Part 6

“On it also he wrought a vineyard heavy-laden with grapes, beautifully wrought in gold. Up above were the black bunches, and the vineyard was set with silver poles throughout; round it he drove a trench of _kuanos_ and a wall of tin; a single causeway led to it whereby the pickers walked when they gathered in the vintage. Maids and merry bachelors were carrying the honey-sweet fruit in woven baskets, and in the midst a boy played a lovely tune on a high-pitched lyre, singing thereto with his dainty voice a sweet dirge of Linus, while the rest kept time with stamping of feet and leaping and song and shrieking.

“On it he made a herd of straight-horned oxen. The cows were fashioned of gold and tin; lowing they passed from the midden to the pasture by a plashing river by a shivering reed-bed. Four cowherds of gold marched along with the kine, and nine white-footed dogs followed them. But among the foremost kine two dreadful lions were holding a deep-voiced bull. He was being dragged away bellowing loudly, but the dogs and the hinds were after him. The two lions had torn the hide of the great bull, and were greedily devouring the entrails and the dark blood, while the cowherds vainly spurred on the swift hounds. But they, forsooth, instead of biting the lions, kept turning back; they would run up close to bark at them and then flee away.

“On it the far-famed Cripple made a sheepfold in a fair valley, a big fold of white sheep, and steadings and huts and roofed-in pens.

“On it the far-famed Cripple fashioned a dance like that which Dædalus of old wrought in broad Cnossos for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. Therein youths and maidens costly to woo were dancing, holding one another by the wrist. Some of the maids had fine linen veils, and some had well-woven tunics with faint gloss of oil. Yea, they had fair garlands on their heads, and the men had golden swords hanging from silver baldrics. Sometimes they would trip it lightly on tiptoes, as when a potter sits and tries the wheel that fits between his hands to see whether it will run. But sometimes they advanced in lines towards one another, and a great company stood round the lovely dance delighted, and among them a holy bard sang to his lyre, and among the dancers two tumblers led the measure, twirling in the midst.

“And on it he put the great might of the River Ocean along the edge of the rim of the closely wrought shield.

“So then when he had fashioned a great and mighty shield he fashioned also a hauberk brighter than the beam of fire, and he fashioned him a strong helmet, fitting the temples, richly dight, and on it put a crest, and he made him greaves of pliant tin.”

I trust that the reader may be able to catch some glimpse of the picture even through the bald prose of translation. We are now in Europe for certain. It might be in Dorsetshire or Bavaria or Auvergne or Tuscany that these women come to their doors to watch the weddings go past, these honest ploughmen drain their beakers, and these weary harvesters look forward to the harvest supper. To this day you may see the peasants of Greece dancing in rings and lines, with agile acrobats to lead them, just as they danced on the shield of Achilles. History goes on its pompous way, leaving the peasant unaltered and the ways of country life unchanged.

KINGS AND GODS

The poet even here, not wholly oblivious of the courtly circles to whom he was singing, has, indeed, brought in a “king.” But it is a poor sort of Basileus who stands there among the clods rejoicing in his heart. He and his ancestral sceptre cut rather a foolish figure among

“The reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley.”

The truth is, of course, that he’s a king in buckram. He is only a country squire with a pedigree, dressed up as a Basileus to suit the convention of the epic. Such too are the “kings” of the Odyssey. There the story requires that Odysseus shall be King of Ithaca and that his faithful wife shall be maintaining his throne in his absence. But the poet or poets were so little accustomed to the ways of kings that they constantly forget the political importance of Penelope and speak as if it were only a question of the jointure of a comely widow. Eumæus the swineherd extols the wealth of Odysseus by saying that no other in Ithaca had so much. They were already in the habit of regarding the market-place as the political focus of the State. So in the town of Scheria “King” Alcinous goes forth daily to the council with the twelve other “renowned kings.” Odysseus their visitor prays that this “king” and his “queen” may be so blessed by the gods that they may leave to their children “the substance in their halls, and whatever dues of honour the people have rendered unto him.” And the “princess” goes out in a mule-cart with the washing. On the stage of the epic the king is, of course, a great and mighty ruler. We are often reminded how fearful is the wrath of kings. The king says, according to a quotation of Aristotle’s, that he has power of life and death. He gives away cities that do not belong to him. He inherits “his sceptre and his dooms” from Zeus and a long line of ancestors. But he cannot live up to these exalted pretensions. He debates policy in the market-place with the other kings (who are often called elders by mistake, though they are young and lusty as an eagle), and matters are settled by the acclamation of the masses. It is the orator who sways the crowds. By occasional slips of the tongue these divine kings are spoken of as a greedy class, just as they are in Hesiod. As for the “dooms” that they receive by inspiration from Zeus, they make no practical use of them. Justice, as we saw on our Shield, is really administered by the elders in the agora. A careless line of the Odyssey tells of “the hour when a man rises from the assembly and goes home to supper, a man who judges the many quarrels of the young men that go to him for judgment.” There is no single example of a king acting as judge in Homer, and though the king pretends to give away cities he sometimes humbly accepts the gift of an acre or two from the citizens for services rendered. There is, indeed, one celebrated passage of the Iliad where monarchy is apparently extolled; but the attentive reader will discern that it is in the language not of primitive patriarchal conditions, but of a partisan of aristocracy or tyranny rebuking the presumption of radical demagogy. It is in the second book of the Iliad. Agamemnon had bidden the Greeks prepare for flight from Troy. It was only a ruse to try their temper, but it succeeded all too well, for the people hastily took him at his word. Now Odysseus is bidden by the goddess Athena to hurry down and stop them.

“He went to meet Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and took from him his ancestral sceptre, ever indestructible, wherewith he went down to the ships of the brazen-shirted Achæans. Whensoever he met a king or man of mark, him he would approach and check with soft words. ‘Sir, it befits not to terrify thee like a coward; nay, sit thee down, and make the rest of the host sit also, for thou knowest not yet the mind of the son of Atreus. Now he is but trying the sons of the Achæans; soon he will smite them, and mighty is the wrath of god-nurtured kings. Honour is his from Zeus, the Zeus of counsel loves him.’

“But when he saw a man of the people shouting, him he would smite with his sceptre and chide with a word. ‘Sir, sit quiet and hear the speech of others, who are better than thou. Thou art unwarlike and cowardly, thou art of no account in war or in council. We cannot all be kings here, we Achæans; many-lordship is not good. Let one be lord, one king, to whomsoever the son of Kronos of crooked counsel has given the sceptre and the dooms that he may be king among them.’

“Thus he went through the host, lording it; and they hurried back to the meeting-place from their ships and tents with a noise as when a wave of the thundering sea crasheth on the mighty shore and the deep resounds.

“The others then sat down and took place on the benches, but Thersites alone still brawled with unmeasured words. He who was full of disorderly speech for idle and unseemly striving against kings.

“He was the ugliest man that came to Troy. He was bandy-legged and lame, and his two shoulders were humped and cramped upon his breast. Above, his head was peaked, and a scanty stubble sprouted upon it. He was the bitterest foe to Achilles and to Odysseus, and ever they were chiding him. Then too he cried out shrill words of reproach against divine Agamemnon. But the Achæans were horribly wroth with him, and hated him in their hearts....

“Thus he spake reviling Agamemnon, the shepherd of the people. But divine Odysseus quickly stood beside him, and scowling rebuked him with a grievous word. ‘Thersites, heedless of speech, shrill ranter that thou art, be still and dare not alone to strive with kings, for I say that there is no creature worse than thou, of all that came with the sons of Atreus to Ilium.’ ...

“Thus he spake, and smote him with his sceptre on the midriff and the shoulders. But he hunched himself up and a big tear fell from him, and a blood-red weal rose up from his back under the golden sceptre. So he sat down and trembled, looked helpless, and wiped away a tear in his pain, and they, for all their anger, laughed sweetly at him. And thus a man would say, looking at his neighbour, ‘Lo, now! Verily Odysseus hath done a thousand good deeds both in discovering good counsel and in leading the battle, but now this is far his best deed among the Argives, in that he hath checked this word-spattering maker of mischief from his rantings. Never again, I ween, will his ambitious heart stir him up to revile kings with words of reproof.’”

Thersites is not a product of simple undeveloped monarchy; the poet who drew this portrait had seen the mob-orator in his native agora. Thersites, it has been said, is the only private in the army. He is the only man who is named without a patronymic. And yet modern research has shown that even Thersites had an ancient cultus as a demigod in Sparta. So true is it that all the figures of the epic stage are figures of tribal ancestor-worship.

That is why the real gods come so badly out of the epics. They are the only immoral people in Homer; they cheat and lie, they smack and squabble. Perhaps we do not expect much decency from Zeus or Aphrodite, but even the stately Hera herself alternates between the crafty courtesan and the scolding fish-wife. And yet Homer is the “Bible of the Greeks”! Herodotus said, and said truly, that it was Hesiod and Homer who assigned to the gods their names, distributed their honours and functions, and settled their appearance and characteristics. In after-times Homer was the universal primer of education. It is extremely probable that Homer and Hesiod selected certain deities out of a vast number for special honour as members of the Olympian family. Why in the world, then, did not Homer honour them? Various explanations have been given. The old explanation was that this is the naive expression of primitive anthropomorphism, which makes gods in the likeness of men, enlarging the human vices as well as the virtues. But no one who really studies Homer can believe in a theory which makes him simple and childlike. Homer’s ridicule of the gods is not the unsophisticated laughter of a child or a savage. It is to be noticed that it is only some of the gods who come badly out of the Homeric theology. No figure could be lovelier than that of the sea-goddess, Thetis, or more dignified than Pallas Athene, or more ethereal than Iris, the ambassadress of heaven. Professor Ridgeway’s belief that Homer was written by a bard of the old race honouring his Achæan masters might explain the mordant raillery of Northern gods like Zeus and Hera. But then Aphrodite, who is the worst treated of all, would seem to be actually the Nature-goddess of Crete, ever accompanied with doves in Cretan art. It is just the Ægean naturalism which is excluded from Homeric religion. There is nothing to connect even Iris with the rainbow. My own explanation would be that hero-worship is Homer’s main concern. So many of his heroes claim descent from Zeus by so many mothers that Zeus cannot be endowed with monogamic morality. The gods can look after themselves; it is the heroes who require the assistance of the bard. I believe, too, in Professor Gilbert Murray’s suggestion that in these passages of impiety we have the intervention of the later Ionic spirit of rationalism. As such passages are widely diffused over the Iliad we should have to place the composition of a considerable part of it so late as the eighth and seventh century before Christ. But as we have seen that the political background of Homer is in the main a scene of aristocracy, precisely such as we have in the seventh-century poet Hesiod, there is no real objection to a late dating.

Once you abandon the absurd belief in Homer’s “primitive simplicity” and admit, what is now certain, that the epic poets could consciously archaise their story, omitting all reference to events and customs which seemed to them too modern to fit in with the divine race of heroes, just as Malory does with the Arthurian knights, there is no objection to believing that large parts of Homer were written in the eighth century. Of course, there are much older traditions and older fragments of epic poetry embedded in our Iliad and Odyssey. No real violence is done to ancient tradition by bringing these poems down to the verge of historical times, for Homer and Hesiod were generally regarded as contemporaries in antiquity. All the civilisation depicted in Homer is far closer to that of historical Greece than to that of the Ægean excavations. Take the armour for another example. Although, as has been said, the heroes generally “smite with the bronze” and their shields are sometimes “like a tower” and “reaching to the feet” and “girding the body,” as on the monuments of Mycenæ and Crete, yet in the ordinary thought of the poets the swords are undoubtedly of iron, since the cut is commoner than the thrust and you do not cut with a sword of bronze, and the shields are “circular,” “equal every way,” “bossed,” and “like the moon.” Sometimes, as in the case of the shield of Achilles, or the shield of Agamemnon, they are adorned with a blazon. In fact, the Homeric warrior is dressed and equipped exactly like the hoplite of Greek history. As regards his methods of fighting, the epic convention naturally requires a series of duels in order to show the individual prowess of the heroes; and, indeed, the various episodes of the Iliad are labelled as “The Prowess of Diomede,” “The Prowess of Menelaus,” and so forth. But at the back of the poet’s mind there constantly appears an ordinary Greek combat between two lines of warriors. Agamemnon once divides the host up into companies, tribe with tribe and brotherhood with brotherhood. Finally, by placing Homer late, in the flourishing culture of Æolis and Ionia, we avoid the absurdity of supposing that a literary form so exquisite and elaborate as the epic should have sprung out of nothing in times of violent unrest, of invasions, migrations, and ceaseless strife. _A priori_ any one would say that lyric poetry must precede epic, as it has done in England. Greek tradition places Orpheus, the father of lyric song, before Homer. There would be nothing surprising in placing the early elegiac poetry on the same chronological level as the earliest hexameters. That the ordinary forms of lyric verse already existed in Homeric times we can see, if we read the poems attentively. The boy sings his vintage song of the death of Linus. At the burial of Hector there are bards to sing dirges. There is reference to the Hymenæus, or wedding-song. There were banquet songs too: in the First Iliad they sing all day long over their cups. Bards like Demodocus sing of the loves of the gods. Thus there is ample evidence that all the common forms of Greek lyric poetry preceded the epic, and that Homer did not spring into existence ready-made out of the void. Still less did the Achæan invaders from the cold North import a finished literary form of composition into the civilised peninsulas of the Mediterranean.

ART OF THE EPIC PERIOD

And now the question arises as to what sort of art we are to match with the poetry of Homer. It was the desire to give some literary equivalent for the glorious art of Mycenæ and Cnossos which led Schliemann and his school to equate it with Homer. Doubtless prehistoric Crete had its literature. But that has all perished, unless the undecipherable written tablets should chance to yield us something. We must realise that great literature can coexist with crude art. There is no great art in England to correspond with Shakespeare, Milton, or Shelley. Language being the easiest medium of artistic expression, literature commonly develops earlier than the graphic or plastic arts. We must therefore be prepared for the shock of finding that Homer belongs to the same period as a very ugly and inartistic decorative style on the vases and most rudimentary and primitive forms of statuary. The pages of Homer do not really lead us to expect anything else. Sculpture is scarcely mentioned in Homer. There is only one temple statue, and that is the statue of Athena at Troy, of which we are told that the Trojan women used to lay a richly embroidered robe upon its knees. We are probably, then, to conceive a rude seated figure of wood or stone such as we find at the earliest stages of Greek sculpture. Their roughness and rudeness might be mitigated by coverings of embroidery. At Branchidæ, near Miletus, a whole series of such figures was discovered, dedicated with writing of about 550 B.C.; but we can easily believe that such a type might persist for more than a century. It is believed that this type of statue has been evolved from the throne, for it appears certain that empty thrones were worshipped before iconic deities were carved. One can see also that it is only lately derived from a technique of wood, so flat are the planes of its surface. The goddess belongs to the chair rather than the chair to the goddess.

Beyond this there are some obviously imaginary figures in Homer, such as the golden torch-bearers in the fairyland of Phæacia, but nothing that we can call sculpture. Also there are many minor “objects of virtue,” such as the drinking-cup of Nestor and the brooch of Odysseus, some of which may be matched by the relics of the Mycenæan tombs; but of course cups and jewels of gold were still preserved from the older civilisation, and notably enough such objects are always accounted for: either Hephæstus has wrought them, or they have been handed down as heirlooms, or brought by the Sidonians over the sea. Homer does not take his art for granted. He uses the potter’s wheel in similes, but the only

art he really describes is that of tapestry-weaving, the domestic art carried on by all his ladies. Thus Helen employs herself at Troy in weaving figures of warriors into her web, and Andromache weaves flowers into hers. What pattern Penelope wove into her everlasting shroud is known only to those who know what song the sirens sang. Appropriate to this prominence of the textile art is the style of ornamentation described, as we have read, upon the shield of Achilles. For these parallel bands of picture-writing

which were in the poet’s mind when he depicted the shield are known to us in the pottery of the seventh and sixth centuries. It is called by modern archæologists the Geometric style, because the whole body of the vase is divided into bands and panels by strips of zigzag ornament. An early phase of the Geometric style is specially named after the Dipylon Gate at Athens, because huge vases of a certain type were found in great numbers in the ancient cemetery of Athens in that neighbourhood. The subject of these vases is generally funereal. We see the body laid out upon the bier and the mourners indicating their grief by laying their hands upon their heads. The figures are rendered in conventional diagrams. To my taste they are almost repulsive. Not only is the drawing of the figures careless and clumsy, but the spirit of the whole thing is ugly. The fidgety nerves of the artist trying to fill every corner with some sort of scrawl, scraping meaningless emblems even between the legs of his horses, wearies the eye of the spectator. His designs have no sort of correspondence with the form of his material, any more than the modern house-decorator’s friezes and dados properly belong to the four flat surfaces of his walls. The vital qualities of good Greek art are self-control, the subordination of the artist to his work, and the perfect adaptation of the artistic form to the subject under treatment. The Dipylon Style does violence to all these canons of good taste. There must be an explanation.

It is easy to see that the ornamentation of a Dipylon vase is borrowed from an alien technique. Pottery never required the artist to divide his field up into parallel bands with borders and fringes. It is clearly from needlework, embroidery, or tapestry that this style is borrowed. You can see the stitches and the threads in many of the patterns. Primitive tapestry is necessarily linear, geometrical, and rectangular.

Now the whole thing becomes clear. Greece is dominated by a masculine race of warriors inartistic by ancestral tradition. Music they have always loved. They are generous patrons to the bard who sings the praises of their ancestors. They like a prettily designed brooch or golden cup. But there are no patrons for the other arts. While their lords are fighting hard and drinking deep the women are perpetually at their looms. The only arts that flourish are the textile arts, and they are largely modelled on Asiatic imported fabrics. The potter is a wretched, despised slave, probably of the old race. He has lost all his manhood and most of his taste, he gets no encouragement to make his cheap pots beautiful, and he has no models for design except the patterns of tapestry or metalwork. All the beautiful earthenware of Cnossos and Kamàres is broken or buried under the ground.

Yet even the Dipylon style gradually improved. While still retaining its Geometric character, vase-painting improves in drawing and colour, until in early Attic work like the famous François vase[14] we reach designs of considerable beauty. Here the horse becomes the favourite animal type. When the potters advance far enough they begin to deal with scenes of heroic legend and mythology, carefully labelling their heroes with their names. The Gorgon, which often figures in Homer, as on the shield of Agamemnon and the ægis of Athene, begins to be an art type in the Dipylon period; so do the sphinx and griffin, which, curiously enough, do not appear in our Homer.

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