On various grounds, we may assert that he had no wife
living at his home. But we cannot therefore assert
that he had never had one. There is however a
wider question: namely whether, in assigning whole
decades of years to the drama of the war, Homer
proceeds as a chronicler, or conventionally for the
purposes of his art. Even were there a merely chro-
nological discrepancy, we might urge that it perhaps
belongs to a field in which poetical colouring is allowed,
and that in any case it affords too narrow a ground for
an argument on authorship.
4. Reply to Objection (3).-As to differences in
the religious department, the objection taken is two-
fold. First, it is held by some that the divine order
exhibits in the Odyssey a higher morality. But in
truth both poems work out strictly the divine counsel
and the ends of justice; both connect morality with
piety; both exhibit elements of corruption in the
celestial hierarchy; in both there are gods, who show
signs of lust and of vindictive passion. If their mirth
II.]
31
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
is marred by their fighting in Iliad xxi., they have
to wink in the Odyssey at the persistent opposition of
Poseidon to the divine counsels in favour of the return
of Odusseus.
It may be doubted whether the higher ethics any-
where in the Iliad undergo such serious disparagement
as in the intrigue of Arès and Aphroditè (Od. viii.);
in the declaration of Athenè to Odusseus in the
thirteenth Book that she was in heaven, as he on
earth, the person most deeply versed in guileful arts;
and in the exhibition of Hermes (Od. xx.) as the
official teacher of thieving and of perjury.
The second point of the objection is, that the
composition and attributes of the divine hierarchy in
the two poems do not agree. Iris is employed as the
divine messenger in the Iliad, commonly, though not
exclusively; Hermes in the Odyssey. The Sun is a
sleeping partner in the Iliad, whose personality is only
detected by a phrase or two; in the Odyssey, he is
active and jealous, both as a ruler upon earth, and as
a member of the Olympian court. Hephaistos is the
husband of Aphroditè in the Odyssey, but of a some-
what ideal Charis in the Iliad. It might be added that
the Hera of the Iliad shares freely in the divine govern-
ment of affairs, but she has no practical part in the
Odyssey; and that Poseidon, whose proceedings are
subject to the direct control of Zeus in the Iliad, has
a much more unchecked action in the Odyssey. Some
minor differences will be noted elsewhere; but these
are important. They would justly lead us to surmise.
duality of authorship, if the poet were in the two
works dealing with the same scenes and races. But,
in a large part of the Odyssey, he passes beyond
the limits of the well known or Achaian world. He
was perfectly aware that there were national varieties
of religion; and it is to these that the foregoing differ-
ences seem to be really referable. If this be so, the
mythological diversities seem to represent not diversity
B
32
[CHAP.
HOMER.
of authorship, but sagacity and circumspection in the
representation of manners as to both poems respec-
tively; and so far as these qualities are rare ones, they
go to make it likely that two works, in each of which
they are remarkable, proceeded from the same brain.
5. Reply to Objection (4).-As to differences in
the political and social sphere, it is true that various
details of life appear in the Oayssey, which are
wanting in the Iliad. So do many details of military
life currently appear in the Iliad and not in the
Odyssey. It could not be otherwise. Camp life is
one thing, civil life is another. No argument can be
founded upon diversities, which belong to the nature
of the scenes pourtrayed.
There is however a political variance, which does
not at once fall within this explanation. The title of
Basileus, or King, is used in the Iliad with the utmost
restraint, and only for some eight or ten Greek per-
sons. But in the Odyssey every Suitor is a basileus. To
account for this, we must advert to the revolutionary
effect, which the Troic expedition could not but tend
to produce in Greece, like the Crusades at a later date
in Europe. Upon the prolonged absence of the chief
lord, nothing could be more natural than that the
petty lords, having for the time no superior, should
affect the sovereign title. But the broad principles of
polity set forth in the Odyssey appear to be identical
with those of the Iliad.
6. Arguments for Unity. Improbability
that there should be Two Poets of such
rank. But those, who defend the unity of the double
work, do not rest satisfied with mere replies to
objections.
The positive grounds for ascribing the Odyssey
to the author of the Iliad may be partially stated as
follows.
Either of these poems places its author at an ele-
vation among the poets of the entire civilisation of
II.]
33
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
the world, which is very peculiar. The judgment of
the Greeks, without doubt very strong in constructive
appreciation, gradually but firmly drew a broad line
between these and the many competing productions,
handed down from the prehistoric age, and assigned
to their author a position of solitary grandeur. He
long held it alone: some would say he holds it still :
some would place Dante by his side, yet more would
so place Shakespeare; few in comparison would
admit any other claim. That one such poet as our
Homer should have arisen in an age stinted in the
materials of thought, possessed of little hereditary
training, an age without aids and appliances, and of
manners including a large barbarous element, is mar-
vellous. To suppose the existence of two men, each
of them a supreme poet, appears to be a very daring
paradox. As the aloe is said to flower once in a
hundred years, so it seems to be but once in one or
two thousand that nature flowers into this unrivalled
product. Either the Iliad or the Odyssey suffices to
stamp the character. It is not agreeable to analogy
to suppose a personality of so transcendent a kind to
have been so soon repeated, and on so limited a
stage.
7. Correspondence of the Poems in Great
Outlines. Some minds will derive a more solid
satisfaction from the positive evidence of correspond-
ence in all the great outlines of the two poems. In
cases where the conceptions of a poet are faint and
shallow, such correspondence might mean little more
than the mere absence of discrepancy. But in Homer
every character, every idea, is sharply cut, and full of
vitality. The correspondence of wooden blocks is
not remarkable, the correspondence of human forms
and faces often is. Now there is not a department of
life or thought, in which close correspondence be-
tween the two poems is not the general rule: and the
objections of opponents have been endeavours to
34
[CHAP.
HOMER.
show particular exceptions. If we take first the
mythology: the divine personages are alike intensely
charged with human elements; they generally act,
govern, love, and hate on the same principles: the
Olumpian polity, a marvellous formation, is similarly
conceived and worked. If we turn to the human
characters, the evidence is yet more many-sided. We
see that the hand, which drew Andromachè, was the
hand to draw Penelopè. We find, not always a cir-
cumstantial identity where the same personage appears
in the two poems, but a new shade of colour, or
modification of attitude, in just proportion to the
change of position. The distressed Helen of the
Iliad becomes the favoured Helen of the Odyssey,
vested in a queenly calm, but still with recollections
which serve to chasten pride. The impassioned
Achilles of the Iliad reappears in all his grandeur, but
beneath a veil of solemn sadness, as befits the Under-
world. But in a character like that of Menelaos, where
the change of circumstances is more material than
moral, the delineation remains without any sensible
alteration. Take again the extreme difficulty of
drawing effectively a character like that of Odusseus.
In one sense, much that is new in him comes out in
the Odyssey: but what so comes out is simply the
complement of the less-developed picture of the Iliad.
For instance, his concise speech (Od. viii.), in reply
to the insult of a prince of the Phaiakes, is, to say the
least, one of the most crushing replies on record:
immensely removed from the studied, artful calm of
his address on the mission meant to appease Achilles.
But it is in full harmony with the account given
by Antenor (I. iii.) of his oratory, which drove as the
snow-flakes drive in winter. The passionate element
of his nature, thus glanced at in the Iliad, is amply
developed in the Odyssey. So the polity, the pro-
fessions, the stage of advancement, both for the fine
and the useful arts, the high refinement of manners,
II.]
35
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
But we must not
It is found in the
combined with occasional signs of recent or sur-
rounding savagery, might all be drawn out as fresh
proofs of an identity of origin.
fail to observe one other concord.
steady bent of mind, which, without any kind of
moroseness, uniformly enlists the sympathy of those
who hear or read on the side of good, and leads them,
as by the hand, to the condemnation and even con-
tempt of evil. In every single case where he portrays
a character radically vicious, Homer contrives that
it shall be regarded not only with disapproval, but with
aversion. There are few among Christian poets, who
can match him in this vital particular: and the har-
mony of the two poems, in a point so characteristic,
again points in a marked manner to their springing
form a single mind.
8. Minute and Undesigned Coincidences.—
The foregoing are all great matters. But there is another
chapter of evidence, on the whole not less important,
yet much more difficult to follow, because made up
of particulars minute in themselves, and strong only
in their combination; like the threads of cotton or of
wool, before and after they are combined into a cloth.
Unfortunately, the force of such an argument as this
must be taken upon trust, until the student of Homer
has accustomed himself to watch for those nicer
turns of thought and expression, which the more
careless reader passes over without notice. It is not
possible to give any just idea of this matter by enume-
ration. Sometimes, however, the correspondences
are those of poetic usage, as in the very delicate
and careful appropriation of epithets; or in the intro-
duction of similes, not simply because they happen to
occur to the poet, but when they are needed, and are of
value to enliven the otherwise slightly flagging move-
ment of the action. Sometimes they are to be de-
tected in the mere force and propriety of a word. Each
poem, for example, hangs essentially upon a man.
4
36
[CHAP.
HOMER.
So the subject is presented in the first word of the
Odyssey, andra. But the Iliad hangs not so much on
the entire destiny, as upon the wrath, of a man; and
again the first word of the Iliad is the cardinal word,
menin. Once in the Iliad we are told how Odusseus was
shorter than Menelaos. Once in the Odyssey Polu-
phemos contemptuously describes him as a little fellow.
Once in the Iliad allusion is made to the hanging-up
of votive offerings (II. i. 39); once also in the Odyssey
(iii. 274); cannibalism is mentioned with horror in the
Iliad (iv. 35); the practice is assigned to monsters
in the Odyssey (Od. ix. 289, x. 130, 134). Domestic
affection is the basis of the conception of Odusseus
in the Odyssey; in the Iliad he is the only one
among the Greek chieftains who ever refers to his
child at home (I. ii. 259; iv. 353). In the Iliad,
Hera, protectress of the Achaians, brings to its close
the great day which had been preternaturally lengthened
for the benefit of the Trojans. In the Odyssey
Athenè, protectress of Odusseus, detains the Night,
and stops Eōs from rising, to give more time for the
converse of the returned hero with Penelopè. In
each poem are found two lines, and only two, con-
sisting exclusively of spondees. I do not know that
any other Greek poet has ventured upon this peculiar
and daring metrical arrangement.
But it is more
notable that in all the four cases alike there is a close
adaptation between the sound of the verse and the
sense (I. ii. 544, xxiii. 221, Od. xv. 333, xxi. 15). These
are not select, but rather random instances of the
minuter harmonies; and their purpose is to suggest to
the student a mode by which he may trace, in the
form of undesigned coincidence, independent evidence
of that close unity of thought and feeling, which has
animated the composition of these great sister works.
9. Want of such Correspondence in all other
Compositions.-The argument from agreement in
the works, and consistency in the characters and
11.]
37
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
essential styles of the two poems acquires additional.
force, when we remember that none of these are
found to be maintained, so soon as we pass beyond
these two compositions to the works of other authors,
whether of the classical period or before it. The
other epics of the Iliac Cycle differ in their narrative
from the Iliad. Thus the absence of such difference
in the Odyssey becomes a topic of great weight. The
great characters of Homer, especially such as Achilles,
Odusseus, Helen, are in every case, when they pass
into the hands of the later writers, altered and de-
based. From this we learn to estimate the power of
the argument for unity of composition drawn from the
perfect consistency of these characters in the two
poems. The objector may safely be challenged to
supply an answer to the question, How it could possibly
happen that there should be such a closeness of
similitude between the two poets in particular whom
he creates for the two poems, and such a total want
of it between them and all others (so far as we know)
who practised the same art?
10. The Distinction of Style and Handling.
-So far as tone and style are concerned, there is no
doubt that the pulse, so to speak, of the Odyssey beats
less vehemently than that of the Iliad. It would,
however, be strange if this were not so, when we
recollect that one is a poem of war, and the other of
peace: one of the barrack, the other of the palace. It
is reasonably believed, among those who oppose the
Chorizontes or Separators, that the just proportion which
exists between the subject and the style of each,
suggests another proportion, not less just, between.
subject and style on the one hand, and time of life
on the other that the Iliad represents the life and
genius of the poet moving upwards to the zenith,
and the Odyssey the same life and genius in the
paler tract beyond.
38
[CHAP.
HOMER.
SECTION III. WOLF AND THE TRANSMISSION BY
MEMORY.
1. Belief before Wolf.-Until the eighteenth
century of our era was near its close, it may be said
that all generations had believed Troy was actually
Troy, and Homer in the main Homer; neither taking
the one for a fable, or (quaintest of all dreams) for a
symbol of solar phenomena, nor resolving the other
into a multiform assemblage of successive bards, whose
verses were at length pieced together by a clever
literary tailor. The earliest age which can be called
critical, and which had ceased to be creative, was that
of the Ptolemies; and it did launch a serious opinion
that there were two Homers, an author of the Iliad,
and an author of the Odyssey. With this theory, one
entitled to all respect, I have already dealt. Into the
destructive speculations generally, the nature and
limits of this work do not allow me to enter. I have
thought it enough to meet them by a rapid exhibition
of the structure of the poems; which must stand or
fall mainly by internal evidence. But one among these
theories demands a particular notice, for the interest
attaching to the question which it raises, and because,
acquiring from circumstances a powerful impetus, it
has carried all the others along with it in its train.
2. Wolf's Attack, and the Defence.-After
slighter premonitory movements, it was Wolf that
made, by the publication of his Prolegomena in 1795,
the serious attack. It had been too carelessly as-
sumed, even for example by Bentley, who disallowed
the original unity of the poems, that Homer wrote
what he composed. Wolf maintained that available
writing was not known at, or till long after, the period
of their composition; and that works of such length,
not intrusted to the custody of written characters,
could not have been transmitted through a course of
II.]
39
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
generations with any approach to fidelity. Therefore
they could only be a number of separate songs, brought
together at a later date. The reply to Wolf rested on
a denial of his proposition, that the resource of writing
was not at the service of the composer of the poems.
It was still boldly contended that they had been
written; and that, being written, they were therefore
capable of transmission.
3. Mischief of the First Defence.—It is now
I believe the prevailing, and I am confident the
correct, opinion that the poems were not originally
written compositions, but were dependent on human
memory for their being handed down. The first
generation of their defenders had seemed to admit
that transmission by memory was impossible; later
champions allowed, that transmission by manuscript
had not been the first actual vehicle. If they were
not thus placed in literal conflict with one another,
at any rate the practical effect was that the adversary
accepted each of the two separate admissions, and
that a great impulse was given to the negative
speculation.
4. The Poems certainly Unwritten.-There
appears to have been not even a colourable ground
for the contention, that the poems were at the outset
written compositions. The prevalence of such an
opinion indeed shows how slight had been the current
methods of study. Only one, or at the outside two,
passages make reference in any way to cut or inscribed
characters. Of these, the only passage which is clear
in making such a reference (Il. vi. 168-73) speaks of
folded and seemingly fastened tablets; from which
we might conclude, apart from any other difficulty,
that there was no portable material, which could be
used for compositions of great length. The lack of
positive evidence is not, however, the principal argu-
ment. Many lays are mentioned in the poems; but
always as lays orally delivered. Many messages are
40
[CHAP.
HOMER.
sent and received, including matter of the utmost
delicacy, such as the offers to the offended Achilles,
where accuracy was of the greatest consequence; but
as a rule all is done by word of mouth. Such messages
are set out in full on sending and on delivery, a prac-
tice which gives a practical and convenient rest to the
mind of a reciting poet, but which is without sense
in the case of a written composition. The same ob-
servation applies to the recurring lines, or formulæ,
with which Homer abounds. The rapid and incessant
movement of the Iliad, and the large portion of the
poem which is thrown into speeches, appear to call
for, and suppose, the aids of voice and gesture. More
than 2,200 lines, reaching nearly the length of two
plays, are recited by Odusseus without a break.
Above all, the Greek Catalogue is treated as a supreme
effort of the poet, and this Catalogue is alone pre-
ceded by a formal and detailed supplication to the
Muses for aid. Now there is no portion of equal
length in the poem, upon which less of poetic force is
expended; but it contains a long list of varied numbers,
and of many hundred epithets and names. As a work
of composition, no part of the poem could be easier;
as a work of memory, none more difficult, than to
observe the right order, and, by avoiding all omission,
to satisfy the jealous fondness of the hearers all over
Greece. In my view it is indisputable that the
poems were not written. But, according to a well-
known rule, great stress, laid upon a bad argument,
brings arguments which are good into discredit; and,
upon the breaking down of the untrue doctrine that
the poems had been written, the enemy rushed in like
a flood. Thus, of all the circumstances of the original
attack, the defence proved to be the worst.
5. Were they Transmitted by Memory ?-
Either, then, they were transmitted by memory, or
not at all. The question is, Could compositions of
such length be so transmitted?
II.]
4I
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
There seems to be no room for doubt, that the
power of recollection would be found adequate to the
office. In those early days, men took only to em-
ployments which they were fit for; and the select
memories of sympathising men, professionally
trained, and carrying on the work for the very
practical purpose of a livelihood, would in all likeli-
hood be able to compass the complete retention of
either poem, perhaps even of both. Division of labour
may have lightened the merely physical task. Long
recitations, we see, were in use. When Odusseus
himself recites at a breath (Od. ix.-xii.) 2,241 lines,
it is nowhere signified that this was in any way an
effort for the speaker, or for the listeners. It is likely
that modern recollection has been weakened by
habitual reliance upon the great labour-saving con-
trivances of manuscript and print. Yet Macaulay,
when occupied with the engrossing pursuit of an
historian, a province wholly foreign, happened to find-
on a casual opportunity, that he could repeat one-half
of Paradise Lost: and among the men of his genera-
tion there were a few, though a very few, whose
capacity of recollection rivalled, or approached even
that of Macaulay. Indeed, the aggregate contents of
various memories at the present day must exceed the
whole mass of the poems.
6. Conservating Effect of the Public
Recitations. This power of memory, however,
would not of itself guarantee us against the creeping in
of small errors in detail; which, it may be argued,
might run together, and grow to serious greatness.
This is so and compounded error is very difficult to
deal with. There was a principle of variance and
decay continually at work for the disintegration of the
poems. Nay, there were many such forces; one,
namely, in the mind of each reciter. But this cir-
cumstance, which at first sight exaggerates the
mischief, provided in some degree the remedy. That
42.
[CHAP.
HOMER.
probably happened then among the Rhapsodists,
which has happened since among critics anxious to
recast their Homers: each would be sufficiently
enamoured of his own deviations from the text, but
by no means as well inclined to those of others. The
errors introduced by the Rhapsodists, at each and
every place of recitation, might be numerous, but
they could not be the same. By jealous love they
would be brought into comparison, which would be
conflict; and they would greatly, like plus and minus
quantities, eject one another. Moreover, the rivalry
of rising bards, would naturally take the form of an
ambition to be preferred on the very ground of
fidelity to an original, which had long proved in a
conclusive manner its own superiority to rivalry.
This proof had been applied by the testing hand of
time; applied as impartially to great authors and
small, as death knocks at the door of the palace and
the cottage. As a destroying angel, he visited every-
where, but he let pass unharmed the paramount
excellence of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Gradually
they were severed from their companionship with all
the lengthened pieces on the same group of events,
called the Trojan Cycle, and these were suffered all to
drop away; although shorter and later compositions,
carrying the name of Homer by a vague ascription,
have come down to us.
7. State Guardianship of the Poems.-The
nature of the case excludes the contemporary testi-
mony of literature to the poems in the first stages of
their existence. But when the literary age had begun,
we find notices of them in considerable numbers, and
very noteworthy in their purport. I select for notice
the interesting statement of Heracleides Pontikos, a
pupil of Plato, that Lukourgos, the Spartan legislator,
having received the poems from the descendants of
Kreophulos, a reputed companion of Homer, brought
them into Greece. Thus the account, which of all
II.]
43
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
others goes the farthest back, exhibits the poems to
us as already receiving the regular cognisance of
public authority. Other testimonies speak of them
as similarly recognised in the time of Turtaios, and
in the time of Solon. In later times, there were regu-
lar State-editions; and there may even be reason to
suppose that there was, in the Greek peninsula at
least, some approach to a standard text.
8. The Survival of the Fittest.-Thus there
were in operation three conservative influences, which
might counteract effectually the tendencies to large
disintegration, and in no small degree even maintain the
general purity of the text. These were, first, publicity
and free competition in the recitations; secondly, the
care of the State for a standing national treasure; thirdly
and most of all, the internal force, the hold upon the
hearts and minds of men, by which the poems had
vindicated their own existence before regular polity
existed, and were handed down as a singular example
of triumph over external difficulties, and of what is
termed "the survival of the fittest." The force of
this observation is enhanced when we remember, that
neither poem is historically, though each is ideally,
complete. The Odyssey does not bring us to the
demise of Odusseus; and the Iliad neither begins nor
ends the Siege of Troy.
9. Fluctuations of Taste.-However valuable
the means, then, that were employed for the conser-
vation of the works, it does not follow that the
estimation of them was altogether exempt from the
action of change in taste, probably brought about by
change in manners. The Athenian drama of the
classical age is by no means in strict conformity with
the Homeric models, when it touches upon Troic
events and characters; possibly because the poems did
not give to Athens what she then thought her just place
among the Greeks. More general causes may also have
acted, as in the cases of the other greatest poets of the
44
[CHAP.
HOMER.
world, Shakespeare and Dante, whose popularity has
not been by any means uniform. Among those who
stand immediately after them, it does not appear that
either Virgil or Milton at once took his proper place
in public estimation. With Homer, the case was
rather the reverse. The careful guardianship of his
poems, when all besides was lost, bears witness to his
commanding position among the minstrels of the
heroic age. With the lapse of time and change of
manners, though he probably lost nothing in vene-
ration, he did not continue in the same degree to be
the companion of daily life. He sang, as it were,
in another key. Moreover, the sustained chivalry
of the Iliad was necessarily above the average mood
of men; and the high standard of domestic virtue,
exhibited in the Odyssey, was no longer to be found
in the debauched common life of the classical
period. Probably we are near the mark in say-
ing, respect and veneration were uniform: popularity
was exposed to fluctuation.
10. On the Trustworthiness of the Text in
Detail. The preservation of the poems in any form
from a remote antiquity is certainly a marvel. There
is nothing parallel to it in the history of literature.
That the general integrity of the text should have
been also preserved, is a supposition not to be accepted
without a close scrutiny. Some of the circumstances
have been set forth, which tend to support it. But
the decision of the question must ultimately depend
on the judgment, which the republic of scholars may
finally form upon the internal evidence supplied by
the condition of the text itself. Unhappily, the full
contents of the poems have never yet been methodi-
cally submitted to the world, so as to allow of a com-
prehensive consideration of their wide range, their
variety, and their very extensive coherence in detail.
Even German sedulity has until the present time
shrunk from this task, and the world has been con-
II.]
45
THE HOMERIC QUESTION.
tented hitherto with slight and imperfect efforts. Dr.
Buchholz, of Erfurt, has at length confronted the
enterprise, and has already published two volumes of
Homerische Realien. One Englishman at least has a
similar undertaking in hand.
II. Anticipation of a Final Judgment.-The
business of diving and mining into the text, and of
systematic gathering and comparison of its contents,
is in truth a new business. Not until they shall have
been thoroughly exposed, and that for a length of
time, can a general and solid judgment be formed
among scholars as to the conclusions which ought to
be drawn from the process. Having laboured much
and long in this province, I am hopeful that a com-
plete cognisance of what Homer contains will go far
to put an end to the disputes whether there was any
Homer, or whether there were two Homers, and even
whether the integrity of the text is or is not what is
termed a sound working hypothesis, on which we may
proceed with reasonable security, though with occa-
sional risk. This however is for the present mere
anticipation. But it is worthy of note that, even while
Homeric scepticism still widely prevails, in theory at
least, upon the Continent, yet, when it is a question
of mythology, or of polity, or of domestic life, or
of manners, or of the state of knowledge, or of arts,
or of industrial production, the non-believers act as
if they believed, and repair to the two poems as a
magazine in which, and in which alone, all the
materials appropriate to their inquiries are set forth
in consistent array. For practical ends, Homer is but
one; and his works, by common consent, are handled
as an organic whole. Happily, the primary character-
istics of the poet are distinct from the minutely
granulated evidence to be obtained from the details
of the text. These are open to the observation and
judgment of the many persons who, without being
professional or persistent students, are cultivated, and
46
[CHAP.
HOMER.
attentive readers. Such are the structure of the
plots, the delineation of characters, their sustained
consistency, the unity and individuality of style.
And these, even alone, may, I hope, be generally
sufficient to obtain a tolerably assured verdict on
the main issues.
CHAPTER III.
HISTORY.
1. Homeric Genealogies: their Use.-Of
chronology, the ordinary framework of history, in
which the succession of its events is adjusted, Homer
knows nothing. He has, however, a rude substitute for
its exact measurements, in reckonings of the generations
of men. Thus he describes the age of Nestor, in the
Iliad, by saying he had passed through two genera-
tions of men, and was ruling amidst the third. His
genealogies therefore, being, as they are, both numer-
ous and remarkably accordant, supply us with a kind
of historical scale, and by means of it a rough outline
of what was, for him, the fore-time may be drawn.
2. Their Nature and Length.-The longest
of these genealogies run up to a god as the first an-
cestor. They give the descents of princes; and they
appear to indicate the first beginnings of political
society, capable of action outwards, and distinct from
mere village-communities. This original paternity
of the gods corresponds, like so much else in Homer,
with the usages of Egypt, which reckoned its earliest
dynasties as dynasties of gods, and still held kings to
be quasi-divine. One Homeric genealogy exceeds all
the rest in its length. It is that of Dardanos. Hector,
who represents the manhood of his epoch, is the
seventh of his line, which sprang immediately from
Zeus. It is noteworthy that this race, the oldest
known to Homer, is also the most easterly, and there-
III.]
47
HISTORY.
fore the nearest to the seat, from whence proceeded
the first migrations westward. It appears to indicate
a period of about two hundred years before the War,
marking the date at which a certain race had arrived
as upon the north-eastern coast of the Ægean Sea. In
Greece, the earliest line we hear of is that of Aiolos.
Sarpedon and Glaukos are in the sixth generation of
that line. It is god-born; and the sire is evidently
Poseidon. Amphimachos, an Elian commander, is
the fifth in the line of Azeus, who is the highest
human ancestor named. Poseidon is expressly named
as the father of the line. Antilochos and his brothers
are of the fifth generation in the line of Salmoneus,
whose origin is probably from Poseidon. Aretè, Queen
of Scheriè, is also of the fifth, in the line of Eurumedon.
There is little doubt that Poseidon is to be regarded
as here supplying the divine paternity, but he also
intervenes in the line itself, and is the queen's great-
grandfather. This is not to be regarded, however, as
a Greek genealogy.
3. Their Ethnological Value. These con-
nections with a god as ancestor are not simply mytho-
logical, but ethnical, and are among the best threads
of guidance upwards to the cradle of Hellenic history;
and this in various ways. For example, in the Dar-
danian line, we learn expressly that the epoch of god-
parentage is also that of the first civic settlement. It is
almost certainly the same in Greece, where traditional
record seems to begin with it: as with Pelops in the line
of Agamemnon, and with Aiakos in the line of Achilles.
These lines are about two generations shorter than the
group before cited. Before these lines, there is nothing
Achaian or Hellenic: they may be taken as denoting
the fountain-head of the race, placed less than a
century before the War of Troy.
4. The immediately pre-Achaian Pericd.—
But it is evident that there was a pre-Achaian history
of the peninsula, and Homer has carefully marked the
5
48
[CHAP.
HOMER.
•
distinction by the use of race-names. The Hellenic
name had not passed its first infancy at the epoch of
the poems. The Achaian name, which was not only
current, but dominant, is never used for facts more
than two generations old. The father of Eurustheus
reigned not over Achaians, but Argeians. This name
we find in the poems, where it does not mean the
local inhabitants of Argolis, to signify principally the
commonalty.
5. Emergence of the Achaian Name, and
its Disappearance. The Achaians came from the
north. They imprinted indeed their name on the
Morea, but Homer shows them to us as an Hellenic
race in Thessaly, and close to the head-quarters of
original Hellenism at the ancient sanctuary of Do-
dona; the Murmidones, he says, were Hellenes, and
were also Achaians. They came as a race, and every-
where took the lead, but they blended with the mass
of the population. After the Dorian conquest, this
appellation entirely lost its national character, and, as
a purely local phrase, indicated only the inhabitants
of the south coast of the Corinthian gulf. Homer tells
us in terms that the Murmidon Achaians were Hellenes.
This wider Hellenic name, not having been specially
associated with the Achaian predominance, survived
the great military and social revolution. It became
classical; and, though superseded for a length of time.
through the overpowering influence of Roman sway,
it is now again the national and European name of
the inhabitants of Hellas.
6. Connection of the pre-Achaian Period
with Egypt. In the pre-Achaian period of about
two generations, the tract afterwards named Boeotia was
inhabited by a race of immigrants, called by Homer
Kadmeians, who founded Thebes. This name, as
well as other signs, connect them with the Theban or
second Empire of Egypt; which, besides appropriating
much of western Asia, made use of the Phoenician
III.]
49
HISTORY.
navigators as its maritime arm, and established a
sovereignty, as sovereignty was then understood, in
Greece and the islands. This we learn from other
sources. But it is in accordance with all the indica-
tions of the Homeric text. Indeed, those indications
are hard to explain, except by accepting the testimony
of the Egyptian monuments. Besides the Kadmeian
link of connection, we find from the genealogies,
various families living in the Greek peninsula, who had
appeared there at a particular time; who had too, as in
the case of King Proitos, connections abroad, and who
exercised sway without belonging either to the stock
of previous inhabitants, or to any large body of
colonists. The name of Aiolos, which heads more
genealogies than one, is placed in manifestly foreign
and southern association by the use of it in the
Odyssey for the ruler of the distant island Aioliè.
The Danaan name is expressly connected with the
Phoenician coast and the paternity of Zeus. The
name Aiolos, and others which have been referred
to, attach themselves to Poseidon. Him we are on
every ground to regard as an imported deity, not indi-
genous like Zeus. He comes over sea from the south-
ern region. These lines, it is to be noted, appear as
the lines of single families. They are in no sense
tribal. They are just what they would have been if
they had sprung from the delegated governors who
in these parts, remote from the centre of power,
represented the Egyptian Empire. We know from
other sources, that it very soon lost the power it had
thus established; and we see from Homer that, at the
time of the War, all administrative connection with it
had ceased.
I
7. Period before that Connection.—But
among whom came these officers, if such they were,
and, whatever they may have been, over whom did
they rule? Doubtless over a people of sufficiently
1 See infra, P. 97.
50
[CHAP.
HOMER.
settled life to be worth ruling over. While tradition
gives us the widespread name of the Pelasgoi, cover-
ing probably many other local names, as
that
of the earliest settled inhabitants of the peninsula,
Homer calls Thessaly, which had not like the Morea
been overshadowed by a great Achaian dynasty,
Pelasgic Argos; and, on the three occasions on which
he mentions the race, he always gives to them a special
epithet of honour. Considering the singular signi-
ficance of his system of epithets, and their total want
of marked qualities at the period of the War, it is
difficult to account for this on any ground, except it
be that they had a title to veneration as the ancient
possessors of the soil, and the first founders of social
life in the peninsula.
8. Marked by Nature-Worship.-But apart
from the mere use of the name, we hear a stronger
proof of the existence of a pre-Hellenic, though by
no means alien population, from the presence of a
peculiar element in the mythology: a strong per-
vading ingredient of Nature-worship, greatly out of
keeping with the anthropomorphism, or, as I would
rather call it, theanthropism, of the Olympian.
system, and manifestly older. We have abundant
traces in Homer of the displaced dynasties of gods,
whose lineage Hesiod has set forth for us, and who
can only have had for their worshippers the popula-
tion termed Pelasgian.
9. Pelasgian, Phoenician, and Achaian
Periods. Let us sum up what has been said. We
seem then to be introduced to the Greek peninsula and
islands when they were inhabited by communities, but
not yet in States; and were at that stage of development
which has hardy and peaceful agriculture for its only
or main art of life. Over these tracts, far-aiming
Egyptian power casts its net, and in establishing its
sway it makes known to them, through her agents,
the useful arts in general, of which Egypt and the
III.]
51
HISTORY.
East were already in possession. As the route be-
tween them is maritime, and as her maritime agents
are supplied by Phoenicia, it is with the Phoenician
name that these arts are, in the mind of Greece,
associated. When Egypt ceases to advance, she
recedes; and it is naturally where the tie is weakest
and least direct that self-government is first recovered;
so that those, who had been the agents of a foreign
power, become petty princes in the land. Meanwhile a
vigorous tribe, of the same ethnical family as the old
inhabitants, spreads itself from the north, and carrying
with it the Achaian name, grows to be the governing
and guiding power of the peninsula and its islands.
This is an outline suggested by probable evidence;
but it does not, in the present state of our knowledge,
lay claim to certainty.
10. Formation of a National Life.-Now
has come the time for those efforts at common action,
whereby that marvellous product, the Greek nation,
was to be formed. They seem at first to have taken
the shape of a reaction; and among them those which
aim at the rejection of foreign sway are perhaps the
noblest. The district around Thebes was the only
district held by a community of foreigners; and it
is not difficult to trace, in the Homeric legend of
the war against Thebes, the marks of a raid upon
the stranger. There is also a legend in the Odyssey
of a predatory expedition to Egypt, which probably
in like manner indicates a movement of retaliation.
The slight references in the poems to the voyage
of the ship Argo, "watched by all with interest,"
and favoured by Hera, the deity most peculiarly
national, fully agree with the suggestion that this
attack on the outlying Egyptian settlement of Colchis
(such it is known to have been) was a blow struck in
the same sense, and with the sagacious choice, in
all likelihood, of the point that was deemed the
weakest.
52
[CHAP.
HOMER.
>>
II. The Pelopid and Dardan Families.-
But the curtain is about to rise upon greater events
than these. The Pelopid family now rules by a
primacy or suzerainty in Greece "over all Argos and
the groups of islands" (I. ii. 102). It is the head of
Achaian power; yet it is not without foreign associa-
tions. The sceptre it had for a symbol was the special
gift of Zeus. But it was a work of art made for him
by Hephaistos, the metal-working god, and all high
metallurgy was at this epoch foreign. The "where-
abouts of Pelops, the first ancestor, is kept obscure.
This suggests his being a foreigner, for Homer never
directly assigns to a foreign origin anything that has
become naturalised in Greece, even if by indirect
means the secret may sometimes be penetrated.
There were relations too, and points of resemblance
between the Pelopid and the Dardan kings. The elder
branch in Greece bore the ancient and peculiar title of
anax andrōn, lord of men, in common with a very few old
houses, apparently of an extraction remotely foreign.
The branch of Anchises, probably also senior, and
ruling at the certainly senior seat of Dardania, while
Priam held the younger, though wealthier Ilion, bore
the same title. Echepolos, a son of Anchises, dwelt
in Greece; Paris, the son of Priam, visited Menelaos,
enjoyed his hospitality, and thus had the opportunity
of carrying off to Troy his wife, the beautiful Helen.
I2. Motives of the Trojan War.-Resent-
ment for a base and cruel wrong, the lust of booty
from a city famous for its wealth, and ambition to
consolidate by a great national effort the power of the
dynasty, alike impelled the Pelopids to undertake the
War of Troy. It seems not easy to understand how
the other chiefs of Greece could be organised for so
great an undertaking, in which they had so slight an
interest. No wonder that the business of combining
them should have been a great business. Greed would
have its influence; but there was more in it than greed.
111.]
53
HISTORY.
There was the political instinct of union, the charm
and fascination of adventure, the irrepressible force of
daring in an energetic people, with ardour not yet
tamed by experience, growing to be dimly but truly
conscious of its destiny, and eager to reap the first-
fruits of its fame. They tried first, if we may believe
the poet, a mission to demand the restoration of
Helen, and of the property which Paris had not
forgotten to steal along with her. The robber and
adulterer did not scruple to bring about a refusal by
bribery in Troy. So began the expedition. It may
have done much to make the nation.
But the poet,
who sang of it, did yet more.
13. The Question as to its Historical
Character. I do not here enter upon the truth of
the Trojan war as history, though I see no reason to
doubt it; and it appears to derive very powerful, if
indirect support from recent discoveries, especially
those of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik and Mukenai.
But we have to deal with it in the main as poetry.
Moreover, the historical character of the poems, in
the inner sense of the term, is independent of what
may be called their technical or formal truth. Even
if the facts were freely exaggerated, or otherwise
altered for the purpose of poetical effect, nay, even if
invented for that purpose, the poems might still be
historical in the most material respects. All those
glimpses of the prior and general history of the race,
which they permit rather than promise, might still be
correct to the letter. The portraiture of religion,
manners, institutions, arts, might be entirely trust-
worthy. The psychology of the poems in its largest
sense might be absolutely true: the state and scale of
the human mind, thought, language, and character,
might be the same; just as, in the Carolingian and
Arthurian romance, we never regard the truth of the
manners as dependent upon the truth of the facts;
and indeed in these, especially in the last-named, it is
54
[CHAP.
HOMER.
difficult to connect the two. In the case of Homer,
on the other hand, it is rather difficult to sever
them. Even the Dorian Revolution, in its terrible and
destructive sweep, bears an indirect witness to the
fidelity of Homer. The political and social disor-
ganisation, for which the Iliad prepares us by the
prolonged absence of the princes and mightiest
men, and which the Odyssey depicts in the dominions
of a particular chief, are the very causes which, most
of all in a young society, would effectually pave the
way for a barbarising, reactionary change such as we
recognise in that Revolution.
CHAPTER IV.
COSMOLOGY.
1. Earth the Centre of the System.-This
earth was for the poet, as it continued to be for the
civilised world through many more than two thousand
years after his time, the solid centre of the Kosmos or
universe, that is to say the ordered aggregate of
material things; a word unknown to him, like the
name by which he passes, but needful to enable us to
deal with his ideas in this department as a whole.
His
2. Habitable Space. A. Olumpos.
division of habitable space was fourfold:-First,
the summit and upper regions of Mount Olumpos
were poetically conceived as of an indefinite height,
wholly beyond the reach of human eye or foot, en-
larged by a like process into ample dimensions, and
associated with the higher aërial region (aither), as the
one proper for celestial movement. Here dwelt the
gods in palaces, the main one certainly and the rest
probably, burnished bright with copper, and construc-
ted for them by Hephaistos, the artificer of the order,
and the source and type of metallic art for men.
IV.]
55
COSMOLOGY.
3. B. The Earth-surface and solid.-The earth-
surface, and the bosom of this great teeming mother, as
far as it was accessible to human toil, were given for
the residence and use of the living tenants. But in
the farthest tract west, or north of west, was thought to
lie a happy region ever fertile, clear in atmosphere,
unvexed with storms, to which at death certain pre-
ferred souls would be sent by the Immortals.
It has been thought that Homer conceived of the
earth as a plane surface. But he speaks of the broad
back of the sea; and the sea, to an acute organ, does
not suggest a plane. It is the sea alone which conveys
to the view the notion of the curvature of the globe.
His eye, in watching ships or coast elevations, had
probably convinced him of the curvature on all sides
of the earth's surface, which is well represented by the
round shield. This figure, as derived from the human
back, and more especially from the backs of animals,
is appropriate to the description of a broad or large
curvature, but not to what is absolutely flat. It is
applied to hills; but never to a plane surface.
4. C. Hades.-a. But the clearest proof that Homer
did not conceive the earth to be flat is to be drawn
from combining together the following particulars. He
believed Hades, the place of the dead, to be under-
neath our feet, and phrases signifying downward move-
ment into this region are habitual with him. The
river Peneios was a branch or arm of Styx; and
therefore communicated with it underground. A sup-
pliant, in addressing the god Aïdoneus, embraces the
ground. Tartaros, as far below Hades as the heaven
stands from the earth, is in the deepest cleft or hollow
of the "ground."
b. Yet there is nowhere a reference to any passage
through the solid ground; and, on the contrary, both
Odusseus, in his visit to the Under-world, and the
spirits of the Suitors also, are distinctly represented as
travelling to it along the surface. At the farthest
56
[CHAP.
HOMER.
point of this, Odusseus has to navigate, for a distance
not measured, the great earth-surrounding river Okea-
nos; and, on the farther side of the stream, he enters
the realm of Aïdes and Persephonè.
c. In the sky, which Homer may have thought to
be a solid, the moon and stars perform their revolutions,
and the Sun travels daily from the eastern to the
western horizon. Finding his way onward from his
resting-place, he is again ready in the morning for his
work. But he appears to pass over the tract of Hades,
for he threatens the Olympian Assembly that, unless
they duly support his dignity, he will cease shining for
them, and will pour his light upon the region of the
dead.
5. D. Tartaros.-The fourth division of the
Kosmos is altogether special and preternatural. It
is called Tartaros. Man has no concern with it; even
criminals of our race are punished in the less profound
Under-world. It is "in the lowest deep a lower deep,"
reserved for the wicked and rebellious Immortals; it
is the counterpart of heaven, standing to the Under-
earth as the heaven stands to the Upper or inhabited
world-surface.
6. Poetical Licence.-The poet had not the
means, and probably did not care, to apply an exact
mensuration to conceptions lying beyond the bounds
of sense and experience, in the case either of his
Heaven or his Under-world. Yet we are compelled by
the foregoing facts to assume that in his mind he
vaguely folded the earth-surface into a solid, and gave
it a mouth or aperture beneath. This supposition is
favoured by the fact that the Chaldæan cosmologists
conceived the earth to be shaped spherically like an
orange, but with a part sliced off the top, the flat side
representing the entrance into Hades.
7. Figure of the Earth-surface.-As to the
superficial form of the earth, we have a guide to the
ideas of Homer in the famous account of the Shield
v.]
57
GEOGRAPHY.
of Achilles, with its various compartments. Round
the whole runs the river Okeanos. This arrangement
shows that he gave to the earth-surface the form of a
shield. But he has shields which are oblong and
compared to a tower, as that of Aias; and also shields
which are circular, and compared to the moon. Of
these two forms, it does not seem quite certain which
he meant to suggest. It has been common to suppose
it was the round form. This best lends itself to the
arrangement probably signified for the compartments,
with the earth and celestial bodies in the centre; and
also to the expression at the close about the mighty
ocean-river flowing round about the shield.
8. Conventional and Mythological Division.
-Such, as far as it can be made out, is the true
physical cosmology on which the poems are based.
They have however another conventional or mytho-
logical scheme, according to which the four divisions.
are: 1. Heaven, or the upper region, both of aither,
or clear air, and of aer, cloud or vapour. This is given to
Zeus by lot. 2. Sea, given in like manner to Poseidon.
3. Hades, the third share, falls to Aïdoneus. 4. The
Earth, including Olumpos, is common ground for all.
CHAPTER V.
GEOGRAPHY.
1. Homer's Means of Knowledge in Geo-
graphy. In order to estimate the geography of
Homer, that is to say his knowledge of the several
configurations upon the surface of the earth, the first
requisite is to remember that, while we draw from
maps accurately measured, he drew only from his
own experience, and from oral report. Again, the
knowledge conveyed by mere experience to an indi-
vidual in topography, which is a small fragment, as it
58
[CHAP.
HOMER.
were, broken off from geography, may be tolerably
complete; but, as far as it is on a larger scale, must be
vague. Distances were only measured by the eye,
and by time in traversing them. The bearings of
land and sea were taken with reference to the points
of the compass, which he knew only in connection
with the sun, rising and setting at given points, and
with four winds. Between these he divided the
entire circle of the horizon; so that the winds of
Homer are not mere indications of points but cover
large arcs. They are
1. Boreas, from N. to E. but leaning to N.
2.
Zephuros, from N. to W. but leaning to W.
3. Euros, from E. to S. but leaning to E.
4. Notos, from W. to S. but leaning to S.
2. Countries apprehended by Phoenician
Report.-Again, as to what he knew by report. Where
the region was one frequented by his countrymen, he
would have the opportunity of correcting error by
various and repeated information. Beyond the sphere
of Hellenic experience, he depended upon foreigners,
that is to say, upon the great navigators of the day,
called Phoenicians. The regions made known by
them may be recognised by these two marks-first
they are the seat of the marvellous; secondly, he
(save once) never defines at all the sea-distances
between two of them, but only between some one
of them and some point of the Hellenic lands, to
which he applies his usual measure of so many days'
voyage with a favourable wind. These two spheres,
of Hellenic and Phoenician experience respectively, it
may be convenient to call by the names of the Inner
and the Outer Geography. There is also a border-land
between them, embracing especially the coasts and
countries of the South-east Mediterranean, in which
Menelaos travels, and which the poet treats as lands of
fact, not of fiction. As to the hearsay derived from
the Phoenicians, we should bear in mind that early
v.]
59
GEOGRAPHY.
navigators exaggerate without fear, both to enhance the
interest of their tales, and to deter inquirers from
trespassing on the ground where they drive a profitable
business; yet so that some features of the original
can commonly be traced in the caricature.
3. Countries Known by Experience.-In
two cases alone, those of Ithaca and of the Trojan
Plain, has Homer given us indications so minute as
to be properly topographical; but he had a fair
general acquaintance with the island group in the
north-east of the Archipelago. The only country of
which he shows a passable geographical knowledge is
continental Greece, including Thessaly on the east as
far as Mount Pindos, but not extending on the west
beyond Aitolia; and including also one or two of the
islands. His description
His description is here thickly studded with
towns, inland as well as on the coast. Among the
Boiotoi alone we have twenty-seven, with a rich
abundance of visible characteristics; such as well-
built, wealthy, beautiful, lofty.
There are no tracts to the west of Greece which
we can bring within the Inner Geography; nor has
the poet a single trustworthy trace of the Italian
peninsula. On the north, his account of Scheriè
seems to be based upon the reports of navigators
about Corfu; but he evidently places it, on his
brain-map, at a point much beyond the actual
distance. Moreover, although he enumerates the
names of certain tribes beyond the Balkans, he looks
upon Pieria, immediately contiguous to Thessaly,
as the limit of the land northwards, and the great
northern and north eastern mass of Europe was taken
by him to be sea. He knew generally the position
of the Bosporos, and had a certain amount of in-
formation on the northern, as well as on the western,
coast of Asia Minor. But, in the Trojan Catalogue
of the Second Iliad, Miletos is the only town men-
tioned upon the whole length of these coasts: the
6
60
[CHAP.
HOMER.
mountains he names are coast mountains, and there
is not a single passage indicating knowledge of the
interior. Beyond Lycia he gives no particulars; but
knows the general position of Phoenicia, with Sidon,
of Egypt, and of a limited tract to the westward,
which he terms Libya. All this country would appear
to form the extreme limit of even rare Greek visits,
and, in a qualified sense only, to belong to the Inner
Geography, or land of fact.
4. The Outer Geography, Eastwards.
The Outer Geography, or wonderland, has for its
exterior boundary the great river Okeanos, a noble
conception, in everlasting flux and reflux, roundabout
the territory given to living man. On its farther bank
lies the entrance to the Under-world; and the passage,
which connects the sea. (Thalassa, or Pontos) with
Okeanos, lies in the east: "where are the abodes of
the morning-goddess, and the risings of the sun"
(Od. xii. 3). Here, however, he makes his hero
confess that he is wholly out of his bearings, and
cannot well say where the sun is to set or rise (Od. x.
139). This bewildered state of mind may be reason-
ably explained. The whole northern region, of sea as
he supposed it, from west to east, was known to him
only by Phoenician reports. Cne of these told him
of a Kimmerian land deprived perpetually of sun or
daylight. Another of a land, also in the north, where
a man, who could dispense with sleep, might earn
double wages, as there was hardly any night. He
probably had the first account from some sailor who
had visited the northern latitudes in summer; and the
second from one who had done the like in winter.
They were at once true, and for him irreconcilable.
So he assigned the one tale to a northern country
(Kimmeriè) on the ocean-mouth eastwards, near the
island of Kirkè, and the other to the land of the Lais-
trugones westwards but also northern, and lying at
some days distance from Aioliè: but was compelled,
v.].
61
GEOGRAPHY.
by the ostensible contradiction, to throw his latitudes
into something like purposed confusion.
5. Thence Round by North and West.-
While these lands, and the island of Kalupso, seem to
be his farthest northward points, we have also the
island called Aioliè, from which a Zephuros brought
him in ten days sailing within sight of Ithaca. This
therefore lay between the west, and the north-west. It
was, in the poet's mind, a clear open sea all the way.
In the west, also, we find the Islands of the Blest, to
which Menelaos has a promise of translation on his
death. We then, moving southwards, come to the north
coast of Africa, on which Mr. Brown has shown that we
ought to place the land of the Kuklopes. After them,
as we move eastwards, we reach the Lotos-Eaters. The
next tract is Libya, which is inhabited by men of no
unusual stamp: and. at this point we have left the
sphere of the Outer-world. From hence round to the
Black Sea, passing east and northward, all is at least
partially known: and again we are in the waters of
Aiaiè, Kirkè's isle, where we entered the zone of the
Outer Geography.
6. The Inner Geography.--The home, or Inner
Geography of Homer, is limited, at the most, to the
Greek Peninsula, with a few neighbouring islands,
and to the line of coast which may be followed by
the eye from Aitolia to the Dardanelles, and from
about Sinopè to a point a little beyond Egypt to
the west.
7. Relation of the Two. In the outer zone,
considered as a whole, we find no trace of local con-
figuration as it actually exists; but particular traits of
spots and regions are put together by the poet in
his brain, and set down upon an imagined earth-
surface as he best can. Unhappily many writers.
have insisted upon forcing the poetical unity of his
brain-chart, not indeed into conformity, but into
general and systematic relation to the geographical
62
[CHAP.
HOMER.
realities, with the necessary result of breaking up
the first, and yet establishing no clear or coherent
connection with the second.
8. Route of Odusseus.-According to the
view here given, the voyage of Odusseus first goes
(in the reverse order to that of the outline just given)
southward as far as Africa; then westward along
the African coast; then northwards to Aioliè. From
hence still further north, first in the west, then in
the east, where day and night each in turn cover the
entire circle of the twenty-four hours. From the east-
ward part of these regions, he visits the Under-world.
He is then directed homewards by a narrow passage,
near the Bosporos, and the route of the ship Argo.
He reaches accordingly Thrinakiè, the island of the
Sun, and seemingly a transcript, as to form, of Sicily;
but transplanted eastwards by the poet, probably
from his associating together the reports of the Strait
of Messina and what he had learned of the Bosporos.
Next, a tempest, beginning from (notos) the south-
west, drives him back northwards through the narrows;
he arrives at Ogugiè, the island of Kalupso, the central
point of the unbounded sea. From thence a passage
of more than seventeen days finally brings him to
Scheriè, on the border of the known geographical
sphere. But, according to the methods of interpre-
tation which have been principally in vogue, the
movements of Odusseus never embraced the east and
north at all, and did not reach westwards beyond
Sicily, the Lipari Islands, and the coast about
Naples.
9. Arrangement of the Catalogues. — In
the Achaian Catalogue, the poet arranges the different
territories, members of the Greek unity, in the relative
positions known to the historic times. At least this
is true as to Southern and Middle Greece, with the
Greek islands: it is more difficult to trace his Thessa-
lian divisions, where the political divisions are less
v.]
63
GEOGRAPHY.
sharply marked. He places all in contiguous groups,
evidently by way of context, to assist the memory:
and he appears to pursue a similar plan in the Trojan
Catalogue. Even in Greece, his ideas of internal
distances can be but vaguely inferred: his sea distances
about the Archipelago, and as far as Egypt, are better
marked.
10. Topography of Ithaca.-In Ithaca there is
no cause to impeach his topography as far as it can
be traced; except that, mentioning its two great
eminences, he gives to Mount Neritos, the southern
one, a preference which it does not deserve, the two
heights being nearly equal: and the greatest diameter
or axis of the island is also inclined too much to the
westward. Its harbour is described with pointed
correctness, as is its general form, and the lower
elevation of the tract towards the north. The spot
now called Polis agrees with all his indications of the
capital, in which the Suitors lived dissolutely, and
where Odusseus had held his paternal reign. There
is no other island, to which his descriptions could be
made over.
II. Topography of the Trojan Plain.-
Equally is this true of the plain in Troas, to which he
has given an immortality of fame. Here the operations
of two armies require a topography both comprehensive
and minute. We have the limiting lines of Ida and
the sea, the Scamandrian plain, near the River Scaman-
dros, forming the north and west portion of the plain
of Troy; the Ileian plain, lying south and perhaps
east from the city; the plain mentioned generally,
and the roll or shelf (throsmos) upon it; the junction
of the rivers Simoeis and Scamander, and yet their
two separate mouths; the ford which crosses the
Xanthos. Then there is the line of ships along the
shore from east to west, with the quarters of Aias and
Achilles, perhaps as the strongest among the chiefs,
at the two extremities.
64
[CHAP.
HOMER.
lf
12. Position and Notes of the City.—An
examination of the position taken by Arès (xx. 48-53)
when the Theomachy approaches, tends to show that
the city was near the Simoeis. This corresponds with
the belief suggested by the discoveries of Schliemann,
that the hill of Hissarlik was the site of Troy.
this were the site, the movements of the chiefs and
armies between the town and camp come within
limits locally admissible. We have then the Skaian
gates of the town, towards the shore, and the Dardanian
towards the old mother-city on the roots of Ida.
Near the Skaian entry is the phēgos, believed to be a
kind of oak: near the city are also the wild fig-tree ;
the tomb of king Ilos its founder, a point convenient
for watch outwards; and a waggon-road, so called
probably because the lighter chariot was more free in
its range over uneven ground. There is also the
mound of Aisuetes northwards, and the hillock Batieia
to the south. The interior of the city receives marks
of individuality in the great Tower upon the wall; the
palaces of Priam, Paris, and Hector; the temples of
Apollo and Athenè on the summit.
13. Identification and Accuracy.-The identi-
fication of these descriptions with the country is
undeniable. The most serious question raised with
respect to their accuracy and coherency appears to be
that suggested by the separate mouths of rivers which
have by joining become one. It seems possible, how-
ever, that this junction was by a bed dry in summer,
but filled at other seasons by the floods. This would
well allow the separate mouths; and it is in some
degree supported by the invitation of Scamandros to
his brother Simoeis in the Twenty-first Book to join him
for the purpose of overwhelming the fatal Achilles with
their united waters.
VI ]
65
MYTHOLOGY.
CHAPTER VI.
MYTHOLOGY; OR, THE OLYMPIAN SYSTEM.
1. Marked Features of the Scheme.-A
great variety of causes invest the Homeric mythology,
which I have called the Olympian system, with an ex-
traordinary interest. One among these is the strong,
subtle, and highly dramatic conception of many
of the personages. Another is their sympathy and
communion with the action of the poems through-
out. A third is the principle of anthropophuism, to
which they are generally made to conform, and
through which they reflect the image of a peculiar
magnified humanity on a very grand scale. Fourthly,
the composite nature of the system, and the relations
of its various members to various portions of the
human family, exhibit to us the Greek or Achaian
nation in process of construction through manifold
influences and admixtures, and supply us with a key to
much of the ethnology of the poems and the time.
Fifthly, the idea of the Olympian system is closely
associated with the progress and consummation of
Greek Art. Sixthly, in this splendid work of Art, for
such it is itself, we trace the real elements of worship
and of an ethical system, deriving its strength from
obligations to an unseen Power; to a plurality, which
is also to a great extent an unity, and which rules the
world. Lastly, while some portions of the scheme
point us towards an earlier and also a ruder state,
and others in the direction of a later and corrupt
civilisation, a third portion reveals a primitive basis
of monotheism, and ideas in connection with it,
which seem to defy explanation, except when we
compare them with the most ancient of the Hebrew
traditions.
66
[CHAP.
HOMER.
2. The Zeus of Homer.-As respects the
drawing of character, I would select from the poems
of Homer, as examples, his Zeus, his Hera, his
Athenè, his Thetis, and his Iris. In the conception
of Zeus, we find the most varied assemblage of
elements. He combines, more than any other deity,
the human and the theistic quality; and in his charac-
ter as a god exhibits the profound moral attributes of
an original monotheism. At one time he is the ideal
Providence, upholding the order and the whole frame
of things. At another, he is the civil governor in the
skies, curbing and controuling with a true political spirit
the newly-compacted society of gods over whom he
rules. Here he often closely resembles Agamemnon ;
but by and bye he will touch also upon Falstaff. We
owe to him by etymology the word jovial; and it is
truly descriptive of his character on its human side.
As the very size and immeasurable waist of Falstaff
have to do with the character of his mind, so large-
ness in all things is an unfailing characteristic of
Zeus. His intrigues are unbounded. His roguish
joy in witnessing from Ida the struggles of an
Achaian with a Trojan soldiery, may call up the
recollection of the rich humour of Shakespeare's
knight on the peppering of his recruits. But the
same sentiment rises out of this miniature to a higher
scale and level, when he comes to revel in that fierce
encounter of the gods, which made Aïdoneus, king
below, shudder and bound from off his throne, lest
the crust of earth itself should break beneath their
strokes and movements, and the ever-unseen realm
at length yawn visibly before mortals and immortals
too. "Go ye," he says to them (xx. 22) with a
strange mixture of merriment and malice, “go ye
among the Achaians and the Trojans; I bide here
in the bosom of Olumpos, to delight my soul as I
look on." And again (xxi. 389), "His soul laughed
within him, as he beheld the gods falling to in battle."
VI.]
67
MYTHOLOGY.
Yet, behind the complex and ever-active theotechnic
machinery of the poem, with its thundering wheels
and mythological paraphernalia, there is still the pres-
ence and operation of an august personage, who has
regard to piety wherever it is found; "Even in their
perishing, I care for them" (xx. 21); and who works
incessantly, effectively, and without noise for the per-
manent ends of justice among men, which were signally
wrought out by the punishment and fall of guilty Troy.
That figure is no other than Zeus in his higher capacity.
He loved Troy for its abundant sacrifices; but his
higher character forbade his acting to avert its doom.
The same ideas operate in the Odyssey, where (except
to avenge a high profanation offered to the god
Helios) he never intervenes at all until a few lines
before the close. In the Iliad mainly, in the Odyssey
entirely, his will is worked out by other divine agents,
themselves exercising their personal freedom, but
bringing about the purposes of a counsel higher and
larger than their own. This counsel has its back-
ground and its ultimate root in pure deity, and for
pure deity Zeus is often a synonym in Homer.
3. His Grandeur.-Wherever he intervenes,
even though outwitted or over-persuaded on the
point immediately at issue, it is invariably with
grandeur. Won by Thetis, he accords to her only a
symbol in the nod which shakes Olumpos, and keeps.
his counsel to himself. Circumvented and enticed by
Hera, his indulgence is veiled in a cloud of golden
beauty, to which Earth answers by a burst of fresh
herbage and choice flowers. He indicates his great
decrees on the issues of battle by exhibiting his
balances in the skies.
Besides the
4. The Prayer of Achilles.
solemn but shadowy figure, visible behind the general
theurgy of the poems, we have a more distinct mani-
festation in a solemn prayer, uttered by Achilles at
the critical moment, when he is sending forth his loved
68
[СНАР.
HOMER.
Patroclos to the war. This prayer is of a kind rare
in the poems, in which a human being asks anything
on behalf of another human being, and not simply for
himself. Though Hera and Athenè had been the
deities, who interposed to prevent his going to violence
with Agamemnon in the first Book, he does not pray
to either of these, but to the Supreme. The god is
addressed as the Zeus of Dodona, the Pelasgic Zeus
of the old inhabitants; but having also the Helloi
for his ministers, sires of the Hellenic race. More-
over, they are represented as serving him, not as
a priestly caste with sacrifices, but as hupophetai,
interpreters and declarers of his will. Thus he is
signified as the god of wide power, the god of no single
race, the god that looks for obedience, and towards
whom we have the ties of moral obligation.
this prayer there is in truth a noteworthy absence of
what may be termed pagan elements, and a marked
exhibition of the idea of supreme and governing
godhead.
In
5. The Athenè of Homer.-Less diversified
in ingredients, but as to some points even more in-
teresting, is the wonderful character of Athenè, which
I at once present, because, while Hera is mythologi-
cally nearer to Zeus, his great daughter is nearer to
him in the intellectual and spiritual order. As the
anthropomorphic tracings are deepest upon the Zeus of
Homer, so they are the least legible upon his Athenè.
She is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of
sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except
the form, sublimated and made awful with fire (glau-
kopis) flashing from the eye. She is a true impersona-
tion of the logos or reason; not of abstract intuitions,
but of an operative understanding, which never errs
in fitting means to ends. While Zeus has the cares
and weight of a general sovereignty, and wakes as the
rest both of gods and men are sleeping, Athenè has a
narrower sphere, but is more completely mistress in it;
vi.]
69
MYTHOLOGY.
shows no sign of being oppressed by her responsibili-
ties, and never on any single occasion fails to attain
her aim.
6. Her Relation to Morality.-Though she
works in concurrence with general justice, and with the
providential order, she is certainly in morals no purist,
for she claims an unrivalled excellence in wile and
stratagem. From the licentious elements, on the other
hand, which Syrian and other Eastern communications
were already forcing into the Olympian system, her
nature is wholly abhorrent. So much so, that through
the long ages of its progressive corruption she remains
the Virgo intemerata, wholly untainted by it. The
magnificent intellectual power, of which she is the
representative, is neither degraded at any point by
appetite, nor ever disturbed by passion. Sleepless
and active as the merest political partisan, she is as
calm as if she dwelt in the stillness of an Epicurean
heaven. Most other gods, and even Zeus himself,
may be greedy of sacrifice, its fume and flavour: but
neither the savoury reek from earth, nor the cup of
ambrosia at Olympian banquets, are ever associated
with her individually as enjoying them. She moves
upon an orbit of mind alone: and, whatever may
have been elsewhere or before, neither in Homer,
nor in the after-time, is she ever connected with
a Nature-Power. Indeed, she is scarcely ever de-
scribed by epithets of personal beauty. Homer has
kept carefully in the background the legend of the
original offence which was given by Paris to Athenè
and to Hera, in awarding the prize of beauty to Aphro-
ditè. He makes but one allusion to it, near the close
of the Iliad. It was a Troic legend, and did not well
assort with the nobleness of the picture, by which he
meant to present Athenè to his countrymen. Whether
her name represents the dawn in an Eastern tongue,
or is inverted from the Neith of Egypt, or what else,
matters little. It is not unlikely that the Apollo of
70
[CHAP.
HOMER.
Homer's time was associated, in the religion of Troas,
with the Sun; but in the Olympian system the connec-
tion is carefully shut out by giving to the Sun a well-
marked separate individuality. That system is not so
exclusively Greek, as to exclude exotic personages;
but every deity, that has a ruling force within the
circle of Achaian life, is strictly cast by Homer in
the mould of Achaian ideas. Nowhere outside her-
self has she contact with material nature: she is,
though in bodily form, a mental organism.
7. Her eminently Practical Character.-
But we must beware of viewing her through the
rather opaque veil of the Roman and later mytho-
logy, which, recognising her as a goddess of thought,
overlooks the fact that she is above all things the
goddess of action. As the working reason, she moulds
daily practice: influences the minds of men; nay,
darkens them penally, by obduracy of heart, in the
case of the guilty Suitors of the Odyssey, even as in
Scripture God, we are told, hardened the heart of
Pharaoh. She, and she alone of the whole Olympian
Court, stands in such close, inward, personal relations
to the soul and spirit of the individual man, as even
to recall the ideas which form the main basis of the
Hebrew Psalter.
8. Her Diversified Attributes: War.-But
besides being, in a peculiar and enlarged sense, the
goddess of conduct, she has three other great func-
tions she is the goddess of War, the goddess of
industrial production, and the goddess of Polity.
In the first of these three capacities she appears on
the Shield of Achilles, together with Arès; and they
are the heads of the rival armies. But her superiority
to him in war is unquestionable: she gives that force
to the spear of Diomed which pierces his divine flesh,
and sends him howling to Olumpos: she lays him.
prostrate with a mighty stone, when he stretches over
seven (say) roods of land, his arms rattling around
VI.)
71
MYTHOLOGY.
him, and his hair begrimed with dust. When, with
Hera, she descends in the fifth Iliad to assist the
Greeks, she casts away her feminine mantle, puts on
the tunic, assumes the gold-tasseled imperishable aigis,
grasps the stout and mighty spear, and mounts into the
chariot as the warrior-deity, while Hera is content
to drive. But she represents intelligent war, Arès
merely the brute work of destruction.
9. Industry. Again, she is the goddess of in-
dustrial production. She instructed Penelopè, and
the women of Scheriè; she inspired artificers, not only
the shipbuilder and the carpenter, but the smith
also, thus overlapping the province of Hephaistos,
like that of Arès, by virtue of her higher place and
origin. When the daughters of Pandareos receive
their accomplishments from the several deities, she
endows them with industrial skill. This function
might perhaps be thought to belong more strictly
to the attributes of the "beneficial" Hermes, who
appears to be the god of gain and increase. Possibly
he may be conceived as the mercantile deity of com-
munication and exchange, she as the goddess of what
we term manufacture. But his possession of the
industrial attribute would, as we have seen from the
case of Arès, be no obstruction to her paramount
hold upon it.
10. Polity.—But, as the wisdom-goddess, she is also
the state-goddess; for already, in the Greek idea, the
State was the highest incorporation of wisdom. From
this office are derived many of her epithets: people-
leading, city-guarding, protectress, and the like. It
is probably in this capacity, as defender of States,
that she is invoked by the Trojans in their difficulty:
for, in the immediate matter of the War, she was their
active opponent. But State-care
But State-care is only a branch
of her vast and active power in the superintendence
of men. And, as we have already seen her covering
the mythological ground of Arès and Hephaistos, so
7
72
[CHAP.
HOMER.
in her political attributes she takes up the higher
aspect of the work, that pure mythology seems to
assign to Themis. Her special relation to the city of
Athens is indicated, but not developed.
II. Her Rank and Birth.-In the character of
Athenè there is a very strong element of self-assertion.
As a partisan of the Achaian cause, she incurs the dis-
pleasure and even the threats of Zeus and she is ex-
hibited as having joined in the grand conspiracy to
dethrone him, which Thetis baffled. Her power is
conceived of so highly, that it seems scarcely to bear
a superior. Down to the time of Horace, she stood
as really the second deity in estimation: and, in mere
precedence, she sat by Zeus at the Olympian banquet,
but probably on the left hand, with Hera on the right.
In the later ages, we have the fully-developed legend
that she sprang, adult and full-armed, from the head of
Zeus. Of this legend some words of Homer (77. v. 880)
appear to convey the substance: and her exemption
from the ordinary law of generation must indicate an
extraordinary nearness to the chief of the gods.
12. Source of the Homeric Conception.-
Even what has here been said must raise the question,
From whence has a conception so powerful and lofty
as that of the Homeric Athenè been obtained? Most
of the Olympian gods, though they are all more or
less costumed, so to speak. in divine attributes, yet
seem to carry them as attached from without, and to
want the highest basis for their character. In this sub-
lime personage we begin to suspect that we are dealing
with something profoundly divine. It would require
an investigation wholly beyond the bounds of this
work to show in what minute and comprehensive
detail the character is developed throughout the poems.
In general terms, her traits are an intellectual supre-
macy, a perfect exemption from infirmity, a complete
detachment from the material world and the limita-
tions of time and space, worship apparently universal,
vi.]
73
MYTHOLOGY.
the possession of the largest theistic attributes, un-
wearied activity in the work of a living Providence,
uncontrolled dominion over nature and the mind.
13. Relation to Apollo: Resemblances and
Differences.-Most of these traits she shares with
Apollo, and with him only; and these two are, in
certain recurring formulæ or stock-lines, associated, as
enjoying superior and distinctive honour, sometimes
alone, sometimes together with Zeus. The main
differences are, that Apollo is less transcendent in
intellect, and less active as a Providence.
On the
other hand, he has a special office as the minister of
death; the gift of unsealing the future; and above
all an unvarying conformity to the will of Zeus, to
which he frequently receives a special commission to
give effect. In her, there is a marked resemblance
to the Hebrew tradition of the Logos. He rather
corresponds with the Seed of the woman, which was
to bruise the serpent's head, while the serpent bruised
the woman's heel. So in Homer Apollo appears as
the destroyer of rebels against deity, his mother Leto
as having had violence offered her by one of them
(Tituos); and the god himself as signally honoured
at Putho, the Delphoi of after-times, a place which
tradition associates with the ancient worship of the
serpent.
14. The Hera of Homer.-The character of
Hera is less intellectual, less complex, less wakeful,
less sublime; but more human, more within the manner
of our understandings, than that of Athenè. As the
sister and the wife of Zeus, we must understand her
to enjoy precedence in Olumpos. But no more can
she in importance, than in sublimity, be compared to
the goddess of the flashing eye. They are however
in no sense rivals, and they act in a singular harmony
together.
15. Reflected Prerogatives of Zeus.-The
grandest element in the character of Hera is her
74
[CHAP.
HOMER.
power over nature. She conducted the ship of Jason
through the perilous passage of the Sumplegades.
She, and she only, after Zeus, commands the services
of Iris, the messenger or angel-goddess. She orders
the Sun to return to rest, that the long day, which was
to be the last of Trojan prosperity, may reach its
close; and he obeys. As she despatched Athenè to
restrain the hand of Achilles in the great debate, and
thus to save the life of Agamemnon, so with Athenè,
when the King goes forth to fight, so she thunders
in his honour. It seems quite evident, that these
prerogatives are as it were reflected upon her by
her intimate association with Zeus: for they are
not sustained by any other corresponding qualities of
character or office.
16. She is eminently National.-She is in
truth, as will have been seen from this enumeration,
a great national divinity: and in Argolis, the seat of
Pelopid power, she retained through after ages the para-
mount place, in that capacity, which the poems give
her. As she stands in Homer, she is without doubt
no part of an original or pure tradition, but is pro-
bably the Hellenised form into which certain other
traditions, older or foreign, had been refined. Her
name suggests a substantial identity with Era, as the
Earth-goddess. We have accordingly no acknowledged
earth-goddess in the poems: but a Gaia only, so with-
drawn from action, and so dimly impersonated, as to
be invisible, and wholly shut out from rivalry. Also
a Demeter, who seems to have been the Earth-mother,
or Mother-earth, in some other old Pelasgic thearchy,
and who is similarly thrown into the background. It
is perhaps in accommodation to this arrangement
that, in his mythological distribution of the parts of
the universe, Homer has not allotted the earth to any
one in particular, but leaves it to be used in common
by each of the three divine brethren. Again, the
epithet boöpis, or ox-eyed, constantly applied to Hera,
vi.]
75
MYTHOLOGY.
may signify a relation to the Egyptian Isis and the
ox-head. From the uniform practice of Homer, we
may be sure he would, in using any conceptions
drawn from nature-worship or animal-worship, first
pass them through the crucible of his imagination, to
bring them into conformity with the anthropomorphic
conditions imposed by his Olympian scheme. The
strictly Achaian nationality of Hera, national as against
the foreigner, and national as distinguished from
Athenè's providential care of the individual, is by
nothing more clearly shown, than by her entire dis-
appearance from the action of the Odyssey.
17. Lack of Special Attributes.-Except when
we regard Hera as a kind of moon to Zeus, shining
by a portion of his light, her mythological attributes
are not sharply marked. She has not a direct rela-
tion to child-bearing, though she can control the Eili-
thuiai, who have one, probably as she controls other
natural agents. In equipping the daughters of Pan-
dareos with gifts, her share was to bestow beauty,
and a quality called pinute, by which, as it is used in
Homer, I understand not intellectual excellence (for it
is assigned to the Telamonian Aias), but good manners,
or breeding; a sense of the becoming. It may excite
surprise that the gift of beautiful form should not pro-
ceed from Aphroditè, who is herself (I. ix. 329) the
selected model of it. But this deity, recognised in
the Troic legend of the Judgment of Paris, and
making way at the Achaian period from the east, by
Cyprus and Kuthera, towards Greece, does not seem
to have been yet recognised in the peninsula itself.
In the Iliad, the circumstances give her a place on
the side of Troy; but she is made odious and con-
temptible by her weakness and cowardice, as well as
by her merely sensual character. She is a member of
the Olympian Court; but one of the last in rank and
efficacy. Artemis the pure is a donor to the daughters
of Pandareos; she gives them stature. But Aphroditè
76
[CHAP.
HOMER.
has only the subordinate office of making application
to Zeus on the subject of their marriages.
18. Womanhood in Hera.-The feminine
character, however, is strongly marked, and by no
means on its higher side, in Hera. In the fourteenth
Iliad we are shown its sensual aspect; but this is
thoroughly subordinated to a political object in the
interest of the Achaians, and she carries through her
plan with all possible tact and craft. More enjoy-
able is the sharpness of the jealous eye, with which,
in the first Iliad, she divines that Zeus had been
holding a conversation with Thetis, and sets vigorously
to work to worm it out of him. She does not quite
succeed; but she well understands the art of giving
herself value by making him uncomfortable. Accord-
ingly, when he sends Iris with a very menacing message
to recall her and Athenè peremptorily from the Plain,
he says he will teach Glaukōpis (I. viii. 406) not to
fight against her sire; "but as to Hera, I do not take.
so much account of it, or put myself in a passion, for
she is always meddling, whatever I may be about."
19. The Thetis of Homer.-The character of
Thetis is as much more graceful than Hera, as it is
less majestic. It is strongly maternal; and she even
assumes a dark mourning garb, to share in the grief
of Achilles for Patroclos. Yet it has not lost the
archness of coquetry: and when in the first Book
she carries to Zeus the important petition on which
hangs the main action of the poem, and he, antici-
pating trouble from Hera, remains silent, she, having
already embraced him by the knees with one arm and
touched him under the chin with her right hand,
poutingly insists that he shall say aye or nay, when
she knows it must be aye; and he has to face a scold-
ing from his Queen accordingly.
20. Her Reconciling Office.-But the charm-
ing picture of the silver-footed goddess, ever fresh from
the sea-bosom when her aid is wanted, is still secondary
VI.]
77
MYTHOLOGY.
to the interest of a great mythologic drama, of which she
is made the central personage. It would appear that,
of all the important figures of his thearchy, this of
Thetis is the one in which Homer has least been a
reporter of current traditions, and which he has most
largely and freely used for his bold constructive
purposes. His office, it must ever be remembered,
was, like that of the War he sang, a nation-making
office. The first factor in the making of a nation is
its religion and he had to compound into unity the
diversified contributions, which had been, and were
being, brought into the country by the various streams
of its population. The old mass, which has been
called Pelasgic, had seemingly various cults, now
embalmed but buried in the verse of Hesiod, of which
the basis is Nature-worship, and which had personages
like Okeanos and Kronos for their heads.
If we may
:
judge from the catalogues of names, each may have
had dominion within a narrow range, and there was no
conceivable tie of unity among them. But, even while
their day lasted, it would appear as if the figure of the
Pelasgic Zeus had towered over all other pretenders
to supremacy; and that, though probably conceived as
an air- and light-god, he was alone possible as a centre
of union, and as a link of connection with the purer
Hellic system that enshrined his name, as well as with
the progressive importations, proceeding mainly from
the south and east. Of the newcomers, the chief were
Poseidon, Hephaistos, Hermes, Aphroditè, Arès. None
of these were so imbued with elemental character, as to
be unfit to figure in his scheme of anthropophuism.
But he had also to deal with the large and various
groups of Nature-powers more or less in possession,
such as Okeanos and Kronos, whom I have named,
the Earth and Sun, whom we know to have been
worshipped by those names in Troy, the old and
genuine water-god Nereus, the Rivers, and many
more, probably including Aïdoneus. With an infinite
78
[CHAP.
HOMER.
ingenuity, he throws back all these personages into sha-
dow: Okeanos is banished, but with respect; Kronos
is penally buried in Tartaros, which doubtless signifies
an active struggle, and the defeat of his worship;
Aïdoneus is invested with a sovereignty, but kept mute
in the Under-world. There also are the River-deities,
to one of whom the spirit of Patroclos is accordingly
charged with a message by Achilles.
21. Her Place as Daughter of Nereus.-
So artful is the poet's method, that he never names
Nereus, the old-elemental god of water (still called
Nero by the Greek population). He presents this
deity as "the aged father in the deep," and signifies
his personal appellation only by the patronymic
Nereides, used for Thetis and her sisters. Now
let us see how he has employed Thetis as a link
of connection between the Pelasgic and Hellenic
systems. As an elemental sea-goddess, she is pro-
perly Pelasgic, and her dwelling is in the unfathomed
depth. But he produces her as married to Peleus,
and as the mother of Achilles, the flower and type,
beyond any other chieftain, of the purest Hellenism.
This is not all. He produces with her, in the eighteenth
Iliad, a train of thirty-three sisters; and some trans-
lators have been puzzled to know why he gives us this
long list of their names, for they say nothing and do
nothing, but simply emerge as companions to Thetis,
and then return to the sea-palace in the shining deep,
while she goes to Olumpos to obtain arms for Achilles.
Now, nothing is so certain as that Homer has not pro-
duced this long train of damsels without a purpose.
What is it? Notice first that the names of his deities
are ordinarily not of Greek derivation. But nearly the
whole of the names of these "ladies," as Lord
Derby calls them, are of the purest Hellenic origin,
and one of them is actually a Doris, akin to the name
of an already known Hellenic tribe. It seems then
that his aim is, through them, to associate the old
vi.]
79
MYTHOLOGY.
sea-god, and the Pelasgian fore-time, with his newly-
sprung Achaian and Olympian system.
22. Zeus and the Great Olympian Feud.—
But the Pelasgic Zeus-and such is the epithet
solemnly given him by the great national hero-
had other rivals to fear, more formidable than these
quiet and but half-animate members of the old
Nature-system. Apollo, indeed, was his sure and
fast friend. But, in shedding off the Pelasgian and
assuming the Hellenic type, he seemingly had to con-
front other deities, with powerful traditions to support
their worships; the great Athenè, Hera with one
hand given seemingly to the old local Gaia, and the
other to the Isis from Egypt, who had undoubted
roots in the country; most of all Poseidon, of whom
it is clear that he came into Greece with all those
called Phœnicians, that is the foreigners, for his wor-
shippers, and from countries over which he had been
supreme. Of this fact I will now mention but one
among the many Homeric traces. It is this: that
in the Odyssey he is apparently revealed to us as
paramount in the southern region of the world, as
well as over the western and northern sea.
He even
presides in the Divine Assembly; and the hall in
which it meets, on this occasion, and on this alone
(Od. viii. 321), is called the "copper-built hall,"
but without the addition that it is the hall "of
Zeus."
23. Interposition of Thetis.-There appears,
then, to have been, consequent on the Phoenician
and Hellic immigrations, a conflict between the
worships of the new and the old inhabitants, which
was requisite to clear the ground for the forma-
tion of the Olympian scheme. Such conflicts are
indicated, in particular cases, as disputes between
particular deities for the possession of particular
towns as Poseidon and Athenè at Athens, Poseidon
and Apollo at Corinth. In such merely local conflicts,
80
[CHAP.
HOMER.
;
Zeus does not appear. But this was on a larger scale
a pervading change in the headship of the territorial
religion. This great transition it appears to be, which
the poet has figured to us in the first Iliad, under the
form of an Olympian legend. It runs to the effect
that Athenè, with Hera and Poseidon, conspired to
put Zeus in chains. They were about to effect their
purpose, when Thetis summoned the great Aigaiōn
with the hundred hands, child of Poseidon, but
mightier than his sire. He came to Olumpos, and
placed himself, in full self-confidence, by the side of
Zeus; whereupon they desisted from their purpose.
This seems to indicate a compromise, under which
the new anthropomorphic ideas and the Hellic tradi-
tions became the ruling factors of the religion, but the
worships come from abroad were fully recognised, and
the old Nature-worship, perhaps symbolised by Aigaiōn,
was found too strong to be cast out, and continued
locally as a kind of Pagan or village cult, while it is of
little note in the literature and educated thought of the
country. Of all this the Thetis of Homer is the clever
and appropriate agent. In a particular case, she had
saved Hephaistos in his youth from being hidden, or
made away with; and, conjointly with a daughter of
Okeanos, she had nursed and reared him down in the
sea-bosom, where the lame but active child, amidst
the music of the murmuring waters, produced the first-
fruits of his art. She is in truth the great mediating
goddess of the Iliad; by whom, both in her wifely and
in her divine capacity, the old Pelasgian agencies are
made to serve the purposes of religious peace, and
both the races and the worships are brought into
reconciliation. It is no wonder, then, that when
she is sent for to the Olympian Court in the twenty-
fourth Iliad, although she is no member of it, and
is therefore of a rank (xx. 106) inferior to that of
Aphroditè, she is treated with an immense respect,
for she sits down by Zeus, Athenè yielding the place.
►
vi.]
81
MYTHOLOGY.
In all this we see the wonderful intertwining of the
celestial and terrestrial spheres in the poems, and their
truly historic aims.
24. The Iris of Homer.-While this noteworthy
Thetis is by extraction a Nature-power, localised in
the country, the Iris of Homer is, like her, confined
to the Iliad, and has no place in the Odyssey, though
he does not present her as a Nature-power at all, and
she has no local relations whatever. Her tie to the
Iliad is ethnical. She has not a world-wide office, like
Zeus, Apollo, or Athene. On her, as on Thetis, the
imagination of the poet has worked powerfully and
freely, but in a form widely different. Thetis avowedly
retains her lineage as daughter of the greybeard of the
sea. But whatever relation Iris has to the rainbow
is carefully and jealously concealed. The names,
indeed, are identical. But iris the rainbow always
has, as might be expected, epithets of colour; Iris
the goddess never. And on one occasion, when she
carries a message to the Winds, at their banquet held
in the house of Zephuros as their primate, and they
welcome her with an eagerness, which may be due
to traditional relationship as well as to gallantry, she
declines to sit down with them, and pleads want of
time. But the cause of her haste is notable.
that she may go to share with the other gods a banquet,
which was entirely for the Olympian Court, on the sacri-
fices of the Aithiopes by the Ocean-shore. Thus she
marks her own position as a goddess not of the
Nature-family, but of the purely Olympian order.
It is
But how did Iris rise so high? Certainly not by her
having a root in a natural phenomenon. She is, on
the contrary, a genuine anthropomorphic conception,
drawn with infinite grace and tenderness, and en-
dowed with singular sense and tact in the execution
of her office as envoy; so that, when she has to carry
to Poseidon a message of rebuke and prohibition,
he is so pleased with her manner of doing it that he
82
[CHAP.
HOMER.
says (xv. 207), "Well is it, when a messenger knows
his business.' Everywhere she is contrasted with the
Nature-powers. Unlike them, she holds her place in
the literature of the country; and, unlike them again,
she has no place in its local worships. Neither a
temple nor a statue of her is mentioned by Pausanias.
25. Apparent Key to the Conception.-Her
function is simply that of a messenger; but, as mes-
senger when writing was not in use, she is also envoy
and agent. She is such at the bidding of Zeus only,
or of Hera in her derivative possession of some of his
prerogatives. She officiates between god and god, or
between god and man. She does not act like Hermes
for the Olympian Court, but for the supreme god
individually. The ground idea of her character as
messsenger is proved by this; that the burly beggar
Antaios of the Odyssey, because he goes from place to
place, and like her, acts as a go-between, is called
Iros.
In the book of Genesis (ix. 11-17) the rainbow is
declared to be from that time forward a messenger
between God and man, for it is to declare to man
the will of the Almighty with regard to the fixed
order of the seasons. If this idea had been tradi-
tionally conveyed from the original source to the
Achaian period and region, we can at once under-
stand how Homer found the tradition, though origi-
nally founded on a natural phenomenon, admirably
suited for that ethereal creation, which he has pre-
sented to us in the buoyant and brilliant form of
his Iris. The rainbow, as a natural power, was in no
proper sense a messenger, so that he did not learn his
lesson from the old Pelasgian cult; there is strong
evidence that it did not come from the bright dry
countries of the southern east, in the exclusion of Iris
from the Outer world of the Odyssey. But every fea-
ture of her character and position tends to ally her
with what I have termed the Hellic tradition.
VI.]
83
MYTHOLOGY.
26. Her Properties as Messenger - God-
dess. Although she is but a sketch, she is one of
those sketches, in which the touch of the incom-
parable master is as clearly seen as in any work of
the most complete development. Only the hand,
that drew Nausicaa on earth, could have drawn Iris
in the skies. She seems lighter than the air itself
upon her golden wings, and the poet always employs
the full resources of pure dactylic verse to signify the
elastic bound, with which she starts upon her missions.
But with all her lightness, she plunges "like lead"
through the waters of the deep, because her swiftness is
even more essential to her even than her lightness. In
full keeping with these, so to speak, physical qualities,
is her ready, nimble mind, her incessant labour for
some purpose of good, not of ill, and the total absence
of every dark or gross or malicious feature from the
really sweet delineation; although, when Zeus has
intimated that he rather wishes his inhibition to.
Pallas to be rough, she, as his faithful organ, shows
that she too keeps a tongue in her head.
27. Glance round the Olympian Court.-I
have thought it better to present with some fulness these
five remarkable specimens of the Homeric thearchy,
than to dwell more briefly and with less freedom upon
each of his Olympian and preternatural personages; in
the hope of thus showing something of the poet him-
self, in a sphere where he is hardly less wonderful or
less interesting, than in his dealing with human agents
and affairs. In handling these five, I have touched
by the way on the offices of Apollo, Hephaistos,
Hermes, Aphroditè, and even Poseidon; I will refer
more slightly still to others.
The Homeric sketch of Artemis is very beautiful
and pure, but slight: with the moon she has no asso-
ciation whatever; it is difficult to trace her origin;
her share in the action is insignificant; she is sorely
belaboured, in the Theomachy, by the strong arm of
8
84
[CHAP.
HOMER.
Hera; but she shares many offices and prerogatives of
Apollo, and seems to reflect him weakly, as Hera
reflected Zeus. The Sun is powerful in the East, but
is wholly exotic, so that the crew of Odusseus en-
deavour to propitiate him by promising to build for him
a temple in Ithaca, that is, to introduce his worship
into the island. Aïdoneus exactly fulfils a definition
of M. Thiers; he reigns, but does not govern, below;
where his spouse, Persephonè, the awful, is the actual
ruler. She has no stated relation to Demeter, and the
origin of Homer's conception is not easily to be traced.
The black poplar (aigeiros) is evidently sacred to one
or both, and the connection of this tree with death and
grief may be traced in the later mythology; while it
probably has its root, like most of the arrangements of
the Homeric Under-world, in Egyptian tradition. Of
this, however, it is a pale reflection, for the future life
did not occupy in the Achaian mind a place of that vast
relative importance, which it had obtained in Egypt.
Leto is a personage chiefly significant in her relation
to Apollo. She has no mythological attribute. She
has been explained as the darkness, out of whose
womb the light arises. This will assort with a
motherhood of the Sun, when such a tradition can be
discovered; but it has no relation at all to the Homeric
Apollo of the Olympian system. The poet always
pays her an extraordinary veneration, for which there is
no basis in legend; but it is at once explained, if the
Apollo of the poems is really founded on the Hebrew
tradition, that there should be a woman, whose Seed
was to redeem the world. Arès is especially the
Thracian god. He wavers before taking his part in
the Iliad. It thereby appears that he must have
had sway in a country, which was divided in sentiment
between Greek and Trojan. There is in him a
strong animal element, and no feature of high
interest. We have Hebè the cup-bearer; and Themis
the summoner of assemblies, whose character has
VI.]
85
MYTHOLOGY.
a relation to political society. Dionè dwells in
Olumpos as a wife of Zeus, and there is some slight
reason for connecting her with him in his Pelasgic
character as the Zeus of Dodona. Dionusos, after-
wards so famous, has in Homer hardly made his way
to deity; certainly he has not reached the Olympian
Court.
28. Notice of Poseidon.- Of all the divinities,
from whose characters the higher elements are absent,
Poseidon is the most remarkable. Lustful, vengeful,
headstrong, self-assertive, yet ever shrewd, he is not
under complete control even from Zeus himself, and
bears plain traces of having enjoyed elsewhere that
supremacy, the full retention of which by him was in-
compatible with the Olympian scheme. He does not
scruple to claim, though not in Zeus's presence, equality
with Zeus and only retires from the field of battle
under his injunction, when Iris reminded him of the
right of the senior brother, under that law of family
order, which even he did not dare to disallow.
He
has a very great importance in the poems, as a key to
their ethnology; and we are enabled to trace his con-
nection with the south in a great degree through his
relation to the horse, over which he is, beyond all
others, the presiding deity.
29. Approximate Number of the Olympian
Court. When Thetis visits Hephaistos in his Olym-
pian workshop, she finds him busied in preparing
twenty self-moving chairs for the meetings of the gods.
It seems probable that Homer intended, roughly
at least, to indicate this as the number of his higher
gods, who composed the Court; apart from the mob
(so to speak) of Nature-powers and others, who were
only summoned to the great assemblies for special
occasions. Eighteen have been already indicated.
Demeter, and Paieon, the healer, may possibly fill
up the number. The suggestion of that number he
may have derived from Egypt, where the gods were
86
[CHAP.
HOMER.
arranged in three orders, with eight in the first, and
twelve in the second; while the third was made up of
a rather promiscuous crowd.
:
30. The Orders of Supernatural Beings in
Homer. The Olympian Court is the masterpiece of
the whole theurgy of Homer. But the classes of
supernatural beings are with him very many, and we
find at certain points imagination and tradition, inven-
tion and history, competing for the ground. We may
consider as purely traditional in Homer, the greater
and the smaller Nature-powers; both those belonging
to ancient deposed dynasties, and those which had
"a local habitation and a name," still acknowledged in
the land. Then there is the minor mythology of the
Outer or Phoenician zone: to which belong Atlas,
Kalupso, Kirkè, Proteus, Leukothoè, and others.
Next, we see darkly looming below ground, the rebel-
lious powers the giants, the Titans, and some more;
punished beyond the few human criminals of Hades,
but yet supernatural beings, not to be confounded with
them. Then we have men on the road to deification :
such as Herakles, Castor, Poludeukes: such perhaps
is Dionusos. We have also the creatures of pure imagi-
nation, such as Strife, Fear, Panic, Rumour. Others
again, like Prayer, with limping feet, and the Graces,
and Sleep and Dream, that hang on the border land be-
tween embodied and (so to speak) disembodied inven-
tion. There remains the very grand conception of the
Ministers of doom. Atè, the seducer, is ever bewil-
dering men into offences, which, when they grow into
habit, and harden into defiance, become atasthaliai.
This noteworthy Homeric word conveys very powerfully
what comes near the Christian idea of sin; and I believe
that it has no corresponding representative in the lan-
guage of classical Greece. Destiny, expressed by various
words, partakes of the nature both of a mere force,
and of a moral law. The former is principally ex-
pressed by Moira, the second by Aisa. The silent
VI.]
87
MYTHOLOGY.
and strong operation of this dumb agent, against, and
sometimes over, both gods and men, is not so crudely
set forth in Homer as in some later systems. It never
appears as the single over-ruling force: and the two
great ideas of the divine will, and of the Ought, or
duty, are the principal factors in the government
of our human world from above or from without.
Against fate either god or man may struggle; nay, it
is sometimes intimated, as to a hero, that he is on the
point of overcoming it. Further, we have the Har-
puiai, or ravishers, who may be considered as a kind
of executioners, but not judges, of Doom. They only
once appear, carrying off the daughter of Pandareos,
probably on account of some ancestral sin. The really
grand figures in this department of the Homeric
supernaturalism are the Erinuës, afterwards called the
Furies in a degenerated tradition, but more truly the
vindicatresses of nature and the moral order. In
some cases, the Erinuës appear to act penally, but
commonly their office is to preserve or to repair. The
thought of the Erinuës causes Poseidon to accept the
monition of Zeus as his elder brother. They arrest
the speaking of the horse Xanthos, who for the
moment had invaded the province of "articulating
men." If Telemachos dismisses his mother from his
home, her Erinuës will come upon him. The dis-
guised Odusseus invokes, against the Suitor Antinoos,
the gods and Erinuës of the poor. When Arès is laid
prostrate in the Theomachy, Athenè tells him it is
due to the Erinues of his mother, from whose party
he had deserted. Later times understood them as
"The Furies"; but we might more properly render
them "The Sanctions." In one obscure instance the
Erinuës seem to be mentioned (Od. xv. 232-4) as
suggesting a grave folly: but this, unless there is an
explanation in some circumstances of the case un-
known to us, is certainly out of keeping with their
general action in Homer.
88
[CHAP.
HOMER.
The
31. The Homeric Theanthropism.
Olympian system of Homer has for its most marked
characteristic the combination of the divine idea with
the essential conditions of our humanity. Every
divine person is conceived of as vested in a human
figure; and the head, hands, feet, or chin of a deity
are the expression of an ingenuous literalism. These
bodies are indefinitely glorious, but still human. Being
human, they afforded a proper subject for Greek art, a
stepping-stone upwards; being indefinitely glorious,
they invited and compelled the artist to labour ever
more and more for "the highest"; for an unseen
perfection; and thus supplied him with the talisman
of his unrivalled excellence. The whole apparatus of
the mind, too, was laid out on the human model; but
the human construction was in the higher deities
attached not as a limitation of the divine idea, only
as its vehicle. As to the appetitive part of humanity,
wherein lies, as in the weak part of a fortification, the
easiest access of the foe, it adheres to the Olympian
gods in infinite diversity of degree. In Athenè and
Apollo, we have no palpable trace of it. In Zeus, it
lodges even to redundance, side by side with genuine
affections, such as those which make him weep for
Sarpedon; with administrative responsibilities which
he keenly feels; and, above all, with that rather more
abstract capacity, in which he represents the higher
motive power of theism. In Arès, Aphroditè, and
Poseidon, this tyranny of lower elements over higher
is almost wholly unchecked. The motherly sentiment
for the wounded Aineias in Aphroditè, though no
higher than the instinct of a bird, almost surprises us
as the solitary manifestation of a redeeming quality.
It is not difficult to see how this refined association
of the divine with the human nature may have sup-
plied a preparatory school, in which the Greek mind
was trained for the reception, "in the fulness of time,”
of the Christian dogma.
vi.]
89
MYTHOLOGY.
32. The Theanthropic Family. This intro-
duction of human forms into divine life was not con-
fined to the representations of individual deity. As
on earth men are constituted in the double association
of the Family and the State, so it is in Olumpos. As
regards the family, Homer had the first elements of it
ready to his hand in the traditions, both foreign and
aboriginal, which distributed deity according to sex
and generation. Nothing could better answer the
purpose of the poet. But he wanted to give a greater
power and scope to the domestic principle for his
larger theanthropic purpose: he required a large family,
not merely an Osiris and an Isis, with Horos for
their son.
He had also to deal with the case of other
deities, like Poseidon or Aïdoneus, with their re-
spective claims to supremacy. Of this business he
acquits himself by going back to a common sire in
the deposed and penally engulphed Kronos, and by
dividing among the three Brothers the air, sea, and
Under-world, with earth common to them all. In this
manner he also finds scope for the Trinitarian idea,
which had come down to him, as it had also appeared
elsewhere in other forms: yet of which it may be
observed, that we do not find it in the old Pelasgic
thearchies, nor apparently in those eastern and
southern systems, which had made contributions to the
Achaian mythology. But it is remarkable that, in the
construction of the Olympian family, the moral standard
has to descend much below that of the Greek part of
the world it ruled. No Greek ideas are more firmly
stamped upon the mind of Homer than the practice
of monogamy, and the abhorrence of incest: but
Hera is the sister of Zeus, her husband, and in her
conjugal capacity she is little better than, like Hecabè,
the queen of a harem. And so live his gods, in per-
petual feasting, with frequent wrangles; in splendid
palaces, and with the refined accompaniment of the
lyre and song.
90
[CHAP.
HOMER.
33. The Polity, or State.-As in the Family,
so the divine order was likewise organised after the
manner of a State. It was something of a free state ;
for all subjects were debated, remonstrance was
allowed, there was a public opinion, and resolutions
were taken in the name of all. The Theomachy was in
the nature of a civil war. The Olympian State was for
the previously disorganised and conflicting worship
(if the comparison be not too far-fetched,) something
like what the Treaty of Westphalia was for Central
Europe. In that State there was the King, who
ordinarily sat with his Boulè, the council, or smaller
assembly, and a greater or universal one for special
occasions; just as on earth below we have Aga-
memnon, then the Kings around him, these together
being the ordinary instrument of government, while
the assembly of the army, or people, is in reserve for
cases of breadth and emergency.
;
34. Exclusion of Grosser Elements.-This
anthropomorphic, or, as I should prefer to call it,
theanthropic, polity already contained elements of
gross corruption, which grew with a pestilent fertility
in later times; until at length the severe judgment of
the Apostle, though he recognises in the mythology
(Acts xvii. 28) a true theistic element, yet treats it as
inviting men to the worship of demons (1 Cor. x.
20, 21). But it was, in itself, a marvellous formation
and so far (we can hardly tell with exactness how far)
as it is due to the genius of a man, it is a stroke
of genius unsurpassed. For let us consider in the
first place that it rather annexed humanity to deity,
than, in its first inception, submitted deity to
humanity. In the next place, to clear the ground for
the gorgeous edifice, it thrust unsparingly away the
dark and cruel systems of the old Nature-worship,
the debasing cult of animals, and the filth and vileness
of those bestial lusts, of which we have the deplor-
able record in the Old Testament, as to those very
VI.]
91
MYTHOLOGY.
countries from which Greece derived the arts of life.
It is therefore almost certain that nascent Hellenism
must have been subjected to the temptation; nay, that
this was presented (as it were) with authority by its
social instructors, and yet that it manfully spurned
and drove back the foul invasion. Its offerings to
its gods were in singular accordance with those which
the patriarchs of the East had practised, and which.
Moses prescribed on Divine authority. But we
look in vain, in the Homeric system, for a Jephtha's
daughter the terrible abuse of human sacrifice to the
gods is entirely foreign to the Olympian scheme,
and the offering of Iphigeneia is either an in-
vention of later date, or it is a tradition which the
mind and feeling of Greece in the heroic time, as
expressed by Homer, did not consent to accept. How
much, then, of what was disparaging to the in-
tellectual dignity, or debasing to the moral sense, of
man was put away by the maker or makers of the
Olympian system!
35. Its Centrality and Durability.-Not that
that system expressed the religion of a country, as it
has been expressed in Christian times by the Christian
Creed. It was a central, not a local religion: for
many persons, in many of its parts, from the first, it
was conventional. It would appear that a great variety
of local worships, of this deity or that, prevailed
throughout the land. But the Olympian was the
intellectual form which acted upon the thought of
Greece, and which determined its literature and art,
so far as these were product of religion. It lost pro-
gressively, and perhaps rapidly, its moral hold; it had
the aid neither of a wealthy or influential priesthood,
nor of sacred books; it was the most purely literary
religion that ever existed; but, resting on this narrow
basis, and possessed of no external supports, it occu-
pied the ground of the most civilised countries of the
world without a rival for near 1500 years, and did not
92
[CHAP.
HOMER.
finally give way, except after a stout resistance, to the
victorious energy of the Gospel.
36. Its Ethnographical Relations. Of the
morality which, though it hardly sprang from, yet
at least subsisted under this religion, I shall speak
presently. Its ethnographical relations seem to be
as follows:-
(1.) The Nature-powers in general are to be con-
sidered as Pelasgian or indigenous. So may Aïdoneus,
Demeter, perhaps Persephonè, and even Hera, who,
however, undergoes a very complete transfiguration
to fit her for her great position in the new thearchy.
(2.) From Phoenicia, Syria, Egypt, Libya are im-
ported Poseidon, Hephaistos, Hermes, Aphroditè.
(3.) In Zeus we have a factor representing the
supreme theistic element of all the religions, which
contributed to make up the system; and, as the Zeus
of the Helloi, he appears to be in a particular degree
a representative of an old monotheism which merges
into supremacy in a polytheistic system.
(4.) In Athenè and Apollo, and in their degrees in
Leto, Iris, and perhaps others, we have clear indi-
cations of an order of traditions which, like the
monotheistic element in the Zeus of the Helloi, had
run through cleaner channels than those either of the
Pelasgian Nature-cult, or of the licentious East. Some
slight positive, and some very strong negative indica-
tions point to the Helloi of the poems as the probable
vehicle of these traditions: while their notes of kin
to the written records and oral reports of the
Hebrews appear to be as conspicuous, as is the
want of anything which could associate them with
another source. At the same time there is no reason
to doubt that figures more or less corresponding to
Homer's Apollo and Athenè were found in foreign
systems, though we are unable, from want of records,
to know whether they bore upon them any similar
marks of a pure and lofty origin.
VI.]
93
MYTHOLOGY.
37. Sacrifice and Priesthood. The poems
appear to indicate, that sacrifices performed in a
manner substantially accordant with that of the
Hebrews, prevailed not only in the Achaian world,
but among contemporary nations. As a rule, what-
ever was eaten was also sacrificed; so that to
slaughter cattle for food was described by the word
(hiereuein), which also signified "to sacrifice." The
same principle is applied to drink as to food, by the
institute of libation: and this is so established, that
when the ship's company of Odusseus had not wine
in Thrinakiè to complete the rite, they made libation
with water. But, when we come to the question of
the person ministering, we strike upon a remarkable
ethnical difference. Priesthood was plainly a Trojan,
and apparently a Pelasgic, institution. But it appears
not to have been Achaian or Hellic. Not only is
there no priest with the Greek army in Troas, but
there is no priest in Ithaca, where the whole social
life of the race is so distinctly laid open to us. The
priest is not named in the list of professions. And
the Helloi of Dodonaian Zeus are not his priests, but
his prophets or seers. Once only we hear of priests in
the peninsula, not as contemporary, but in the legend
of Meleagros. They are mentioned plurally, which
nowhere else occurs, and in connection with elders
(gerontes), so that probably the two are synonymous. In
this view it would not be the professional priest who is
intended, but the elder or house-father, who was the
original sacrificer; like Abraham or Noah in Genesis,
like Agamemnon, Nestor, and indeed Priam, in the
poems. This remarkable distinction may be traced
down to the historic period; for the priests of ancient
Greece do not seem at any time to have weighed
greatly in the political or social scale.
94
[CHAP.
HOMER.
CHAPTER VII.
ETHNOLOGY.
I. Related to Mythology.-The ethnology of
the poems stands in close connection with their
mythology. That mythology fell into three groups;
(a) the old Nature-powers of the country; (b) matter
imported by the immigrants from the south and east ;
and (c) a group of higher stamp, broadly distinguished
from the others; especially from the first, by loftier in-
telligence, from the second by a loftier moral standard.
There is nothing systematic in the ethnology of the
poems; nor is there in any other branch of the in-
struction which they afford, and which is only to be
fully attained by a careful gathering and comparison
of details. As to tracing particular races in Greece,
we have this particular difficulty to confront; that the
aim of our poet in the heroic age was to consolidate
the inward unity of the nation, so that indications of
a foreign origin for any of its branches might have
tended to mar the design. Accordingly Homer dis-
closes to us nothing of any Egyptian, Phoenician, or
even Achaian settlements. He does not tell us from
whence came settlers like Kadmos, or heads of
dynasties like Pelops, or Aiakos, or Portheus. Per-
haps the only exceptions are to be found in that
speech of Zeus, where he recounts his loves. Here
he incidentally shows us that Minos, the source of
the Cretan royalty, was associated with a Phoenician
extraction; and, in making Perseus the child of
Danaè, he supplies us with two names, of which the
first, from evidence afforded by the poet in the
names of Persè and Persephonè, and the latter by
the light of Phoenician history, suggest foreign asso-
ciations. Besides the indirect disclosures of the
VII.]
95
ETHNOLOGY.
poet, we have the aid of philology, which tells us,
for example, that Kadmos signifies a foreigner, and
which discovers the root of the names of some among
the Nature-powers in the existing Albanian tongue;
and of archæology, which, by disclosing and explain-
ing ancient monuments, has thrown great light upon
the connection between Homeric knowledge and
foreign sources.
2. The Phoinikes of Homer.-Every reader
of these poems must be struck by the recurrence and
the importance of the Phoenician name; most of all
by its predominance in all over-sea navigation to
foreign lands, and its nearly exclusive association
with works of art. We must carefully bear in mind
that it is not, apparently, a name assumed by any
race or people; but only a name given them by
Homer and his countrymen, whose destiny it was,
long afterwards, to bear the name of Greeks, given
them by the Romans. Of the city of Tyre we do not
yet hear: Sidon is the Phoenician centre or capital.
The Taphians are taken to be a Phoenician colony;
and the Phaiakes of Scheriè appear to be an iden-
tical rendering of the Phoinikes proper, from the
resemblance of the names, and more especially from
their paramount prerogatives in navigation, and their
great advancement in works of art. We see, indeed,
the same splendid metallic ornamentation in the
palace of Menelaos, as in the palace of Alkinoos;
but then Menelaos has been visiting the land of the
Phoinikes. We find Odusseus himself a producer
(the only one in Greece) of a work of art; but a
number of marks suggest for this chief a Phoenician
extraction. Whenever advanced building-work is
mentioned, there is always some foreign, that is
Phoenician, trace to be discovered. The Games in
Scherie are given at length, probably because they
were the prototype of the Games of Greece. But there
is no chariot race in those Games; and no horse is
9
96
[CHAP.
HOMER.
mentioned anywhere in connection with the Phaiakes,
from which we may perceive that they were probably
the Phoinikes proper, worshippers of Poseidon, and
a navigating people, but whose land was not one to
be reckoned among horse-breeding countries.
3. Compare the Frankish Name of later
times. It appears that the Phoenician name in Homer
stands to a great extent for that of foreigner in general.
If, as I suppose, at the Troic time, or shortly before it,
Phoenicia formed a part of the great Egyptian Empire
which had then its capital at Thebes, Phoenician ships
supplied the means, seemingly the exclusive means, of
carrying on its communications with its transmarine
possessions, in which Greece and her islands were in-
cluded. Under these circumstances, the Phoenician
name would very naturally signify in Greece all that
was Egyptian and Eastern, which is near y equivalent
to saying, all that was foreign as, in the Levant, the
name of Frank long served for all the Western peoples,
in consequence of the prominence of the French nation
in the long series of the Crusades.
4. Notes of Foreign Connection.-There is
in Homer a very general and pervading association
between a group of marks, of which a portion are
Phoenicianism, the god Poseidon, the use and special
training of the horse, a share of the comparative ad-
vancement in the arts, and finally the use of the archaic
title anax andrōn. In this title, the use of the genitive
is significant. The phrase may fairly be said to bear
on it a foreign and hereditary stamp. The word anax
in Homer carries with it an idea of absolutism or
ownership; and such a lordship of men, that is of free
men, would hardly be an Achaian idea. Whenever
anax expresses sovereignty, the noun governed is in
the dative; except in two instances: one where Sleep
(whose power is absolute) is the anax of gods and
men; another where it is joined with laōn (II. ix. 97),
but this is applied to Agamemnon, an anax andrōn.
VII.]
97
ETHNOLOGY.
Basileus, not anax, was the national expression of the
highest title in relation to a free Achaian community.
Homer often speaks of basilēes Achaiōn, never of
anactes Achaiōn. Again, the title of anax andrōn
seems to have belonged to senior branches only. It
is therefore borne by Anchises and Aineias, but not
by Priam or any of his sons. Agamemnon the elder
brother, has it; Menelaos, the younger, has not.
Again, all these have horses specially named or indi-
cated as belonging to them. Two other persons,
Augeias and Eumelos have the title; and of these
Augeias presides over the chariot-races of Elis, while
Eumelos has the finest mortal horses of the army.
Only one other person is named in a single passage as
anax andrōn, and he is king of Ephurè, a town-name
which, by various signs, is connected with Phoenician
or southern associations. Poseidon is peculiarly the god
of the horse; and possibly became the Greek or
Olympian sea-god, because the horse came into Greece
by sea. He is unquestionably associated with the south,
by his special connection with the Aithiopes, and by
various other notes. The use of the horse, which was
unknown to the Memphian or first Egyptian empire,
was introduced under the second, apparently from
Libya or Upper Egypt, or both. The tests for tracing
foreign origin, which I have pointed out, are a portion
only of those which the poems supply. Another is
the name of Aiolos. Bellerophon the Aiolid can be
shown from the text to be descended from Poseidon,
and this is declaring in other words his foreign ex-
traction.
5. Foreign, or Phoenician Element in the
Greek Nation.—It is not possible in the brief com-
pass of these pages to draw out and connect in their
varied groups the particulars of proof, but even what has
been said may serve to suggest the presence, at the
Troic era, of an element in the Greek nation origi-
nally foreign, but now domesticated. This element
98
[CHAP.
HOMER.
is everywhere associated with an advanced condition
as to the arts of life, and it supplies Greece with
many of its ruling houses. It seems allowable to
suggest by way of conjecture, that the founders of
these houses may have been persons who themselves,
or whose ancestors, had first come into the country as
the local representatives of the Egyptian power. I will
finally point out that we have one clear instance of
this immigration from the south-east in the case of
Kadmos and the settlers he brought into Boeotia;
against whom, under the name of Kadmeians, the
Achaians made war one generation before the war of
Troy. Generally, however, we trace rather the ap-
pearance of single families in this connection, than of
settlers in bodies; we have Aiolids in Homer, but
Aiolians as a tribe or race (who however continued
in the historic time to be specially connected with the
Poseidon-worship) are not found there, and seem
to belong to the Dorian, not the Achaian period.
This Phoenician element of the Greek nation was
non-Aryan; it was numerically weak, but was power-
ful in station, wealth, intelligence, and social advance-
ment.
6. Hair as an Index of Race.-One of the
curious notes attached to nationality in Homer is the
colour of the hair. Dark hair is a note of the
foreigner, and of southern extraction. There is
great personal beauty in the royal family of Troy:
but no auburn or light hair is ever found there. Posei-
don is, among other modes, marked for a southern
deity by his carrying the name of "the dark-haired,"
not merely as an epithet, but as a distinctive title.
Zeus had dark eye-brows, but is nowhere stated to
have dark hair. Nor have the Greek chieftains.
Achilles and Menelaos have the colour of their hair
mentioned, and it is auburn. Pelops may have been
a foreigner: if so, there is little doubt that the use
of this epithet for Menelaos is meant to mark the
VII.]
99
ETHNOLOGY.
complete naturalisation of the family. Odusseus, too,
had auburn hair; though his beard was dark (Od.
xiii. 397, xvi. 176). I have been assured that, in the
Greece of to-day, light hair is still held as indicating
the purest Hellenic blood.
7. Two other Elements in the Greek Na-
tion. In the non-Phoenician mass of the Greek
people, it is not difficult to trace a plain dualism of
race. The two great factors of the nation, thus indi-
cated, it will perhaps be well to call respectively the
Achaian and Pelasgian factors. Universal tradition
makes the Pelasgians the first and pre-Hellenic inhabi-
tants of the country. The Arcadians of Homer are
marked as bearing specially this aboriginal character.
They dwelt in the central hill country of Peloponnesos,
while the dominant race remained in the plains and
the more accessible country near the sea. They had
no maritime pursuits. They sailed to Troy in ships
provided by Agamemnon, and probably as part of his
contingent.
8. The Achaian Element.-A broader indica-
tion may be found by examining the incidents which
attach to the three national appellatives of the
poems, namely, Danaan, Argeian, and Achaian.
The Danaan name is never attached to the people
historically or politically: but in the army only. Its
epithets are martial, and the use of the word appears
to be altogether archaic and poetic. The Achaian
name is the true national name of the period: and it
is used more frequently than the Danaan and the
Argeian names taken together. As used in the army,
it has a very perceptible leaning towards the chiefs.
and the upper class. As employed historically and
beyond the camp, it has sometimes a local force. So
it is applied in the Catalogue to the people of Aiginą.
and Mases, and in the Odyssey to a part of Crete;
indicating points, probably, at which the race had
first settled down after its southward movement. It is
100
[CHAP.
HOMER.
more remarkably applied to the followers of Achilles ;
for here it is, as has been already shown, immediately
coupled with the Hellenic name; and the name
Hellene, itself derivative from Helloi and akin to
Hellas, is associated with those first ancestors of the
stock by the prayer of Achilles to the Dodonaian
Zeus of his neighbourhood, the god who had these
Helloi for his ministers. But the name of Achaians
is used in Ithaca, where the tribal sub-name of the
inhabitants was Kephallenes, evidently because it was
the current national name; and it is commonly so em-
ployed in Homer. Further, the poems indicate to us
the time when the Achaian name began to be thus em-
ployed, and what name it supplanted. Its application
is limited to the Pelopid period upwards. The army
which marched against Thebes, one generation before
the war, is an Achaian army. There were Achaians,
too, in the youth of Nestor. But, in the nineteenth
Iliad, we have a legend of the births of Eurustheus and
of Heracles in the previous or Perseïd period. Here
the name given to the population, over whom the na-
scent babe was to reign, is not Achaians, but Argeians.
Proitos, nearly at the same epoch, was a ruler over
Argeians." Thus we see the Achaians take their
place as a conquering, or at any rate a ruling, race
over and among a pre-existing population. In them
we have the second great factor of the Greek people.
With them comes the first rise of the Hellenic stock,
to which they belonged, and which, with Agamemnon
for its political head, had Achilles for its typical and
ideal example. It is evident that this race did not
bring with them the arts into Greece, but found them
there found them among the old population, as to
settled social life; among the Phoenician immigrants,
as to advance and culture. What they seem to have
brought with them was the true political spirit; the
faculty of nation-making; the power, will, and fitness
to fill the highest place; the capacity to receive every
66
VII.]
ΙΟΙ
ETHNOLOGY.
lesson in art and culture that the children of the East
could convey and to open and develop it to a point
beyond what the East had dreamed of.
9. Use of the Argeian Name in Homer.-
Who, then, were these Argeians, whose name was sup-
planted by the name of a more imperial stock? First
let us look at the epithets applied in the Iliad, where
this appellation is used: for in the Odyssey it has
practically disappeared. It is employed in the singu-
lar, as in the “Argeian Helen:" but here the name
is purely local; it meant what is commonly called
Argive, and has its propriety from her being an Argive
domiciled in Troy. In the plural, it sometimes means
the soldiery of the army, sometimes the inhabitants
of North-eastern Peloponnesos. When applied to
the soldiery, it very rarely carries a descriptive epithet;
widely differing herein from the Danaan and Achaian
names, which abound in epithets descriptive of high
qualities. This prepares us for another characteristic ;
it is never applied distinctively to the chiefs, but seems
plainly to indicate the inferior mass.
10. Its Probable Meaning.-When we look to
the word itself, there is great reason to believe that it
means field-tiller, or cultivator; in which way it would
most appropriately designate those who had first estab-
lished settled agriculture in the peninsula of Greece.
On the one side it is related to ergon, which, in the
old Greek of the Peloponnesos, was always, or some-
times, written argon, and which in its application to
man (for women it means tissues, and the like) signi-
fies primarily the labours of agriculture. On the
other side it is related to agros, which in Homer's
time meant the country as distinct from the town.
It is, further, akin to the epithet argos, which appears
to have for its ground-meaning the idea of strenuous
or laborious. There is some reason to believe that
at one time argeios came to have the meaning of the
Latin word agrestis, as opposed to urbanus, or rustic,
102
[CHAP.
HOMER.
in the sense of rude. Enough has perhaps now been
said to indicate the presence in Greece of a pervading
rural population, who had established family life, and
village communities somewhat after the manner of
those among the present Slavonians. It appears also
that they had towns, if they were the population
largely embraced under the name of Pelasgians. For
the Pelasgians of the second Iliad had a Larissa;
and Larissa is a name referred by Strabo to Pelasgic
origin, and signifying a citadel or place of security.
But, in truth, the distinction of city and village, as to
size, was slight: the place of refuge and defence was
as such necessarily confined. It need not surprise
us were it to be proved that the hill of Hissarlik, if it
were the actual Troy, did not allow for that city of
deathless and world-wide renown a space much or
at all exceeding three acres.
II. The Pelasgian Element.-In the Argeian
population we may recognise what I have called the
Pelasgian character. At any rate we find, apart from
this or that name, more or less conventional, the
industrial and rural quality, which marks them as
probably the third, and numerically most important,
factor of the nation.
The character, which has here been ascribed to the
Argeian or Pelasgian population, can be traced in
the Iliad by the industrial names given to the undis-
tinguished soldiery. In their case, as in the remark-
able case of the Scherian sea-farers, and of the Nereid
nymphs, Homer avails himself of proper names to tell
the story of the persons themselves by means of etymo-
logy. This observation applies also to those whom
he calls Ionians; and to the Trojan soldiery, who are
not at all exhibited in that marked inferiority to the
Greek mass, which is found in the chieftains. Among
the Greek chiefs we never find these industrial names;
but, where we can trace the roots, many appellations
descriptive of high qualities, such as Thrasumedes
VII.]
103
ETHNOLOGY.
Peisistratos, Menelaos, Agamemnon, Sthenelos, Pro-
tesilaos. No names of this kind will be found among
the Attic or Ionian persons mentioned in 77. xiii. 690,
I, XV. 332, 7, 8; only one among thirteen Trojans of
the common order despatched in the fifth Book;
only three among seventeen ordinary Greeks slain by
Hektor and Arès in the fifth and eleventh Books; a
very large proportion among the Lycians (of 77. v. 677,
8), whom the poet recognises as having a strongly
Hellenic character; and a large proportion also among
the Suitors of the Odyssey. In opposition to the
tunic-trailing Iaones, these Lycians are amitrochitōnes;
they wear the short tunic, not requiring a girdle, which
is suited to an active and martial race.
12. Iaones. Javan. The Mythical Hellen.
-It thus appears that the Ionians in Homer rank
rather with the industrial, than the imperial, element
of the population in Greece. It is another question
what light can be thrown upon their history from other
quarters. It is held, says Professor Rawlinson in his
Origin of Nations, that these Iaones, for such is their
Homeric name, represent the Javan of that great eth
nographic document, chap. x. of the Book of Genesis :
and that the Greeks generally were known in the East
under the name of Javan. But the student cannot be
too careful, in approaching the ethnology of Homer, to
dismiss wholly from his mind the post-Homeric verses,
which describe a Hellen as the father of the Greek
race, with Doros, Aiolos, and Xouthos for his sons,
and Xouthos again with two sons, Ion and Achaios.
This misleading composition is much later than
Homer: it belongs to a time when Hellenes had
been established as the common name of all Greeks;
when, among the particular races, the Dorians had the
pre-eminence; when the Aiolians were a race, and not
the family of a (real or mythical) person; when the
Achaians had shrunk into insignificance; and when
the Ionians of Athens had come into a forward place.
104
[CHAP.
HOMER.
Every item of this enumeration is in conflict with the
text of Homer, and betrays a different and later age.
There are many other race-names in Homer; but
none which throw any general light, either on the
poems, or on the formation of the Greek nation.
CHAPTER VIII.
ETHICS OF THE ACHAIAN TIME.
1. Relation of Morals to Religion.-The
ethics, or morals, of the Achaian time are connected
with its religion, not universally, as in the Christian
ages, but sub modo. The morality of the Homeric
man is founded on duty, not to the particular person-
ages of the Olympian system, but to the divinity, theos,
or the gods in general, theoi. Sometimes to Zeus ; not,
however, as the mere head of the Olympian Court, but
as heir-general to the fragments and relics of the old
monotheistic traditions. One of the greatest branches,
and props, of morality for the heroic age lay in the care
of the stranger and the poor; and of this law Zeus was
the peculiar guardian, as he was (Od. xiii. 213) of the
moral law at large. The current of these moral ideas
runs through the poems in a great degree separately
from the mythology, yet by the side of it, like rivers
in certain cases, whose waters can be distinguished
after their junction. Of the whole supernatural ap-
paratus, perhaps the most ethical part is to be found
in the Erinuës, and in that ingredient of the idea of
Destiny which is represented by the word Aisa.
2. To Ritual. But the morality of the period is
also connected with, and really, if partially, sustained
by its ritual. Sacrifice could not be substituted for
duty, nor could prayer. Such, upon the abduction of
Chruseis, was the reply of Calchas the Seer: nothing
VIII.]
105
ETHICS OF THE ACHAIAN TIME.
would avail but restitution; and this not the restitu-
tion of the maid for a price, as it was originally asked
and refused, but restitution without any compensation.
It is true, that the gods among themselves speak more
of the sacrifices which men offer as a title to divine
favour, than of their performance of duty. But this
seems to be an exhibition of their own theanthropic
nature on the appetitive side, rather than an indi-
cation of the heroic morals. Some facts at any rate
are plain: first, that the men, whose liberality in
sacrifice they commend, are good men, such as
Hektor, Eumaios, and Odusseus; secondly, the bad
men, such as Paris and the Suitors, are not men-
tioned as habitually liberal offerers. The only case,
in which a great sinner shows bounty in sacrifice, is
that of Aigisthos, after he has corrupted Clutaim-
nestra. But he had been ordered beforehand by the
gods not to commit the crimes, and his efforts at
sacrificial bribery did not prevent them from ordain-
ing (Od. i. 40) a terrible retribution. Thirdly, in the
description of character, piety to the gods is commonly
united with, not disjoined from, the discharge of
relative duty; as in Od. vi. 120, where the question
is asked, "Are they insolent, fierce, and unrighteous,
or are they good to strangers, and pious towards the
gods?" The bad men, notably such as Poluphemos
and the Kuklopes, who despise duty to man, are also
contemners of the gods. Thus then the morality of
the poems is in principle a religious morality, a chain
binding earth to heaven.
3. The Beginnings of Corruption.-It was
flecked, however, with spots of nascent corruption,
which were sure to spread; and unhappily the taint
came with the mythology itself. Hermes, a deity of
Phoenician importation, grants to men the endowments
of perjury and theft. Athenè exults in her own tricks
and those of Odusseus, which, however, stand in clear
contradiction to the indignant truthfulness of Achilles.
106
[CHAP.
HOMER.
Lust was mythologically exhibited to the Greek eye in
various forms, especially in the characters of Zeus and
of Aphroditè; and the episode of the Eighth Odyssey
recited in Scheriè, shows us what vile examples the
East was already setting, in the glorification of shame-
less adultery, to the Achaian race. The character of
Heracles, as it is given in the poems, is marked with
lawless violence; and his shade is in the Under-world,
but he himself (autos) has joined the banquets of the
gods. These were, however, perilous yet recent ex-
ceptions. They had not become the rule.
As a
general law, the man who did his duty was the man
who well served the gods, and who was accepted by
them.
4. It was in some respects a Reform.-When
we take note of moral defects in the Olympian system,
we must bear in mind, that it repudiated the worship of
inanimate bodies and animals; that at least it greatly
retrenched the iniquities, with which Asia had already
polluted its religion; and that it expelled altogether
the very basest of those elements, which it was left for
later and more polished times to reintroduce.
5. The Law of Duty. The law of duty, as
between man and man, thus on the whole sustained
by religion, was undoubtedly real, if imperfect. The
most striking proof of this reality is to be found in the
remarkable fidelity and consistency with which the
poet uses his command over the sympathies of the
hearers, so as to direct them towards good persons
and good ends, and to estrange them from the bad.
In the very groundwork both of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the cause of Greece and the cause of Odus-
seus, which gain the upper hand, are each the cause of
right, justice, and the family order. Not only is this so,
but in each particular case we are impelled or led in
such a way by the master, that we like and dislike as we
ought to like and dislike; and, again, not only as to
the main distinction between good and bad, but even
VIII.]
107
ETHICS OF THE ACHAIAN TIME.
as to the shades of each. In the Iliad, Paris, Aphro-
ditè, and Thersites, in the Odyssey the Suitors and the
paramour Melantho, are made odious to us. There
is no tampering with the greatest moral laws; as far as
Homer knows right, he works it out loyally into the
tissue of his poems. The splendid gifts of Achilles
and Odusseus do not inspire an undiscriminating ad-
miration we feel free to censure the savage element
in the retribution administered to the gross offence of
Agamemnon, and to question the terrible sternness, in
some points, of the tragedy in the Ithacan palace. The
splendid beauty, and even the gracious penitential
humility, of Helen do not bewitch us into a forgetful-
ness that she had erred. Our unmixed sympathy is
reserved for characters such as the grand Penelope,
the affectionate Andromachè; for Nausicaa, the flower
of maidenhood; for Eumaios, the picture of an intel-
ligent, sound-hearted, and devoted dependent. No
small proportion of writers in the Christian period
fail to carry our instincts of approval and disapproval
to their proper aims with the unfailing rectitude of
Homer.
6. Slavery. Two of the testing questions for the
Achaian ethics are, the institution of slavery, and the
estimate and position of woman. The blot of slavery
is there; and that is all. As far as the poems inform us,
it was domestic, and not predial slavery: connected,
in all cases, with the supply of the household, or with
personal attendance on its heads. The slave could
hold property. We hear of no exceptional laws con-
cerning him beyond the essential one that, receiving
his food, raiment, and domicile, he laboured generally
for another, yet apparently not with the rigid exclusion
of all acquisition for himself. Arms are given to the
slaves of Odusseus, and are used by them, as if there
was nothing unusual in it. They were not of inferior
races: they seem to have been usually captives, who
would often be of birth and rearing higher than the
•
10
108
[CHAP.
HOMER.
commonalty. Reasoning from the Odyssey, we need
not suppose that slaves were excluded from the army
before Troy. In fact the presence of a few names
among the common soldiery, such as Agelaos and
Aisumnos, which have affinity to the higher class,
leads to the conjecture that there were slaves serving
in the army, who had been born to a better station.
But, even though a mild slavery, it must have been
attended with a sense of depression and disappoint-
ment, and abatement of the higher energies. It did
not, however, like modern slavery, pervert the public
opinion of the community with regard to its own
nature, if, as is probable, Homer was in harmony
with his hearers when he sang that on the day when
the freeman became a slave, he lost, by the ordi-
nance of Zeus, one half his manhood (Oď. xvii. 322).
7. Estimate and Position of Woman.
Much better than this can the Achaian age bear the
application of the test drawn from the estimate of
woman. Here again there can be no stronger evidence,
than the stamp which Homer has set on his female
characters. The most notable of them compare
advantageously with those commended to us in the
Old Testament: while Achaian Jezebels are nowhere
found. There is a certain authority of the man over
the woman; but it does not destroy freedom, or imply
the absence either of respect, or of a close mental
and moral fellowship. Not only the relation of
Odusseus to Penelope and of Hector to Andromachè,
but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of Menelaos to
the returned Helen, are full of dignity and attachment.
Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles viewed her as
in expectation a wife, called her so, avowed his love
for her, and laid it down that not he only, but every
man must love his wife, if he had sense and virtue.
Among the Achaian Greeks, monogamy is invariable;
divorce unknown: incest abhorred. The sin of the
father of Phoinix with a loose woman is recorded as
VIII.]
109
ETHICS OF THE ACHAIAN TIME.
a gross dishonour to his mother. Aigisthos, having
committed a crime in the murder of Agamemnon,
commits another crime (Od. i. 39) by marrying his
widow. Only in one case have we any trace of what
may be termed professional or promiscuous lust.
The sad institution which, in Saint Augustine's time,
was viewed by him as saving the world from yet worse
evil, is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails
in the camp before Troy, but only single concubinage.
Some of the women, attendants in the Ithacan palace,
were corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors; but some
were not. It should perhaps be noted as a token of
the respect paid to the position of the woman, that
these very bad men are not represented as ever having
included in their plans the idea of offering violence to
Penelope. The noblest note, however, of the Homeric
woman remains this, that she shares the thought and
heart of the husband: as in the fine utterance of Pene-
lopè, she prays that rather she may be torn away by the
Harpies than remain "to glad the spirit of a meaner
man” (Od. xx. 82) than her great husband, still away
from her.
8. Fundamental Merits and Defects. If we
go over the forms of vice and virtue in detail, it will
appear upon the whole, that natural law was profoundly
revered, while conventional law hardly yet existed;
that there was a deep and even delicate sense of the
dignity of man, and a total absence of the extreme
forms of wickedness, with which later ages have been
familiar; but a low estimate of the value of life, which
we now measure somewhat more justly, and an
apparent licentiousness as to property, the law of
meum and tuum, which when examined opens out
into a defect of wider range; an incapacity, namely, or
indisposition, to acknowledge in foreign communities,
and their members individually, the possession of that
general human right (themis and themistes), which were
an elementary idea as between the members of the
ΓΙΟ
[CHAP.
HOMER.
Greek civil society, the rulers and the ruled. We
never hear of a Greek slave: but the best men did
not scruple to purchase the kidnapped victims whom
Phoenician vessels brought from abroad to their shores.
When Odusseus says (Od. xxiii. 357) he will repair the
live-stock the Suitors had wasted partly by plunder,
partly by the free gifts of Achaians, it would appear that
the plunder in view must have been foreign, for he could
hardly look for voluntary offerings from a class whose
property he meant to lay waste. In this view, the
question, commonly put to strangers on their arrival,
is not without interest, "Who are you, and from
whom; where are your city and your ancestors?”
This is no mere curiosity: it is rather an inquiry
whether the new-comers are possessed of a presump-
tive title to hospitality as Greeks, so as to be xenoi,
or to have had the xenian tie formed by earlier inter-
course; or whether they are buccaneers, who scour the
seas at the hazard of their lives, and carry with them
woe, but to whom? not to neighbours, nor to men
at large, but to allodapoi (Od. iii. 74), the foreigners
or strangers proper, with whom they have no social
'bond of union.
9. View of Homicide.-Homicide in these cir-
cumstances was lightly regarded; and Odusseus, when
feigning himself a Cretan, does not scruple to say,
even while he is making a plea for himself as a stranger
in Ithaca, that he deliberately took the life of one
who had only deprived, or sought to deprive, him of
his due share in the spoils of Troy. Commonly the
man-slayer of the poems has acted in passion, and he
flies after the act, because the relations are entitled
to retaliate. But, when he has escaped, he loses none
of the general titles to hospitality enjoyed by the
stranger. He may become indeed a suppliant
(hiketès), but Zeus guards the rights of suppliants
as well as of other wanderers and poor (Od. xiii. 213,
xvi. 422.) These ideas must have been most deeply
VIII.]
III
Ethics of THE ACHAIAN TIME.
rooted ; for down to our own time they have been
found to subsist and operate in the Greek peninsula.
10. Family Life. The obligations of family
life were very strongly felt in paternal, filial, and fra-
ternal, as well as in conjugal relations. Phoinix in
youth becomes exasperated against his father for
gross wrong to his mother, aggravated by what follows
with himself: he feels tempted to parricide, but flies
his country to avoid the infamy sure to follow upon
the sin. Brother is attached to brother, as Deiphobos
to Hector; and Agamemnon, though a selfish cha-
racter, to Menelaos. In Sarpedon and Glaukos, we see
the warm love of cousins. The mother of Odusseus
pines away and dies, from yearning for her absent son.
The grief of old Laertes at the fiction of his death, his
passionate and seemingly dangerous joy when assured
that he really sees him, have more than all the fresh-
ness of affection in its prime. The last adjuration of
Hector to Achilles is in the name of his parents; and
the line, in which Priam beseeches the tremendous
warrior to remember Peleus, is one of the most fa-
mous in all literature. The young are tenderly cared
for. The rights of the old to authority and reverence
are strongly felt. They exercise the offices of the
judge, the priest, the counsellor. But here, as else-
where, we observe a profound good sense in the
Achaian time and race, which pushes no claim to
extremes. Laertes, when he has lost the full posses-
sion of his powers, goes into retirement; and it
even appears from a line in the Iliad (v. 92) as if
sovereignty was most usually exercised by those
only who had reached, but had not passed, the
maturity of their corporal and mental powers.
II. Particular Virtues and Failings.-Let us
conclude with a few notes on particulars. Wine was
sociably enjoyed, but drunkenness was abhorred, and
is always followed by calamity; it partakes of brutal
excess, dishonours nature, and therefore is much
I12
[CHAP.
HOMER.
more than merely disapproved. Sexual frailty exists
among Achaians, only in narrow measure. A certain
element of boastfulness is discoverable even in so
gallant a chief as Diomed. Nor is he ashamed to take
an advantage of Glaukos in the friendly exchange of
arms, copper against gilded, nine oxens' worth for
the value of one hundred. The tender affections are
most freely exercised, in kissing on the side of joy, tears
on the side of sorrow, and by none more freely than
by the great Protagonists, Achilles and Odusseus.
On one important and characteristic subject, the
exposure of the person to view, the men of that time
had a peculiar and fastidious delicacy. The self-
possession and self-command of every Greek are
perfect. These qualities may be traced even in
Thersites. In whatever state the Greek may be, he
is never bewildered: his soul never rocks upon its
pedestal. Only in the Suitors is there a loss of pre-
sence of mind: and this is by a divine judgment. Free
in taking, Greeks are liberal in giving. Greed rests as
a reproach upon the character of Agamemnon, soli-
tary in this respect. There is little mercy to enemies,
little pity, but no cruelty: life is taken for cause,
never gratuitously or in sport; torture is unheard of.
The rapacious and profligate Suitors, exhibit to us the
lowest form of Achaian immorality. Of the more
bitter and base depravities, whether in institutions or
individuals, we do not find a trace.
12. The Quality of Aidos.-The noblest of
all the ethical indications of the poems is perhaps
to be found in the notable and comprehensive word
aidos. It refuses to be translated by any single term
of the English, or perhaps of any other modern lan-
guage; indeed I doubt whether it had not abated
much of its force in the classical age of Greece. It
means shame, but never false shame; it means
honour, but never the base-born thing in these last
times called prestige. It means duty, but duty shaped
Ix.]
113
POLITY.
with a peculiar grace. It means reverence, and this
without doubt is its chief element. It means chivalry;
and, though this word cannot be given as a good tech-
nical translation, it is perhaps nearer, in pith and
inarrow, to the Homeric aidōs than any other word
we know. But aidōs excels it, as expressing the
faculty of the mental eye turned ever inwards.
Aidos is based upon a true self-respect, upon an ever-
living consciousness of the nature that we bear, and
of the obligation that we owe its laws. There is no
sin, that a human being can commit, without sinning
against aidos.
CHAPTER IX.
POLITY.
1. Ground Ideas of Achaian Polity.-The
polity of the Achaian time and people was simple.
This may best be signified by stating that the word
law is not found in Homer, but only the word com-
mon-right, themis, or in the plural themistes: the
material lying in our nature, which is gradually drawn
forth and, upon experience, shaped into laws. But,
simple as were the forms of the Homeric polity, it
nevertheless is the department in which, as to every
fundamental point, the Homeric Greeks were most
advanced. It was pervaded by publicity. It was
worked mainly by persuasion, with force only as the
last resort. It was founded in reciprocal duty and
reciprocal benefit. The absurd idea that the nation
exists for the rulers, and not the rulers for the
nation, finds no countenance in the Homeric poems.
The ruler enjoys, but he also works. The com-
munity obeys without any note of servitude, but yet
in the spirit of a religious veneration. All the first
114
[CHAP.
HOMER.
fundamental lessons of political science may be
learned, particularly by Englishmen, in studying the
Achaian politics.
2. Its Religious Sanction.-This simple polity
is founded under a sanction distinctly divine. It is
Zeus, who gives to the ruling office the power that
it enjoys. His wrath descends upon the men who
pervert justice. We find in Homer the idea expressed,
so prominent in the Old Testament, that the sin of
the ruler brings suffering on the country. This how-
ever is not accompanied with the fiction of passive
obedience, or with exclusion of the community from
the question who shall rule. In the Odyssey, when the
return of Odusseus and the slaughter of the Suitors
are made known, the people meet to decide that very
question.
3. Monarchy was its Form.-It is government
under a single head, which, growing out of the original
and probably remembered constitution of men in
families, forms the rule of general practice: though
we have in the army instances of a plurality of leaders,
and in some of the cases there is no indication of a chief
authority. The heads of the most considerable commu-
nities, and likewise the chiefs peculiarly distinguished in
any manner, such as Telamonian Aias, and Odusseus,
appear in the army as having the place of a king
(basileus); and this title is also fully recognised in the
rulers of foreign lands. The word is used largely of
the Suitors in the Odyssey, who were probably upstarts
in the absence of the true king. Minor chiefs have
no special title, unless perhaps hegetōr, or in the
Army hegemon. The name of anax appears to belong
rather to a class than an office. The good king
mild and gentle as a father. The vice mentioned
as marking evil rulers is delivering crooked judgments,
and thus putting force in the place of right. Cor-
ruption, not violence, is what appears to be imputed
to Agamemnon as demoboros. He practised violence
IX.]
115
POLITY.
against Achilles; but the great chief would have
resorted summarily to force in return, unless he had
been restrained by a divine injunction.
4. Functions of the King.-The king's office
was hereditary, and he held it by primogeniture. The
office had four branches, and he also appears before us
in a fifth capacity. (a.) He already performs the duty
which elsewhere, and in Greece afterwards, devolved
upon the priest, of offering sacrifice.. For examples,
we have Nestor in Pulos, Agamemnon on the plain of
Troy. (b.) He is the general, and leads the people to
war. The responsibilities of command are vividly
exhibited in Agamemnon, whose mind sometimes
appears on the point of giving way under the pressure,
and who from this cause bursts into a profusion of
tears under difficulty. (c.) He is the judge; and this
is the duty which may be considered primary, for it is
the one which Achilles describes as belonging to the
possession of the skeptron, or royal staff. (d.) Fourthly,
he is the Head of the Assembly: he summons and
presides in it, but apparently without any other
defined power. Telemachos, acting as king, is said to
call the Ithacan assembly (Od. i. 90), Achilles (I. i.
54), apparently to procure the calling of it. The ruling
office had already begun to gather incidental emolu-
ments. The king received, without objection, gifts from
traders for permission to exercise their traffic: so in the
Seventh Iliad (470) and Seventh Odyssey (8-11); and
so in the Book of Genesis (xliii. 11). The two talents,
mentioned in the trial-scene on the Shield, were,
according to some, a fee payable on the administration
of justice, and if so, they are to be reckoned as in the
nature of royal revenues, since we must regard the
judges as his delegates. Further, it would seem that
he presided over, and to a great extent regulated, the
division of the booty in war. In honour his position
was higher still: the titles Zeus-born and Zeus-
nurtured appertained to his office.
116
[CHAP.
HOMER.
5. His Crown-Lands, and Duties.-Lastly,
the king is a proprietor. He holds a temenos, or public
estate. This might be civil, or might be given tỏ
the worship of a deity, and probably the support of
his priest. The temenos of a king appears on the
Shield of Achilles; and he watches with pleasure the
operations of his reapers. On the other hand the
property, on which Laertes lives in retirement, is
called agros, and not temenos; it was acquired by
himself, seemingly out of his savings. With these
honours, and these possessions, the king was expected
to exercise a large hospitality. After his fight with
Hector, Aias repairs to the quarters of Agamemnon
and to the banquet there, as if it were a matter of
right and of course (vii. 313). Alkinoos, when
Odusseus arrives in Scheriè, is entertaining his brother
kings. Some among the friends of Odusseus, as
well as others his enemies perhaps in greater number,
appear to have feasted at his palace in his absence.
But besides this tax upon his resources, a heavier
obligation lay upon him; and it is expressed in the
noble speech (II. xii. 310) of Sarpedon to his cousin
Glaukos: "Why have we place and preference at
feasts? why are we looked upon as gods? why have we
that broad estate by Xanthos? That we may stand
in the foremost of the Lycian ranks, and court the
burning battle." Finally, to the kings of Homer
personal beauty is largely accorded: and they were
eminently refined in manners.
6. The Council.-As around Zeus in the Olym-
pian Court, so around Agamemnon in the camp, there
was a small body of at least eight principal chieftains,
also called kings, who formed the Boulè, or Council.
These were Menelaos, Nestor, Odusseus, Achilles,
Diomed, Idomeneus, Aias the Telamonian, and Aias
the Oilean. They bear the general appellation of
gerontes, elders, as well as kings. The term is official,
for some were very young, and only two beyond
Ix.]
117
POLITY.
middle life. This Council, of course without Achilles,
is called together by Agamemnon in the Second Iliad,
after he has at his own discretion summoned the
assembly, but before it meets, and in order to consider
what proposition should be made to it. The chiefs
meet again before the solemn sacrifice and Array : and
again, in the ninth Book, they send the Embassy to
Achilles. It was an institution of peace as well as of
war. In disorganised Ithaca it does not, indeed,
appear in action, but, in the place of assembly, seats
were set apart for it; in his youth Odusseus had been
sent on a mission by Laertes and his Council; and
Nausicaa in Scheriè meets the King Alkinoos on his
way to the Council. In this consultative and execu-
tive body, discussion is quite free, and it guides Aga-
memnon quite as much as it is guided by him.
7. The Assembly.-So far we have dealt with
those of noble birth. It is more remarkable to find,
in this early time, that the people at large met together
in a place of assembly (agorè) appointed for the pur-
pose, and usually near the temples of the gods and
the palace of the king. When any great and cardinal
matter is to be decided, the Assembly is called. In
the camp, we see the political as well as military
picture of a nation: and we find the fate of the ex-
pedition submitted to the mass of the soldiery. The
fictive advice of Agamemnon to return home is
taken in good earnest, and all rush in tumultuous joy
to give it effect, when Odusseus, by an extraordinary
exercise of vigour, rallies them, with a word of per-
suasion for the chief men, and of reproof, not omit-
ting a blow of his staff, for the nosiest of the mob.
Thersites, the blackguard of the army, renews the
idea, and is severely beaten by Odusseus; but not
until after he has addressed him in a speech, probably
meant to feel the pulse of the Assembly. Thersites
is thus put down, undoubtedly, by force; but the act of
Odusseus is emphatically approved by the people. In
118
[CHAP.
HOMER.
L
the ninth Book, Agamemnon again proposes the
abandonment of the enterprise; Diomed, after a
pause, rises and condemns him outright, declaring for
his part that he and Sthenelos will fight to the last.
Of this, in the teeth of Agamemnon, the Assembly
approve in their usual manner, by acclamation. The
real weight and importance of the Assembly are made
clear in the first Book, when Achilles, instead of going
to Agamemnon or the chiefs, chooses it as the arena
on which to raise his great controversy concerning the
cause of the Plague. But the Assembly could meet
even in times of disorder, and in the absence of any
executive authority. Accordingly, the people of
Ithaca gathered spontaneously upon finding that the
Suitors, the actual heads of society, were slaughtered,
and that Odusseus, after his long absence, had
returned. They proceed to consider what part they
shall take for the settlement of the country. There
are no majorities and minorities formally stated; but
more than half" determined to offer no opposition
to the returned king, while the remainder resisted
him; and, after being worsted, obtained, in con-
sequence of a sign from heaven, terms of accommo-
dation.
(6
8. Publicity and Persuasion.-It was thus in
the light of day, and with the knowledge of all, that
great public affairs were carried on. This in itself is
an indispensable note of freedom, and one of its main
guarantees. But the speeches, made in these assemblies,
are as full of strong and serious reasoning as those
addressed to the few members of the Boulè, or those
which pass, before five persons only, in the barrack
of Achilles. In this last case, where we should have
expected only a conversation, we have the most
elaborate of all the Orations found in the poems.
But, in all the three descriptions of debate, we have
an uniformity of tone and of style, which of itself
would assure us that, in the large as well as the small
IX.]
119
POLITY.
meeting, there was one and the same object in view,
namely, to effect persuasion.
9. Oratory in Homer.-It is, however, material to
consider the defined place given by the Achaian Greeks
to this instrument of persuasion. The art of speech
was in truth at this period what may be termed their
only fine art; and they had carried it, at a stroke,
to its perfection. In this matter Homer is no un-
conscious agent. In Scheriè his Odusseus describes
beauty and excellence of speech as the two great
gifts of the gods; but, with speech, mind is insepar-
ably bound up. "In your infancy," says Phoinix to
Achilles, "you knew nothing either of battle or of the
assembly." And then Peleus appointed him to give
Achilles his proper equipment as a man, by teaching
him both to be "a speaker of speeches, and a per-
former of exploits." (I. ix. 443.) And so in a re-
markable epithet, reserved for these two agencies
alone, he recognises nothing but the battle and the
agore as able to give glory to a man (kudianeira).
Io. The Tis, or Public Opinion.-He has
completed our view of this great spring of political
life by an ingenious contrivance, used to show that the
ordinary Achaian mind worked and passed judgment
upon all sorts of matters that were presented to the
people in mass. His agent is the Tis, or Somebody;
the common thought, the embodied sense, of the
lookers on. The declarations of Tis, introduced with
the formula, "But thus observed somebody, looking
to his neighbour beside him," are invariably brief and
pithy, and they are likewise always right. Where
there is a common interest of the Achaians and
Trojans, the Tis appears as both Trojan and Achaian.
There is a Tis of Olumpos, and a Tis even of the
dissolute Suitors, and he speaks exactly what, though
in itself wrong, is apt from their point of view. More-
over this case is of interest, because it shows how
deeply Homer was imbued with the idea of a
11
120
[CHAP.
HOMER.
common mind working in every community, so that
his men were not stones or dolls, but men in very
deed.
II. Orders of Society.-Round the king we see
a landed aristocracy. A middle class can only be
said to exist in a sense ill-defined on either side; but
to it we may refer bards, priests, prophets, surgeons
or healers of hurts (who approached as nearly to the
physician as the surgeon), and skilled artificers, who,
like the rest, exercised a gift distinctly divine. All
these may be called the deimoergoi, or professional
men, of the time. Those who tended animals, and
tilled the soil, probably formed the bulk of the com-
munity. There is no evidence that slaves were
numerous. A class of thetes, or hired workmen, had
come into existence, but there is no reason to suppose
it extensive. Probably these, together with slaves,
made up the households of the lords, and furnished
the needful strength for tillage and herding on their
lands. All seem to have joined in military service,
except the Priests and the Bards, from neither of
which classes have we an instance.
12. Exchanges.-Natural shrewdness was the
guide of the people in the business of exchanges. They
had no abstract knowledge of political economy; yet
they had a far better name for it, oikophelia, the busi-
ness of increasing the house property, than our very
misguiding phrase. Money did not exist. The nearest
approach to it was in the two half talents, deposited
"in court," so to speak, for the civil action represented
on the Shield. Oxen in some degree supplied a standard
of value; bought slaves were estimated in them; and
it is curious to observe how cheap they are stated to
have been on the Plain of Troy, as we might expect,
compared with the price in Ithaca. Stored wealth
consisted in the metals; but no store is mentioned
either of tin, or lead, or kuanos, which I take to be
bronze,
x.]
121
TROJAN AND ACHAIAN.
CHAPTER X.
EUROPE AND ASIA, OR TROJAN AND ACHAIAN
1. General Relation.-Troy appears, from the
genealogy of Dardanos, to exhibit a polity and society
somewhat older than those of Greece, with no very
marked severance of race, but with a perceptible, and
even in some respects decided, difference of manners,
institutions, and tendencies. There was a friendly
relation between the Dardanid and the Pelopid
houses possibly this gave an opening for the base
act of Paris. A son of Anchises presented the mare
Aithè to Agamemnon, and probably lived under him
in Greece. The Karians of the Trojan army are called
barbarophonoi, speakers of an outlandish tongue. Mix-
ture of language is stated to pervade that army.
But the Trojan people are nowhere described as
barbarous, or as allothrooi, speakers of a foreign tongue.
There is no sign of a very different stage of arts, or
constitution of society. The main social difference
is in the strict monogamy of the Greeks compared
with the polygamy of Priam; but, if this were the
only case, it touches the royal house only, and not the
people. The general effect of the Iliad is to leave.
an impression, that there was no national animosity
between Greek and Trojan. We are told expressly,
that only by bribed agency did Paris avert a public
judgment or movement against him. The chiefs
exhibit a marked inferiority to their rivals on the
Achaian side, but not so the soldiery. Had there
been a broad ethnical distinction, it would have been
every way agreeable to the strong national spirit of
the poet to declare it in a decisive manner. It seems
probable that, in the same general way in which we
122
[CHAP.
HOMER.
apply the Pelasgian name to the popular mass in
Greece, we might also apply it in Troas. The
most marked lines of difference between the Greeks
and the Trojans of Homer lie in the two broad fields
of religion and polity. But these differences are
consistent with, and tend to support, the views which
we have derived from the general evidence of the
poems, that the old agricultural settlers of the Greek
peninsula learned polity in its truest sense from the
Achaians, and that they had professed, before the
advent of that race, a different and lower variety of
religion.
2. Difference in Religion.-The difference of
religion between the Achaian army and the people
whom they invaded, is indicated in the clearest manner
on the occasion of the Pact made with a view to peace,
when the Greek sacrifice is offered to Zeus, but, and
this on the proposal of Menelaos, that of the Trojans
to the Earth and the Sun. Agamemnon performs the
office of priest for the two jointly; and he invokes
not only the Sun and the Earth, but the Rivers, and
with these the Powers of the Under-world, who after
death inflict punishment on the perjured. When we
analyse this invocation, we perceive that, together
with the address to Zeus, the appeal to the sub-
terranean powers was entirely within the compass
of Greek ideas, which attached the utmost value to
the Oath as a bond of society, both human and
divine. But the rest is the Trojan share. The
Rivers are added to the first suggestion of Mene-
laos in entire harmony with the sequel of the poem ;
for the Scamandros fights obstinately with Achilles
on behalf of Troy, and calls his brother Simois to
his aid. Eōs, another Nature-power, is made known
to us as the bride of the Trojan prince, Tithonos; and
the Sun is reluctant to set, when he does it at the com-
mand of Hera, for the purpose of bringing to its close
the last day of adverse fortune to the Greeks. It
x.]
123
TROJAN AND ACHAIAN.
appears also that the Trojans were in close relation with
those other parts of the Olympian scheme, which I
have described as Phoenician. Troy itself had offended
Poseidon, but he remained in relations of peculiar
amity with the Dardanian branch, and accordingly he
saves Aineias from Achilles. Aphroditè is the para-
mour of Anchises, and appears in Troy to Helen.
Hephaistos had a priest in Troas. The employment
of Hermes to conduct Priam to the camp, and his
final revelation of himself, probably indicate his being
worshipped in Troas. There is, indeed, no part of the
Olympian system, which we can positively affirm to
have been excluded from the country; still, there is
plainly a closeness of relation between that region
and Nature-worship, such as we do not find among
the Achaians, but have found reason to ascribe to
the older and Pelasgian inhabitants of Greece.
3. Difference in its Development.-It is pro-
bable that wherever we find a temenos, or estate dedi-
cated to a deity, there was a priest to live' upon it.
There is no temenos in Ithaca: the mere grove (alsos)
was a different thing. There is none in Greece,
except for Spercheios and Demeter, two of the Nature-
powers; and we have no contemporary Greek priest.
In Troas we have the temenos (and of course the
priest) of Zeus; the priest of Apollo at Chrusè; the
priest of Hephaistos; the priest (aréter, literally
pray-er) of Scamandros; lastly, Theano, the high-born
priestess of Athenè. Seers or prophets were common
to both countries. Against this ritual development,
so to call it, in Troas, we may set the rich imaginative
development of spiritual existences above the order
of Nature-agents, which have been noticed in the
chapter on the Olympian scheme. We hear of no
statue in Greece, corresponding to the statue of
Athenè or Pergamos; but this may be accident.
4. Its Application to Conduct.-In the duty
of sacrifice, Priam and Hector were eminently punctual,
124
[CHAP.
HOMER.
and we never hear of any defect amongst the Trojans.
They besought the aid of Athenè; but in doing this they
never thought of the unredeemed wrong of the abduc-
tion of Helen. Among the Achaians, on the other hand,
when Calchas was asked whether Apollo's wrath was
for lack of sacrifice, the answer was, "Neither prayer
nor hecatomb, but restitution is the one thing needful."
The Greeks are comparatively neglectful in the matter.
There are three great cases of omission recorded; that
of Menelaos in Egypt, and those of the Army before
constructing the rampart, and before undertaking the
final return. But, if we look to relative morality, it is
rather with the Greeks. Plainly so in the main cause
of quarrel. Indeed, we can hardly conceive such an
act as that of Paris done by one of the Achaians.
The same may be said of the perjury of Pandareos,
which breaks the truce, and again lets loose the war.
There was a base plot to slay Menelaos when he
came, before the war, to reclaim his wife. Euphorbos
wounded Patroclos in the back. No similar acts are
recorded on the Greek side. The polygamy of Priam
is another unfavourable note. Even the best of the
Trojan characters have broad veins of weakness.
5. Differences in Polity.-The Succession.
Externally, the form of polity is the same.
We see
a King, a Council or company of the old, and an
Assembly of the people, meeting by the doors of the
royal palace. But we may perceive a real difference
in the spirit and movement of these institutions.
Hector is the working sovereign, while Priam retains
the dignity. We may perhaps contrast this arrange-
ment with the case of Laertes. Again, was Hector the
eldest son? In Greece we find maintained the birth-
right of the first-born; though the case of Menelaos
would seem to show that it had not the exaggerated
form, in which no share is left to the younger. But
polygamy is very adverse to the rule of hereditary suc-
cession. Achilles taunts Aineias with being a candi-
x.]
125
TROJAN AND ACHAIAN.
date for the throne of Troy after the death of Priam.
Again, it is remarkable that Hector's son was called
Astuanax, not, as might be supposed, by his father's
birthright, but because Hector was the best champion
of the city. Again, Paris is called by the supreme
name of Basileus, which is never given to Hector.
Though an indifferent combatant, who does nothing but
with the bow, he takes the next rank to Hector in the
field, and commands the second division. Although in
character contemptible, he is the only prince, besides
Hector, who has a palace of his own. Again, the
word hebè, which means early rather than advanced
manhood, is applied to Hector; but not to Paris, who,
according to the poems, had carried off Helen nearly
twenty, or at least very many, years before. Hector
is called young in the lament of Andromachè, whose
grandfather had been alive during the war; no such
indication occurs as to Paris, though he is of a
splendid presence. It is probable, then, on the whole,
that Paris was the senior, and that the rule of
succession was somewhat variable.
6. Council and Assembly.-Among the Achai-
ans, the forms of their institutions had become, in some
degree, definite. In Troas they were much otherwise.
The Trojan elders hung round Priam with the title of
demogerontes; but we have no proof of their regular
action or debate as a Council. The Achaian assem-
blies were in general regularly summoned by the
heralds, and there was a separate place for the elders.
We cannot trace these arrangements in Troy. Indeed
we are told that they met all together, young and old.
Their assemblies have the air of a chance gathering
(agoras agoreuon, Il. ii. 788). They seem to have been
more unruly (vii. 346). The speeches are shorter, and
announcements rather than reasonings. The
Assembly dealt with business as in Greece; but not
with the same deliberation. When Pouludamas spoke
in a way Hector did not like, he was wont to reply
are
126
[CHAP.
HOMER.
that a stranger ought not to disturb the public mind.
The restoration of Helen had been debated in
assembly. But the mental process was not the
same, and Homer marks the difference in the very
form of assent. The Achaians unanimously shouted it
(epiachon). The Trojans tumultuously clattered it (kela-
desan). At the burial of their dead, both armies were
silent; the Achaians spontaneously, the Trojans be-
cause Priam forbade a noise. The Achaians marched
in silence, too, to battle; but the Trojans with a loud
buzz. A finer sense, a higher intelligence, a firmer
and more masculine tissue of character, were the basis
of distinctions in polity, which were then Achaian
and Trojan only, but have since, through long ages
of history, been in no small measure European and
Asiatic respectively.
7. Partiality of the Witness.—It is true that
Homer may have been biased by his intense nationality,
so as to do the Trojans less than justice; and that a
poet of their own might have given a different com-
plexion to the picture as well as the tale of Troy. But,
if we assume the historic basis in the abduction of
Helen, much of the rest follows in natural sequel:
and many of the traits which have been noticed,
minute separately, and only important when combined,
have all the appearance of having been touches given
naturally and accurately to the painting, without any
malicious intention to disparage.
XI.]
127
CHARACTERS.
CHAPTER XI.
CHARACTERS.
1. Plan of the Chapter.-A full account of the
Homeric characters would furnish the material of a
separate treatise. They supply, too, for the self-
prompted observation of commencing students, one
of the most appropriate fields. On both grounds, I
shall attempt in this limited work no exhaustive survey,
but shall attempt, after a few general observations, to
deal with a very few, especially with the two Prota-
gonists, Achilles and Odusseus. I may refer here to
what will presently be said (Chapter xiii.) on the
differences between those of the characters who fall
generally into the same category. Mure, in his
History of Greek Literature, has been very happy
in dealing with some of those which he has touched.
2. General Manner of Treatment.-In cha-
racters, Homer never repeats himself. No two per-
sonages of the poems offer to us the same figure
under the dress of an altered name. This is true,
and it is rather peculiar to the poet, of classes of
characters. The Greek characters of the Odyssey
have a different tone from those of the Iliad: we
view them as if through another atmosphere. In
the same way, the Greek characters of the Iliad
have a different tone from the Trojans. The same
is true of the Lycian cousins as compared not only
with the Trojans, but with the Greeks, to whose
model they fundamentally conform. They have a
shade of sadness, as of men fighting in a cause, and
by the side of comrades, without an entire sympathy.
If, on the other hand, we take the foreign characters
of the Outer Zone, Kirkè and Kalupso, the Laistru-
gones and the Kuklopes, we do not find the same
128
[CHAP.
HOMER.
incisive handling. The traits are more generalised.
The poet is dealing not with what he has seen, but
with what he knows only by report. When he gets
back to the border-land of Scheriè, he is more at
home; he draws upon a background supplied by the
Phoenician element in Greece, which seems not to
have lost all its distinctive marks. Besides having
variety and originality, Homer's characters are true
in a peculiar degree-(a) probably because he is
describing an age he personally knew; (b) because
certainly that age is more truthful, both in its evil
and its good, than the gradual elaboration of modern
manners and society permits. While it knew largely
of self-respect, it hardly knew at all of self-conscious-
ness. There is no word in Homer meaning mere
shyness. What is right and what is wrong is stated with
the same naïveté. Perhaps the highest of all the titles
of Homer to a superlative excellence in the drawing
of characters is to be found in the inability of the
after-poets to maintain them at the level on which
he had placed them. The Achilles, the Odusseus,
the Helen, in later hands are no more than com-
paratively feeble, yet gross, caricatures of the great
originals.
3. Intensity of Achilles.-The character of
Achilles has for its most marked characteristics
grandeur and intensity. It is colossal in scale, and
ranges in some respects over a wider compass than
that of any other hero of poetry or romance. Yet
with all this its parts are so accurately graduated,
and so nicely interwoven, that it is in perfect keeping
throughout. Its self-government is indeed only partial.
But any degree of self-government is a wonder, when
exercised over such volcanic forces. It is a con-
stantly recurring effort at rule over a constantly re-
curring rebellion, beginning with an inward conflict
during the first assembly, and ending with one in
the closing scene with Priam. Self-command, always
XI.]
129
CHARACTERS.
in danger, is never wholly lost; and there is a noble
contrast between the strain put upon his strength to
suppress his own passion, and the masterful ease with
which he prostrates every enemy. But he often
allows the tide of emotion to flow on, yet forbids it
to overflow its banks.
4. His Ferocity.-Ferocity is an element in his
character, but is not, as has been sometimes sup-
posed, its base. Indulged against the Greeks, it is
an exaggerated reaction, such as may be found in
very fine natures, against a foul injustice heightened
with a number of surrounding aggravations. Indulged
against Hector, it is the counterpart of his profound
inconsolable affection for the dead Patroclos. In his
overbearing wrath he utters the wish, "Would I could
bring myself to devour thee!" and after his death
he drags him thrice round the tomb of Patroclos ;
but the mangling of his body, when he has fallen, is
left to the common soldiery.
5. Largeness of Range.-The scope of this
character is like the sweep of an organ over the whole
gamut, from the lowest bass to the highest treble, with
every diversity of tone and force as well as pitch.
From the fury of the first assembly, he calms down to
receive with graceful courtesy the pursuivants who
fetch Briseis. Before the stern excitement of the
debate with the Envoys, he has been enjoying the
gentle pleasure of the lyre, and chanting the deeds of
heroes. From his rage against Hector, he passes to
tears with Priam. When the heaven-sent arms clash
on the floor of his barrack, he kindles into fierce joy;
but the hero did not disdain to deck himself with
gold ornaments of Nastes the Karian, which in him
suggest effeminacy, but in Achilles seem only a
tribute to the magnificence of his manhood. Marked
as are these contrasts, they are thoroughly harmonised,
not simply by art in the transition, but by the largeness
of the scale.
130
[CHAP.
HOMER.
:
6. Odusseus compared with Achilles.-Since
Achilles seems everywhere to tread upon the bounds
of the preterhuman, it might seem impossible to pro-
duce another Protagonist, who must as such be more
or less his rival. But the Odusseus is limned with such
incomparable art, that at no one point does he appear
like an inferior Achilles. Achilles always, Odusseus
never, touches on the superhuman. He is always
thoroughly human. Colossal grandeur is the basis of the
one character: a boundless diversity and many-sided-
ness, is the spell that gives the other its fascinating
power. The adjective polūs, many or manifold, is the
basis of nearly all the characteristic words appropriated
to Odusseus it is curious that no single epithet con-
taining that word is ever applied to Achilles. The
variety of Achilles was in a magnificent and profuse
display of gifts, whether of taste, fancy, intellect or
emotion. In Odusseus an equally powerful and more
versatile intellect works with the strictest reference
to a practical end, and works in the precise way best
fitted to attain it. The splendour of the reply of
Achilles to the Envoys could not be meant to con-
vert them the stinging and compressed oration of
Odusseus in Scheriè (viii. 165), so marvellous in force
and so exact in justice, utterly extinguishes his adver-
sary, who afterwards makes his apology and reparation.
The vast power of Achilles runs to waste in punishing
his countrymen, by his withdrawal, for a sin, which at
worst they only tolerated. The power of Odusseus
never runs to waste, never fails to reach its mark.
Largeness of range marks each alike; but while.
Achilles exults in arms and in ornaments, Odusseus
unites to the highest qualities of a statesman and a
warrior not only extraordinary excellence in the race,
the quoit, the boxing and the wrestling-match, but he
is ready to mow, or to plough a field, against a leader
of the Suitors. The character of Achilles is rich as a
museum; that of Odusseus as a toolshop. There are
XI.]
131
CHARACTERS.
contrasts at every point between Achilles and Odusseus.
Perhaps it is to mark such a contrast that Homer has
made Odusseus shorter in stature than the average.
Yet it will be found not only that they have a common
basis of character in manhood, intellect, and common
tone, but that neither of them is ashamed of tender
emotion in its proper place; they weep as freely as
they think loftily and fight bravely.
7 His Personal Qualities.-The subject of the
Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity of setting forth
the domestic character of Odusseus, in his profound
attachment to wife, child, and home, in such a way as
to adorn not only the hero, but his age and race. To
personal beauty he does not lay a special claim, and he
is denounced by Poluphemos as a poor creature to
look at; but, when he sate, he was more majestic than
Menelaos. A combination of daring with prudence,
with an infinite diversity of application, forms the staple
of his action. But Homer is the master, not the slave,
of his own ideas, and does not exhibit them in a
pedantic, unreal uniformity. The Greek, in general,
not excluding Achilles, was with him what we term a
man of business." Odusseus was a little more. His
prudence, so commended by Athenè, leans towards
craft, though not so as to impair his general integrity
of aim. It is also once disturbed by curiosity, when
he insists on remaining in the cave of Poluphemos to
see what happens; once even by foolhardiness, when,
after re-embarking, he exasperates the monster with
his pungent addresses. There is here undoubtedly a
fault, yet it is not all fault: it is also the irresistible
aspiration of genius to measure itself with danger, and
to plunge boldly into the unknown.
66
8. Female Characters: Nausicäa and
Penelope. — Among the feminine characters of
Homer, passing by Andromachè, the model
"Of perfect wifehood and pure womanhood,"
12
132
[CHAP.
HOMER.
there are three, which display beyond the rest the
supreme skill of the master: Penelope, Nausicäa,
and Helen. It may almost be questioned whether any-
where in literature there is to be found a conception
of the maiden so perfect as Nausicäa in grace, tender-
ness, and delicacy. The sense and tact, which are
combined with them, are as practical as those of any
man. I think that modern genius, which has effected
a like union in Portia, has not perhaps exhibited so
consummate a harmony of what, as human nature is
constituted, are more or less rival qualities. Penelopè
is scarcely a less formidable competitress with all
later attempts to delineate the queenly matron. The
grace, which in Nausicäa was so young and tender,
has in Penelopè blossomed into a perfect dignity.
Within the rich circle of her endowments as a woman,
her great intellect has been constituted on the scale
of an Elizabeth, not without reference to the com-
panionship essential for such a husband. Transplant
that intellect into the nature of a man, and it might
develop into another Odusseus. But where it is,
it lies in the same harmony with the fully-developed
woman, as the young powers of Nausicäa with her
maiden freshness.
9. Helen.-Lastly, I come to Helen. There are
more powerful pictures in Homer; Penelopè is one
of them; but there is none more noteworthy, none
that presents bolder combinations. Her story is not
fully told. But we are obliged by it to suppose, that
her great calamity was also, in some not exactly mea-
sured degree, her guilt. She is not, like those we
have last had in view, an ideal object; but a mixed
portraiture. Her original offence is not aggravated
by her apparent transfer to Deiphobos after the death
of Paris: even Penelopè had such a transfer to
expect, and could only delay it to the uttermost. But
she came down to the Horse, and imitated the voice
of Argive women she had formerly known; ostensibly,
XI.]
133
CHARACTERS.
though the stratagem was strangely shallow, to draw
forth the husbands suspected to be within. Here
again the suggestion is, that she had weakly yielded to
pressure; for, we are told, Deiphobos was behind her
as she went. On the other hand, it is irrational to
regard her as a type of a depraved character. The
original act is described not as a flight, but as an
abduction, from her husband. Though the occasion
of so much woe to the Trojans, and carped at by some
of the family of Priam, she was ever treated tenderly
by Hector. She regards Aphroditè with horror, and
Paris with scarcely concealed aversion and contempt.
She is spoken of in the poems generally, by all persons,
without disrespect. In the Odyssey she reappears
full of queenly dignity, and perfectly restored to the
love and confidence of Menelaos, though the gods.
mark her offence by giving her no children to add
to the beautiful Hermionè. With "beauty such as
never woman wore," and with the infirmity of purpose
which chequered her career, she unites not only
grace and kindliness, but a deep humility, and a
peculiar self-condemnation, which come nearer to the
grace of Christian repentance than anything, in my
knowledge, that has come down to us with the
ancient learning.
10. Other Characters.-Very many other charac-
ters will repay a careful study: the politic valour of
Agamemnon; the modest valour of Menelaos; the
brilliant valour of Diomed; the sturdy valour of the
greater Aias. But Agamemnon, though strong in
policy, is the least Achaian of all the chieftains :
tainted with selfishness and greed of gain, and with-
out the bravery in council, which he shows on the
field. On the Trojan side, Hector has been unduly
exalted by Roman favour; and the error was of neces-
sity repeated by Italian writers in the middle ages.
In the Iliad he compares poorly with Sarpedon and
Glaukos, but very advantageously with the worthless.
134
HOMER.
[CHAP.
Paris. His courage is far from perfect, and there.
are in him veins both of vainglory and of rashness. But
he is pious towards the gods, affectionate and beloved
in his domestic relations, a laborious and unselfish
patriot, laden perhaps with more responsibility than
he well can bear. At the latest moment, driven to
bay, he recovers a perfect manhood, and dies the
hero's death.
CHAPTER XII.
Art, and THE ARTS.
1. State of Art in Greece.-Fine art, as dis-
tinguished from the arts in general, is known to Homer,
but hardly as practised by the Greeks. They used
articles of bronze, but we never hear of tin as a com-
modity among them. They fused metal into moulds,
but there is no trace of their mixing metals together.
The gold-worker (chrusochoos) was a gold-beater; his
tools were the anvil, the hammer, and the pincers; and
his work in that capacity was, to plate a portion of
gold on the horns of an animal for sacrifice. But in
the performance of this very work he is also called the
chalkeus, or copper-smith; and the gold was supplied to
him by Nestor, so that even this simple operation
would secın not to have implied a regular trade. The
practice is carried a little further in a simile, where we
are told of the rare artificer, instructed by Hephaistos
and Athenè, who plates gold upon silver, and so pro-
duces beautiful works. This probably represents the
summit of Greek contemporary art; but it will be
observed that it includes no reproduction by imitation
from nature, either vegetable or animal. No worker
in metals is mentioned among the professional classes
in the Seventeenth Odyssey. Iron was scarce; it was
XII.]
135
ART, AND THE ARTS.
carried past Ithaca, from what point we know not,
to exchange for copper. Homer was acquainted with
the practice of hardening it, in the axe or adze, by
plunging it, when hot, into cold water. From the
purposes to which copper was applied, there must
also have been the means of hardening this metal;
but they are not specified. Of anything like Art,
except in metal, the poems give no sign. A statue
of Athenè appears to be implied by Il. vi. 303; but,
had it been a work of art, it would have been more
distinctly noticed. It was probably wooden. There
is no mention of art-work in stone; but stone pillars
are erected over graves; once ivory is wrought.
2. The Shield of Achilles.-The chief and
most splendid work of art in the poems is the Shield
of Achilles. It is so large and elaborate a production,
and the power of the poet has been so freely spent in
giving expression to its excellence, that it may be said to
stand in some degree of contrast, as well as comparison,
with the other products of art. Some, therefore, have
thought this magnificent conception the fruit of a later
age. Others, conceiving that Homer must have seen
something of the kind, bring down his date to the
period of the largely-figured shields, which explorers
have discovered. But why may not the poet com-
pound as well as the artist? Why should not Homer,
by combining particulars which he had seen in sever-
ance, have supplied a groundwork for these very
shields, as some of Dante's descriptions of super-
natural scenes are known to have provided them for
the medieval painters? The arms of Agamemnon
carried serpents in relief, with figures of Gorgo, Fear,
and Panic. The compartment of the dance on the
great Shield was like a work that Daidalos had wrought
for Ariadnè; showing that the poet had heard of or
seen some such work. A signet ring of prehistoric
antiquity has been found by Schliemann at Mukenai,
which has signs of a combination very like that of the
136
[CHAP.
HOMER.
first and most remarkable compartment on the Shield.
This Shield is the work of a god: it therefore repre-
sents the summit of art. That god is Hephaistos, a
deity secured for Greece only by the mediating action.
of Thetis, and marked with all the signs of foreign
and eastern origin.
3. Other Works of Art in the Poems.—For,
as the god Hephaistos is notably linked to objects of
art in the poems, so they are frequently by name
associated with Sidon, the Phoinikes, and the East.
They are numerous: I will name a selection. The first
that meets us is the sceptre of Agamemnon, which
was a work of Hephaistos, presented by him to Zeus,
and by Zeus, through Hermes, to Pelops. The baldric
of Heracles, with its hunts and battles, stands very
high in the poet's estimation; as did the golden clasp
of the mantle of Odusseus. In this the dog is throttling
the fawn, whose feet quiver in its gripe. Here we
have, in each case, living objects from nature.
In a
range more purely ornamental, there is the necklace
of gold and amber, brought by the Phoinikes. Ear-
rings of gold were familiar; they have been found in
numbers at Hissarlik. The head-dress of Andromachè
is elaborately described in the Iliad. Our translators
had been unable to render the passage with precision;
but it has become quite intelligible on being compared
with two rather complex ornaments of gold¹ for the
head, which Schliemann discovered at the same place.
Ivory is stained for ornament by Maionian and
Karian women. A bowl shaped in silver, the finest
in the world, was the work of the Sidonians. Another,
of silver with a rim of gold, was the work of Hephaistos,
presented by the Sidonian king. A Thracian sword
was "beautiful;" but this may have been only for its
metal. Agamemnon, and he alone, had a sword with
golden studs, set apparently upon a sheath of wood.
Now at South Kensington Museum (May, 1878).
•
XII.]
137
ART, AND THE ARTS.
One instance only occurs of a work of art, which is
stated to have been wrought in Greece. It is the
elaborate bedstead the handiwork of Odusseus, the
universal genius, to whom spear, sword, bow, plough,
and axe, with every fine tool, were all alike; and
who carries many marks of Phoenician connection.
Utility, in the sense of purpose, is associated with
all the Homeric works that have beauty of design.
4. The Useful Arts.-When, therefore, we speak
of the useful arts in Homer, we mean those in regard
in which beauty is not prominent, or specifically men-
tioned. Among these useful arts, the great art was
agriculture, with its ploughmen, sowers, reapers; its
cowherds, goatherds, sheepherds, swineherds. There
are no grooms: the care of the horse would seem—
while even Hera does not disdain to handle the
animal in Olumpos-to have been reserved on earth
for a higher order; even for princesses, like Andro-
machè. There are some signs of advance in the
Homeric agriculture. We have the profession of the
ochetegos, the drainer or channel-digger, already named.
Mules had begun to be substituted for oxen, and were
thought by the poet preferable. The woodman's art
was known and esteemed; for, says Homer, it is
by skill, not strength, that he rightly fells the tree.
Building in hewn stone is commonly a sign of foreign,
or as it may be called Phoenician, agency. The
waggon was known, and was drawn by mules: there
was also a waggon-road.
5. Instruments of War.—The chariot, on the
other hand, an instrument of war, was sometimes
highly decorated, and had coverings of cloth thrown.
over it when not in use. To draw it was, we may
say, the exclusive work of the horse. To mere
draught he was too noble to be submitted. Apart
from a single casual instance in the Tenth Iliad, riding
(keλntisei) would appear to have been a rare and
singular exhibition, or the half-foreign accomplishment
138
[CHAP.
HOMER.
of the Kentauroi.
shield, circular or oblong, and with a belt for carrying
it; the helmet, the breast plate, and the greaves from
knee to ancle: there being no provision for the upper
leg, nor for the back; for how could an Achaian back
be turned? Among offensive weapons, the bow was
little in use with the Achaian army; much with the
Trojans, who make great play at a distance. In this
there may be something of national pride; when
at home in Ithaca, Homer exhibits Odusseus as a
supreme master of the bow. And his descriptions
show how well he himself knew the proper manner of
shooting with it. It is not excluded from the funeral
Games; but it is left to secondary heroes. The offen-
sive weapons of the Greek warriors are the sword (with
its belt), the spear, the javelin, the axe, and the half-
axe, or axe with one edge; nor must the hurling of
large stones by the most powerful heroes be left out
of view. Machaira, the knife or dagger, is used not
in actual fight, but by the surgeon or the sacrificer.
The defensive weapons were the
6. Works of Artisans.-The potter's wheel is
known and appears (in a simile) on the Shield: but
he himself is mentioned only there, and productions
in pottery hardly appear in the poems. We cannot
infer that they did not exist, or the same inference
would hold as to stone implements, of which we have
I think none portable, but only the millstone. I infer,
rather, that in neither kind did the utensils made
attain to much beauty or high excellence. Copper
utensils, as well as arms, prevail: and the copper-
smith is a pretty familiar personage. The wood-
worker is known both as carpenter and ship-builder:
he has a tool for boring, and he uses the plummet
to give accuracy to his work. The house and the
ship, or even the chariot, of Homer, I could not here
attempt to describe.
7. Food.-The business of the butcher, and that
of the cook, were absorbed in the office of the
XII.]
139
ART, AND THE ARTS.
sacrificer and his assistants. The preparation of bread.
and cakes doubtless fell, as well as the grinding of
corn into flour, to women. Beef and mutton were freely
used. When we come to large consumption of pork,
as in Ithaca, or in Scheriè, it seems to be a note of
foreign connection. There is general mention of
considerable variety in bread or vegetable food; but
meat was all roasted. Cheese was in use. Fish,
like birds, was little esteemed as an article of food:
we hear, however, of the fisherman and his net, as
well as of the ferryman plying between Ithaca and
Cefalonia.
8. Employments of Women, and House-
hold Offices.--Women were employed as house-
keepers and as nurses, and they discharged most of
the indoor duties of the household. Their standing
occupation was in spinning and weaving the material
of flax or wool into garments, carpets or rugs, cover-
lets, and other bedclothes. Softness and beauty in
these works are mentioned: but embroidery com-
monly stands in connection with foreign workers,
or foreign relationship or instruction: as does the
mention of drugs. Men are employed in the office
of carving, and the general conduct of the banquets
of the Suitors: but the women begin their household
work in the morning, about the palace in Ithaca,
with an air of routine resembling the like operations
of the housemaid in our own age.
140
[CHAP.
HOMER.
CHAPTER XIII.
HOMER'S PLACE AND OFFICE AS A POET.
1. The Greek Mind and Work.-The place
and office of the Greeks in regard to letters, and to
the culture of the human mind throughout all time,
have been admirably described in the opening section.
of Mr. Jebb's Primer of Greek Literature. It is quite
idle for modern theorists to suppose that we can dis-
pense with their aid, or shake off what some would
call a thraldom. This could only be done by going
back to a state which, whatever its equipments in
certain respects, would be, in essential points, one
nearer to barbarism than that which we now hold.
The work of the Greeks has been done once for all,
and for all mankind. Regarding more closely their
office in the great design of Providence for the edu-
cation of man, we may say at large that it was to
supply a special school, in which the whole intel-
lect of the individual man was to be trained. Their
literature, says Mr. Jebb, has the unity not of a
library, but of a living body. It is based in con-
formity to nature, in close mutual relation of parts; in
harmony between sound and sense, between thought
and language; in solidity, balance, and measure. In
every one of these qualities Homer led the way, and
supplied a standard for his countrymen; and it may
be truly said that the criticisms and estimates formed
at other periods, which treat him as limited, or fitful,
or abounding more in invention than in judgment,
betray a superficial acquaintance with his text. Our
own age, less creative perhaps than some others,
possesses increasingly the lower but yet valuable pre-
rogative of a systematic and earnest criticism; and
XIII.]
141
HOMER THE POET.
far more has been done within the last century to
work the rich mine of his poems, than in the eighteen
hundred years preceding. Very much, however, yet
remains to reward the labourers of the future.
The
2. Homer's Relation to it.-The qualities that
mark Greek letters in general are pre-eminently found
in Homer: such as force, purpose, measure, fitness,
directness, clearness, and completeness. To these he
adds a richness and variety, a comprehensive univer-
sality, which is given only to the highest genius. The
force, which marks a full and healthy development in
mind and body, is in Homer, as in the Greeks generally,
not thrown idly about, but addressed to an aim.
thought is in strict proportion to the subject, and the
language is fitted exactly to the thought. It goes to
its end by the straightest road. The clearness of
Homer is unrivalled in literature. The passages, in
which his meaning is open to the smallest shade of
doubt, either as to thought or language, might perhaps
be counted on the fingers. Such a clearness could
hardly survive the advent of philosophy. It was the
privilege of the childhood of the race, a true though
an Herculean childhood. Lastly; the assertion may
create greater surprise in some, but it is true, that
Homer's forms of expression are in a very high degree
complete, as a statue shaped and polished to the
finger-nail was in the Roman proverb complete; not
merely in their main outlines, but in refined and subtle
detail. The whole of these eminently Greek qualities
may be summed up in one phrase-poetic truth.
3. His Characteristic Style. Besides his
general prerogative as an universal genius, and
besides the properties in which Homer is followed,
and as it were reproduced, in his countrymen, he has
other particular gifts of his own. For example, he is
probably the most characteristic of all poets. Traits
personal to himself inhere in his whole work, and
perpetually reappear upon the surface. Sir Walter
142
[CHAP
HOMER.
Scott has admirably described the fine style of Swift
as the style which puts the right words in the right
places. No more just sentence could have been
written on the style of Homer.
But the merit thus
described is essentially general. Homer has also the
special quality, that all he produces carries the maker's
mark. But the maker's mark, when too prominent,
constitutes what is called mannerism. With Homer
the maker's mark never obtrudes the maker, or places
him between the reader and the theme. It never in-
terferes with the aim and matter of the poem. Only
it is there, ready when wanted. If we look for it, we
find it. We then discover that in him what we call
style, while he has the simplest of all styles, is also,
setting aside the class of mannerists, perhaps the
most peculiar to the individual. It would be hardly
possible to quote five lines from him, which must not
at once by internal evidence be recognised as his.
Even in the smallest shred of the painting, the
painter's touch is seen. So that though imitated
often, in form and in material, the imitations of him
are known by their trick and effort, not by their
likeness.
4. His suppression of Himself.-And while
his com in one sense bears his image, Homer, like
Shakespeare, is remarkable for the suppression of him-
self. The harmonious laws of his mind are everywhere
visibly at work, but the ego-the mere personality
-is nowhere to be traced. The pronoun itself only
occurs in some few invocations to the Muse. In
the exordium of the Iliad he says not, like Virgil and
Tasso, "I sing,” not even "Teach me to sing;" but
"Sing, O Goddess." In the Odyssey, "Tell me,
O Muse, of the man;" where the personal pronoun
is a mere grammatical necessity. The only passage,
in which we seem for a moment to see the figure of
the minstrel is the prelude, in the Second Iliad, to the
long detail of the Greek Catalogue. This Catalogue
XIII.]
143
HOMER THE POET.
was not, like the Poem at large, a tissue woven with
continuity of thought, but rather a heap of details
without a natural tie. The effort of memory was
arduous. Hence the special appeal for aid from the
inspiring deities.
5. His Adaptation of Sound to Sense.-Homer
is wonderful in his adaptation of sound to sense.
This is a property of his great rivals, Shakespeare and
Dante. But he had an instrument for the purpose
in the Greek hexameter, such as they did not possess,
and such as I take to be perhaps unrivalled in all the
world. The time of each verse may be termed uniform,
and is made up of twelve standard units; but there are
five of these units which may be broken into halves
at will, with a short syllable assigned to each half; so
that the syllables of the verse may vary between
twelve and seventeen. The distinction between long
and short syllables, is thus the key to the extraordi-
nary elasticity of his system. By the addition of
syllables we lay more weight upon our lines; he takes
it away. There are other subtle diversities of law, all
tending to enlarge his poetic freedom: one the variety
of cæsura, or principal break of words in the line, and
another a sovereign licence in changing occasionally
the form of the word so as to alter the time (as from
Achilles to Achiles), or in reversing the quantity, as in
dia or Ares, “at his own sweet will," by a process which
seems to belong to a very early stage in the life of a
language, and by a prerogative which it would not be
safe for any but a sovereign poet to assume.
general result is, that he moves almost without re-
straint, in the full freedom of Nature. The clothing
does not confine, while it sets off, the limbs of Thought.
He varies incessantly the velocity of his movement,
and the weight of his tread, in due proportion to the
subject he is exhibiting. The Italian vocabulary for
regulating a musical performance finds full expression
in the method of his verse.
The
13
144
[CHAP.
HOMER.
6. Examples of this Adaptation.-By way of
exemplifying the operation of this most elastic pro-
sody, I may observe that, when he has to describe the
rapid motion of the flying chariots, when the horse
Xanthos has to assure Achilles that it was by no tar-
diness of steeds that Patroclos became a victim, or
when he tells of the light velocity of the mares that
had Boreas for their sire, the rapid, that is to say the
short, syllables of each verse are increased to eight and
even ten. Here the short syllables actually outnumber
the long, and the verse seems to gallop. When, on
the other hand, he has to describe hard, heavy blows,
or the massive constituents of an abundant banquet on
the tables, and on two other similar occasions, he goes
so far as to exclude short syllables altogether by what
are termed spondaic lines. Virgil, who is certainly
of the greatest masters of versification in the world,
imitates this method of Homer's, but cannot match
him. Again, to learn how very far it is from easy to
make words bound, as Homer does, let the reader turn
to Pope, one among our most famous adepts. It is
in one among his very best renderings of sound that he
gives us the wind-born mares (Pope's Il. xx. 270):-
"These lightly skimming, when they swept the plain,
Nor plied the grass, nor bend the tender grain;
And when along the level seas they flew,
Scarce on the surface curled the briny dew."
But he surely fails to convey the idea of lightness when
he describes, after Virgil, in a lengthened and loaded
verse, the similar movement of Camilla, who
'Skims the unbending corn, and flies along the main."
Again, when Iris, the "beautiful and swift," sets out
upon her messages, or when the horse is at full speed,
Homer uses the dactylic line of seventeen syllables.
This adaptation he carries, without violence, into
detail. For example, the speech of the horse Xanthos
XIII.]
145
HOMER THE POET.
to Achilles is mournfully predictive, and therefore
requires a fair share of spondees; but when he pleads
that it was through no want of speed that Patroclos
perished, he does it in a dactylic line. When Achilles
is weeping before Priam, two lines (xxiv. 511, 512)
have together five spondees; when he puts away his
grief and rises up (513-515), three lines have only four.
With the command he possessed over his verse, he
did not need to use the ignoble artifice of filling it with
unmeaning words. His expressions seem to have
flowed, rather than fallen, into their places with spon-
taneous ease. I doubt whether he knew, even as
much as Shakespeare had to know, what we common
men mean by effort. Others besides Homer wrote
in the hexameter, both Greek and Latin, with the
same laws; but not even Virgil, a supreme master of
versification, has been able to make it do the work,
which Homer obtained from it in the ever-varying
adaptation of language to thought, of sound to sense.
7. Use of Particles.-In another matter, Homer
was supremely happy in his instrument; for the Greek
tongue in his hands lent itself by its particles to slight
and delicate shadings of the sense, which it is im-
possible for us to follow, since we have no terms to
express the fine touches they convey, without, at the
same time, expressing a great deal more, and thus
deranging the artful balance both of thought and of
expression. This is felt either less, or not at all, in
translating other Greek writers: but the particles of
Homer are the despair of his translators. Periphrasis is
found intolerable; and there is no refuge but omission.
It is remarkable, that the simple life of the Greeks
should have been equipped in language with a nicety
that modern times and tongues have lost, and likewise
that that nicety should have been most fully developed
in the earliest and most artless period of Greek letters.
8. Use of Epithets.—It is more easy for us to
trace this exact and delicate modelling of thought
146
[CHAP.
HOMER.
the use of epithets, which is certainly one of Homer's
most marked peculiarities. What shading does for the
painter, epithets, together with particles, appear to
effect for Homer; and this, as to both, in a greater
degree than, so far as I know, for any other author. I
doubt the opinion sometimes held, that there abound
in Homer idle or "otiose" epithets, which do not add
to the sense. Take the case of the hollow ships."
Certainly, hollowness is implied in the ship, as bright-
ness is in the fire or the sun. But poetry, especially
recited poetry, and most of all the poetry of Homer,
is a perpetual presentation of images; and the epithet
hollow assists to raise the image for the mental eye of
the hearer. By developing the sense intended, it
adds to the sense received.
9. For the Horse.-Homer has a most refined
use of epithets, even for animals. He employs nearly
eighty for the horse: an astonishing number, many
of which, as might be expected, express fire or speed.
But he distributes them with a finer discrimination
than will be readily observed elsewhere. He never
applies to the horse an epithet of rapidity, or fire, on
occasions when the animal is engaged otherwise than
in rapid, energetic movement. Not less than six elabo-
rate passages might be cited from which such phrases
are wholly excluded: among them the descriptions of
the horses of Achilles weeping upon the death of
Patroclos, and of the mares of Erichthonios feeding.
That is, he avoids giving a general trait, which would
not be in harmony with the particular situation.
When he describes the animal generally, the epithets
of swiftness reappear: as in the cases of Eumelos, ii.
763; Zeus, viii. 41; Rhesos, x. 436.
10. For Men. So much for animals. But the help,
refreshment, and guidance to the mind, which epithets
can convey, and the part they can play in the delinea-
tion of character, is nowhere to be seen as it is to be
tutely traced in the epithets of Homer, for all his
XIII.]
147
HOMER THE POET.
In
great characters, divine and human. For example,
he only gives the epithet (thrasus), rash, to Hector
when there is something in the actual situation that
brings out his rashness. Three times he is admonished,
in the sense of caution, by the circumspect Pouluda-
mas. On these three occasions, the line which in-
troduces the speech notes him as "the rash Hector":
but on these three only. Again, the epithets of
Homer are made to do what other poets have effected
by lengthened descriptions. It may be said, indeed,
with nearly literal truth, that in Homer there are no
descriptions at all. The whole purpose of the poet is
wrought out in actions and in speeches. But his epi-
thets stand instead of descriptions. By the epithets
given to the Danaan, Argeian, and Achaian appella-
tives, we can perceive the
can perceive the true meaning of the
names. We see that he did not think highly of
the Ionians; for he calls them tunic-trailing, while
his Achaians are copper-tunicked, or mailed.
the case of Odusseus, especially, all the wealth and
resource of his mind is peculiarly expressed by epithets.
In the case of Achilles, the epithets are comparatively
commonplace; without doubt because his character
is so amply expressed in strong and vehement
action. Homer pursues more, and far more success-
fully than any other poet, the method of giving efficacy
to these epithets by exclusive appropriation. Among
those given to Odusseus, there are eight most cha-
racteristic of his mind and disposition; they are Dii
metin atalantos, tlemon, polumetis, poluphron, polutlas,
polutropos, polumechanos, poikilometis: not one of
them is ever applied to any other person. Two other
epithets he shares only with his great brother-protago-
nist, Achilles, among living men: these are theios,
divine, and ptoliporthos, city-sacker. Even in his own
family, where all are prudent, the distinctions are
carefully maintained. Noble Penelopè is periphron,
the reflective. Telemachos is pepnumenos, the sensible.
148
[CHAP.
HOMER.
But these epithets are never exchanged; neither the
wife nor the son ever have any of the characteristic
epithets of the father, nor has he theirs.
II. Shadings of the Characters.—I may now
proceed to bring towards a close what I have to say
on the very refined qualities of Homer, by passing
from these epithets of human character to his more
general exhibition of its more subtle distinctions. The
minute distinctions of character are best seen, where
characters are apparently allied. Thus the Trojans,
taken generically, are not cowards; but in the ground-
work even of Trojan courage, in the tissue of the mind,
there is a weakness that stands in marked contrast
to the masculine tone of the Greek. The seeming
exceptions are, the Lycian Sarpedon and his cousin
Glaukos; but the picture of the Lycians in Homer
includes the descent of these heroes from Bellerophon,
and constantly shows that he regarded that people
as ethnical relatives of the Greeks. Achilles, Aias,
Diomed are paramount in bravery: but endurance
marks the bravery of Aias, as brilliancy that of
Diomed, while Achilles is in all things on the borders
of the preterhuman. Of the two it is Diomed, not
Aias, who is in some sort of competition with Achilles;
accordingly it is Aias, not Diomed, who is sent as co-
envoy with Odusseus in the embassy of the ninth
Book. Behind these three lie what may be called the
political courage of Agamemnon, only put forth in
emergency; and the prudent courage of Odusseus,
which is always forthcoming in exact proportion to
the occasion, and filling the place that no other is
found to fill. The wisdom, again, of Nestor is amus-
ingly accompanied with self-complacent reflection;
that of the great Odusseus is entirely spent upon its
end, and never once in either poem, though even he
cannot always repress the hardihood of curiosity, does
he indulge in the slightest egoism. Phoinix is of the
standing of Nestor, and has the same retrospective
XIII.]
149
HOMER THE POET.
habit of mind; but is effectually marked off by this,
that his entire heart and thought are in the welfare of
Achilles. The Nestor of the Odyssey is carefully dif-
ferenced from the Nestor of the Iliad, yet in just
proportion to the altered circumstances of his rather
fidgety character. Like Helen, without any infringe-
ment of identity, he has received an accession of
dignity and calm. There is a great resemblance
between Penelopè and Andromachè, each the normal
exhibition of the wife and mother under heavy strain :
but, again, it is the Greek who wins the day with
Homer, for Penelopè only of the two has the depth
and scope, which fit her to be the soul-sharing partner
of the great Odusseus, and which would have been
thrown away upon the smaller scale of mind exhibited
in Troy. Again, Telemachos is not, and will not be
if he grows for a century, an Odusseus. The prudence
and rectitude are there, as in the father's son: but the
ready initiative, the prompt presence of mind, the
supple strength, the unbending purpose, the rich re-
source, are gone; and, while the lineage is obvious,
poetry has returned to prose.
12. Sense of Beauty; Number; Colour.—
The very keen perception of beauty in form, in order,
and in movement, which is found everywhere in the
poems, conveys the idea that, in this organ too Homer
was, even to an unusual degree, finely strung. Even
where he has to condemn its adjuncts, he does not fail
to pay it a due homage. Nireus, for his beauty, has a
splendid passage given him in the Catalogue, though it
winds up by blasting him as a poor creature (alapadnos),
with small following. To Euphorbos on his death, a
warrior of no marked distinction, he has devoted some
of his tenderest and most graceful lines, for no other
reason, as it seems, than that he was of remarkable
beauty. In a few instances, we trace an indefiniteness
of language, which suggests that the faculty in him
had not yet profited by the great advantage derivable
150
[CHAP.
HOMER.
by us from what has been termed of late heredity.
His idea of number, when it becomes large, grows, as
with a child, very loose; hundreds float somewhat
vaguely before him; thousands are as billions or quad-
rillions. So, also, he knew but little and vaguely of
the differences of colour, except as approximations
to the opposite ideas of light and darkness, both of
which he grasped firmly, and turned very largely to
poetic use. He never gives an epithet of colour to a
flower; never calls the skies blue; and there is no
word in the poems which would justify an assertion,
that he had any approach to a distinct perception
either of green or of blue. Yet so well did he employ
his comparatively scanty materials, that his visual
imagery is both abundant and highly imposing.
13. Similes of Homer; Rhymes; the
Pun. The developed similes of Homer, without
counting those more slightly stated, exceed two
hundred and thirty, of which only about forty are
in the Odyssey. They are employed to relieve the
action where it flags, or where, as in the details of war,
it wants variety. They are therefore very unequally
distributed. The first Book of the Iliad, where the
action is very animated as well as diversified, has
none. The sixteenth and seventeenth, where the
action is wholly martial, have between them thirty-
seven. They are usually from three to five lines in
length, and are supplied by very varied observation
of the scenes of life and the operations of war.
we pass from the Iliad to the Odyssey, in proportion
to the change of subject, similes from the chase and
storm, which had been very frequent, become rare,
and domestic or still life predominates. The elements
of rhyme may also be largely detected in the poems by
the observant reader: in a few instances they are so
prominent for example in the two closing lines of
the magnificent description of the Shield of Achilles—
that they can hardly be overlooked.
The parono-
As
XIII.]
151
HOMER THE POET.
masia, or pun, if it has no older parent, may con-
tentedly claim the parentage of Homer. He has
given it a marked sanction in the Outis of the Odyssey,
and not less than a dozen instances may be found.
14. His Relation to Greek Poetry in its
several Branches.-Passing from these frag-
mentary remarks, I add a few words on Homer's more
direct contributions to the literature of his country,
and indeed of the world. From him has been drawn
the epic, which I suppose contests with the drama
the title to supremacy among the kinds of poetry.
It seems to me, however, that Homer stands in a
nearer relation, than has commonly been perceived,
to the theatre of his country. And this, not only on
account of the remarkable degree in which he con-
ducts the action of his poems through the medium of
the speeches. In its earliest acknowledged stage the
Greek drama shows us but a single actor or reciter,
together with a Chorus chanting odes in honour of
Dionusos: upon which Chorus there certainly de-
volved the office of passing judgments, according to
right and truth, upon the action of the piece.
Now
Homer, reciting his own poems, was himself an actor,
using a musical accompaniment: and he introduces
from time to time, under the name of ris (tis), a per-
sonage extrinsic to the action, who performs the part
of a judicious observer, and is the organ, like the
Chorus, of a sound public opinion.
The poetry of Homer appears to have supplied the
basis of the hymns which are untruly associated with
his name as their composer; and it is easy to per-
ceive how the elegy might find food from his laments
(threnos) over the dead, and the war-song of Turtaios
derive its inspiration from the whole strain of the
Iliad. In the view of Aristophanes, he seems to have
been properly the poet of war. The triumphal hymn
of praise, or paian, is commemorated in the Iliad, as
already established in use.
152
[CHAP.
HOMER.
15. To Oratory.-There is one noble branch of
Greek literature, which we cannot but refer markedly to
Homer, namely, its political oratory. For the oratory
of argument and sarcasm, we turn to the embassy of
the Ninth Iliad in the barrack of Achilles: for the
oratory of passion and withering invective to the de-
bate in the Assembly of the First Book, or to the
wonderful speech of Odusseus in reply to the inso-
lence of the Scherian Prince, given in the Eighth
Odyssey. I know not where to find grander models;
and I cannot think Achilles in any way inferior to
Demosthenes. Nor was this a bye-blow of the poet's
genius. We have seen that the subject of public
speech had a large and well-defined place in his mind;
and one of the very few passages in his poems, that
can be called properly descriptive (introduced however
in a speech), will be found in the eight splendid lines.
of the Third Iliad (216-23), which celebrate the
eloquence of Odusseus.
16. To History.-Less direct than the relation
of Homer to the oratory of Greece, but still suffici-
ently perceptible, is the manner in which his poems
supply the first suggestion of the great work of the
historians. Apart from the mere incidents of the war
of Troy, or from whatever nucleus of truth there may
be in the adventures of Odusseus, Homer is the
historian of their age in the picture he has given us of
its mind, its institutions, and its manners. Nor does
it seem possible to account for the large number of
important pre-Troic legends that he has introduced,
especially into the Iliad, upon any other ground than
this, that the bard of the heroic age, making use of
the only vehicle it afforded, worked with positive
historic aims.
17. Philosophy a marked Exception.-But
if Homer can thus be exhibited as the father of Greek
letters in most of their branches, there is one great
exception, which belongs to a later development.
XIII.]
153
HOMER THE POET.
That exception was the philosophy of Greece;
which seems to have owed its first inception to the
Asiatic contact established after the great eastern
migration. The absence of all abstract or metaphy-
sical ideas from Homer is truly remarkable. Of all
poets he is the most objective, and the least specu-
lative. Of the impersonated Unseen no poet has
made such effective employment; of the Unseen,
except as connected with impersonation, he never I
think makes use, unless on two occasions; one (vol.
vii. 36) where the ships of the Phaiakes are as swift
as a wing, or as a thought; and the other when
he compares the agitated mind of Hera with the
quickened intelligence of a man stimulated and
informed by much travel (77. xv. 30). The nearest
approach to these cases is perhaps to be found in
such passages as the reflection of Achilles on the
mixed dispensation of life, and its prepondering sad-
ness. But this is incorporated thought. Two caskets
are on the floor of heaven: the contents are respect-
ively good and evil. From them Zeus dispenses the
mixed fortunes of some, and the unmixed misery
of others. Homer was not an optionist. But neither
did he multiply gratuitous perplexities. The contro-
versies of materialism were unknown to him. All the
world, all life, all experience, filled his magazine ;
for him mind and matter had suffered no breach of
harmony. Human life had an aspect mostly sad: but
the universe, as to its general constitution, was still
in tune.
THE END.
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hesitate to bespeak for it the widest circulation and the most earnest atten-
tion. It should be in the hands of every school-teacher and friend of edu-
cation throughout the land."-New York Sun.

"
WOR
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 00409 7195
Life anu ci
LEY.
By ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY. With Illustrations. One
vol., 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
The work, with the author's usual felicity in captivating the youthful
mind, discusses the structure and habits of the invertebrate animals.
II.
Fairy-Land of Science.
By ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY, author of "A Short His-
tory of Natural Science,” etc.
trations. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
With numerous Illus-
"A child's reading-book admirably adapted to the purpose intended
The young reader is referred to Nature itself rather than to books, and
taught to observe and investigate, and not to rest satisfied with a coller
of dull definitions learned by rote and worthless to the possessor.
present work will be found a valuable and interesting addition to th
what overcrowded child's library."-Boston Gazette.
"It deserves to take a permanent place in the literature
London Times.
"So interesting that, having once opened the book, w
how to leave off reading."-Saturday Review.
III.
A Short History of Natura
the Progress of y
From the Time of the G
Young
For Schools and G
BUCKLEY
With
"The volume is attractive
their discoveries. Its remar
which the true landmarks
of the information conve
nevertheless invested.
of furnishing a text-
London Daily Nev
"A most adm
discoveries in
up new world
"The b
ural scien
New
D

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ENGLISH COMPOSITION, 1. Nichol.
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