Part 3

There seems to be a kind of hazy notion that though an elaborate system of pictography may have been current among the American Indians, for example, the alphabet, or for that matter the Cretan script, came to Greece as a kind of gift of the gods, and was taken over by a population that had no graphic means of communication. It is true that the earlier records of such, owing to their having been largely on perishable materials, such as bark or hides, may in many cases be irrecoverable. But we may be sure that they existed throughout the Aegean lands, as elsewhere. Nay, it was because they not only existed, but had already reached a comparatively advanced stage, that the acceptation of such a highly developed system of writing as that of the Phoenician alphabet was rendered possible. Even the forms of the letters must themselves have been largely familiar, since, as we have seen, the use of the linearized signs of the purest alphabetiform character goes back to what in many respects must be regarded as another world, and to a time, it may be, when articulate language was itself but imperfectly developed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I may refer to my forthcoming publication, _Scripta Minoa_, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

[2] ‘Exemples de figures dégénérées et stylisées à l’époque du Renne.’ (_Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie préhistoriques_, 1906. Compte Rendu, t. i, pp. 394 seqq.)

[3] ‘L’Évolution de l’Art Pariétal des Cavernes de l’Âge du Renne.’ (_C.r. du Congrès d’Anthropologie, etc._, 1906, t. i, pp. 367 seqq.) Fig. 3 is taken from this (p. 370, Fig. 120).

[4] E. Cartailhac et l’Abbé H. Breuil, ‘Les peintures et gravures murales des Cavernes Pyrénéennes, II. Marsoulas.’ _Anthropologie_, xvi (1905), pp. 431 seqq. Fig. 4 is taken from p. 438, Fig. 8.

[5] Alcalde del Rio, _Las Pinturas y Grabados de las Cavernas prehistóricas de la Provincia de Santander_, 1906. Fig. 5 is taken from _Anthropologie_, xvii (1906), p. 145, Fig. 3.

[6] E. Piette, ‘Les Écritures de l’Âge glyptique.’ _Anthropologie_, xvi, p. 8, Fig. 9.

[7] _Reliquiae Aquitanicae_, B, Pl. XXVI, Fig. 10.

[8] Op. cit., p. 9.

[9] See R. Verneau, ‘L’Anthropologie des Grottes de Grimaldi.’ (_Congrès International d’Anthropologie, etc._, 1906, pp. 114 seqq.)

[10] Capitan, Breuil et Peyrony, ‘Figures anthropomorphes ou humaines de la Caverne des Combarelles.’ _Congrès International d’Anthropologie, etc._, 1906, pp. 408 seqq. (See p. 411, Fig. 149.)

[11] It is perhaps worth making the suggestion that these anthropomorphic figures with their animal snouts may in some cases be caricatures, at the hands of the ‘Men of Cro-Magnon’, of the low negroid element of the population--the ‘Men of Grimaldi’ of Dr. Verneau--with their markedly prognathous jaws and broad nostrils.

[12] _Anthropologie_, xv (1904), p. 638.

[13] _Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1879-80, p. 312.

[14] Cf. Lucretius, v. 1030, 1031 ‘ipsa videtur Protrahere ad gestum pueros infantia linguae’.

[15] For smoke the same, but undulating. The sign is also used for fire.

[16] Garrick Mallery.

[17] E. Piette, ‘Les Galets Coloris de Mas d’Azil’ (_Anthropologie_, vii, pp. 386 seqq.), and ‘Les Écritures de l’Âge glyptique’ (op. cit., xvi, pp. 1 seqq.).

[18] _Anthropologie_, t. xiv (1905), pp. 655 seqq.

[19] Ed. 1672, p. 125. A.

[20] Scheffer, op. cit. p. 129--see Fig.

[21] P. J. von Strahlenberg, _Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia_ (English Edition, 1738, Table VII).

[22] Cf., _inter alia_, A. E. Holmberg, _Scandinaviens Hällristningar_ (1848) (who wrongly referred them to the Viking Period); Hildebrand, ‘Forsök till Förklaring ofver Hällristningar’ (_Antiquarisk Tiskscrift för Sverige_, ii); Montelius, ‘Sur les Sculptures de Rochers de la Suède,’ _Compte rendu du Congrès d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie préhistoriques_, Stockholm, 1874, pp. 453 seqq.; N. G. Bruzelius, ‘Sur les rochers sculptés découverts en Scanie’ (_ibid._, pp. 475 seqq.).

[23] _C.r. Congrès, etc._, Stockholm, vol. i, p. 466, Fig. 22.

[24] Sir J. G. Simpson, _British Archaic Sculpturing_, Plates XXXIV, XXXV.

[25] Op. cit., Pl. XXVII.

[26] ‘On the Tumuli and Inscribed Stones at New Grange,’ Dowth and Knowth, pp. 32 seqq. (_Trans. of R. I. Academy_, 1892.)

[27] Capitan, Breuil et Charbonneau-Lassay, ‘Les Rochers gravés de Vendée’ (_Bull._, 1904, _Acad. Inscript. Paris_); and see E. Cartailhac, _Anthropologie_, xvi, pp. 192, 193, who inclines to refer the group of monuments with which the authors compare the Vendée rocks to the Neolithic Period.

[28] See Coffey (op. cit., p. 33, Fig. 24), who first pointed out the analogy with New Grange. Compare another sculptured slab of the same dolmen reproduced by D. A. Mauricet (_Étude sur le Manné Lud_, Vannes, 1864, Plates VII-IX). Similar ‘ship’ signs occur on the slabs of Mein Drein.

[29] Ricardo Severo, ‘As Necropoles Dolmenicas di Traz-os-Montes’ (_Portugalia_ t. i. Oporto, 1903).

[30] Don Manuel de Góngora y Martinez, _Antigüedades prehistóricas de Andalucía_, pp. 64 seqq.

[31] Among recent contributions to our knowledge of this North African group may be mentioned G. B. M. Flamand, ‘Les Pierres Écrites (Hadjrat Mektoubat) du Nord d’Afrique et spécialement de la région d’In-Salah’ (_Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie préhistoriques_, Paris, 1900).

[32] S. Berthelot, _Bull. de la Soc. Géogr. de Paris_, 1875.

[33] They were first mentioned about 1650 by P. Gioffredo, _Storia delle Alpi Marittime_.

[34] The _Maraviglie_ were first scientifically described by Mr. F. G. S. Moggridge (_Trans. of Congress of Preh. Arch._ 1868, pp. 309 seqq.). See, too, L. Clugnet, _Matériaux_, xii. 1877, pp. 379 seqq.; Issel, _Bull. di Pal. It._, 1901.

[35] C. Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings of the Italian Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902 and 1903.

[36] I visited the spot in 1893 under the guidance of Padre Amerano of Finalmarina.

[37] See my remarks in the _Athenaeum_, December 18, 1897.

[38] C. Bicknell, op. cit., pp. 38, 39.

[39] _Ilios_, Whorl No. 1983.

[40] Professor Sayce, however, _Ilios_, p. 696, takes note of the possibility that such inscriptions as _go-go-ti-re_ ‘may be intended for ornament’.

LECTURE II

HOMER AND ANTHROPOLOGY

In B. R.’s Elizabethan translation of the two first books of Herodotus a marginal note to a startling statement about Egyptian manners begs us to ‘Observe ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen’. Though Anthropology, as its name indicates, takes all that is human for its province, it certainly pays most attention to ‘Ye Devices’--beastly or not--of the savage or barbarian, and to their survival in civilized societies, ancient and modern. Now, as far as these primaeval devices go, Homer has wonderfully little to tell us. Though he is by far the most ancient Greek author extant, it is in all the literature which follows after him that we find most survivals of the barbarian and the savage. Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets (800-650 B.C.?), and in the sketches of the plots of the Cyclic poems which have reached us, there are survivals of barbaric customs--for example, of human sacrifice, and the belief in phantasms of the dead, even when the dead have been properly burned and buried--which do not appear in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The tragedians, the lyric poets, and the rest, all allude to vices which Homer never mentions--to amours of the gods in bestial forms (in all probability a survival of Totemism in myth), to a revolting rite of sanguinary purification from the guilt of homicide, and to many other distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism in the society of ancient Greece. We do not find these things in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age. But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience. No incest or cannibalism, in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is reported concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse. Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends, almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent.

Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. I wish I could keep clear of the complex ‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that, since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to the _Iliad_, at the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite opinions as to the origin of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Poets, and almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand, and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority of scholars and special students who have written on the subject maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ had their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’, and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even Wolf recognized as their _unus color_, the harmony of their picture of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms, and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly, have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature, of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied other early poetic literature--say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest Irish romances--they would learn that minute variations in such matters of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony, _unus color_, prevails in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, which must therefore be the product of one age.

But to this some adverse critics reply that harmony, indeed, there may be, but that it results, first from the influence of tradition--each new poet adhered to the old formulae without conscious effort--and, next, that the later poets deliberately and learnedly _archaized_, consciously studied the descriptions, and maintained the tone of their predecessors, while at the same time they as deliberately introduced the novelties of their own time. This is their logic. Their double theory is untenable--first, because it is self-contradictory; next, because in all known early art and literature the poet or painter, treating ancient themes, dresses the past in the costume of the present with which he is familiar. To archaize is a very modern effort in art, as all early literature and every large picture-gallery prove. As for unconscious adherence to tradition, it leads to the repetition of epic formulae and standing epithets; but later poets, and uncritical ages, when they describe a more ancient life, always copy the life of their own time. We see too that late learned poets who archaized--Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, even Quintus Smyrnaeus--while they do their best to imitate Homer, cannot keep up the _unus color_, but betray themselves in a myriad details: for example, Virgil arms his Greeks and Trojans with iron weapons, and Apollonius introduces the ritual purification of blood with blood, ignored by Homer.

Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’, of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice, gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’, so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct bodies, such as _Iliad_, _Odyssey_, _Cypria_, _Aethiopis_, _Little Iliad_, _Nostoi_, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned Athenians, about 600-500 B.C., or if we suppose, with others, that the Ionians, for educational purposes, Bowdlerized _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, at an earlier date, we ask, Why were _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ expurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by ‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic poems? Was it because the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ alone were cut out of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ omit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence, with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There is no inscription bearing witness to it--_that_, and that alone, would be ‘record’--there is only a late and shifting tradition that, about the time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For all old epic poetry, or only for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_? If for them alone, why for them alone?

I am thus constrained to suppose that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, on the whole, are the fruit of a single age, a peculiar age, an age prior to the earliest period of Greek life as historically known to us. If it be not so, if these epics are mosaics of life in four or five centuries of change, compiled for purposes of education by learned Athenians, it seems that they are worthless to the anthropologist and to the historical student of manners and institutions. If the poems contain scores of archaized passages, in which the poets deliberately neglect the life which they know (while at the same time in other passages they deliberately innovate), then the poems are of no anthropological value. The statements of the critics are self-contradictory, which I still think proves them to be illogical; and in speaking of Homer I shall treat him as a witness to a genuine stage of society in prehistoric Greece and Asia.

As to date, the poems quite undeniably are derived from that late stage of Mycenaean or Minoan civilization which has been revealed by the excavations of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete, and Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, and of many other explorers of Homeric sites. The decoration of the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus; the art of the goldsmith, the use of chariots in war, the shape and size of the huge Homeric shield; the cuirass, _zoster_, and _mitrê_ of the warriors, the weapons of bronze described in Homer, all correspond with objects discovered or delineated in works of art of the late Minoan period in Greece and Crete. But Homeric customs of all sorts also vary much from the facts of the Minoan archaeologist. The monuments of the late Minoan Age reveal modes of burial wholly unlike the Homeric practice of cremation and interment of the bones in lofty tumuli or barrows. They prove the existence of sacrifice to the dead, which Homer ignores. They display fashions of costume quite alien to the Homeric world. They yield none of the iron tools of peaceful purpose with which Homer is perfectly familiar. They furnish abundance of stone arrowheads, which are never mentioned in the Epics.

The conclusion suggested is that Homer knew a people living on the ancient Minoan sites, and retaining much of the Minoan art, much of the military material, but advanced into a peculiar form of the Early Bronze Age; clad in quite a new fashion, practising another form of burial, entertaining other beliefs about death and the dead, but still retaining the flowing locks often represented in pictures of men in Minoan art.

The use of body armour too is in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ universal in regular war; from the rarity of delineation thereof in Minoan art this appears to be another innovation. Homer is quite conscious that he is singing of events gathered from legends of a time long before his day, a time with which he is in touch, which has bequeathed much to his age, but which, we see, is in some respects less advanced than and in many ways different from his own. He attributes to the old legendary heroes, however, the institutions with which he is familiar--institutions that are not those of any known period of historic Greece. They are no figments of fancy. They closely correspond, as far as form of government is concerned, with the early feudalism described in the oldest Irish epical romances, and in the French _chansons de geste_ of the eleventh to the thirteenth century A.D. We find an Over Lord, like the Celtic _Ardrigh_, or the _Bretwalda_ in early England, ruling over Princes (_Ri_), with an acknowledged sway, limited by unwritten conventions. He holds, as Mr. Freeman says of the Bretwalda, ‘an acknowledged, though probably not very well defined, supremacy.’ His rule is hereditary; the sceptre is handed down through the male line. Zeus has given him the sceptre, and he confessedly rules, like Charlemagne even in the later _chansons de geste_, by right divine. He has the Zeus-given sceptre, and he has the _θέμιστες_, a knowledge of ‘a recognized body of principles and customs which had grown up in practice’ (_Iliad_ ix. 99).

The origin of the Over Lord, as of all kingship, may be traced to a combination of sagacity, courage, and experience in war, in an individual, and to his consequent acquirement of property and influence, _plus_ the survival of the prestige of the medicine man, to whom the ruling supernormal Being of the tribe is supposed to speak. A very low example is the Dieri medicine man inspired by Kutchi; an elevated example is the Homeric Minos, who converses with Zeus. Even the dream of Agamemnon is worthy of respect, says Nestor, ‘because he has seen it who boasts himself to be the best of the Achaeans’; another man’s dream might be disregarded (_Iliad_ ii. 80-83). However, Agamemnon does not lay stress on such communications; Calchas is the regular interpreter of omens and the will of the gods. A divinity doth hedge Agamemnon, though Achilles half draws his sword against him. He has the right to summon the whole host, and to exact fines for absence; he has the lion’s share of all spoils of war; he is war leader, but always consults his peers, the paladins of Charlemagne. From him much that is not easily tolerable is endured, but, if he goes too far in his arrogance, a prince or peer has the recognized right, like Achilles, to throw up his allegiance. By due gifts of atonement, of which the rules are ceremonially minute (_Iliad_ xix. 215-75), the Over Lord may place himself within his right again, and he who refuses the atonement is recognized to be in his wrong. The whole passage about the minutiae of atonement in _Iliad_ xix delays the action, and is censured by critics as ‘late’. But it cannot be late, it could only have been composed for a noble audience keenly interested in the customary laws under which they lived, laws unknown to historic Greece. We are accustomed to similar prolixity and minuteness about points of law in the Icelandic sagas.

It has been said that Homer, an Asiatic poet of the ninth century B.C., lived imaginatively in, say, the thirteenth century, B.C. as Mr. William Morris imaginatively ‘lived in’ the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. But Morris came after Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the imaginative archaeological reconstruction of past ages by poets and artists. Shakespeare did not ‘live in’ any age but his own. His Hamlet fights with the Elizabethan long rapier, not with short sword and axe. Homer, too, lives in his own sub-Minoan age, and in that alone.

The poets of this age of loose feudalism are always partial to the princes rather than to the Over Lord. The Irish romance writers much prefer the chivalrous Diarmaid, or Oscar, to Fionn, the Over Lord, and the later writers of _chansons de geste_ in France utterly degrade Charlemagne in favour of his paladins.

Greek, Irish, or French, the poets have a professional motive: there are many courts of princes wherein they may sing, but only one court of the Over Lord. In this partisanship Homer is relatively moderate; his Agamemnon is perhaps the most subtle of all his portraits; unsympathetic as is the Over Lord, his Zeus-given supremacy always wins for him respect. The whole picture of Over Lord and princes is a genuine historical document, a thing of a single age of culture, far behind the condition of the Ionian colonists. The princes themselves owe their position to birth, wealth, and courage. Except Aias and Odysseus, chiefs of rocky isles, all own abundance of chariots. They are surrounded by a class of gentry (the Irish _Flaith_) who are also fighters from chariots, and stand out above the nameless members of the host. It is they (_Iliad_ ix. 574) who promise to Meleager a demesne out of the common land. I conceive that such a τέμενος, or demesne, was much more than a κλῆρος, or ‘lot’; he was a very poor man who had no lot (_Odyssey_ xi. 490). Probably the gentry, or γέροντες, had their gift of a τέμενος, or demesne, ratified in the popular assembly, which, I think, did no more than ratify their decisions.

The gentry held rich fields, ‘very remote from any town’ (_Iliad_ xxiii. 832-5). Society was feudal or chivalrous, not democratic. It is true, as Mr. Ridgeway says (_J. H. S._, vi. 319-39) that we do not hear of land in the lists of a man’s possessions, but of livestock, gold, iron, and chariots and arms. On the other hand, the gentry certainly held rich fields remote from the cities.

We have no clear light on Homeric land-tenure, but land was held by individuals, in firm possession, if not in property; a prince like Menelaus has whole cities to give away. If a prince lent stock to the owner of a lot, and if the owner became bankrupt, the lot, legally or illegally, would glide into the possession of the prince.