CHAPTER V.

HOMERIC ZOOLOGY.

THE establishment of a clear distinction between men and beasts might seem a slight effort of defining intellect, yet it has not been quite easily made. In children the instinct of assimilation long survives the experience of difference. A little boy of six, asked by the present writer what profession he thought of adopting, replied with alacrity that he ‘would like to be a bird,’ and it was only on being reminded of the diet of grubs associated with that state of life, that he began to waver as to its desirability. The same incapacity for drawing a boundary-line between the realm of their own imperfect consciousness and the mysterious encompassing region of animal life, is visible in the grown-up children of the wilds. Hence the zoological speculations of primitive man inevitably take the form of a sort of projection of human faculties into animal natures. Now human faculties, released from the control of actuality, spontaneously expand. In a vague and vaporous way, they transcend the low level of hard fact, and become pleasantly diffused in the ‘ampler ether’ of the unknown. Beasts thus transfigured are incapable, it may be said, of simple rationality. The powers transferred to them grow like Jack’s Beanstalk, beyond the range of sight.

Universal folk-lore, in all its tangled ramifications, bears witness to the truth of this remark. Tutelary animals, of the Puss in Boots type, abound and expatiate there. They are all-contriving and infallible. Their favour leads to fortune and power. They hold the clue to the labyrinth of human destinies. Through their protection the oppressed are rescued, the ragged are clothed in golden raiments, the outwardly despicable win princely honours, and have their names inscribed in the ‘Almanach de Gotha’ of fairy-land. No wonder that such beneficent potentates, albeit feathered or furry, should have been claimed as ancestors and hereditary protectors by human beings full of untutored yearnings for the unattainable. To our ideas, indeed, there seems little comfort or credit to be got out of counting kinship with a beaver, a bear, or an opossum; but things looked differently when the world was young; nor has it yet everywhere grown old. In Australia, black bipeds still own themselves the cousins and clients of kangaroos. American Indians pay homage to ‘manitous’ personally, as well as to ‘totems’ tribally associated with them; and twilight tales are perhaps to this hour whispered in Ireland, about a certain ‘Master of the Rats,’ whose hostility it is eminently undesirable though lamentably easy to incur.

Even among Greeks and Romans of the classical age, to say nothing of Aztecs and Alemanni, belief lurked in the preternatural wisdom of certain animals. Their formal worship, most fully elaborated in Egypt, but diffused over ‘Tellus’ orbed ground,’ sprang from the same stock of ideas. To a remarkable extent, the Greeks were exempt from its degrading associations. Their partial survival on Greek soil, as in the veneration at Phigaleia, of the horse-headed Demeter, represented, without doubt, an under-current of aboriginal tradition, reaching back to the Pelasgic fore-time.

Now it might have been anticipated that the earliest literature would have been the most deeply permeated by these primitive reminiscences. But this is very far from being the case. Their influence is scarcely perceptible in the two great epics of Troy and Ithaca; and indeed the modes of thought from which they originated were completely alien to the ethical sentiments pervading those marvellous first-fruits of Greek genius. Neither poem includes the smallest remnant of zoolatry. The Homeric divinities are absolutely anthropomorphic. They are men and women, exempt from the limitations, unscathed by the ills of humanity, and radiant with the infinite sunshine of immortal happiness. Of infra-human relationships they exhibit no trace. They are far less concerned with the animal kingdom than they grew to be in classical times. Typical beasts or birds have not yet become attached to them. The eagle, though once in the Iliad called the ‘swift messenger’ of Zeus, is altogether detached from his throne and his thunder-bolt; Heré has not developed her preference for the peacock—a bird introduced much later from the East; Athene is without the companionship of her owl; no doves flutter about the fair head of the ‘golden Aphrodite’; Artemis needs no dogs to bring down her game. The Olympian menagerie, in short, has not been constituted. On the ‘many-folded’ mountain of the gods, no beasts are maintained save the half-dozen horses strictly necessary for the purposes of divine locomotion.

Very significant, too, is Homer’s ignorance of the semi-bestial, semi-divine beings who figure in subsequent Greek mythology. ‘Great Pan’ has no place in his verse; Satyrs and Tritons are equally unrecognised by him; his Nereids are ‘silver-footed sea-nymphs,’ with no fishy tendencies.

Mixed natures of any kind seem, in truth, to have been little to his taste. Even if he could have apprehended the symbolical meanings underlying them in dim Oriental imaginations, he could scarcely have reconciled himself to the sacrifice of beauty which they involved. Men, horses, bulls, lions, were all separately admirable in his eyes; but to blend, he felt instinctively, was not to heighten their perfections. Thus, the hybrid nature of the Centaurs, if present to his mind, was left undefined as something ‘abominable, inutterable.’ The Harpies, realised by Hesiod as half-human fowls, remained with him barely personified tornadoes. Neither Pegasus nor the Minotaur, neither the bird-women of Stymphalis, nor the Griffons of the Rhipæan mountains, found mention in his song, and he admitted—and that in a family-legend—but one true specimen of the dragon-kind in the ‘Chimæra dire’ slain by Bellerophon. The monstrosity of Scylla is left purposely vague. She is a fancy-compound defying classification. She lived, too, in the outer world of the Odyssey, where ‘things strange and rare’ flourished in quiet disregard of laws binding elsewhere.

In the same region of wonderland occur the oxen of the Sun—the only sacred animals recognised by our poet. They had their pasturing-ground in the island of Thrinakie, whither Helios retired to divert himself with their frolics after each hard day of steady Mediterranean shining; and so keen was his indignation at their slaughter by the famished comrades of Odysseus, that a cosmical strike would have ensued but for the promise of Zeus to inflict condign punishment upon the delinquents. From the shipwreck by which this promise was fulfilled, Odysseus, alone exempt from guilt in the matter, was the solitary survivor.

The Homeric treatment of animals, compared with the extravagances prevalent in other primitive literature, is eminently sane and rational. Not through indifference to their perfections. A peculiar intensity of sympathy with brute-nature is, on the contrary, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Homeric poems. But that sympathy is based upon the appreciation of real, not upon the transference of imaginary qualities. Beasts are, on the whole, kept strictly in their proper places. The only genuine example of their sublimation into higher ones is afforded by the horses of Achilles, and this during a transport of epic excitement. Otherwise, the fabulous element admitted concerning animals—and it is just in their regard that fable commonly runs riot—is surprisingly small.

In its room, we find such a wealth of acute and accurate observation, as no poet, before or since, has had the capacity to accumulate, or the power to employ for purposes of illustration. It is unmistakably private property. Details appropriated at second-hand could never have fitted in so aptly with the needs of imaginative creation. Moreover, the conventional types of animal character were of later establishment. There was at that early time no recognised common stock of popular or proverbial wisdom on the subject to draw upon. The lion had not yet been raised to regal dignity; the fox was undistinguished for craft, as the goose for folly. Beasts and birds had their careers in literature before them. Their reputations were still to make. They carried about with them no formal certificates of character. The poet was accordingly unfettered in his dealings with them by preconceived notions; whence the delightful freshness of Homer’s zoological vignettes. The dew of morning, so to speak, is upon them. They are limned direct from his own vivid impressions of pastoral, maritime, and hunting scenes.

As to the locality of those scenes, some hints, but scarcely more than hints, can be derived. For in the course of nearly three thousand years, the circumstances of animal distribution have been affected by changes too considerable and too indeterminate to admit of confident argument from the state of things now to the state of things then; while the notices of the poet, incidental by their very nature, are of the utmost value for what they tell, but warrant only very hesitating inferences from what they leave untold. Thus, it does not follow that because Homer nowhere mentions the cuckoo, he was therefore unfamiliar with its note, which, from Hesiod’s time until now, has not failed to proclaim the advent of spring among the olive-groves of Bœotia, and must have been heard no less by Paris or Anchises than by the modern archæological traveller, along the oak-clad and willow-fringed valley of Scamander. Nor is the faintest presumption of a divided authorship supplied by the fact that the nightingale sings in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad. Nevertheless, analogous considerations should not be altogether neglected in Homeric criticism. They may possibly help towards the answering of questions both of time and place: of time, through allusions to domesticated animals; of place, by a comparison of the known range of wild species with the fauna of the two great epics. And, first, as regards domesticated animals.

The list of these is a short one. The Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad commanded the services of the horse in battle, of oxen and mules for draught; dogs were their faithful allies in hunting and cattle driving, and they kept flocks of sheep and goats. The ass appears only once, and then indirectly, on the scene, when the lethargic obstinacy of his behaviour serves to heighten the effect of Ajax’s stubbornness in fight. Thus:

And as when a lazy ass going past a field hath the better of the boys with him, an ass that hath had many a cudgel broken about his sides, and he fareth into the deep crop, and wasteth it, while the boys smite him with their cudgels, and feeble is the force of them, but yet with might and main they drive him forth when he hath had his fill of fodder; even so did the high-hearted Trojans and allies, called from many lands, smite great Aias, son of Telamon, with darts on the centre of his shield, and ever followed after him.[136]

Footnote 136:

_Iliad_, xi. 557-64.

The creature’s ‘little ways’ were then already notorious, although all mention of him or them is omitted from the Odyssey, as well as from the Hesiodic poems. His existence is indeed implied by the parentage of the mule. But mules were brought to the Troad _ready-made_ from Paphlagonia.[137] It was not until later that they were systematically bred by the Greeks.

Footnote 137:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _Wanderings of Plants and Animals_, pp. 110, 460.

The Semitic origin of the word ‘ass’ rightly indicates the introduction of the species into Europe from Semitic Western Asia. As to the date of its arrival, all that can be told is that it was subsequent to the beginning of the bronze epoch. The pile-dwellers of Switzerland and North Italy were unacquainted with an animal fundamentally Oriental in its habitudes. Its reluctance, for instance, to cross the smallest streamlet attests the physical tradition of a desert home; and the white ass of Bagdad represents to this day, the fullest capabilities of the race.[138] Yet neither the ass nor the camel was included in the primitive Aryan fauna. For they could not have been known, still less domesticated, without being named, and the only widespread appellations borne by them are derived from Semitic sources. Evidently the loan of the words accompanied the transmission of the species. It is very difficult, in the face of this circumstance—as Dr. Schrader has pertinently observed[139]—to locate the Aryan cradle-land anywhere to the east of the Bosphorus.

Footnote 138:

Houghton, _Trans. Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. v. p. 49.

Footnote 139:

_Thier- und Pflanzen-Geographie_, p. 17.

Dr. Virchow was struck, on his visit to the Troad, in 1879, with the similarity of the actual condition of the country to that described in the Iliad.[140] The inhabitants seem, in fact, during the long interval, to have halted in a transition-stage between pastoral and agricultural life, by far the larger proportion of the land supplying pasturage for ubiquitous multitudes of sheep, oxen, goats, horses, and asses. The sheep, however, belong to a variety assuredly of post-Homeric introduction, since the massive tails hampering their movements could not well have escaped characterisation in some emphatic Homeric epithet.

Footnote 140:

_Beiträge zur Landeskunde der Troas_; Berlin. _Abhandlungen_, 1879, p. 59.

Both short and long-horned cattle, all of a dark-brown colour, may now be seen grazing over the plain round Hissarlik, the latter probably resembling more closely than the former those with which Homer was acquainted. The oxen alike of the Iliad and Odyssey are ‘wine-coloured,’ ‘straight-horned,’ ‘broad-browed,’ and ‘sinuous-footed’; it was above all through the shuffle of their gait, indicated by the last adjective, and due to the peculiar structure of the hip-joint in the whole species, that the poet distinctively visualised them. ‘Lowing kine,’ and ‘bellowing bulls’ are occasionally heard of, chiefly—it is curious to remark—in later, or suspected portions of the Iliad. Sheep and goats, on the other hand, are often described as ‘bleating,’ and the cries of birds are called up at opportune moments; but Homer’s horses neither whinny nor neigh; his pigs refrain from grunting; his jackals do not howl; the tremendous roar of the lion nowhere resounds through his forests. Homeric wild beasts are, indeed, save in the vaguely-indicated case of one indeterminate specimen,[141] wholly dumb.

Footnote 141:

_Iliad_, x. 184.

Singularly enough, a peculiar sensitiveness to sound is displayed in the description of the Shield of Achilles. Yet plastic art is essentially silent. Even the perpetuated cry of the Laocoön detracts somewhat from the inherent serenity of marble. The metal-wrought creations of Hephæstus, however, not only live and move, but make themselves audible to a degree uncommon elsewhere in the poems. Thus, in one scene, or compartment, a _lowing_ herd issues to the pasturing-grounds, where two lions seize from their midst, and devour, a _loudly-bellowing_ bull, while nine _barking_, though frightened dogs are, by the herdsmen, vainly urged to a rescue. In the vintage-episode of the same series, delight in melodious beauty is almost as apparent as in the so-called ‘Homeric’ hymn to Hermes. The ‘Linus-song,’ ‘sweet even as desire,’ sung to the youthful grape-gatherers, sounds through the ages scarcely less sweet than

The liquid voice Of pipes, that filled the clear air thrillingly,

when the Muses gathered round Apollo long ago in the ethereal halls of Olympus.

Among the animals now variously serviceable to man by the shores of the Hellespont, are the camel, the buffalo, and the cat, none of them known, even by name, to the primitive Achæans. The household cat, as is well known, remained, during a millennium or two, exclusively Egyptian; then all at once, perhaps owing to the exigency created by the migration westward of the rat, spread with great rapidity in the first centuries of the Christian era, over the civilised world. Saint Gregory Nazianzen set the first recorded European example of attachment to a cat. His pet was kept at Constantinople about the year 360 A.D.[142] No archæological vestiges of the species, accordingly, have been found in Asia Minor. Cats haunt the ruins of Hissarlik, but in no case lie buried beneath them.

Footnote 142:

Houghton, _Trans. Society Biblical Archæology_, vol. v. p. 63.

The bones mixed up among the prehistoric _débris_ belong chiefly, as might have been expected, to sheep, goats, and oxen, those of swine, dogs, and horses being relatively scarce.[143] Hares and deer are also represented, and of birds, mainly the goose, with scanty traces of the swan and of a small falcon. These remains are of different epochs, yet all without exception belong to animals mentioned in the Iliad, whether as wild or tame. The Homeric condition of the pig and goose respectively presents some points of interest.

Footnote 143:

Virchow, _loc. cit._ p. 63.

The pig was not one of the animals primitively domesticated in the East. The absence of Vedic or Avestan mention of swine-culture makes it practically certain that the species was known only in a wild state to the early Aryan colonists of Iran and India. Nor had any more intimate acquaintance with it been developed in Babylonia; although the Swiss pile-dwellers, at first similarly behindhand, advanced, before the stone age had terminated, to pig-keeping.[144] Dr. Schrader, indeed, bases upon the occurrence only in European languages of the word porcus, the conjecture that the subjugation of the ‘full-acorned boar’ was first accomplished in Europe;[145] and if this were so, the operations of swine-herding would naturally come in for a larger share of notice in the Odyssey, as the more European of the two poems, than in the Iliad. And in fact, the swineherd of Odysseus is an important personage, and plays a leading part in the drama of his return—pigs, moreover, figuring extensively among the agricultural riches of Ithaca, while there is no sign that any were possessed by Priam or Anchises. Alone among the Greeks of the Iliad, Achilles is stated to have placed before his guests a ‘chine of well-fed hog’; and the very few Iliadic allusions to fatted swine are all in immediate connexion with the same hero. If this be a result of chance, it is a somewhat grotesque one.

Footnote 144:

Rütimeyer, _Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten_, pp. 120-21.

Footnote 145:

_Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 261.

The porcine proclivities of modern Greeks are especially strong. Christian and Mahometan habitations were, in the days of Turkish domination, easily distinguished by the sty-accommodation attached to the former; while in certain villages of the Morea and the Cyclades, the pigs no longer occupied a merely subordinate position, and odours not Sabæan, wafted far on the breeze, announced to the still distant traveller the nature of the harbourage in store for him.[146]

Footnote 146:

Gell, _A Journey in the Morea_, p. 63.

The most antique of domesticated birds is the goose, and Homer was acquainted with no other. Penelope kept a flock of twenty,[147] mainly, it would seem, for purposes of diversion, since the loss of them through the devastations of an eagle is treated from a purely sentimental point of view. They were fed on wheat, the ‘height of good living,’ in Homeric back-premises. The court-yard, too, of the palace of Menelaus sheltered a cackling flock,[148] the progenitors of which Helen might have brought with her from Egypt, where geese were prehistorically reared for the table. That the bird occurs _only_ tame in the Odyssey, and _only_ wild in the Iliad, constitutes a distinction between the poems which can scarcely be without real significance. The species employed, in the Second Iliad, to illustrate, by the tumult of their alighting on the marshy banks of the Cayster, the clangorous march-past of the Achæan forces, has been identified as _Anser cinereus_, numerous specimens of which fly south, in severe winters, from the valley of the Danube to Greece and Asia Minor.

Footnote 147:

_Odyssey_, xix. 536.

Footnote 148:

_Ib._ xv. 161.

The familiar cocks and hens of our poultry-yards are, in the West, post-Homeric. Their native home is in India; but through human agency they were early transported to Iran, where the cock, as the bird that first greets the light, acquired in the eyes of Zoroastrian devotees, a pre-eminently sacred character. His introduction into Greece was a result of the expansion westward of the Persian empire. No cocks are met with on Egyptian monuments; the Old Testament leaves them unnoticed; and the earliest mention of them in Greek literature is by Theognis of Megara, in the middle of the sixth century B.C.[149] Pigeons, on the other hand, are quite at home in Homeric verse. They are of two kinds. One is the rock-pigeon, called from its slate-coloured plumage _peleia_ (πελόs = dusky), and described as finding shelter in rocky clefts, and evading pursuit by a rapid, undulating flight.[150] Its frequent recurrence in similes can surprise no traveller who has observed the extreme abundance of _Columba livia_ all round the coasts of the Ægean.[151] The second Homeric species of _Columba_ is the ring-dove, once referred to as the habitual victim of the hawk. Tame pigeons are ignored, and were, indeed, first seen in Greece after the wreck of the Persian fleet at Mount Athos in 492 B.C.[152] Yet dove-culture was practised as far back as the oldest records lead us in Egypt and Persia. The dove was marked out as a ‘death-bird’ by our earliest Aryan ancestors, and figures in the Vedas as a messenger of Yama. But Homer, unconcerned, as usual, with animal symbolism, makes no account, if he had ever heard, of its sinister associations.

Footnote 149:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _Wanderings of Plants and Animals_, pp. 241-43.

Footnote 150:

Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 120.

Footnote 151:

Lindermayer, _Die Vögel Griechenlands_, p. 120.

Footnote 152:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 257.

Among Homeric wild animals, the first place incontestably belongs to the lion, and the Iliad, in especial, gives extraordinary prominence to the king of beasts. In savage grandeur he stalks, as it were, through the varied scenery of its similitudes, indomitable, fiercely-despoiling, contemptuous of lesser brute-forces. His impressive qualities receive no gratuitous enhancement; he rouses no myth-making fancies; there is no fabulous ‘quality of mercy’ about him, nor of magnanimity, nor of forbearance; he is simply a ‘gaunt and sanguine beast,’ a vivid embodiment of the energy of untamed and unsparing nature.

He is not brought immediately upon the scene of action; the Homeric poems nowhere provide for him a local habitation; it is only in the comparatively late Hymn to Aphrodite that a place is specifically assigned to him among the feral products of Mount Ida. His portraiture, nevertheless, in the similes of the Iliad is too minute and faithful to leave any shadow of doubt of its being based upon intimate personal acquaintance. The poet must have witnessed with his own eyes the change from majestic indifference to bellicose frenzy described in the following passage; he must have caught the greenish glare of the oblique feline eyes, noted the preparatory tail-lashings, and mentally photographed the crouching attitude, and the yawn of deadly significance, that preceded the fierce beast’s spring.

And on the other side, the son of Peleus rushed to meet him, like a lion, a ravaging lion whom men desire to slay, a whole tribe assembled; and first he goeth his way unheeding, but when some warrior-youth hath smitten him with a spear, then he gathereth himself open-mouthed, and foam cometh forth about his teeth, and his stout spirit groaneth in his heart, and with his tail he scourgeth either side his ribs and flanks and goadeth himself on to fight, and glaring is borne straight on them by his passion to try whether he shall slay some man of them, or whether himself shall perish in the forefront of the throng.[153]

Footnote 153:

_Iliad_, xx. 164-73.

Take, again, the picture of the lioness defending her young, while

Within her the storm of her might doth rise, And the down-drawn skin of her brows over-gloometh the fire of her eyes.[154]

Or this other, exemplifying, like the ‘hungry people’ simile in ‘Locksley Hall,’ the ‘imperious’ beast’s dread of fire:

And as when hounds and countryfolk drive a tawny lion from the mid-fold of the kine, and suffer him not to carry away the fattest of the herd, all night they watch, and he in great desire for the flesh maketh his onset; but takes nothing thereby, for thick the darts fly from strong hands against him, and the burning brands, and these he dreads for all his fury, and in the dawn he departeth with vexed heart.[155]

Footnote 154:

Way’s _Iliad_, xvii. 135-36. The feminine pronouns are here introduced to avoid incongruity. The Homeric vocabulary did not include a word equivalent to ‘lioness.’

Footnote 155:

_Iliad_, xx. 164-75.

Scenes of leonine ravage among cattle are frequently presented. As here:

And as when in the pride of his strength a lion mountain-reared Hath snatched from the pasturing kine a heifer, the best of the herd, And, gripping her neck with his strong teeth, bone from bone hath he snapped, And he rendeth her inwards and gorgeth her blood by his red tongue lapped, And around him gather the dogs and the shepherd-folk, and still Cry long and loud from afar, howbeit they have no will To face him in fight, for that pale dismay doth the hearts of them fill.[156]

We seem, in reading these lines—and there are many more like them—to be confronted with a vivified Assyrian or Lycian bas-relief. In the antique sculptures of the valley of the Xanthus, above all, the incident of the slaying of an ox by a lion is of such constant recurrence[157] as almost to suggest, in confirmation of a conjecture by Mr. Gladstone,[158] a similarity of origin between them and the corresponding passages of the Iliad. The lion, indeed, occupies throughout the epic a position which can now with difficulty be conceived as having been assigned to him on the strength of European experience alone. Still, it must not be forgotten that the facts of the matter have radically changed within the last three thousand years.

Footnote 156:

Way’s _Iliad_, xvii. 61-67.

Footnote 157:

Fellows’ _Travels in Asia Minor_, p. 348, ed. 1852.

Footnote 158:

_Studies in Homer_, vol. i. p. 183.

In prehistoric times, the lion ranged all over Europe, from the Severn to the Hellespont; for the _Felis spelæus_ of Britain[159] was specifically identical with the grateful clients of Androclus and Sir Iwain, no less than with the more savage than sagacious beasts now haunting the Upper Nile valley, and the marshes of Guzerat and Mesopotamia.

Footnote 159:

Boyd Dawkins and Sanford, _Pleistocene Mammalia_, p. 171.

Already, however, at the early epoch of the pile-built villages by the lake of Constance, he had disappeared from Western Europe; yet he lingered long in Greece. Of his presence in the Peloponnesus only legendary traces remain, although he figures largely in Mycenæan art; but in Thrace he can lay claim to an historically attested existence. Herodotus[160] recounts with wonder how the baggage-camels of Xerxes’ army were attacked by lions on the march from Acanthus to Therma; and he defines the region haunted by them as bounded towards the east by the River Nestus, on the west by the Achelous. Some Chalcidicean coins, too, are stamped with the favourite oriental device of a lion killing an ox; and Xenophon _possibly_—for his expressions are dubious—includes the lion among the wild fauna of Thrace. The statements, on the other hand, of Polybius and Dio Chrysostom leave no doubt that he had finally retreated from our continent before the beginning of the Christian era.[161]

Footnote 160:

Lib. vii. caps. 125, 126.

Footnote 161:

Sir G. C. Lewis, _Notes and Queries_, vol. viii. ser. ii. p. 242.

A Thessalian Homer might, then, quite conceivably, have beheld an occasional predatory lion descending the arbutus-clad slopes of Pelion or Olympus; yet the continual allusions to leonine manners and customs pervading the Iliad show an habitual acquaintance with the animal which is certainly somewhat surprising. It corresponds, nevertheless, quite closely with the perpetual recurrence of his form in the plastic representations of Mycenæ.

The comparatively few Odyssean references to this animal can scarcely be said to bear the stamp of visual directness unmistakably belonging to those dispersed broadcast through the earlier epic. Yet it would probably be a mistake to suppose them derived at second-hand. Without, then, denying that the author of the Odyssey had actually ‘met the ravin lion when he roared,’ we may express some wonder that he, like his predecessor of the Iliad, left unrecorded the auditory part of the resulting brain-impression. For the voice of the lion is assuredly the most imposing sound of which animated nature seems capable. Casual allusions to it in the Hymn to Aphrodite and in the (nominally) Hesiodic ‘Shield of Hercules,’ are, nevertheless, perhaps the earliest extant in Greek literature.

The bear figures in the Iliad and Odyssey solely as a constellation, except that a couple of verses interpolated into the latter accord him a place among the embossed decorations of the belt of Hercules. The living animal, however, is still reported to lurk in the ‘clov’n ravines’ of ‘many-fountain’d Ida,’ and, according to a local tradition, was only banished from the Thessalian Olympus through the agency of Saint Dionysius.[162] The panther or leopard, on the contrary, although contemporaneously with the cave-lion an inmate of Britain, disappeared from Europe at a dim and remote epoch, while plentifully met with in Caria and Pamphylia during Cicero’s governorship of Cilicia. Even in the present century, indeed, leopardskins formed part of the recognised tribute of the Pasha of the Dardanelles. The life-like scene, then, in which the animal emerges to view in the Iliad, bears a decidedly Asiatic character. Mr. Conington’s version of the lines runs as follows:

As panther springs from a deep thicket’s shade To meet the hunter, and her heart no fear Nor terror knows, though barking loud she hear, For though with weapon’s thrust or javelin’s throw He wound her first, yet e’en about the spear Writhing, her valour doth she not forego, Till for offence she close, or in the shock lie low.[163]

Footnote 162:

Tozer, _Researches in the Highlands of Turkey_, vol. ii. p. 64.

Footnote 163:

_Iliad_, xxi. 573-78.

Thoroughly Oriental, too, is the vision conjured up in the Third Iliad of Paris challenging

To mortal combat all the chiefs of Greece,[164]

armed with a bow and sword, poising ‘two brass-tipped javelins,’ a panther skin flung round his magnificent form. Elate with the consciousness of strength and beauty, unsuspicious of the betrayal in store for him by his own weak and volatile spirit, the _gaietta pelle_ of the fierce beast might have encouraged, as it did in Dante, a cheerful forecast of the issue; yet illusorily in each case. In the Odyssey, the panther is only mentioned as one of the forms assumed by Proteus.

Footnote 164:

_Iliad_, iii. 20 (Lord Derby’s trans.).

The Homeric wild boar is of quite Erymanthian powers and proportions; with more valour than discretion, he does not shrink from encountering the lion himself—

Being ireful, on the lion he will venture;

and the laying-low of a single specimen is reckoned no inadequate result of a forest-campaign by dogs and men. Such an heroic brute, worthy to have been the emissary of enraged Artemis, succumbed, no longer ago than in 1850, to the joint efforts, during several toilsome days, of a band of thirty hunters.[165] The ‘chafed boar’ in the Iliad either carries everything before him, as Ajax scattered the Trojans fighting round the body of Patroclus; or he dies, tracked to his lair, if die he must, fearlessly facing his foes, incarnating rage with bristles erected, blazing eyes, and gnashing tusks. Nor was the upshot for him inevitably fatal. Idomeneus of Crete, we are told, awaiting the onset (which proved but partially effective) of Æneas and Deiphobus,

Stood at bay, like a boar on the hills that trusteth to his strength, and abides the great assailing throng of men, in a lonely place, and he bristles up his back, and his eyes shine with fire, while he whets his tusks, and is right eager to keep at bay both men and hounds.[166]

Footnote 165:

Erhard, _Fauna der Cycladen_, p. 26.

Footnote 166:

_Iliad_, xiii. 471-75.

The boar is a solitary animal. Like Hal o’ the Wynd, he fights for his own right hand; and he was accordingly appropriated by Homer to image the valour of individual chiefs, while the rank and file figure as wolves and jackals, hunting in packs, pinched with hunger, bloodthirsty and desperately eager, but formidable only collectively. Jackals still abound in the Troad and throughout the Cyclades, and their hideous wails and barkings enhance the desolation of the Nauplian and Negropontine swamps.[167] Neither have wolves disappeared from those regions; and the old dread of the animal which was at once the symbol of darkness and of light, survives obscurely to this day in the vampire-superstitions of Eastern Europe. The closeness of the connexion between vampires and were-wolves is shown by a comparison of the modern Greek word _vrykolaka_, vampire, with the Zend and Sanskrit _vehrka_, a wolf.[168] Nor were the Greeks of classical times exempt from the persuasion that men and wolves might temporarily, or even permanently, exchange semblances. Many stories of the kind were related in Arcadia in connexion with the worship of the Lycæan Zeus; and Pausanias, while critically sceptical as regards some of these, was not too advanced a thinker to accept, as fully credible, the penal transformation of Lycaon, son of Pelasgus.[169] Such notions belonged, however, to a rustic mythology of which Homer took small cognisance. His thoughts travelled of themselves out from the sylvan gloom of primeval haunts into the open sunshine of unadulterated nature.

In wood or wilderness, forest or den,

he met with no bogey-animals. For him neither beast nor bird had any mysterious significance. He attributed to encounters with particular species no influence, malefic or beneficial, upon human destiny. Of themselves, they had, in his view, no concern with it, although ordinary animal instincts might, under certain conditions, be so directed as to be expressive to man of the will of the gods. In the Homeric scheme, birds and serpents exclusively are so employed, without, however, any departure from the order of nature. Thus, by night near the sedgy Simoeis, a heron, _Ardea nycticorax_, disturbed by the approach of Odysseus and Diomed, assured them, by casually flapping its way eastward, that their expedition had the sanction of their guardian-goddess.[170] The choice of the bird was plainly dictated by zoological considerations alone; it had certainly no such recondite motive as that suggested by Ælian,[171] who, with almost grotesque ingenuity, argued that the owl, as the fowl of Athene’s special predilection, could only have been deprived of the privilege of acting as her instrument on the occasion through Homer’s consciousness of its reputation as a bird of sinister augury—

Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen—

the truth being that both kinds of association—the mythological and the superstitious—were equally remote from the poet’s mind.

Footnote 167:

Von der Mühle, _Beiträge zur Ornithologie Griechenlands_, p. 123; Buchholz, _Homerische Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 202.

Footnote 168:

Tozer, _Researches_, vol. ii. p. 82.

Footnote 169:

_Descriptio Græciæ_, lib. vi. cap. 8; viii. cap. ii.

Footnote 170:

_Iliad_, x. 274.

Footnote 171:

_De Naturâ Animalium_, lib. x. fr. 37.

Similarly, the portent of

An eagle and a serpent wreathed in fight

appeared such only by virtue of the critical nature of the conjuncture at which it was displayed. Hector, relying upon what he took to be a promise of divine help, aimed at nothing less than the capture, in the rout of battle, of the Greek camp, and the conflagration of the Greek ships. But every step in advance brought him nearer to the tent where the irate epical hero lay inert, but ready to spring into action at the last extremity; and it was fully recognised that the arming of Achilles meant far more than the mere loss of the fruits of victory. The balance of events, then, if the proposed _coup de main_ were persevered with, hung upon a knife-edge of destiny; and pale fear might well invade the eager, yet hesitating Trojan host when, just as the foremost warriors were about to breach the Greek rampart, an eagle flying westward—that is, towards the side of darkness and death—let fall among their ranks a coiling and blood-stained snake.[172]

And adown the blasts of the wind he darted with one wild scream; Then shuddered the Trojans, beholding the serpent’s writhing gleam In the midst of them lying, the portent of Zeus the Ægis-lord, And to Hector the valiant Polydamas spoke with a bodeful word.[173]

His vaticinations were defied. The Trojan leader met them with the memorable protest:

But thou, thou wouldst have us obey the long-winged fowl of the air! Go to, unto these have I not respect, and nought do I care Whether to rightward they go to the sun and the dayspring sky, Or whether to leftward away to the shadow-gloomed west they fly. But for us, let us hearken the counsel of Zeus most high, and obey, Who over the deathling race and the deathless beareth sway. One omen of all is best, that we fight for our fatherland!

Footnote 172:

Shelley has adopted and developed the incident in the opening stanzas of the _Revolt of Islam_.

Footnote 173:

_Iliad_, xii. 207-10 (Way’s trans.).

Magnificent, but, in the actual case, mistaken. The shabby counsel of Polydamas really carried with it the safety of Troy.

The eagle is virtually the Homeric king of birds. He is in the Iliad ‘the most perfect,’ as well as ‘the strongest and swiftest of flying things’; his appearances in both poems, often expressly ordained by Zeus, are always momentous, and are, accordingly, eagerly watched and solicitously interpreted; moreover, they never deceive; to disregard the warning they convey is to rush spontaneously to destruction. It is only, however, in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, usually regarded as subsequent, in point of composition, to the cantos embodying the primitive legend of the ‘Wrath of Achilles,’ that the eagle begins to be marked out as the special envoy of Zeus. Later, the companionship became so close as to justify Æschylus in implying that the bird was in lieu of a dog to the ‘father of gods and men.’ The position, on the other hand, assigned, in one passage of the Odyssey, to the hawk as the ‘swift messenger’ of Apollo, was not maintained. The Hellenic Phœbus eventually disclaimed all relationship with the hawk-headed Horus of the Nile Valley. The rapidity, however, of the hawk’s flight, and his agility in the pursuit of his prey, furnish our poet, again and again, with terms of comparison. Here is an example, taken from the description of the deadly duel outside the Scæan gate.

As when a falcon, bird of swiftest flight, From some high mountain top on tim’rous dove Swoops fiercely down; she, from beneath, in fear, Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake, Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey; So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew, So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit, Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[174]

Footnote 174:

_Iliad_, xxii. 139-44 (Lord Derby’s trans.).

In popular Russian parlance, too, ‘the hurricane in the field, and the luminous hawk in the sky,’ are the favourite metaphors of swiftness.[175] Only that Homer’s falcon has no direct relations with light; and of those indirectly traceable in the one phrase connecting him with Apollo, the poet himself was certainly not cognisant.

Footnote 175:

Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, vol. ii. p. 193.

Vultures always lurk behind the scenes, as it were, of the Homeric battle-stage. The abandonment to their abhorrent offices of the bodies of the slain formed one of the chief terrors of death in the field, and presented a much-dreaded means of enhancing the penalties of defeat. The carrion-feeding birds perpetually on the watch to descend from the clouds upon the blood-stained plain of Ilium, are clearly ‘griffon-vultures,’ _Vultur fulvus_; but the ‘bearded vulture,’ _Gypaëtus barbatus_, the _Lämmergeier_ of the Germans, which, like the eagle, pursues live prey, occasionally lends, in a figure, the swoop and impetus of its flight to vivify some incident of extermination.[176] Both species occur in modern Greece.[177]

Footnote 176:

_Odyssey_, xxii. 302; _Iliad_, xvi. 428, xvii. 460.

Footnote 177:

Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 134.

One of the few bits of primitive folk-lore enshrined in the Iliad relates to the wars of the cranes and pygmies. The passage is curious in many ways. It contains the first notice of bird-migrations, implies the constancy with which the ‘annual voyage’ of the ‘prudent crane’ was steered during three thousand years,[178] and records the dim wonder early excited by the sight and sound of that

Aery caravan, high over seas Flying, and over lands with mutual wing Easing their flight.

Footnote 178:

Koerner, _Die Homerische Thierwelt_, pp. 62-65.

In the Iliadic lines, the clamour of the Trojan advance, in contrast to the determined silence of their opponents, is somewhat disdainfully accentuated:

When afar through the heaven cometh pealing before them the cry of the cranes, As they flee from the wintertide storms and the measureless deluging rains. Onward with screaming they fly to the streams of the ocean-flood, Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and blood.[179]

Footnote 179:

Way’s _Iliad_, iii. 3-7.

The simile is felicitously plagiarised by Virgil in his

Quales sub nubibus atris Strymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranant Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[180]

but with the omission of the pygmy-element, probably as too childish for the mature taste of his Roman audience. Its origin may perhaps be sought in obscure rumours concerning the stunted races encountered by modern travellers in Central Africa. The association of ideas, however, by which they were connected in a hostile sense with ‘fowls o’ the air’ is of trackless antiquity. It partially survives in the notion, current in Finland, that birds of passage spend their winters in dwarf-land, ‘a dweller among birds’ meaning, in polite Finnish phrase, a dwarf; and bird-footed mannikins have a well-marked place in German folk-stories;[181] but the root from which these withered leaves of fable once derived vitality has long ago perished. Aristotle described the ‘small infantry warr’d on by cranes’ as cave-dwellers near the sources of the Nile;[182] Pliny turned them into a kind of pantomime-cavalry, mounted on rams and goats, locating them among the Himalayas, and conjuring up a fantastic vision of their periodical descents to the seacoast, to destroy the eggs and young of their winged enemies, against whom they could no otherwise hope to make head.[183] For such disinterested ravage as was committed on their behalf by Herzog Ernst, a mediæval knight-errant smitten with compassion for the miserable straits to which they were reduced by the secular feud imposed upon them, could scarcely be of more than millennial recurrence.[184]

Footnote 180:

_Æneid_, x. 264-66.

Footnote 181:

Grimm and Stallybrass, _Teutonic Mythology_, pp. 1420, 1450.

Footnote 182:

_De Animal. Hist._ lib. vii. cap. ii.; lib. iii. cap. xii.

Footnote 183:

_Hist. Nat._ lib. vii. cap. 2.

Footnote 184:

_Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum_, Bd. vii. p. 232.

The Homeric wild swan is _Cycnus musicus_, great numbers of which yearly exchange the frozen marshes of the North for the ‘silver lakes and rivers’ of Greece and Asia Minor. But the swan of the Epics sings no ‘sad dirge of her certain ending.’ Unmelodiously exultant, she flutters with the rest of the fluttering denizens of the Lydian water-meadows, in a scene full of animation.

And as the many tribes of feathered birds, wild geese or cranes or long-necked swans, on the Asian mead by Kaÿstros’ stream, fly hither and thither joying in their plumage, and with loud cries settle ever onwards, and the mead resounds; even so poured forth the many tribes of warriors from ships and huts into the Scamandrian plain.[185]

Nor do the

Smaller birds with song Solace the woods

of Homeric landscapes; once only, the ‘solemn nightingale’ is permitted, in the story of the waiting of Penelope, ‘to pour her soft lays.’ ‘Even as when the daughter of Pandareus,’ the Ithacan queen tells the disguised Odysseus, ‘the brown bright nightingale, sings sweet in the first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the trees; and with many a turn and thrill she pours forth her full-voiced music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew with the sword unwitting, Itylus the son of Zethus the prince; even as her song, my troubled soul sways to and fro.’[186]

Footnote 185:

_Iliad_, ii. 459-63.

Footnote 186:

_Odyssey_, xix. 518-24.

Intense appreciation of the sentiment of sound is here unmistakable; yet elsewhere in the Homeric poems we hear of the sharp cry of the swallow, of the screams of contending vultures, the piercing shriek of the eagle, the wild pæan of the hawk, the clamorous vociferations of his terrified victims, but nothing of the tender notes of thrush, lark, or linnet, though deliciously audible throughout Greece

In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides.

Even in the island of Calypso, where delights are imaginable at will, the poplars and cypresses house only such harsh-voiced birds as owls, hawks, and cormorants—perhaps in order to leave the uncontested palm for sweet singing to the nymph herself. The power of song does not, indeed, appear to be, in Homer’s view, ‘an excellent thing in woman.’ It is not included among the gifts of Athene, or even among the graces of Aphrodite. None of his noble or admirable heroines possess it. It is reserved, as part of a baleful dower of fascination, for enchantresses who lure men to oblivion or ruin—for Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens.

The Odyssey being essentially a sea-story, the prevalence in its fauna of marine species is not surprising. Seals frequently present themselves; coots and cormorants, laughing gulls and sea-mews, dive and play amid the surges that beat upon its magic shores; ospreys call and cry; a cuttle-fish is limned to the life; Scylla has been supposed to represent a magnified and monstrous cephalopod. Dolphins are common to the Iliad and Odyssey, and frequent the Ægean nowadays as of old.[187] Their mythical associations in post-Homeric literature are, indeed, forgotten; but the direction in which they travel, collected into shoals, helps the fishermen of Syra and Melos to a rude forecast of the set of impending winds.

Footnote 187:

Erhard, _Fauna der Cycladen_, p. 27.

The only significant zoological novelty, then, in the Odyssey may be said to lie in its recognition of the goose as a domesticated bird. The prominence given by it to swine-keeping, only incidentally mentioned in the Iliad, is also noteworthy. A dissimilarity, on the other hand, in the ethical sentiment towards animals displayed in the two poems—above all, as regards the horse and dog—cannot fail to strike a dispassionate reader; but this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in a separate chapter. The remark need only here be added that the conception of the dog Argos seems no less thoroughly European than that of the horses of Rhesus is Asiatic. Both, it is true, may have had a local origin on the same side of the Hellespont, but, from the point of view of moral geography, they undoubtedly belong to different continents.