Part 4

The people were free, like the lotless man who employs labourers--_their_ situation is not clear--and like the artisans--smiths, carpenters, workers in gold--and the slaves, men and women, were captives in war, or persons kidnapped by pirates--though they may have been of high rank at home, like the swineherd Eumaeus. In war it was open to a man to kill a prisoner or to set him at ransom, as in the Middle Ages. The various crafts had their regular professors, though it pleased Odysseus to be a master of all of them, from ploughing to shipbuilding.

It was a very tolerable state of society; slaves were well treated; women, of course, held a position high above what was theirs in historic Greece. True, they were usually purchased with a bride-price; but the lofty level of their morality, infinitely above that of Europe in the age of chivalry, suggests that men allowed a free choice to their daughters.

No woman sells herself; there is not a harlot in Homer, common as they are in the earliest records of Israel. No doubt they existed, but the poet eschews mention of them. Here, as everywhere, the austerity of his tone, though he is not a Puritan, makes him far from an exhaustive authority on manners and customs. To him, as Mr. Gissing well observes, the stability of the home, typified by the wedding bed of Odysseus, made fast to a pillar of a living tree, is very sacred. In camp, and in wanderings, the men live as they will; at home, as we learn from the cases of Laertes and the father of Phoenix, a good man keeps no mistress, and the wife soon gives a worse man cause to rue his laxity. All this is very unlike the morals of historic Greece. The bride-price is, indeed, a barbaric survival; but the purity of the morals of the married women proves that it was modified in practice by the benignity of fathers to ‘well-loved daughters’. The highest tender was not necessarily accepted. We hear of no amours of maids and bachelors; the girls do not sleep, like the young men and like fair Margaret of the ballad of Clerk Saunders, in bowers in the court, but in rooms of the upper story, where only a god can come unnoticed. Nausicaa is most careful not to compromise herself by being seen in the company of a stranger.

Naturally, in a society that carries arms always, the tone of courtesy, where deliberate insult is not intended, is very high, and rude speech, like that of Euryalus to Odysseus in Phaeacia, is atoned for with an apology and the gift of a sword. Except the Over Lord, no man is habitually rude.

As to warfare, as in the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, the Irish romance based on the manners of the late Celtic period (200 B.C. to 200 A.D.), the gentry fight from chariots, dismounting at will, while the host, with spears, or with slings, bows and arrows, follows or exercises its artillery from the flanks. Except when the rain of arrows does execution, we hear next to nothing of the plebeian infantry. The age of hoplites was as remote as the age of cavalry, and the phalanxes are only mentioned when they are broken. The chariot age is familiar in Assyrian, Egyptian, and Minoan art, as among the Britons and Caledonians who fought with Rome. The chariot was extremely light; a man could lift a chariot and carry it away (_Iliad_ x. 505). Probably the chariot came into use for war, as Mr. Ridgeway supposes, in an age when a pony was unequal to the weight of a man in armour; the Highlanders, with their Celtic ponies, used chariots in Roman times; never did they acquire a breed of horses fit for chargers, hence they lost the battle of Harlaw. To judge by Homer’s description of horses, the chariot survived the cause of its origin; steeds were tall and strong enough for cavalry purposes, but human conservatism retained the chariot. A speech of Nestor, in _Iliad_, Book iv. 303-9, shows that Homer knew by tradition the Egyptian custom of charging in serried squadrons of chariotry, while in his own day the lords of chariots usually fought dismounted, and in the loosest order, or no order. Nestor naturally prefers ‘the old way’; no late poet could have made this interpolation, for, in the Greek age of cavalry, he could have known nothing of chariotry tactics. The Egyptian chariotry used the bow, while their adversaries, the Khita charioteers, fought with spears, in loose order, as in Homer--and had the worst of the fight.

The Homeric retention of the huge body-covering shield, familiar in Minoan art, was more or less of a survival of a time when archery was all-important. The shield, as among the Iroquois and in mediaeval Europe, was suspended by a belt. The same shields, among the Red Indians, and in the Middle Ages (eleventh and twelfth centuries), were, so to speak, umbrellas against a rain of arrows; as the bow became more and more despised, the historic Greeks adopted the round parrying buckler, good against spear- and sword-strokes. The body armour, as far as greaves are concerned, was an advance on Minoan practice. In Minoan art the warriors are usually naked under the huge shields; happily, one or two seals found in Crete, and a pair of greaves in Cyprus, prove that greaves, cuirass, _zoster_, and _mitrê_, the mailed kirtle of Homer, were not unknown even before the earliest age at which one could venture to place the Epic (see Note).

The use of the metals, in war, is peculiar, but not unexampled. Weapons are, when the metal is specified, always of bronze, save one arrow-head of primitive form (_Iliad_ iv. 123), and a unique iron mace (_Iliad_ vii. 141). Implements, including knives, which were not used in war, were of iron, as a rule, of bronze occasionally. The only battle-axe mentioned is of bronze (_Iliad_ xiii. 611); axes, as implements, are usually of iron, so are the implements of the ploughman and shepherd. No man in Homer is said to be ‘smitten with the iron’, it is always ‘with the bronze’; but trees are felled ‘with the iron’ (_Iliad_ iv. 485).

Odysseus shoots ‘through the iron’, that is, through the open work of the iron axe-heads, which were tools. This curious overlap of bronze and iron, the iron being used for implements before it is used for weapons, has no analogy, as far as I am aware, in Central and Northern Europe. But Mr. Macalister has found it perfectly exemplified in Palestine, in certain strata of the great mound of Gezer. Here all weapons are of bronze, all tools of iron (_Palestine Exploration Fund_, 1903, p. 190).

This state of affairs--obviously caused by military distrust of iron while ill-manufactured, when bronze was admirably tempered--is proved by Mr. Macalister to have been an actual stage in culture, ‘about the borders of the Grecian sea.’ We find no archaeological evidence for this state of things in tombs of the period of overlap of bronze and iron in Greek soil. But then we have never excavated a tumulus of the kind described by Homer, and, if we did, the tumulus (which necessarily attracts grave-robbers) is likely to have been plundered. This is unlucky; we have only the poet’s evidence, in Greece, for the uses of bronze and iron as they existed in Palestine. But I think it improbable that the poet invented this rare stage of culture. Again, if we believe, with most critics, that late poets introduced the iron, it is to me inconceivable that they could abstain, in rigorous archaism, or unconscious adherence to tradition, from occasionally making a warrior ‘smite with the iron’, or from occasional mention of an iron sword or iron-headed spear, while they did not archaize or follow tradition when they spoke of iron knives, axes, tools, and so on.

In tradition of the bronze age, the tools, no less than the weapons, must have been of bronze. Why, then, did late archaizing poets make them of iron, while they never made the weapons of anything but bronze?

The great objection to my opinion is _Odyssey_ xvi. 294, xix. 13, the repeated line in which occurs the proverbial saying, ‘iron of himself draws a man to him.’ Here iron is synonymous with ‘weapon’, the weapons in the hall of Odysseus are to be removed, on the pretence that ‘iron’ draws a man’s hands, and may draw those of the intoxicated wooers in their cups.

I am opposed to regarding a line as ‘late’ merely because it contradicts one’s theory. The critics have no such scruples, they excise capriciously. But this line not only contradicts my theory, it contradicts the uniform unbroken tenor of both epics. It is a saying of the Iron Age, when ‘iron’ has become a synonym for ‘weapon’, as in Thucydides and Shakespeare. But everywhere else in the epics the metallic synonym for ‘weapon’ is ‘bronze’. The metallic synonym for ‘tool’ is ‘iron’. Men are ‘smitten with the bronze’, trees are ‘felled with the iron’.

I think that, in these circumstances, it is not inconsistent to doubt the line’s antiquity. If we accept it, we must suppose that one solitary late minstrel out of hundreds (on the separatist theory) let the cat out of the bag and enabled us to be sure that an indefinite amount of the epics was composed in the full-blown Age of Iron, though all the other later poets firmly kept the secret by invariably giving to the heroes weapons of bronze. Mr. Ridgeway is against me. He writes: ‘The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron.’ He may see it so, but Homer saw it otherwise, and never gives a warrior an iron sword or spear (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i, p. 301).

No early poet, perhaps no poet, can avoid, in religion and myth, barbaric and savage survivals, owing to the nature of the legendary materials on which his works are based. Nobody, we may almost say, invents a plot: all borrow from the huge store of world-wide primaeval _Märchen_, or folk-tales. In the _Odyssey_, _Marmion_, and _Ivanhoe_, the plot rests on the return of the husband or lover from unknown wanderings, unrecognized, except in _Ivanhoe_ and the _Odyssey_, by the faithful swineherd. This is a plot of _Märchen_ all over the world. Gerland, and, recently, Mr. Crooke and others, have studied the _Märchen_ embedded in Homer. One such story is that of the Shifty Lad in Dasent’s _Tales from the Norse_, and the Shifty Lad is only a human representative of the shifty beast, Brer Rabbit or another, who is so common in savage folklore. Now Homer, in the character of Odysseus, merely combines the Returned Husband with the Shifty Lad. It would not be hard to show that Odysseus is really the hero of the _Iliad_, as well as of the _Odyssey_, the man whom the poet admires most, and _he_ is the real ‘stormer of the city’ of Ilios. He is the type of sagacious, resolute, indomitable courage; the thoroughly well-balanced man, the most tenacious in war. But, in the _Odyssey_, the nature of the original _Märchen_, as in the encounter with the Cyclops, and the necessity for preserving his disguise, when he returns to Ithaca, compel the poet to make Odysseus foolhardy and an ingenious liar. The sentiment of Homer’s audience and of Homer is with Achilles when he says that he ‘hates a lie like the gates of hell’. But the given material does not permit Odysseus to cherish this chivalrous disdain of falsehood, and Athene, the most ethical of the Olympians, applauds his craft. The materials of legend also yield the cruelty of Achilles; like a hero of the Irish epic, the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, he drags a dead man behind his chariot; and, ‘with evil in his heart, he slays twelve Trojan prisoners with the bronze,’ at the funeral of Patroclus. This is not, to the poet’s mind, a case of human sacrifice, nor does Achilles intend the souls of the men to be thralls of Patroclus.

Homer regards Achilles as slaying the captives merely to glut his fury with revenge, ‘anger for thy slaying’ (_Iliad_ xxiii. 23). This is the explanation which he gives to himself of an incident which he finds in his traditional materials, probably a memory of human sacrifice. Historic Greece was familiar enough with such ritual; but it is a marvel of evil to Homer; he clearly fails to understand it. He is most embarrassed by his materials in matters of religion. Unlike Hesiod he does not love to speak of what the gods did ‘in the morning of time’, things derived from a remote past of savage mythology; the incest, the amours in animal form, the cannibalism, the outrage of Cronos on his father, the swallowing of Zeus. But he cannot get rid of the ancient mythological element in the Olympians. Though the Zeus of Eumaeus is ethical, just, benignant, a truly religious conception; though Homer has almost a bitter sense of the dependence of men on the gods; though ‘all men yearn after the gods’; the Olympians, as they appear in the story, are the freakish beings of myth, capricious partisans, amorous, above all undignified. Only among the gods has married life its sad, if humorous, aspect, as in the bickerings of Zeus and Hera; only among the gods is adultery a joke. Among men it is the direst outrage of sanctity of the home. So alien to Homer is the mythology which he inherits that he finds it easiest to treat the gods humorously, save where they guard the sacredness of the oath (_Iliad_ iii. 275), and are protectors of strangers, suppliants, and of the poor. The mythological survivals are, to Homer, inevitable, but distasteful. As to a belief in a future life, in Homer there is a prevailing idea, but it is mixed with the other ideas which, however contradictory, always exist in this mysterious matter. The prevailing idea is that the dead, if they receive their due rites of fire and interment, abide, powerless for good or evil, in a shadowy _sheol_ in the House of Hades. If they do not get their dues of fire they wander disconsolate, and may become ‘a cause of wrath’ to men, may appear to them in dreams, or in

the margin grey, ’Twixt the soul’s night and day.

In the House of Hades is neither reward nor punishment (if we take _Odyssey_ xi. 570-600 for a late interpolation), but mere lack of vigour and of the sun. Only the prophet Tiresias, like Samuel in _Sheol_, ‘keeps his wits’ and his faculty of precognition.

Yet, in the scene of the Oaths (_Iliad_ iii. 278-9), certain powers are appealed to which ‘beneath the earth punish men outworn’. I do not think this a late interpolation, because the formula of the sacrifices connected with the oath is likely to be very ancient, to be pre-Homeric, and to reflect an old belief no longer popular. In these matters all contradictory notions may coexist, as when the hymn of the Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales prays Baiame to admit the soul of Erin into his paradise, Bullimah, while the myth says that Erin is now incarnate in a little bird. Many of the lowest savages believe in a future of rewards and punishments, but the doctrine of the efficacy of fire has all but driven this faith out of Homer’s ken.

Cremation is the great _crux_ of Homeric anthropology, cremation, and the consequent absence of ghost-feeding, and of hero-worship. Archaeology shows that these practices went on unbroken in Greece, and archaeology cannot show us a single example of the Homeric barrow and method of interment. Yet the method is a genuine historic method in Northern Europe of the Age of Bronze. Homer did not invent it; he mentions no other mode of disposing of the dead, but we have never found its traces in Greece. The shaft graves and tholos graves of late Minoan times have left no vestige of tradition in the Epics, and the cremation and barrow are equally absent from the view of the archaeologist. I cannot venture on any guess at an explanation. We are precluded from supposing that cremation arose in the wanderings after the Dorian invasion, for the purpose of concealing the remains of the dead from desecration by alien foes. The shaft grave might conceal them, the tumulus and pillar above only advertise their whereabouts to the ruthless foe.

It is plain that, on many points, Homer, with his austere taste, is not a very rich source for the anthropologist in search of savage survivals. In Homer no human beings work magic; a witch, like a harlot, is not to be found in the Epics. Both are familiar in the Old Testament. There is a second-sighted man, but his was a natural faculty. Homer never alludes to the humbler necessities of our animal nature; unlike Shakespeare, he never makes old Nestor cough and spit, when roused, as in the _Doloneia_, by a night alarm. Nobody coughs in Homer. He sings for an audience that has lived down the ape, though the tiger has not wholly died. He knows nothing of our instruments of torture, rack and boot and thumbscrews, which, in Scotland, outlasted the seventeenth century. Historic Greece was not very successful in expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece were never so successful as Homer. I infer that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic lays. It is the nature of the highest objective art, whether in epic or ballad, to be clean: the Muses are maidens.

NOTES

Page 47. The reference to Mr. Verrall refers to his article on Homer in _The Quarterly Review_, July, 1908. I myself suppose that some editorial work was done for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ at Athens, before the Persian war. There is plenty of smoke in literary tradition, and ‘where there is smoke there is fire’. But the smoke-wreaths are vague and multiform as the misty ghosts in Ossian, and I cannot, with Mr. Verrall, regard the words of a fourth-century orator.

Page 48. Lycurgus is not ‘record’. By ‘record evidence’ for Greece I understand inscriptions, nothing more and nothing less.

Page 57. ‘cuirass, _zoster_, and _mitrê_.’ See figure, a copy of a clay seal, of which nearly a hundred impressions have been published in _Monumenti Antichi_. See for further particulars my article on Homer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for January, 1908, also Mackenzie, _Annual of the British School at Athens_ (1905-6, p. 241).

Page 59. _Odyssey_ xvi. 294, xix. 13, for

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος

a friend suggests

αὒτως γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἀνδράσι δῆρις.

This emendation I leave at the mercy of the learned.

LECTURE III

ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE GREEK EPIC TRADITION OUTSIDE HOMER

In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, ‘Homer presents to the anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to do with anthropology.’ By Homer of course Mr. Lang means the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or Olympian.

But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum, of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those ‘beastly devices of the heathen’ which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists--if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists: ceremonies of magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-worship, ghosts and anthropomorphic gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as ‘good medicine’ and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice.

This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics--I mean those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect--by the Orphic literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly perhaps by the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.

Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing the _Iliad_, just as the _Iliad_ here and there shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that point in detail here. Even supposing that the _Cypria_, as a poem, could definitely be called ‘later’ than the _Iliad_, it is enough to say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.

Two arguments will suffice. First the argument from analogy. Few anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the high, austere, knightly atmosphere of the _Iliad_ as primitive when compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and the ouranian birds: the great mother goddess of Anatolia, the human sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain places, to have no bridge.

Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.

Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I tried to say about this in my _Rise of the Greek Epic_, I will restate it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on; and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of ‘all Ionians’, and afterwards of ‘all Athenians’. The poems were demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a land of semi-savages to the Hellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere slough out of which Hellas rose.

Now to one lecturing on Anthropology in Homer, the difficulty is to find enough material. In the case of the early saga outside Homer, the difficulty is only what to choose and where to stop.