xvii. 254),

ἀλλά τις αὐτὸς ἴτω, νεμεσιζέσθω δ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ Πάτροκλον Τρωῇσι κυσὶν μέλπηθρα γενέσθαι.

In one passage particularly, Telemachus distinguishes with great clearness the three kinds of motive by the terms proper to them respectively (Od. ii. 64-7);

(1) νεμεσσήθητε καὶ αὐτοὶ, (2) ἄλλους τ’ αἰδεσθῆτε περικτίονας ἀνθρώπους, οἳ περιναιετάουσι· (3) θεῶν δ’ ὑποδείσατε μῆνιν.

That is νέμεσις, for the self-judging conscience: αἰδὼς, for human opinion: and lastly, fear, in regard to the divine wrath.

The existence of the moral standard within a man is also, I think, very strongly implied in the word ἀτασθαλίη, which is applied to deep, deliberate, habitual, or audacious wickedness. For when it is intended to let in any allowance for mere weakness, or for solicitation from without, or for a foolish blindness, then the word ἄτη is used. And I doubt whether, in any one instance throughout the poems, these two designations are ever applied to one and the same misconduct. It is certainly contrary to the general and almost universal rule. The ἀτασθαλίη is something done with clear sight and knowledge, with the full and conscious action of the will: it is something regarded as wholly without excuse, as tending to an entire moral deadness, and as entailing final punishment alike without notice and without mercy. Nothing can account for the introduction into a moral code of a form of offence conceived with such intensity, and ranked so high, except the belief that the man committing it had deliberately set aside that inward witness to truth and righteousness, supplied by the law of our nature, in the repudiation of which the universal and consentient voice of mankind has always placed the most awful responsibility, the extremest degree of guilt that the human being can incur.

~_Regard for general opinion._~

The high place assigned throughout the poems to public opinion as a moral check is visible at every turn. And this check applies variously to various classes. With the most abandoned, like the Suitors, it is feeble; and is only invoked on special occasions, as when Telemachus combines it, in the passage lately cited, with the other moral sanctions. Even Paris is represented as quite beyond the reach of it: and Helen meekly wishes, that if the gods had determined she should live, she could have been the husband of a man more open to the influence of the public sentiment[812]:

[812] Il. vi. 349-51.

ὃς ῥ’ ᾔδη νέμεσίν τε καὶ αἴσχεα πόλλ’ ἀνθρώπων.

But upon characters less frivolous and less corrupt, this power acts with great efficacy: so much so, that Phœnix says he was restrained, when in his passion, from killing his father by some benevolent deity, whose mode of proceeding was, we shall perceive, very remarkable: for the suggestion he made to Phœnix with such good effect was, not that he would be punished by the gods for the offence, but that he would become an offence and scandal among men[813]:

[813] Il. ix. 459-61.

ἀλλά τις ἀθανάτων παῦσεν χόλον, ὅς ῥ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ δήμου θῆκε φάτιν, καὶ ὀνείδεα πόλλ’ ἀνθρώπων, ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.

The δήμου φάτις, or public opinion, weighs even with the matron Penelope among the motives to her virtuous and heroic conduct; and the maid Nausicaa, no less circumspect than artless, finds in the φῆμις ἀδευκὴς, the bitter gossip, of Scheria, an apology for desiring Ulysses not to enter the city in her company[814].

[814] Od. vi. 273-7.

But the sentiment of regard to general opinion comes out in other and yet finer forms as a practical regulator of conduct in the heroic age.

Perhaps we might venture to rely upon the uses of the single word αἰδὼς, with the cognate verb and adjective, in Homer, for proof that the condition of the Greeks of his age was a condition of high civilization, in that which constitutes its most essential part, namely, that which relates to the affections and passions of man; the expansion by moral forces of the one, and the compression of the other.

Shame, in all its many forms, has more than one pervading characteristic to mark it as an agent alike powerful and delicate in its influence upon human conduct.

First, it essentially involves this idea: that while it refers to an external standard, independent of ourselves though able to act upon us, still the power thus invoked is one altogether distinct from the idea of force. So sensitive indeed is the feeling of shame, that at the first moment when force comes into view, it alters its nature, and passes into fear. That which it apprehends is something, which dwells only in the ethereal region of opinion; and yet this, by the fineness of its appreciation, it converts into an agent effective both to excite and to restrain. Thus it exhibits to us the human spirit guided by silken reins, and in this way bears emphatic witness to the high training, by which alone it can become susceptible of so gentle a guidance.

Secondly, it embraces not only the character of acts as they are in themselves or appear to us, but also the aspect which they will naturally present to others. It therefore essentially involves the recognition of a high form of relative duty: it obliges us, in regulating the whole tenour of our conduct, to make the feelings of others an element in our own decisions. This principle of a mutual regard, not confined to certain positive acts of relative duty, but pervading the whole course of moral action, lies at the root of all genuine and high civilization.

Shame must have reference to some standard exterior to ourselves, and it therefore tends towards uprooting the law of selfishness. In one of its highest forms, the one perhaps most familiar to us in Homer, it is termed self-respect. But self-respect does not mean a regard to self: it means a virtuous regard to a standard established by adequate consent and authority, and owned, not set up, by the individual conscience; together with a determination that ‘self’ shall be made to conform to it.

The φθορὰ of this sentiment is what we term false shame: which does evil, or refrains from good, in submission to a depraved standard of opinion external to us, and in defiance of our own knowledge of right. This kind of shame is treated with no respect in Homer: for examples of it we must look to Amphimachus and Leiodes, two better-minded but complying Suitors, who end by perishing with the rest.

~_The force and forms of αἰδώς._~

The numerous forms of the sentiment of αἰδὼς in the heroic age are a proof of the large and varied development to which it had already attained.

How fine a feeling is that according to which, as with Homer, the bold men are also the shamefaced ones! as in his line,

αἰδομένων δ’ ἀνδρῶν πλέονες σόοι ἠὲ πέφανται.

This line, as it is repeated, seems to have the character of a γνώμη in the poems[815].

[815] Il. v. 531. xv. 563.

The most marked and frequent use of αἰδὼς is in the sense of self-respect as applied to military honour and bravery. The words αἰδὼς, Ἀργεῖοι, which are employed as an exhortation to fight, constitute one of the Homeric formulæ. Homer does not permit this use of the word to the Trojans: but once it is employed for his gallant favourites, the Lycians. (Il. xvi. 422. xvii. 336.)

Once, indeed, the term is applied to Trojans, but this is in the converse of the usual sense. It would be αἰδὼς, a disgrace, says Æneas, were we to let Troy be taken through our want of manhood. This is a lower signification. And again, as we shall see, the established formula of military incitement for the Trojans is different and less refined[816].

[816] Il. vi. 112 et alibi.

Sometimes αἰδὼς is an excess of deference, or what we might call scrupulosity; the feeling which carries the fastidious observance of some right sentiment towards others up to the point where it threatens to interfere with a public or other clear duty. So Telemachus begs of Nestor, ‘tell me the truth,’

μηδέ τί μ’ αἰδόμενος μειλίσσεο, μηδ’ ἐλεαίρων[817].

[817] Od. iii. 96.

In the Doloneia, Agamemnon, fearful that Diomed will choose Menelaus as a companion out of deference, says, ‘Do not let αἰδὼς influence you: choose the best man.’ Sometimes it is compassion, or ruth; as when Achilles, before the ransom, is said to show no αἰδὼς towards the body of Hector. But here αἰδὼς includes the idea of shame and self-respect. Sometimes it is reverence towards a superior, as in Od. xiv. 505, and in αἰδοῖος applied by Helen to Priam in Il. iii. 172. In this manner it becomes applicable to the sentiments a man should entertain towards the gods,

ἀλλ’ αἰδεῖο θεοὺς, Ἀχιλεῦ[818].

[818] Il. xxiv. 503.

And this is a very remarkable use of the term, because Priam certainly does not mean to urge upon Achilles a dread of the gods, but something quite distinct. Sometimes it is applied by a superior to an inferior; and means ‘his or her dues,’ as among the Immortals, where Jupiter says to Thetis, that he reserves the honour of the ransom for Achilles,

αἰδῶ καὶ φιλότητα τεὴν μετόπισθε φυλάσσων[819].

[819] Ibid. 111.

It may also be felt towards an inferior among men: Agamemnon is exhorted to feel it towards Chryses[820], for it is not a personal sentiment, but implies an object, outside the mere person who is the immediate occasion of it. So Achilles is intreated to revere (αἴδεσθαι) Lycaon, a vanquished and suppliant enemy[821].

[820] Il. i. 23. 377.

[821] Il. xxi. 74.

Sometimes it signifies the constitution of a special relation, over and above the general bond between man and man. A person’s αἰδοῖοι are his relations, friends, guests, and the like. Even so a wanderer is αἰδοῖος to the gods (Od. v. 447). Sometimes it means purely mental modesty, as in Od. viii. 171, ὁ δ’ ἀσφαλέως ἀγορεύει αἰδοῖ μειλιχίῃ; he speaks with that engaging bashfulness and careful indication of respect for his audience, which forms a principal grace of the orator. Sometimes the physical, as well as mental, quality of modesty; as when αἰδὼς kept the goddesses at home (Od. viii. 324). Sometimes, again, simply shyness; as when Telemachus is exhorted by Minerva to put away αἰδὼς in Od. iii. 14; or as in the phrase κακὸς δ’ αἰδοῖος ἀλήτης; ‘it will never do for a beggar to be shy.’

No finer shading of sentiment, I think, can be found in the language of the most civilized nations, nor any case so remarkable of a high and tender, and at the same time largely developed state of feeling at a time when material progress was so partial, rude, and slight. And of the vital importance of this element of the Greek moral code, we find a proof in the representation of Hesiod, who gives it as a characteristic of his iron, or post-Homeric, age, that αἰδὼς along with νέμεσις had fled from the earth.

~_Other cognate terms._~

There are other words, the use of which in Homer approximates occasionally to the sense of αἰδώς. The nearest of them is σέβας (as in Il. xviii. 178), with its verb σέβομαι; which, as we have seen, is sometimes applied simply to an internal standard recognised by the conscience. But in Il. iv. 242, οὔ νυ σέβεσθε; seems to be equivalent to οὐκ αἰδεῖσθε; or ‘for shame.’

The word νέμεσις, too, is sometimes used in a sense akin to that of αἰδώς: as when Neptune exhorts the Greeks, ἐν φρεσὶ θέσθε ἕκαστος αἰδῶ καὶ νέμεσιν (Il. xiii. 121): compare vi. 351. Again, in Od. i. 263, ii. 136, xxii. 40. But this sentiment is usually half way between αἰδὼς and fear, because what it apprehends, though it is not force, yet neither is it simple disapproval; rather it is disapproval with heat, disapproval into which passion enters. It contributes, however, to complete a very remarkable picture of the human mind.

The comparison between Greeks and Trojans, or Europeans and Asiatics, will prove, we shall find, greatly in favour of the former as to most parts of their morality. We have now to touch upon a feature in Greek manners which is unfavourable.

~_Homicide in the heroic age._~

With regard to the practice of homicide, the ordinary Greek morality was extremely loose; while we have no evidence of a similar readiness for bloodshedding among the Trojans: and enough is told us of Trojan life and manners to have probably brought out this characteristic, had it existed.

Among the Greeks, to have killed a man was considered in the light of a misfortune, or at most a prudential error, an ἄτη πυκινὴ[822], when the perpetrator of the act had come among strangers as a fugitive for protection and hospitality. On the spot, therefore, where the crime occurred, it could stand only as in the nature of a private and civil wrong, and the fine payable was regarded, not (which it might have been) as a mode, however defective, of marking any guilt in the culprit, but as, on the whole, an equitable satisfaction to the wounded feelings of the relatives and friends, or as an actual compensation for the lost services of the dead man. The religion of the age takes no notice of the act whatever[823].

[822] Il. xxiv. 480.

[823] Friedreich, Realien, sect. 139.

The ordinary practice, we learn from the blunt speech of Ajax to Achilles[824], was to accept the established fine upon the loss even of a brother or a son, if offered, and then to let the slayer remain unharmed. If he would not pay, or if the relations would not accept the payment, the alternative was flight: but it does not appear that this entailed any loss of character, perhaps rather otherwise. It was, however, the most common issue of such an affair, and, as such, it furnishes Homer with a simile. Priam, appearing before Achilles by surprise, is compared to a man who, having had the misfortune to kill somebody, appears unexpectedly in a strange place[825].

[824] Il. ix. 632-6.

[825] Il. xxiv. 480-2.

~_Eight instances in the poems._~

We will proceed to examine the cases of homicide recorded in the poems, which are alike numerous and remarkable.

I. Medon[826], the illegitimate brother of Oilean Ajax, migrates from Locris to Phylace, having, in the usual phrase, killed a man, ἄνδρα κατακτάς. This man was a kinsman, not improbably a brother, (for γνωτὸς may mean brother, as in Il. iii. 174, and xxii. 234), of his ‘stepmother,’ as she is called; that is, of Eriopis, the lawful wife of his father. And yet he retains or improves his position in Phylace, and appears, in the Thirteenth Iliad, as the commander of all the Phthians except the Myrmidons.

[826] Il. xiii. 659-7. xv. 333-6.

II. Theoclymenus[827], of the prophetic family of Melampus, suddenly makes his appearance before Telemachus, when he is about to embark from the Peloponnesus for Ithaca. He inquires of Telemachus who he is[828]; and, on finding that the youth is not in his own country, but a stranger, he says, ‘So am I: I have killed a man, and am flying from the vengeance of his family: they are powerful, and I am in fear lest they should take my life.’ Telemachus immediately promises to take him on board, and entertain him hospitably. He does not seem at all shocked at the intimation he has received. He does not think it worth while to ask the fugitive, whether he killed the man wantonly, or under provocation. But he forthwith assigns to him the place of honour[829]:

πὰρ δὲ οἷ αὐτῷ εἷσε Θεοκλύμενον.

[827] Od. xv. 220 _et seqq._

[828] Od. xv. 260.

[829] Ibid. 285.

III. The next is an instance not less remarkable than the one last named. Tlepolemus, the son of Hercules and Astyoche, kills Licymnius the maternal uncle of his father, and his own grand-uncle. The sufferer is, moreover, in his old age, or he could hardly be the grand-uncle of an adult person; and no plea or palliation is mentioned for the act. The children and grandchildren of Hercules prepare to levy war upon him: but so far is he from having suffered in character for what hardly can have been other than a barbarous and brutal action, that he is enabled to raise a large body of emigrants, who accompany him to Rhodes. When distributed there in three settlements, they are blessed by the peculiar favour of Jupiter; and Tlepolemus appears before Troy as the commander of the Rhodian contingent[830].

[830] Il. ii. 658-70.

IV. Again, the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus had its origin in the circumstance that Menœtius delivered over his son into the protection of Peleus, because, being a youth, he had quarrelled with another youth, the son of Amphidamas, over a game of dice, and had slain him, νήπιος, οὐκ ἐθέλων, as the Poet says; that is, of course, without malice prepense[831]. This is the more worthy of notice, because it is evident that the character of Patroclus, partly perhaps for the sake of contrast with that of Achilles, and therefore of relief to it, is meant to be represented as one of peculiar gentleness[832]; a quality in which no one of the great Greek chieftains, except Menelaus, can compete with him.

[831] Il. xxiii. 86.

[832] Il. xix. 282-300.

V. In the Fifteenth Iliad, Hector slays Lycophron, son of Mastor, when he is aiming at Ajax. This was an inhabitant of Cythera who had quitted his country for homicide, ‘but whom,’ says Ajax to Teucer, ‘we honoured as if he had been a beloved parent[833].’

[833] Il. xv. 429-40.

VI. Again, the case of Epeigeus is remarkable; for he had been lord of Budeum:

ὅς ῥ’ ἐν Βουδείῳ εὐναιομένῳ ἤνασσεν τὸ πρίν·

But having slain a cousin, apparently also of the higher order, he had to fly to Peleus and Thetis for protection[834].

[834] Il. xvi. 571.

VII. In the Thirteenth Odyssey, Ulysses, after being deposited in Ithaca, gives a fabulous account of himself to the disguised Minerva, in which we may be sure that he includes nothing which was deemed essentially dishonourable. In this account he represents himself as a fugitive from Crete on account of homicide. Orsilochus, the son of Idomeneus, had endeavoured, as he says, to deprive him of his share of the Trojan booty: for this cause he waylaid him by night, took away his life without being perceived by any one as he was returning from the country, and then embarked, to avoid the consequences, in a Phœnician ship[835].

[835] Od. xiii. 256-75.

VIII. An anonymous Ætolian, having slain a man, fled to Ithaca, visited Eumæus, and as a matter of course was entertained, nay petted, by him; ἐγὼ δέ μιν ἀμφαγάπαζον (Od. xiv. 379-81).

Even this great number of instances do not so fully illustrate the familiarity of the practice, and its thorough disconnection from the idea of moral turpitude, as the mode in which it furnishes the material of general illustration or remark. When Homer desires to represent on the shield of Achilles the ordinary form of public business in an assembly, he chooses a trial for homicide[836]. And so Ulysses, when explaining to Telemachus the formidable difficulties with which, after the slaughter of the Suitors, he has to contend, observes that those whom he has slain were the very flower of the community; whereas, in ordinary cases, a man flies his country after having put but a single person to death, and this even though he be one who has few to take up his quarrel[837].

[836] Il. xviii. 479.

[837] Od. xxiii. 118-22.

Now if we knew these facts concerning the Greeks of the heroic age, and knew nothing else, we should at once conclude that they were an inhuman and savage people, who did not appreciate the value of human life. But this is not so. They are not a cruel people. There is no wanton infliction of pain throughout the whole operations of the Iliad, no delight in the sufferings of others. The only needless wounds are wounds given to the dead[838]; a mode of action which imputed nothing brutal or degrading, in times when mankind had not yet learned from the Christian Revelation the honour due to the human body.

[838] Il. xxii, 371.

It is not then mere savageness, and the low estimate put upon life, which determines the view of the heroic age with respect to homicide. And if not, then it can only be an unbalanced appreciation of some other quality, such as courage, which was commonly implied and exhibited in such cases.

~_Why viewed with little disfavour._~

It seems as though the display of force and spirit of daring, which accompany crimes of violence in a rude age, had such a value in the estimation of the early Greeks, as to excuse proceedings which would otherwise have been visited with the severest censure. We shall find reason to believe that Paris may have had a certain credit in their eyes for carrying off Helen by the strong hand, which went to redeem or mitigate his adultery, and breach of hospitable rights. This idea, which is undoubtedly startling, is supported by the strange narrative of Hercules and Iphitus. Iphitus was the possessor of certain fine mares. Hercules, determined to possess them, visited him, received his hospitality, slew him, and carried off the animals. Now it may indeed be the mixed character of Hercules, which places his εἴδωλον in the Shades, while he is himself among the Immortals; but still the scale is cast on the whole in his favour. Yet surely the story of Iphitus exhibits a crime of the blackest dye; and the only palliation of it that is conceivable seems to lie in this, that he probably did not use stratagem, but proceeded by main force. The crime of Ægisthus, the blackest in the poems, appears to derive its highest intensity from the fact, that he slew Agamemnon like an ox at the stall, in the friendly feast itself, without notice or the opportunity of defence, and by a plot deliberately laid. Such is the effect of all the three passages in which this outrage is described[839]. The most favourable supposition which the case of Hercules admits is, that he came for plunder, and put the possessor of the horses to death, without premeditation, upon his refusal to yield them up; and that such an act, though a proper object of divine resentment, was yet not black enough to destroy his title to honour and a celestial abode[840].

[839] Od. i. 35-7. iv. 524-35. xi. 409-20.

[840] Od. xxi. 22-38. xi. 601-4.

We will now pass on to a kindred subject.

~_Piracy in the heroic age._~

Thucydides has stated that in the earlier ages of Greece the practice of piracy was alike widespread and honourable: οὐκ ἔχοντός πω αἰσχύνην τούτου τοῦ ἔργου, φέροντος δέ τι καὶ δόξης μᾶλλον[841]. In support of this opinion he refers to the questions then usually addressed to strangers on their arrival in a country; such as that by Nestor to the pseudo-Mentor and Telemachus, in order to learn what their business was, or whether they were pirates[842];

[841] Thuc. i. 5.

[842] Od. iii. 72.

ἢ μαψιδίως ἀλάλησθε, οἷά τε ληϊστῆρες, ὑπεὶρ ἅλα, τοίτ’ ἀλόωνται ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, κακὸν ἀλλοδαποῖσι φέροντες;

Now I think that the last line seems to explain the favourable view which was taken by the Greeks of the practice of piracy. For it combined with the hazards of navigation, then so much more serious than at present, the chance of desperate encounters. It appealed, in the very highest degree, to the spirit of adventure; a spirit congenial especially to the earliest youth of a people full of unsatisfied and, so to speak, hungry energies. The mischief inflicted was inflicted on ἀλλόδαποι, on those with whom there was no close tie, either as compatriots or as ξεῖνοι. Now we must bear in mind that the law which, even in the time of Thucydides, governed the relations of the Greek tribes among themselves, during the period of their high civilization, was a permanent or ordinary state of hostility suspended from time to time by conventions for so many or so many years[843]. The same principle, applied to a period when political organization was less mature, and when men lived rather in knots and companies than in states, involves the Homeric view of piracy. And that view, entertained in such times, should occasion far less surprise, than our finding Thucydides inform us that the same system continued throughout whole divisions of Greece in his day; καὶ μέχρι τοῦδε πολλὰ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ νέμεται, περί τε Λοκροὺς τοὺς Ὀζόλας, καὶ Αἰτώλους, καὶ Ἀκαρνᾶνας, καὶ τὴν ταύτῃ ἤπειρον[844]. The gains of the pirate’s life were in some sense fairly balanced by its dangers. The piracy of that age was not like piracy in ours, the strong and well-armed waiting for the feeble and defenceless; it was a game of more even chances, and the real resemblance for it is to be found, not among the Algerine corsairs, not even in the Highland clans sweeping down from the mountains upon the Lowland Scots, but most properly in the more even-handed forays of the border warfare between England and Scotland.

[843] It seems, however, possible that the sense of the ἑκατονταετεῖς σπονδαὶ might be the same as that which we attach to a lease for nine hundred and ninety-nine years.

[844] Thuc. i. 5.

There is indeed yet a higher authority for this kind of piracy, than that to which Thucydides has referred. Ulysses, when he has destroyed the Suitors, considers, in conversation with his wife, not only how he is to preserve his remaining property in live stock, but how he is to replace what his enemies have destroyed. Part he thinks his subjects will make up to him by presents, but great part he will himself obtain by freebooting[845];

[845] Od. xxiii. 357.

πολλὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἐγὼ ληΐσσομαι.

We can hardly, I think, restrain the meaning of the word to the booty of legitimate and successful war. Sometimes, as in the case of the Cicones, piracy is scarcely distinguishable from war; but Ulysses fairly relates of himself a piratical attack upon Egypt, which can leave us no room for scruple in supposing, that he might without hesitation think of doing again what he thought it worth while to pretend that he had done before. Both these last-named instances may serve, however, to show that, in times when preparedness for war was habitual, the pirate took no great advantage in such attacks as these. For with the Cicones Ulysses had the worst of it at last[846]; and in the case of Egypt, according to his fable, the whole party were taken prisoners or slain. Kidnapping, however, such as that of Eumæus stolen in his childhood, is not, I presume, to be regarded as equal in honour to freebooting with the strong hand, thus apparently stamped with the sanction of Ulysses.

[846] Od. ix. 59.

And yet this model-man had been stung to the very quick by Euryalus in Phæacia, who said to him, ‘You do not look like a man to compete in athletic games; but rather like one of the captains of merchant vessels, who looks after the cargo and makes rapacious profits[847]!’

[847] Od. viii. 159-64.

Nor, after all, is this so strange as at first sight it might appear; for the Phœnicians, the merchants of those days, were also kidnappers and slave-dealers: and if their transactions were not, like those of the pirates, uniformly bad, they were, when exceptionable, double-dyed in guilt, because they involved fraud as well as robbery.

~_Mixed view of it in the poems._~

Again, as to piracy, it by no means appears that it was attended with respect, nor is the language of the poems quite uniform regarding it. In the νεκυία of the Twenty-fourth Odyssey, and also in that of the Eleventh, the shade of Agamemnon calls freebooters of this description ἀνάρσιοι ἄνδρες[848]. The Cretan piracy of the pseudo-Ulysses in Egypt is mentioned as an act of ὕβρις, an outrage deservedly punished by Jupiter[849]. On the other hand, Greek trade, like Phœnician, embraced kidnapping. At least the Taphians carried away from her country the Phœnician nurse, who in her turn carried off the young Eumæus.

[848] Od. xxiv. 111.

[849] Od. xiv. 262.

Upon the whole, after allowing liberally for the masculine character and redundant energies of the Hellenic people, we shall best explain their favourable view of piracy by remembering the near relation it then bore both to war, which we know may be just and honourable, as well as to trade, which we regard as in itself both innocent and beneficial. Since Homer’s time the character of war has been softened, and that of trade has been elevated, almost immeasurably; while that of piracy has been lowered; hence there is now a wide gulf, where there was then scarcely even a seam discernible; and Homer might have sung the expressive words of Goëthe in Faust,

Krieg, Handel, und Piraterie Dreieinig sind sie, nicht zu trennen.

We may also, I think, find among the Greeks a tendency to family feuds, beyond certain limits, of which the poems do not afford any instance on the Trojan side.

Of these, two have already been noticed among the homicides. Medon kills his father’s wife’s kinsman. Tlepolemus kills his grand-uncle. But also Phœnix for a quarrel flies from his father’s home and settles in Dolopia. Phyleus, the father of Meges, for a similar reason migrates to Dulichium[850]. Eurystheus, as the great grandson of Jupiter, is of reputed kin to Hercules his son; but persecutes him through life with the imposition of cruel and endless toils. Meleager has a fierce feud with his family, which is recited by Phœnix as a warning to Achilles. Bellerophon is expelled from Greece by a family quarrel. Ægisthus himself is the cousin of Agamemnon.

[850] Il. ii. 629.

As with families, so with communities. The pre-Troic legends are almost invariably legends of the internal raids and wars of Greece. They were a people of the strong and the red hand, marvellously combined with high refinement, true love of art and song, and an unexampled political genius.

But although the Homeric age had not ceased to be as yet an age of violence, it was as far as possible from being one marked by a general sway either of unbridled appetite, or of ungovernable passion; and if it is sometimes mistakenly supposed to have borne this character, the appearances which produce the illusion are due only to the fact, that vice of all kinds then went straight forward to its work, and had not yet learned, in the school of the wisdom of this world, how much it might gain from method, order, and reserve.

~_Temperance in the heroic age._~

We have ample signs of that regard for temperance, bodily as well as mental, which Homer united with his thoroughly convivial spirit. By the mouth of Ulysses, he reprehends even that mild form of excess in wine which does no more than promote garrulity (Od. xiv. 463-6). When the Greeks were about to suffer great calamities on their return, he makes them proceed in a state of drunkenness to the Assembly[851]. When Elpenor dies by an accidental fall, he assigns drunkenness as the cause, and takes care to inform us that he was young, and neither valiant nor sensible[852]. Ulysses encourages the brutal Polyphemus to drink, with a view to his own liberation. And the proceedings of the monster, when intoxicated, are certainly more revolting than those of Stephano, if not than those of Caliban, in the Tempest. Again, though it is certainly true, that the most vivid denunciation of excess in liquor to be found throughout the poems is put into the mouth of the Suitor Antinous[853], yet I think it was plainly meant to be accepted as spoken in earnest, and as expressing the sense of Homer. Wine, we thus learn, caused the Centaur Eurytion to lose his ears and nose. In no single case does the Poet permit liquor to act in the slightest degree upon the self-possession of his heroes, or of any character whom he esteems; or represent them as either doing, or leaving undone, any act through excess in drink[854]. The only allusion to its influence, in connection with a practical result, is one very faint, and perfectly innocent. It is when, dissatisfaction having prevailed among the Grecian kings and army, as we see from the speech of Diomed, Nestor recommends Agamemnon to treat his Council to a supper, before proceeding to obtain their advice; and observes to him, that he can readily do it, for he has wine and all other provision in abundance. The intention apparently is to lay the ground for concord, not in excess, nor even here in hilarity, but at least in amicable humour[855]. To the Immortals, indeed, it is conceded to abide at the banquet for the livelong day, but not to men; for the pseudo-Mentor observes to Nestor in the Third Odyssey, that it is not seemly to sit long at the sacred (that is, regular and public) feast[856].

[851] Od. iii. 139.

[852] Od. x. 552-60. xi. 61.

[853] Od. xxi. 293-304.

[854] Even Scott, one of the most refined, as well as greatest, among imaginative writers, once allows his hero to commit himself grossly in point of manners, under the influence of intoxication. It is in Rob Roy (chap. xii.), at Osbaldiston House.

[855] Il. ix. 69.

[856] Od. iii. 335.

It is much to be regretted that Horace, who in many cases has shown himself an accurate reader of Homer, has in this point grossly mistaken him:

Laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus[857].

[857] Hor. Ep. i. 19, 6.

And this summary character, unfortunately false, has saved men the trouble of collecting the true one from the works of the Poet himself.

~_Self-control in the heroic age._~

When we turn to another form of temperance or self-government, namely, that which we call self-control, we find it eminently exemplified among Greeks. It appears as a pervading and national quality in that silence on the field of battle, which they combined with such an inward energy of determination. In Ulysses it is carried up to its perfection. Perhaps the only occasions on which he even seems to relax it are those of the answer to Euryalus in the Eighth Odyssey, and the reply to Agamemnon in the Fourth Iliad.

So much, however, of emotion as he suffers to escape him in those passages, only serves to heighten the effect of his words, not to make him deflect by one jot or tittle, though in undoubted warmth, from the true rule of reason. But we find this quality not only developed powerfully in a pattern-man like Ulysses; it is also strongly infused into such a warrior as Diomed. This is proved by the manner in which he bears[858] the chiding of Agamemnon on his rounds, and rebukes Sthenelus for having been provoked into a petulant answer. At the same time it is highly illustrative of the national character, that this young and ardent warrior, who could thus bear a reprimand on the field, stored up the recollection of it within his breast: and when, at the beginning of the Ninth Book, Agamemnon showed his own faint-heartedness by advising the abandonment of the enterprise, then Diomed, having watched his opportunity, recalled the circumstances, and quietly but effectively replied upon Agamemnon[859]. Nay more, perhaps the most striking proof of the abundance of this high quality among the Greeks is in the very case where it is on the whole outmatched by the passion that it ought to master, namely, in the case of Achilles. There is something indeed sublime in the manner in which, many times over, when he feels the tide of wrath rising within him, he eyes his own passion, even as a tiger is eyed by its keeper, and puts a spell upon it, so that it dare not spring. Thus it is, when he parleys with himself on the question, whether he shall end the strife with Agamemnon by slaying him, in the Assembly of the First Book. And thus again, when he feels that the words which Priam has incautiously let drop are kindling a flame which, if further fed, would consume the aged and sorrowing suppliant, he is conscious of the rising tempest, and before it has swollen to such force as to disturb his self-command, he sternly, but yet not unkindly, bids him to desist. It is by trying them in mental conflicts like these, that Homer shows us of what mettle his Greek kings were made. It would be curious to draw out a list of the multitude of words in which he describes, under every possible aspect, the power and habit of self-control. But perhaps one of his slightest is also one of his most effective touches. The applause of the Greeks in their Assembly is always described by a word different from that employed to describe the very same indication of feeling by the Trojans. He usually says ἐπὶ δ’ ἴαχον υἷες Ἀχαιῶν for the Greeks: for the Trojans it is ἐπὶ δὲ Τρῶες κελάδησαν. The Greeks shout forth their energetic approval: the Trojans clatter, as if their tongues could not bear restraint.

[858] Il. iv. 411-18.

[859] Il. ix. 32-49.

Yet we must not suppose, either on account of the self-command of the Greeks that they were apathetic, or on account of their frequent homicides that they were inhuman, and savagely indifferent to the infliction of pain on their fellow-creatures.

Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans appear to have been ferocious in the treatment of enemies. The extreme point to which they go is that of giving no quarter: but they never, even in the exasperation of battle, inflict torture with their weapons. The immolation of twelve Trojan youths over the dead Patroclus is doubtless cruel: but it falls far short of what the passions of war have produced in other times and countries. With the manner of inflicting death, passion never has to do.

~_Savage ideas occasionally expressed._~

An inquiry, however, which seems to be most curious, is suggested by the passages in which Hecuba wishes that she could eat Achilles[860], Achilles that he could find it in his heart to devour Hector[861]; and again in which Jupiter[862] suggests to Juno, that nothing could satiate her spite against Troy so well as if she were to eat up Priam and his whole family. For the question arises, how is it that we find these remains of the wildest savagery in company with a refinement of manners and feeling, which the poems very frequently exhibit, and which even reaches in some important points to a degree never exceeded in any country or any period of the world?

[860] Il. xxiv. 212.

[861] Il. xxii. 345-8.

[862] Il. iv. 35.

The answer I presume to be this: that the civilization of the Greeks in the heroic age, though as to the mind it was really a very high, was yet also a very young civilisation. Its path was marked and decided, but it had not had time to travel far from barbarism. It was not safe by distance, nor defended by the ramparts of long tradition, nor strengthened by the force of continuing bent, and consolidated immemorial habit. The Homeric gentleman, with his civilization, stood, in respect to barbarism, like him who voyages by sea,

digitis a morte remotus Quatuor aut septem;

only the thickness of the plank is between him and the wilderness which he has left: and if passion makes a breach, the mood of the wild beast reappears. We may account for the cannibalish observation of Jupiter by the fact that he has no self-control in Homer: but that of Hecuba is to be accounted for on the principle I have endeavoured to describe. So it is with Achilles: and so, too, when the wise Ulysses, slaughtering the wretched women of his household who had erred, seems tinged for once with a flush of barbarism. When _we_ let loose the tiger within us, his range is limited not by any force springing from our own will or choice, but by the strong dikes and barriers of social wont, and by habits of thought as well as action, which have been accumulated by the long labours of many successive generations of mankind.

We have already[863] noticed something that will well bear comparison with this state of things in the reports which are made to us respecting modern Persia, the cradle in all likelihood of the family of Achilles.

[863] Achæis or Ethnology, sect. x. p. 570.

At the same time it is to be borne in mind that this cannibalism, of which we have glimpses in Homer, in the first place was limited, even in speculation, to enemies; and in the second place, existed in speculation only. Of this we have pretty strong proof from the case of the crew of Ulysses in the Twelfth Odyssey. They did not touch the oxen of the Sun, until death from hunger stared them in the face. Then Eurylochus made a manful speech on the subject of the option before them, between dying on the one side, and the slaughter of some of the animals on the other. But those circumstances of the last extremity, to which they were reduced, were the very circumstances in which the fortitude even of Christians[864] has given way, and with respect to which no prudent man dares to pronounce a judgment upon persons that so succumb. Yet there is not in the case before us the slightest hint at a resort to this most horrible remedy.

[864] The awful ‘Ugolino’ of Dante ends with the line

Poscia più che ’l dolor potè ’l digiuno.

I am free to own that I cannot dismiss from my mind the suspicion that what the poet means to convey to us in these darkly veiled expressions is the devouring of the wretched children by their parent. (Inferno, xxxiii. 75.)

~_Not unfamiliar to later Greece._~

Besides the circumstance, that in Homer the cannibal _dicta_, abstractedly so shocking, are the mere words of phrensied passion, and that there are no corresponding acts, we have to observe that the Poet is never found exhibiting the sentiment of joy in connection with the positive infliction of suffering upon an enemy. It was by no means so among the later Greeks. Too many instances might, indeed, be supplied of the increase of cruelty with the lapse of time.

Homer, again, has nowhere made woman to be even the sorrowing minister of justice: as if he felt that there was a radical incompatibility between the proper gentleness of her nature, and the use of the sword of punishment. But in the Hecuba of Euripides, after the aged matron, exasperated by the treacherous murder of her son Polydorus, has put to death the two children of the assassin Polymestor, and has likewise put out his eyes, he addresses to her these words (v. 1233),

χαίρεις ὑβρίζουσ’ εἰς ἔμ’, ὦ πανοῦργε σύ·

and she, no way shrinking from the imputation, replies

οὐ γάρ με χαίρειν χρὴ, σὲ τιμωρουμένην;

In one place Homer has taken an opportunity of showing us, what he thinks of the principle of exultation over fallen enemies. When Euryclea is about to shout over the fallen Suitors, Ulysses, though he has not yet ended the bloody work of retribution, gravely checks her. ‘It is wrong,’ he says, ‘to exult over the slain. These men have been overtaken by divine providence, and by their own perverse deeds: for they regarded no human being, noble or vile, with whom they had to do: wherefore they have miserably perished in their wickedness.’ The whole tone and language of this rebuke, so grave and earnest as it is, and more sad even than it is stern, is worthy of any moral code that the world has known.

~_Wrath in Ulysses and in Achilles._~

There is indeed a terrible severity in the proceedings of Ulysses against the Suitors, the women, and his rebellious subjects. But it is plain that the case, which Homer had to represent, was one that required the hero to effect something like a reconquest of the country. It is also plain that Homer felt that these stern measures would require a very strong warrant. Hence without doubt it is, that the preparations for the crisis are so elaborate; the insults offered to the disguised master of the palace so aggravated; and the direct agency of Minerva introduced to deepen his sufferings. Hence, again, when the incensed warrior is about to pursue with martial ardour the flying insurgents, his eagerness is mildly marked as excessive, and is effectually checked by the friendly but decisive intervention of Jupiter. Some critics have objected to this passage, and have argued that it could not be genuine. They surely must forget, that Homer does not seek to present us in his protagonists with a faultlessness which would have carried them out of the sphere, such as it was conceived by him and by his age, of life either divine or human. Both Ulysses and Achilles may err. But where they err, it is in measure and degree. Ulysses is the minister of public justice, and of divine retribution. But he is composed, like ourselves, of flesh and blood, and he carries his righteous office, in a natural heat, to the verge of cruelty. Then the warning voice is vouchsafed to him, and he at once dutifully obeys. And is, then, a thing like this so new and strange to us? And has neither our philosophy nor our experience of life taught us that there are no circumstances, in which a good and just man runs so serious a risk of becoming harsh and cruel unawares, as when he is hurried along by the torrent of an originally righteous indignation?

Even so with Achilles. He is, no more than Ulysses, merely vengeful, but he resents a wrong done to justice, to decency, and to love, in his person. Upon the stream of this resentment he is carried, until it threatens to become a torrent. Then, by an admirable design, he is chastised in the yet deeper passion of his soul, his friendship for Patroclus; and so is recalled within the bounds of his duty to his suffering countrymen.

But in both cases the foundation of conduct is just and sound: by neither is any sanction given to the principle which the Gospel rebukes, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ For a wrong done to principles of public morality and justice is in each case alike the thing chiefly resented, although in each case the person who resents it is also a person that had greatly suffered by it.

Again, we should misunderstand Homer’s picture of the Greek character, if we conceived that he left no room in it for those accesses of emotion, with respect to which it may be difficult to say whether they contributed most to its strength or its weakness, while it seems clear that they are in near association with both.

The Poet’s intention does not oblige him to place his protagonists beyond the reach of human infirmity, as we see in the stubborn wrath of Achilles, and in the awakened keenness of Ulysses for the blood of his rebellious subjects[865]. And though he never exhibits them as vicious, still, in the case of Ulysses, as well as in that of Achilles, he has introduced into his picture great quickness of temper, which is indeed nearly, though not necessarily, connected with sensitiveness of honour. On two occasions in particular is this observable: in the sharp answers namely of Ulysses, first to Agamemnon, who on his circuit accuses him of remissness in military duty[866]; and secondly to the θυμοδακὴς μῦθος of Euryalus[867], who has taken him for a πρήκτηρ or merchant, and a rogue to boot.

[865] Od. xxiv. 526, 37.

[866] Il. iv. 350.

[867] Od. viii. 185, 162.

~_The Domestic affections._~

The point in which the ethical tone of the heroic age stands highest of all is, perhaps, the strength of the domestic affections.

A marked indication of the power of this principle among mankind is to be found in its prevalence even among the Olympian deities. For its appearance there has no relation to divine attributes properly so called; it is strictly a part of the mythology; a sentiment copied from the human heart and life, and transferred to these inventive or idealized formations. Indeed we always find it in connection with that in which they are most human, namely, the indulgence of their sensual passions, and the results of that indulgence in their human progeny. It is not, therefore, among the higher or traditive deities that we find the sentiment; it does not exist in Apollo or Minerva, whose love is always of a different kind, and is grounded in the gifts or character of the person who is the object of it, as for instance, the great Ulysses[868], or, in a smaller sphere, the skilful Phereclus, who built the ships of Paris[869]. It is in Jupiter over Sarpedon, in Neptune for the blindness of his brutal son Polyphemus, in Mars over Ascalaphus, in Venus about Æneas; and these two last are the two deities whose ethical and intellectual standard is the lowest of all[870].

[868] Od. iii. 221.

[869] Il. v. 59.

[870] Il. xvi. 431, 59. Od. i. 68-71. Il. xv. 115; and Il. v. 311-17.

When we come down to earth, we find the sentiment strong everywhere. Among the Trojan royal family, where there is but little sense of the higher parts of morality, this feeling is intense alike with Priam and with Hecuba. The latter is not passionate, she is ἠπιόδωρος[871]. Yet on the death of Hector we see her become a tigress, and wish she could devour the conqueror[872]. Ulysses chooses for the title by which he would be known that of the Father of Telemachus[873]. It is true indeed that, then as now, the imperiousness of bodily wants made itself felt; and it was then more ingenuously acknowledged. Hence Telemachus, attached to his father, when he explained the double cause of his grief and care to the Ithacan assembly, first named the death or absence of his father, but then proclaimed as the chief matter, the continuing waste and threatened destruction of his property[874]:

[871] Il. vi. 251.

[872] Il. xxiv. 212.

[873] Il. ii. 260.

[874] Od. ii. 48.

νῦν δ’ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπαντα πάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δ’ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.

And the gist of his complaint against the Suitors was, not their urging Penelope to marry, but their living upon him while prosecuting the suit[875]. But then this is a father, whom he has never known or consciously seen. The Shade of Achilles in the nether world is anxious upon one subject: it is that he may know if old Peleus is still held in honour. In another he is also deeply interested; it is the valour of his son: and the gloom of his chill existence is brightened into an exulting joy, when he learns that Neoptolemus is great in fight[876]. The mother of Ulysses died neither of disease nor of old age, but of a broken heart for the absence of her son[877]. But the most signal proof of the power of the instinct is in its hold upon the self-centred character of Agamemnon, which, as a general rule, leaves no room in his thoughts for anything, except policy alone, that lies beyond the range of his personal propensities and especially his appetite for wealth. But when the gallant Menelaus, ashamed of the silence of his countrymen, accepts the challenge of Hector[878], Agamemnon seizes him by the hand, and beseeches him not to run so terrible a hazard. And again, in the Δολώνεια, when Diomed has to select a companion, Agamemnon, in dread lest his choice should fall on Menelaus, desires him to take not the man of highest rank, but the most valiant and effective companion for an enterprise of so critical a kind. His motive was apprehension for the safety of his brother[879]:

[875] Ibid. 50 and seqq.

[876] Od. xi. 494, 538.

[877] Od. xi. 198-203.

[878] Il. vii. 92-119.

[879] Il. x. 234-40.

ὣς ἔφατ’, ἔδδεισεν δὲ περὶ ξανθῷ Μενελάῳ.

The war too is full of the most pleasing instances of attachment between brothers; Ajax and Teucer, Glaucus and Sarpedon, and many other instances less illustrious, might be quoted. It is the sad end of Polydorus which at the last works up Hector into the most daring heroism; and again in the Odyssey, the advantage is set forth of having brothers, who defend a man while he is living, and avenge him when he is dead[880].

[880] Od. viii. 585, xxiv. 434, and xvi. 97, 115-21.

And hence it is that, even though Greeks were hot of head and ready of hand, we find no instance where, in consequence of a broil, one member of a family inflicts violence or death upon another of the same household. The horrible idea of parricide, and the execration with which public opinion would brand such a crime, restrain Phœnix at the very height of his passion from laying hands upon his father[881]:

[881] Il. ix. 461.

ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.

Directly that we pass beyond the household and its affections intertwined by habit, the aspect of the case alters. Out of six instances of unpremeditated homicide in Homer, three[882] are committed upon relations by blood or by affinity, though not very near ones. Medon, the bastard of Oileus, kills a relation of the lawful wife. Tlepolemus the son of Hercules kills his grand-uncle Licymnius. Epeigeus of Budeum kills his cousin.

[882] Il. xiii. 695-7. ii. 658-70. xvi. 57.

~_Relationships close, not wide._~

This marked line of distinction, between the homicides of crime and the homicides of misfortune, illustrates another point in the structure of Greek society. Relationships do not appear to have been reckoned by them as subsisting beyond a rather narrow range. We cannot trace any defined idea of kin more remote than the first cousin. The lexicographers treat the term ἀνέψιος as capable of a wider sense; but the only individuals named as ἀνέψιοι by Homer, whose relationships we can follow, are first cousins: namely, Caletor son of Clytius, and Dolops son of Lampus, both first cousins of Hector[883]. There are also persons named in the poems, whose consanguinity we can trace, while it is nowhere noticed by the Poet: for instance, Eumelus is first cousin, once removed, to Nestor. Priam and Anchises are second cousins: Æneas and Hector third. These relationships are never referred to. Thus then society is not arranged in clans, but in tribes, united by the general sense of a common name, a common abode, a common history, a common religion, and a remote sense of a common tribal stock, without any sense of personal affinity in each individual case. Again, it is curious to observe that the xenial relation was not less vivacious than that of blood. The tie of blood subsists in the second generation from the common ancestor; and Diomed and Glaucus similarly own one another as ξεῖνοι, because two generations before Œneus had entertained Bellerophon[884].

[883] Il. xv. 419, 22; 525, 54.

[884] Il. vi. 215.

~_Purity in the heroic age._~

The elevated and free social position of womankind in the Homeric times of itself implies a great purity of ideas respecting them. This subject, however, will receive a separate discussion.

There is a passage of Athenæus which conveys to us a tradition of no ordinary beauty, and effectually severs for us ideas and objects which only a corrupt bias has associated. He tells us that Zeno of Citium[885], whatever the practice of the Stoic leader may have been, conceived of Ἔρως, the God of Love, as a deity of friendship, liberty, concord, and public happiness, and of nothing else. So likewise his antecessors in philosophy taught that this deity was as a being perfectly pure: σεμνόν τινα καὶ παντὸς αἰσχροῦ κεχωρισμένον. This idea took refuge in the Venus Οὐρανία, the opposite one in the Πάνδημος, or promiscuous[886]. In the later ages of Greece, the distinction of these two characters one from the other feebly lived on: but there was no subjective basis for the separate existence of the former, and it was practically eclipsed, if not absorbed. The true severance of the ideas probably was effected before the time of Homer; and they were lodged in separate impersonations. The effective form of the Celestial Venus is to be sought most probably in Diana, though it was natural for Plato and the philosophers to keep alive the memory of the distinction by way of apology for the popular religion. The traces of this unstained conception were in later times only to be found in the sphere of art, and were even there not always visible: but in the Homeric poems, and probably in the Homeric period, this purity of admiring sentiment towards beautiful form appears to have been a living reality.

[885] Athen. b. xiii. c. xii. p. 56.

[886] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. II. ii. 41. Plato Sympos. 8. (180 C.)

Our inquiry on this subject must have reference partly to the Poet, and partly to his period and nation. I will first deal with the points which have a bearing upon the age as well as the bard: and will thereafter subjoin what appears to touch Homer only.

~_Lay of the Net of Vulcan._~

Let us commence, then, by considering that one and only case, in the whole compass of twenty-eight thousand lines, which might lead to an opposite conclusion: the case of the second Lay of Demodocus, or the adultery of Mars and Venus[887].

[887] Od. viii. 266-366.

Of course it is impossible to justify this single passage upon its own merits: but there are many circumstances that ought to be borne in mind by those who wish to form an accurate judgment upon it in its connection with the morals either of the Poet himself, or of the age to which he belonged.

Of these the most important, in my view, is the tendency which the Pagan religion already powerfully showed to become itself the positive corrupter of morality, or, to speak perhaps more accurately, to afford the medium, through which the forces of evil and the downward inclination would principally act for the purpose of depraving it. Even in Homer’s time, the existing mythology contained ample warrant for the scene of indulgence here laid bare; and we see the remaining modesty and delicacy of mankind feebly resisting the torrent of passion, which ought to have been counteracted, but which, on the contrary, was principally swollen and impelled, by the agency of the acknowledged religion of the country.

It was impossible for Homer to be altogether above the operation of influences so closely allied with an origin believed to be celestial: nor could it be easy for the popular Poet wholly to disregard the tastes of his hearers: the Poet, whose strains swept over the whole height and depth of life and nature, both human and divine, could not absolutely shut out from his encyclopædic survey so marked a characteristic of Olympian habits. He has not omitted to mark as peculiar, in more ways than one, the licence he has assumed. The lay is sung in an assembly attended by men only: and it purports also to describe a scene, from which the goddesses intentionally kept away. The amusement of the deities present is not universal: Neptune, the senior one among them, does not laugh[888], but takes the matter gravely, and desires to put an end to the scandal, by promising to make to the injured husband a pecuniary reparation[889]. He evidently appears to act under an impulse of offended dignity at least, though not of modesty. Again, the Poet endeavours to give a ridiculous air, not only a laughable one, to the whole proceeding, through the extreme mortification of the guilty persons; who, when released, are made to disappear in real dismay and discomfiture[890]. In this point he altogether differs, undoubtedly, from the generality of the writers of licentious pieces, as materially as he does in the simplicity of his details; and that supposition of a partially moral aim on which some have ventured, is not so extravagant as to deserve total and absolute rejection.

[888] The translation in Pope’s Odyssey, which in the most material parts has a more highly charged colouring than the Greek original, here reverses the sense. Homer says Neptune did not laugh, οὐδὲ Ποσειδάωνα γέλως ἔχε: Pope says, ‘even Neptune laughs aloud.’ Pope’s work is a great work: but it is not a good rendering, nor a bad rendering, of Homer: it is no rendering at all. Od. viii. 244.

[889] Od. viii. 347, 356.

[890] Od. viii. 361, 2.

It has been common to employ, in vindication of Homer, the supposition that the passage is spurious. There is something rather more marked in the personal agency of the Sun than the poems elsewhere present; and undoubtedly Apollo is made to assume a tone wholly singular, and unsupported by what is told of him in the rest of the poems. These are arguments, so far as they go, against it. But I do not venture to adopt this alluring expedient: for the general character of the colouring, diction, and incidents, appears to be Homeric enough. And again, if licentiousness was to come in, this was exactly the way for its entrance, because it was after a banquet; because it was among men exclusively, and not in the presence of women; because of the connection with mythology; and because the tale is thoroughly in keeping with the mythological character of the personages chiefly concerned.

The direct reference however of the evil to the influence of a perverted religion can be supported by distinct evidence from other parts of the poems. In the Iliad there appear to be but two passages, which can fairly be termed indelicate. One is the account of the proceeding of Juno, with the accompanying speech of Jupiter, in the Fourteenth Book[891]. This relation belongs strictly to the mythology of the poem, and it is evidently handled in an historical manner; for Jupiter’s details, at least as it seems to me, are introduced for the purpose of fixing ancient national legends, as much as the stories of Nestor and Phœnix. The other passage is that, which in a few words contains the sensual advice given by Thetis, as a mother, to her son Achilles in his grief, by way of comfort;

[891] Il. xiv. 312-28. 346-53.

ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι μίσγεσθ’[892].

[892] Il. xxiv. 130.

This precisely exemplifies the relation of which I speak. The deity teaches the debased lesson: the human hero passes by the recommendation in silence. Homer would have put no such language as this into the mouth of one of his matrons.

When we come to pass sentence upon Homer, we must remember that, since in the Odyssey he represents the comic as well as the serious side of life, he ought in justice to be first compared with his successors. And here we not only shall find he gains by the comparison with Aristophanes or with Horace, but that he gains yet much more when tried by the standard of the other great school of poets which followed him in associating heroic subjects with wit and with amusement, namely, the poets of the Italian romance. There is hardly, perhaps, one of that whole school of Christian writers, who has not descended to licentiousness of far more malignant type. Nor let it be supposed that the Æneid shows in this respect any superiority in Virgil or in his hearers. As to Virgil, and as to his poems, if we take the whole of them into view, I am afraid that whatever the veil of words may do, the case was in reality bad enough: as to the hearers of the Æneid, we must remember that they were not a people, but a court: we must compare his Roman auditors with the hearers of Homer, not as to that particular only of their public amusements, but as to the whole; that is, we must compare the Homeric poems not with the Æneid alone, but with the Æneid and the Floralia. In Homer’s time, men had not learned to screen their vices behind walls which also serve to fortify them. And it still remains more than doubtful whether the appetite of Homeric Greece would have endured the garbage on which Christian Florence was content to feed, during its carnivals, in the period of its most famous civilization.

~_Evidence of comparative purity._~

From this scene let us turn to consider the evidence for asserting the comparative purity of Homer’s age, and the peculiar purity of his mind.

2. We find in Homer no trace whatever of the existence of those unnatural vices, which appear to have deeply tainted the lives of many of the most eminent Greeks of later days[893]; which drew down the blasting sentence of St. Paul[894]; which in early times had been visited on the Cities of the plain; and which, it is no less strange than horrible to think, have left their mark upon more than one period or portion even of the literature of Christendom, in a manner and degree such as must excite scarcely less of surprise than shame.

[893] Athenæus, b. xiii. c. 77-84.

[894] Rom. i. 24-7.

The seizure of Ganymedes became in later times the basis of a tradition of this kind: but there is not a trace of it in Homer. The intense love and admiration of beauty to which his pages bear constant witness is wholly disconnected from animal passions, and in its simplicity and earnestness is, for its combined purity and strength, really nearer the feeling of some of the early Italian painters, and of Dante, than any thing else I can recall.

This is the more remarkable when we bear in mind what had already, and long before his time, happened in the East, and is recorded for us in the Book of Genesis.

Homer most rarely alludes to what is unbecoming in the human form: in the case of woman not once, and in the case of men only where he has a legitimate and sufficient purpose. Thus when Ulysses[895] threatens to strip Thersites to the skin in the event of his repeating his turbulence and insolence, it is plainly with an honest view to inflict upon him the last extremity of shame, and to make him an object of general and wholly unmixed disgust. Again, when Priam refers to the likelihood that his own body may be stripped naked, and then mangled by animals after his death, every one feels that the insult to natural decency, which he anticipates, contributes only to enhance the agony of his feelings. And the scene in the Odyssey, where Ulysses emerges from the sea upon the coast of Scheria, will always be regarded as one of the most careful, and yet most simple and unaffected, examples of true modesty contained in the whole circle of literature. Now these appear to be, not peculiarities, but samples of the general manners. We should look in vain for the proofs of an equal truth and fineness of perception among the Hebrews or among their forefathers, unless it be among a very few individuals, who, under a direct teaching from above, became select examples of virtue.

[895] Il. ii. 262. See also on this subject, Il. v. 429. vi. 357. Od. v. 149-59, 227.

Many other indications in the poems converge upon the same point. The horror with which incest was regarded is one. The deep grief and humility stamped on the character of Helen is a second. The manner in which the chastity of Bellerophon is held up to admiration, and followed by reward, is a third[896]. The high-toned living widowhood of Penelope is of itself conclusive on the point before us.

[896] Il. vi. 161, 2.

Homer’s subject in the Iliad was one, which tempted and almost forced him into indecency, where he had to refer to the original crime of Paris or to describe his private life. The manner in which he has handled it is deserving of all praise. He treats as an evil gift the original promise and temptation to Paris. The scene in the end of the Third Book was necessary in order to complete the view of the character of that bad prince: and it could not have been drawn in a manner less calculated to seduce the mind, whether by the management of its details, or by the sentiments of loathing which it raises against the principal actor.

Undoubtedly we must, as regards the whole morality of the poems, ascribe much to the praise of Homer personally: yet it is plain that he represented his age in no small degree. First, because, as a popular and famous minstrel, he could not have been in sharp or general contrast with the feeling of his contemporaries. Secondly, because we perceive remains of this seriousness and purity in the older Greek writers junior to Homer. Thirdly, because we find from Thucydides that, at the time when the original Olympian games were instituted, it was still the custom carefully to avoid the exposure of the human form, and that a different practice was introduced afterwards by the Lacedæmonians, probably without evil intention, and for gymnastic ends alone (Thuc. i. 6).

And now, if we contemplate the belief, ideas, and institutions of the heroic period, as they would work upon an individual, we shall, perhaps, find that they fully justify the outline with which this section began. We may, indeed, see in the Homeric pictures of that age much to condemn or to deplore; but we may also be led to believe that if, through God’s mercy, there have been happier, there also have been less happy forms, for human destiny to be cast in.

~_Life of the high-born Greek._~

The youth of high birth, not then so widely as now separated from the low, is educated under tutors in reverence for his parents, and in desire to emulate their fame: he shares in manly and in graceful sports, acquires the use of arms, hardens himself in the pursuit, then, of all others the most indispensable, the hunting down of wild beasts, gains the knowledge of medicine, probably also of the lyre. Sometimes, with many-sided intelligence, he even sets himself to learn how to build his own house or ship, or how to drive the plough firm and straight down the furrow, as well as to reap the standing corn[897]. And when scarcely a man, he bears arms for his country or his tribe, takes part in its government, learns by direct instruction and by practice how to rule mankind through the use of reasoning and persuasive power in political assemblies, attends and assists in sacrifices to the gods. For all this time he has been in kindly and free relations, not only with his parents, his family, his equals of his own age, but with the attendants, although they are but serfs, who have known him from infancy on his father’s domain.

[897] Od. xviii. 366-75.

He is indeed mistaught with reference to the use of the strong hand. Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild and gentle youth may be betrayed, upon a casual quarrel over some childish game with his friend, into taking it away. And even so throughout his life, should some occasion come that stirs up his passions from their depths, a wild beast, as it were, awakes within him, and he loses his humanity for the time until reason has re-established her control. Short, however, of such a desperate crisis, though he could not for the world rob his friend or his neighbour, yet he might be not unwilling to triumph over him to his cost, for the sake of some exercise of signal ingenuity: while, from a hostile tribe or a foreign shore, or from the individual who has become his enemy, he will acquire by main force what he can, nor will he scruple to inflict on him by stratagem even deadly injury[898]. He must, however, give liberally to those who are in need; to the wayfarer, the poor, the suppliant who begs from him shelter and protection. On the other hand, should his own goods be wasted, the liberal and open-handed contributions of his neighbours will not be wanting to replace them.

[898] Od. xiii. 259-70.

His early youth is not solicited into vice by finding sensual excess in vogue, or the opportunities of it staring in his eye and sounding in his ear. Gluttony is hardly known; drunkenness is marked only by its degrading character and the evil consequences that flow so straight from it, and is abhorred. But he loves the genial use of meals, and rejoices in the hour when the guests, gathered in his father’s hall, enjoy a liberal hospitality, and the wine mantles in the cup[899]. For then they listen to the strains of the minstrel, who celebrates before them the newest and the dearest of the heroic tales that stir their blood, and rouse their manly resolution to be worthy, in their turn, of their country and their country’s heroes. He joins the dance in the festivals of religion; the maiden’s hand upon his wrist, and the gilded knife glancing from his belt, as they course from point to point, or wheel in round on round[900]. That maiden, some Nausicaa or some Hermione of a neighbouring district, in due time he weds, amidst the rejoicings of their families, and brings her home to cherish her, ‘from the flower to the ripeness of the grape,’ with respect, fidelity, and love.

[899] Od. viii. 5-11. xiv. 193-8.

[900] Il. xviii. 594-602.

Whether as a governor or as governed, politics bring him, in ordinary circumstances, no great share of trouble. Government is a machine, of which the wheels move easily; for they are well oiled by simplicity of usages, ideas, and desires; by unity of interest; by respect for authority, and for those in whose hands it is reposed; by love of the common country, the common altar, the common festivals and games, to which already there is large resort. In peace he settles the disputes of his people, in war he lends them the precious example of heroic daring. He consults them, and advises with them, on all grave affairs; and his wakeful care for their interests is rewarded by the ample domains which are set apart for the prince by the people[901]. Finally, he closes his eyes, delivering over the sceptre to his son, and leaving much peace and happiness around him[902].

[901] Il. ix. 578. xii. 313.

[902] Od. xxiii. 281-4.

Such was, probably, the state of society amidst the concluding phase of which Homer’s youth, at least, was passed. But a dark and deep social revolution seems to have followed the Trojan war: we have its workings already become visible in the Odyssey. Scarcely could even Ulysses cope with it, contracted though it was for him within the narrow bounds of Ithaca. On the mainland, the bands of the elder society are soon wholly broken. The Pelopid, Neleid, Œneid houses are a wreck: disorganization invites the entry of new forces to control it: the Dorian lances bristle on the Ætolian beach, and the primitive Greece, the patriarchal Greece, the Greece of Homer, is no more.

~_Ethics of earlier and later Paganism._~

When we take a general survey of the practical morality of the Heroic age, and compare it with that of later times, we must at once be struck with the great superiority of the former, in all that most nearly touches the moral being of man. The mere police of society, indeed, improves with the advance of civilization. The law of determinate rights to property, which we rather dangerously call the law of _meum_ and _tuum_, whereas it is but a limited part of that great ordinance, comes to be better understood in later times, and better defended by penal sanctions. A clearer ideal, as well as actual, distinction, is gradually established between force and civil right. But who will venture to say that the duties of man to the Deity, or the larger claims of man upon man, were better understood in the age of Pericles or Alexander, of Sylla or of Augustus, than in the days of Homer?

It is to be expected that, when the elements of wealth are for the most part such as nature offers, when man has hardly left the mark of his hand upon the earth, when little has been appropriated, and that little indeterminately, then the description of right which is least understood should also be least respected; namely, the law which withdraws things from original community of use into individual dominion. To this day we dispute, what was the pristine foundation of the law of property. Why do we not perceive that this is equivalent to an admission, that in the first periods of political society, the whole idea of property must of necessity have been more or less vague? And consequently, that even plunder in primitive times is a different thing from plunder in later times, not only as to public estimation, but as to the moral colour of the act, and that it should be judged accordingly?

~_Points of superiority in the former._~

Let us then consider the notes of moral superiority which the Heroic age of Greece presents to us.

Human sacrifices were not then offered upon bloody altars to the gods. Not even the direst extremity of suffering suggested the thought of cannibalism as an alternative of escape from death[903]. Wailing infants were not then exposed to avoid the burden of their nurture. The grey hairs of parents were treated with reverence and care; and if their weakness brought down insult upon them, it stung the souls of their children, even after death. To age in general a deep and hearty reverence was paid by the young. Woman, the grand refining element of society, had not then been put down in the estimation of any man, far less of the wisest men, to the level of persons degraded by the habits of captivity, and was not held to be a ζῶον ἔμψυχον. Slavery itself was mild and almost genial. It implied the law of labour, and possibly, in ordinary cases, a prohibition to rise in life: but of positive oppression, and of suffering in connection with it, or of any penal system directed to its maintenance, we have no trace whatever. Marriage was the honourable and single tie between man and his helpmate[904]. Connections with very near relations were regarded with horror; the wife was the representative, the intelligent companion and friend, of her husband; adultery was held in aversion, a crime rarer then than in most after-periods: and the sacred bond between husband and wife was not liable to be broken by the poor invention of divorce.

[903] Od. xii. 327-51.

[904] On this and the kindred points, see inf. sect. ix.

Organized unchastity had not then become a kind of devil’s law for society. The very name and nature of unnatural lusts appear to have been unknown in Greece, centuries after Sodom had been smitten for its crimes. The detestable invention, which set gladiators to kill one another for the amusement of enraptured spectators, was reserved for times more vain of their philosophy and their artificial culture. The rights of the poor were acknowledged in the form of an unlimited obligation to relieve them, under pain of the divine displeasure: and no stranger or suppliant could be repelled from the door of any one, who regarded either the fear of God or the fear of man.

As respects the gods, the remains of ancient piety still in some degree checked the activity of the critical faculty, and the reverence for the Power that disposes events and hates the wicked was not yet derided by speculation, nor wholly buried beneath fable and corruption. True, sacrifice was regarded as the indispensable and effective basis of religion: but in general, as between Greek and Greek, those who were most careful of virtue were also most regular in their offerings. Men were believers in prayer: they thought that, if in need they humbly betook themselves to supplication, they would be heard and helped. In short, they kept their hold upon a higher power, which we see to have been real, because they resorted to it at those times when human nature eschews illusion, and cries out for reality. Ulysses, in affliction or in need, addresses himself to the gods: even Ægisthus, when alarmed, begins to think much of them: but Cicero or Quintilian, when the arrow of grief has touched them to the quick, seek for comfort in philosophical calculations on the great woe and little weal of life.

Yet, even while all this was so, there lay in the accumulating mythology the thickly scattered seeds of destruction, both for belief and for duty. How could marriage continue single, pure, or permanent, in the face of the promiscuous lusts of Jupiter? Why should not helpless infants be exposed, when Juno, disgusted with the form of Vulcan, threw him down into the sea? Why should not man make a joyous spectacle of blood and wounds, when they were already beheld with amusement by the highest of the gods? The examples of rebellion, of discord, of luxury and selfish ease, were all of them ready to forward the process of corruption among men; and this armoury of curses was prepared too in the very quarter, where his eye should behold nothing but what is august and pure.

Again. In all descriptions of tender feelings the Greeks of the Homeric age are much nearer than those of later times to the standard of truth and nature.

The heroes of Homer weep freely; but, says the Agamemnon of Euripides[905], while he complains of the restriction, weeping is the recognised privilege of humble life only;

[905] Iph. in Aul. 446.

ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον· καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχει ἐγὼ γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.

And Aristotle thought, as is thought now, that weeping was unfit for men. The wise man, he conceives[906], cannot incite others to mourn with him, διὰ τὸ μηδ’ αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός: but women, and woman-like men, γύναια καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἄνδρες, are glad of such companionship in sorrow.

[906] Aristot. Eth. IX. xi. 4.

There are indeed three most important points of the Homeric poems, in which it would appear that the Greek character greatly hardened, and greatly sank, as the nation advanced in its career. One of them is the principle of sympathy. Another is that of placability, which Homer has very powerfully exhibited in Achilles. The third is that of humility, of which we have an example in Helen, in the Helen of Troy and the Helen of Sparta, such as heathenism nowhere else, I believe, presents to us.

It has thus appeared that if we take the state of morality as it appears among mankind in the poems of Homer, and compare it with that of Greece in its highest civilization, we find before us two grand differences. Those offences against the moral law, which constitute crimes of violence, were more justly appreciated at the later period; but as to those which constitute, in the language of Christianity, the lusts of the mind and of the flesh, a great preference is due to the former.

We are naturally led to inquire, Whence these two movements in opposite directions? That mankind should either lose ground or gain it, in morality as a whole, is far less startling at first sight, than that, at one and the same time, with respect to one great portion of the moral law there should be progress, and with respect to another, retrogression.

In reality, however, this was the condition of man: retrogression as to his spiritual life, but advance and development, up to a certain point, with regard to the intellectual and the social career. Sins of the flesh lay chiefly between God and the individual conscience: the social results did not palpably and immediately reach beyond the persons immediately concerned. But crimes of violence struck directly at the fabric of society by destroying security of person and property; and robbed mankind, especially the ruling part of mankind, of the immense advantages and enjoyments which they reaped from civilized life. Thus, the moral sense was quick, and even grew quicker with the lapse of time, when it was fed and prompted by such motives of self-interest as lay within its appreciation, like those which the desire to enjoy the commodities of life supplied. But it languished and all but died, when its business was to maintain those virtues which involve severe self-denial, and of which the reward never can be fully appreciated except by those who are so favoured as to practise them in the highest degree.

Nor must we overlook some special bearings of the institution of slavery upon this question. As it grew and was consolidated, it of course entailed an increased necessity for laws to defend life and goods against violence. But as regarded the other class of offences, its influence was all in the sense of more and more relaxation. For beauty and defencelessness, when they were combined in slaves, at once wrought up attraction to the uttermost, and removed all obstacles to enjoyment. While at the same time the partial indulgence, which at all periods has commonly attended such commerce between slaves and their masters, operated as a safety valve to let off the political dangers of that system: so that, on the one hand, slavery was a feeder to lust, and, on the other, lust was a buttress to slavery.

That it was not on moral grounds that in the later times of Greece life and property were better defended than in the former, we may partly judge from finding that, though it is in the nature of all society that a nation should rather incline to gild the days of its forefathers with ornaments beyond the truth, the later Greek traditions crammed the heroic age with a mass of crimes of which Homer knows nothing. He sets Minos and Rhadamanthus before us as characters positively good: Thyestes and others are at worst neutral in character: but all these, according to the later tradition, were either accessory to, or contaminated with, the most horrible enormities.

~_Notes in the Poems of commencing decline._~

It seems, indeed, as if Homer had himself lived to note the signs of moral degeneracy. In part, we may perhaps say, it is inseparably associated with that deterioration in the character and idea of government, which begins to be traceable in the Odyssey. But in that poem he has given us another indication of it, unlike any thing in the Iliad, where he never contrasts the present unfavourably with the past, except as to mere corporal strength. For he makes Minerva as Mentor deliver to Telemachus the sentiment, that among sons a small number only are equal to their fathers[907], a very few indeed excelling them, but the greater part falling short of them. In later times, we have come to associate threnodies of this kind with the notion that they are complaints of course, formulæ taken up and reiterated successively from generation to generation. It may or may not be just thus to view them: but whether it be just or not for later times, I think that we ought not so to limit the force of the idea when it meets us in the age of Homer: the world was then young, and human society had not so learned its ‘ancient saws or modern instances,’ as to separate them from the truths of experience and of observation. The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.

[907] Od. ii. 276.

SECT. IX.

_Woman in the Homeric age._

No view of a peculiar civilization can on its ethical side be satisfactory, unless it include a distinct consideration of the place held in it by woman. And, besides, the position of the Greek woman of the heroic age is in itself so remarkable, as even on special grounds to require separate and detailed notice. It is likewise so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the historic ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization, as to form in itself a sufficient confutation of the theories of those writers who can see in the history of mankind only the development of a law of continual progress from intellectual darkness into light, and from moral degradation up to virtue.

The idea and place of woman have been slowly and laboriously elevated by the Gospel: and their full development has constituted the purest and most perfect protest, that the world has ever seen, against the sovereignty of force. For it is not alone against merely physical, but also against merely intellectual strength, that this protest has been lodged. To the very highest range of intellectual strength known among the children of Adam, woman seems never to have ascended, but in every or almost every case to have fallen somewhat short of it. But when we look to the virtues, it seems probable both that her average is higher, and that she also attains in the highest instances to loftier summits. Certainly there is no proof here of her inferiority to man. Now it is nowhere written in Holy Scripture that God is knowledge, or that God is power; while it is written that God is love: words which appear to set forth love as the central essence, and all besides as attributes. Woman then holds of God, and finds her own principal development in that which is most God-like. Thus, therefore, when Christianity wrought out for woman, not a social identity, but a social equality, not a rivalry with the function of man, but an elevation in her own function reaching as high as his, it made the world and human life in this respect also a true image of the Godhead.

Within the pale of that civilization which has grown up under the combined influence of the Christian religion as paramount, and of what may be called the Teutonic manners as secondary, we find the idea of woman and her social position raised to a point even higher than in the poems of Homer. But it would be hard to discover any period of history or country of the world, not being Christian, in which they stood so high as with the Greeks of the heroic age.

There are various heads under which we may inquire into the subject before us.

One is the law of marriage in the heroic age, and the state of the specific relation between the sexes.

A second is the employments assigned to women; how high did they reach, and how low did they descend?

A third is the social footing on which they stood, as tested by manners.

A fourth is the general outline of the woman’s character, as it is to be estimated from the varied specimens which Homer has set before us.

~_Law and custom of marriage._~

Firstly; a main criterion of the general condition of woman in a given state of society is to be found in the view which it may exhibit of the great institution of marriage. In proportion as that institution is purified and elevated by just restraint, the condition of woman is honourable, free, and happy. In proportion as it is relaxed, in accommodation to human infirmity or appetite, the condition of woman is degraded and servile; for where desire is the law, strength is its appropriate and only sanction, and the cause of the weaker fails. Just as a strict and efficient police is most important to the unprotected, so a strict law of marriage is most for the interest of the woman.

The general position of womankind in the Homeric age is high on both sides of the Archipelago; but, as respects marriage, its chiefest pillar, it is perceptibly even higher among the Greeks than among the Trojans. Among the multitude of cases, that either directly or incidentally come before us in the poems, there is nothing that at all resembles the Asiatic household of Priam, or that seems to favour polygamy. Nor have we any instance where a wife is divorced or taken away from her husband, and then made the wife of another man during his lifetime. The froward Suitors, who urge Penelope to choose a new husband from among them, do it upon the plea that Ulysses must be dead, and that there is no hope of his return: a plea not irrational, if we presume that the real term of his absence came to even half the number of years which Homer has assigned to it. The ancient law of England, while it repudiated the principle of divorce, recognised the presumption of the husband’s death, when brought near to certainty by a long term of absence, as equivalent to death itself for the purpose of exempting the wife from civil penalty in case of her marriage. Ægisthus, again, finds it extremely difficult to corrupt Clytemnestra: and his success in inducing her to marry him entails, as if a matter of course, the murder of her former husband. The crime is mentioned by Jupiter, in the Olympian Court, as consisting of the two parts, of which he by no means specifies the latter as the more atrocious[908];

[908] Od. i. 36.

(1) γῆμ’ ἄλοχον μνηστὴν, (2) τὸν δ’ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα.

The law of marriage differs from most other human laws in a very important particular. It is their excellence to impose the _minimum_ of restraint, which will satisfy the absolute wants of society: but the aim and the criterion of a good law of marriage is to impose the _maximum_ of restraint that human nature can be induced _bonâ fide_ to accept. Doubtless there is here also a conceivable excess: but it would be and has been indicated by the general withholding of submission, or evasion of obedience. Up to that point, the restrictions of the marriage law are not evils to be endured for the sake of a greater good, but are good in themselves.

In order that this great institution may thoroughly fulfil its ends, it is especially requisite,

1. That it should not be contracted between more than one man and one woman.

2. That it should on both sides be, in the main and as a general rule, deliberate and spontaneous.

3. That the contract, once made, should not be dissolved.

And closely allied to these there is yet a fourth negative:

4. That nuptials should not be contracted between persons who stand within certain near degrees of relationship.

5. It is always requisite that this engagement should exclude not only the possibility of marriage for either partner with a third person, but also any other fleshly connection without marriage.

Of these propositions, the first, third, and fourth, are heads of restraint on marriage. Every one of the three was acknowledged by the Greeks of the heroic age.

~_Marriage always single._~

The rule of conjugal fidelity was admitted, though not wholly without relaxation, to be as applicable to men as to their wives. This, and all the other restrictions, were applied to women with undeviating strictness.

1. As regards the first, it is plain, from a mass of evidence so large as to amount, in spite of its being negative, to demonstration, that the uniform practice of the Greeks required the marriage union to be single. This, however, of itself, is saying little; but it imports much besides what is on the surface: it implies, that, with due allowances, the spirit of the marriage contract is a spirit of equity and of well adjusted rights, as between those who enter into it.

2. This relation was also conceived by the Greeks in a spirit of freedom.

It held a central place in life thoroughly European, as opposed to the Oriental ideas. Nay, it approximated very much to the ideas prevailing in our own country as well as age. We do not find in the poems any instance of a marriage enforced against the will of a young maiden, or contracted when she was of years too tender to exercise a judgment. Nausicaa fears that if she is seen with Ulysses, censorious tongues will immediately put it about that she is going to be married to him. They will say, ‘Who is this tall and handsome stranger with Nausicaa?’[909] Surely she is going to become his bride. Truly she has picked up some gallant from afar, who has strayed from his ship: or some god has come down to wed her. Better it were if she found a husband from abroad, since, forsooth, she looks down upon her Phæacian suitors, though they are many and noble. Then continues this model of maidens; ‘Thus I shall come into disgrace; and indeed I myself should be indignant with any one who should so act, and who, against the will of her parents, frequented the company of men before being publicly married.’ In this remarkable passage we have such an exhibition of woman’s freedom, as scarcely any age has exceeded. For it clearly shows that the marriage of a damsel was her own affair, and that, subject to a due regard freely rendered to authority and opinion, she had, when of due age, a main share in determining it. That is to say, to the extent of choosing a mate among the competitors. The expression of giving away or promising a daughter, by parents, is often used[910], but we perceive the limits of its meaning from the passage just quoted. The more so, because similar expressions as to the proceedings of parents are applied in Homer to the marriages of sons[911]. I do not suppose it would have been open to any maiden to remain single. That all should marry, that there should be no class living in celibacy, was a kind of law for society in its infant state, even as now it may be said to be almost a law for the most numerous classes of society. Above all I suppose it to be clear that a marriageable widow could not ordinarily remain in widowhood. No reproach arises to Helen, on account of the renewal of her irregular union with Deiphobus; and when Penelope, or others in her behalf, contemplate the death of Ulysses, and her consequent release from the marriage state, that change is always treated as the immediate preface to another crisis, namely, the choice of a second husband.

[909] Od. vi. 275-88.

[910] Il. xi. 296. xix. 29. ix. 141. vi. 191. Od. vii. 311. iv. 6.

[911] Il. ix. 394. Od. iv. 10.

Although social intercourse with man might not, as Nausicaa says, be sought by damsels, it might innocently come on occasions such as those afforded by public festivities, or by an ordinary calling[912].

[912] Il. xviii. 567, 593, and xxii. 126.

~_Freedom of the woman._~

But again, the persecution of Penelope by the Suitors bears emphatic testimony to the freedom of woman within the limits I have described. The utmost of their aim is to coerce her into marrying some one; even as their sin lies in bringing this pressure to bear upon her before the death of Ulysses has been ascertained. On the other hand, the pressure is a moral one: her violent removal is never thought of; and the absolute silence of the poem on the subject proves that it would have been at variance with the prevailing manners, had any cabal been formed, in order even to constrain her choice towards a particular person. The very presents, by which the profligate Suitors endeavoured to ingratiate themselves with the women of the household of Ulysses, speak favourably of the free condition of the sex, and seem to show, that it descended even into lower stations.

For the Greek in the heroic age, marriage was the pivot of life. It took place in the bloom of age: hence[913] the beautiful expression, θαλερὸς γάμος, Od. vi. 66, xx. 74. It even marks of itself the age of persons; Alcinous has five sons, three ἠΐθεοι, and two ὀπυίοντες, (Od. vi. 63): three youths or bachelors, and two married.

[913] Friedreich, Realien, §. 57. p. 200.

Presents were usually brought by the bridegroom, and dowries sometimes given with the bride. Where the two concurred, the presents may have been either in the nature of compliments, or intended to meet the expense of the wedding festivities. The absence of the former, and the occurrence of the latter, seem each to be more or less in the nature of an exception. With a wife returning to her parents, the dowry returned also[914]. On the other hand, to judge from the story of Vulcan and Venus, wherever adultery was committed, the guilty man was bound to pay a fine[915]. The poems give us several instances where personal gifts and energy served instead of wealth, as recommendations in suing for a wife[916]. The drawing of the Bow affords a conspicuous example of the prevailing ideas.

[914] Od. ii. 132.

[915] Od. viii. 329.

[916] Od. xi. 287. xiv. 210. Il. xiii. 363.

Upon the whole, then, in all that related to forming engagements by marriage, there seems to have been preserved a large regard to the freedom and dignity of woman[917]. War was doubtless in this respect her great enemy; she then became the prey of the strongest, and it is probable that this may have been the most powerful instrument in promoting the extensive introduction of concubinage into Greece.

[917] Friedreich, Realien, c. III. ii. p. 204.

With respect to the ceremonial of marriage, and the nature of its formal engagement, the Homeric poems furnish us with scanty evidence. There is no mention, in fact, of any promise or vow attending it. The expression δαινύναι γάμον, in Od. iv. 3, seems to contain all that would be included by us when we speak of celebrating marriage. Not that it was the mere banquet that created the conjugal relation: it was doubtless the ἀμφάδιος γάμος, the solemn public acknowledgment, to which relatives and friends, and, in such a case as that of Hermione, the public or people of the state, thus became witnesses. This subject will be further considered in connection with the case of Briseis.

~_Perpetuity of the tie of marriage._~

3. If the mode of entry into the obligations of married life was as simple and indeterminate as we have supposed, such a want of formalities greatly enhances the strength of the testimony borne by the facts of the heroic age to what may be called the natural perpetuity of the marriage contract.

It is a very remarkable circumstance, that, of the two great poems of Homer, each should in its own way bear emphatic testimony to this great, and, for all countries that can bear it, this most precious law.

Neither poem presents us with any case of a divorced wife; of a couple between whom the marriage tie, after having once been duly formed, had ceased to subsist. And each poem in its own way raises this negative evidence to a form of the greatest cogency, from its happening to present the very circumstances under which, if under any, the dissolution of the bond would have been acknowledged.

In the Iliad, the wife of Menelaus, his κουριδίη ἄλοχος, has been living for many years in _de facto_ adultery with Paris. The line between marriage on the one hand, and continued cohabitation together with public recognition on the other, being faintly drawn, Helen is familiarly known in Troy as the wife of Paris; so she is called by the Poet, and so she calls herself[918]. Menelaus, too, is described as her former husband[919]. Whether this was a mere acquiescence in a certain state of facts, or the regular result of more relaxed usages respecting marriage in Troy, may be doubtful. But it is clear that the view of the Greeks was directly opposite. They never speak of Paris as the husband of Helen. In their estimation, all the rights of Menelaus remained entire; and, as we shall see, it appears that, even while the possession of them was withheld from him, he acknowledged the reciprocal obligations. Nay, Hector himself seems to describe Helen as still the wife of Menelaus; γνοίης χ’ οἵου φωτὸς ἔχεις θαλερὴν παράκοιτιν[920]. The war was (so to speak) juridically founded on the fact, that the lawful marriage was not dissolved by adultery, even with the addition of all that followed: that the relation of Helen to her ancient husband was unchanged. Accordingly, Agamemnon recollects with pain, that if his brother should die, he will no longer be in a condition to demand her restoration, and to enforce it by arms, for his soldiers will forthwith return home[921].

[918] Il. iii. 427. xxiv. 763.

[919] Il. iii. 140. Of Deiphobus, we are never told that he was Helen’s husband: and he could only for a very short time have had possession of her. The only trace of the connection is that, when Helen went down to the horse, Deiphobus followed her. Od. iv 276.

[920] Il. iii. 53.

[921] Il. iv. 169-75.

The result is in full conformity with this view. When the war ends, Helen resumes her place as a matter of course in the house of Menelaus. She bears it with unconstrained and perfect dignity; and her relations to her husband carry no mark of the woful interval, except that its traces indelibly remain in her own penitential shame.

It is plain that the Greeks heartily detested the crime of adultery: for one of the three great chapters of accusation against the Suitors is, that they wooed the wife of Ulysses in his lifetime[922]. But it is not less plain that they knew nothing of the idea, that by that crime it was placed in the power of any person to obtain or to confer a release from the obligations of marriage.

[922] Od. xxii. 38.

Next to adultery, desertion or prolonged absence has afforded the most favoured plea for the destruction, so far as human law can destroy it, of the marriage bond. And indeed it is hardly possible to push the opposite doctrine to its extreme, and to say that no married person may remarry, except with demonstrative evidence of the death of the original husband or wife respectively. Probably, however, no period of the world has exhibited a more stringent application of the doctrine of indissolubility to the case of desertion, than that on which the plot of the Odyssey is founded; where, after an absence of the husband prolonged to the twentieth year, Penelope still waits his return; prays that death may relieve her from the dread necessity of making a new choice; and, thus directed by her own conscience and right feeling, likewise apprehends condemnation by the public judgment in the event of her proceeding to contract a new engagement[923].

[923] Od. xvi. 75.

The Heroic age has left no more comely monument, than its informal, but instinctive, and most emphatic sense, thus recorded for our benefit, of the sanctity of marriage, of the closeness of the union it creates, and of the necessity of perpetuity as an element of its capacity to attain its chief ends, and to administer a real discipline to the human character.

~_Greek ideas of incest._~

4. A further proof of the elevated estimate of marriage among the Greeks is afforded by their views, so far as they can be traced, of the offence termed incest.

The Homeric deities, indeed, were released in this respect, as in others, from all restraint. Eris, or Enuo[924], was both the sister and the concubine of Mars: Juno, the sister and the wife of Jupiter. Æolus[925], though called φίλος ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσιν, must have been more than man; because Jupiter had made him warden of the Winds, which it was his prerogative to confine or to let loose[926]. And in virtue, I suppose, of belonging to the class of superior beings, his six daughters were, without any consciousness of offence, the wives, the αἰδοῖαι ἄλοχοι, of his six sons[927].

[924] Il. iv. 441.

[925] Od. x. 2.

[926] Od. x. 20.

[927] Od. x. 7.

In Troy, Helen apparently becomes the wife of two brothers in succession. We must not overrate the force of merely negative evidence, but it will be observed that Homer does not furnish us with any trace of this usage among the Greeks. The story of Phœnix probably implies, that the connection of the same woman with a father and a son was incestuous; for the full efficacy of the remedy proposed by his mother turns on the supposition, that there would remain to his father no alternative but incest after Phœnix had gained his object, and that such an alternative would at once deter him from the love of the stranger.

In Scheria, Alcinous is married to Arete, the daughter of his elder brother Rhexenor[928]. Tyro was the wife of Cretheus, and was apparently also his niece[929]. Again, we appear to find in the Iliad an example of a marriage, by one shade yet less desirable, that of a man with his aunt. Tydeus, the father of Diomed, was married to a daughter of Adrastus: and Ægialeia the wife of Diomed, as she is called Ἀδρηστίνη, was probably his aunt likewise[930].

[928] Od. vii. 65, 6.

[929] See Achæis, sect. ix. Od. xi. 235-7.

[930] Il. iv. 121.

We have also among the Trojans an example of a man’s marriage with his aunt. Iphidamas, son of Antenor[931], was brought up in the house of Cisses his maternal grandfather; and he contracted a marriage with his mother’s sister just before proceeding to the war.

[931] Il. xi. 220-6.

At the same time, the law of incest is clearly a progressive one from the infancy of mankind onwards, and what we have to consider is not so much its precise extent, as the degree of genuine aversion with which the violation of it is regarded. Upon this subject there can be no doubt, when we read the passage in the Eleventh Odyssey respecting the μέγα ἔργον of Œdipus and Epicaste, and the fearful consequences which, though it was done in ignorance, it entailed upon them[932]. In principle, then, that restriction of the field of choice, which adds so greatly to the intimacy and firmness of the marriage tie, was fully recognised in Greece.

[932] Od. xi. 271-80.

Neither do we want traces in Homer of that remarkable effect of the unifying power of marriage, which confers upon each partner in the union an equal and common relation to the family of the other, by a convention which has so much of the moral strength of fact. The most remarkable of all the indications upon this subject in the poems is that, which relates to the future life of Menelaus. He is said to be elected to the honour of a place in the region of Elysium after this life, not in virtue of his own merits, but as being, through his marriage with Helen, the son-in-law of Jupiter.

The recognition of relationships through the wife or husband to the husband or wife respectively, and the existence of names to describe them, is a sign of the completeness of the union effected by the marriage tie. That these terms were not merely formal and ceremonious, we may judge from the speech of Alcinous:

ἦ τίς τοι καὶ πηὸς ἀπέφθιτο Ἰλιόθι πρὸ ἐσθλὸς ἐὼν, γαμβρὸς ἢ πενθερὸς, οἵτε μάλιστα κήδιστοι τελέθουσι, μεθ’ αἷμά τε καὶ γένος αὐτῶν[933].

[933] Od. viii. 581-3.

Now of these words we have the following;

πηὸς, for any relative by affinity;

ἐκυρὸς, πενθερὸς, father-in-law;

ἐκυρὴ, mother-in-law;

δαὴρ, brother-in-law;

γαλοὼς, sister-in-law;

γαμβρὸς, son-in-law;

νυὸς, daughter-in-law;

μητρυίη, stepmother; or the lawful wife, in relation to a spurious son. There is but one real example, Eeribœa, of a stepmother in Homer (Il. v. 389).

And, lastly, we have εἰνατεὶρ, husband’s sister-in-law, a relationship not expressed by any word in the English and many other languages. The εἰνατέρες are always separate from the γαλόῳ.

The formation of this large circle of relationships by affinity is the correlative to a well-defined strictness in the marriage law. For these relationships would mean nothing, but would simply betoken and even breed confusion, unless marriage were perpetual and incest eschewed.

Friedreich[934] truly observes, that the law of incest, instead of being tightened, was relaxed at a later period in Greece; a very decided mark of moral retrogression, which cannot be cancelled by all the splendours of her history.

[934] Realien, c. III. ii.

~_Fidelity in married life._~

5. We come now to the remaining question; how was this great obligation practically observed in the Greece of the heroic age?

Part, at least, of the answer is easy to give. By women it was observed admirably. Except only in the case of Anteia, two generations old, there is no instance in Homer of a woman who seeks the breach of it. The forcible or half forcible seduction[935], and progressive contamination, of a part of the unmarried women who belong to the household of Ulysses, is one of the three great crimes which draw down from Heaven such fearful vengeance upon the Suitors. Of the παλλακὶς, we hear but twice in the poems; nor can we say that this word meant more than a concubine[936]. Among the Greek chieftains, cases of homicide are more frequent than those of bastardy. And when such instances are mentioned, it is not in the hardened manner of later times.

[935] Od. xxii. 37, κατευνάζεσθε βιαίως.

[936] Il. ix. 449. Od. xiv. 203.

It is something at least that, in such matters, a nation should be alive to shame. We have various signs that this was so in Greece. One of them is the tender expression[937]:

[937] Il. ii. 514, cf. xvi 184.

παρθένος αἰδοίη, ὑπερώϊον εἰσαναβᾶσα.

It must be remembered, when we touch upon these morbid parts in human life and nature, that the society of that period did not avail itself of the expedient of the professional corruption of a part of womankind in order to relieve the virtue of the residue from assault.

Among the Greek chieftains and their families, Polydore, a sister of Achilles, had a spurious son[938]. Nestor[939] sprang from a father of spurious birth. Each Ajax had a spurious brother. Only Menelaus of all the chiefs is mentioned as having himself had an illegitimate son. This son, who has the touching name of Megapenthes, was born to him by a slave, evidently after the rape of Helen; he was apparently recognised in part; his marriage was celebrated at the same time with that of his legitimate sister Hermione, but it was contracted with a person of lower station. He was τηλύγετος, the last as well as the first; though Helen, owing, as the Poet intimates, to a divine decree, had no more children, with whom to console her husband, after her return from the abduction.

[938] Il. xvi. 175.

[939] Od. xi. 254.

The superior rank conferred by lawful birth is in every case strongly marked; and this perhaps is the reason why we never find the succession to sovereignty in Greece disturbed by illegitimate offspring.

The great majority of illegitimate births in Homer are those ascribed to the paternity of deities. It is probable that this extraction may be pleaded to cover sometimes marriages which were conceived to be beneath the station of the woman; sometimes instances like that of Astyoche[940], when war had both excited passion, and provided opportunities and victims for its gratification[941]. Setting these cases aside, the cases of illegitimacy in heroic Greece appear to be rare.

[940] Il. ii. 658-60.

[941] Achæis, or Ethnology, Sect. ix. p. 534.

At the same time, instances are found[942] in which a spurious child (only, however, I think in the case of a son) is brought up in a manner approaching to that of the legitimate offspring: and a certain relationship is acknowledged to exist, for the wife is said to be μητρυίη, or step-mother, to the illegitimate son. In the case of Pedæus, it was Theano, Antenor’s wife, who herself educated the bastard: but it is plain that in Troas concubinage was far more fully recognised, than in Greece.

[942] Il. v. 69-71. Od. xiv. 203.

Agamemnon in the First Iliad, as we have seen, when announcing his attention to make Chryseis a partner of his bed, by no means treats this concubinage as being what it would have been with Priam, a matter of course and requiring no apology, but founds it upon his preferring her to his wife Clytemnestra[943].

[943] Il. i. 112.

In the camp before the walls of Troy it certainly appears as if by the use of the word γέρας, prize, Homer might, as it is commonly assumed, mean to indicate, for most of the principal chiefs, that they had captives taken in war for concubines. But the point is far from clear; and at any rate Menelaus, as is observed by Athenæus, forms an exception[944]. This circumstance affords rather a marked proof of Greek ideas with respect to the durability of the marriage tie; for that author is probably right in ascribing it to his being, as it were, in the presence of his wife Helen. This concubinage, however, appears to have been single in each case where it prevailed; or, if it was otherwise, Homer has at least deemed the circumstance unfit to be recorded. There is no sign that the seven Lesbian damsels of Il. ix. 128 were concubines.

[944] Athen. xiii. 3. ὅτι οὐδαμῶς τῆς Ἰλιάδος Ὅμηρος ἐποίησε Μενελάῳ συγκοιμωμένην παλλακίδα, πᾶσι δοὺς γυναῖκας.

Achilles, after the removal of Briseis, had Diomede[945] for the companion of his couch. But Briseis appears to have had his attachment in a peculiar degree. He calls her his ἄλοχον θυμάρεα[946]. It is said that the word ἄλοχος may mean a concubine[947]. I do not find any passage in Homer, except this of Il. ix., where it may not with the most obvious propriety be translated ‘wife.’ It has its highest force, no doubt, in such expressions as μνηστὴ ἄλοχος and κουριδίη ἄλοχος: even as we say intensively ‘wedded wife.’ But the term is the standing phrase for wife, as much as τέκνα for children; and it is impossible, consistently with what we see of the usages of marriage among the Greeks, to suppose that the same term was alike applicable to wives and concubines. Nor is it necessary to draw such a conclusion from this passage. We might be tempted to suppose, that Achilles here puts a strain as it were upon the use of the word, and for the moment calls Briseis his wife, in order to prepare the way for the tremendous and piercing sarcasm which immediately follows[948]:

[945] Il. ix. 664.

[946] Ibid. 336.

[947] Damm, Liddell and Scott. In Od. iv. 623, Nitzsch considers that ἄλοχοι must mean wives of the δαιτύμονες. In Od. ix. 115, I find no reason for departing from the plain meaning of wives. It would be giving too much credit to the Cyclopes for civilization, were we to suppose that they recognised a distinction between wife and concubine.

[948] Il. ix. 340.

ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ’ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων Ἀτρεῖδαι;

But we may, I think, more justly, and without any resort to figure, observe, that the whole argument of this passage turns upon and requires us to suppose his having treated Briseis as he would have treated a wife. So likewise his declaration, that every good man loves and cares for his wife, becomes insipid, and the whole comparison with the case of Menelaus senseless, unless we are to give the force of wife to the name ἄλοχος.

Probably the explanation may be, that she was designated for marriage with him; for in the Nineteenth Book, where she utters a lamentation over Patroclus, she declares how that chief kindly encouraged her to bear up in her widowhood and captivity, promising that she should be the wife of Achilles, and that the banquets, which, with their attendant sacrifices, seem to have constituted for the Homeric Greeks the ceremonial of marriage, should be celebrated on their return to Phthia[949]. I should therefore suppose that we might with strict justice render ἄλοχος, in Il. ix. 336, ‘my bride;’ always remembering that we are dealing with a relation that was not governed by rules, and that might virtually inure by usage only.

[949] Il. xix. 295-9.

The subsequent passage[950], in which the hero speaks of marrying some damsel of Hellas or Phthia, is quite consistent with this construction, for, as it is plain that no actual marriage had been concluded between them, his relation to Briseis terminated with her removal _de facto_. The same passage, as well as the custom of Greece, makes it reasonable to understand that the mother of Neoptolemus, whoever she may have been, was now dead.

[950] Il. ix. 395-7.

~_Mode of contracting marriage._~

Indeed it is to be remembered all along, that we are speaking of a state, rather than an act. We know nothing of a ceremonial of Homeric marriage beyond the exchange of gifts and the celebration of festivities in connection with the domicile, neither of which could ordinarily have place in the case of a captive while continuing such. She would grow into a wife in virtue of intention on the part of her lord, confirmed by habit, and sealed by a full recognition when the circumstances, that would alone admit of it, should have arrived.

The concubinage of the Greek chiefs, practised as it was during a long absence from home, bears an entirely different domestic and social character from that of Priam. It clearly constitutes, especially if the connections were single, the mildest and least licentious of all the forms in which the obligations of the marriage tie could be relaxed.

The presence of a concubine within the precinct of the family seems to have been differently viewed by the Greeks; for here, and here only, do we find the disparaging word παλλακὶς (whence the Latin _pellex_) applied to a person in that position. The two cases of it are as follows. In one of them Ulysses feigns a story of his having been a son of the Cretan Castor, born of a παλλακὶς, but (which he mentions as a departure from the general rule) regarded by his father as much as were his legitimate children[951]. The other is the instance of Phœnix in the Ninth Iliad. Amyntor his father had an intended or actual concubine; and, bestowing his affections on her, slighted the mother of his child. She, in resentment or self-defence, entreated her son Phœnix to cross or anticipate his father[952], and win the woman to his own embraces[953]. He complied; and thus drew down upon himself the dire wrath and curses of his father, which kindled his own anger in return; but he restrained himself from the act of parricide, and became a fugitive instead. This legend is somewhat obscure; but it appears to indicate plainly that concubinage was not a recognised institution among the Greeks, as it seems to have been among the Trojans.

[951] Od. xiv. 199-204.

[952] The expression is παλλακίδι προμιγῆναι.

[953] Il. ix. 447, and seqq.

So again, when Laertes had purchased Euryclea[954], we are told that he never attempted to make her his concubine, anticipating the resentment of his wife. It is plain, therefore, that this would have been an admitted offence on his part; and accordingly, that concubinage was contrary to the ideas of Greece respecting conjugal obligation.

[954] Od. i. 433.

~_Dignity of conjugal manners._~

Within the precinct of the Greek marriages, which was secured and fenced in the manner we have seen, there prevailed that tenderness, freedom, and elevation of manners, which was the natural offspring of a system in the main so sound and strict. The general tone of the relations of husband and wife in the Homeric poems is thoroughly natural; it is full of dignity and warmth; a sort of noble deference, reciprocally adjusted according to the position of the giver and the receiver, prevails on either side. I will venture to add, it is full also of delicacy, though we must be content to distinguish, in considering this point, between what is essential and what is conventional, and must make some allowance for the directness and simplicity of expression that characterized an artless age[955].

[955] See Friedreich, Realien, c. ii. §. 56. pp. 196-200, where this subject is excellently treated.

With this delicacy was combined a not less remarkable freedom in the Greek manners with respect to women. We find Penelope appearing in her palace at will, on all ordinary occasions, before the Suitors; although, on the other hand, no woman would be present where any thing like license was to be exhibited, as we may judge from the case of the lay of Demodocus in the Eighth Odyssey. The general freedom of woman is however most fully exhibited in the case of Nausicaa. She goes forth into the country with her maidens unattended. When Ulysses appears there is no fear of him as a man, or even as a stranger, but only from his condition at the moment. This difficulty she surmounts with a dignity which she could not have possessed by virtue of her personal character only, nor except in a case where great liberty was habitually and traditionally enjoyed by women.

Her arrangement of the manner in which he is to enter the city apart from her, and her regard in this matter to opinion, both rest upon the same presumption of her freedom from petty control, as does her playful demand upon Ulysses for ζωάγρια, or salvage.

Again, how remarkable it is that Alcinous, far from being surprised that his maiden daughter should have entered into conversation with a stranger, is actually on the point of finding fault with her for not having shown a greater forwardness, and brought him home in her own company: a reproach, from which Ulysses saves her by his intercession[956].

[956] Od. vii. 298, 307.

~_Social position of the wife._~

It is not only from this or that particular, but it is from the whole tone of the intercourse maintained between men and women, that we are really to judge what is the social position of the latter.

And this tone it is which supplies such conclusive evidence with respect to the age of Homer. Achilles observes, that love and care[957] towards a wife are a matter of course with every right-minded man. Love and care, indeed, may be shown to a pet animal. It is not on the mere words, therefore, that we must rest our conclusions; but upon the spirit in which they are spoken, and the whole circle of signs with which they are associated. It is on the reciprocity of all those sentiments between man and wife, father and daughter, son and mother, which are connected with the moral dignity of the human being. It is on the confidence exchanged between them, and the loving liberty of advice and exhortation from the one to the other. The social equality of man and woman is of course to be understood with reserves, as is that other equality, which nevertheless indicates a political truth of the utmost importance, the equality of all classes in the eye of the law. There are differences in the nature and constitution of the two great divisions of the race, to be met by adaptations of treatment and of occupation; without such adaptations, the seeming equality would be partiality alike dangerous and irrational. But, subject to those reserves, we find in Homer the fulness of moral and intelligent being alike consummate, alike acknowledged, on the one side and on the other. The conversation of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, of Ulysses and Penelope in the Twenty-third Odyssey, the position of Arete at the court of Alcinous, and that of Helen in the palace of Menelaus, all tell one and the same tale. Ulysses, for example, where he wishes to convey his supplication in Scheria to the King, does it by falling at the Queen’s feet: but she does not supplicate her husband: the address to her seems to have sufficed. And Helen appears, in the palace of Menelaus, on such a footing relatively to her husband, as would perfectly befit the present relations of man and woman. Nay, we may take the speech of Helen in the Sixth Iliad, addressed to Hector, where she touches on the character of Paris, as equal to any of them by way of social indication. What we there read is not the sagacity or intelligence of the speaker, but it is the right of the wife (so to call her) to speak about the character of her husband and its failings, her acknowledged possession of the standing ground from which she can so speak, and speak with firmness, nay, even with an authority of her own.

[957] Il. ix. 341.

When we see Briseis, the widow of a prince, sharing the bed of Achilles, and delivered over as a slave into the hands of Agamemnon, when we find Hector anticipating that Andromache might be required to perform menial offices for a Greek mistress, and Nestor encouraging the army not to quit Troy until they had forced the Trojan matrons into their embraces, we are struck with pity and horror. But we must separate between the danger and suffering which uniformly dogs the weak in times of violence, most of all, too, after the sack of a city, and what belongs to the age of Homer in particular. After this separation has been effected, there remains nothing which ought to depress our views of the position of woman in the heroic age. The sons of Priam, princes of Troy, were sold into captivity by Achilles as he took them[958]: of course the purchasers put them to menial employments. Not only so, but Eumæus, the faithful swineherd and slave of Ulysses, was by birth royal: his father Ctesios was king of two wealthy and happy cities[959]. From the name Εὐρυμέδουσα, it would appear probable that she also, the chamber-woman of the palace of Alcinous, though a captive, was of noble birth[960].

[958] Il. xxi. 40.

[959] Od. xv. 413.

[960] Od. vii. 8.

There is not in the whole of the poems an instance of rude or abusive manners towards woman as such, or of liberties taken with them in the course of daily life. If Melantho gets hard words, it is not as a woman, but for her vice and insolence. The conduct of the Ithacan Suitors to Penelope, as it is represented in the Odyssey, affords the strongest evidence of the respect in which women were held. Her son had been a child: there was no strong party of adherents to the family; yet the highflown insolence of the Suitors, demanding that she should marry again, is kept at bay for years, and never proceeds to violence.

~_Force of conjugal attachments._~

We find throughout the poems those signs of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which, from all that has preceded, we might expect. While admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an Immortal, Ulysses frankly owns to her that his heart is pining every day for Penelope[961]. It is the highest honour of a hero to die fighting on behalf of his wife and children. The continuance of domestic happiness, and the concord of man and wife, is a blessing so great, that it excites the envy of the gods, and they interrupt it by some adverse dispensation[962]. And no wonder; for nothing has earth to offer better, than when man and wife dwell together in unity of spirit: their friends rejoice, their foes repine: the human heart has nothing more to desire[963]. There is here apparently involved that great and characteristic idea of the conjugal relation, that it includes and concentrates in itself all other loves. And this very idea is expressed by Andromache, where, after relating the slaughter of her family by Achilles, she tells Hector, ‘Hector, nay but thou art for me a father, and a mother, and a brother, as well as the husband of my youth[964].’ To which he in the same spirit of enlarged attachment replies, by saying that neither the fate of Troy, which he sees approaching, nor of Hecuba, nor of Priam, nor of his brothers, can move his soul like the thought, that Andromache will as a captive weave the web, and bear the pitcher, for some dame of Messe or of Hypereia[965].

[961] Od. v. 215.

[962] Od. xxiii. 210.

[963] Od. vi. 180-5.

[964] Il. vi. 429, 30. Compare the following: _Domino suo, imò Patri; conjugi suo, imò Fratri; ancilla sua, imò filia: ipsius uxor, imò soror; Abælardo, Heloissa_. Abæl. Opp.

[965] Il. vi. 450-7.

~_Woman-characters of Homer._~

With the pictures which we thus find largely scattered over the poems, of the relations of woman to others, the characters which Homer has given us of woman herself are in thorough harmony. Among his living characters we do not find the viragos, the termagants, the incarnate fiends, of the later legends. Nay, the woman of Homer never dreams of using violence, even as a protection against wrong. It must be admitted, that he does not even present to us the heroine in any more pronounced form, than that of the moral endurance of Penelope. The heroine proper, the Joan of Arc, is certainly a noble creation: but yet one perhaps implying a state of things more abnormal, than that which had been reached by the Greeks of the Homeric age. The pictures of women, which Homer presents to us, are perfect pictures; but they are pictures simply of mothers, matrons, sisters, daughters, maidens, wives. The description which the Poet has given us of the violence and depravity of Clytemnestra, is the genuine counterpart of his high conception of the nature of woman[966]:

[966] Od. xi. 427.

ὣς οὐκ αἰνότερον καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο γυναικὸς, ἥτις δὴ τοιαῦτα μετὰ φρεσὶν ἔργα βάληται.

For, in proportion as that nature is elevated and pure, does it become more shameful and degraded when, by a total suppression of its better instincts, it has been given over to wickedness.

Of the minor infirmities of our nature, as well as of its grosser faults, the women of Homer betray much less than the men. Nowhere has he introduced into a prominent position the character of a vicious woman. The only instance of the kind is among a portion of the female attendants in the palace of Ulysses, where, out of fifty, no more than twelve were at last the willing tools, having at first[967] been the reluctant victims, of the lust of the proud and rapacious band of Suitors. Clytemnestra, indeed, appears as a lofty criminal in the perspective of the poem, but her wickedness, too, is wholly derivative. Ægisthus corrupts her by a long course of effort, for, as Homer informs us, she had been a right-minded person; φρεσὶ γὰρ κέχρητ’ ἀγαθῇσι[968]. On the one side we have only to place her and the saucy slut Melantho; on the other, we have Andromache, Hecuba, and Briseis in the Iliad; in the Odyssey, Penelope and Euryclea, Arete and Nausicaa; the slightly drawn figures, such as that of the mother of Ulysses in the Eleventh Odyssey, are in the same spirit as the more full delineations. There is not a single case in the poems to qualify the observation, first, that the woman of Homer is profoundly feminine: secondly, that she is commonly the prop of virtue, rarely the instrument, and (in this reversing the order of the first temptation) never the source, of corruption.

[967] Od. xxii. 37.

[968] Od. iii. 266.

In company with all that we have seen, we likewise find that the limits of the position of woman are carefully marked, and that she fully comprehends them. There is nowhere throughout the poems a single effort at self-assertion: the ground that she holds, she holds without dispute. If at any point a stumblingblock could be likely to be found, it would be between a mother just parting with her authority, and a son newly come of age. Yet Penelope and Telemachus never clash, and thoroughly understand one another. Again, the Homeric man, even the Homeric good man, is sometimes the subject of hasty, vehement, and tumultuous passions; the woman never. She finds her power in gentleness; she rules with a silken thread; she is eminent for the uniformity of her self-command, and for the observance of measure in all the relations of life. The misogynism which marked Euripides and other later writers has, and could have, no place in Homer: the moral standard of his women is higher than that of his men; their office, which they perform without fault, is to love and to minister, and their reward to lean on those whom they serve.

The lower aspect of the relation between the two sexes is in the poems wholly secondary. All that tends to sensualize it is commonly repelled or hidden, and, when brought into mention at all, is yet carefully and anxiously depressed. Even the cases of exception, which lie beyond the pale of marriage, are kept in a certain analogy with it, and are as far as possible removed from the promiscuous and brutal indulgence, which marked the later Pagan ages, including those of the greatest pride and splendour, and which still so deeply taints the societies of Christendom.

We may find, if it be needed, some further evidence of the high position of woman upon earth in the relation subsisting between the Homeric gods and goddesses respectively. For that relation approaches as nearly as may be to equality in force and intelligence, while in purity the latter are on the whole superior. After Jupiter, the deities most elevated in Homer are, Juno and Minerva, Neptune and Apollo; and of all these, I think, we must consider Minerva to have stood first in his estimation. This arrangement could not but harmonize with, while it also serves to measure, his ideas of the earthly place and character of woman.

A similar inference is suggested by the tendency of the Greeks to enshrine many ideas, sometimes great, and occasionally both great and good, in feminine impersonations.

We will, lastly, inquire into the employments of women in the heroic age; both to ascertain how nearly they could approach to the summits of society, and also what was their general share in the division of occupations.

~_Women were admitted to sovereignty._~

Among nations where war, homicide, and piracy so extensively prevailed, it is certainly deserving of peculiar consideration, that we should find any traces of the exercise of sovereignty by a woman. There are however three cases in the poems, which in a greater or less degree serve to imply that it was neither unknown nor wholly unfamiliar.

1. Andromache states, that her mother was queen in Hypoplacian Thebes. The word is βασίλευεν[969]. It implies more than being the mere wife of a king; though, as it was during the life time of her husband Eetion, we cannot justly infer from it that there was here any exercise of independent sovereign power. It is the only instance in the Iliad, where we have any word, that has βασιλεὺς for its basis, applied to a woman.

[969] Il. vi. 425.

2. The common tradition is, that Jason acquired possession of Lemnos by marriage with Hypsipyle its queen. This is so far supported by Homer that, while Jason clearly appears in the poems as a Greek, we notwithstanding find his son sovereign of Lemnos, without any indication of a conquest or regular migration, and Hypsipyle is mentioned as his mother. The simple fact that the mother, contrary to Homer’s usual practice, is in this case named as well as the father, raises a presumption that it is because she had reigned in the island[970].

[970] Il. vii. 468, 9.

In the Eleventh Odyssey we are told that Neleus, the younger of the two illegitimate sons of Tyro, came to dwell in Pylos, and that he married Chloris, the youngest daughter of Amphion an Iasid, giving large presents to obtain her hand[971]. The text proceeds,

[971] Od. xi. 254-7, 281-5.

ἡ δὲ Πύλου βασίλευε, τέκεν δέ οἱ ἀγλαὰ τέκνα.

This may mean that she became his queen when he was king of Pylos: or it may mean that he became her husband when she was already queen there.

The Odyssey discloses to us the manner in which, under circumstances like those of the Trojan war, sovereign power would naturally pass into female hands otherwise than by inheritance.

It would appear that, when Agamemnon set sail for Troy, he left Clytemnestra in charge of his affairs as well as of his young son Orestes, only taking the precaution to provide her with a trustworthy counsellor in the person of his Bard[972]. As it was by inveigling Clytemnestra that Ægisthus obtained the sovereign power, she must evidently have been its depository.

[972] Od. iii. 263-8.

In like manner it would appear, that Penelope was left in charge of Telemachus by Ulysses when he went to Troy, and that Mentor was appointed to perform for her some such friendly office, as that which the Bard undertook for Clytemnestra. The statement here is, that Ulysses committed to him authority over his whole household[973]. But it is plain that Penelope had the indoor management; since Telemachus speaks of the mode in which she regulated the reception of strangers[974], and we hear of her rule in other matters[975]. Here we see openings for the natural formation of the word βασίλισσα, which seems originally to have meant, not a king’s wife merely, but a woman in the actual exercise of royal authority; and which first appears in the Odyssey.

[973] Od. ii. 225-7.

[974] Od. xx. 129-33. comp. xix, 317. sqq.

[975] Od. xxii. 426, 7.

The ordinary occupation of women of the highest rank in the poems is undoubtedly to sit engaged, along with their maidens of the household, in spinning, weaving, or embroidery. Thus we find it with Helen, Penelope, and Andromache. But when Hector bids Andromache retire to these duties, he speaks of them in contradistinction not to all other duties, but to war, which, as he says, is the affair of men. Even this rule, however, was subject to exception. The Bellerophon of Homer fights with the Amazons[976]; and the part taken by the goddesses in the Theomachy shows, that the idea of women-soldiers was not wholly strange to his mind; as it is in fact to this day, I believe, less attractively exemplified in the African kingdom of Dahomey. But manual employments, taken alone, would not afford a just criterion. The dialogues of the speeches clearly show that then, as now, the woman was concerned in all that concerned her husband.

[976] Il. vi. 186.

~_And to the service of the gods._~

Next to political supremacy, we may naturally inquire how far women were qualified for the service of the gods.

We have various signs, more or less clear, of their sharing in it. The reference to the Nurses of Dionysus cannot be wholly without force in this direction. The abstraction of Alcyone by Apollo has probably a more positive connection with female ministry. But we are provided, as far as Troy at least is concerned, with one clear and conclusive instance. The Sixth Iliad affords us a glimpse of a female priesthood, and a worship confined to women, that subsisted among the Trojans. Helenus, alarmed at the feats of Diomed, urges Hector to desire Hecuba to collect the aged women for a procession to the temple of Athene, with a robe for a gift, and with the promise of a hecatomb (Il. vi. 75-101). Hector then acquaints the troops, that he was going to desire the old counsellors and the matrons of the city to supplicate the deities, and to promise hecatombs (iii. 15). There seems to be something of policy in the way in which he thus generalizes, for the army, his account of the design: perhaps afraid of the effect that might be produced by its peculiar character. When he finds Hecuba, he lays upon her precisely the injunction that Helenus had recommended. She sends her female servants to collect the aged women through the city (286, 7). She leads them to the temple of Athene in the citadel. They are there received by Theano, who had been appointed, apparently by the Trojan public[977], priestess to that deity. Theano takes the robe from Hecuba, and herself offers it and prays. Her prayer is for the city, and not for the men by name, but for the wives and infants: and her promise is, _we_ will sacrifice, ἱερεύσομεν, twelve, not oxen, but heifers, yearlings, untouched by the goad (Il. vi. 296-310). Thus the feminine element runs apart through the whole.

[977] Eustath. in loc.

We have no reason to conclude that this order of things was exceptional; for though the time was one of peculiar danger and emergency, the temple, the worship, and the priesthood stand before us as belonging to the regular institutions of Troy.

We have no case like that of Theano among the Greeks. It could, indeed, hardly be expected; as priesthood had not yet grown to be an Hellenic institution. Yet, while the direct force of the narrative speaks for Troy alone, we are justified in giving it a more general significance, because the Greek woman is apparently rather before than behind the Trojan one in influence, and in the substantiveness of her position.

In the Trojan genealogy[978] no notice is taken of women; nor have we any means of judging whether they were regarded as capable of succession to the throne, or what was their political and historical importance. But among the Greek races this was clearly great. The large number of women whom Homer has introduced in the realm of Aides, and the parts assigned to them, are plain indications of their important share in the movement of Greek history.

[978] Il. xx. 215-40.

~_Their household employments._~

The apportionment of the ordinary employments of women appears to have been managed in general accordance with the suppositions, towards which all the foregoing facts would lead us.

We have them indicated in a great variety of passages of the poems, from among which we may select two in particular.

The first relates to Circe and her attendant Nymphs; but we may take it as an exact copy of the arrangements of a prince’s household.

Circe has four female servants, who are called δρήστειραι. The first provides the seats with the proper coverings; the second prepares and lays the tables; the third mixes the wine and brings the goblets; the fourth carries water, and lights the fire to boil it[979].

[979] Od. x. 348-59.

The second passage exhibits to us the household of Ulysses at the break of day, when the in-door and out-door servants are setting about their morning duties.

There were fifty women servants. Of these twelve were employed as flour-grinders (ἀλετρίες); and this appears to have been the most laborious employment among all those assigned to women. Eleven of the twelve have finished their task and retired to rest; the twelfth remains till the morning at her work, and curses the Suitors who cause her such fatigue[980].

[980] Od. xx. 105. Cf. xxii. 421.

It is now dawn[981]. Part of the maid-servants are lighting the fire. The old but active Euryclea is up betimes, and has[982] the place of housekeeper. She desires a part of them to set smartly about sweeping the house, and putting the proper covers on the furniture; another part are to wipe the tables and the cups; a third bevy, no fewer than twenty in number, are dispatched for water[983].

[981] Od. xx. 122.

[982] Od. xxii. 425.

[983] Ibid. 149-56, 158.

Meantime the men-servants (δρηστῆρες or θεράποντες)[984] of the Suitors have made their appearance, and they set about preparing logs for the fire. Then come in from the country the swineherd with his swine, the goatherd with his goats; and, from over the water, the cowherd with his cow, and with more goats.

[984] Od. xvi. 248, 53. xx. 160.

Taking the general evidence of the poems, it stands thus. Of agricultural operations, we find women sharing only in the lighter labours of the vintage[985]; or perhaps acting as shepherdesses[986]. The men plough, sow, reap, tend cattle and live stock generally; they hunt and they fish; and they carry to the farm the manure that is accumulated about the house[987].

[985] Il. xviii. 567.

[986] Such seems to be the most probable meaning of Il. xxii. 126-8.

[987] Od. xvii. 299.

Within doors, the women seem to have the whole duty in their hands, except the preparation of firewood and of animal food. The men kill, cut up, dress, and carve the animals that are to be eaten. The women, on the other hand, spin, weave, wash the clothes, clean the house, grind the corn, bake the bread and serve it[988], with all the vegetable or mixed food, or what may be called made dishes[989] (εἴδατα πολλά). They also prepare the table, and hand the ewer with the basin for washing. And a portion of them act as immediate attendants to the mistress of the palace, Andromache, Penelope, or Helen.

[988] Od. iv. 623.

[989] Od. vii. 172-6, et alibi.

~_Their service about the bath._~

Thus far all is easy and becoming; but an apparent difficulty confronts us when we find, that it was the usage for women to undertake certain duties connected with the bathing of men. Sometimes this was done by servants; thus it was managed for Telemachus and Pisistratus in the palace of Menelaus, and for Ulysses in that of the Phæacian king. On the other hand, it was sometimes an office of hospitality rendered by women, and even by young damsels, of the highest rank, to distinguished strangers of their own age or otherwise. Polycaste, the young and fair daughter of Nestor, (as the text is commonly interpreted,) bathed and anointed Telemachus, and put on him a cloak and vest[990]. Helen herself, when she was living in Troy, performed the like offices for Ulysses, on the occasion of his mission thither in the disguise of a beggar[991]:

[990] Od. iii. 464-8.

[991] Od. iv. 252.

ἀλλ’ ὅτε δή μιν ἐγὼ λόεον καὶ χρῖον ἐλαίῳ, ἀμφὶ δὲ εἵματα ἕσσα....

And lastly, the goddess Circe discharged the very same function, with some addition to the description, on behalf of Ulysses her visitor. For here it is explicitly stated, that she poured water over his head and shoulders[992]:

[992] Od. x. 361.

ἔς ῥ’ ἀσάμινθον ἕσασα λό’ ἐκ τρίποδος μεγάλοιο, θυμῆρες κεράσασα, κατὰ κρατός τε καὶ ὤμων.

This usage has given occasion, as was perhaps to be expected, to much criticism[993] upon the immodest habits of Homer and his age. Pains have also been taken in their defence[994]. And certainly, if there be need of a defence, Eustathius does not supply one by pleading, that it was the custom of the time, and that the Pylian princess doubtless acted by the command of her father[995]. What is wanted appears to me not to be defence, but simply the clearing away of misapprehensions as to the facts.

[993] See Pope on Od. iii. 464-8.

[994] Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol. v. 34.

[995] Eustath. in loc. 1477.

It would assuredly be strange, were we to detect real immodesty among such women of the heroic age as Homer has described to us; or even among such men. At a period when the exposure, among men only, of the person of a man constituted the last extremity of shameful punishment[996], and when even in circumstances of the utmost necessity Ulysses exhibited so much care to avoid anything of the kind[997], it is almost of itself incredible that habitually, among persons of the highest rank and character, and without any necessity at all, such things should take place. And, as it is not credible, so neither, I think, is it true.

[996] Il. ii. 260-4.

[997] Od. vi. 126-8.

It may be observed, that there is no case of ablution thus performed in the Iliad. But this appears to be only for the same reason, as that which makes the meals of the camp more simple, than those which were served in the tranquillity of peace and home.

~_Explanations of the presumed difficulty._~

The words commonly employed by Homer in this matter refer to two separate parts of the operation: first, the bathing and anointing, then the dressing. They are commonly for the first λούω and χρίω: for the second βάλλω, with the names of the proper vestments added (Od. iii. 467);

ἀμφὶ δέ μιν φᾶρος[998] καλὸν βάλεν ἠδὲ χιτῶνα.

[998] Or χλαῖναν, as in Od. x. 365.

But the whole question, in my view, really depends upon this: whether the verbs used mean the performance of a particular operation, or the giving to the person concerned the means of doing it for himself. Just as by feeding the poor, we mean giving them wherewithal to feed themselves. This is the suggestion of Wakefield[999], and I believe it to be the satisfactory and conclusive solution of the whole question. We might be prevailed upon to travel a good way in company with Heroic simplicity, and yet not quite be able to reach the point which the opposite interpretation would require.

[999] On Pope, Od. iii. 464-8.

I think that the construction, which I have indicated as the proper one, is conclusively made good, first by the general rules for the sense of the words λούω, λούομαι, and kindred words in Homer: and secondly, by the detailed evidence of facts.

When the guests at a feast wash their hands, the standard expression is in the middle voice, χερνίψαντο δ’ ἔπειτα. When Ulysses and Diomed washed in the sea, the expression is ἱδρῶ ἀπενίζοντο: when they afterwards bathed and anointed themselves, it is λούσαντο, λοεσσαμένω, ἀλειψαμένω[1000]. To smear arrows with poison is ἰοὺς χρίεσθαι χαλκήρεας[1001]. For the maidens of Nausicaa, when they bathe and are anointed, we have λοεσσάμεναι and χρισάμεναι[1002]. In fact the usage is general.

[1000] Il. x. 572-7.

[1001] Od. i. 262.

[1002] Od. vi. 96; cf. 219, 20.

The case stands rather differently with βάλλω. Here the active usage is, I believe, the common one. But there is ample authority for the converse or active use of the middle voice, which corresponds with the middle use of the active. As for instance,

αὐτίκα δ’ ἀμφ’ ὤμοισιν ἐβάλλετο κάμπυλα τόξα[1003].

[1003] Il. x. 333. Cf. Od. xi. 427.

There can therefore surely be no reason to doubt that βάλλειν in this place follows the inclination of the leading words of the passages, and signifies, that as the water and the oil, so likewise the fresh clothing to put on, were given by the damsel for the purpose, but by no means that the operations, or any of them, were actually performed by her.

If the word βάλλειν meant ‘to put on,’ there would be, as Eustathius[1004] observes, an ὑστερολογία, for the χίτων was as a matter of course put on before the φᾶρος. But if it means ‘to give for the purpose of putting on,’ then there is no solecism in the mode of expression.

[1004] On Od. iii. 467.

We must not, however, pass by the case of Circe in the Tenth Odyssey, where, as we have seen, it is stated that the water was actually poured by the Sorceress over the head and shoulders of Ulysses. It is also true that the old word λοέω, equivalent to λούω, is used there in the active voice.

Upon this I observe three things:

1. The statement that the water was poured over his head and shoulders, as he sat in the bath, evidently implies that what may be called essential decency was preserved.

2. Even if it were not so, we could not in this point argue from the manners or morals of a Phœnician goddess to those of a Greek damsel.

3. The meaning probably of λοέω is middle, in this as well as in the other cases: she gave him water to wash with, pouring it over his head and shoulders, and then leaving to him the substance of the operation, which was not completed by this mere act of affusion.

~_Case of Ulysses landed in Scheria._~

Finally, let us consider the evidence from the case of Ulysses in Scheria, which appears of itself conclusive.

1. In Od. vii. 296. Ulysses says that Nausicaa (according to the popular construction of the term) bathed him: καὶ λοῦσ’ ἐν ποταμῷ.

2. But from Od. vi. 210, we find that what she did was not to bathe him, but to give orders to her attendants that he should be bathed,--that is, should be provided with the requisites for bathing. Her words were, λούσατέ τ’ ἐν ποταμῷ, ὅθ’ ἐπὶ σκέπας ἔστ’ ἀνέμοιο.

3. Upon this they took him to a recess, gave him clothing and oil, and bid him bathe himself, ἤνωγον δ’ ἄρα μιν λοῦσθαι: upon which he requested them to stand off, as otherwise he could not proceed: ἄντην δ’ οὐκ ἂν ἐγώγε λοέσσομαι (ibid. 218-22).

It would appear therefore, that the statements of Homer give no ground whatever for sinister or disparaging imputation. His pictures do not entirely correspond with modern ideas: but they may well leave on our minds the impression that, in the period he described, if the standard of appearances in this department was lower, that of positive thought and action was higher, as well as simpler, than in our own day.

We have now concluded what it seemed needful to say on the employments of women.

~_Subsequent declension of the place of woman._~

It was, however, little likely that a state of things, such as has been described, should last.

The idea of marriage was in aftertimes greatly lowered, together with the moral tone in general; and the very name of γάμος, with its kindred words, underwent a change of sense, and was made applicable to such a relation as that established between the Greek chieftains in the war of Troy and their captives in cases where they had wives already[1005].

[1005] The case of Achilles, who calls Briseis his wife, and who had no other, has been already discussed.

Thus, in the Hecuba of Euripides, as the mother of Cassandra, she intercedes with Agamemnon to avenge the murder of her son Polydorus, on the ground that the youth had become a κηδεστὴς, or relation by affinity to Agamemnon, who had a wife already[1006]:

[1006] Hecuba, 817.

τοῦτον καλῶς δρῶν ὄντα κηδεστὴν σέθεν δράσεις.

And, in the Troades, Cassandra has with Agamemnon certain σκότια νυμφευτήρια (258); and again,

γαμεῖ βιαίως σκότιον Ἀγαμέμνων λέχος[1007].

[1007] Ibid. 44. cf. ver. 358.

Similar language is used in the case of Andromache[1008]. The ideas of the heroic age would have admitted no such depravation of marriage.

[1008] Ibid. 724.

In truth it would seem not only as if, before Christianity appeared, notwithstanding the advance of civilization, the idea and place of woman were below what they should have been, but actually as if, with respect to all that was most essential, they sank with the lapse of time.

The contrast between the views of the marriage state entertained in the heroic age, and at the period which we regard as the acmè of the Greek civilization, will, perhaps, be best conceived by referring to the passage ascribed to Demosthenes, as it is quoted by Athenæus, which explains succinctly the several uses of prostitutes, concubines, and wives, apparently as classes all alike recognised, and without any note of a moral difference in their social position and repute respectively. The first are for pleasure, the second for daily use, the last for legitimate offspring, and for good housekeeping[1009].

[1009] Athenæus xiii. 31. Döllinger Heid. u. Jud. ix. 31.

And yet it continued to be, in the time of Aristotle, a favourable distinction of Greece as compared with the barbarians, that the woman was not with them equivalent to the slave. Throughout their history they continued to be a nation of monogamists, except where they became locally tainted with oriental manners[1010].

[1010] Arist. Pol. I. ii. 4. Döllinger ix. 25.

Again, Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, taking a general survey of the relation between man and wife, describes it as a government indeed, but as analogous to that natural and perfect form of government which he terms aristocracy. It is founded on merit and fitness. The man leaves to the woman all for which she is best suited, and each kind contributes its particular gifts to make up the common stock.

There was much, then, of solidity, and permanence in the ground secured for the Greek woman by the heroic age. But the philosopher, sagacious and dispassionate as he is, had still a much less elevated view of her position than Homer had exhibited.

There may[1011], he says, be in a tragedy a good or bad woman, a good or a bad slave; there is room for variety even in these; καί τοίγε ἴσως τούτων τὸ μὲν χεῖρον τὸ δὲ ὅλως φαῦλόν ἐστι. No such classification, no such comparison, could have found place in the heroic age. Yet more remarkable is the little postscript assigned to the widows of the dead in the funeral oration assigned by Thucydides to Pericles: “If I must also say a few words, for you that are now widows, concerning what constitutes the merit of a woman, I will sum up all in one short admonition. It will be much for your character not to sink beneath your own actual nature (τῆς ὑπαρχούσης φύσεως μὴ χείροσι γένεσθαι); and to be as little talked about as possible among men, whether for praise or for dispraise[1012].”

[1011] Aristot. Poet. c. 28.

[1012] Thuc. ii. 45.

SECT. X.

_The office of the Homeric Poems in relation to that of the early Books of Holy Scripture._

Even if they are regarded in no other light than as literary treasures, the position, both of the oldest books among the Sacred Scriptures, and, next to them, of the Homeric poems, is so remarkable, as not only to invite, but to command the attention of every inquirer into the early condition of mankind. Each of them opens to us a scene, of which we have no other literary knowledge. Each of them is, either wholly or in a great degree, isolated; and cut off from the domain of history, as it is commonly understood. Each of them was preserved with the most jealous care by the nation to which they severally belonged. By far the oldest of known compositions, and with conclusive proof upon the face of them that their respective origins were perfectly distinct and independent, they, notwithstanding, seem to be in no point contradictory, while in many they are highly confirmatory of each other’s genuineness and antiquity. Still, as historical representations, and in a purely human aspect, they are greatly different. The Holy Scriptures are like a thin stream, beginning from the very fountain-head of our race, and gradually, but continuously finding their way through an extended solitude, into times otherwise known, and into the general current of the fortunes of mankind. The Homeric poems are like a broad lake outstretched in the distance, which provides us with a mirror of one particular age and people, alike full and marvellous, but which is entirely dissociated by an interval of many generations from any other records, except such as are of the most partial and fragmentary kind. In respect of the influence which they have respectively exercised upon mankind, it might appear almost profane to compare them. In this point of view, the Scriptures stand so far apart from every other production, on account of their great offices in relation to the coming of the Redeemer, and to the spiritual training of mankind, that there can be nothing either like or second to them.

But undoubtedly, after however wide an interval, the Homeric poems thus far at least stand in a certain relation to the Scriptures, that no other work of man can be compared to them. Their immediate influence has been great; but that influence which they have mediately exercised through their share in shaping the mind and nationality of Greece, and again, through Greece upon the world, cannot readily be reduced to measure: _Les vraies origines de l’esprit humain sont là; tous les nobles de l’intelligence y retrouvent la patrie de leurs pères_[1013]. Insomuch that, passing over the vast interval between those purposes which concern salvation, and every other purpose connected with man, this remains to be admitted, that there is a relative parallelism between the oldest Holy Scriptures and the works of Homer. For each of them stands at the head of the class of powers to which they respectively belong; and the minor seems to present to our view, as well as the major one, the indications of a distinct Providential aim that was to be attained through its means.

[1013] Renan, Études d’Histoire Religieuse, p. 40.

The relation, however, of the Homeric poems to the earlier portion of the Sacred Scriptures, appears to me to be capable of being represented in a more determinate form than it assumes when they are merely compared as being respectively the oldest known compositions, and as each confirming the testimony of the other by numerous coincidences of manners.

~_Providential functions of Greece and Rome._~

For the Eastern world, it is, I suppose, generally acknowledged that we ought to regard Mahometanism as having had, no less than Judaism, a place, though doubtless a very different place, in the determinate counsels of God. So in the West, we must view the extraordinary developments, which human nature received, both individually and in its social forms, among the Greeks and Romans, as having been intended to fulfil high Providential purposes. They supplied materials for the intellectual and social portions of that European civilization, which derives its spiritual substance from the Christian Faith. And they wrought out solutions apparently conclusive for the questions which absolutely required an answer, as to the capacity or incapacity of man, when without the aid of especial divine light and guidance, to work out his own happiness and peace. That Divine Word, which tells us that the Redeemer came in the fulness of time, indirectly points to the great transactions which filled the space of ages since the Fall, when time was not yet full; and the greatest of all those great transactions surely were the parts played by Greece and Rome, as the representatives of humanity at large in its most vigorous developments. They too, as well as the discipline of the Jewish people, doubtless belonged to the Divine plan. All these varied manifestations may differ much in their character and rank, but yet, like the body, soul, and spirit of a man, they are to be referred to one origin, and they are integrants to one another.

Just in the same manner with the parallel currents of historical events, it would appear that the early Scriptures and the Homeric poems combine to make up for us a sufficiently complete form of the primitive records of our race. The Scriptures of the Old Testament give us the history of the line, in which the promise of the Messiah was handed down. But the intellectual and social developments of man are there represented in the simplest and the slightest, nay, even in the narrowest forms. With the exception of Solomon, who, in spite of his wisdom, was enticed away from God by lust, and of the two illustrious specimens of uncorrupted piety in the midst of dangerous power, Joseph and Daniel, I know not whether we can, on the authority of Holy Scripture, point to any character of the Mosaic or Judaic history as great in any other sense, than as the organs of that Almighty One, with whom nothing human is either great or small. It is plain that if we bring the leading characters of that history into contrast with the Achilles or the Ulysses of Homer, and with his other marked personages, these latter undoubtedly give us a representation and development of human nature, and of man in his social relations, that Scripture from its very nature could not supply. Each has its own function to perform, so that there is no room for competition between them, and it is better to avoid comparison altogether; and to decline to consider the legislation of Moses as a work to be compared either with the heroic institutions, or with systems like those of Lycurgus or of Solon. We then obtain a clear view of it as a scheme evidently constructed not alone with human but with superhuman wisdom, if only we measure it in reference to its very peculiar end. That end was not to give political lessons to mankind, which are more aptly supplied elsewhere. It was to fence in, with the ruder materials of the ceremonial and municipal law, a home, within which the succession of true piety and enlightened faith might be preserved; a garden wherein the Lord God might, so to speak, still walk as He had walked of old, and take His delight with the sons of men. But this high calling had reference only to chosen persons, a few among the few. Over and above this interior work, there was a national vocation also. The aim of that vocation seems to have been to isolate the people, so as to stop the influences from without that might tend in the direction of change; and so far to crystallize, as it were, its institutions within, that they might preserve in untainted purity the tradition and the expectation of Him that was to come.

When the Almighty placed his seal upon Abraham by the covenant of circumcision, and when He developed that covenant in the Mosaic institutions, in setting the Jewish people apart for a purpose the most profound of all His wise designs, He removed it, for the time of its career, out of the family of nations.

~_Sacred Books not mere literary records._~

Should we, like some writers of the present day, cite the Pentateuch before the tribunal of the mere literary critic, we may strain our generosity at the cost of justice, and still only be able to accord to it a secondary place. The mistake surely is to bring it there at all, or to view its author otherwise than as the vehicle of a Divine purpose, which uses all instruments, great, insignificant, or middling, according to the end in view, but of which all the instruments are perfect, by reason not of what is intrinsic to themselves, but, simply and solely, of their exact adaptation to that end[1014].

[1014] To show with what jealousy believers in revelation may justly regard the mere literary handling of the Older Scriptures, I would refer to the remarkable work of M. Ernest Renan, ‘_Études d’Histoire Religieuse_.’ This eloquent and elastic writer treats the idea of a revealed religion as wholly inadmissible; highly extols the Bible as a literary treasure; but denies that the general reading of the Bible is a good, except in so far as _il vaut beaucoup mieux voir le peuple lire la Bible que ne rien lire_ (pp. 75, 385).

If, however, we ought to decline to try the Judaic code by its merely political merits, much more ought we to apply the same principle to the sublimity of the Prophecies, and to the deep spiritual experiences of the Psalms. In the first, we have a voice speaking from God, with the marks that it is of God so visibly imprinted upon it, that the mind utterly refuses to place the prophetical books in the scale against any production of human genius. And all that is peculiar in our conception of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, does not tend so much to make them eminent among men, as to separate them from men. Homer, on the other hand, is emphatically and above all things human: he sings by the spontaneous and the unconscious indwelling energies of nature; whereas these are as the trumpet of unearthly sounds, and cannot, more than Balaam could, depart from that which is breathed into them, to utter either less or more.

But most of all does the Book of Psalms refuse the challenge of philosophical or poetical competition. In that Book, for well nigh three thousand years, the piety of saints has found its most refined and choicest food; to such a degree indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest. There are developed all the innermost relations of the human soul to God, built upon the platform of a covenant of love and sonship that had its foundations in the Messiah, while in this particular and privileged Book it was permitted to anticipate His coming.

We can no more then compare Isaiah and the Psalms with Homer, than we can compare David’s heroism with Diomed’s, or the prowess of the Israelites when they drove Philistia before them with the valour of the Greeks at Marathon or Platæa, at Issus or Arbela. We shall most nearly do justice to each by observing carefully the boundary lines of their respective provinces.

~_Providential uses of the Homeric poems._~

It appears to be to a certain extent agreed that Rome has given us the most extraordinary example among all those put upon record by history, of political organization; and has bequeathed to mankind the firmest and most durable tissue of law, the bond of social man. Greece, on the other hand, has had for its share the development of the individual; and each has shown in its own kind the rarest specimen that has been known to the world, apart from Divine revelation. The seeds of both these, and of all that they involved, would appear to be contained in the Homeric poems[1015]. The condition of arts, manners, character, and institutions, which they represent, is alike in itself entire, and without any full parallel elsewhere. It is for the bodily and mental faculties of man, that which the patriarchal and early Hebrew histories are for his spiritual life.

[1015] In the Roman History of Mommsen is contained a masterly comparison between those two rival developments of human life, the collective and the individual, which are represented by Rome, and by later or historic Greece, respectively. (Mommsen Röm. Gesch. I. 2. pp. 18-21.) Both of them are open to criticism. In the one we may notice and brand the characteristic of an iron repression, in the other that of a lawless freedom. But the age which ended with the war of Troy, and cast the reflection of its dying beams upon its noble but chequered epilogue in the Odyssey, appears to make no fundamental deviation from the mean of wisdom in either direction: on the whole, it united reverence with independence, the restraint of discipline with the expansion of freedom: and it stood alike removed, in the plenitude of its natural elasticity, from those extremes which in modern religion have, on the one side, absorbed the individual, and on the other (so to speak) excommunicated him by isolation.

Of the personal and inward relations of man with God, of the kingdom of grace in the world, Homer can tell us nothing: but of the kingdom of Providence much, and of the opening powers and capabilities of human nature, apart from divine revelation, everything. The moral law, written on the tables of stone, was in one sense a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, because it demonstrated our inability to tread the way of righteousness and pardon without the Redeemer. And perhaps that ceremonial law, which indulged some things to the hardness of heart that prevailed among the Jews, was by its permissions, as some have construed a very remarkable passage in Ezekiel[1016], a schoolmaster in another sense; because it witnessed to the fact that they had greatly fallen below the high capacities of their nature. And again, in yet a third sense, we may say with reverence that these primeval records are likewise another schoolmaster, teaching us, although with another voice, the very same lesson: because they show us the total inability of our race, even when at its maximum of power, to solve for ourselves the problems of our destiny; to extract for ourselves the sting from care, from sorrow, and above all, from death; or even to retain without waste the vital heat of the knowledge of God, when we have become separate from the source that imparts it.

[1016] Ezek. xx. 25.

~_They complete the code of primitive instruction._~

It seems impossible not to be struck, at this point, with the contrast between the times preceding the Advent, and those which have followed it. Since the Advent, Christianity has marched for fifteen hundred years at the head of human civilization; and has driven, harnessed to its chariot as the horses of a triumphal car, the chief intellectual and material forces of the world. Its learning has been the learning of the world, its art the art of the world, its genius the genius of the world, its greatness, glory, grandeur, and majesty have been almost, though not absolutely, all that in these respects the world has had to boast of. That which is to come, I do not presume to portend: but of the past we may speak with confidence. He who hereafter, in even the remotest age, with the colourless impartiality of mere intelligence, may seek to know what durable results mankind has for the last fifteen hundred years achieved, what capital of the mind it has accumulated and transmitted, will find his investigations perforce concentrated upon, and almost confined to that part, that minor part, of mankind which has been Christian.

Before the Advent, it was quite otherwise. The treasure of Divine Revelation was then hidden in a napkin: it was given to a people who were almost forbidden to impart it; at least of whom it was simply required, that they should preserve it without variation. They had no world-wide vocation committed to them; they lay ensconced in a country which was narrow and obscure; obscure, not only with reference to the surpassing splendour of Greece and Rome, but in comparison with Assyria, or Persia, or Egypt. They have not supplied the Christian ages with laws and institutions, arts and sciences, with the chief models of greatness in genius or in character. The Providence of God committed this work to others; and to Homer seems to have been intrusted the first, which was perhaps, all things considered, also the most remarkable stage of it[1017].

[1017] I must frankly own that, for one, I can never read without pain the disparaging account of the Greek mind and its achievements which, in the Fourth Book of the Paradise Regained, so great a man as Milton has too boldly put into the mouth of our Blessed Lord. We there find our sympathies divided, in an indescribable and most unhappy manner, between the person of the All-wise, and the language and ideas, on the whole not less just, which are given to Satan. In particular, I lament the claim, really no better than a childish one, made on the part of the Jews, to be considered as the fountainhead of the Greek arts and letters, and the assumption for them of higher attainments in political science. This is a sacrifice of truth, reason, and history to prejudice, by which, as by all such proceedings, religion is sure to be in the end the loser.

~_Christianity supplied a centre to history._~

Without bearing fully in mind this contrast between the providential function of the Jews and that of other nations, we can hardly embrace as we ought the importance of the part assigned, before the Advent of our Lord, to nations and persons who lived beyond the immediate and narrow pale of Divine Revelation. The relation of the old dispensation to those who were not Jews, was essentially different from that of Christendom to those who are not Christians. Only the fall of man and his recovery are the universal facts with which Revelation is concerned; all others are limited and partial. The interval between the occurrence of the first, and the provision for the second, was occupied by a variety of preparations in severalty for the revelation of the kingdom of God. Until the Incarnation, the world’s history was without a centre. When the Incarnation came, it showed itself to be the centre of all that had preceded, as well as of all that was to follow: and since the withdrawal of the visible Messiah, the history of man has been grouped around His Word, and around the Church in which the effect and virtue of His Incarnation are still by His unseen power prolonged.

The picture thus offered to our view is a very remarkable one. We see the glories of the world, and that greatest marvel of God’s earthly creation, the mind of man, become like little children, and yield themselves to be led by the hand of the Good Shepherd: but it seems as though the ancient promise of His coming, while just strong enough to live in this wayward sphere, was not strong enough to make the conquest of it; as if nothing but His own actual manifestation in the strength of lowliness and of sorrow, and crowned by the extremity of contempt and shame, was sufficient to restore for the world at large that symbol of the universal duty of individual obedience and conformity, which is afforded by the establishment of the authority of the spiritual King over all the functions of our nature, and all the spheres, however manifold and remote they may seem to be, in which they find their exercise. Nor is this lesson the less striking because this, like other parts of the divine dispensations, has been marred by the perversity of man, ever striving to escape from that inward control wherein lies the true hope and safety of his race.

But, even after the Advent, it was not at once that the Sovereign of the new kingdom put in His claim for all the wealth that it contained. As, in the day of His humiliation, He rode into Jerusalem, foreshadowing his royal dominion to come, so Saint Paul was forthwith consecrated to God as a kind of first fruits of the learning and intellect of man. Yet for many generations after Christ, it was still the Supreme will to lay in human weakness the foundations of divine strength. Not the Apostles only, but the martyrs, and not the martyrs only, but the first fathers and doctors of the Church, were men of whom none could suspect that they drew the weapons of their warfare from the armouries of human cultivation: nor of them could it be said, that by virtue of their human endowments they had achieved the triumphs of the cross; as it might perhaps have been said, had they brought to their work the immense popular powers of St. Chrysostom, or the masculine energy of St. Athanasius, or the varied and comprehensive genius of St. Augustine.

Nor, again, if we are right in the belief that we are not to look for the early development of humanity in the pages of Jewish and patriarchal history, but rather to believe that it was given to another people, and the office of recording it to the father, not only of poetry, but of letters, does it seem difficult to read in this arrangement the purpose of the Most High, and herewith the wisdom of that purpose. Had the Scriptures been preserved, had the Messiah been Incarnate, among a people who were in political sagacity, in martial energy, in soaring and diving intellect, in vivid imagination, in the graces of art and civilized life, the flower of their time, then the divine origin of Christianity would have stood far less clear and disembarrassed than it now does. The eagle that mounted upon high, bearing on his wings the Everlasting Gospel, would have made his first spring from a great eminence, erected by the wit and skill of man; and the elevation of that eminence, measured upward from the plain of common humanity, would have been so much to be deducted from the triumph of the Redeemer.

~_Purpose served by the design._~

Thus the destructive theories of those, who teach us to regard Christianity as no more than a new stage, added to stages that had been previously achieved in the march of human advancement, would have been clothed in a plausibility which they must now for ever want. ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are[1018].’ An unhonoured undistinguished race, simply elected to be the receivers of the Divine Word, and having remained its always stiffnecked and almost reluctant guardians, may best have suited the aim of Almighty Wisdom; because the medium, through which the most precious gifts were conveyed, was pale and colourless, instead of being one flushed with the splendours of Empire, Intellect, and Fame.

[1018] 1 Cor. i. 27, 8.

Transcriber's Note

Page headers in the printed book have been converted to headings, and are marked with ~swung dashes~.

The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. xiv "sovereignity" changed to "sovereignty"

p. 42 (note) "vii-x." changed to "vii.-x."

p. 79 "unequivocially" changed to "unequivocally"

p. 118 "insolence:" changed to "insolence:’"

p. 165 "ὤλετό" changed to "ὤλετο"

p. 173 "attention," changed to "attention."

p. 192 "exemplfied" changed to "exemplified"

p. 277 "order" changed to "order."

p. 285 "Hom Theol." changed to "Hom. Theol."

p. 288 "Ganymed" changed to "Ganymede"

p. 291 "ἀῖσα" changed to "αἶσα"

p. 299 "peoples," changed to "peoples"

p. 320 "ῥεία" changed to "ῥεῖα"

p. 328 in "disaffection has yet been exhibited.[607]", the footnote anchor has been added to the text.

p. 336 "ῥεία" changed to "ῥεῖα"

p. 352 "subject so" changed to "subject to"

p. 354 "2." changed to "(2.)"

p. 356 "δὲ" changed to "δέ"

p. 364 "it sessential" changed to "its essential"

p. 365 in "νόον ἔτραπεν[711].", the footnote anchor has been added to the text.

p. 377 "purity, of" changed to "of purity,"

p. 383 (note) "264" changed to "264."

p. 403 (note) "Romische" changed to "Römische"

p. 404 "elswehere" changed to "elsewhere"

p. 410 "devolopment" changed to "development"

p. 420 "ἔσθλος" changed to "ἐσθλὸς"

p. 426 "morality." changed to "morality,"

p. 436 "ἀτὴ" changed to "ἄτη"

p. 460 "Ἕρως" changed to "Ἔρως"

p. 474 "ἔγω" changed to "ἐγὼ"

p. 494 in "Ajax had a spurious brother", a footnote anchor has been removed from the text.

p. 499 (note) "in excellently" changed to "is excellently"

p. 505 "φρέσι" changed to "φρεσὶ"

p. 517 "ἔγωγε" changed to "ἐγώγε"

The following are used inconsistently in the book:

aftertimes and after-times

battlefield and battle-field

bowstring and bow-string

cupbearer and cup-bearer

dependence and dependance

Dî and Dii

Dioscuri and Dioscouroi

Erinuës and Erinues

fountainhead and fountain-head

Histie and Hestie

i. e. and i.e.

indoor and in-door

preeminence and pre-eminence

reestablished and re-established

stepmother and step-mother

synonym and synonyme

Theomythology and Theo-mythology