Читать книгу Familiar Studies in Homer - Agnes M. Clerke - Страница 4

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The perennial youth of the Homeric poems is without a parallel in the history of art. No other imaginative works have so nearly succeeded in bidding defiance to the ‘tooth of time.’ Like the golden watch-dogs of Alcinous, they seem destined to be ‘deathless and ageless all their days.’ Nor is theirs the faded immortality of Tithonus—the bare preservation of a material form emptied of the glow of vitality, and grown out of harmony with its environment. Their survival is not even that of an ‘Attic shape’ whose undeniable beauty has, in our eyes, assumed somewhat of a recondite coldness, very different from the loveliness of old, when connoisseurship was not needed for appreciation. The Iliad and Odyssey are still auroral. They have the charm of an ‘unpremeditated lay,’ springing from the very source of our own life; they appeal alike to rude sensibilities and to cultivated tastes; their splendour and pathos, their powerful vitality, the strength and swiftness of their numbers, require to be accentuated by no critical notes of admiration; they strike of themselves the least tutored native perception. These vigorous growths out of the deep soil of humanity have not yet been transported from the open air of indiscriminate enjoyment into the greenhouse of æstheticism; delight in them lays hold of any schoolboy capable of reading them fluently in the original as naturally as enthralment with ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ commands the unreflecting nursery. For they combine, as no other primitive poetry does, imaginative energy with sobriety of thought and diction. The ne quid nimis regulates all their scenes. They are simple without being archaic, fervid without extravagance, fanciful, yet never grotesque. The strict proprieties of classic form effectually restrain in them the exuberance of romantic invention. Not that any such distinctions in the mode of composition had then begun to be thought of. The poet was unconsciously a ‘law unto himself.’ Indeed the very potency of his creative faculty prescribed retrenchment and moderation; the images conjured up by it with much of the plastic reality of sculpture subjecting themselves spontaneously to the laws of sculpturesque fitness. Clear-cut and firm of outline, they move in the transparent ether of definite thought. Projected into the vaporous atmosphere of a riotous fancy, they might show vaster, but they could hardly be equally impressive.

But these matchless productions are not merely the ‘wood-notes wild’ of untrained inspiration. They imply a long course of free development under favourable conditions. The vehicle of expression used in them might alone well be the product of centuries of pre-literary culture. Greek hexameter verse was by no means an obvious contrivance. It is an exceedingly subtle structure, depending for its effect—nay, for its existence—upon unvarying obedience to a complex set of metrical rules. These could not have originated all at once, by the decree of some poetical law-giver. They must have been arrived at more or less tentatively by repeated experiments, the recognised success of which led, in the slow course of time, to their general adoption.

Moreover, the legendary materials of the Epics were not dug straight out of the mine of popular fancy and tradition. They had doubtless been elaborated and manipulated, before Homer took them in hand, by generations of singers and reciters. The ‘tale of Troy divine’ was already a full-leaved tree when he plucked from it and planted the branches destined to flourish through the ages. His verses display or betray acquaintance with many ‘other stories’ of public notoriety besides those completely unfolded in them. The fate of Agamemnon, the death of Achilles, the madness of Ajax, the advent of Neoptolemus, the slaying of Memnon, son of the Morning, the ambush in the Wooden Horse, the mysterious wanderings of Helen, the last journey of Odysseus, furnished themes of surpassing interest, all or most of which had been made into songs for the pastime of lordly feasters and the solace of noble dames, before the wrath of Achilles suggested a more adventurous flight. Inexhaustible, indeed, was the store of romantic adventure furnished by the famous ten years’ siege.

A castle built in cloudland, or at most

A crumbling clay-fort on a windy hill,

Where needy men might flee a robber-host,

This, this was Troy! and yet she holds us still.[1]

1.Lang’s Helen of Troy, vi. 21.

But the saga-literature of the Greeks did not begin with the mustering of the fleet at Aulis. The ‘ante-Troica’ were not neglected. Many a ballad was chanted about the doings of those ‘strong men’ who ‘lived before Agamemnon,’ although it was not their fortune to be commemorated by a supreme singer. That supreme singer, however, knew much concerning the Argonauts, the War of Thebes, the Calydonian Boar-hunt, the sorrows of Niobe, and the betrayal of Bellerophon; ante-Trojan lays served as parables for the instruction of Clytemnestra, and the recreation of Achilles in that disastrous interval when he doffed his armour and strung his lyre. And a small but privileged class of the community was devoted, under the presumed tuition of the Muses, to the perfecting and perpetuation of these treasures of poetic lore.

Homer was accordingly no unprepared phenomenon. He rose in a sky already luminous. The flowering of his genius, indeed, marked the close of an epoch. His achievements were of the definitive and synthetic kind; they summed up and surpassed what had previously been accomplished; they were the outcome—although not the necessary outcome—of a multitude of minor performances.

Now it is impossible to admit the prevalence of such sustained poetical activity as the Homeric Epics by their very nature postulate, apart from the existence of a tolerably widespread and well-regulated social organisation. They besides describe a polity which was certainly not imaginary, and thus lead us back to a pre-Hellenic world, different in many ways from historical Greece, and separated from it by several blank and silent centuries. The people who moved and suffered, and nurtured their loves and grudges in it, were called ‘Achæans’—the ethnical title given by Homer to his countrymen from all parts of the Greek peninsula and its adjacent islands. Homer himself was evidently an Achæan; Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus, Helen and Penelope, sprang from the same race, which was an offshoot from the general Hellenic stock. They were a seafaring people, but not much given to commerce; active, energetic, sensitive, highly imaginative, they showed, nevertheless, receptivity rather than inventiveness as regards the practical arts of life. Their great national exploit was probably that bellicose expedition to the Troad upon which the Ilian legend, with all its mythical accretions, was founded; and some records of attacks by them on Egypt have been deciphered on hieroglyphically-inscribed monuments; but they can claim no assured place in history. As a nation, they ceased indeed to exist before the dim epoch of fables came to an end; the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus brought about their political annihilation and social disintegration, impelling them, nevertheless, to establish new settlements in Asia Minor, and thus setting on foot the long process by which Greek culture became cosmopolitan.

Homeric conditions do not then represent simply an initial stage in classic Greek civilisation. There was no continuous progress from the one state of things to the other. Development was interrupted by revolution. Hence, much irretrievable loss and prolonged seething confusion; until, out of the chaos, a renovated order emerged, and the Greece of the Olympiads comes to view in the year 776 B.C.

For this reason Homeric Greece is strange to history; the relative importance of the states included in it, the centre of gravity of its political power, the modes of government and manners of men it displays, are all very different from what they had become in the time of Herodotus. But it is only of late that these differences have come to have an intelligible meaning. Until expounded by archæological research, they were a source of unmixed perplexity to the learned. The state of society described by Homer could certainly not be regarded as fictitious; yet it hung suspended, as it were, in the air, without definite limitations of time or place. These uncertainties have now been removed. The excavations at Mycenæ, undertaken by Dr. Schliemann in 1876, may be said to have had for their upshot the rediscovery of the old Achæan civilisation, the material relics of which have been brought to light from the ‘shaft-tombs’ of Agamemnon’s citadel, the ‘bee-hive tombs’ of the lower city, in the palaces and other coeval buildings of Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Orchomenos. The points of agreement between Homeric delineations and Mycenæan antiquities are, in fact, too numerous to permit the entertainment of any reasonable doubt that the poet’s experience lay in the daily round of Mycenæan life—of life, that is to say, governed by the same ideas and carried on under approximately the same conditions with those prevailing through the ancient realm of the sons of Atreus.

The detection of this close relationship has lent a totally new aspect to what is called the Homeric Question, widening its scope at the same time that it provides a sure basis for its discussion. For this can no longer be disconnected from inquiries into the status and fortunes of the great confederacy, out of the wreck of which the splendid fabric of Hellenic society arose. The civilisation centred at Mycenæ covered a wide range; how wide we do not yet fully know: the results of future explorations must be awaited before its limits can be fixed. It undoubtedly spread, however, beyond Greece proper through the Sporades to Crete, Rhodes, the coasts of Asia Minor, and even to Egypt. The traces left behind by it in Egypt are of particular importance.[2] From the Mycenæan pottery discovered in the Fayûm, tangible proof has been derived that the Græco-Libyan assaults upon that country were to some extent effective, and that the seafaring people who took part in them were no other than the Homeric Achæans, then in an early stage of their career. The fact of their having secured a foothold in the Nile Valley accounts, too, for the strong Egyptian element in Mycenæan art; and the evidence of habitual intercourse is further curiously strengthened by the presence of an ostrich egg amid the other antique remains in the Myceneæan citadel graves.[3] Above all, the Egypto-Mycenæan pottery, from its association with other objects of known dates, is determinable as to time. And it appears, as the outcome of Mr. Flinders Petrie’s careful comparisons, that one class of vases, adorned with linear patterns, goes back to about 1400 B.C., while those exhibiting naturalistic designs were freely manufactured in 1100. The culminating period, however, of pre-Hellenic fictile art is placed considerably earlier, in 1500-1400 B.C., and there are indications that its development had occupied several previous centuries. Mr. Petrie, indeed, finds himself compelled to believe that the Græco-Libyan league was already active in or before the year 2000 B.C. Achæan predominance may, then, very well have boasted a millennium of antiquity when the Dorians crossed the Gulf of Corinth. Its subversion drove many of the leading native families over the Ægean, where they found seats already doubtless familiar to them through their own and their ancestors’ maritime and piratical adventures, and the colonising impulse once given, did not soon cease to promote the enlargement of the Greek domain. But the mass of the Achæan people lived on in their old homes, in a state of subjection resembling that of the Saxons in England after the Norman Conquest. They were designated ‘Periœci’ by their Dorian rulers.

2.Flinders Petrie, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vols. xi. p. 271; xii. p. 199.

3.Schuchhardt and Sellers, Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 268.

Archæological discoveries have thus shown the largeness of the historical issues embraced in the Homeric Question; they also afford the possibility, and still more, the promise, of satisfactorily answering it. The problem is threefold. It includes the consideration of where, when, and how the great Epics were composed.

Seven cities—

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ—

competed for the honour of having given birth to their author. Wherever, in short, their study was localised by the foundation of a school of ‘Homerids,’ there was asserted to be the native place of the eponymous bard. The truth is that no really authentic tradition regarding him reached posterity. The very name of ‘Homer,’ or the ‘joiner together,’ is obviously rather typical than personal; and it gradually came to aggregate round it all that was antique and unclaimed in the way of verse. The aggregation, it is true, was presumably formed in Asiatic Ionia; the ‘Cyclic Poems,’ supplementary to the Iliad, were mainly the work of Ionic poets; and the Epic was substantially an Ionic dialect. Yet the inference of an Asiatic origin thence naturally arising now clearly appears to be invalid. The linguistic argument, to begin with, has been completely disposed of by Fick’s remarkable demonstration that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent an early process of Ionicisation.[4] So far as metrical considerations permitted, they were actually translated from the Æolic, or rather Achæan tongue, in which they were composed, into the current idiom of Colophon and Miletus. Objections urged from this side against their production in Europe have accordingly lost their force; and the reasons favouring it, always strong, have of late grown to be well-nigh irresistible. Some of the more cogent were briefly stated by Mr. D. B. Monro in 1886;[5] and others might now be added. One only, but one surely conclusive, need here be mentioned. It is this. Homer could not have been an Asiatic Greek, because Asiatic Greece did not exist in Homer’s time. He was aware of no Achæan settlements in Asia Minor; not one of the twelve cities of the Ionian confederacy emerges in the Catalogue, Miletus only excepted, and Miletus with a special note of ‘barbarian’ habitation attached to it.[6] The Ionian name is, in the Iliad, once applied to the Athenians[7] (presumably), but does not occur at all in the Odyssey; where, on the other hand, Dorians, unknown in the Iliad, are casually named as forming an element in the mixed population of Crete.[8] The reputed birthplaces of Homer, then, on the eastern coast of the Ægean, were, when he had reached his singing prime, still occupied by Carians and Mæonians; and we must accordingly look for his origin in the West. There is no escape from this conclusion except by the subterfuge of imagining the geography of the Epics to be artificially archaic. They related to a past time, it might be said, they should then reproduce the conditions of the past. But this is a notion essentially modern. No primitive poet ever troubled himself about such scruples of congruity. Nor if he did, could the requisite detailed information by possibility be at his command, while his painful care to avoid what we call anachronisms would cause nothing but perplexity to his unsophisticated audience. Homer’s map of Greece must accordingly be accepted as a true picture of what came under his personal observation. It is, indeed, as Mr. Freeman says, ‘so different from the map of Greece at any later time that it is inconceivable that it can have been invented at any later time.’[9] Since, however, it affords the Greek race no Asiatic standing ground, it follows of necessity that Homer was a European.

4.Die Homerische Odyssee in der ursprünglichen Sprachforme wiedergestellt, 1883.

5.English Historical Review, January, 1886.

6.Iliad, ii. 868.

7.Ib. xiii. 685.

8.Od. xix. 177.

9.Historical Geography, p. 25.

This same consideration helps to determine the age in which he lived. Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. Not a hint betrays acquaintance with the fact that the polity described in them had, in the meantime, been overturned by external violence. A silence so remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition that when they were composed, the revolution in question had not yet occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view. Practical explorations have shown pre-Hellenic Greece to have been the seat of a rich, enterprising, and cultivated nation. They have hence removed objections on the score of savagery, inevitably to be encountered, formerly urged against pushing the age of Homer very far back into the past. The life carried on at Mycenæ, in fact, twelve or thirteen centuries before the Christian era, was in many respects more refined than that depicted in the poems. It was known to their author only after it had lost something of its pristine splendour. But the Mycenæan civilisation of his experience, if a trifle decayed, was complete and dominant; and this it never was subsequently to the Dorian conquest. To have collected, however, into an imaginary organic whole the fragments into which it had been shattered by that catastrophe, would assuredly have been a task beyond his powers. Nothing remains, then, but to admit that he lived in the pre-Dorian Greece which he portrayed. Moreover, the state of seething unrest ensuing upon the overthrow of the Mycenæan order must have been absolutely inconsistent with the development of a great school of poetry. If Homer, then, was a European—as appears certain—the inference is irresistible that he flourished before the society to which he belonged was thrown by foreign invaders into irredeemable disarray—that is, at some section of the Mycenæan epoch.

There are many convincing reasons for holding that section to have been a late one. One of the principal is the familiar use of iron in the poems, although none has been met with in the old shaft-tombs within the citadel of Mycenæ, and only small quantities in the less distinguished graves below. It is, to be sure, conceivable that a substance introduced as a vulgar novelty devoid of traditional or ancestral associations might have been employed for the ordinary purposes of everyday life long before it was allowed to form part of sepulchral equipments; a similar motive prescribing its virtual exclusion from the Homeric Olympus. Still, the discrepancy can hardly be explained away without the concession of some lapse of time as well.

The Homeric and Mycenæan modes of burial, too, were different. Cremation is practised throughout the Epics; the Mycenæan dead were preserved intact. ‘The contrast,’ Dr. Leaf remarks,[10] ‘is a striking one; but it is easy to lay too much stress upon it. It may well be that the conditions of sepulture on a campaign were perforce different from those usual in times of peace at home. The mummifying of the body and the carrying of it to the ancestral burying-place in the royal citadel were not operations such as could be easily effected amidst the hurry of marches or the privations of a siege; least of all after the slaughter of a pitched battle. It is therefore quite conceivable that two methods of sepulture may of necessity have been in use at the same time. And for this assumption the Iliad itself gives us positive grounds. One warrior who falls is taken home to be buried; for to a dead son of Zeus means of carriage and preservation can be supplied which are not for common men. Sarpedon is cleansed by Apollo, and borne by Death and Sleep to his distant home in Lycia, not that his body may be burnt, but that his brethren and kinsfolk may preserve it ‘with a tomb and gravestone, for such is the due of the dead.’

10.Introduction to Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 26.

He said; obedient to his father’s words,

Down to the battle-field Apollo sped

From Ida’s height; and from amid the spears

Withdrawn, he bore Sarpedon far away,

And lav’d his body in the flowing stream;

Then with divine ambrosia all his limbs

Anointing, cloth’d him in immortal robes;

To two swift bearers gave him then in charge,

To Sleep and Death, twin brothers; in their arms

They bore him safe to Lycia’s widespread plains.[11]

11.Iliad, xvi. 676-88 (Lord Derby’s translation).

The Mycenæan custom of embalming corpses was not, then, strange to Homer; and the Homeric custom of burning them has perhaps—for the evidence is indecisive—left traces in the more recent graves of the Mycenæan people. What is certain is that simple interment was everywhere primitively in use, and that the pyre was a subsequent innovation, at first only partially adopted, and perhaps nowhere exclusively in vogue.

The plastic art of Mycenæ seems to have been on the decline when the ‘sovran poet’ arose. This can be inferred from the wondering admiration displayed in his verses for what must once have been its ordinary performances, as well as from the marked superiority assigned in them to foreign over native artists. They include besides no allusion to the signet-rings so plentiful at Mycenæ, no notice, in any connexion, of the art of gem-engraving, nor of the indispensable luxury—to ladies of high degree—of toilet-mirrors. Active intercourse with Egypt, again, had evidently ceased long prior to the Homeric age. The Nile is, in the poems, not even known by name, but only as the ‘river of Egypt;’ and the country is reached, not in the ordinary course of navigation, but through recklessness or ill-luck, by adventurers or castaways.

We can now gather the following indications regarding the date of the Homeric poems. They must have originated during the interval between the Trojan War—which, in some shape, may be accepted as an historical event—and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. They probably originated not very long before the latter event, when the Mycenæan monarchy was of itself tottering towards a fall precipitated by the frequently repeated incursions of ruder tribes from the north. The generally accepted date for the final event is eighty years after the taking of Troy, or 1104 B.C. But this rests on no authentic circumstance, and may very well be a century or more in error. A preferable chronological arrangement would place Homer’s flourishing in the eleventh century, and the overthrow of Mycenæ near its close. Difficulties of sundry kinds can thus be, in a measure, evaded or conciliated, without encroaching overmuch on the voiceless centuries available for the unrecorded readjustment of the disturbed elements of Greek polity.

As to the mode of origin of the two great poems which have come down to us from so remote an age, much might be said; but a few words must here suffice. It is a topic on which the utmost diversity of opinion has prevailed since F. A. Wolf published, in 1795, his famous ‘Prolegomena,’ and as to which unity of views seems now for ever unattainable. For demonstrative evidence is naturally out of the question, and estimates of opposing probabilities are apt to be strongly tinctured with ‘personality.’ Prepossessions of all kinds warp the judgment, even in purely literary matters, and, in this case especially, have led to the learned advocacy of extreme opinions. Thus, partisans of destructive criticism have carried the analysis of the Homeric poems to the verge of annihilation; while ultra-conservatives insist upon a seamless whole, and regard the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of Homer, in the same sense and with the same implicit confidence that they hold the Æneid and the Eclogues to be Virgilian, or ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’ to be Miltonic productions. Between these widely diverging paths, however, there is a middle way laid down by common sense, which it is tolerably safe to follow. A few simple considerations may help us to find it.

We must remember, in the first place, that the Homeric poems were composed, not to be privately read, but to be publicly recited. They remained unwritten during at least a couple of centuries, flung on the waves of unaided human memory. Oral tradition alone preserved them; and not the punctilious oral tradition of a sacerdotal caste like the Brahmins, but that of a bold and innovating class of ‘rhapsodes,’ themselves aspiring to some share in the Muse’s immediate favours, and prompt to flatter the local vanities and immemorial susceptibilities of their varied audiences. Within very wide limits, they were free to ‘improve’ what long training had enabled them to appropriate. Their licence infringed no literary property; there was no authorised text to be corrupted; one man’s version was as good as another’s. It is not, then, surprising that the primitive order of the Epics became here and there disarranged, or that interpolated and substituted passages usurped positions from which they could not afterwards easily be expelled. Expository efforts have, indeed, sometimes succeeded only in adding fresh knots to the already tangled skein. Pisistratus, however, did good service by for the first time editing the Homeric poems.[12] Scattered manuscripts of them had doubtless existed long previously; but it was their collection and collation at Athens, and the disposal in a determinate succession of the still disjointed materials they afforded, which placed the Greek people in the earliest full possession of their epical inheritance.

12.German critics doubt the fact. See Niese, Die Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, p. 5.

As the general result of a century of Homeric controversy, instinctive appreciation may be said broadly to have got the better of verbal criticism. Not but that the latter has done valuable work; but it is now pretty plainly seen to have been, in some quarters, carried considerably too far. The triumphs enjoyed by German advocates of the ‘Kleinliedertheorie’—of the disjunction, that is to say, of the Epics into numerous separate lays—are generally recognised to have been merely temporary. A large body of opinion was, at the outset, captivated by their arguments; it has of late tended to swing back towards some approximation to the old orthodoxy. There is, indeed, much difficulty in conceiving the profound and essential unity apparent to unprejudiced readers of the Iliad and Odyssey to be illusory; nor should it be forgotten that the evoking of a cosmos from a chaos implies a single regulative intelligence. And a cosmos each poem might very well be called; while the ‘embryon atoms’ from which they sprang, of legends, stories, myths, and traditions, constituted scarcely less than an

Ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time, and place, are lost.

The Odyssey and the Iliad, however, stand in this respect by no means on the same footing. In the former, fundamental unity is obvious; the development of the plot is logical and continuous; there are no considerable redundancies, no superfluous adventures, no oblivious interludes; the sense of progress towards a purposed end pervades the whole. Careful scrutiny, it is true, detects, in the details of the narrative, some few trifling discrepancies; but attempts to remove them by tampering with the general plan of its structure lead at once to intolerable anomalies. So much cannot be said for the Iliad. Here the component strata are manifestly dislocated, and some intruded masses can be clearly identified. Thus the Tenth Book at once detaches itself both in substance and style from the remaining cantos. It narrates an adventure wholly disconnected from the main action unfolded in them, and narrates it with a coolness and easy fluency very unlike the rush and glow of genuine Iliadic verse. Few, accordingly, are the critics who venture to claim the episode, brilliant and interesting though it be, as an integral part of the original poem. Yet even when it has been set aside, things do not go altogether straight. The basis of the story is furnished by the wrath of Achilles and its direful consequences; but while the hero sulks in his tent, a good deal of miscellaneous and largely irrespective fighting proceeds, during which he sinks out of sight, and is only transiently kept in mind. Zeus himself is allowed to forget his solemn promise to Thetis of avenging, through the defeat of the Greeks, the injury done to her son by Agamemnon; and the Olympian machinery generally works in an ill-regulated and haphazard fashion. Moreover, the embassy of conciliation in the Ninth Book is ignored later on; while the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Books, devoted mainly to the obsequies of Patroclus and Hector, have by some critics been deemed superfluous, by others inconsistent with an exordium announcing—as Pope has it—

The wrath that hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign

The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,

Whose limbs unburied by the naked shore,

Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.

Through the weight of these objections, Mr. Grote felt compelled to dissever the Iliad into a primitive part, which he called the Achilleid, and a mass of accessional poetry, most likely of diverse origin and date. And a similar view still prevails. Only that the Achilleid has been cut down, by further retrenchments, to the compass of a somewhat prolix Lay, treating, as its express subject, of the ‘Wrath’ of Achilles. Dr. Leaf indeed accentuates the separation by upholding the probable origin, on opposite sides of the Ægean, of the nuclear and adventitious portions of the Epic.

The force of some of the arguments urging to this analysis cannot be denied, yet there are others, perhaps of a higher order of importance, which indicate the former predominance of a partially destroyed entirety of design through by far the larger portion of this wonderful prehistoric work. Speaking broadly, an identical spirit pervades the whole. The Tenth Book, and a few notoriously interpolated passages, such as the feeble and futile Theomachy, make the sole exceptions to this rule of ethical homogeneity. Elsewhere, from beginning to end, we meet the same spontaneous fervour of expression, the same magnificent energy kept in hand like a spirited steed; an unfailing sense of the splendour of heroic achievement, and a glowing joy in human existence, tempered by the heart-thrilling remembrance of its pathetic mystery of sorrow. This prevalent uniformity in manner and spirit is certainly unfavourable to the hypothesis of divided authorship.

The marvellous beauty and power of those sections of the poem believed to be adventitious is also a circumstance to be considered. They include many of its most famous scenes—the parting of Hector and Andromache, the arming of Athene, the meeting of Glaucus and Diomed, and the whole vivid interlude of Diomed’s prowess, the orations in the tent of Achilles, the chariot-race, the reception of Priam as his suppliant by the fierce slayer of his son. To them exclusively, above all, belongs the personal presentation of Helen; outside their limits, she has no place in the Iliad.

These same accretions are not merely magnificent in themselves, and rich in shining incidents, but they add incalculably to the general effect of the Epic. They contribute, in fact, a great part of its dramatic force and the whole of its moral purport. Without them it would be a bald and unfinished performance—the abortive realisation of a sublime conception. The arming of Agamemnon, for instance, and his feats of private valour, could never have been designed as the immediate sequel to the Promise of Zeus; while they constitute a most fitting climax to the series of the baffled Greek efforts for victory. They are admirably prepared for by the stories of the duel between Menelaus and Paris, of the broken pact, of the prowess of Diomed, of the nocturnal embassy to Achilles. Moreover, the irresistible might of Pelides is brought with tenfold impressiveness on the scene after the fighting powers of each of the other Achæan chiefs have been fully displayed, and proved fruitless. Above all, the Achillean drama itself would lose its profound significance by the retrenchment of the Ninth and two closing Books. For it was the implacability of the ‘swift-footed’ hero that was justly punished by the calamity of the death of Patroclus; and he showed himself implacable only when he haughtily rejected a formal offer of ample reparation.[13] At that point he became culpable; and might only win revenge at the cost of the acutest anguish of which his nature was capable. The Ninth Book, in short, constitutes the ethical crisis of the Iliad; and the moralising at second-hand, to the innermost core of its structure, of a work purporting to be already complete, is certainly a unique, if not an impossible phenomenon.

13.Mr. A. Lang urges this point with great effect in an article on ‘Homer and the Higher Criticism’ (National Review, Feb. 1892), published after the present Chapter had been sent to press.

Nor is it easily credible that the ransom of the body of Hector made no part of its fundamental plan. Greek feelings of propriety would have been outraged—and outraged in the most distasteful way—by disregard of the dying petition of so spotless and disinterested a champion, albeit of a lost cause, and by the abandonment of his body as carrion to unclean beasts and birds. And Achilles, without the elevating traits of his courtesies in the Games, and his pity for Priam, would have remained colossal only in brutality, a blind instrument of fury, an example of the triumph of ignoble instincts. But such a presentation of his character could never have been purposed by the author of the First Iliad. Not of this base stamp was the hero whom Thetis rose from the sea to comfort. For even in the first rush of his tremendous passion, he still saw the radiant eyes and listened to the voice of Athene; he did not wholly desert celestial wisdom; and celestial wisdom could never have suffered the balance of his stormy soul to be finally overthrown. But just the needed compensatory touches are supplied by his noble bearing in the Patroclean celebration, and far more, by his chivalrous compassion for the hapless old king of Troy. They could not have been omitted by a poet of supreme genius—could not, since the imagination has its logical necessities, among which may be reckoned that of equilibration. There is accordingly no possibility of founding a truly great poem, wholly, or mainly, on the crude brutalities of actual warfare. Humanity revolts from them in the long run; and humanity prescribes its laws to art. The slaughtering rage of Achilles demands a corresponding height of generosity and depth of pity; it would else be atrocious. His wrath, in fact, postulates his tenderness; and hence the great difficulty in believing that the singer of the First Book failed to insert the Ninth, or stopped short at the Twenty-second Book of the Iliad.

The upshot of our little discussion, then, is to assign both to the Iliad and Odyssey a European origin, in the pre-Dorian time, when Mycenæ was the political centre of the Achæan world. Provisionally, they may be said to date from the eleventh century B.C. Moreover, the Odyssey in its essential integrity, and the Iliad in large part, are each the work of one master-mind. The Iliad, none the less, can no longer be said to present a poem ‘of one projection’; it shows seams, and junctures, and discrepancies; its mass has, perhaps, been broken up and awkwardly pieced together again; it is a building, in fact, which has suffered extensive restoration.

The further question remains as to the united or divided authorship of these antique monuments, regarded as separate wholes. Are they twin-productions, or did they spring up independently, favoured by the same prevailing climate, from a soil similarly prepared? The answer may be left to the dispassionate judgment of any ordinary, uncritical reader. Supposing his mind, per impossibile, a blank on the point, it would certainly not occur to him to attribute the two poems to a single individual. They are probably as unlike in style as, under the circumstances, it was possible for them to be. A great deal, indeed, belongs to them in common. They were rooted in the same traditions; they arose under the same sky and in the same ideal atmosphere; the inexhaustible storehouse of their legendary raw material was the same. Strictly analogous conditions of politics and society are depicted in them; they were addressed to similarly constituted audiences; their verses were constructed on the same rhythmical model. Moreover, the author of one was familiar with the grand example set him by the other. Yet the temper and spirit of each are profoundly different. In the Iliad, a magnificent ardour prevails; the singer is aflame with his theme; his words glow; vivid impressions crowd upon his mind; it takes all the power of his genius to restrain their riotous audacity and marshal them into orderly succession. The author of the Odyssey, on the other hand, is in no danger of being swept away by the impetuosity of his thoughts. He is always collected and at leisure; he has even esprit, which implies a low mental temperature; he can stand by with a smile, and look on, while his characters unfold themselves; his passion never blazes; it is smouldering and sustained, like that of his protagonist.

Numerous small discrepancies, besides, seem to betray a personal diversity of origin. So Iris, the frequent, indeed the all but invariable messenger of the gods in the Iliad, drops into oblivion in the Odyssey, and is replaced by Hermes; Charis is the wife of Hephæstus in the Iliad, Aphrodite in the Odyssey; Neleus has twelve sons in the Iliad, three in the Odyssey; Pylos is a district in the Iliad, a town in the Odyssey; the oracle of the Dodonæan Zeus is located in Thessaly in the Iliad, in Epirus in the Odyssey, and so on.[14] The Odyssey, moreover, is obviously junior to the Iliad. It gives evidence of an appreciable development of the arts of life relatively to their state in the rival poem; the processes of verbal contraction have advanced in the interval; the ethical standard has become more refined; while formulaic and other expressions common to both are unmistakably ‘in place,’ as geologists say, in the Iliad, ‘erratic,’ or ‘transported,’ in the Odyssey.

14.See an article on the ‘Doctrine of the Chorizontes,’ in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 133.

A difference in the place of origin, perhaps, helps to accentuate the effect due to a difference of time. The thread of tradition regarding these extraordinary works is indeed hopelessly broken. Their prehistoric existence is divided from their historical visibility by the chasm opened when the civilisation of which they were the choicest flowers was subverted by the irrepressible Dorians. The Iliad, however, contains strong internal evidence of owning Thessaly as its native region. The vast pre-eminence of the local hero, the Olympian seat of the gods, the partiality displayed for the horse, intimacy with Thessalian traditions and topography, all suggest the relationship. The name of Thessaly, it is true, does not occur either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey; nor had the semi-barbarous Thessalians, when they were composed, as yet crossed the mountains from Thesprotia to trample down the Achæan culture of the land of Achilles. It thus became, after Homer’s time, the scene of a revolution analogous in every respect to that which overwhelmed the Peloponnesus.

The Homer of the Odyssey, who was not improbably of Peloponnesian birth, must have travelled widely. He had undeniably some personal acquaintance with Ithaca, his topographical indications, apart from the gross blunder of planting the little island west, instead of east of Cephalonia, corresponding on the whole quite closely with reality. And he knew something besides of most parts of the mainland of Greece, of Crete, Delos, Chios, and the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. The experience of the Iliadic bard was doubtless somewhat, though not greatly, more limited. Its range extended, at any rate, from ‘Pelasgic Argos’ to the Troad, familiarity with which is shown in all sections of the Trojan epic. The cosmopolitan character of both poets is only indeed what might have been expected. The privileged members of an Achæan community must have enjoyed wide opportunities of observation. For Mycenæan culture was strongly eclectic. Elements from many quarters were amalgamated in it, Asiatic influences, however, predominating. The men of genius who acted as the interpreters of its typical ideas would hence have been unfit for their task unless they had personally tried and proved all such elements and influences. They were presumably to some extent adventurers by sea and land. But, further than this, their individuality remains shrouded in the impenetrable veil of their silence.