Читать книгу The World of Homer - Andrew Lang - Страница 11

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In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours of women—on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin—he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.

It is an instance of the high and noble taste of the poet and his audience, that he dwells most on the best and most charming of the women in old traditions, and is manifestly reluctant to tell of any evil deed, or any cruel sorrow of a lady. Yet legend was full of women fierce and revengeful as Brynhild; such women as Medea, who slew her own children; Ino, who hated her step-children; Althaea, who, to avenge her brothers, burned the brand that was the life-token of her son, Meleager of the golden hair. There was hateful Eriphyle, bribed by the gift that drew her lord to his doom; there was hapless Epicaste, wedded to her son, the slayer of his father; there were unhappy Chloris, and unhappy Tyro, mother of Pelias and Neleus by Poseidon, and victim of a feminine revenge. But this part of the tale is Ionian or Athenian, not Homeric. In Homer a woman is not dishonoured, but more highly esteemed, because she has been loved by a god. In Attic traditions she is cruelly punished by her own kinsfolk.

The wicked and ill-fated ladies who remind us of heroines in ancient German epos, are scarcely mentioned, or not at all in the Iliad (where they could only appear in digressions), and the poet merely touches on their fortunes when Odysseus meets them in Hades. From the guilt and the misery of the "far-renowned brides of ancient song," Homer averts his eyes. Even to Clytemnestra, though her sin cannot be hidden, he allows the bon naturel which Mary Stuart justly claimed for herself. We are reminded of the tenderness of Chaucer for the fault of Cressida, "Ne me list this sely womman chyde."

Homer himself never blames Helen, he regards her with the affection and pity of Hector and Priam: it is the Trojan women and Penelope, her cousin, who speak frankly of Helen and the ruin which she wrought. In the Iliad she does not, "where'er she came, bring calamity"; she is penitent, she longs for home, and her lord, and her one child, the little maid Hermione. She scorns the cowardice of her lover, and, in the third Book of the Iliad, the poet plainly declares that she is. the unwilling victim of Aphrodite. In the Odyssey, wherever she appears, she brings beauty, grace, charm, and quiet, and her appointed home is in the temperate meadows of the Elysian land.

Homer does not dwell on the passion of love; he could not do so in an epic of war, and in an epic of a man seeking to win, on the sea, "the return of his company." But each epic turns on and is motive by love; the Iliad springs from the lawless love of Paris and Helen; the Odyssey from the wedded love of Odysseus and Penelope. The Wrath of Achilles, too, arises on account of his lost love. In the instance of Paris, love has turned to the most tragic end: the passion of Helen is changed into bitter contempt and inconsolable regret.

The loves of youth and maiden, the whispered oaristys "from rock and oak," are seldom the theme of Greek poetry; in the Epics they would be as out of place as in the Chanson de Roland. The loves of Troilus and Cressida were, to Chaucer, the central interest of the Trojan leaguer; no such place could they hold in Homer: he has an infinitely larger and nobler topic. Yet he who listens may hear "The awakened loves around him murmuring," in the lines that, through the din of battle, just mention some old amour of gods with mortal maidens, of mortal men with fairies of the woods and hills.

Considering the warlike nature of the Iliad, the parts played by women, by Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, and the touches that bring forward the wifely tenderness of Theano, are almost surprising; while the whole poem is dominated by the maternal love of Thetis, that magical figure of sorrow, foreboding, and affection, without which the character of Achilles would be jejune, and bereft of occasions to display its fond of tenderness and melancholy. Of course we are told that all these women are "late," and formed no part of the original lay of the Wrath: that is to be expected of critical sagacity.

The magnificent passages on Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba; the humorous descriptions of Hera; Athene, her divine father's darling, and of Aphrodite; the unnatural hatred of Althaea; the caprice of Anteia; the pathos of the dirges of Briseis for Patroclus, of Helen for Hector; the remorseless jealousy of the mother of Phoenix, when his father loves a mistress among her maids, all supply "the female interest" in the Iliad.

There is not so much "female interest" as in the Volsunga Saga, but women occupy the same position, are regarded with the same deference; they are free, on earth and in Olympus, they give their counsel and even carry their point, as in the Icelandic sagas. In the Odyssey, Arete and Nausicaa appear exactly in the fashion of Wealtheow, Hrothgar's Queen, and her daughter in Beowulf,[1] they grace the company and still the quarrels of men.

The whole view of women is what we may call "northern"; it is the view of the sagas, of the English and the Teutonic epics; and is remote from the spirit of the partly orientalised poets of Ionia. But for the bequest of ancient heroic tradition the poets of Athens could not have created their noble heroines. Attic life, Ionian life, could not produce such women; and Aeschylus and Sophocles fall back on memories of heroines who are not Ionian and are not Attic, in the great majority of cases. Christian Europe at various times, in the age of the chivalrous romances, and in comedy generally, fell far below the old northern and Achaean view of the women's part. To chivalry, adultery was a duty, to our European comedy it was a jest: marriage was a bourgeois business. But even to historic Greece the sanctity of the marriage-tie was a serious matter: adulterous intrigues are not the theme of Greek poets and comedians, as they have been ever since our Middle Ages. Lancelot, and still more Tristram, would have been stigmatised as Paris is by Hector; and Guinevere and Iseult would have heard more reproaches from their own sex, than Penelope and the Trojan women bestow on Helen. The Gods are a sinful and adulterous generation, in the mythical view; but in the religious view they warn Aegisthus against his sin and its consequence.[2]

Turning to the legal position of women, we do not know much about the civil penalty or fine for adultery (μοιχάγρια), but Menelaus, the soul of honour, is eager to avenge himself in the duel. The fine for adultery may have been the equivalent of the bride-price paid by the bridegroom. Hephaestus, in the song of Demodocus, demands the return of the bride-price which he gave for the faithless Aphrodite, the ἔεδνα.[3] The bride-price, often mentioned, is a well-known institution, obsolete in historic Greece but familiar to the poet. In very rare cases in Homer, a man may receive a bride without paying a price for doing some great public service: in some circumstances the father will even give a dowry with the bride.[4] In the most notable passage where dowry (μείλία) is mentioned by the poet, he plainly shows his knowledge that the giving of dowry is an exception to the general rule; for he mentions the rule—the wooer pays the bride-price ἔεδνα, but in his sore need of Achilles, Agamemnon offers his daughter "without price" (ἀνάεδνον), and plus such gifts as no man ever endowed his daughter with.[5] This is no proof that the poet of Book ix. lived in a later age than that of the bride-price. He merely recognises what, in an age of bride-price, must have been the fact, that in unusual circumstances, when the alliance of a man was of crucial importance to the father, he would buy instead of selling his daughter's marriage. People were never such pedants as not to infringe a custom, not sacred but a secular bargain, when strong need came on them.

In another instance the husband was King Priam, whose alliance was worth buying by the aged father of the bride. "Circumstances alter cases," as critics often forget, and such rare divergences from the usual rule are not proofs of late interpolation. The Icelanders gave dowries with their daughters, but when Njal was especially eager for a bride for his foster son, he offered to reverse the process and give ἔεδνα, bride-price.[6] In the case of the marriage of Penelope (a very peculiar instance, as there was no proof that she was a widow, and as it is not easy to see who "had her marriage"), we hear of bride-price "such as is meet to go with a dear daughter." This return of the price, or of part of it, was familiar to the Laws of Hammurabi and of the Germans of Tacitus.[7] We may, with the separatist critics, suppose that the passages about returning the bride-price of Penelope when she goes to her second husband,[8] belong to a later period than the body of the Epics; or, more probably, that a variety of customs may coexist (that they may we have proved), and, in any case, Penelope's people were anxious to get her off their hands in one way or another, her situation being irksome and anomalous. Rare must be the examples of interpolated details, when a case so anomalous as that of Penelope is seized on as proof of the presence of later social practices. The passages about Penelope are peculiar. In Od. ii. 53, Telemachus says that the wooers have no mind to go to the father of Penelope, who αὐτὸς ἐεδνώσαιτο θύγατρα. If we take this to mean "will endow her," the writer does not know the meaning of ἔεδνα; but I conceive him to say, "will fix the bride-price," or make the terms.[9] Compare Iliad, xiii. 384, ἐπεὶ οὔ τοι ἐεδνωταὶ κακοί εἰμεν, "we will not make hard marriage terms," that is, will not demand a heavy bride-price.

In Od. i. 278, ii. 196, Telemachus is bidden to take his mother to her father, "they will give the marriage feast and ἀρτυνέουσιν ἔεδνα, many such as should follow with a dear daughter." Mr. Murray says that the writer of these lines "mistook the meaning of estim because he had forgotten the custom" (R. G. E. p. 152). But even Aeschylus knew that ἔεδνα were gifts from the bridegroom (Prometheus, 559, quoted by Mr. Murray); and if the author of the passages in Odyssey, i. ii., did not know, he cannot have read the Iliad and Odyssey. This is so improbable, for even the author of the very "late" song of Ares and Aphrodite (Od. viii. 318) knew all about the legal nature of ἔεδνα, that we can hardly suppose the writer of the passages in Od. i. ii. to have fancied that ἔεδνα meant "dowry."

One thing is certain, that the prehistoric usage of bride-price almost uniformly prevails in the poems, with a trace of such variations in custom as actually occur, when circumstances or affection demand it, in every stage of human society. The bridal customs are not pedantically stereotyped in Homer, but variations in accordance with circumstances do not prove lateness or earliness, any more than such female names as Alphesiboea, Phereboea, Polyboea, and others, indicating that a daughter, on her marriage, will bring many kine into her family, "express the excuse which the parents made to themselves for venturing to rear the useless female child."[10]

Not even in Australian black society are girls more apt than male babies to be killed as bouches inutiles, they are far too valuable to their brothers or maternal uncles, being exchanged for other men's sisters or nieces as brides. The cattle-owning barbaric societies of Africa are not addicted to female infanticide, much less could Homeric society be with its wealth and its tenderness of heart. In Greek non-Homeric legend how often do we hear of a baby-girl being exposed? It is the boys who suffer, in the hope of defeating some prophecy. Homeric society is infinitely remote from that in which girls were too expensive and useless to keep.[11]

Homer is the last author in whom we can hopefully look for survivals of savagery, or of cruel and filthy superstitions. In the Epics there is not a harlot, common as they are in the ancient Hebrew books. It is not to be supposed that the ancient profession was unknown, but all such things are ignored in deference to a taste more pure than that of early Ionian society and of historic Greece from first to last. The tone of taste and morals is, in short, Achaean, like the poet himself;[12] Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, makes Patroclus mimic Nestor; he

"coughs and spits,

And with a palsy fumbling in his gorget,

Shakes in and out the rivet,"

in "a night-alarm." Shakespeare has read of the night-alarm in Iliad, Book x., but not there did he find, nowhere in Homer could he find "the faint defects of age" made matter of merriment. In Homer nobody coughs!

The Homeric idea of the family is symbolised in the wedding bed which Odysseus fashioned with his own hands, making it fast to the trunk of a living tree that it might never be moved.[13] and adorning it with inlay of gold, silver and ivory. According to many critics, of whom Wolf is the earliest, the final books of the Odyssey are later than the rest, and the idea of a separate chamber for husband and wife is late. Other critics, when they find mentions of such a separate chamber (δάλαμος) in other parts of the Epic, explain them as late interpolations. They appear once again to forget that in no civilised society is there absolute uniformity of detail in all the arrangements of domestic life. An interesting example may be found in Scott's description of the hall and house of Cedric the Saxon—the hall floored with "earth mixed with lime, trodden into a hard substance, such as is often employed in flooring our modern barns," the rafters "encrusted with a black varnish of soot" (the melathron), the walls "hung with implements of war," "the low irregular building," are like the house of Odysseus. There were "buildings after building."[14] Contrasted with these arrangements were the castles of the Normans, "tall, turreted, and castellated buildings."

"In the Iliad and Odyssey the houses are normally one-room halls. The master and mistress live in the megaron in the daytime and sleep there at night … grown-up sons and daughters have separate 'halls' or thalamoi built for them close by."[15]

On this showing, Odysseus had chosen to adopt a different arrangement, it does not quite follow that the account of his house is late; it would be hard to prove that thalamos (chamber) and megaron (hall) are identical, we hear of no outside thalamos, like that of Telemachus, occupied by a girl, and the whole topic demands very minute criticism. But the question of Aegean and Achaean architecture is at present the subject of controversy among architectural specialists.

The happiness of wedded life has never been more nobly praised than by Homer in the famous speech of Odysseus to Alcinous. Adultery is laughed at only among the gods. Moreover, we never hear of lightness of behaviour in girls, except when a God is the wooer, and that is reckoned an honour, the woman is sought for in marriage by mortals. In Ionian tradition, as has been said, on the other hand, the girls beloved by gods are severely punished, like Tyro.

Fidelity is not expected from men when absent at a long siege, or lost in unknown lands, like Odysseus, who does not scruple to tell Penelope about Circe and Calypso. At home the fidelity of husbands depends on the characters of the pair. Laertes is fond of a fair handmaid, but dreads the wrath of his wife, as the father of Phoenix, in a similar case, found that he had good reason to do. The bastards of whom we hear are probably sons of the captives of the spear, brought home as Agamemnon unadvisedly brought Cassandra. Theano, wife of Antenor, "nurtured his bastard, like her own children, to do her husband pleasure."[16] Teucer also, a bastard, was brought up by his father in his own house.[17] There was one law for the men, another for the women, and Dr. Johnson approved of this moral system in England.

The domestic relations are very pleasingly portrayed in the Iliad. Homer, to be sure, knows that family life is not always monotonously peaceful and affectionate. In the long speech of Phoenix (Book ix.) we see a son, Meleager, who has a feud with his maternal uncles and is under his mother's curse. This family feud, in which the wife and mother takes sides with her own kin against her husband or sons, is a common motive in the oldest Teutonic Epics, and even in the historic traditions of the Camerons.

But it is among the Olympians that Homer finds his blustering, teasing yet placable husband and father, Zeus; his shrewish wife, Hera; his rather spiteful daughter, Athene; and his lady of pleasure, Aphrodite, whose intrigues are a jest. The affection of Zeus for his daughter, none the less, is happily displayed, while among men the fraternal affection of Agamemnon for Menelaus is his most agreeable trait. Parents and children, except in the woeful adventure of Phoenix, are always on the best of terms, as in the households of Odysseus, Nestor, and Alcinous; and the petulance of Priam towards his sons, after the death of Hector, is excused by his age and intolerable sufferings. "With his staff he chased forth the men, and they went before the old man in his haste."[18]

In short, though wives were bought with the bride-price, it seems probable that the affectionate Homeric fathers allowed more latitude of choice to their daughters than has, in many periods, been permitted by ourselves in England, and no literature in the world displays a happier domestic life, a life more gentle, true, and loving than the old Epics of the mail-clad Achaeans.[19]

[1] Beowulf, 611–628, 1162–1174, 1215–1231.

[2] Odyssey, i. 36–43.

[3] Odyssey, viii. 317–320.

[4] Iliad, xxii. 51, ix. 146–158.

[5] Iliad, ix. 146 et seqq.

[6] Story of Burnt Njal, vol. ii p. 81.

[7] Germania, R. G. E. p. 151, note 1, citing Ham. 160, 163, 164.

[8] Odyssey, i. 278, ii. 195–197.

[9] See Pierron, "qu'il s'entendra avec le prétendant." Merry and Riddell translate, "will accept gifts of wooing for his daughter." Leaf: "get the bride-price for his daughter."

[10] R. G. E. p. 151.

[11] No society is less affluent than that of the Australian tribes. But this does not provoke preferential female infanticide. See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 51, 52, 264; Northern Tribes, p. 608; Howitt, Native Tribes of South East Australia, pp. 749, 750.

[12] See Appendix, "The supposed Expurgation of Homer."

[13] Odyssey, xxiii. 183–204.