CHAPTER XX
CONCLUSIONS
As much of this treatise is occupied with criticism of the views of the most modern representatives of the Wolfian school, I ought, in fairness, to state my own general conclusions. I am led to suppose that the _Iliad_ is a work of one brief period, because, as has been shown, it bears all the notes of one age; and is absolutely free from the most marked traits of religion, rites, society, and superstition that characterise the preceding Aegean, and the later "Dipylon," Ionian, Archaic, and historic periods in Greek life and art.
Again, I believe that the _Iliad_ is, in the main, the work of a single poet. To that conclusion I am led partly by the unity of the thought, temper, character, and _ethos_ of both epics; partly by the perfect consistency in the drawing, throughout, of multitudes of characters, all conceived with as much delicacy as firmness. It is to me inconceivable that a number of poets should have developed, with such perfect consistency and with such fine _nuances_, the character, for example, of Achilles, who has been called "a splendid savage!"
If our critics studied him as Shakespearian students examine Hamlet or Macbeth, it is improbable that they could think the wrath of Achilles "a second-rate subject." It does not appear to me that his wrath about "a personal slight"--the loss of Briseis, is a fit of the sulks; that Achilles, as was said of Byron in one of his portraits, looks like "a great sulky schoolboy whom somebody has deprived of a plum-cake."
Consider what Achilles is; the son of a goddess: himself, in extreme youth, the recognised hero and _nonpareil_ of the whole Achaean array. His one over-mastering passion is desire of renown:
"One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name."
He might live long, happy, and honoured at home with the father whom he so tenderly loves and pities, but he sets forth to Ilios, knowing surely that there he must inevitably perish in the flower of his youth. He chooses to pay with his life for immortal renown. In Hades he says that he would liefer be on earth the hind of a landless man, than king over the Dead, so fast is the hold of this earth upon his heart. But he could not love his life so much
"Loved he not honour more."
Now, in the opening of the _Iliad_ he is to lose life and the sunlight, and also to lose honour. This is no mere personal slight; loss of the honour which he is buying with his life is no unworthy cause of anger in such a hero. He complains, again and again, that Agamemnon has, _on every occasion_, dishonoured him. The seizure of Briseis, his special "mead of honour," is only the last straw, the culminating insult. "In like honour," he says, "are held both the coward and the brave." He has toiled most hardly of all. "Even as a bird bringeth her unfledged chickens each morsel as she winneth it, and with herself it goeth hard, even so was I wont to watch out many a sleepless night, and pass through many days of battle, warring with folk for their women's sake." There is here, in Book ix., that tenderness of reference to the devotion of the maternal instinct which characterises Achilles in his relations with his own mother, a goddess of many sorrows, for the sake of him who has chosen his doom. To her, in the first Book, as on the death of Patroclus, he cries, in the spirit of the little child of whom he speaks so touchingly in Book xvi.: "a fond little maid that runs by her mother's side, and bids her mother take her up, snatching at her skirts, and tearfully looks at her." Homer puts such words in the mouth of none but the slayer of men, Achilles.
"Mother," he cries by the grey sea, in Book i., "seeing thou didst of a truth bear me to so brief a span of life, _honour at least ought the Olympian to have granted me._"
Is it not plain that "the personal slight" to Achilles--being what he is, saying, like the great Montrose in a note scribbled on his pocket Bible, "_Honour is my life,_" is it not plain that the insult is deadly both to life and honour?
In this sense Homer understands the wrath of Achilles. He had _fond_ of tenderness,--he ransomed his captives, while Agamemnon slew the prisoners to whom Menelaus was giving quarter. Again, as we shall see ("The Supposed Expurgation of Homer"), it was far from unusual, in Homeric warfare, for the slayer to mutilate the slain, cutting off his head, putting it on a stake, or even carrying it home as a trophy. But Achilles did not even, as usual, despoil Eetion of his armour, "for his soul had shame of that; but he buried him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." In contrast with his natural clemency, the wrath of Achilles for Patroclus's sake is all the more monstrous; he far transcends the customary ferocities of dishonour to the dead. Achilles says (xxi. pp. 100-105): "Until Patroclus met his day of destiny, dearer was it to my heart to spare the Trojans; and many I took alive and sold over sea." But when once his honour, his life-price, is taken from him, his wrath will be sated by nothing--not by prayers or gifts of atonement, but by the slaughter of his comrades among their ships--_then_, indeed, they will know his worth. It is this moral tragedy, _corruptio optimi_, that inspires Homer in the _Iliad_.
Achilles is, of all the men in Homer, the most passionately affectionate. His love of Patroclus, like that of Jonathan for David, "passeth the love of women"; an affection for his elder, the playmate of his childhood, so pure and so strong that poets of historic Greece could not understand it. But when he is smitten to the heart by the loss of Patroclus his wrath again breaks, as in the ninth Book of the _Iliad_, through all measure; and he does cruel and evil deeds, his revenge is hateful to Gods and men. This is the moral tragedy of the _Iliad_; and that which wrecks the heart and soul of Hamlet, or that which brings to shame the honour and courage of Macbeth, does not go deeper.
Having fashioned such a character as Achilles, no poet equal to the task could leave him in the course of cruelty and shame which is his in the opening of the last Book of the _Iliad_. No hand but that which created the Achilles of the first Book could so restore him to himself that the Achaeans might again "see the great Achilles whom they knew." Only that one genius could conceive and achieve the immortal scene wherein Priam kisses "the hands of Achilles, terrible, manslaying, that slew so many of his sons."
"Fear thou the gods, Achilles, and have compassion on me, even me, bethinking thee of thy father. Lo, I am more piteous yet than he, and have braved what none other man on earth hath braved before, to stretch forth my hand toward the face of the slayer of my sons." There follows the lament of Achilles, for the father whom he, in search of honour, "may not tend as he groweth old, since very far from my own country I am dwelling in Troyland, to vex thee and thy children."
Even here, Achilles feels that he dares hardly trust himself, so strong is the wild beast of passion within him. So consistent, so delicate, so strong a delineation of character, I cannot conceive to be the work of more hands than one, it is the work of the hand of Homer. Throughout the whole poem every person is drawn with equal firmness, delicacy, and consistency. The study of Agamemnon is the most complex (see _Homer and his Age,_ pp. 50-81). The foil to Agamemnon, the good Menelaus, the kindest and most chivalrously honourable of men, always conscious of his debt to the Achaeans, always eager to dare beyond his strength, is a worthy pendant. Odysseus throughout the poem is the poet's most admired hero; the wisest and most steadfast, here as in the _Odyssey_. It is so with the rest, with all of them; and this with the unity of _ethos_, of temper, of thought on human destinies, is the great argument for the unity and single authorship of the _Iliad_ in the main. To others, probably, as to Wolf, this consistency is apparent when they read the _Iliad_, as alone it was meant to be read or heard, "for human pleasure," without constantly dwelling on "oppositions of science falsely so called," and hunting for discrepancies which often are not discrepant.
It is not an article of my faith that there is no non-original matter in the _Iliad_. In another book, _Homer and the Epic_, I mentioned the passages which, to me, seem probably alien, for one reason or another. About the authorship of the Catalogue I do not know enough to be able to form an opinion. In the dream of Agamemnon and what follows, in Book ii., I might guess that two or three lines have been omitted, though on the whole the waverings of Agamemnon are thoroughly consistent with his character, and are meant to throw into light the steadfastness of Odysseus. I think that Phoenix is not properly introduced in Book ix., but there he is a necessary character; his warning to Achilles, not to fight before receiving atonement, has an influence throughout, backed as it is later by the counsels of Odysseus. The battles between Troy and the Ships, in Books xii.-xv., might be more lucid; but so might Napier's account of the battle of Salamanca, and Lord Roberts's of the Siege of Delhi. I understand Homer better than I do either of these military historians; but I have taken more pains to understand him. I would rather believe the _Aristeia_ of Idomeneus to be by another hand; it is perfunctory; and the proceedings of Poseidon are perplexing, like the doings of Ares and Athene in the first fifty lines of Book v. The Gods always, by the infinite inconsistencies of mythology, cause confusion, but the text itself has an air of dislocation. The arming of Agamemnon in the opening of Book xi., seems to me non-authentic, as far as our knowledge of Homeric armature goes. The whole passage about the destruction of the Achaean wall by the Gods, in the after time, reads to me like a pedantic later explanation of the absence of traces of the works.
The meeting of Aeneas and Achilles in Book xx. would seem more suspicious than, to me, it does, if Aeneas were not, throughout, a special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan, because of Priam's suspicion of "the Orleans branch." I am inclined to think that the poet knows, all through, a "saga" of Aeneas as preserving the seed of the Royal House of Troy. In Book v., and elsewhere, he is always under divine protection, that of Apollo or of Aphrodite, "only Zeus shielded thee, and other gods," says Achilles. "It is appointed for him to escape that the race of Dardanus perish not," says Poseidon in Book xx.; and were the passage solitary, I should think it all an interpolation. But the poet always, probably for traditional reasons, takes very good care of Aeneas. The last bouts in the Funeral Games seem unlike Homer.
In the _Odyssey_, the passages about the concealing of the arms (xvi., xix.) are dislocated, to say the least; and all the close of the poem, especially the second Nekyia, has always lain under suspicion in critical times. Sainte-Beuve would not abandon, but admired it; I only feel that, if all this be later, it has taken the place of lost earlier material, for the poem could not conceivably close till the blood feud of Odysseus and the kin of the Wooers was appeased. An Achaean like a Scandinavian audience understood the rules, and insisted that the settlement of the blood-feud must be explained.
These are the main points at which, as far as I can judge, something has gone wrong. There are others: the interchange of shields between Nestor and Thrasymedes in the opening of Book xiv. had probably some lines of explanation given to it, though, as Mr. She wan was the first to perceive, the exchange was the necessary consequence of the manoeuvres in Book x. Here Thrasymedes lent his shield to Diomede for his night _reconnaissance_, Thrasymedes would then send for and use Nestor's shield, while Nestor would obtain the shield of Thrasymedes next morning from Diomede.[1]
Nothing can be more simple and natural; but the thing was so obvious as to escape attention till Mr. She wan read Homer in a Homeric spirit. No doubt there are other passages with which I am dissatisfied, but the curious may refer for them to my earlier book, _Homer and the Epic_.
It is not so strange that there are dislocations ill patched up, as that far more of extraneous matter, especially of Ionian matter, has not found an entry into the Epics. How the text has been so well guarded I cannot explain; Mr. Murray's theory of expurgation of certain beliefs, ways and manners, is examined in Appendix B.
As to how the Epic was evolved, I am unable to say anything precise for want of evidence. Analogy from other early national epic poetry fails us here, because nowhere is there any early national poetry of the same scope and the same consistency. Again, in such epics as the _Chanson de Roland_, and even in _Beowulf_, mythical as it is, there are actual traces of historic events. We know that, because we have chronicles and official annals corroborating parts of the _Chanson de Roland_, or proving the historic existence of a few characters in the _Volsunga Saga_, and _Beowulf_; but in the case of the Homeric poems we have no evidence of the actual existence of any personage.
As for the _chansons de geste_, we know, or at least the most eminent French scholars believe, that these, or the earliest of them, are the final poetic results of actual reminiscences, recorded in lays or ballads, popular or military, of the reign of Charlemagne. But Homer is far in advance of the age of ballads on actual events in the remote past.
M. Gaston Paris says: "The _Chanson de Roland_ is not a work composed _d'un seul jet à un moment donné_, it contains elements of very different dates and different sources"--there is a basis of popular or military ballads; there are additions invented by professional poets to increase the interest. "The author of the Chanson is Legion."[2] I entirely agree, and Legion is the author of _Paradise Lost_, and the author of _King Lear_, or _Hamlet_, or _Macbeth_. Legion is the name of the myth-makers from an age of savagery onwards; of the Greek and Roman and Celtic poets and historians, of the Christian theologians, and Anglo-Saxon minstrels and low Latin versifiers, and heavy Dutch poets, and gay Italian poets, who have contributed the ideas and material to _Paradise Lost_. But the Epic is Milton's though Homer and Virgil are among the authors: without their lives it had not been what it is. The _form_ is Milton's, and the form of the _Iliad_ is Homer's.
These things are manifest. All poetry, down to a lyric like "Bonnie Dundee," has, in one sense, a multiplicity of authors. The poet selects, combines, and gives form to a mass of pre-existing materials.
In _Lear_, Shakespeare works on a _Märchen_ still current in rural England. That _Märchen_ he takes in the pseudo-historic form given to it by the chroniclers. Shakespeare combines with it--for Gloucester and Edmund--a French story which he finds in Sidney's _Arcadia_. He has before him an earlier drama on King Lear; he selects, arranges, composes, he adds what is his own, the poetry, and the fatal conclusion; and even so the author of our _Iliad_ treated _his_ materials. Of all poetry, and especially of all epic poetry, the author's name is Legion. Legion supplies the materials, and examples of different methods of dealing with them, and the stock of ballad or epic formulae. The final poet makes his selections, his combinations, and fuses all into a new form.
It may be said that I mean by "Legion" something which M. Gaston Paris did not mean. But what _did_ he mean? Did he mean that a different _laisses_, or strings of verses on one assonance in the _Chanson de Roland_, were by different poets, and were tacked together by one man, who, perhaps, made omissions and additions? If this was what M. Gaston Paris meant, I do not agree with him, nor with any one who may hold the same opinion about the evolution of our _Iliad_. I know perfectly well what I mean, when I say that Legion provided Homer's materials, and showed various methods of treating them.
What these materials were we cannot exactly know. There must have been much heroic poetry in hexameter verse; in Homer the form has reached perfection. The style retains some peculiarities of popular poetry, of ballads, as in stereotyped formulae descriptive of habitual actions of every kind. Like our ballads, the poet never avoids a formula, if he can find one current; if he invents a new one, he clings to it. This recurrence of formulae is no less marked in _Iliad_ viii. than in Child's four hundred _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, or in _La Chancun de Willame_, one of the oldest _chansons de geste_.
Homer's chief heroes need no introduction to his audience, as Roland and Oliver, Ganelon and Naismes needed none. All his characters were familiar figures in an ancient legend of an expedition against the Northern shore of Asia. About that we have no historic knowledge, and it is rare indeed that chronicles record any "facts" given in early _chansons de geste_. The rear-guard action at Roncevaux is an exception; it is a historical fact.
Homer surveyed the whole, selected some situations, invented others, combined and fused all in the furnace of his genius, just as did Milton and Shakespeare. But how Legion made the _Iliad_, with no Homer, no one great genius, but in some incomprehensible manner of combination, I have never understood. I have never seen any description of the processes which was clear, coherent, intelligible, and corroborated by an example historically known. Theories of "redactors," "editors," literary committees, are all in the air; we cannot say, with Mrs. Quickly, "You, or any man, knows where to have them." No theory shows us "where to have" the _Dichter_, where, or when, or in what circumstances he did whatever he is supposed to have done.
[1] _Homer and his Age_, pp. 276-278.
[2] _Légendes du Moyen Age_, pp. 46-47.
APPENDIX A
THE CATALOGUE
The date, purpose, and historical value of the Catalogue are matters vigorously disputed, and critics not only vary among themselves, but change their own minds, as is natural, when new facts accrue. Topographical study of the Greek mainland, and new discoveries of prehistoric sites that had been overlooked, necessarily throw new light on Homer's conception of prehistoric Greece. Thus M. Bérard appears to have found again what learned late Greek geographers had lost, the site of Nestor's city of Pylos.
Nestor, in _Iliad_, xi. 664-762,[1] telling a long story about his early prowess, gives many topographical details. But he "is clearly ignorant of the geography of the western Peloponnesus," says a critic. Here the theory is that Nestor's story is by a late editor of the Iliad, who had read the Catalogue, picked out some places named at random, and thrown them in anywhere.[2] But M. Bérard studies the topography on the spot, and finds sites which, he thinks, coincide perfectly with the topography of Nestor, and also, with that of the journey of Telemachus, in the _Odyssey_, to Pylos, the home of Nestor, and on to Menelaus in Sparta. It is strong corroboration that M. Bérard's location of Pherae, where Telemachus passes the night on his way to Sparta, and of Pylos itself, makes the topography of Homer intelligible.[3]
But we must remember that people who deem the _Iliad_ a thing of rags and patches, stitched on, in this case, by some ignoramus of about 540 B.C., are eager to find discrepancies everywhere; while the learned and minute French geographer was equally anxious to find proofs of Homer's accuracy. At all events, if he is right, Nestor does not talk ignorant nonsense.
Geographical and archaeological research produce modifications of opinion, but the critical weathercock veers, less necessarily, with every wind of theory that blows from Germany. Thus Mr. Leaf, in the first edition of his _Iliad_ (vol. i. p. 73), found nothing to prove that the Catalogue "is of late origin." "It was considered a classical work--The Doomsday Book of Greece, at a very early date.... There seems to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor."
Nothing new has been discovered since Mr. Leaf wrote in this orthodox fashion, nothing new has arisen except the studies of M. Bérard, which, if we accept his view, confirm the accuracy of the Catalogue. But, in 1900, Mr. Leaf abandoned his earlier position.
"The whole perspective of the Catalogue," he says, "is entirely different from that of the _Iliad_." Heroes, as Niese remarks, appear in the _Iliad_ who do nothing in that poem; but play their parts "in other portions of the Epic Cycle." The conclusion is that "the Catalogue originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle, and was composed for that portion of it which, as worked up into a separate poem, was called the _Cypria_, and relates the beginning of the tale of Troy, and the mustering of the fleet at Aulis."[4] This contains much debatable matter. What the cycle was before it was "worked up into" separate poems, or whether such a nebulous cycle existed at all, we know not. I must refer the reader to Mr. Allen's essay on the whole subject, which is too condensed to be summarised in briefer space.[5] "The Catalogue was taken by Homer from its time and place in saga to his second Book and to the Troad." I do not quite understand how a long passage in hexameters could be taken from "saga." Mr. Allen's critical remarks on prehistoric Greek topography and territorial divisions, are most valuable; and so is his account of the Dorian and other pretensions which wrought confusion in topographical designations. He has proved, I think, that the Catalogue is a very archaic document, which no later persons were interested in inventing, or would have been able to invent. Beyond that I am unable to go, and we must await the results of excavation on prehistoric sites in Greece. Our information as to the _Cypria_ credits it with no Catalogue of the Achaean ships and men; but it is easy to reply that our accounts are wrong, that the authors spoke of a _Cypria_ made up after the Catalogue was placed in the _Iliad_.
[1] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. 465, 466.
[2] Leaf, Note to _Iliad_, xi. 756; _Iliad_, ii. 615, 617.
[3] Bérard, _Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée_, pp. 108-113.
[4] Leaf, vol. i. p. 86.
[5] _Classical Quarterly_, April 1909.
APPENDIX B
The argument of my book is that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ represent the usages and ideas of a prehistoric society. They are not the ideas and usages of proto-historic and historic Hellas, but of the Achaean invaders, or, at least, of the high-born men and women to whom Homer sang. On the other hand, Mr. Murray, if I succeed in understanding his position, holds that the ideas and usages of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are a kind of mosaic, the result of a long process of "expurgation of Homer." If this view be correct, my whole argument, of course, is builded on the sand. Homer does not represent the ethical and religious beliefs and usages of a moment in the past.
It is therefore necessary to state, with textual citations as full as possible, Mr. Murray's presentation of his case, given, first, in his _Rise of the Greek Epic_, and, later, in one of the Oxford Lectures by several authors, published in _Anthropology and the Classics_. Mr. Murray has very kindly assisted me by explaining points in which I was unable to follow his reasoning. But these explanations prove that we start from assumptions so opposed in their nature that community in conclusions is impossible. Perhaps even mutual intelligence cannot be perfect. Thus my reading of the Epics leads me to the conviction that they were composed in an age which knew nothing of coined money; an age when cattle were the standard of values:--this or that object was worth so many cows. But in Mr. Murray's opinion this standard was preserved in the epics, after it was obsolete in practice, for reasons of stylistic convention. While I suppose our two epics to have been epics at a period very remote, when Achaean society was in its bloom; he holds that there were no epics till the Achaeans and the conquered peoples were intermingled. Earlier, there were only lays, and the silence of our epics as to coined money, for example, is a convention derived from the lays of a time when cows were the measure of value. Each of us, it seems to me, has to assume a kind of miracle. I have to think, and do think, that our epics were composed by a poet to amuse the leisure of an Achaean Court, and also that they were miraculously preserved, whether by writing or in memory, through several changeful centuries. I believe that this occurred because the poems are great harmonious structures, such as only a poet could produce; and because the many changes in society, costume, law, belief, and usage which the successive ages evolved, do not appear in the poems.
Mr. Murray, I think, has also to postulate another kind of miracle. Evolution, in some way which I do not understand, produced our epics out of a mass of floating poetical material. It appears that men are born to hold one view or the other, to believe in one or the other prodigy.
However, in the view which is not mine, stylistic conventions in the later poetry were based on a following of what was no convention in the older poetry, say as to the use of coined money or of cavalry. Now I know no other early national poetry, and no literary epics of the critical ages of Greek and Roman literature, where such convention is employed. Virgil was learned; Virgil knew Homer intimately; yet his Greeks and Trojans use iron weapons, not weapons of bronze; and the Roman buckler, not the Homeric shield.
To take another case, as soon as armorial bearings came into mediaeval Europe, the singers of the _chansons de geste_ introduced them,--regardless of their absence in the earlier lays, which knew no such blazons. No convention of silence arose.
There is only one mention of writing in Homer. The Greek tragedians knew well that writing was, as far as Homer shows, very rare in the heroic age. But some of the heroes and heroines write whenever they have occasion. There is no archaistic convention. As I have shown in _Homer and his Age_, ancient poets and artists had, no more than Shakespeare, our modern habit of attending to "local colour" as historically known to us by research.
Perhaps it may be urged in reply, that early mediaeval epic poets were much less conservative than early Greeks. They altered, for example, the assonant _laisses_ of the early _chansons_, and did them into rhyme, while Greece for epic purposes never deserted the hexameter. But I can give a fair parallel to the Greek non-observance of a convention in the Irish epic cycles.
The poets of the ancient Irish cycle of Fian ought, by the theory of convention, to have made their heroes use war-chariots like the heroes of the elder saga of Cuchullin. But they follow no such convention; their heroes ride or fight on foot, because such was the nature of war in their own later time.
The same reasoning applies throughout. I cannot believe that the makers of our epics, working in the early historic age, omitted mention of cavalry, coined money, periodical games, or anything else known to them, because they found no such matter in more ancient lays concerning and composed in a previous age. We have seen that the old "non-Homeric" epics were, as their fragments prove, full of non-Homeric usages. No "stylistic convention" forbade mention of these usages.
Thus no such stylistic convention--maintained in our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, neglected in the _Cypria, Aethiopis,_ and the rest--can be accepted. In fact, another and a special cause for many of Homer's silences has to be suggested, as we shall see. Once more it is my assumption that our epics were made in the main as we have them, for a peculiar audience, a courtly and knightly audience, known to themselves and their poet as "Achaeans." That they were of unmixed race I do not suppose; these Northern invaders, their chiefs at least, would marry the daughters of the princes of the land. But I assume that our epics were made for them, _while they retained their Northern ideas_; on many points very like the ideas, usages, and beliefs of the heathen Scandinavian settlers in Iceland. It is maintained by Mr. Murray that the ideas of "the conquered races" were very different, and that, as the two peoples mingled, the ideas of the conquered races re-emerged. This is manifestly true. But my view is that Achaean society, courtly society at least, had not adopted the beliefs and usages of the conquered races at the time when our epics, which ignore them, were composed. But these usages and ideas are usual in the fragments of the Cyclic epics on Trojan affairs. No stylistic convention interfered and kept them out. Mr. Murray has to discover a special cause for the presence in the "Cyclic" of much that is absent from our two epics.
The ideas of Mr. Murray, in some passages of his work, appear to be precisely the opposite of my own. In other passages we seem to be on the very point of agreement.
When we are told, in passages to be quoted, that there was in the formation of the _Iliad_, and to a less extent in that of the _Odyssey_, a strong element of reform and expurgation, we ask ourselves--who, in what age, and from what motives, were the reformers and purgers of _what_ pre-existing poetic and legendary materials? Were those materials the property of the "Achaean or Northern" conquerors, or of the pre-existing "conquered races" (to use Mr. Murray's terms); or were the materials a medley derived from both sources? Were the purgers Achaean poets working on materials, at least in part the property of the conquered races? Or was the purgation mainly done by Ionians, that is, by the mixed Greek peoples settled in Asia; peoples certainly retaining many of the ideas of the conquered races which our Homer ignores? Or did "the Achaean or Northern spirit" purge away some things distasteful to that spirit, while the Ionians purged away other things? What the elements more or less purged away are supposed to be, we shall see later. In the passage to which I have referred[1] we find the following statements:--
"The epic tradition of Greece, vast and tangled in its wealth of varied beauty and ugliness, was left by the Homeric poets a much cleaner and colder thing than they found it. In the result, two influences were mainly at work. First, a general humanising of the imagination, the progress of a spirit which, as it loved beauty, hated cruelty and uncleanness. Secondly, a race prejudice. The relation of the Northern and the aboriginal elements in the Homeric poems are involved, when you come to details, in inextricable confusion, but in general the 'Homeric' tone of mind represents more of the Achaean or Northern spirit; the spirit of those scattered strong men who in their various settlements were leading and shaping the Aegean world. The special myths, beliefs, and rites that were characteristic of the conquered races are pruned away or ignored; the hero-worship, the oracles, the magic and witchcraft, the hocus-pocus of purification, all that savours of 'the monstrous regiment of women, the uncanny prowess of dead men, and the baleful confusion between man and God.'
Here I should absolutely agree with Mr. Murray, if I were convinced that "the Northern or Achaean spirit" of Achaean poets was dealing mainly with "the epic tradition" of præ-Achaean Greece. If they were, they would certainly "ignore or prune away" manners and beliefs which were not their own. But I have shown, I think, that between Achaean and Athenian early "Saga" a great gulf was fixed in Homeric times. The Homeric poet dealt with Achaean legend, which could not contain ghost-worship, "hocus-pocus of purification," and so on. Let me here remark that no known later Greek taste objected to the _märchenhaft_, the preposterous element in "Saga." Pindar and the dramatists do not reject it, I have shown, but Homer does in the _Iliad_. Had Homer revelled in it, later Greek taste saw nothing out of keeping here; had no temptation to expurgate Pegasus, or the soul-box of Meleager, or the magical invulnerability of Achilles, or his medicinal spear, or that magical property, the Luck of Troy, the palladium, and so forth. The genius of Homer, not later expurgation, accounts for his reticence.
Next, I seem to discern that "the progress of a spirit which hated cruelty and uncleanness" refers to a period when "Achaeans" and "Pelasgians," long intermingled, were becoming what is called "Hellenic," the people of early historic Greece in the sixth century. What this Hellenic spirit might, if it could, purge away is just the ferocity which is _not_ purged away; the ferocity which mutilates, and, when the deed is not executed, has threatened to mutilate foes slain in open fight; and which denies, or wishes to deny, honourable burial to the dead. On the dead "unseemly things" are wrought, with little or no rebuke from the poet, except in the case of the extreme ferocities of Achilles against Hector and the twelve Trojan captives. Thus Agamemnon "smote Hippolochus to earth, and cut off his arms and neck with the sword, then tossed him like a ball of stone to roll through the throng"; or rather "like the trunk of a tree."[2] In the same way the minor Aias cuts off the head of Imbrios, and throws it like a football "into the scrum."[3] Hector is keen to cut off the head of Patroclus, and stick it on a stake, like the head of the great Montrose.[4] Peneleus decapitates Ilioneus, and waves the head at the Trojans.[5]
Manifestly these ferocities were _de bonne guerre_ in the society to which Homer sang. I conceive that they were hateful to the taste of the historic Hellenic spirit. Could it have expurgated these ferocities it would have done so. But it could not. Other examples might be given. Thus Euphorbus,[6] who dealt the first wound to Patroclus, threatens to cut off and carry home the head of Menelaus. Euphorbus was avenging his brother, slain by Menelaus. Peneleus was avenging Antimachus, his friend. The ferocities are sometimes prompted by personal vengeance. Euphorbus would have kept his word, but the spear of Menelaus pierced his throat. We cannot find expurgation in failure to accomplish a purpose. Hector meant to fix the head of Patroclus on a stake, so Iris tells Achilles,[7] and to give his body to the dogs to devour. Such was warfare as known to Homer; and the intellect of later Greece, which probably abhorred such deeds, expurgated nothing.
Mr. Murray writes[8] that "no other corpse" (except Hector's) "is maltreated in the Iliad." Such treatment was quite deliberately planned by men of both armies, and was also executed in hot blood. I have given examples enough of such maltreatment.
To cruelty we return, and to refusal of burial. It seems to have been quite usual. The notable exception in clemency is Achilles; before his passion came on him he ransomed his captives, and "his soul had shame to despoil the dead Eëtion"; but he burned him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him.[9]
In the Iliad ferocity runs high, in these particulars; the historic hatred of such doings is growing but slowly. "The spirit that hated cruelty" has left the facts where it found them; there is no expurgation of them. As to the Hellenic historic spirit and its hatred of "uncleanness"--_autres temps, autres moeurs_! Homer has no allusions to the survival of savage vices detested by "the Northern spirit." But, granting that the waxing spirit of Hellenism expurgated atrocities committed on the dead (though they stand staring upon us in the _Iliad_), "the Northern or Achaean spirit" is credited by Mr. Murray with "pruning away or ignoring" the characteristic rites, beliefs, and usages of the conquered races.
The earlier the period, the more drastic would be the purification. Achaeans, not yet leavened with "Pelasgian" blood and beliefs, could not celebrate what they confessedly did not practise. In their work no later expurgation could cleanse away that which their work could not contain.
Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth, these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas, most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were, a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.
There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by aspersions of swine's blood I can remember no Northern example.
The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the ghost. "Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied soul," in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of purification by blood.
The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels, originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are somewhat shadowy and remote.
As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland, his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in the _Odyssey._ The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess, Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, in _Beowulf_, with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam, would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in the _Iliad_ we have only the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to but slightly.
Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions "characteristic of the conquered races" in Greece[10] (and characteristic of the historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed Scandinavian epic would be as pure as the _Iliad_. The absence of mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals, purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries, would be quite natural and unaffected.
The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages. Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these things in their manners.
As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually persecuted,[11] we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems, are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example, was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the _Iliad_. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide. So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from Apolline expurgation.
I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray's writings.
EXPURGATION
"The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets ... were mainly responsible for the work of expurgation."
"Homer has cut out" certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and "mutilations of the Hesiodic gods" "for their revoltingness" (p. 122).
"Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing tone of the _Iliad_" (p. 131).
So far the "expurgations" appear to have been done mainly by the Homeric poets themselves "in the middle and later generations." Yet, as to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been the purest of all.
It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way "expurgate" the "Cyclic" epics.
"If the educational use of the _Iliad_ began in Ionia as early as the eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we have been dealing" (p. 133).
Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, the _Iliad_ was a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of purification from which the _Cypria_, for example, and other "Cyclic" poems escaped.
"The Epos" has "its prevailing Achaean tone," owing to "the prestige of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of the Saga and the Bard," and "the partial return to the migratory life" (p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent, the "Cyclic" poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations of Homeric poems leave _them_ alone? Because already selected for recitation?
If the Achaean or Northern spirit, "the clean and lordly Northern spirit," made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to do in the way of purification?
It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. "As the population became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion, re-emerged" (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is un-Homeric and un-Achaean.
Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic populations inserted the superstitions into the _Iliad_ where they had not been previously, and then cut them out again.
It is not easy to understand how stories "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer" "had been expurgated from Homer centuries back" (p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in his _Prometheus_. If Homer or the Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have dealt at all in a story "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer," or for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions, why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?
Then the old questions re-arise, why were the "Cyclic" poems of the heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric recitations at Athens (see "The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer"). Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: "The recitation was established about the end of the sixth century ... so much seems historically clear." (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!) "It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants." Now, as our authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain that they had no good authority. "The Solonian laws and constitution were promulgated in 594 B.C.," says Grote; that was at least eighty years before a date "about the end of the sixth century." The men are far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in the thirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody, not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.
All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died "not easily," if he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if they found such matter in Homer.
Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaic festival.
How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations contributed to the expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, must be stated in Mr. Murray's own words. I may first observe that, in his opinion, "the body of the poem" (the _Iliad_), "even in the latest parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else, something older and more Northern."[12] How, if this be true, the Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!
A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted:
"In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, 'Homer presents to the anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to do with anthropology.' By Homer, of course, Mr. Lang means the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or Olympian.
"But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum, of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those 'beastly devices of the heathen' which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists--if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists; ceremonies of magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-xvorship, ghosts, and anthropomorphic (theriomorphic?) gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as 'good medicine' and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice.
"This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics,--I mean those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect,--by the Orphic literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly, perhaps, by the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.
"Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing the _Iliad_, just as the _Iliad_ here and there shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that point in detail here. Even supposing that the _Cypria,_ as a poem, could definitely be called 'later' than the _Iliad_, it is enough to say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.
"Two arguments will suffice: First, the argument from analogy. Few anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the high, austere, knightly atmosphere of the _Iliad_ as primitive when compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and the ouranian birds; the great mother goddess of Anatolia, the human sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain places, to have no bridge.
"Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.
"Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I tried to say about this in my _Rise of the Greek Epic_, I will restate it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on; and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of "all Ionians,"[13] and afterwards of "all Athenians." The poems were demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a land of semi-savages to the Hellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere slough out of which Hellas rose."
* * * * *
I agree that the "non-Homeric sagas" represent more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought. Homer was not concerned with pre-Hellenic habits of thought; he represents the Hellenes who "possessed Hellas, the land of fair women, and followed Achilles."
I also entirely agree that "the later literary whole" (by which I at least mean Hesiod, the "Cyclic" fragment, and much of Greek tragedy, not to speak of antiquarian learning) "contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion." But the theory that these things were once in, but were purged out of, the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_ still baffles me. If they were usages peculiar to the conquered races, how could they appear in the poetry of the uncontaminated Northern or Achaean conquerors?
How, again, can we say that "the great mass of saga poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century"? Notoriously the "Cyclic" poems, or the legends which were given in those poems, were greatly preferred as subjects of art by the Athenian vase-painters of the sixth century, and by Polygnotus when he decorated the Lesche at Delphi. The stories, I have shown, reached the Middle Ages through Rome and through Graeco-Roman literature, and eclipsed our Homer. To them we owe the unhappy _Troilus and Cressida_ of Shakespeare.
We have no evidence known to me that proves the selection, "at some early time for public recitation," of "two poems," at the solemn four-yearly meeting of "All Ionians" and afterwards of "all Athenians." Mr. Verrall supposes the "Cyclic" poems, as well as our Homer, to have been recited at the Panathenaea. I know no evidence that they were, and none proving that they were not. I am unaware of any reason for which our _Iliad_ should have been specially selected for education in the Ionia of the eighth century, and for public recitation. The reason is the further to seek if the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, when thus selected, "were demonstrably still in a fluid condition"; indeed, while they were still in a fluid condition, I do not know how they could have been deemed so much more choiceworthy than other poems still (I presume) fluidic.
If "the intellect of Greece was focussed upon" _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ while they were still fluidic, but already selected, then the expurgation was due, not to Achaean poets who ignored and pruned away the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, but to _les intellectuels_ of Greece, who (whatever their private opinions might be) saw hero-worship in daily practice; and if they killed any one, were purified by pigs' blood. Hesiod stood high in universal knowledge, was a consecrated authority; if he could be purged, why was he not purged? Because he was not recited? Yet he was part of education, and needed a Bowdler much more than Homer.
The practices and beliefs expurgated from Homer were not "done in a corner" in historic Greece.
So "primitive," so barbaric was the intellect of historic Greece even in the sixth century and in the age of Pericles, and later, in regard to heroic tombs, for example, that the heroic ghosts were supposed to inhabit their sepulchres in the shape of rather harmless snakes, like the _Idhlozi_ of the Zulus. "In Snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb," says Miss Harrison.[14]
Miss Harrison publishes reproductions of works of Greek art from the sixth century (when all ugly things of this kind, we are told, were drastically rejected from the _Odyssey_ and _Iliad_) to the fourth century. We see the dead, a male and a female ghost, receiving offerings. The artist is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chairs of the holy heroes is a huge snake with a man's beard. He is a _human_ snake, the incarnation of the dead man's ghost. This is the belief of the Baronga of Delagoa and of the Zulus.[15]
In a vase, a _lecythus_, of the fifth century, the worshippers surround a tumulus with a phallus-shaped pillar on top. A huge snake occupies the tumulus; he is the ghost's incarnation.[16]
Not in glens of mountainous Arcadia, or in recesses of rural chapels alone, were these things done. The theatre showed sacred tombs; each place of periodical games had its presiding hero; relics were in high request, living men, conquerors or athletes, came to be divinised; at the Eleusinia the initiates saw rites of savage origin; oracles of the dead were publicly consulted; the purification rites went on as law demanded--all publicly, all unrebuked.
Does any one suppose that priapic images like those of the Admiralty Islands were features in Homer's conception of a street in Mycenae or Ilios? These images were sacred in the Athens of Pericles, the Hermae were not like Homer's Hermes. Is it likely that, if the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations found such things as these in Homer, they would cut them out as too naughty to be mentioned, or for some other reason not to be mentioned, at a public festival of men and women familiar with all these things, and seeing in them nothing but good?
It seems unlikely. Moreover, if the Northern or Achaean spirit had ignored or pruned away these things, they could give no trouble to the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations.
When we come to consider examples of expurgation, we may prefer to pass by the odious vices reprobated by the code of Australian savages, but highly popular in historic Greece. They do not occur in our Homer, and I know but one allusion to them in the Icelandic sagas, and that is in a mere impossible taunt about a Bogle. But no one can say that Homer never heard of such things; we might as well say that, because nobody coughs in Homer, no Achaean ever condescended to cough. The profession of Rahab cannot have been unknown, though Homer never mentions it. In short, a high ideal tone is preserved, Homer is not Monsieur Zola; an epic is not a "naturalistic" novel.
When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation might be later inserted. Thus, in _Odyssey_, vii. 54, Alcinous and Arete are "of the self-same parents." Later, a genealogy makes them uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-known _Märchen,_ a tale of No Man's Land, as in his mention of the adelphic marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of Theocritus.[17]
I am following Mr. Murray's examples of expurgation. The spirit of the battles in the _Iliad_ "is chivalrous," he says. "No enemy is ever tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18]
One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever _they_ were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly, on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred a more horrible story--not, of course, because they approved of such proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his sources, in _Märchen_ and chronicles. He followed a French story in Sidney's _Arcadia_, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings" Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a living enemy.
There is a passage in the _Iliad_ (xiii. 573) in which a man, speared from behind through the bowels, "where a wound is most baneful to wretched mortals, writhes about the spear ... for a moment, not for long"; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the line which he renders "he struggled quite a little while, not at all long," to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so, or may not; the fact that the line _is_ a formula, like those of our ballads, makes me incline to think it ancient. The point is not of much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in the _Odyssey_, is a proof that Homer's men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In the _Iliad_ there is no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been treated like Melanthius.
I understand Mr. Murray to argue that the _Iliad_ has been expurgated, but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while the _Odyssey_ (l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray's arguments that such words as _ἄφυκτος_, not "to be escaped," applied to arrows in the _Iliad_, and "bitter" (πικρός) and "groanful" and "not long to be supported" as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows, I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary. _Πικρός_ means "sharp," according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause groans enough; the heroes "do not long support" flesh-wounds from _spears_, but "retire hurt." That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die (iv. 134) when arrow--smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh arrow, "unused before," "whose poison has not been rubbed off." I reply that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would use a new spear in a tournament.
In the _Iliad_, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points. People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone, corrupt human bones by preference.
As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think that it was expurgated from the _Iliad_ by men who let it stand in the Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas of _Iliad_, i. 74-83, who dare not name the cause of Apollo's wrath unless Achilles will guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord's three daughters, in the Iliad.
Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens "would have been rejected from the _Iliad_, not only because human sacrifice was a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an interest in women."[19] As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to Mr. Murray's theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated intervals,[20] the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere, and I am surprised at the remark, "We have no tradition of Minos's death."[21]
The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is a world-wide _Märchen_, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous cannibalism.
Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.[22] It was customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, "a man mad with grief, a man starving and sleepless," a man who knows that Hector intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage, or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not. There was no ritual for such a slaughter, 'and, as a matter of fact, it is crowded into a shamefaced line and a half.' You would expect this sacrifice to have at the very least twenty."[23]
You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.
Much of this theory of expurgation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ seems to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established cult of heroes, should be deemed "ill-omened" at the recitations, in no way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed "well-omened" in the performances of Athenian tragedy.
If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they were not there, _les intellectuels_ of Athens could not expurgate them.
[1] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[2] _Iliad_, xi. 145-147.
[3] xiii. 202-204.
[4] xviii. 176-177.
[5] xiv. 496-505.
[6] xvii. 39.
[7] xviii. 175-177, xvii. 126.
[8] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
[9] _Iliad_, vi. 416-419.
[10] _R. G. E._ p. 134.
[11] _R. G. E._ pp. 245-246.
[12] _R. G. E._ p. 173.
[13] This archetype, Mr. Murray has just said, is "unknown."
[14] _Prolegg. to Study of Greek Religion_, 1903, p. 329.
[15] _Ibid_. pp. 327, 328.
[16] _Ibid_. p. 329.
[17] _R. G. E._ pp. 116, 117.
[18] Ajax, 1031. Andromache, 399.
[19] _R. G. E._ p. 123.
[20] _Ibid_. p. 127.
[21] See Roscher's _Lexikon_, s.v. Minos.
[22] _R. G. E._ pp. 130, 131.
[23] _R. G. E._ p. 131.
THE ALLEGED ATHENIAN RECENSION OF HOMER
Wolf could not but confess that the _Iliad_, as we possess it, is an unity, better or worse; is a literary structure. How, then, did it come to be what it is, if it were the work of several authors in several ages? Wolf replies, "History speaks! The voice of all antiquity, and, on the whole, the consent of all report bears witness that Pisistratus was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them."[1]
This amazing statement shows that there are classical scholars who mean, when they speak of "History," something that no historical student means when he uses the same term. About any dealings by Pisistratus with Homer, history is mute as the grave. Not only is there no record--that is, no contemporary public inscription--testifying that Pisistratus or any other person "first had the Homeric poems arranged and committed to writing," there is not even a hint of a reference to any tradition of this event, in the great Historians of the following century, Herodotus and Thucydides, none in Aristotle, none in Ephorus (in the fourth century B.C.), none in the remains of Aristarchus and other famous Alexandrian grammarians. History is silent even as to a rumour. We know that Dieuchidas, a Megarian historian of the fourth century, said something about its being Solon rather than Pisistratus who did something in connection with Homer. We know this from a mutilated passage in an author of the third century, Diogenes Laertius. That is all.[2] Tradition from the time of Pisistratus himself to that of Cicero speaks no articulate and intelligible word as to what, according to Wolf, the voice of all antiquity declares. When we come after five centuries of historic silence to Cicero, we do not find him agreeing with Wolf that Pisistratus first had the poems of Homer committed to writing, but saying that "he is said" (by whom?) "to have been the first to have arranged, in their present order, the books of Homer, previously in disarray?"[3]
Cicero speaks only of what "is said." The unvouched for report mentioned by Cicero half a milennium after the date of Pisistratus is not history, of course; is not evidence. Long before Cicero, in the fourth century, Ephorus and Heraclides Ponticus told other stories about the coming of Homer to Sparta, stories equally unhistorical. The author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue, _Hipparchus_, represented the second son of Pisistratus as the first to bring Homer to Attica, and to regulate Homeric recitations. None of these writers stands for History, none of them agrees with another; they had no historical knowledge of whatever facts there may have been.
We are in presence (1) of variants of a tradition doubtless founded on fact, namely, that at an unknown date an Act was passed in Athens regulating the recitations of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival; by some accounts an Act limiting the recitations to "Homeric" poetry alone; and (2) of a legend that Pisistratus, or his second son, collected and arranged in a certain order the Homeric poems. The earliest and only good evidence, says Mr. Monro, with regard to the recitation of Homer at Athens, is that of two orators two centuries later than Pisistratus, Lycurgus and Isocrates. The former said in a speech "Our fathers thought Homer such a good poet that they made a law for him alone among poets that his poems should be recited by rhapsodists at every quinquennial holding of the Panathenaea."[4] No date is given, but Lycurgus must apparently be thinking of a date prior to Tyrtaeus, as we shall see later. When Lycurgus says that the poems of Homer alone were to be recited at the festival, he is of so late a date that he probably means the Iliad and Odyssey. If the Act were made in Solon's time, "Homer" may conceivably include all heroic epic poetry. We know nothing about it.
Isocrates[5] says that the ancestors of the Athenians "desired to make Homer's art honoured, both in contests of music (i.e. of the reciters) and in the education of the young" (Monro, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 15). Still later, in a passage with an important lacuna, Diogenes Laertius says that Solon passed a law regulating the recitations,[6] the very law which is attributed to Hipparchus by the author of the Dialogue of that name.[7] In Sicyon also, in the sixth century, there were recitations of Homer by competing rhapsodists; they were put down by the tyrant Cleisthenes.[8]
Mr. Monro says that for the existence of an Athenian law about Homeric recitations, whatever the date of that law may have been, we have historical testimony. Indeed, if there were no such law, even rhetoricans of the fourth century could scarcely tell the Athenians that such a law existed. But as to its date and scope, and the name of the statesman who passed it, if any exact information had existed, perhaps there might have been some agreement among the persons who speak of it. If nothing like a History of Literature existed before the fourth century, we can expect no information. If it did exist, it was of no value to Ephorus, Heracleides, and the author of the _Hipparchus_. They are all at odds.
Mr. Monro says, as every man trained in historical criticism must say, "modern scholars have tried to harmonise these notices, and to assign to (the Spartan) Lycurgus (named by Ephorus), Solon (named by Diogenes Laertius)," Pisistratus, and Hipparchus their several shares in the service done to Homer. "This would be legitimate if there were reason to regard any of the notices as historical. But, in fact, they are merely mythical anecdotes, supplemented by the guesses of scholars."[9] Whatever Homeric critics may think, they will find no trained historian to dissent from Mr. Munro on those points.
_Historia silet_! History is mute. We only know that from an uncertain period there were quinquennial recitations of "Homer," and Homer alone, at Athens, and that "Homer" was used in education. Beyond that all is "guesses of scholars." These guesses vary according to the taste and fancy of the learned.
In this conclusion every one who is accustomed to historical criticism will agree with Mr. Monro. Nothing can be made out of late and contradictory statements; nothing beyond the fact that "Homer" (whatever may be meant by "Homer") was quinquennially recited, under regulations, at Athens, and entered into public education.
Mr. A. W. Verrall, however, says: "In general, the very last thing that we get from disputants on either side is an exact construction and estimation of what, truly or falsely, is recorded about the history of Homer." Mr. Verrall writes thus in a _Quarterly_ review of Mr. Murray's _Rise of the Greek Epic_, and of my _Homer and his Age_.
The questions as to what is "recorded" about "the history of Homer," I had treated in my _Homer and the Epic_ (pp. 35, 38, 67-70), examining the evidence, such as it is, and the opinions of Wolf, Ritschl, and others; and siding with Mr. Monro (I may add, with Blass, Meyer, Nutzhorn, Mr. T. W. Allen, and many others). In _Homer and his Age_ (pp. 46-50), I again went over the old ground, in reference to Mr. Leaf's changes of opinion.
Mr. Verrall writes:[10] "The texts, as we have said, are not treated fairly." Now really the texts are treated as the historian treats all texts that come into his province. The dates of the alleged events are set beside the dates of the texts concerning them; the texts are remote, contradictory, and unevidential; the best historians, and the historian who most carefully examined the popular traditions concerning Pisistratus and his sons, namely, Thucydides, say nothing about the alleged events.
Mr. Verrall also writes: "The record, such as it is, is hardly ever correctly represented. The most punctilious of scholars (Grote, for example) are in this matter not to be trusted."[11]
These are severe reproaches! Mr. Monro is not mentioned: are any of his remarks unfair and untrust-worthy?
Mr. Verrall says: "We cannot but think that the ancient record about the origin of Homer suffers unfairly from certain prepossessions which all would disclaim, but which are more easily disclaimed than abandoned."
For me, I frankly confess my own prepossessions, but consciousness of his bias is the safeguard of the historian; it compels him to make certain that he adds nothing to and takes nothing from what Mr. Verrall calls "the ancient record," and _I_ call "the various ancient legends." Mr. Verrall insists that "internal evidence about the history of a book, if not controlled by record, is liable to infinitely elastic interpretation." Certainly, but there is no possibility of "control by record" in the case of the history of the Homeric poems.
No historian can agree with Mr. Verrall that "as a matter of record and apart from inference or hypothesis, this Homer of ours ... appears as an artificial product of scholarship, the result of a critical process."[12] It is he who insists on the technical term "record"; it is not pedantic, therefore, to reply that "record" there is none. By "record" Mr. Verrall seems to mean, as regards the "artificial product of scholarship," a statement of opinion made five centuries after the alleged events.
The first testimony, or "record," cited by Mr. Verrall has nothing to say about our Homer as "an artificial product of scholarship." It deals merely with the legalised recitation of Homeric poetry, and of that poetry alone, at the Panathenaea. The text is that which Mr. Monro calls "the earliest evidence," "that of the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates," in the fourth century.
That is good evidence. Lycurgus could not speak to the Athenians of a law which, to their knowledge, did not exist. Lycurgus, in fact, had been cajoling his Athenian audience with a set of fables about their ancestors, whose patriotism and valour in _pre-Homeric times_ he applauds. Did not Erechtheus in a war with Thrace sacrifice his own daughter in obedience to an oracle, and then defeat the invaders! For this noble action Lycurgus cites a play by Euripides, _The Erechtheus_!
Lycurgus next says that Athens made a law that the poems of Homer alone should be recited at the Panathenaea; and that, encouraged by the patriotism ascribed by the poet to Hector, the Athenians, in the Persian affair, were ready to die, not for their city only, but for all Hellas. Such men were the Athenians, in public and private life: then comes the story of the Spartans borrowing Tyrtaeus from Athens, and their approval of a Tyrtaean poem adapted in part from _Iliad_, xxii. 71 ff.
That is all. Mr. Verrall writes: "By Lycurgus this whole educational movement, and the adoption of Homer as the basis of it, is attributed to the Athenians as a people...." What Mr. Verrall says about "a revolution in the method of education not less momentous than any movement in history,"[13] has, I think, but scanty warrant in the actual words of Lycurgus. It is Mr. Verrall, not Lycurgus, who compares the effect of Homer on Athens with the effect ("notorious," as he too truly says) of the Bible upon Scotland. All this about an educational movement, however true it may be, is, I fear, "inference and hypothesis" of Mr. Verrall's own. Lycurgus speaks of learning courageous patriotism from Homer, all the rest we have to assume; at least I cannot find it in Lycurgus.
Mr. Verrall has next to meet the charge of contradictions among the late writers who attribute to Solon, Pisistratus, and _Hipparchus_ the law about recitations at the Panathenaea. But these texts, except the pseudo-Platonic _Hipparchus_, say nothing about Homer as "an artificial product of scholarship." Mr. Verrall declares that Lycurgus and the _Hipparchus_ say nothing about the "arrangement" of the poems, "they speak merely of adoption and compilation."[14] But Lycurgus says nothing about compilation, the Hipparchus says nothing about compilation.
The _Hipparchus_ says, what Lycurgus does not say, "that _Hipparchus_, son of Pisistratus, first brought the poems of Homer to Attica, and that he obliged the rhapsodists at the Panathenaic festival to recite consecutively, so that the people might hear entire poems, and not merely passages chosen at the will of the reciter."[15]
Not a word about "compilation." The Hipparchus falls into all the errors regarding the history of the Pisistradae that are pointed out by Thucydides.[16] Mr. Verrall is not lucky, he chooses a very erroneous anonymous author, and makes him speak of "compilation," which I do not see that he mentions, and calls his "no late or dubious authority."[17]
Next, the _Hipparchus_ attributes to a man who might have been Solon's great-grandson the law which Diogenes Laertius attributes to Solon. Mr. Verrall palliates the contradictions in a curious way. "These ascriptions have presumably the same measure of truth as the connecting of the Reformation now with one and now writh another of the princes or statesmen of the sixteenth century."[18]
I do not know what historian connects the Reformation with one statesman or prince and with one only. But the texts of Mr. Verrall attribute not a religious and political movement dating, in England, from about 1370 to--?, but a single legislative Act, to several statesmen of about four generations. They are not speaking of a prolonged "educational movement," but of one legislative Act,--about which they really know no particulars.
The correct analogy to this Act is the authorisation of a translation of the Bible in England. No historian attributes that feat to any prince but gentle King Jamie: none says that it was due to Henry VIII., Edward VI., or Elizabeth. The historian cannot assume that when Diogenes Laertius attributes the law on recitations to Solon, and the _Hipparchus_ attributes it to the son of Pisistratus, both authorities mean only that a whole educational movement occurred in the sixth century. The existence of primary education in the Athens of the seventh and sixth centuries is proved by the multitude of _inscribed_ vases with paintings of Homeric, Cyclic, and Attic legends; but Diogenes and the _Hipparchus_ are speaking variously about a single legislative enactment.
Mr. Verrall next supposes that the "Homer" then recited and taught at Athens was probably the whole "Cycle" of Cyclic poems.[19] This question he must settle with Mr. Murray, who, we have seen, says that the poetry selected for recitation at the Panathenaea was none but the still fluid lays of which, as I understand, our two epics are the final result; while the Cyclic poems were rejected.
[1] _Prolegomena_, 2nd edition, 1859, p. 85.
[2] See _Homer and his Age_, pp. 44-50.
[3] _De Oratore_, iii. 34.
[4] _Leocr_. p. 209.
[5] _Panegyr_. c. 42.
[6] Diog. Laert. _Solon_, i. 57.
[7] See Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 393. 397.
[8] _Herodotus_, v. 67.
[9] _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 27
[10] _Quarterly Review_, July 1908, p. 76.
[11] _Ibid._ p. 53.
[12] _Quarterly Review_, July 1908, p. 54.
[13] _Quarterly Review_, July 1908, p. 55.
[14] _Ibid_. p. 60.
[15] _Hipparch_, p. 228 B.
[16] Thucydides, vi. 57-59; Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 393.
[17] _Quarterly Review_, p. 58.
[18] _Ibid_. p. 58.
[19] _Quarterly Review_, p. 60.
APPENDIX D
THE LOST EPICS AND THE HOMERIC EPICS (_WIEDERHOLUNGEN_)
In Chapter XVIII., on Homer and the "Cyclic" Poems, I fear that I have not succeeded in understanding Mr. Murray's view of the subject. The fault of misapprehension is not perhaps entirely without excuse. Generally speaking, I give the erroneous impression that Mr. Murray thinks the _Iliad later_ than what are usually called the "Cyclic" poems on the themes connected with Troy. He certainly says that passages in the Iliad "seem to be derived from the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis...."[1]
He also says: "In its actual working up, however, our _Iliad_ has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term." Moreover, "we happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships[2] and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis--the so-called _Cypria_ or Cyprian verses. Our Catalogue has in all probability been taken from there."[3] Here we are told that our Iliad derives some passages and the Catalogue from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, and from several other named epics, "the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis," while, "in actual working up, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles...." It was natural that, on hearing how the Iliad borrowed from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, I should think that the _Cypria_ was regarded as an old chronicle poem _complete in itself_ before it was borrowed from by the _Iliad_. The chronicle poem of events so mythical and remote could not resemble a monastic chronicle in receiving additions from contemporary history. This remark also applies to the other poems with names, _Sack of Ilion,_ and so on, and with contents which must be definitely known, if it be known that the _Iliad_ borrowed from them, or seems to have borrowed from them. One could not but be convinced, then, that these old _books_ which lent, were supposed to be earlier finished than the book, the _Iliad,_ which borrowed from them. But Mr. Murray also said, and here the prospect wavers: "The truth is that these various books or masses of tradition were growing up side by side for centuries. All the great books were growing up together, and passages could be repeated from any one to any other."[4]
Now a _book_ is one thing--a book with a name, such as _Cypria_, is not equivalent to "a mass of tradition," which is another thing. To take an example, we have _The Wallace_ of Blind Harry (_circ_. 1460), a book about as long as the _Odyssey_. Harry's materials were "a mass of tradition," including, it is believed, popular ballads, concerning events then remote by a century and a half. We cannot call the mass of tradition "a _book_ which was growing up"; nor can we call the mass of tradition about the Graeco-Trojan affairs before the tenth year of the siege, _a book_. There is no _book_ till the _Cypria_ is made, and the _Cypria_ cannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on the _mass of tradition_ is not borrowing from a _book,_ any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, is another question). Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. But if a poem, with a definite name and a definite scope, the _Iliad_, borrow passages from another poem with a definite scope and name, the _Cypria_ or others, then the poem that lends is the earlier, and the poem that borrows is the later. It was the use by Mr. Murray of these definite names of poems, _Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis_, and so on, with his assertion that another book, the _Iliad_, borrows passages from them, which led me to suppose that the lending poems were, in his opinion, _complete_ (in one form or another) when the _Iliad_ borrowed from them. Here I misinterpreted him.
Had Mr. Murray written: "Other passages," in the _Iliad_, "seem to be derived from the masses of tradition about matters previous to and later than the opening and end of the _Iliad_--masses of tradition which in time became the topics of the _Cypria_, the _Little Iliad_, the _Aethiopis_," then I should have understood and agreed with him. The true view of the case, Mr. Murray's own view, seems to be this: there might be actual Greek books (probably not definitely _named_ till a later age), and these books might, like the _Chanson de Roland_, be _remaniés_; might be modernised, and might receive additions; and another book, that which we call the _Iliad_, might exist, and, like the _Chanson de Roland_ (in the _Roncevaux_ poem) might receive additions, the facts, in some cases, being taken from the other books, which were undergoing similar vicissitudes.
This is not my own view of what occurred, but it is a thinkable state of things, and I regret that I did not understand Mr. Murray's position.
At the same time, if one found in a _chanson_ of the thirteenth century matter borrowed from the conclusion of _Roncevaux_ (the _remaniement_ of the _Chanson de Roland_), one could not say that it was borrowed from _Roland_, a substantive earlier poem, in a metre not that of _Roncevaux_.
There is a sense in which all early Greek epics might be said to borrow passages from each other. The statement would, however, I think, be misleading. The fact would be more correctly expressed by saying that the epics probably (like our own traditional ballads certainly) employ a common set of formulae to express habitual and often repeated actions and events--dawn, night-fall, feasts, preparations of food, arming, arraying a host, greeting a guest, falling in battle, and other constantly recurring circumstances.
"They hadna sailed a league, a league, A league but barely three."
"They hadna walked in the bonny greenwood, Na an hour but barely are."
The formula for the death of lovers--
"The one was buried in Mary kirk, The other in Mary quire," etc.,
is of constant recurrence.
The murderer always
"takes out a little penknife That hung low by his gare,"
or--
"Lifts up a gilt dagger Hung low down by his knee."
The mother or lady, awaiting her son or lover, always
"Looks over tower and town,"
or--
"Looks over Castle Doune."
After a death it is always
"Bells were rung and mass was sung."
"'A grave, a grave,' Lord Bernard cryd, 'To put these lovers in.'"
"'A bed, a bed,' Clark Saunders cried, 'A bed for you and me.'"
Motherwell, who wrote without Homer in his mind, seems to state the case of the ballads very clearly. "There is not an action, not an occurrence of any sort, but what has its appropriate phraseology; and to enumerate all these would, in effect, be to give the principal portion of all our ancient ballads. For in all cases where there is an identity of interest, of circumstance, of action, each ballad varies not from the established mode of clothing these in language.... They were the general outlines of every class of human incidents...."
Motherwell adds that "something of the same sort, though in a less marked degree, may be discovered in the construction of the longer metrical romances."[5] When we look at Book viii. of the _Iliad_, we see that, in Mr. Leaf's words, "it has undoubtedly great spirit and movement," though "nearly one-third" of the lines "are found again in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--sometimes with a slight difference."
For reasons connected with the study of ballad poetry I have made some imitations of the traditional ballads, and find that, though the stories I tell are new, yet they abound in ballad formulae: indeed, a ballad, if it is to resemble the traditional sort, cannot be made on other principles. Ancient Greek epic poetry, intended, like the ballads, to be recited, not to be read, preserved the old popular and traditional convention. Critics quarrel as to the parts of the epic in which the lines are "original" and the parts in which they are "borrowed." Of many of them we may say that they are neither borrowed nor original, but are parcels of the common epic stock.
I lately met with a curious example of the critical method of treating Homer applied in certain criticisms of Scottish ballads. One ballad, "Auld Maitland," was distributed, by the critic, between Hogg and Scott. In certain stanzas he found _Wiederholungen_ of lines in the English ballad of "Chevy Chase," and of others in Herd's version of "Otterburne" (1776). The verses in "Auld Maitland" which presented _these Wiederholungen_ were speculatively assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd; because, in a confessed interpolation by him of two lines, where only half a stanza was received from the recitation of "Auld Maitland," the words "Remember Percy" occur. In "Chevy Chase" we have "But trust me, Percy." Hogg was following "Chevy Chase." But in "Auld Maitland" we read, "King Edward rode, King Edward ran"; while in "Jamie Telfer" we have "The Scotts they rode, the Scotts they ran." Now _that_ line occurs in Scott's, and did not occur in Hogg's version of "Jamie Telfer." Moreover, Scott himself, the critic believes, wrote the part of "Jamie Telfer" where the Scotts ride and run. "If Hogg is responsible for the insertion of this line" ("King Edward rode, King Edward ran"), "he must have borrowed it from "Edom of Gordon," where we have "Sum they rode, and sum they ran."
_He must have borrowed it_! How like is all this to the higher criticism of Homeric _Wiederholungen_! In fact, ballad poetry and Homeric poetry have stocks of formulae open to every maker. Not to use them would be not to play the game.
Thus the criticism went on, and Scott's hand was detected exactly as Hogg's had been, by the occurrence, in "Auld Maitland," of ballad-formulae which also appear in ballads edited by Scott.
Enfin, "Auld Maitland" was declared to be, in the critic's opinion, in origin a composition of Hogg's, which he tried to palm off on Scott as traditional. Scott detected Hogg, entered into the plot, wrote stanzas and lines into the ballad, and palmed it off on the public.[6]
The critic happened not to know (or did not mention) the history of how the ballad was first heard by Laidlaw in the mouth of a servant girl; and how Laidlaw got a version in manuscript from Hogg, who heard a recitation by his uncle, Will o' Phawhope. The critic had never seen the extant original MS. sent by Hogg to Laidlaw, and given by Laidlaw to Scott. He had never, of course, collated that manuscript with the copy published by Scott. When we make the collation, we find that Scott neither rejected nor added a single stanza; that he made a necessary and successful emendation in one line; and that the few small verbal differences between Hogg's MS. and Scott's printed ballad may be accounted for by the fact that the copy printed from was that received from a recitation by Hogg's mother.
Thus the higher criticism, working on lines recognised as orthodox in Homeric circles, was absolutely erroneous from beginning to end. The critic was acute, ingenious, even brilliant, but he had scanty knowledge of the facts in the case. He had not consulted certain printed books germane to the matter; he had not consulted the ballad-manuscripts at Abbotsford, and the manuscript letters.
In Homeric criticism, alas! we have not the letters and manuscripts of the poet. But it is clear from the case of "Auld Maitland" that, in the absence of facts, our motto, in conjecture, should be--_Gang warily!_
[1] _R. G. E._ p. 165.
[2] As has been said, I am aware of no evidence for this statement.
[3] _R. G. E._ p. 164.
[4] _R. G. E._ p. 163.
[5] See Motherwell's essay on "The Origin and History of Scottish Ballad Literature," in his _Ancient and Modern Minstrelsy_.
[6] _Further Essays on the Border Ballads_. By Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. Fitzwilliam Elliot. 1910.
INDEX
(Figures in italics signify notes, r.--referred to)
Abantes of Euboea, 14, 143. Abrahams, Miss E., cited on early Greek female costume, 87, 89, 90, 92. Achaean culture, quality of, 3-4, 7; architecture, 42; Homeric Epics the fruit of, 221; Northern character of, 262 _et sqq_. Achaeans, the, 2; probable conquests of, in Greece and Crete, 10-2, 13-4, 16; character of their invasion, 33; domestic life of, 37, 41-4; siege operations of, 47; in battle, 52-4; not under a vow during siege of Troy, 132. Achaeus, 139. Achilles, mutiny of, 24-5; shield of, 29; Wrath of, 35, 195, 202, 246-7; love of, for his mother, 36, 239, 247-8; relations of, with Agamemnon, 38, 54, 122, 123, 131, 195, 234, 235, 237-43, 247; relations of, with Hector, 45-6, 277, 279; and Patroclus, 45, 54, 105, 111, 123, 236, 239-42, 244, 248-9; merciful qualities of, 46, 47, 265; vengeance of, on Achaeans, 54, 235-43; quoted on death, 106; cult of, 126; tradition of, and Thersites, 133, 180-1; Homeric tradition and characterisation of, 167, 168, 169, 246-50; tradition of, in _Cypria_, 190, 209, 211; spear of, 205, 209; tradition of, in _Aethiopis_, 212-4; in _Iliou Persis_, 217; armour of, 225, 244-5; meeting of, and Aeneas, 251; r., 18, 28, 30, 98, 132, 163, 193. Acusilaus, 173. Adrastus, 17, 126, 158. Aegean culture, 2; arrival of, in Thessaly, 11; recollection of, in Homeric days, 20, 33; architecture, 42; armour and weapons, 48-9, 60-1; iron not used for weapons in, 96; vases, 97; jewellery, 99; burial customs, 106-7; traces of hero-worship in, (?) 113; religion, 116, 117; gold cups of Vaphio, 132. Aegeus, legends of, 175. Aegina, relics found in, 145-6. Aegisthus, warned by the gods, 37, 123. Aeneas, represents the "Orleans branch" at Troy, 17, 251; prominence of, in _Iliou Persis_, 216; protected by Apollo, 232. Aepytus, grave of, 109. Aeschylus, mentions purification by swine's blood, 29, 134-45; traditions used by, 188, 270; r., 37, 39. Aethra, un-Homeric traditions of, 155, 214-6. Agamemnon, the Over Lord, 15; character of, 24, 248, 250; relations of, with Achilles, 24-5, 38, 54, 95, 122, 123, 131, 234, 235, 237-43, 247; brings home Cassandra, 43; ferocity of, 46, 51-2, 265; proclaims purification, 133; Ionian hostility to, 160; un-Homeric traditions of, 142, 190, 192, 195, 202, 208, 210, 279; his camp wall, 227-30; arming of, 251; r., 102, 127, 230. Agrios, late story of, 180-1. Aias, quoted on blood-price, 29; shield and armour of, 31, 70-1; relations of, with Hector, 46, 53, 54. 185, 238; Ionian partiality for, 160, 189, 202; reference to, in Quintus Smyrnaeus, 192; cult of, 213; suicide of, 163, 216. Aietes, legends of, 165, 167, 174-5, 177; land of, variously located, 178-9. Alcinous, 42, 43. Allen, T. W., _197_, _201_, 258-9, 284. Althaea, 34, 36, 169. Amphimachus, 184, 185. Andromache, 34, 36, 45. Antenor, 43, 161. Antinous, shooting of, 101-2. Antiope, 174. Aphrodite, intrigues of, 43, 122; her scratched hand, 86, 90-1, 232-3; relations of, with Paris and Helen, 205-7; r., 211. Apollo, at siege of Troy, 47, 54; omniscient, 125; temple of, at Delphi, 130; purification of, 133, 268; defrauded, 102. Apollonius Rhodius, 20, 179. Archery, 49 50, 53, 55. Arctinus, 200, 212, 215. Areithous, tomb of, 109. Ares, Hymn to, 27; character of, 28; and Aphrodite, 40; speared by Athene, 232, 233; doings of, perplexing, 251. Argo, voyage of the, 164-5, 178-9. Ariadne, 88; dress of, in art, _94_, 95; and the Theseus legend, 154, 150, 212. Aristarchus, 281. Aristeia of Idomeneus, 251. Aristotle, cited on the poetic quality of the _Iliad_, 201-2; r., 281. Armour and Weapons, the Homeric, 48-9, 60-1, 65-80. Art. _See_ Aegean. Artemis, representations of, 115; Homeric conception of, 115-6; Orthia, rites of, 117; of Brauron, resemblance of, to Nemesis of Rhamnus, 207; connection between, and sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 210. Arthurian Romances referred to, 10, 12, 21, 24, 164, 182. Asa, cremation of, 108. Asius, 17, 231. Astyanax, murder of, 46, 216. Athamas, legends of, 164-5. Athene, guides the arrow of Pandarus, 76; costume of, in art, 83, 89-90; visits Nestor, 128-9; temples of, 130-1; patroness of Troy, 124; jealous, 162, 205-6; offended with the Achaeans, 216; gift of, to Diomedes, 232-3; abets the Trojans, 238; doings of, perplexing, 251; r., 36, 43, 121, 136. Athenian Recension, the alleged, 270-1, 273, 274-6, 280, 282, 284, 287-8. Athenians, genealogy of, according to Pausanias, 137-40; difference between, and Achaeans, 141; preferred Ionian traditions, 202. See Attica. Athens, would-be refuge of Achaean princes, 139, 160. Atridae, the, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 208. Attica, had no part in Achaean history, 23, 141-2; potters of, 146; gold workers, 147; legends and traditions of, 154-6, 157, 158-60, 202. Auge, grave of, 109. "Auld Maitland," criticism on, criticised, 293-4.
Bannockburn, battle of, cited, 57. Bellerophon, 17, 18, 161, 167, 168-9, 171, 173, 176. _Beowulf_, cited, 37, 105-6, 163, 203, 253, 267. Bérard, M., on the use of iron in early days, 98; on the topography of the Catalogue, 257-8. Bethe, Dr. Erich, his attempt to trace "tribal history," 183-5. Bird Myths, 157. _Bitter Withy, The_, Ballad of, 121. Blind Harry, his _Wallace_, cited, 203, 290. Blood-price, the, 29. Bounos, 174, 175. Brauronia, the, 117. Bride-price, custom of, 38-40. Briseis, Wrath of Achilles over, 195. 235, 242, 246-7; r., 36, Britain, method of war in early, 48. Bronze Age, the 3-4, 5, 107; the overlap, 96-104. _Brus_, the, 203. Brynhild, 34. Burial, methods of, in Minoan Age, 3; in Homeric Age, 4, 108-12; in Dipylon Age, 5; cremation recorded throughout the _Iliad_, 105-6; Aegean methods, 106-7; Jewish, 107-8; in Attic art, 147.
Calchas, prophecy of, 208-9; timidity, of, 210, 279. Calydonian Boar, Hunt of, 163, 166. Carians, the, 12, _13_, 17; civilisation and intermarriages of, 143-4. Cassandra, 43. Castor, un-Homeric legends of, 207-8, 215. Catalogue of the Ships, 14-5, 16, 218-9, 257-9, 289. Cauer, Herr, cited on uses of bronze and iron, 97, 98. Cerberus, 136. _Chansons de Geste_, cited, 10, 13, 21, 24, 26, 163, 182, 253, 255, 261; _Chanson de Roland_, 36, 203, 253, 254, 291; _Chancun de Willame, La_, 80, 255. Chariots, uses of, in Homeric war, 51, 52, 54-6, 58, 59, 69-70, 80. Charlemagne, romances of, 10, 12, 24, 26, 164, 166, 182. Chaucer, 35, 36. Cheiron the Centaur, 205. Chimaera, the, 169, 267. Chitons, tearing of, 47; controversy over period and style of 60-5; worn by women, 90, 91. _See also under_ Costume. Chlaina. _See_ Costume. Chryseis, 129, 210, 211. Chryses, 129, 130. Cicero, cited on the connection between Pisistratus and the Homeric poems, 282. Circe, story of her birth, 177; home of, variously located, 178-9; r., 42, 182. Cleisthenes, 126. Clemens Alexandrinus, 173. Clytaemnestra, 30; frailty of, 35, 123; reputed foster-mother of Iphigeneia, 210. Cnossos, palace of, 12, 16, 31, 101, 148. Codrids, the, 23. Colophon, horsemen of, 56. Corinth, legendary conncction of, with Argo, 173-6. Corinthus, 174, 175. Costume, "Late Minoan," 2; Homeric, 4; Third and Fourth Ages, 5; men's, 60-5, 68, 75; women's, 61, 74, 81-95. Cremation. _See under_ Burial. Crete, Minoan art in, 2, 20; Achaean settlement in, 12; the "true Cretans," 13; a dependency of Greek mainland, 15, 16; prehistoric, 272-3. Cyclic Poems, the, different in character and style from Homeric poems, 6-9, 46, 111, 133, 143, 150, 163, 168, 169-70, 187, 218-21, 263, 268; attitude of, towards Over Lord, 26-7; (_Little Iliad_, 66, 202, 214-5, 219); reference in, to sons of Theseus, 154; pretensions of, 160; story of Thersites in, 181-2 (_Cypria_, the, analysis of, 188-93, 198-212; date uncertain 195-6, 269, 272; the Catalogue, 258-9); what the poems are, 197; date of material and treatment, ?, 198, 199; writers of, mere imitators, 200; the Aethiopis, 212-4, 219; the Iliou Persis, 215-7, 219; relation of, and Homeric Poems according to Mr. Murray, 218-21, 289-91; not expurgated, 269, 270; legends of, preferred as subjects of art, 274; were they recited at Athens?, 288. Cyclops, the, 18. Cymri, wars of, 164. Cypassis. See Costume. Cypria. See Cyclic Poems. Cyprus, Phoenicians in, 20.
Danaans, the, 51. Dawkins, R. M., cited on Greek early female costume, 85, 87, 88, _90_, 94. Deidameia, 209. Deiphobus carried out of the fight, 231. Demeter, Hymn to, 117; mention of, in _Odyssey_, 118; mysteries of, 267. Demodocus, songs of, 30, 38, 124; his tale of the Wooden Horse, 215-6. Demophon, 154, 215. Dictys Cretensis, anti-Homeric traditions accepted by, 9, 190-3, 195, 196, 209, 211, 217. Dieuchidas, cited on connection of Solon and Homer, 281. Diogenes Laertius cited on Solon and the Athenian recitations, 282, 283, 287. Diomede, promises a sacrifice to Athene, 129; Ionian hostility to, 160; takes up the feud of Thersites, 180-1, 213; genealogy of, 181; conflicting traditions of, 190, 191, 193, 195, 231-3; the exchange of shields, 252; r., 15, 18, 46, 52, 158, 238. Dione, cited on the wounding of Hades, 136. Dionysus, traditions and rites of, 118-9; Homer's contempt for, 120; r., 231, 232, 267. Dipylon culture, characteristics of, 4-5, 147; female costume, 81-5; view of, as to future life, 111. Dolon, 230. Dümmler, Ferdinand cited on Hector's connection with Boeotia, 183.
Eëtion, buried in his armour, 47, 112, 248, 265. Egypt, relations between, and Crete, 3; known to Homer, 18-9. Eleusis, Mysteries of, 117, 120, 133, 275. Elpenor, burial of, 106, 112. Ephorus, 281, 282, 283. Ephyre, Eumelian tradition of, 171, 174-5. Epicaste, 34. Epicharmus attacks the character of Odysseus, 188-9. Epopeus, 174, 175. Erechtheus, worship of, 117, 214; marriage of his daughter, 139; tradition of, according to Euripides, 285-6. Eriphyle, 34. Eris, 205. Eteocles, 31, 158, 159. Eumaeus, kidnapped by Phoenicians, 19, 30; belts his chiton, 62; piety of, 124; r., 32, 103. Eumelus, methods and reputed works of, 170-9, 187, 219, 273. Euphorbus, his corslet, 73, 74-5; would have mutilated Menelaus, 265. Euripides, cited on the fate of Hector, 46; his version of the Tale of Thebes, 158; of Theseus, 158-9; of Odysseus, 188; of Palamedes, 192-3; of Ephigeneia, 211; of Polyxena, 217; his _Erechtheus_, 286; r., 138. Eurycleia, 129. Eurypylus, 163, 209, 241. Eurytus, his bow, 49; urn, 110. Eustathius, Bishop of Thessalonica, quoted on the quality of Homeric religion, 133-4. Evans, Arthur, cited on the François Vase, 8; on Homeric mention of bronze and iron, 99; on burial customs, 107; and on the Mycenaean sun-god, 114.
Fairies, Homeric, 132. Farnell, G. S., cited on Homer's Artemis, 116. Fibulae, 2, 4, 6, 64, 65, 84, 86-7, 91-3, 145, 148. Fitz-Alan Stewarts, fabulous genealogy of, 139, 140. Four Ages: First (Aegean or Minoan), 2-3, 7. Second (Homeric), 3-4, 6-7. Third (Dipylon), 4-5, 7. Fourth (Proto-Historic), 5, 6.
Games, periodical, not known in Homerian times, 30. Geography, confusion of early mythical, 179. Gezer, excavations at, 99. Ghost-worship ignored by Homer, 110, 117. Glam, burning of, 266, 267. Glaucus, his encounter with Diomede, 231-3; tells the tale of Bellerophon, 161, 171; r., 13, 17, 18, 46. Golden Ram, search for the fleece of, 165. Gold work in Attica, 147. Gorgias, 188. Greece, influence of Minoan culture in, 3; probable conquests in, by Achaeans, 10, 11, 12; relation of, to Crete, 15-6; relations between, and Egypt, 19; language or languages of prehistoric, 151-3; legendary history of, 168; prominent vices of, 189. Grettir, 266, 267. Grote, George, cited on Attica and the ancient epic poets of Greece, 154; cited on Athenian version of the Tale of Thebes, 158; uses Achacan legends, 182; his discovery of apparent discrepancies in conncction with Achilles, 234, 237-8, 239-43; on the Solonian laws, 270; Mr. Verrall on, 284. Gunnar, 266.
Hades, wounding of, 136. Haghia Triada, seal impressions of, 63, 73, 79. Hall, H. R., cited on Phoenician commerce, 19. Hallstatt, cemetery of, 96. Hammurabi, Laws of, 39. Harrison, Miss Jane E., cited, 275. Hector, relations of, with Helen, 35, 36; relations of, with Achilles, 45-6, 111, 120, 235, 241, 264-5, 277; and Patroclus, 45, 108, 265; relations of, with Aias, 46, 185, 238; his prowess in battle, 51-4; reputed connection of, with Boeotia, 183-6; offers Polyxena to Achilles, 217; r., 43, 112, 212. Helbig, Herr, cited on different uses of bronze and iron, 97, 98, 100; cited on Homeric cremation, 107; cited on anti-Minoan stories, 156. Helen, has been in Egypt, 18; occupations of, 30, 33; immortal charm of, 34-5; blamed by the Trojan women, 35, 37; and Paris, 35, 206-7; un-Homeric traditions of, 190, 214-5; parentage of, according to Cypria, 206; reputed to be mother of Iphigeneia, 210; r., 36. Helios, 174, 177, 179. Helle, legends of, 163-4. Hellen, sons of, 139 140. Hephaestus, demands the return of the bride-price, 37-8; domestic misfortunes of, 122; and spear and armour of Achilles, 205, 244. Hera, Homeric description of, 36, 43, 121; her peplos, 93; jealousy of, 122, 162, 205-6; favours the Argo, 178; in battle, 232. Heracles, a bowman, 49; feud of, with Neleus, 135-6, 168; Homeric tradition of, 162; presumed older poem on, 172; r., 161. Hermione (daughter of Helen), 35. Herodotus, cited on changes in Athenian female costume, 90; on purification by blood, 134; cited on the origin of the Ionians, 138, 142, 143; cited on Pelasgian speech, 151-2; on body-snatching, 183; on relations of _Cypria_ and _Iliad_, 200; r., 119, 281. Hero-worship, in historic Greece, 125-6; un-Homeric, 127; few traces of, in early Northern literature, 266, 267. Hesiod, on uses of bronze and iron, 103; his myth of Cronos, 116; his view of Minos, 156; legends known to, 168-9; school of, 170; in agreement with Homer on birth of Circe and Aietes, 177; geography of, 178,179; non-Homeric stratum of his poetry, 272, 273, 274-5; r., 22, 159. Heyne, C. G., cited, 240, 241. Hill-Tout, Mr., cited on use of corslets and shields, 80. Hipparchus, alleged founder of Homeric recitations at Athens, 270-1, 283, 286-7. Hippemolgoi, the, 18. Hippias, 271. Hippolochus mutilated, 265. Hipponax, 63. Hogarth, David George, excavations of, 148; cited on Ionian civilisation, 149. Hogg, James, part of "Auld Maitland" speculatively assigned to, 293-4. Homer, reality of Homeric civilisation, 1-2, 3-4, 5-9; epoch of his heroes indefinite, 10; omits mention of Achacan conquests in Crete, 10-11, 12; his account of Crete in _Odyssey_, 13; and attitude towards Asians, 13, 17-8; his view of the dependency of Crete, 15-6; ignores Ionian traditions, 10, 158, 187, 218, 221; ancestry, 20; his system of land tenure, 21-4, 26-7; a lover of peace, 28-9; purification by swine's blood unknown to, 29-30, 129, 133, 135, 198; interested in the "folk," 31-2; in touch with Aegean culture, 33; his chivalrous treatment of women, 34-7; on family life and morality, 41-4; customs of, war and weapons, 45-50; his tactics, 51-5; criticism of his battles, 56-9; on men's dress and armour, 60-79; female costume, 81-95; his age one of "overlap," 96, 104; cremation and cairn-burial, 105-12; religion and ethics of, 107, 110, 111, 115-7, 120-7, 128; makes scanty mention of temples, 130-1; not superstitious, 132-3; his conception of the Ionians, 137, 142-3; ignorant of the Theseus myth, 155; his view of Minos, 155-6; individuality of his minor characters, 161; his knowledge of "Sagas" and _Märchen_, 161-3; and treatment of material, 163-71; did not borrow from Eumelus, 172, 174, 177-9; his story of Bellerophon, 176; in accord with Hesiod on parentage of Circe, 177; geographical knowledge of, not extensive, 179; his casual mention of Thersites, 180-2; cult of heroes unknown to, 185, 194; his tradition of Odysseus, 188-9, 190; Palamedes apparently unknown to, 190, 193, 198; disagreement of critics over authenticity of his works, 200-8; his characterisation of Achilles, 246-50; of Agamemnon, 250; perfection of form in his poetry, 254-5; only one mention of writing in, 261; rejects all _märchenhaft_, 264; ferocity in, not expurgated, 264-5; did not sing for "groundlings," 277; reputed connection of Pisistratus with his poems, 281, 286; effect of, on the Athenians 286. Hoplites, 55, 56. Horse, the Wooden, 47, 163, 215-6. Hypsipyle is loved by Jason, 96, 179.
Idas, 207, 208. Idomeneus of Cnossos, 14; prowess of, 15, 53; his Achaean descent, 16; his trophies, 47; his genealogy, 156. _Iliad_, manner of, Achaean, 12, 221; the _Catalogue_, 13-7; tenure of property in, 22; treatment of women in, 35, 36; domestic relations, 43; account of battle in, 51-4; untouched by Ionian hands, 59, 150; false passage in, 103; cremation customary in, 105; other funeral rites, 112; Dionysus, 118-9; Ionians once mentioned in, 138; geographical knowledge not extensive in, 179, 198; character of Odysseus, 188; no mention of Palamedes, 194, 195; later or earlier than the _Cypria_?, 195-6, 200; asserted not to be the work of one man, 201; Aristotle's criticism of, 201-2; tradition of Castor and Polydeuces in, 208; material possibly obtained from, for the _Cypria_, 211-2; multiplex authorship of, a foregone conclusion with sundry critics, 223-4; Miss Stawell on, 244-6, 244; Verrall on, 226-8, 245; Leaf, 230, 231, 233, 241, 244; Grote, 234-43; ferocity prevalent in, 265; Mr. Murray considers the body of, to be Ionian, 271-3; author's general conclusions on, 246-50; possibly alien passages in, 250-1; who were the purgers?, 263. _Iliad_, the _Little_. See Cyclic Poems. Imbrios, mutilated, 265. Infanticide, female, 40, 44. Ino, ill-treats her step-children, 34, 164; r., 127. Ion, descent of, 139; buried in Attica, 140. Ionian, civilisation, different from Homeric, 6-9, 144, 148-9; --colonists apparently unknown to Homer, 12; --land tenure in early settlements, 23; --poets, their treatment of women, 37; --historical warfare, 56; --poets, anachronisms of, 60-3, 70; --art, 148-9, 150. Ionians, who were they?, 137-8; their fabulous genealogy, 138-9, 140; difference between, and Achaeans, 141; Homeric conception of, 142-3; intermarriages and religious observances of, 143-4; in Attica, 147; mixed traditions of, 154, 157; have no Homeric traditions, 158; attempts of, to attach themselves to the great traditions, 158-9, 160, 195; degradation of Odysseus traceable to, 189-90, 193; could not purge what they themselves practised, 268. Iphigeneia, various legends of, 157, 193, 210-11, 221, 279. Iphitus, murder of, 135, 136. Ireland, early civilisation in, 21-2; heroic, ceremonial observances in, 31; method of war in, in late Celtic times, 48. Iron, early and later uses of, 3, 4, 5, 21, 96-104, 107. Isocrates, boasts of Theseus, 158-9; cited on the public recitation of Homer, 282-3, 285. Itylus, 157.
Jardanus (river), 13. Jason, loves Hypsipyle, 96, 179; legends of, 165-7, 175-6. Jehoram, King, not cremated, 108.
Kalewala, the Finnish, 165, 166. Kirchhoff, Herr, cited on Homeric mention of iron, 100. Kuhnert, Herr Ernst, on quality of Homer's poetry, 169.
Laertes, 43. Laestrygones, 18. Laid law, William, 294. Land Tenure, Homeric, 21-3; in Ionian colonies, 23. Langside, battle of, 53. Laocoon,215. Laomedon, 162. Layard. Sir A. H., cited on Greek armour and costume, 67, 74, 91, 92, 93. Leaf, Walter, cited on Homeric fighting, 58; on Homeric armour, 70, 76; on costume of Mycenaean women, 83-4; on archaic female costume, 94; on false passage in the _Iliad_, 103; on Demeter and Diogenes, 118; on the "chiton trailers," 138; on Theseus myth, 155, 214; on Panyassis, 172; on Thersites, 181; on character of the Cyclic Poems, 200; on the Catalogue, _219_, 258; on the unity of the _Odyssey_, 224; on the camp wall, 230; on certain alleged contradictions, 231, 233, 241; on Thetis, 244; on Book VIII. of the _Iliad_, 292-3. Lemnos, adventures of the Argonauts in, 179. Leonymus, 213. Lesches, 200. Locrians, archery of the, 53, 55, 137. Lom, Ian, 28. Lucretius, his theory of ghosts, 110. Lycians, the, intermarriages of Greeks with, 17, 144. Lycurgus, legends of, 118-9, 231; worshipped by the Spartans, 126; connection of, with the Homeric Recitations, 282, 283, 285, 286. Lynceus, 207, 208.
Mabinogion, the Welsh, 166. MacAllister, R.A.S., result of his excavations at Gezer, 99. Mackenzie, Dr., on Homeric armour, 73. Mahaffy, J. P., on the Attic standard of morality, 188-9. Marathon, 174; Bull of, 175. Marriage, adelphic, 276. Medea, r., 34, 180; un-Homeric legends of, 165-7, 173-75 not mentioned by Homer, 177; Eumelian account of, 178. Meges, reared by Theano, 161. Melanippus, worship of, 126. Melanthius, 102; fate of, 278. Meleager, the "golden-haired," r., 14, 16, 25, 34; gifts offered to, for his services, 21; war between, and the Couretes, 28; family feud of, 43; Homeric tradition of his fate, 161, 169; Thersites insulted by, 180. Melissa, 112. Memnon, 163; Ionian tradition of, 213. Menelaus, his home, 31; chivalrous character of, 37, 46, 248, 250; affection of Agamemnon for, 43; aids Odysseus, 52; arrow-smitten, 76, 77, 278; Ionian hostility to, 160; un-Homeric traditions of, 190, 207, 208; r., 15, 16, 71, 127, 265. Menestheus, 137, 138. Milton, John, 14, 253, 255. Mimnermus, cited on Aia, 178. Minos, Idomeneus descended from, 14, 16; blood-sacrifices said to have been abolished by, 113; Homeric view of, 155-6; un-Homeric legends of, 167; his bull, 175; fate of, obscure, 279; r., 154 Minotaur, the, 15, 156, 175. Momus, advice of, 204-5. Monro, D. Binning, cited on Homeric use of iron, 100-2, 104; on pollution and purification, 133; on non-reference to Aethra, 155; on the Cyclic Poems, _197_, 198-9; on Homer's ignorance of Taurus, 210; on the Athenian Recitations, 282-4, 285. Mülder, Herr, his criticism of Homeric battles, 56, 58-59. Mure, Col., 226. Murray, G. G. A., cited on bride-price, 39; female infanticide, _44_; on Hector, 46; on Homeric battles, 56-57, _57-8_; on Homeric armour, 70, _71_, _73_; on Homeric mention of iron, 104; on cremation, 107, _109_; on sacrificial rites, 129, _130_; suggests a difference in date between portions of the _Iliad_, _131_; on the Cyclic Poems, 150, 200; on the Ionian Colonists, 144; thinks Homer borrowed from "Eumelus," 171, _172_; on reluctance of scholars to admit the possibility of Homer having borrowed, 176-77; on Thersites, 180; on Hector's connection with Boeotia, 183, 184; on the quality of the _Iliad_, 203; on the presumed date of the Homeric Epics, 218, 219-21; his theory of expurgation, 252, 260-8, 288; particular passages from, quoted and discussed, 268-80, 289-91. Mycenaean, shields, 5; --culture, 7; --tombs, 32; --palaces, 33; --daggers, 48; --arrow points, 50; --Warrior Vase, 56, 62; --battles, 56, 57; --female costume, 83-4; --gods and goddesses, 113, 114. Myres, J. L., cited on Greek female costume, 94; on Pelasgian question, 153.
Naber, Herr, cited, 98. Nausicaa Homeric presentment of, 34, 37, 83. Nausithous, a builder of temples, 130; founder of Phaeacia, 170. Neleidae, the, 140, 159. Nelius, Attic legend of, 23; feud of, with Heracles, 135-6, 168; r., 34. Nemesis of Rhamnus, a non-Achaean goddess, 199, 212, 221; conflicting traditions of, 206-7. Neoptolemus, prowess of, at Troy, 216. Nephele, legends of, 163-4. Nestor, his tales of ancient fights, 10-1, 28, 58, 59, 161; cited on the Achaean attitude towards the Over Lord, 25-6; his house, 31; visited by Athene, 128-9; feud of, with Heracles, 135-6, 168; garrulity of, 208; mentions the camp wall, 229, 230; and the interchange of shields, 252; site of his city of Pylos, 257-8; r., 43, 97. 215. Njal, offers a bride-price, 38.
Odysseus, Egypt known to, 18, 28; skilled in arts of peace, 30; his house and family life, 30-1, 41-2, 43; and the bow of Eurytus, 49, 135; in battle, 52; his tunic, 62; fibula, 64-5; shield of, 70; his use of bronze and iron, 98; story of the removal of the weapons and the wooers, 100-4; in Hades, 123; song for the staunching of his blood, 133; and purification of Achilles, 133, 180; Ionian hostility to, 160, 202, 216; relations of, with Circe, 178; Homeric tradition of, contrasted with others, 183-93, 195, 208, 211, 217, 250-51; feud of, with kin of the wooers, 252; seeks for arrow-poison, 278; r., 15, 17, 22, 25, 32, 35, 112, 129, 130, 181. _Odyssey_, manner of, Achaean, 12, 221; account of Crete in, 13, 22; mention of Egypt and Phoenicians in, 18-9; the Over Lord, 25; treatment of women in, 35, 36-7; family life in, 41-2; mention of iron weapons in, 100-1, 102-3; funeral rites, 112; Demeter mentioned in, 118; ethical aspect of the gods in, 123-5, 127; Ionian traits not present in, 150; Minos in, 156; geographical knowledge not extensive in, 179, 198; element of _Märchen_ in, 187; character of Odysseus, 188-9; legend of Castor and Polydeuces, 208; more critically dissected in Germany than in England, 224; doubtful passages in, 251-2; who were the purgers?, 263; mention of poisoned arrows in, 278. Oedipus, curses his sons, 31; burial of, 159; r., 139. Oenomaus, tomb of, 109. Oiax, avenges Palamedes, 192-3. Orestes, bones of, carried to Sparta, 126; purification of, 135; takes refuge in Athens, 139. "Overlap," ages of, 96, 97, 102. Over Lord, the Homeric, 23-7.
Palamedes, inventor of alphabetic writing, 26, 194; not mentioned by Homer, 160, 193, 198, 199, 208; Ionian tradition of, 189-2; Athenian, 192-3; probably a Culture Hero, 194-6, 220; Ionian legends of, never intruded into _Iliad_, 211, 212, 218; r., 202. Pandarus, ill fame of, 17; an archer, 49, 50, 278; shoots at Menelaus, 76; daughter of, 157. Panyassis, presumable source of his legends, 172. Paris, and Helen, 35, 37, 207; taunted for his use of the bow, 50; Choice of, 162, 205; wounds Achilles, 162, 217; r., 71. Paris, M. Gaston, cited on the _Chanson de Roland_, 253, 254. Patroclus, relations of, with Achilles, 45, 54, 105, 111, 123, 236-42, 244, 248-9; relations of, with Hector, 45, 108, 265; scales the walls of Troy, 47; burial of, 111, 112; r., 36, 213. 227, 245. Pausanias, cited on the bronze corslet, 66; cited on graves and urns, 109-10; on the places of nativity of Zeus, 115; and the fabled genealogy of the Athenians, 138-9; cited on death of Meleager, 169; on a Eumelian "History of Corinth," 172, 173, 174; does not cite Eumelus for Bellerophon, 176; disagrees with his account of Medea, 178; antiquarian traditions preserved in, 272, 273; and legends of human sacrifice, 279; r., 127, 159, 183, 206, 207, 210, 213. Pegasus, legends of, 176. Pelasgians, r., 11, 12, 16, 141, 151-3. Peleus, 25, 205. Peneleus, ferocity of, 265. Penelope, domestic life of, 30; attitude of, towards Helen, 35, 37; her bride-price, 38-9; in _Telegonia_, 182. Penthesilea, slain by Achilles, 180, 212. Peplos, description of, 84. _See also_ Costume, women's. Perdrizet, cited on Greek female costume, 94. Periclymenus, fairy story of, 136, 168. Periphetes of Mycenae, 184, 185. Phaedra, 156. Pheidias, 115, 117, 206. Pherecydes, cited, 180, 211. Philoctetes, bitten by a serpent, 15, 211; favoured by Attic poets, 189, 202; arrows of, 214; ringing back of, 216; r., 26, 160, 163. Philostratus, cited on Polyxena, 217. Phoenicians, 19, 20, 30. Phoenix, warning of, to Achilles, 25, 238, 243-4; not properly introduced in Book IX., 250-1; r., 36, 43, 161. Phorcys, his corslet, 66. Phrixus, legends of, 164-5, 279. _Pictorial Atlas of Iliad and Odyssey, Engelmann and Anderson's_, illustrations in, cited, 74-5, 77. Pindar, follows Ionian traditions, 26; on Pegasus, 176; adopts Eumelian account of Medea, 178; belittles Odysseus, 189; does not reject _märchenhaft_, 264. Pins, long, use of, in female costume, 84, 86-7, 90, 91. Pinza cited on Homeric female costume, 91, 93. Pisistratus (Nestor's son) sacrifices to Athene, 129; (Athenian) alleged founder of Homeric recitations at Athens, 270; reputed connection of, with Homeric poems, 281-3, 284, 286. Plato, cited on purification by blood, 134; cited on the Homeric view of Minos, 155; his reference to Palamedes, and Aias, 192, 194. Polydamus, advice of, to Trojans in battle, 52-3. Polydeuces, un-Homeric legends of, 207-8, 215. Polygnotus, his decoration of the Lesche, 66, 274. Polynices, 31; burial of, 158-9. ? Polyxena, traditions of, 195-6, 216-7. Poseidon, r., 18, 34, 162; rallies the Achaeans, 52, 53, 59; wreaks his grudge on Odysseus, 124; and Periclymenus, 136, 168; patron of Ionian league of cities, 144; doings of, perplexing, 251. Priam, attitude of, towards Helen, 35; pays no bride-price, 38; excusable petulance of, 43; attitude of, towards Aeneas, 216, 251; Achilles' reception of, 239, 249; r., 131, 192. Proclus, Epitome of, cited, 204, 205, 214. Protesilaus, 54, 137, 211. Purification by swine's blood unknown to Homer but familiar to Ionians, 29, 30, 133-4, 135-6, 198, 212-3; no Northern example of, 266, 267.
Quintus Smyrnaeus, 215, 276.
Reichel Dr., his criticism of Homeric armour cited, 65, 68-70, 72-3, 76, 80. Rhadamanthus, 16, 156. Ridgeway, William, his theory of Homer, 102, 136; his theory of prehistoric language in Greece, 151, 152-3. _Roncevaux_, the, 291. _Ruined City_ (Anglo-Saxon poem), 33.
Sacrifice, human, 210-1, 216-8, 272, 279. Sacrificial rites, Homeric treatment of, 128-30, 131. "Saga," growth of, 166-7. Saint Aignan, patron of Orleans, 126. Sainte-Beuve, cited on the Odyssey, 252. Sarpedon, 13, 17. Saul, King, treatment of his corpse, 108. "Schiltrom," formed by Achaeans in battle, 53; cavalry powerless against, 55. Scholiast, the, cited, 204-5, 213, 241, 244. Scotland, method of war in, in Roman times, 48; Highland clans in action, 52; fabulous genealogy of kings, 138-9. Scott, Sir Walter, works of, r., 41-2, 162, 293-4. Semele, mother of Dionysus, 118-9. Shakespeare, _Troilus and Cressida_, 41, 194, 274; _Macbeth_, 233, 234; his method of construction compared with Homer's, 254, 255; _King Lear_, 277. Shewan, Mr., cited on Nestor and Thrasymedes, 252. Sicyon, 174. Sidney, Sir Philip, his Arcadia cited, 254, 277. Sinon, 214, 276. Sisyphus, 17, 123. Solon, 90; connection of, with the Athenian Recension of Homer, 270, 281, 283, 286, 287. Sophocles, r., 37; on Hector, 46; his _Oedipous_, 159; belittles Odysseus, 188, 189. Spata, relics found in tombs of, 145-6. Stasinus, 200, 205. Stawell, Miss F. Melian, her "_Homer and the Iliad_" cited, 72, 77, 224-6, 234, 236, 244. Stesichorus, 210, 213, 217. Stichios, 138, 184. Studniczka F. K., cited, 83, 87, 183.
Tantalus, punishment of, 123. _Telegonia_, the _dénouement of_, 182. Telemachus, quoted on the marriage of Penelope, 39; bidden to hide the weapons, 100, 102, 103; un-Homeric traditions of, 182, 208; journey of, to Pylos, 257; r., 31, 42, 128. Telephus, un-Homeric legend of, 209, 220. Teucer, 43, 49. Theano, wifely tenderness of, 36, 43, 161; sacrifices to Athene, 131, 161. Thebans, the, show the tomb of Hector, 183. Thebes, wealth of, 18-9; Tale of, Athenian version, 158-9. Themis, 205, 206. Theocritus, 276. Thersites, un-Homeric traditions of, 133, 180-2, 189, 198, 212-3. Theseus, prowess of, not dwelt upon by Homer, 15, _16_; un-Homeric legends of, 154-5, 157-9, 199-200, 210, 214-5, 216, 221; Ionian legends of, never introduced into _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, 218. Thesmophoria, 117. Thessaly, civilisation in, dissimilar from Southern Greece, 10-11. Thetis, maternal love of, 34, 36; prayer of, 54, 195, 235, 236; advice of, to Achilles, 132; un-Homeric legends of, 168, 205, 211, 213; and the armour of Achilles, 244-5; love of Achilles for, 247-8. Thrasymedes, 129, 252. Thucydides, cited on the Ionian Migration, 143; on the deaths of Hipparchus and Aristogeiton, 271; on the history of Pisistratus, 281, 284, 287. Tirynthian art, female costume, in, 81-6. Tityus, punishment of, 123. Tlepolemos of Rhodes, 14. Tribal History, attempt to extract, from names of heroes in _Iliad_, 182-3, 185, 180. Troy, siege of, 45-9, 51-4, 58-9, 132, 162-3. Tyro, punishment of, 34, 42. Tyrtaeus, 286. Tzetzes, on the parentage of Iphigeneia, 210; on Polyxena, 217.
Vases: Black Figure, 5, 6, 48, 67, 74, 75. François, the, 86-90, 93. Panathenaic, 79. Red Figure, 5, 67, 74, 75, 77. Tirynthian, 67. Warrior, the, 56. Verrall, A. W., on Mr. Lang's defence of Homeric unity, 226-8; a reply to, 229-31; on the "multiple authorship," 245; on the Athenian Recitations, 274; on the customary manner of criticising Homer, 284-8. Virgil, r., 9, 160, 192, 193, 214, 215-6, 261. _Volsunga Saga_, 36, 253.
Wace, Mr., cited on Greek female costume, 94. Walters, H. B., cited on the François Vase, 86, 90; on Ionic female costume, 94. Waterloo, battle of, cited, 55, 57. Weapons. See Armour. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, cited on the relation of Homer to the mass of ancient epic poetry, 200-1, 203; on the _Cypria_, 219. Wolf, C. W. F. A., his criticism of the Homeric Poems, 41, 222, 223, 224, 246, 250, 281, 284. Wooers, the, 100, 101, 103, 104, 111, 129, 132, 133, 252. Writing, in Minoan Age, 3.
Xuthus marries the daughter of Erechtheus, 139-40.
Zedekiah, King, cremation of, 108. Zerelia, result of excavations at, 11. Zeus, and Minos, 16, 155, 156; Homeric conception of, 43, 116, 118, 120-1, 122, 124, 162, 174; prayer of Thetis to, 54, 235; birth-myth of, 115; promises of, fulfilled, 123, 235-6, 237; un-Homeric conceptions of, 190, 195, 204, 206, 209, 211. Zulus, belief of, in incarnations of the dead, 275.
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Transcriber's note:
The original book contained several unpaired double quotation marks. It was not clear where the missing quotation marks belonged, so no attempt was made to add them.