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The World of Homer

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Title: The World of Homer

Author: Andrew Lang


        
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THE WORLD OF HOMER

by

ANDREW LANG

With Illustrations







Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1910



[Illustration: Moulded Pithos from Sparta. Illustrates 7th-6th Century
Armour, with Thigh-Piece From _British School at Athens_, vol. xii.
(_Macmillan Co. Ltd_.)]




PREFACE


In 1895 I published _Homer and the Epic_ (pp. 424), containing a
criticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which is
the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book,
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, observing on the modern ideas of
interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages
which, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" and
inconsistency.

I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the
early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies,
more or less imperfect, with Homer.

On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor
Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish
_Kalewala_. He says:

"The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so
often and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics,
proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and
from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and
groundless."

The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century,
separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the _Æneid_ and
the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, from those which belong to the period of
spontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned many epic
lays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the
right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made themselves,"
as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not "epic lays," but ballads like
"Jock o' the Side," and "Archie o' Cafield," and "Johnie Cock," despite
its name the most romantic of all.)

"These epic lays were called 'national' or 'popular,' not only by
virtue of their contents, sentiment, and audience, but mainly because
the poetry which takes this form is natural, collective, popular, and
hence 'national' in its origin and development." (By "collective"
I understand the author to mean, not that a whole country-side
automatically and collectively bellows out a new ballad, but that the
original author uses traditional formulae in verse wherever he can,
and that his ballad is altered in the course of recitation by others,
so that any version which has been obtained from recitation is, in
fact, one of many variants which have arisen in course of time and
recitation.)

"The baseless application of this principle is to regard the national
poems not as creations of a single poet, but as put together out of
shorter pre-existing lays (either by a single person at one time, or
by several in succession), until the final fashioning of the poem. And
this process is conceived of as a mere stringing together, without any
sort of fusion, so that a critical philologist, thanks to his special
sharpness and by aid of certain criteria, would be in a position to
recognise the joinings, and to recover the lays out of which the poem
has been made up.

"With this preconceived idea people have gone on anatomising the Epics;
from Lachmann to the present day they have not desisted, although so
far no positive satisfactory and harmonious results have been won. This
restless business of analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of
its own fruitlessness, yet unconvinced of it, builds up and pulls down,
and builds again, while its shifting foundations, its insufficient and
falsely applied criteria, condemn it to remain fruitless, tedious, and
repulsive. The observer marks with amazement the degree of intellectual
shortsightedness produced by excessive and exclusive analysis. The
investigator becomes a sort of man-microscope, who can see atoms but
not bodies; motes, and these magnified, but not beams."

Comparetti proceeds: "No doubt before the epic there existed the
shorter lays; but what is the relation of the lays to the epic? Is the
epic a mere material synthesis of lays, or does it stand to them as
a thing higher in the scale of poetic organisms,--does it move on a
loftier plane, attaining higher, broader conceptions, and a new style
appropriate to these?" Notoriously the epic infinitely transcends in
scale, breadth of conception, and grandeur of style any brief popular
lays of which we have knowledge. It never was made by stringing _them_
together.

So much for the little lay theory. "But there remains the nucleus
theory" (the theory of "the kernel"), "for example of an original
Achilleis" (the _Menis_) expanded by self-denying poets into an
_Iliad_. Comparetti does not believe that a poet would fashion lays "to
be inserted in a greater work already constructed by others, nor that
he would have done this with so much regard for other men's work, and
with such strict limitation of his own, that the modern erudite can
recognise the joinings, and distinguish the original kernel and each of
the later additions."

Here Wolf anticipated Comparetti, he did not believe that the additions
could be detected.

But Comparetti does not reckon with his host. The astute critics tell
us that the later poets did _not_ compose "with so much respect for
other men's work"; far from that, the poet of _Iliad_ ix. calmly turned
the work of the poet of _Iliad_ xvi. into nonsense, we are told (see
_infra_, "The Great Discrepancies"). Again, the critics will say that a
later poet did not "fashion lays to be inserted in another man's work."
He merely fashioned lays. Much later other men, the Pisistratean, or
Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension, took his lays and
foisted them into the middle of another man's work, making every kind
of blunder and discrepancy in the process of making everything smooth
and neat.

Comparetti goes on: "The difficulty is increased when we have to do
with epics which seem in all their parts to be composed on a definite
plan, which exists in the final poem, not in the supposed kernel. The
organic unity, the harmony, the relation of all the portions, which
are arranged so as to lead up to the final catastrophe, are such as to
imply the agreement and homogeneity of the poetic creation in a common
idea, and, moreover, resting on that idea--a limitation of the creative
processes."

Comparetti, I fear, forgets that his "man-microscopes" see none of
these things; "they see the mote, not the beam." Finally, granting
the pre-existence of a mass of poetic material, "He who could extract
from this mass the epics which we possess, and not a kind of Greek
_Mahabharata_, would have produced, at all events, such a work of
genius that in fairness he must be called not merely the redactor, but
the author and poet."

How true is all that Comparetti says of "this restless business of
analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of its own fruitlessness,
yet unconvinced of it! It builds up, and pulls down, and builds again,
while its insufficient and falsely applied criteria condemn it to
remain fruitless, tedious, and repulsive."

"Our little systems have their day." "They have their day, and cease
to be." The little system which explained the _Iliad_ as a mass, or
rather a concatenation of short lays, "has had its day." The system
of a primal "kernel" (Books i., xi., xvi., and so forth)--a kernel
more archaic in language than Books ix., x., xxiii., xxiv.--is also
perishing, "stricken through with doubt." The linguistic analysis
of Miss Stawell (_Homer and the Iliad_, 1909) and, in America, of
Professor Scott, has fatally damaged the linguistic tests of books for
earliness and lateness.

The most advanced German critics find that Book i. of the _Iliad_ is
no longer that genuine kernel which, with certain other passages,
represents the primal _Menis_, or "wrath of Achilles," as opposed to
the later accretions of three or four centuries. _Das ist ausgespielt!_
The "kernel" hypothesis is doomed. Its cornerstone--Book i. of the
_Iliad_, is, by the builders of new theories, rejected; it is now
one of the latest additions to the _Iliad_.[1] Only to one point is
criticism steadfast. The _Iliad must_ be a thing of rags and tatters;
and it is torn up by the process of misstating its statements and
finding "discrepancies" in the statements misstated.

Again, as even Comparetti's "man-microscopes" could not well help
seeing that the epics, though not good enough as compositions for them,
still _are_ compositions; have, in a way, organic unity, harmony,
adjusted relations of all the portions, some critics tried to account
for the facts as the result of the labours of the Pisistratean, or
Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension at Athens, in the sixth
century B.C. But so many critics of all shades of opinion have rejected
this hypothesis, even with scorn, as "a worthless fable," "an absurd
legend," part of Homeric mythology (Blass, Meyer, Mr. T. W. Alien, D.
B. Monro, Nutzhorn, Grote, and many others), that it can scarcely be
restored even by the learned ingenuity of Mr. Verrall.[2]

In defect of the late Recension, which is wholly destitute of historic
evidence, a poet, a _Dichter_, has to be sought somewhere, and at some
period of the supposed "evolution" of the _Iliad_. He may lawfully
be sought, it seems, at any period of the history of the poem, except
at the point where, in fact, the poet is always found, namely at the
beginning. The search for the poet will never find him anywhere else.
He cannot be made to fit into the eighth or seventh or sixth century;
it is useless to look for him at the Court of Croesus! A poem purely
Achaean had an Achaean author.

None of the many critical keys fits the lock. The linguistic key breaks
itself, it cannot break the wards.

Archaeology is used as a test of passages very early and very late;
and the archaeology is also wrong, demonstrably fallacious. The
archaeologists themselves, Mr. Arthur Evans and Mr. Ridgeway, will
have none of Reichel's key. Whatever archaeology may prove, it does
not prove what Reichel and his followers believed it to demonstrate.
If I succeed in convincing any separatist critics that the costume and
armour in the _Iliad_ are much less like the costume and armour of
Ionia in the seventh century B.C. than like those of Athens at the end
of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries, these critics will
probably be grateful. Here, they may perhaps say, is proof of our late
Athenian recension, by which the actual Athenian dress and armour of
540-480 were written into the ancient poems.

I would agree with them if the members of the Committee of Recension
had excised the huge Homeric shields, introduced cavalry in place of
chariotry, iron instead of bronze weapons; excised the bride-price
in marriage law, introduced the rite of purification of homicides by
pigs' blood, and generally, in a score of other ways, for example by
introducing hero-worship, had brought the _Iliad_ "up to date." But as
I cannot easily conceive that _only_ armour and costume were brought
up to date, I suppose that the whirligig of time and fashion had
reverted in Athens to hauberks of scales in place of the uniform use
of back-plate and breast-plate, and had also deserted the Ionian and
early Hellenic _cypassis,_ the Aegean loin-cloth or bathing-drawers for
the longer and loose Homeric chiton.

If each critic would publish his own polychrome _Iliad_, with
"primitive" passages printed in gold, "secondary" in red, "tertiary" in
blue, "very late" in green, with orange for "the Pisistratean editor,"
purple for the "diaskeuast," and mauve for "fragments of older epics"
stuck in the context, and so on, the differences that prevail among the
professors of the Higher Criticism would be amazingly apparent.

One writer of a book on Homer has accused me of neglecting "science" in
favour of mere literary appreciation, and of "trying to set back the
hands on the clock of criticism." Really I want to clean and regulate
that timepiece, which reminds one of

    "The crazy old church-clock
    And the bewildered chimes,"

in Wordsworth's poem.

Never were chimes more bewildered, verdicts more various, and
contradictions in terms more innocently combined than in the higher
criticism of Homer. It is necessary and right that men's opinions
should alter, in consequence of reflection, and of the increase of
our knowledge of prehistoric Greece, through the revelations of
excavators on the ancient sites of a rediscovered world. It is natural
that Homeric critics should sometimes contradict themselves and each
other. But they contradict each other so constantly and confidently
that, clearly, their conclusions are not to be called conclusions of
_science_.

That in one book a critic should reject, let us say, the hypothesis
of the "Pisistratean recension" of the epics, and, in his next book,
accept it, is nothing. Reflection has caused him to change his opinion.
But when, in one book, in one chapter, perhaps in one page, a critic,
without perceiving it, bases his argument on contradictions in
terms, then his house is founded on the sand, and needs no tempest to
overthrow its pinnacles and towers.

Through indulgence in fantastic theory-making, and through disregard of
logical consistency, Homeric criticism has become, as Blass vigorously
put the case in his latest work, "a swamp haunted by wandering fires,
will-o'-the-wisps."

In 1906, in _Homer and his Age_, I again studied the Homeric Question,
with particular reference to fresh archaeological discoveries, and
to the contradictory methods, as I reckon them, which critics have
employed in the effort to prove that the Homeric epics are mosaics,
composed in, and confusing the manners and usages of, four or five
prehistoric and proto-historic ages.

I do not now reprint either of my earlier books on Homer. Further
study appears to have made many points more clear than they were. It
is especially clear that "the Ionian father of the rest," as Tennyson
calls Homer, is _not_ Ionian; that the early Ionian settlers in Asia
respected Homer's matter, which is Achaean, and did not intermingle
with it any traits of their own very different beliefs, rites, tastes,
morals, usages, armour and costume.

By the term "Ionian" I here mean to speak of the works composed in the
Ionian settlements in Asia, probably in the eighth to seventh centuries
B.C., and of the non-Homeric beliefs, rites, usages, costume and armour
of the same people and period. Most of these beliefs, usages, and rites
also mark historic Hellas, and very probably existed in the early
populations of Greece before the dominance of Homer's Achaeans.

On the chronological period, as determined by archaeology, in which
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were composed, I am fortunate in having the
support of Mr. Arthur Evans, the chief authority in this matter; while
Mr. T. W. Allen, our leading textual critic, is persuaded of the fact
of Homeric unity. Where language is concerned (as has been said),
the linguistic Appendices to Miss Stawell's _Homer and the Iliad_
(1909), with the minute and elaborate studies of Professor Scott of
the North-Western University, Illinois,[3] seem to me to overthrow
the separatist conclusions as to the presence of an earlier stage of
language and metre in some books; a later, or "Odyssean" stage in other
books of the _Iliad_. I have seen scarcely any public criticism in
reply to Miss Stawell and Professor Scott on these essential points, in
which I have not scholarship enough to pretend to be a judge.

Meanwhile my friend, Mr. Shewan, has in preparation a comprehensive
criticism of the separatist arguments, especially those drawn from
language and metre; a work which, I venture to think, it will not be
easy, and will not be fair, to ignore.

All my writings on the Homeric question are, necessarily,
controversial. The reaction against the suggestion of Wolf, against
a critical tradition of a century's standing, has begun in earnest.
But the friends of that tradition are eminently learned, and occupy
the highest places in scholarship and education. Scholars as eminent,
who differ from them, as a rule, are content to keep their own
opinions, and remain silent. If the views of the reaction, of the
believers in Homeric unity, in the epics as the wonderful legacy
of the brief prehistoric Achaean age, are to prevail, the opposing
ideas must be assailed, and if possible confuted. In all controversy
the constant danger is the tendency to misunderstand opponents. As a
rule, A. supposes B. to be holding this or that position. A. assails
and captures it, but B. was holding quite another position. A. has
misunderstood his case. Critics of works of mine, on other subjects,
have often missed my meaning, and I am therefore constrained to
suppose that I may have, in like manner, misconstrued some of the
opinions of others, which, as I understand them, I am obliged to
contest. I have done my best to understand, and will deeply regret any
failures of interpretation on my part.

Mr. Gilbert Murray, whose opinions I am obliged to oppose in the
course of "the struggle for existence," has, with very great kindness
and courtesy, read my proof sheets, and enabled me to give a less
inaccurate statement of his position. On one point where I had
misapprehended it, I have added an Appendix, "The Lost Epics and the
Homeric Epics."

I owe more than I can easily express to the kindness of my friend, Mr.
A. Shewan, of St. Andrews, who read and corrected my first proofs (any
surviving errors are due to my own want of care), and who has lent me
books and papers from his Homeric collection.

Mr. R. M. Dawkins, Head of the British School of Athens, has had the
goodness to read my chapters on Homeric, Ionian, and historic armour
and costume, and I have quoted the gist of his letters on points
where he differs from my conclusions. The topic of female costume is
peculiarly difficult and disputable.

                                                      A. LANG.
_September_ 9, 1910.



[1] Vinzler, _Homer_, p. 597 ff.

[2] See Appendix B, "The Supposed Athenian Recension."

[3] "Odyssean Words found in but One Book of the _Iliad_" _(Classical
Philology_, vol. v. p. 41 ff.). "The Relative Antiquity of the _Iliad_
and _Odyssey_ tested by Abstract Nouns" (_Classical Review_, vol.
xxiv., p. 8 ff.).




CONTENTS

        I. HOMER'S WORLD. THE FOUR AGES
       II. HOMERIC LANDS AND PEOPLES
      III. HOMERIC POLITY. THE OVER LORD
       IV. HOMER'S WORLD IN PEACE
        V. MEN AND WOMEN
       VI. THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR
      VII. HOMERIC TACTICS
     VIII. MEN'S DRESS IN HOMER. ARMOUR
       IX. WOMEN'S COSTUME
        X. BRONZE AND IRON. WEAPONS AND TOOLS
       XI. BURIAL AND THE FUTURE LIFE
      XII. RELIGION IN GREECE: PRE-HISTORIC,
           HOMERIC, AND HISTORICAL
     XIII. TEMPLES. ALTARS. RITUAL. PURIFICATION
      XIV. HOMER AND IONIA
       XV. ATTIC _VERSUS_ ACHAEAN TRADITIONS
      XVI. HOMER AND "THE SAGA"
     XVII. THE STORY OF PALAMEDES
    XVIII. HOMER AND THE CYCLIC POEMS
      XIX. THE GREAT DISCREPANCIES
       XX. CONCLUSIONS

        _APPENDIXES_

           THE CATALOGUE
           THE SUPPOSED EXPURGATION OF HOMER
           THE ALLEGED ATHENIAN RECENSION OF HOMER
           THE LOST EPICS AND THE HOMERIC EPICS (_WIEDERHOLUNGEN_)

           INDEX




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MOULDED PITHOS FROM SPARTA _Frontispiece_
SACRIFICE TO ATHENE
DAGGER WITH LION-HUNTERS
TIRYNTHIAN VASE: MAN IN HAUBERK
CRETAN SEAL-IMPRESSION, MINOAN ARMOUR
MENELAUS AND HECTOR FIGHTING OVER EUPHORBUS
WARRIORS ARMING
LADY POURING OUT WINE FOR WARRIOR
PRINCESS FROCK: TIRYNS
COSTUME OF WOMEN: TIRYNTHIAN VASE
METOPE OF ATHENE, OLYMPIA
THE FATES ON THE FRANÇOIS VASE
ARIADNE, THESEUS, AND MINOTAUR
HISTORIC GREEK COSTUME




THE WORLD OF HOMER

CHAPTER I

HOMER'S WORLD. THE FOUR AGES


"Homer's world," "the world that Homer knew," these are familiar
phrases; and criticism is apt to tell us that they are empty phrases.
Nevertheless when we use them we think of that enchanted land, so
clearly seen in the light of "the Sun of Greece"; in the light of
Homer. It is a realm of splendid wars, of gleaming gold and bronze,
of noble men and of the most beautiful of women, which shines through
a rift in the mists that hide the years before it and the years that
followed. Can what appears so brilliant, so living, so solid, have
been unreal, the baseless fabric of a vision; of a dream, too, that
Homer never dreamed, for there was no Homer? The Homeric picture of
life, the critics tell us, displays no actual scene of past human
existence, and is not even the creation of one man's fantasy. It
is but a bright medley and mosaic of coloured particles that came
together fortuitously, or were pieced together clumsily, like some
church window made up of fragments of stained mediaeval glass. "Homeric
civilisation," says a critic, "is like Homeric language; as the one was
never spoken, so the other was never lived by any one society."[1]

It is the object of this book to prove, on the other hand, that Homeric
civilisation, in all its details, was lived at a brief given period;
that it was real. This could never be demonstrated till of recent
years; till search with the spade on ancient sites that were ruinous or
were built over anew in the historic times of Greece, revealed to us
the ages that were before Homer, and that succeeded his day. By dint of
excavations in the soil we now know much of the great Aegean or Minoan
culture that was behind Homer; and know not a little of the Dark Ages
that followed the disruption of his Achaean society.

In studying Homer, and the predecessors and successors of the men
of his Achaean time, we find ourselves obliged to take into account
Four distinct Ages, and the culture of two or perhaps three distinct
peoples; the pre-Homeric population of the Aegean coasts and isles; the
Homeric Achaeans: and the historic Greeks, who appear to descend from,
and to hold of both the pre-Homeric and the Homeric strains of blood
and civilisation.

Turning then to what we shall style the Four Ages, we observe first,
that which is called the "Late Minoan," namely the bloom, in Crete and
on the mainland, of a civilisation even then very ancient, having its
focus, and chief manifestation, in the isle of the Hundred Cities. Here
the art is most graphic, a revelation of the life; the palaces are
most numerous and most magnificent; the towns are most tranquil, being
unwalled, as the palaces are unfortified; while the arrangements, as
for sanitation; and the costume of the women at some periods, are quite
modern in character. Separate bodices and skirts, heavily flounced,
were worn; through all varieties of fashion the dresses were sewn and
shaped. Men did not, as a rule, wear the Homeric smock or chiton, but
loin-cloths or bathing-drawers. Brooches or fibulae, like safety pins,
were not in use.

This culture had also in a less remarkable degree affected the mainland
of Greece. It was an Age of bronze, for weapons and implements,
with this peculiarity, that, while arrow tips were often of stone,
beautifully chipped flint, or of keen black glass-like obsidian, iron
was known, a few large finger-rings of iron occur in graves; the metal
being rare and strange. It was an Age of linear writing, on clay
tablets, or in ink with pen or reed. The dead, perhaps occasionally
embalmed, were buried in shaft tombs hewn deep in the rock; or in
"beehive"-shaped sepulchres with chambers, often sunk in the side of a
hill. With the dead were laid their arms of bronze, golden ornaments,
crystal and ivory, and silver, and cups and vases of peculiar fashion,
fabric, and decoration.

Concerning the language or languages of the people of this First
Age, nothing is known with certainty, as their writing has not been
deciphered. We know that they were and had long been in touch with
Egypt, and the highly civilised Egyptian society. Egyptian objects are
found in the ruins of Cretan palaces; Cretan pottery is abundant in the
soil of Egypt; and their envoys, in Egyptian wall-pictures, bear ingots
and golden cups of their fashioning, as presents or as tribute to
Egyptian kings. Their palaces, about 1450-1400 B.C. (?) were sacked and
consumed by fire, but their culture, and even their writing, continued
to exist with dwindling vitality. Of the religion we speak later.

Then comes the Second Age, the period represented in the Homeric poems.
Greek is their language, whether the people of the Cretan culture
on the mainland of Greece had previously spoken Greek, or a cognate
language, or not. Iron had ceased to be a rare metal used only for
rings; it was now employed for tools and implements, occasionally for
arrow-heads, and was an article of commerce; but bronze was the metal
for swords, spears, and body armour; and stone was no longer used for
arrow points; leather no longer, as previously, sufficed for shield
coverings, bronze plating was needed. The dead were not now buried
merely, they were cremated, as often in ancient central and northern
Europe, and as in these regions the bones were placed in urns of gold,
bronze, or pottery, wrapped in linen, and bestowed in a stone-built
chamber, beneath a mound or cairn of earth, on which was set a memorial
pillar.[2]

Treasures do not appear to have been buried with the dead, as a rule.
A new costume, a northern costume, had come in, not sewn and shaped,
as in the previous age, but fastened with pins and _fibulae_, "safety
pins," such as were in use in northern regions, in the basin of the
Danube, Bosnia, and North Italy. This is the costume and these are the
pins and brooches described by Homer.

The Third Age, subsequent to the Homeric, is a dark period; illustrated
by the vases and other objects found at ancient "Tiryns of the mighty
walls"; and by the contents of the cemetery outside of the Dipylon
gate at Athens; in Cretan sites and elsewhere. The nature of the
civilisation (called "the Dipylon") will be described later. It is
the fully developed age of iron for weapons and implements; riding
of horses is superseding the war-chariots, common to both preceding
periods; art is represented by both decadent Minoan work, and rude
vase-paintings of human existence. The dead, with humbler treasures,
are more frequently buried than burned; cairns are not raised over
them; the costume of women appears to have been, occasionally at least,
a survival from or revival of that of the First Age, the separate skirt
and bodice.

The Fourth Age is the archaic or "proto-historic" period of Greece. It
is represented by objects found in the soil of Sparta of the ninth to
seventh centuries; by objects of the eighth to seventh century used
by Ionian settlers in Asia, as at Ephesus; and by "proto-Athenian"
"post-Dipylon" vases and other archaic remains in art; while, later,
come the Black Figure vases of the early sixth century, to which
succeed the more accomplished painters of the Red Figure vases (late
sixth and early fifth centuries). In this period male costume was often
more of the first or Aegean, than of the second or Homeric Age.

Now, according to the majority of critics of Homer, the life, with
all its details, which he describes, is not that of a single age,
our second, but is a mosaic of all Four Ages. "The first rhapsodies
were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous Mykenaean
shield--the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with
breastplate and light round buckler. The whole view of life and death,
of divine and human polity had changed."[3]

If this be true, the Homeric world as depicted in the poems existed
only in fancy; it is a medley of four periods extending over some six
centuries or more, and the Homeric picture must be a mere chaos as
regards costume, manners, rites, armour, tactics, laws, geographical
knowledge, domestic life, and everything. Is it such a chaos? The
critics say that it is, and seek for proof in the poems. They find
anachronisms and inconsistencies as to armour (but not costume), as to
rites, as to marriage laws, as to houses, as to tactics, as to land
tenure; but the inconsistencies and anachronisms at most are petty,
and, we are to argue, at most represent such minute variations from the
norm as occur in all societies, savage or civilised.

For the Homeric period, except in the case of the _fibulae_ marking
the change of costume in the Second Age, we have little evidence
except in the Homeric poems themselves. No Homeric cairns with their
characteristic contents have been discovered by modern scientific
experts, a point to be discussed later. But for our Fourth Age we have
literary evidence, that of the remains and epitomes of the Cyclic
poems, composed in Ionia, about the eighth to seventh centuries, by
the poets of the Ionian settlers in Asia, who were dominated by Attic,
not Achaean traditions. These poems, we are to show (see "The Cyclic
Poems") differ immensely, in descriptions of rites and of religion,
and in the characters of heroes, in their pseudo-historic legends,
and in geographical knowledge, from the pictures given by Homer. The
Ionian armour, too, and round or oval blazoned bucklers worn on the
left arm, as displayed in archaic and early Black Figure vases, are
widely different from Homeric armour, and from the huge Homeric shield,
unblazoned, suspended by a belt or baldric.

The Fourth Age, in fact, is represented by its own epic poetry, and
by its own art; and its representations of armour, religion, rites,
personages, and traditions, are never intruded into our Homeric epics.
The two ages stand apart. The Homeric world is not that of the Fourth
Age. There is no mosaic, except in the epic poetry of the Fourth
Age, which imitated the Homeric poetry, but is full of conspicuous
anachronisms in essential points.

Though the details of life in the Second and Fourth periods,--the
Homeric or Achaean and the Ionian, stand conspicuously apart, modern
criticism, we have said, represents them as inextricably mingled in our
Homer, and naturally thus confused, for what is most ancient in our
Homer is said to have been worked over and recomposed by the poets of
Ionia; in Ionia, we are told, Homer had a second birth, and our Homer
is half-Ionian.

The critical case is well stated thus: "There is, on the whole, a
striking resemblance between the life of Homer's heroes in its material
aspects and the [Aegean] remains" [of our First Age] "which have been
discovered at Tiryns, Mykene, and elsewhere. The two cultures are not
identical, but, beyond doubt, the Homeric resembles in the main the
Mykenaean rather than that of the "Dipylon" (so far as we know it),
or the archaic Greek. _The ancient tradition is on the whole truly
kept in the Epos. Yet in many points we can see traces of apparent
anachronisms,_" whether the departure from the "Mykenaean" be "due to
a later development of that culture itself, _or to an unintentional
introduction of elements from the very different conditions of later
Greece_."[4] In the Epics carried to Asia, says our author, "much
of the old was faithfully preserved, though adapted to new hearers,
much being new added." "We meet with so many inconsistencies so
closely interwoven that the tangle may well seem beyond our powers to
unravel."[5]

When novelties were intentionally added the purpose was to please
listeners later by many centuries than those for whom the original
poets sang; to please the active commercial citizens of Ionia, who
had not the polity, nor the armour, nor the war-chariots, nor the
weapons, nor the costume, nor the beliefs, nor the burial rites, nor
the marriage customs, nor the houses, nor the tactics, nor the domestic
life, and had more than the geographical knowledge of the people who
listened to the original minstrel. Each of the novelties supposed to
have been introduced to gratify new hearers, each novelty in armour,
weapons, tactics, would only produce in the _Iliad_ an unintelligible
and chaotic blend, such as, the critics tell us, actually was
produced--a tangle which we cannot unravel. The fighting scenes, in
particular, thanks to the retention of old armour and tactics, and the
simultaneous introduction of novelties to please practical readers,
must have passed all understanding, and, as we are told, they make
nonsense. No practical hearers in that case could have endured the
confusion, a point to be demonstrated in detail.[6]

Let us remember, too, that the novelties said to have been introduced
were of the pettiest kind. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ retain a
non-Ionian polity: non-Ionian burial rites; non-Ionian marriage customs
(in which a change is detected in one case); non-Ionian houses;
non-Ionian shields, non-Ionian armour, non-Ionian military tactics;
while truly and specially Ionian rites and beliefs and geographical
knowledge are all absent. Why should poets who were innovating have
left the whole Homeric picture standing except in certain minute
details of corslets, greaves, bride-price, and upper storeys and
separate sleeping chambers in houses?

It is our opinion, therefore, that the details of life in the poems
are all old and all congruous; while we find the "much new" abundantly
present, _not_ in Homer, but in the fragments and summaries of the
contents of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, dating from the age (770-650
B.C.) when the novelties are supposed to have been most copiously
foisted into the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--in which, as a matter of fact,
they never appear. Far from altering the old epics, I hope to show that
the Ionians laboured at constructing new epics, the "Cyclics"; partly
for the purpose of connecting their ancestors with ancient heroic
events in which, according to Homeric tradition, their ancestors played
no part; partly to tell the whole tale of Troy.

The task of these Ionian poets was later taken up by the Athenian
tragedians, and a non-Homeric, we may say almost an anti-Homeric
tradition was established, was accepted by Virgil and by the late Greek
compiler, Dictys of Crete; and finally reached and was elaborated by
the romancers of the Christian Middle Ages.

It is not easy to do justice to this theory except in a perpetual
running fight with the believers in the Ionian moulders of the Homeric
poems into their actual form with its contents. Now few things are
more unpleasant than a running fight of controversial argument, the
reader is lost in the jangle and clash of opinions and replies,
often concerned with details at once insignificant and obscure. Into
such minutiae I would not enter, if they were not the main stock of
separatist critics.

On the whole, then, it seems best to describe, first, as far as we
may, the age preceding that of Homer, and then the Homeric world, just
as the poet paints it, without alluding to differences of critical
opinion. These are discussed later, and separately.



[1] _Church Quarterly Review_, vol. xi. p. 414. It is easy to recognise
the anonymous writer.

[2] It does not follow, in my opinion, that the change in burial
customs necessarily implies the advent of a new and strange "race" on
the scene. Mr. Ridgeway writes that the discovery in the Roman Forum of
"graves exhibiting two different ways of disposing of the dead--the one
class inhumation, the other cremation, of itself" is "a proof of the
existence of two races with very different views respecting the soul."
("Who were the Romans?" _Proceedings of the British Academy_, vol.
iii. p. 7. (_Tiré à part_.) The word "race" has the vaguest meaning,
but the Tasmanians are usually supposed to have been a fairly unmixed
"race." Yet they buried, as do the Australian tribes, in a variety of
ways, cremation, inhumation, tree burial, and in other fashions, and
all sorts of beliefs about the soul co-existed. (See Ling Roth, _The
Tasmanians_, pp. 128-134.) Methods of burial do not afford proof of
varieties of "race."

[3] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii., 1902, p. x.

[4] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. xiv, xv.

[5] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. x. Much of the "new," we must remark, was
added, on this theory, not "unintentionally," but consciously and
purposefully.

[6] See "Homeric Arms and Costume," and "Homeric Tactics," _infra_.




CHAPTER II

HOMERIC LANDS AND PEOPLES


Homer conceives of his heroes as living in an age indefinitely remote:
their epoch "has won its way to the mythical." They are often sons
or grandsons of Gods: the Gods walk the earth among them, friendly,
amorous, or hostile. From this fact, more than from the degeneracy in
physical force which Homer often attributes to his contemporaries, we
see that the mist of time and the glamour of romance have closed over
the heroes.

But this might happen in the course of a pair of centuries. In the
French _Chansons de Geste_ of 1080-1300, Charlemagne (_circ_. 814), a
perfectly historical character to us,--has become almost as mythical
as Arthur to the poets. He conquers Saracens as Arthur conquers all
western Europe; he visits Constantinople; he is counselled by visible
angels, who to some degree play the part of the gods in Homer.

Perhaps two or three centuries may separate Homer from any actual
heroic princes of whom traditions have reached him. Modern research
holds that the Achaeans of Homer, by infiltration and by conquest, had
succeeded to more civilised owners of Greece.

But Homer has nothing to say about a conquest of Greece by the
Achaeans, Danaans, Argives, and the rest, from the north, except in
two cases. He speaks of combats with wild mountain-dwelling tribes in
Thessaly, in Nestor's youth. Nestor knew "the strongest of men who
warred with the strongest, the mountain-dwelling Pheres,"[1] shaggy
folk, says the _Catalogue_, whom Peirithous drove out of Pelion in
northern Thessaly, and forced back on the Aethices of Pindus in the
west.[2] It appears, from recent excavations, that the age of stone
lingered long in these regions, and the people were probably rude and
uncultivated, like the Centaurs.

The recent excavators of Zerelia, north-east of the Spercheios valley,
the home of Achilles, write that their discoveries in the soil "clearly
point to the fact that in prehistoric times the cultures of North
and South Greece were radically different. This probably indicates
an ethnological difference as well."[3] Before the period when "Late
Minoan III." pottery occurs in Thessaly, the people used stone tools
and weapons, and knew not the potter's wheel. It may not, therefore, be
too fanciful to regard Nestor's tales of fights with a wild mountain
race as shadowy memories of actual Achaean conquests in Thessaly, where
Aegean culture arrived very much later than in Southern Greece.

Secondly, Homer twice speaks of regions as "Pelasgian," in which
he represents the actual inhabitants as Hellenes and Achaeans, not
Pelasgic. These regions are the realm of Achilles in south-west
Thessaly; and Epirus.[4] But the actual Pelasgians whom Homer knows
are allies of Troy; they dwell on the North Aegean coasts (where
Herodotus found living Pelasgians), or reside, with Achaeans,
Dorians, True Cretans, and Cydonians, in Crete. These facts indicate
Homer's knowledge that, in some regions, Achaeans had dispossessed
"Pelasgians," whoever the Pelasgians may have been. Again, Homer makes
Achilles address the "Pelasgic Zeus" of Dodona in Epirus, in which he
locates Perhaebians and Eneienes.

It thus appears that he supposed the Achaeans to have driven out
Pelasgians from Epirus and Thessaly, at least, if not from southern
Greece. It may well seem to us strange that as the Achaean settlement
in Crete, or at least in parts of Crete, must have been comparatively
recent when Homer sang, he never mentions so great an event. But
reasons for and a parallel to his silence are not hard to find. If,
as many authorities hold, the great Cnossian palace had fallen, and
the Cretan civilisation had sunk into decadence before the Achaeans
_arrived in the island_,[5] they might meet with but slight resistance;
great feats of heroism might not claim record. Again, the Norman
Conquest gave rise to no Anglo-Norman epic. The invaders already
possessed their epic tradition, that of Charlemagne, borrowed from
"the Franks of France," while they presently, in the twelfth century,
took up and expanded the epic traditions of the Welsh and Bretons,
in the Arthurian cycles of romances. In the same way, for all that
we know, the Achaean epics may have a basis in the traditions of the
earlier and more civilised populations usually styled "Pelasgians."
The manners, however, of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are Achaean, as the
manners of the French romances of Arthur are not Celtic, but feudal and
chivalrous.[6] Homer, in any case, conceives of his own race as at home
in Greece and Crete, and he has nothing to say about Greek settlements
on the Asiatic coast. To him the inhabitants of Miletus are not the
Ionian colonists. "Carians uncouth of speech" dwelt by the banks of
the Meander, and the Asiatic allies of Priam are people "scattered, of
diverse tongues."[7] For purposes of convenience all parties to the
war understand each other's speech.[8]

In _Odyssey_, xix. 172-177, Homer gives an account of populous Crete,
with ninety cities, and a mingling of various tongues, "therein are
Achaeans, and True Cretans high of heart, and Cydonians, and Dorians
in their three divisions, and noble Pelasgians." Did they vary in
language, or in dialect and accent merely? We cannot know, we cannot be
sure that "True Cretans" were the pre-existing Aegeans. The Cydonians
dwelt beside the Jardanus; Jardanus is also a river-name in Elis. Mr.
Leaf thinks of the Semitic _yârad_, "to flow" (Jordan), but we have
other such river-names, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra Yarra; the
word may be onomatopoeic, expressing the murmur of the water.

Homer, in any case, does not despise the Asiatic allies of Troy as
"barbarous," does not think them alien wholly, as the poets of the
_Chansons de Geste_ regard the Saracens,--worshippers of Mahound and
Apollon. The Asians have the same gods and rites as his own people;
Glaucus and Sarpedon are as good knights and live in precisely the same
sort of polity as Aias or Achilles. Homer does not think of the strife
as between Hellenes and Barbarians, that is a far later idea never
interpolated into the Epics. All men are children of the Olympians.

It would appear that Homer sang before the northern invasion, usually
called "Dorian," caused the Achaean and Ionian migrations from the
Greek mainland, and the Greek settlements on the Asiatic coast (950-900
B.C.?). He never alludes to these events, but it may be said that he
deliberately conceals them.

The account which Homer gives of the Achaean heroes and their realms
is to be found in the Catalogue of the Ships in Book ii., a passage
of three hundred lines. It is, perhaps, not very probable that this
long list was usually recited at popular gatherings, and there is much
dispute as to its date and purpose. We relegate to an appendix some
remarks on the debated questions. Whether the Catalogue, or most of
it, was part of the original _Iliad_ or not, most of it was certainly
composed at a time when the condition of prehistoric Greece was
well known, when a lively tradition of its divisions still existed;
moreover, it is the work of a poet, and Milton deemed it worthy of
imitation in _Paradise Lost_.

The Catalogue was omitted from many manuscripts of the _Iliad_,
probably because it was thought tedious reading. But to us there is
poetry in the very names of "rocky Aulis," and "Mycalessus of the wide
lawns," and "dove-haunted Thisbe," and "Lacedaemon lying low among
the rifted hills." The author wrote "with his eye on the object,"
and the doves of Thisbe have survived many empires and religions,
still floating round their old domains and uttering their changeless
note.[9] "Pleasant Titaresius" still mingles his clear waters with the
chalk-stained Peneius, and Celadon brawls as when Nestor heard its
music.

The Catalogue enumerates all the Achaeans; Boeotians, Phocians,
Minyans; light-armed Locrian slingers; the Abantes of Euboea, fond of
close combat; the Arcadians, whose dialect was nearest akin to Homer's
own language, but who take no part in the action; the Epeians of Elis,
once foes of Nestor's Pylians; the far-off Aetolians, no longer led
by golden-haired Meleager; the Cretans of Cnossos, under Idomeneus,
grandson of Minos; his neighbour Tlepolemos of Rhodes, of the blood of
Heracles, and probably a Dorian, though the Dorian name is not uttered;
and some of the Sporades. There are, too, the south Thessalian Achaeans
and Hellenes, the Myrmidons under Achilles; the men of Philoctetes,
who lies sore hurt by a serpent's bite in the Isle of Lemnos; the
descendants in Thessaly (not a Homeric name) of the Lapithae; the
Pethraebians from "wintry Dodona"; the men of Argos and Tiryns of the
mighty walls, under Diomede; the men of Lacedaemon under Menelaus; the
Athenians (much suspected of interpolating their own mention), Odysseus
of the western and Aias of the eastern isles (Ithaca and Salamis); and
the host of Agamemnon, lord of Corinth, Sicyon, and Mycenae, himself
the Over Lord of all.

Taking the Catalogue as it stands, the princes of whom Agamemnon of
Mycenae was Over Lord come from the Greek mainland, from southern
Thessaly and Aetolia to the southernmost point of the Morea, and the
islands as far south and east as Crete, Carpathos, and Rhodes.

Now, as Agamemnon is the Over Lord, and Idomeneus of Cnossos in Crete
is one of his thanes, so to speak, the poet clearly regards the Greek
mainland as the centre of an Achaean dominion, of which Crete is a
great dependency. He shows no idea that Crete had been the centre of
another power, and the focus of another civilisation, held by a people
who, since the age of stone weapons and implements, had developed its
culture without interruption, and had sent its arts to the mainland of
Greece. To Homer, Mycenae is the centre; the prince of Cnossos is a
great feudatory of Agamemnon.

The poet is much interested in Crete; not only does the _Iliad_ dwell
on the prowess of Idomeneus the prince of Cnossos, and of Meriones;
but in the feigned tales of Odysseus, when he returns to Ithaca, he
represents himself as a Cretan adventurer. Homer avoids the Athenian
tales about Cretan tyranny, about the Minotaur, and the prowess
of Theseus in aid of the freedom of Athens. These things are not
touched upon, as they certainly would have been had Athenians freely
interpolated the poems. Homer entirely ignores all Athenian and Ionian
traditions.[10]

This is not the place to ask whether Achaeans from the mainland were
the men who took and sacked the palace of Cnossos in Crete about 1400
B.C., or whether the spoilers were "Pelasgians," that is, people
living on the mainland in Cretan conditions of culture, driven from
the mainland by the Achaean irruption; or whether the palace was
wrecked during an internal revolution before the Achaeans came to the
island.[11] Homer undeniably regards Idomeneus as an Achaean and a
descendant of Minos; and Minos as a son of Zeus.[12] Rhadamanthus of
his blood, is "the golden-haired," like Menelaus, Meleager, and some
other heroes.[13] We are not here concerned with discrepant traditions,
and with the idea that Minos is an Aegean as Pharaoh is an Egyptian
name of kings in general. That may be so; Minos may have been a figure
in Cretan legend before the Achaeans came thither; if so, they adopted
him as their own. We are only stating Homer's view of the relations
between Crete and the Achaean power on the mainland.

Homer's Catalogue of the Asian allies of Troy is brief, and contains
only about sixty lines. There was a Trojan Catalogue in the _Cypria_,
a lost Ionian epic poem of the eighth century, and as the Ionian
colonists in Asia knew the country of their settlement well, it is
likely to have been copious. Beginning, in Homer's Trojan Catalogue,
with the Dardanians under Aeneas, who may be said to represent "the
Orleans branch" of the Trojan royal family, we next hear of the Trojans
under Pandarus, who, in fact, broke the solemn oaths of truce, and
sealed the doom of Ilium (_Iliad_, iv.), but who somehow as "Sir
Pandarus of Troy" acquired another kind of ill fame among our mediaeval
poets. He dwelt by the Aesepus. "At the extreme north of the Troad,
where the Hellespont opens out into the Sea of Marmora," lived Adrastus
and Amphius. Asius led forces from Sestus and Abydus, on both sides,
European and Asian, of the Hellespont: there were also Pelasgians,
apparently from the European side. There were, from Europe, Thracians
and Cicones; the chief Thracian contingent arrived later (see _Iliad_,
Book x.). The Cicones, with whom Odysseus has trouble when first he
leaves Troy, in the _Odyssey,_ are also European, as were probably,
in origin, the people of Troy itself. European are the Paeonians,
the Paphlagonians, again, are Asiatic; the Alizonians are remote
and unrecognisable. Then we have Asiatic Mysians and Phrygians, and
Maeonians from near Sardis, and under Mount Tmolos inland. The Carians
of Miletus (later an Ionian city) follow, the Meander is their river;
last come the Lycians under Sarpedon (whom legend connects with Crete),
and Glaucus; another Glaucus was son of Sisyphus of Ephyre (Corinth),
in Argos, and was father of Bellerophon. Bellerophon, again, was sent
to his death in Lycia, by Proetus, who had married a Lycian princess.
The Lycian Glaucus of the _Iliad_ is a grandson of Bellerophon
(_Iliad_, vi.).

According to this story, Greeks freely passed to Lycia and intermarried
with Lycians. Only the Carians are described as "barbaric" in language.
Homer knows not, we said, the distinction of Hellenes and Barbarians;
the Greeks did not know it till the struggle of their Asiatic colonies
against Lydia and Persia produced the sense of "racial" repulsion. In
Homer any Greek prince going to Asia is courteously treated, perhaps
settles there like Bellerophon, or makes hereditary guest-friendships,
like the ancestors of Glaucus and Diomede.

The distinction which Homer does know is that between god-fearing
men, with cities, laws, and rulers, on one hand, and men who are like
the Cyclops, lonely, and lawless (_Od._ ix. 112-115). The Cyclops is
not so godless as he boasts himself to be; he does pray to his father
Poseidon, but he is wholly lawless, and each man is king in his own
family. The cannibal Laestrygones, even, have a king and a city, though
their manners are disgusting. Homer cannot easily, we see, conceive
of men whose polity and cities are not like those with which he is
familiar. He may have heard vaguely of far northern tribes abiding by
their fiords in the land of amber, the land of the nightless summer
and of the sunless winter. Such tales would come with the amber from
the Baltic coasts, for which merchants bartered the bronze swords and
vessels of their own civilisation. He had certainly heard of "the proud
Hippemolgoi," drinkers of mares' milk, nomad Scythians north of the
Danube, living like Tartars on koumiss.[14] If he has heard of any
empire in the Asian _hinterland_, he may speak of it as one of the two
Ethiopian realms; but here all is mythical.

Egypt, too, appears in the tales of Odysseus when he represents himself
as a Cretan adventurer, a raider in the lands by the river Aegyptus.
Helen has been in Egypt, and received the drug _nepenthes_ from the
wife of the king, just as she has been in Egyptian Thebes, and carried
treasures thence (_Od_. iv. 130 ff.). Achilles[15] knows the wealth
of Egyptian Thebes, and its hundred gates, and countless charioteers.
Sicily is known to the _Odyssey_, a poem of Ithaca and the west, and
of "perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn"; it is not mentioned in the
_Iliad_, a poem of the east and the Asian shore. The Phoenicians are
familiar as traders (_Iliad_, xxiii. 743), and are much better known,
as is natural, to the sea-poem, the _Odyssey_. The appearance of the
Phoenicians in the _Odyssey_, when they sell jewels to the women and
kidnap the child Eumaeus, has been spoken of as work of the seventh
century B.C.; a scene of contemporary life in that late age. But Mr.
H. R. Hall, writing on early relations between Greece and Egypt, as
depicted in Egyptian wall-paintings of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
represents commerce between the Aegean peoples of Greece and Crete as
filtering through "Phoenician channels." The Phoenicians were active
navigators and were merchants then and afterwards, that is, from the
sixteenth century B.C. onwards. A fresco in an Egyptian tomb of the
early date shows the arrival of "beaknosed" Phoenicians "in voluminous
and multi-coloured robes," one of them carrying "a small Mycenaean
amphora," at the Theban quays.[16] This being so, it is not so easy
to bring down the Phoenicians of the _Odyssey_ to the seventh century
B.C. The Sidonians make the goods which the Phoenicians transport, but
the Phoenician slave of the father of Eumaeus declares that she comes
from the town of Sidon, and the Phoenician sailor knows her parents
(_Odyssey_, xv. 415-433). No very clear distinction seems to have been
drawn between Phoenicians and Sidonians.

These Semitic peoples were persistently credited, till lately, with all
the finer works of art and craft which Homer mentions. The discovery
of the art of Minoan Crete has made this unqualified attribution
impossible.[17] Certainly Homer conceives of the Semites as doing a
large trade, and as kidnapping children in the Greek seas; but their
own art was imitative, and it is unlikely that, in Homer's time, the
characters of their alphabet had ousted those of Aegean civilisation.
It is curious that the place in which Phoenicians exercised most
influence, Cyprus, was also the place where the Phoenician alphabet
was so long in supplanting the native syllabary, akin to the unread
documents of Minoan Crete.

We may thus conceive Homer's ancestors, by 1400 B.C., as men far from
savage or barbarian,[18] who then succeeded to an Aegean civilisation
much more luxurious and artistic than their own; and, centuries later,
when Homer sang, the glow of the Aegean culture still flushed the sky:
its art was known to the poet.


[1] _Iliad_, i. 266-268.

[2] _Iliad_, ii. 741-744.

[3] _Proceedings, British School of Athens_, xiv., 1907, 1908, p. 223.

[4] _Iliad_, ii. 681-684, xvi. 233-235.

[5] Mackenzie, "Cretan Palaces," in _Brit. School of Athens_, xii. pp.
216-258.

[6] The parallel has been brought to my notice in detail by Mr. J. W.
Mackail; it had already occurred to me in a general way.

[7] _Iliad_, ii. 867, ii. 804.

[8] In the line just cited, and in the Carians Βαρβαροθώνω of _Iliad_,
ii. 867, we cannot positively know whether Homer is thinking of
different languages, or of differences in accent and dialect.

[9] Leaf, on _Iliad_, ii. 502.

[10] Save in the interpolated name of Theseus, twice, and in doubtful
parts of _Odyssey_, xi.

[11] These various views are held, or have been held, by Mr. Evans,
Mr. Ridgeway, Dr. Mackenzie, and others (_Monthly Review_, 1901, pp.
121-131; _Times_, Oct. 31, 1905; _Annuals, British School of Athens_,
xi. p. 14; _ibid._ xii. 216 _et seqq._, xiii. 423 _et seqq._). In Dr.
Mackenzie's ample arguments, cf. Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 32,
33, the Pelasgians were the sackers of Cnossos. The evidence is mainly
archaeological, and might be argued over endlessly.

[12] _Iliad_, xiii. 450.

[13] These views are suggested by Professor Ridgeway in a paper read to
the British Academy; see _Athenaeum_, June 5, 1909.

[14] _Iliad_, xiii. 5, 6, and Leaf's note.

[15] _Ibid._ ix. 381. Mr. Leaf attributes the lines to "some person
with a dull chronological mind," who remembered that Thebes in Greece
had been left in ruins by the war of the Epigonoi. "He forgot, however,
that Egypt is elsewhere unknown to the _Iliad_." If a place is unknown
because no one has occasion to mention it, unknown is Thebes to the
_Iliad_. But to say that a poet familiar with Crete never heard of
Egypt; that Egypt was rediscovered between the dates of composition
of _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is arbitrary. We might as well say that
Shakespeare, who never mentions tobacco, never heard of the weed, or
that no Biblical author ever saw a cat (out of the Apocrypha).

[16] B. S. A. viii. 174.

[17] See Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 83-86.

[18] _Ibid._ pp. 112-115.




CHAPTER III

HOMERIC POLITY. THE OVER LORD


As Homer conceives the period of his heroes, they live in a perfectly
well known stage of society, illustrated in later northern Europe by
the French _Chansons de Geste_; by the most ancient Irish stories
in prose mixed with verse; and even to some extent by the Arthurian
romances. Every prince has his castle and town or towns, his lands,
pasturage, tilth, and orchards; he is, in the Irish phrase, a _righ_.
He is surrounded by the γέροντες,--in Irish the _flaith_, the gentry
or squires, who held "rich lands remote from towns," and possessed
war-chariots.[1] The princes and gentry with war-chariots alone take
notable individual parts in the fighting, whether they fight mounted
or dismounted. It is the gentry who offer a rich demesne, vineland
and tilth, to Meleager, imploring him to take part in their war.[2]
It appears to me that the gentry themselves held land in severalty,
perhaps contrary to the old letter of the law, and in possession rather
than in property.

The question of Homeric land tenure, as of all early land tenure
before written records, is very obscure. There existed "common
fields" certainly; but were they common property, each freeman having
no more than his strip; separated, we know, from that of others by a
longitudinal "balk" or boundary? We hear of men wrangling across the
balk, "with measures in their hands, in _a common field_, striving
for their right within scanty space."[3] Such quarrels were common in
the Scotland of the eighteenth century, under the "run-rig" system
of common fields; but then the men were tenants. They may have been
free-holders in Homer's time, each with his assured "lot" (κλὴρος)[4]
The Irish tribal free man had a right to one of these lots, which were
redistributed by rotation, but many lots came gradually into the hands
of each of the _flaith_, squires, (γέροντες), who were rich in cattle,
and let out the cattle to poor lease-holders, for returns of rent in
kind. A mail in Homer might have no lot,[5] and yet employ hinds, and
be a cultivator. He must have been a tenant farmer.

In the _Iliad_, apart from the demesnes allotted to great men by the
γέροντες, we only hear of personal property, gold, iron, cattle, and
so on. In the _Odyssey_ (xiv. 211) we read of men in Crete who each
possessed several lots; and in so old a civilisation nothing is more
probable. One is inclined to suppose that the majority of freemen held
each his lot, while some had lost their lots; that many who had been
land-holders came to hold as tenants merely, under rent in kind paid
for stock to the γέροντες, who were rich in ploughing cattle; and that
some γέροντες, and all princes held demesnes and a large share of
the unfenced pasturage, worked by slaves and hinds. This is quite a
practicable condition of affairs; there were all grades of wealth, some
men were, as Odysseus feigned to be, wandering tramps. By the time of
Hesiod lots of land were purchaseable,[6] but we do not hear in Homer
that lots could be bought and sold.

It does not seem that these variations of conditions, in a society
where the rich and the very poor certainly coexisted, are proofs that
ideas and practices of various later ages have been brought into the
Epics by the insertion of lays of various dates. In savage and barbaric
societies on a very low level, even in Australia, we find the most
various social rules coexisting, and tribes with maternal and with
paternal reckoning of descent live side by side. In Melanesia the
conditions of native land-tenure vary greatly, some are "primitive"
others not so.[7] When we reflect on facts so certain, it seems strange
that the hints of varieties in the condition of land-tenure in Homer
are regarded as a proof that the poems are a patchwork of the usages of
four changing centuries.

We do not, of course, know anything about land-tenure in the early
Ionian settlements in Asia, where, if anywhere, novelties would be
interpolated. Probably, as was usual and natural in the foundation of
a colony, each freeman was assigned his lot. But as the cities became
full of seafaring traders and sailors, some men thus occupied would
part with the lots which they could not cultivate, and these would be
bought by capitalists. Now Homer never mentions the purchase of lots.
Athenian tradition held that their colonists were led by the Codrids,
descendants of kings not Athenians, descendants of the sons of Neleus
of Pylos, Nestor's family. This legend was probably invented for the
purpose of introducing Attica into the Achaean cycle of history, in
which Attica, as far as Achaean traditions inform us, had no part.
Indeed we cannot know whether or not princes like these of Homer long
ruled the Ionian cities. Colonists are usually impatient of monarchy.

Returning to the Homeric Over Lord, the princes do not hold land from
the Crown, so to speak. The Over Lord is _primus inter pares_ by right
divine, not by election. In late forms of the Trojan tale, Agamemnon
is only an _elected_ general; this idea may be derived from the Ionic
poem, the _Cypria_. In Homer, Agamemnon is commander-in-chief _by
birth_; but the princes, in formal council, or on the field, deliver
their advice, which may or may not be accepted. Agamemnon usually gives
way to it. The Over Lord's rights are not strictly defined, except by
traditionary custom. Like Charlemagne in the later _Chansons de Geste_,
like Fion MacCumhail in his cycle, even like Arthur, the Achaean
Over Lord is not the favourite of the poets and romancers. They much
prefer, in Homer's case, the princes; in the mediaeval romances they
prefer Diarmaid, Cuchullain, Oscar, Lancelot, and the rest, to the
Over Lord. Except in the case of Arthur, who himself tends to become a
_fainéant_, the Over Lords are always capricious, arbitrary, unjust,
always encroaching, and are apt to be rebuked or even reviled, by
their more energetic subordinates. Agamemnon is in a position between
that of the Charlemagne of the _Chanson de Roland_, and the dotard
of the later _chansons_. His divine right is always recognised; his
bursts of insolent temper are easily checked; his nervousness as a
commander-in-chief brings on him rebukes to which he instantly yields,
and is partly redeemed by his personal prowess and skill with the
spear. When the Over Lord's insolence and injustice are beyond bearing,
the injured prince may blamelessly "renounce his allegiance," return
home or remain without taking part in battle or council. Nobody blames
Achilles for his mutiny, least of all does Athene, till he, in turn,
exceeds his rights by refusing atonement and apology.[8] It seems that
Achilles would actually have lost consideration had he returned to
action without receiving gifts of atonement,[9] as Meleager did in his
day. This is the chief point of the long exhortation of Phoenix.[10]

When reconciliation did occur, it was regulated by minute etiquette
(as in _Iliad_, xix. 171-183); there is an oath, a banquet, the gifts
of atonement are publicly brought into the midst of the Assembly, ἐς
μεσσην ἀγορήν, and exhibited: none of these points may be omitted in
the customary mode of giving satisfaction, ἵνα μή τι δίκης ἐπιδευὲς
ἔχηισθα.

These transactions Odysseus forces on the reluctant Achilles, as one
who "knows better" than he.[11]

There is nothing superstitious in the manly and constitutional attitude
of the princes towards the king. He is not a god of vegetation, who
is slain or sacrificed yearly or at longer intervals; if ever such a
mortal king god of vegetation existed anywhere. In the _Odyssey_ (xix.
107-114) we hear that, under a godfearing king, who reigns over strong
men and a large population, and maintains just dealings, the crops,
whether of grain or fruit-trees, and the flocks are fertile, while the
sea yields fish abundantly, "through the king's good government." Here
is a trace of belief in the prosperity of a good king, the gods reward
him, and his people prosper. But there is no hint that the king, as the
embodiment of a god, controls the weather.

The Achaean attitude towards the Over Lord is stated by Nestor,--"Think
not, son of Peleus, to strive with a king, might against might,
seeing that no common honour pertaineth to a sceptred king to whom
Zeus apportioneth glory." "I have beside me," says Agamemnon, "others
that shall do me honour, and above all Zeus, lord of counsel." He
inherits his sceptre "that over many islands and all Argos he should
be lord." He rules by right divine, but there are recognised limits
to his authority. This is a well-known form of polity in early
civilisations, and, so far, Homer, from first to last, thoroughly
understands his world. He never lets his Over Lord fall into the
decadence of Charlemagne in the _Chansons de Geste_. It may be a later,
it was certainly a more hostile spirit, as regards the Over Lord, that
reached the Cyclic poets (_circ_. 760-660), who dwell on the tyranny
suffered by Palamedes and Philoctetes, Palamedes being the inventor
of alphabetic writing. Pindar and the Greek tragedians followed, and
exaggerated such traditions.[12]

Homer retains the true sense of the position of the Over Lord, no
tincture of the ideas of later ages appears in the Epics. Now, is it
not a point worth considering that the Epics, though the critics take
them to have been open to interpolation even in their oldest passages,
down to 540 B.C. or thereabouts, never contain the word τύραννος or any
of its compounds? The τύραννος, the "Tyrant," was originally the person
who unconstitutionally seized power in one of the republics, usually
oligarchic, that succeeded to the Homeric kingships. We place the early
"tyrants" in the eighth century and onwards. To the Athenian tragedians
a Homeric king was a "tyrant." Yet despite the assumed facility of
interpolation into the Epics, even at a much later date than the eighth
century, no late poet foisted into our Epics the word τύραννος, nor
the ideas which it denotes. This abstinence is irreconcilable with the
supposed freedom of late interpolating poets in uncritical ages. The
Epics are perfectly consistent in their view of the divine right,
but limited power, of the Over Lord. He may display illegal arrogance
(ὕβρις), but he is never a τύραννος. The word, and the ideas connected
with the word,--usurpation by an individual of despotic power over
members of a free commonwealth,--were familiar to Greeks on both sides
of the sea in the eighth century. Interpolators of that period could
hardly have kept the word τύραννος out of their additions of new
matter, but it appears to occur for the first time in the Hymn to Ares:
"tyranny" (τύραννίς) is familiar to Archilochus.[13]

Thus, in the important matter of polity, we see that the Homeric
picture of society is coherent, represents a well-known social
and political state of affairs, is drawn with minute knowledge
of the rights and duties of all concerned, and bears no trace of
interpolations made under the later conditions known to Ionian poets
in Asia. But some epics of these poets display a grudge against the
Over Lord and his House, which is un-Homeric, and is exaggerated by the
Athenian tragedians.


[1] _Iliad_, xxiii. 832. All this passage, the conclusion of the
funeral games, is regarded as a late addition. It may be, but the poet
preserves the distinction between the uses of iron for implements, and
of bronze for weapons, which pervades both Epics. When a warrior like
Achilles offers a mass of iron for a prize, "we rather expect from
him," says Helbig, "an allusion to the military uses of the metal"
(_Das Homerische Epos_, pp. 330, 331, 1887). But Homer does not regard
iron as a military metal.

[2] _Iliad_, ix. 574-580.

[3] _Iliad_, xii. 421-423.

[4] xv. 498.

[5] Odyssey, xi. 490.

[6] Opp. 341.

[7] Codrington, _The Melanesians_.

[8] _Iliad_, ix. "When Achilles is justly angered with Agamemnon at
first none can blame him (ix. 523); but if he persists after Agamemnon
has sued for forgiveness, then there will be nemesis; people will be
indignant. He will know he is doing wrong." So Mr. Murray writes (Rise
of the Greek Epic, p. 81).

[9] _Iliad_, ix. 605.

[10] ix. 434 _et seqq_.

[11] They weary the critics, who are not at the Homeric point of view.
"It is quite conceivable that the whole idea of the Reconciliation
is an afterthought ... it is not only consistent with the character
of Achilles, but materially adds to the movement of the story, if we
suppose that on hearing of the death of Patroklos he set out to avenge
it without more ado" (Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 317).

[12] See _infra_, "The Story of Palamedes."

[13] 25 Bergk.




CHAPTER IV

HOMER'S WORLD IN PEACE


Though Homer describes a military aristocracy he is remarkable for his
love of peace and hatred of war. His war-god, Ares, is a bully and a
coward; his home is Thrace; and he is never mentioned with sympathy.
It seems to follow that Homer's people are conceived as long settled
in tranquil homes; and, though Achilles says that "cattle are to be
had for the raiding of them" (_Iliad_, ix. 406), actual fighting to
recover captured cattle is thrown back into the youth of Nestor. Young
adventurers, however, expend their energy, like the Icelanders of the
sagas, in "going on viking," "risking their own lives, bringing bane
to alien men." The great war against Thebes is a memory of an earlier
generation; as are the combats with the wild and shaggy hill tribes,
and the war between Meleager and the Couretes. When war is in hand
it has no more spirited singer than Homer; he has a special word (if
correctly rendered) for "the joy of battle" (χάρμη), but it has often
been remarked that his men are not very resolute and stubborn fighters.
They are not like the Spartans or the Macleans, with their traditional
rule of never retreating.

War may be a duty, in the eyes of Homer, but it is not a pleasure;
and this is the more singular as, in early societies, the bard, who,
like Ian Lom,[1] does not fight himself, is fond of provoking men to
battle. Though Odysseus, in his feigned tales of himself as a Cretan
adventurer, speaks of piracy, and of raids on the coasts of Egypt,
and though casual homicides are lightly mentioned, the Homeric is a
peace-loving world. The wild justice of the blood-feud, after a fatal
blow struck in anger, exists, and, as a rule, the slayer goes into
exile, to some friendly prince, and thus avoids the feud of the dead
man's kin.

On the Shield of Achilles was depicted a scene at the _Althing_ (to
use the Icelandic expression): "The folk were gathered in the assembly
place; for there was a strife arisen, two men striving about the
blood-price of a man slain; the one claiming to pay full atonement,
expounding to the people, but the other denied him, and would take
naught." The people are taking sides, and shouting, the heralds
restrain them, the γέροντες (the _probi homines_ or _prud'hommes_) sit
listening, on stone seats in the sacred circle.[2] The public sense
had enabled the slayer to remain at home, if the kin of the dead would
accept the blood-wyte, and allow the feud to be pacified. As Aias says
to Achilles, "a man accepts recompense of his brother's murderer, or
for his dead son; and so the manslayer for a great price abides in his
own land...."[3] Probably it was usual to accept the blood-price if
a man had been slain openly, sword in hand; but when a premeditated
murder was committed, actual revenge was desired. There was nothing
reckoned mean or contemptible in the pacific arrangement: in heroic
Iceland it was hard indeed to induce men to accept it.

These are the manners of a settled people, who will bear much for
the sake of peace, and of a people free from superstitious dread of
the blood curse, and ignorant of the filthy rite of purification by
the blood of swine, which was a regular piece of ritual in historic
Hellas, and is familiar to Aeschylus,[4] the Ionian epic poets, and
to Apollonius Rhodius. Certainly the rite was unknown to Homer, who
mentions many homicides but says nothing of purification or of
pollution. This point is later studied in detail. The life of the
heroes in peace is the life of all early aristocracies who do not idle,
and do not intrigue in a Court. The women spin and embroider, like
Penelope and Helen, and keep their eyes on household affairs, and on
their poultry, mainly geese. Nausicaa sees to the washing of the linen.
The men hunt hares and boars, and attend "days of law" in the legal
courts, and take part in funeral games. As yet we hear of no periodical
games, such as the Olympian, Isthmian, and Pythian, though the legends
of historic Greece pretend that these were founded in pre-Homeric times.

The princes also looked well to their lands. Odysseus alone is
mentioned as a skilled ploughman, carpenter, and shipwright, as some of
the Icelandic heroes are swordsmiths, but we see little of any prince
but Odysseus in peaceful life. There are professional artisans, whose
services are highly valued, carpenters, potters, bronze-smiths, and
weavers.

The women meanwhile are amused by the visits of Phoenician pedlars, who
bring goods and gauds of every kind, and steal a child or carry away a
serving maid if they have the opportunity, as in the case of Eumaeus.
After supper the minstrel of the prince chants lays, like Demodocus
in Phaeacia. As Spenser observed in Ireland, and as the Brehon laws
declare, the minstrel was highly honoured and trusted; the minstrel of
Agamemnon is charged, during the war, with the care of Clytemnestra.
These poets did not accompany the host to the war, where Achilles
solaced himself by singing to the harp "the renowns of men."[5]

Such is the general picture of Homer's world in time of peace, as
far as the days and works of the princely class and the gentry are
concerned. They are richly equipped with cups of gold, and furniture
inlaid with ivory and silver, even in the house of Odysseus. This
was but the dwelling of a king of a rocky isle. Entering the hall of
Menelaus, Telemachus bids his companion, the son of Nestor, marvel at
the gleam of bronze, gold, electrum, silver, and ivory.[6] Apparently
the home of Nestor in Pylos was not so rich and lordly. The house of
Menelaus is a picture of a dwelling rich in such treasures as have
been found in the Royal graves of Mycenae and in the palace of Cnossos
in Crete. In the house of Odysseus we hear of no bathroom and bath,
in which the girls of the house bathed princely guests and gave them
change of raiment.[7] Weapons adorn the walls (in the house of Odysseus
only), unless this be a later addition to the picture.

In the Homeric hall, each guest had his own little table and his chair.
The prince and his wife sat in the centre, beside the fire, under the
chief pillars. Honoured guests sat by them; the beggar was placed on
the threshold, with his mess of meat. As in heroic Ireland, where the
rules were very minute, some portions of the flesh were more honourable
than others. In the lost _Thebais_, Oedipus curses his sons, Eteocles
and Polynices, because they send him, not the shoulder, but the haunch
(ἰσχίον)[8] This is a very archaic touch.

Homer's world is aristocratic. The poet, none the less, has his eye
on the folk; on the honest poor woman who carefully weighs her wool;
on the aged female thrall who is busy all night over her task of
grain-grinding, and prays that the wooers who have broken her strength
may now eat their latest meal. He is keenly interested in the work of
artisans, such as the currier and shield maker who wrought the great
shield of Aias; in the fisherman with his nets, or line and bait; in
the diver for oysters; in the woodmen with their axes; in sowing and
ploughing, and the relative merits of oxen and mules as plough-beasts;
in the quarrel between two farmers over their boundary balk in the
common field; in the lot of the hind of a landless man, the hardest lot
of any; in gold-workers and spinners; shepherds, hunts-men, herdsmen;
in the potter who "sitting by his wheel maketh trial of it whether it
run"; in the virtues of a swineherd, a slave, who is noble by birth,
like Eumaeus; in all seafaring men down to the pursers and stewards;
in the laughing girls that gather in the vintage, while a boy makes
sweet music, and sings the song of Linus with delicate voice; in the
ploughman who has a drink of wine at the end of the furrow; in the
gardener with his orchard, the watering of a plot as it is done to this
day in the East; the fruit trees that Odysseus as a child was given
"for his very own"; in the smith's warm forge where masterless tramps
sleep at night; in the beggar men with their wallets, who crouch on the
outer part of the threshold; in the old cadger who goes on the errands
of the wooers; in the little girl that runs till she is weary by her
mother's side, and catches at her skirt, praying to be taken up in her
arms; in the children who build castles with the sea sand; in boys who,
"always fond of mischief," stone the wasps' nest, and make the angry
wasps a common nuisance; or cudgel the stubborn ass that is too strong
for them; in all poor wayfarers who wander under the protection of
Zeus; in all suppliants who, having slain a man, embrace the knees of
the prince to whom they flee. All mankind are as interesting to Homer
as the gallant youths at the bridal dance who wear "daggers of gold in
baldrics of silver"; such bronze daggers with gilded blade-centres as
were found in the tombs of Mycenae and elsewhere.

It is plain from Homeric descriptions of palaces, and of works of
art, that his age had not lost touch with or memory of the Aegean
culture. Whether some great Aegean or Mycenaean palaces with friezes
of cyanus (dark blue glass paste), and of metals, were still in a
habitable state, in Homer's days, or whether only the tradition
of their glory survived,--as memories of Roman buildings dwell in
the early Anglo-Saxon poem on the _Ruined City_ of the Romans in
England,--it is clear that plenty of Aegean artistic work in gold
and other metals, cups and sword hilts, was preserved, and known to
the poet. The Achaeans did not invade merely to destroy, like the
Anglo-Saxon invaders of Romanised Britain. Far more civilised and
refined than these rude hordes, they could appreciate and preserve as
well as burn and break,--in an hour of furious sack,--the treasures of
the more civilised race. But these treasures they could not imitate and
reproduce, apparently (they are often spoken of as the work of the god
Hephaestus), and the ancient Aegean art waned and passed under new and
crude influences.

Much as Homer delights in works of art, and vividly as he describes
them, and describes the toil of weavers, carpenters, shipwrights,
ploughmen, reapers, and vintagers, he never shows us a painter at
work on wall or vase, nor a mortal hand delineating, in any material,
men and women; except when Helen is weaving a great purple web, and
embroidering thereon, or interweaving there-with, "many battles of
horse-taming Trojans and mail-clad Achaeans."[9] This art implies some
knowledge of drawing and painting: from the Homeric age we have no
relics of this art; but such webs might, like the Bayeux tapestry, last
long, and might be imitated, and it may have been from such old Aegean
fabrics or copies of them that Homer took his idea.


[1] The bard of the Macdonalds in the year of Montrose.

[2] _Iliad_, xviii. 497-504.

[3] ix. 632-634.

[4] _Eumenides_, 273.

[5] _Iliad_, ix. 186, 189.

[6] _Odyssey_, iv. 70-75.

[7] _Ibid._ iii. 464-469. The word for bath, ἀσαμἰνθος, is thought,
like other words with the same termination, to be of the language of
the Aegean race, whoever they may have been: the termination is common
in place-names, and names of flowers.

[8] Kinkel, _Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta_, p. 11.

[9] _Iliad_, iii. 125-127.




CHAPTER V

MEN AND WOMEN


In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and
chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the
perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect
maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal
charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours
of women,--on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter
virgin,--he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.

It is an instance of the high and noble taste of the poet and his
audience, that he dwells most on the best and most charming of the
women in old traditions, and is manifestly reluctant to tell of any
evil deed, or any cruel sorrow of a lady. Yet legend was full of women
fierce and revengeful as Brynhild; such women as Medea, who slew her
own children; Ino, who hated her step-children; Althaea, who, to avenge
her brothers, burned the brand that was the life-token of her son,
Meleager of the golden hair. There was hateful Eriphyle, bribed by the
gift that drew her lord to his doom; there was hapless Epicaste, wedded
to her son, the slayer of his father; there were unhappy Chloris, and
unhappy Tyro, mother of Pelias and Neleus by Poseidon, and victim of a
feminine revenge. But this part of the tale is Ionian or Athenian, not
Homeric. In Homer a woman is not dishonoured, but more highly esteemed,
because she has been loved by a god. In Attic traditions she is
cruelly punished by her own kinsfolk.

The wicked and ill-fated ladies who remind us of heroines in ancient
German epos, are scarcely mentioned, or not at all in the _Iliad_
(where they could only appear in digressions), and the poet merely
touches on their fortunes when Odysseus meets them in Hades. From the
guilt and the misery of the "far-renowned brides of ancient song,"
Homer averts his eyes. Even to Clytemnestra, though her sin cannot be
hidden, he allows the _bon naturel_ which Mary Stuart justly claimed
for herself. We are reminded of the tenderness of Chaucer for the fault
of Cressida, "Ne me list this sely womman chyde."

Homer himself never blames Helen, he regards her with the affection
and pity of Hector and Priam: it is the Trojan women and Penelope, her
cousin, who speak frankly of Helen and the ruin which she wrought. In
the _Iliad_ she does not, "where'er she came, bring calamity"; she is
penitent, she longs for home, and her lord, and her one child, the
little maid Hermione. She scorns the cowardice of her lover, and, in
the third Book of the _Iliad_, the poet plainly declares that she is.
the unwilling victim of Aphrodite. In the _Odyssey,_ wherever she
appears, she brings beauty, grace, charm, and quiet, and her appointed
home is in the temperate meadows of the Elysian land.

Homer does not dwell on the passion of love; he could not do so in
an epic of war, and in an epic of a man seeking to win, on the sea,
"the return of his company." But each epic turns on and is _motive_ by
love; the _Iliad_ springs from the lawless love of Paris and Helen; the
_Odyssey_ from the wedded love of Odysseus and Penelope. The Wrath of
Achilles, too, arises on account of his lost love. In the instance of
Paris, love has turned to the most tragic end: the passion of Helen is
changed into bitter contempt and inconsolable regret.

The loves of youth and maiden, the whispered _oaristys_ "from rock and
oak," are seldom the theme of Greek poetry; in the Epics they would be
as out of place as in the _Chanson de Roland_. The loves of Troilus and
Cressida were, to Chaucer, the central interest of the Trojan leaguer;
no such place could they hold in Homer: he has an infinitely larger and
nobler topic. Yet he who listens may hear "The awakened loves around
him murmuring," in the lines that, through the din of battle, just
mention some old amour of gods with mortal maidens, of mortal men with
fairies of the woods and hills.

Considering the warlike nature of the _Iliad_, the parts played by
women, by Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, and the touches that bring forward
the wifely tenderness of Theano, are almost surprising; while the whole
poem is dominated by the maternal love of Thetis, that magical figure
of sorrow, foreboding, and affection, without which the character of
Achilles would be jejune, and bereft of occasions to display its _fond_
of tenderness and melancholy. Of course we are told that all these
women are "late," and formed no part of the original lay of the Wrath:
that is to be expected of critical sagacity.

The magnificent passages on Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba; the humorous
descriptions of Hera; Athene, her divine father's darling, and of
Aphrodite; the unnatural hatred of Althaea; the caprice of Anteia; the
pathos of the dirges of Briseis for Patroclus, of Helen for Hector; the
remorseless jealousy of the mother of Phoenix, when his father loves
a mistress among her maids, all supply "the female interest" in the
_Iliad_.

There is not so much "female interest" as in the _Volsunga Saga_, but
women occupy the same position, are regarded with the same deference;
they are free, on earth and in Olympus, they give their counsel and
even carry their point, as in the Icelandic sagas. In the _Odyssey_,
Arete and Nausicaa appear exactly in the fashion of Wealtheow,
Hrothgar's Queen, and her daughter in _Beowulf_,[1] they grace the
company and still the quarrels of men.

The whole view of women is what we may call "northern"; it is the
view of the sagas, of the English and the Teutonic epics; and is
remote from the spirit of the partly orientalised poets of Ionia.
But for the bequest of ancient heroic tradition the poets of Athens
could not have created their noble heroines. Attic life, Ionian life,
could not produce such women; and Aeschylus and Sophocles fall back
on memories of heroines who are not Ionian and are not Attic, in the
great majority of cases. Christian Europe at various times, in the age
of the chivalrous romances, and in comedy generally, fell far below
the old northern and Achaean view of the women's part. To chivalry,
adultery was a duty, to our European comedy it was a jest: marriage
was a _bourgeois_ business. But even to historic Greece the sanctity
of the marriage-tie was a serious matter: adulterous intrigues are not
the theme of Greek poets and comedians, as they have been ever since
our Middle Ages. Lancelot, and still more Tristram, would have been
stigmatised as Paris is by Hector; and Guinevere and Iseult would have
heard more reproaches from their own sex, than Penelope and the Trojan
women bestow on Helen. The Gods are a sinful and adulterous generation,
in the mythical view; but in the religious view they warn Aegisthus
against his sin and its consequence.[2]

Turning to the legal position of women, we do not know much about
the civil penalty or fine for adultery (μοιχάγρια), but Menelaus,
the soul of honour, is eager to avenge himself in the duel. The fine
for adultery may have been the equivalent of the bride-price paid by
the bridegroom. Hephaestus, in the song of Demodocus, demands the
return of the bride-price which he gave for the faithless Aphrodite,
the ἔεδνα.[3] The bride-price, often mentioned, is a well-known
institution, obsolete in historic Greece but familiar to the poet. In
very rare cases in Homer, a man may receive a bride without paying
a price for doing some great public service: in some circumstances
the father will even give a dowry with the bride.[4] In the most
notable passage where dowry (μείλία) is mentioned by the poet, he
plainly shows his knowledge that the giving of dowry is an exception
to the general rule; for he mentions the rule--the wooer pays the
bride-price ἔεδνα, but in his sore need of Achilles, Agamemnon offers
his daughter "without price" (ἀνάεδνον), and _plus_ such gifts as no
man ever endowed his daughter with.[5] This is no proof that the poet
of Book ix. lived in a later age than that of the bride-price. He
merely recognises what, in an age of bride-price, must have been the
fact, that in unusual circumstances, when the alliance of a man was of
crucial importance to the father, he would buy instead of selling his
daughter's marriage. People were never such pedants as not to infringe
a custom, not sacred but a secular bargain, when strong need came on
them.

In another instance the husband was King Priam, whose alliance was
worth buying by the aged father of the bride. "Circumstances alter
cases," as critics often forget, and such rare divergences from the
usual rule are not proofs of late interpolation. The Icelanders gave
dowries with their daughters, but when Njal was especially eager for a
bride for his foster son, he offered to reverse the process and give
ἔεδνα, bride-price.[6] In the case of the marriage of Penelope (a very
peculiar instance, as there was no proof that she was a widow, and as
it is not easy to see who "had her marriage"), we hear of bride-price
"such as is meet to go with a dear daughter." This return of the price,
or of part of it, was familiar to the Laws of Hammurabi and of the
Germans of Tacitus.[7] We may, with the separatist critics, suppose
that the passages about returning the bride-price of Penelope when
she goes to her second husband,[8] belong to a later period than the
body of the Epics; or, more probably, that a variety of customs may
coexist (that they may we have proved), and, in any case, Penelope's
people were anxious to get her off their hands in one way or another,
her situation being irksome and anomalous. Rare must be the examples
of interpolated details, when a case so anomalous as that of Penelope
is seized on as proof of the presence of later social practices. The
passages about Penelope are peculiar. In _Od_. ii. 53, Telemachus says
that the wooers have no mind to go to the father of Penelope, who
αὐτὸς ἐεδνώσαιτο θύγατρα. If we take this to mean "will endow her,"
the writer does not know the meaning of ἔεδνα; but I conceive him to
say, "will fix the bride-price," or make the terms.[9] Compare _Iliad_,
xiii. 384, ἐπεὶ οὔ τοι ἐεδνωταὶ κακοί εἰμεν, "we will not make hard
marriage terms," that is, will not demand a heavy bride-price.

In _Od_. i. 278, ii. 196, Telemachus is bidden to take his mother to
her father, "they will give the marriage feast and ἀρτυνέουσιν ἔεδνα,
many such as should follow with a dear daughter." Mr. Murray says that
the writer of these lines "mistook the meaning of estim because he had
forgotten the custom" (_R. G. E._ p. 152). But even Aeschylus knew that
ἔεδνα were gifts from the bridegroom (_Prometheus_, 559, quoted by Mr.
Murray); and if the author of the passages in _Odyssey_, i. ii., did
not know, he cannot have read the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. This is so
improbable, for even the author of the very "late" song of Ares and
Aphrodite (_Od_. viii. 318) knew all about the legal nature of ἔεδνα,
that we can hardly suppose the writer of the passages in _Od._ i. ii.
to have fancied that ἔεδνα meant "dowry."

One thing is certain, that the prehistoric usage of bride-price almost
uniformly prevails in the poems, with a trace of such variations in
custom as actually occur, when circumstances or affection demand it, in
every stage of human society. The bridal customs are not pedantically
stereotyped in Homer, but variations in accordance with circumstances
do not prove lateness or earliness, any more than such female names
as Alphesiboea, Phereboea, Polyboea, and others, indicating that a
daughter, on her marriage, will bring many kine into her family,
"express the excuse which the parents made to themselves for venturing
to rear the useless female child."[10]

Not even in Australian black society are girls more apt than male
babies to be killed as _bouches inutiles_, they are far too valuable
to their brothers or maternal uncles, being exchanged for other men's
sisters or nieces as brides. The cattle-owning barbaric societies of
Africa are not addicted to female infanticide, much less could Homeric
society be with its wealth and its tenderness of heart. In Greek
non-Homeric legend how often do we hear of a baby-girl being exposed?
It is the boys who suffer, in the hope of defeating some prophecy.
Homeric society is infinitely remote from that in which girls were too
expensive and useless to keep.[11]

Homer is the last author in whom we can hopefully look for survivals of
savagery, or of cruel and filthy superstitions. In the Epics there is
not a harlot, common as they are in the ancient Hebrew books. It is not
to be supposed that the ancient profession was unknown, but all such
things are ignored in deference to a taste more pure than that of early
Ionian society and of historic Greece from first to last. The tone of
taste and morals is, in short, Achaean, like the poet himself;[12]
Shakespeare, in _Troilus and Cressida_, makes Patroclus mimic Nestor; he

                         "coughs and spits,
    And with a palsy fumbling in his gorget,
    Shakes in and out the rivet,"

in "a night-alarm." Shakespeare has read of the night-alarm in _Iliad_,
Book x., but not there did he find, nowhere in Homer could he find "the
faint defects of age" made matter of merriment. In Homer nobody coughs!

The Homeric idea of the family is symbolised in the wedding bed which
Odysseus fashioned with his own hands, making it fast to the trunk of
a living tree that it might never be moved.[13] and adorning it with
inlay of gold, silver and ivory. According to many critics, of whom
Wolf is the earliest, the final books of the _Odyssey_ are later than
the rest, and the idea of a separate chamber for husband and wife
is late. Other critics, when they find mentions of such a separate
chamber (δάλαμος) in other parts of the Epic, explain them as late
interpolations. They appear once again to forget that in no civilised
society is there absolute uniformity of detail in all the arrangements
of domestic life. An interesting example may be found in Scott's
description of the hall and house of Cedric the Saxon,--the hall
floored with "earth mixed with lime, trodden into a hard substance,
such as is often employed in flooring our modern barns," the rafters
"encrusted with a black varnish of soot" (the _melathron_), the walls
"hung with implements of war," "the low irregular building," are like
the house of Odysseus. There were "buildings after building."[14]
Contrasted with these arrangements were the castles of the Normans,
"tall, turreted, and castellated buildings."

"In the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ the houses are normally one-room halls.
The master and mistress live in the _megaron_ in the daytime and sleep
there at night ... grown-up sons and daughters have separate 'halls' or
_thalamoi_ built for them close by."[15]

On this showing, Odysseus had chosen to adopt a different arrangement,
it does not quite follow that the account of his house is late;
it would be hard to prove that _thalamos_ (chamber) and _megaron_
(hall) are identical, we hear of no outside _thalamos_, like that of
Telemachus, occupied by a girl, and the whole topic demands very minute
criticism. But the question of Aegean and Achaean architecture is at
present the subject of controversy among architectural specialists.

The happiness of wedded life has never been more nobly praised than
by Homer in the famous speech of Odysseus to Alcinous. Adultery is
laughed at only among the gods. Moreover, we never hear of lightness
of behaviour in girls, except when a God is the wooer, and that is
reckoned an honour, the woman is sought for in marriage by mortals.
In Ionian tradition, as has been said, on the other hand, the girls
beloved by gods are severely punished, like Tyro.

Fidelity is not expected from men when absent at a long siege, or lost
in unknown lands, like Odysseus, who does not scruple to tell Penelope
about Circe and Calypso. At home the fidelity of husbands depends on
the characters of the pair. Laertes is fond of a fair handmaid, but
dreads the wrath of his wife, as the father of Phoenix, in a similar
case, found that _he_ had good reason to do. The bastards of whom we
hear are probably sons of the captives of the spear, brought home as
Agamemnon unadvisedly brought Cassandra. Theano, wife of Antenor,
"nurtured his bastard, like her own children, to do her husband
pleasure."[16] Teucer also, a bastard, was brought up by his father
in his own house.[17] There was one law for the men, another for the
women, and Dr. Johnson approved of this moral system in England.

The domestic relations are very pleasingly portrayed in the _Iliad_.
Homer, to be sure, knows that family life is not always monotonously
peaceful and affectionate. In the long speech of Phoenix (Book ix.)
we see a son, Meleager, who has a feud with his maternal uncles and
is under his mother's curse. This family feud, in which the wife and
mother takes sides with her own kin against her husband or sons, is a
common motive in the oldest Teutonic Epics, and even in the historic
traditions of the Camerons.

But it is among the Olympians that Homer finds his blustering, teasing
yet placable husband and father, Zeus; his shrewish wife, Hera; his
rather spiteful daughter, Athene; and his lady of pleasure, Aphrodite,
whose intrigues are a jest. The affection of Zeus for his daughter,
none the less, is happily displayed, while among men the fraternal
affection of Agamemnon for Menelaus is his most agreeable trait.
Parents and children, except in the woeful adventure of Phoenix, are
always on the best of terms, as in the households of Odysseus, Nestor,
and Alcinous; and the petulance of Priam towards his sons, after the
death of Hector, is excused by his age and intolerable sufferings.
"With his staff he chased forth the men, and they went before the old
man in his haste."[18]

In short, though wives were bought with the bride-price, it seems
probable that the affectionate Homeric fathers allowed more latitude of
choice to their daughters than has, in many periods, been permitted by
ourselves in England, and no literature in the world displays a happier
domestic life, a life more gentle, true, and loving than the old Epics
of the mail-clad Achaeans.[19]


[1] _Beowulf_, 611-628, 1162-1174, 1215-1231.

[2] _Odyssey_, i. 36-43.

[3] _Odyssey_, viii. 317-320.

[4] _Iliad_, xxii. 51, ix. 146-158.

[5] _Iliad_, ix. 146 _et seqq_.

[6] _Story of Burnt Njal_, vol. ii p. 81.

[7] Germania, R. G. E. p. 151, note 1, citing Ham. 160, 163, 164.

[8] _Odyssey_, i. 278, ii. 195-197.

[9] See Pierron, "qu'il s'entendra avec le prétendant." Merry and
Riddell translate, "will accept gifts of wooing for his daughter."
Leaf: "get the bride-price for his daughter."

[10] _R. G. E._ p. 151.

[11] No society is less affluent than that of the Australian tribes.
But this does not provoke preferential female infanticide. See Spencer
and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 51, 52, 264;
_Northern Tribes_, p. 608; Howitt, _Native Tribes of South East
Australia_, pp. 749, 750.

[12] See Appendix, "The supposed Expurgation of Homer."

[13] Odyssey, xxiii. 183-204.

[14] _Odyssey_, xvii. 266.

[15] _R. G. E._ p. 153.

[16] _Iliad_, v. 69-71.

[17] viii. 281-284.

[18] xxiv. 247.

[19] Mr. Murray refers me, for female infanticide among Greeks, to a
letter in _Pap. Oxyz_., 744: "Keep a male. Cast out a female child."
These may have been the manners of late Egyptianised Greeks, but I am
not dealing with them. See p. 40 _supra_ under note 2.




CHAPTER VI

THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR


On the fringe of the horizon, in Homer's day as in our own, always hung
the cloud of war. In war, men were as cruel as they have usually been.
A successful siege of a city involved the slaying of its defenders, and
the carrying away of the women, "to make another's bed, and draw water
from another's well." Hector, when the broken oaths of the duel[1] make
it certain that Troy must perish, looks for no better fortune to befall
Andromache; may the earth be mounded above him before that day!

Though a truce is granted for the cremation and burial, with one common
cairn, of the men who fall in a great battle,[2] it is not Achilles
alone who would fain refuse burial, and rest in the House of Hades,
to an enemy. Hector intends to give the body of Patroclus to the dogs
of Troy, and to fix his head on the palisade above the wall.[3] The
fury of Achilles, when he learns from Iris the intentions of Hector,
has thus more excuse than is usually supposed. Homer himself found
such deeds in the tradition; and though he regards them with horror,
he cannot expurgate them. The insults lavished by Achilles on the
dead Hector are ἀεικέα ἔργα, deeds of shame.[4] But the deeds of
Hector would have been as shameful. The treatment of Hector was not
sensational enough for the refined taste of the Athenian tragedians.
Sophocles and Euripides make Achilles drag the wounded but living
Hector.[5]

The tragedians here followed a tradition that was not Homer's; it
may have come, Mr. Murray suggests, from the lost Cyclic poem _Iliou
Persis_, the _Sack of Ilios_. The Cyclic poets of 750-650 B.C. are in
all ways more superstitious and barbarous than Homer; theirs is the
taste of a later age than his, and, as we shall see, they are usually
followed by the Athenian tragedians. They preferred the "sensational"
and the "harrowing," and did not shrink, in the _Andromache_, as in
the Ionian _Sack of Ilios_, from the brutal murder of Hector's child,
Astyanax. Homer's men are never child-murderers. City sackings were
as cruel as those of Cromwell in Ireland, of Monk in Dundee; our own
dealings with Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo are more recent examples,
and these were towns of our allies. But Homer's men do not, like the
Assyrians, torture prisoners of war; such captives were starved,
tortured, and literally caged, to extract ransom, during our Hundred
Years' War with France; as Cromwell's prisoners, after Dunbar, were
starved in Durham Cathedral. In Homer, ransom is sometimes accepted,
in the earlier days of the siege. Achilles, especially, took ransoms
and was merciful. Contrast the ferocity of Agamemnon, who refuses
quarter, and slays a man to whom Menelaus was giving quarter.[6]
Agamemnon actually cuts off the hands and head of one foe, and throws
the head into the throng! He desires that not even the male child
in the womb may escape! (_Iliad_, vi. 56-60). There are chivalrous
passages, as when Hector and Aias exchange gifts after an indecisive
passage of arms, and when Diomede and Glaucus recognise their ancestral
friendship; but there are plenty of cases in which victors exult with
cruel humour over their fallen foes, in the spirit of Arthur in
Layamon's _Brut_. (1200 A.D.).

The dead, except in the case of Eetion on whom Achilles had ruth, were
always stripped of arms and armour, if the victors were not impeded.
The hut of Idomeneus held many such Trojan spoils. There are hints
of a custom of tearing the tunics, or chitons,[7] but they are vague
and unimportant. No doubt the act, when performed, was intended as an
insult, but it is only alluded to twice or thrice: in one case the
tunic is "of bronze," answering to the current term _χαλκοχίτωνες_,
"bronze-clad."[8] The case is obscure.

_A la guerre comme à la guerre_. The morals of war in Homer are not
unlike those of war everywhere in the matter of "atrocities." The siege
operations were very inefficient. The Achaeans were not able to invest
Troy, and they never dreamed of an escalade. Without a scaling-ladder
Patroclus "thrice clomb on the corner of the lofty wall," and was only
thrust back by Apollo.[9] But scaling-ladders are never mentioned; a
night attack is never contemplated. The famous Wooden Horse is the
only hint of an approach under a wooden cover on wheels (the mediaeval
"Sow"); and if it was anything of that sort, Homer did not understand
its nature. The efficient fighting in the open was done by chariotry
(the owners usually dismounted and fought in line or column); as in
most ancient oriental countries, Scotland in Roman times, and Ireland
in the Late Celtic period, perhaps as late as 300 a.d., also in early
Britain. By the date of the Black Figure vases (sixth century B.C.)
and in seventh century art, the painters often introduce mounted men:
the "late poets" abstained from doing so, it appears, except the late
unspeakable _Stümper_ of the Doloneia, according to Reichel.

The tactics, as far as we can make a coherent picture of them, were
peculiar, but not unexampled.

At the beginning of a pitched battle the knights (owners of chariots)
dismounted, and formed a thick and serried line of infantry: behind
them came the nameless host, concerning whose armour we have no
information. The light-armed archers and slingers showered their
missiles, and the combat might last for hours. At "the break of the
battle," when one side had broken the enemy's line, the victors pursued
either on foot, or, more generally, in their chariots which had been
stationed behind them in the close combat; while the vanquished leaped
into their chariots and fled, save the brave who retired face to the
foe. After the break in the battle, the individual exploits of the
mounted knights, the chariotry, fill the picture, till the beaten
forces reach the wall of the Greek camp, or of Troy, when a rally
occurs, followed by another battle in ordered ranks.[10]

As to the armour and weapons, Homer represents every man-at-arms as
wearing a helmet, usually of bronze; and a huge shield, very long, like
the three sorts of shield represented in Aegean art on the Mycenaean
dagger blade showing lion hunters. Some shields in this art are in
form like the figure 8, they belly out, and protect a man from neck to
ankles. Others are merely doors, flat and oblong, of the same size;
others are equally large, cylindrical, and partly protect the sides.
All are hung from the shoulder by baldrics, not held in the hand,
like the parrying bucklers of the eighth century and later. Homer thus
describes such huge shields as these of Aegean art, with baldrics; but
his language not infrequently conveys the impression that some shields
are circular; indeed, it is only by wrenching the sense of the Greek
that any other meaning can be obtained. The details are considered
later; meanwhile Homer's shields are neither those of the Dipylon
period nor of archaic Greek art, and in their size and their baldrics
correspond to those of Aegean representations. The substance of the
shields is layers of ox's hide, covered with a plating of bronze.
Warriors also wear corslet, metal girdle, and metal-plated kirtle: the
corslet was thin, and could be pierced by arrows. The greaves to cover
the shins were probably of bronze, laced up with wire, as in a pair
from Enkomi in Cyprus, of the Age of Bronze, now in the British Museum.
No thigh pieces are mentioned, though they are commonly shown in the
art of the seventh to sixth centuries.[11]

For offensive weapons the men-at-arms use two spears with heavy heads
of bronze, these are usually thrown; and a sword of bronze, commonly
a heavy cut and thrust blade (never the long Elizabethan rapier of an
earlier Minoan time), with a handle of ivory, inlaid or studded with
gold or silver, in some cases. The sheath is similarly decorated. Only
once do we hear of a battle-axe of bronze; and the dirk, sometimes of
iron, is never said to be used in battle. These weapons have analogues
in certain swords and daggers found in Aegean graves.

Archery is not so highly considered as when "the man Heracles" and
the great Eurytus were bowmen. Odysseus, the heir of the mighty bow
of Eurytus, left it at home, and fought as a heavy-armed footman.
Pandarus, on the other hand, left his horses and chariots at home, and
came to Troy trusting in his bow.[12] Teucer, Pandarus, Paris, and
occasionally Meriones, are the bowmen, among the princes, and Paris
and Pandarus are taunted for their weak and cowardly missiles; honour
was to be won with sword and spear. The Scots archers, in the same
way, were always anxious to come to hand-strokes with their sperths,
or battle-axes; the Highlanders threw down their muskets, after one
discharge, and went in with the claymore; the French never reconciled
themselves to the long bow; the Spartans despised it. This was the
Homeric sentiment: the bow was scarcely the weapon for a hero. The
arrow-heads were of bronze.[13] In Mycenaean graves at Kakovotos (Old
Pylos) in Elis, the stone arrow points are of very fine neolithic
work.[14] When archery declined yet lower, in historic times, the
round or oval parrying buckler, carried on the left arm, came in, as a
protection against spears and sword-strokes. This parrying buckler does
not appear in Homer: efforts made to discover it are unsuccessful.

Thus Homer describes a given stage in the art of war: his pictures are
not patchworks of "Mycenaean" fighting (about which we know nothing),
and of civic Greek fighting in the age of civic heavy-armed foot.


[1] Iliad, iii. iv.

[2] vii. 332-420.

[3] xviii. 175-177.

[4] Ferdiad, in the Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, also drags a dead man
by his chariot wheels.

[5] _R.G.E._ p. 118. _Ajax_, 1031. Euripides, _Andromache_, 399.

[6] _Iliad_, vi. 37-65, xi. 122-147.

[7] _Iliad_, xi. 100, ii. 416.

[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 439, 440. That the bronze tunic is a softening of
the sense by a late interpolator is not very likely, for Homer, we
have seen, represents a warrior as cutting off a dead man's hands and
head; and if he does not shirk this, if no later hand corrects him, why
should he strain at tearing a chiton? Miss Stawell ingeniously remarks
that the chiton-tearing is a proof of the prevalent use of corslet? If
men fought without corslets, the chiton "must always have been getting
torn in the mêlée, whatever the warrior's fate. But the sign would have
been unmistakable if the tunic was usually covered by the corslet and
could not be torn until that was taken off...." (_Homer and the Iliad_,
p. 211). But, I fear, Homeric warriors did not come to such close
quarters as at Rugby football.

[9] _Iliad_, xvi. 702, 703.

[10] See "Homeric Tactics."

[11] For details and discussion, see "Homeric Armour and Costume."

[12] Iliad, v. 193-205.

[13] On stone and bronze arrow-heads, see Tsountas and Manatt, p. 209.

[14] Kurt Müller, _Alt Pyhs_, p. 292. _Attische Mitteilungen_, 1909.
Cf. plate xv.




CHAPTER VII

HOMERIC TACTICS


Homer is not a scientific military historian, but a poet. Consequently,
in his accounts of pitched battles, he naturally dwells on the prowess
of famous individuals in the single combat; the struggle of one hero
against a group of assailants; the pursuit and the flight; more than he
dwells on the long encounter of marshalled lines before "the break in
the battle."

Let us consider the battle in _Iliad_, xi. The princes begin by giving
their chariots to the charioteers, "to hold them in by the fosse, well
and orderly," and "themselves as heavy men-at-arms were hastening
about."[1] They are then marshalled in order, with the chariots behind
them. Meanwhile Hector arrays the Trojans, being now with the front
and now with the rear ranks.[2] The fight begins; "equal heads had the
battle." The two forces meet like two bands of reapers shearing the
corn of a field from either limit, and meeting in the centre.[3] This
steady fight of lines of dismounted men-at-arms endures from dawn to
midday, till, at noon, comes "the break in the battle," "the Danaans
by their valour brake the battalions."[4] Agamemnon, on foot, rushes
into the ruined ranks of Troy, and slays many Trojans in their chariots
(which they would naturally mount for the sake of speedier flight);
there is a pursuit of the broken foe, "footmen kept slaying footmen
as they were driven in flight, and horsemen slaying horsemen with
the sword"; till the flying Trojans rally at the Scaean gate, while
Agamemnon still slays the hindmost fugitives. A flesh-wound irks him,
and he "retires hurt." Hector, by command of Zeus, has waited for this
moment, and now leads a chariot-charge among the scattered Achaeans.
Henceforth there is a series of individual encounters; Odysseus is
alone and is surrounded; he fights hard; he calls for aid, and is
rescued by Menelaus and Aias. Several Achaean princes are wounded,
among others Diomede, Agamemnon, and Odysseus retire to their quarters
for rest and surgical aid.

This is not scientific fighting: no general is apart, receiving news
of the fight, sending supports where they are needed, husbanding the
reserves, and so forth. The leaders actually _lead_, and their men are
discouraged and give ground when the chiefs are put out of action,
precisely as in the Highland armies of clans under Dundee or Montrose
or Prince Charles, where so much depended on the success of the first
onslaught. Homer's men have more faculty for recovering from a severe
stroke. The Achaeans, after a long struggle of heavy dismounted
men-at-arms, drive the Trojans to the city wall. The Trojans rally,
and drive the Achaeans to their own fortifications, where there is a
confused mellay at the fosse and under the wall.[5]

Polydamas very properly now advises the chivalry of Troy to dismount
and fight on foot (_πρυλέες_) in dense columns, while their chariots
are held stationary by their squires. Hector approves, and the
dismounted Trojans form five columns of attack on a fortified
position.[6] The Achaeans, scattered and disheartened, are mainly led
and helped by the two Aiantes, but Poseidon rallies five or six young
heroes of Boeotia, Aetolia, Crete, and Pylos.[7] They are confessedly
both wearied and demoralised by the success of Hector in breaking down
the gate.[8] They are actually weeping!

But now, encouraged by the god, they form a "schiltrom," a close
clump of spears advanced and levelled, underlying and overlying each
other.[9] (The spears of defenders and assailants, at the battle of
Langside (1568), were so closely interlocked, that discharged pistols
and daggers thrown by the combatants lay on them!) Shield touches
shield, the plumes of the helmets meet.[10]

As was natural, Hector's column was arrested by the "dark impenetrable
wood" of Achaean spears,[11] and now the poet makes Poseidon, who
has lost a grandson (xiii. 207) in the fight, stir up Idomeneus, who
is at a distance from Hector's point of attack, and we have the day
of valour, and the success of the Cretan prince, on the left of the
Achaean fortified position. The Boeotians there, with the Athenians and
"Ionian tunic-trailers," are hard pressed, but the Aiantes make a stout
resistance, and the arrows of the Locrians are showered on Hector's
column.[12] Polydamas advises Hector to retreat, but he hurries off and
brings up reinforcements in good order. He then tries again and again
to break through the schiltrom of the Achaean dismounted men-at-arms,
and the two forces clash with cries of onset.[13]

Here we have a renewal of the steady conflict of men duly marshalled.
Hector, however, is put out of action, sore smitten by a boulder from
the hand of Aias; the Trojans give ground, are pursued, and fall back,
till when Hector revives, Aias and the princes who joined him at the
command of Poseidon, form a firm line of resistance.[14]

Again there is a dogged contest of marshalled forces, till Apollo
causes a panic among the Achaeans, and their line is broken. "Then man
fell upon man _when the close fight was scattered_,"[15] and we have
a new set of individual valiances, among the bravest; but the Achaean
host is flying in disorderly rout, "hither and thither in terror,"
through the ditch and within the wall.

It is in his chariot, to which he had been carried when stunned by
the boulder, that Hector now calls for a chariot charge on the fosse
and wall, which Apollo makes possible by levelling the wall into the
dyke.[16] After mixed fighting, the spear of Aias is lopped in twain by
the sword of Hector, and fire is thrown into the ship of Protesilaus.
This is the moment that Achilles has prayed and longed for since the
first book of the poem. Addressing Agamemnon, he then swore a great
oath by the sceptre that "longing for Achilles shall come upon the
Achaeans one and all, when multitudes fall dying before manslaying
Hector."[17] In the same book he bids Thetis pray to Zeus to "hem the
Achaeans among the sterns of their ships, given over to slaughter."[18]
When the Embassy sought Achilles in Book ix., with the offers of
Agamemnon, this dire need had not fallen on the Achaeans, and Achilles
rejected their prayers. But he promised to fight if Hector, as he
burned the ships, came to those of the Myrmidons.[19]

Hector never came so far; for[20] though Achilles kept the letter
of his vow in Book ix., and did not arm, he sent Patroclus forth in
Achilles' armour, at the head of the Myrmidons, and their charge on
rear and flank drove the Trojans far from the ships and the wall.

This is a brief summary of the main movements in the engagement, up to
the moment when Achilles let slip the Myrmidons. We see that, setting
aside the interferences of gods, and the pardonable exaggeration of
the prowess of favourite heroes, we have a set of as natural pictures
of the flux and reflux of battle-tides as if we were reading about
Waterloo. The character of the engagements is conditioned by the use of
dismounted men-at-arms as heavy infantry, whether employed in lines of
resistance, in squares or schiltroms of levelled spears, or in columns
of attack. The fighting men in view are the gentry, stiffening "the
host," the _λαός_ of whose equipment we know little, while the archery
of light-armed bowmen, such as the Locrians, is not without its effect.
But the bows are short, and the arrow is drawn only to the breast,
not, as by Egyptian and Assyrian archers, on the monuments, and by the
archers of mediaeval England, to the ear. Chariots are not employed,
in Homer, as on the Egyptian monuments, in charging squadrons, closely
and neatly arranged, but in the flight and the pursuit, and to bear the
prince rapidly to distant points of the field.[21]

The most obvious and closest analogy to Homeric warfare is that of
the period (1300-1430 A.D.) when the Flemings and Scots had shown the
powerlessness of charges of heavy cavalry against the schiltroms of
spearmen, if these had not been broken up by "artillery preparation,"
by the long bow. Henceforth the English knights, squires, and "lances,"
or men-at-arms dismounted, their horses being held in reserve, and
received the attacks of the heavy French cavalry on foot, with spear,
sword, and axe. In case of defeat (which did not occur) or of pursuit,
the horses were in readiness. Heavy armed infantry, like the hoplites
of historic Greece, were developed later than Homer, and the heavy
cavalry then became a separate arm. The changes occurred in the dim age
between the date of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ and the dawn of historic
Greece. Chariots ceased to be employed in war by the Greek cities of
Asia. The chief arm was the heavy drilled infantry, the hoplites. We
catch our first glimpses of them on the Warrior Vase of the upper and
later stratum at Mycenae, and on an old sculptured Mycenaean stele,
later "plastered over and painted in fresco." In the former is a line
of swordless spearmen on the march; on the latter, a row of swordless
spearmen in the act of brandishing the spear. Their bucklers are worn
on the left arm: they appear to wear hauberks, not corslets of plate,
but one cannot be certain.[22] In these figures we see the germ of the
infantry of historic Hellas. The war chariot becoming obsolete, civic
cavalry were employed; the horsemen of Colophon were celebrated for
dealing a fatal conclusive charge.

Nothing could be much less like Homeric than historical Ionian warfare,
except in so far as Homer's dismounted men-at-arms resemble the heavy
historic infantry, who never mount.

We have now given a brief sketch of Homer's idea of a general
engagement in force. The clash of marshalled lines of heavy dismounted
men-at-arms ends in the breaking of the phalanxes, and in the single
combats, or combats of small knots of heroes, in which the poet and his
audience take special delight.

We now criticise the modern criticisms of Homeric pictures of battles.

Herr Mülder, in 1906, and Mr. Murray, in 1908, discover that Homeric
formations and fighting are a confusion of the methods of historic
Greece--with drilled hoplites and cavalry,--and the "Mycenaean" system
of "a battle of _promachoi_ or champions."[23]

According to the English critic, in the Iliad "the men are, so to
speak, advertised as fighting in one way, and then they proceed
to fight in another."[24] As we have seen, they are "advertised as
fighting in one way," that is, in ordered phalanxes of dismounted
men-at-arms, and they _do_ fight in that way, from dawn till noon; and
then when "the phalanxes are broken," when "the battle is scattered,"
they "fight in another way"; there is flight, pursuit, and examples
of individual valour; there is a rally, and the lines of men on foot
re-form. What else could there possibly be? The charge of the Union
brigade, at Waterloo, begins by "fighting in one way," a resistless
charge of squadrons, and ends by "fighting in another way," in knots,
with individual examples of flight, or of single prowess, when
Piré's Red Lancers swoop down on the scattered and broken ranks.
At Bannockburn you have the slow advance of the clogged English
columns on a narrow front, you have the slow advance in mass of the
Scottish spearmen, till "the phalanxes are broken" of England, and
then comes the isolated struggle of Edward II., and the charge of
d'Argentine,--alone.

It was always thus that men fought, before the invention of modern
projectiles. It was thus they fought at Inkerman, nay, for a moment at
Waggon Hill, as one who was in the thick of it informs me. Ian Hamilton
and de Villiers, Albrecht and Digby Jones were among the _promachoi_.

There is no confusion of a "Mycenaean" and a historic mode of battle in
Homer; and we have absolutely no evidence as to how a "Mycenaean" or
Aegean general engagement was conducted: no Aegean work of art in which
it is represented.[25]

There is no confusion of military styles in Homer; the trouble is
caused when Herr Mülder chooses to say that there is confusion;
that a fight of masses is _promised_ (apparently by an Ionian
interpolator), and that single combats are _given_ (apparently by the
older minstrel).[26] Both sorts of fighting are given in their proper
places: the engagement of masses before, the individual valiances after
"the battle is scattered," while in the clash of the massed forces,
the conduct of prominent assailants and defenders is noted. Mülder's
remarks arise from his eagerness to prove that not only the armature is
a muddle of anachronisms, which is not the case, but that the fighting,
too, is anachronistic and self-contradictory.

The aged Nestor remembers and approves of a mode of fighting which,
at Troy, has become obsolete, owing to the new system of dismounting
the men-at-arms and arraying them in line or in column of attack. He
says to his Pylians (_Iliad_, iv. 303 _seqq_.), "Neither let any man,
trusting to his horsemanship and valour, be eager to fight the Trojans
alone before the rest, nor yet let him draw back.... But whensoever a
warrior from his own chariot can come at the chariot of the foe, let
him thrust forth with his spear, even so is the far better way," the
_old_ way. "The style of fighting is not Epic," says Mr. Leaf. It is
meant not to be "Epic"; it is old-fashioned, like Nestor.

We know "the old way" from pictures on Egyptian monuments, showing
the charge of squadrons using the bow, and routing an irregular
advance of Hittite chariotry, using the spear. But, under Troy, the
combatants usually fight dismounted; always, in the opening of a
general action. But though Nestor recommends the old chariotry tactics,
Herr Mülder says that he is recommending the historic, "the modern
method," and attributing it to the old military school of his youth (οἱ
πρότεροι).[27] The general purpose is to prove that "edifying passages
from the old Ionic hortatory writers seem to have been introduced into
Homer."[28]

The tactics and military formations of Homer are as intelligible as
those of Chandos and Henry v. They can only be misunderstood by critics
under the suggestion of the idea that the _Iliad_ is riddled with
Ionian tamperings. The Ionians never touched the matter of the _Iliad_.


[1] _Iliad_, xi. 49, _ αὐτοὶ δὲ πρυλέες σὐν τέύχεσιθωρηχθέντες_. Cf. v.
744, _πρυλέες_ "may mean either _footmen_ or _champions_." Leaf.

[2] _Iliad_, xi. 59-66.

[3] xi. 67-69.

[4] θαλάγγαι, xi. 90.

[5] _Iliad_, xii. 3, _μάχοντο ὀμιλαδόν_. Cf. xii. 35, 36.

[6] xii. 66-107.

[7] _Iliad, xiii_. 81-124.

[8] xiii. 80-90.

[9] πτύσσοντο, xiii. 134.

[10] xiii. 128-133.

[11] xiii. 144-148.

[12] xiii. 789-906.

[13] xiii. 833-837.

[14] xv. 299-301.

[15] _Iliad_, xv. 328.

[16] xv. 343-366.

[17] i. 241-244.

[18] i. 409-412.

[19] ix. 653-656.

[20] xvi. 1-155.

[21] Rapid retreat, xi. 359-360. Rapid pursuit, viii. 87-90, 340-349.
Leaf on viii. 348. Cf. Caesar, _Bellum Gallicum_, iv. 33. Chariot in
attendance to remove wounded hero, xi. 273, 399. Quick mounting and
dismounting, xvi. 426, 427.

[22] Ridgeway, _E. A. G._, vol. i. pp. 313-315.

[23] _R. G. E._ pp. 141-143. _Homer und die altjonische Elegie_, pp.
32-41.

[24] _R. G. E._ p. 143.

[25] Mr. Murray writes: "It is in this way" (in phalanxes) "that
people are said to be going to fight before each great battle begins.
But strangely enough it is not at all in this way that they really
fight when the battle is fairly joined, in the heart of the poem. In
the heart of the poem, when the real fight comes, it is as a rule
purely Mycenaean." We do not know how Mycenaeans fought in a general
engagement. But people, in Homer, do fight as they "are said to be
going to tight," when a schiltrom of spears is formed and is assailed,
as in _Iliad_, xiii. 125-205. There the Trojan charge is checked by the
hedge of spears. The general assault, the combined resistance, and the
conduct of the most prominent men in defence and attack, is described,
just as, at Waterloo and Culloden, historians describe the general
conflict, and also the individual prowess of Shaw, Gillie Macbean, and
others.

[26] Mülder, _op. cit_. p. 32.

[27] Mülder, op. cit. p. 36.

[28] _R. G. E._ 133, note 1. Thus the hortatory eloquence of Poseidon
(xiii. 108 fi.) is an echo of Callinus's stimulating appeal to the
young to bestir themselves, when the country is at war. Callinus.
fr. 1. Thus Poseidon cannot say "young men, don't be slack," without
quoting an Ionian elegiac poet! (Mülder, pp. 12, 13). It is waste of
time to discuss criticism of this sort, especially as, even if there
were any borrowing, the Ionian elegy-maker must be reminiscent of the
_Iliad_, as Tyrtaeus is in a familiar passage.




CHAPTER VIII

MEN'S DRESS IN HOMER. ARMOUR.


As the following remarks are inevitably full of minute and complex
detail, it may be well to say briefly what I wish to prove. According
to the view of many critics, German and English, the "early lays" of
the _Iliad_ were composed when men wore smocks or chitons, like the
Greeks of the historic ages. In war, on this theory, they wore no
armour save the huge body--covering shields of Aegean art, but _not_
the loin-cloth or the bathing-drawers which were the sole costume of
the Aegean fighting man. The Homeric warrior of the "early lays" was
thus accoutred; like the Aegean warrior, he had no body armour save
the shield, but, by way of dress, he had the smock or chiton, not the
loin-cloth.

On this theory the corslet did not come into vogue till the eighth to
seventh century. Then it arrived with the _zoster_, or mailed belt, and
the _mitrê_, or mailed kirtle. When these had been accepted, the huge
early shield, slung by a baldric, was discarded for the round or oval
parrying buckler, blazoned with a device, and carried on the left arm.
The smock or chiton continued to be worn. Ionian poets interpolated
their corslet, mitre, zoster, and greaves into passages of old lays
that originally knew no such armour. The result was confused nonsense.

Against all this I am to contend that greaves, bronze corslets of
plate, bronze girdles, and mailed kirtles were known in Aegean times
long before the arrival of the Achaeans in Crete: proof is given from
a work of Aegean art. Secondly, hauberks of metal scales were worn
in very early post-Homeric times; and Homer minutely describes such
hauberks, which clasped in front and back. Thirdly, the Ionian armour
of the eighth, seventh, and early sixth centuries was not Homeric. Men
wore, not hauberks of mail, clasping at front and back, but corslets
with breast-plate and back-plate fastened at the sides; with these
they wore neither mailed belt nor mailed kirtle. They wore not only
greaves, but protective thigh-pieces (_parameridia_) unknown to Homer.
But, about 530 B.C., these corslets of plate began to go out, and yield
place to hauberks of mail, clasping at front and back; and with these
were worn mailed belts and mailed kirtles, but no thigh-pieces. In
Homer this is the usual equipment, though corslets of plate appear also
to be known.

As to dress, the Ionian warrior of the eighth to early sixth century
did not wear in active life the Homeric smock or chiton. He either
reverted to the Aegean loin-cloth or drawers, or he wore a very tight
curt jerkin, coming down no lower than the buttocks. It was when the
mailed hauberk, mailed belt, and mailed flaps under the belt came in,
that the smock or chiton also reappeared, and the tight curt jerkin or
the loin-cloth went out.

Thus the Ionian minstrels did not bring into old lays armour which
they did not wear, and the chiton which they did not wear they did
not excise. Nor did any one, at any time, foist in the round Ionian
parrying shield on the left arm: the Homeric body-covering shield hung
by a baldric retained its place. Women, too, I am to argue, reverted
on occasion to the Aegean tight bodice, small waist and skirt, or wore
a chiton tight, comparatively short, and not, like the Homeric peplos,
long, loose, and trailing. But these intermediate periods, between the
Homeric and historic, left not a trace in the pictures presented by the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.

Why was the new Ionian armour introduced, as we are told it was, while
the un-Homeric features in dress were not introduced into the poems?

Coming to men's dress in Homer, we do not know exactly how long the
ordinary Homeric chiton was. If the word τερμιόεις means "reaching to
the feet," it would apply well to a shield of the huge Mycenaean make,
and to a chiton, and it is used of both.[1] But some take it to mean
"fringed," which cannot apply to the Mycenaean shield, or to chitons as
represented anywhere except perhaps in the Warrior Vase (sub-Mycenæan)
of Mycenae. No brooches are mentioned as fastening chitons, and it
rather appears that these resembled the very short-sleeved, rather
loose, and not girdled sewn smock of the lowest figure in the Mycenaean
"siege vase." Eumaeus the swine-herd belts his chiton with a girdle
when he goes out to his work.[2] Probably, therefore, it reached the
feet, and had to be "kirtled up." Now the curt jerkin of seventh to
sixth century art needs no tucking up, it merely covers the buttocks.
The material was linen, if the name chiton be derived from a Semitic
word for linen.

When we read that the tunic of Odysseus was "shining like the skin of
a dried onion, so soft it was, and bright as the sun," it is not quite
clear whether it was as _tight_, or as bright, as the onion skin; and
perhaps its brilliance suggests that it was of silk, rather than of
linen, unstarched.

A person who comes fresh from Homer to the study of Greek archaic art,
of the latest eighth, the seventh, and the sixth centuries, cannot but
be struck by the fact, rather neglected by writers on costume, that the
men are _not_ wearing the Homeric chiton, which needs to be kirtled up
in active life. On the other hand, "on the earliest vases the men
are often nude, with the exception of a loin-cloth or pair of tight
fitting bathing-drawers."[3] This is the usual pre-Achaean dress of
men in Minoan art. In archaic Greek art, men often wear either a very
tight jerkin, covering the trunk, or, "on the earliest vases," the men
have reverted from the Homeric chiton to the Aegean loin-cloth and
bathing-drawers. Either this is the case, or the men, in fact, never
wore the chiton in the "earliest" lays; the chiton, like the armour, as
we are told, must have been introduced by the "tunic-trailing Ionians."
Yet these Ionians, or any Greeks of the eighth to seventh centuries,
in their art are represented as wearing loin-cloths, bathing-drawers,
or curt tight jerkins needing not to be girdled up, except in cases of
reverend seignors, in a house of repose, and at festivals. (See fig. 1.)

[Illustration: Fig. 1.--Sacrifice to Athene--B.F. Archaic Vase-Painting]

One or other or all of the tight curt men's garments--loin-cloth,
bathing-drawers, or jerkin, reaching from the shoulders to just below
the buttocks--was called in Ionia the _cypassis_, a term as much
unknown to Homer as the article itself.

The _κυπυσσις_ is mentioned by Alcaeus (611 B.C.) and prayed for by
Hipponax, an Ephesian poet contemporary with Croesus: in art we find
it represented from the eighth to the sixth century.[4] Such a dress,
with a very broad belt, is a male costume common for archers and men
at work, in the Assyrian art of the eighth to seventh centuries and in
Aztec art![5]

It is a good dress for fighting men; its fashion changes, and finally
it divides down the front, below the belt, with embroidered borders, in
Assyrian and archaic Greek art. In some cases it does not suffice for
decency. This is not the Homeric chiton, especially if that reached to
the feet, and needed to be girdled when a man went about active work.
At peaceful festivals, Ionians wore the "trailing chiton," in active
life the un-Homeric tight curt garment.

We may understand, I think, that between the age when the Homeric poems
were composed, and the eighth century B.C., men's costume had greatly
altered. The Homeric chiton did not cease to exist, but it was worn by
men merely on festive occasions, and by old men; while the dress in
active life reverted towards the Aegean costume, the bathing-drawers,
or even loin-cloth; or more usually became the short tight jersey,
covering the trunk and the upper part of the thigh. This is a natural
reversion. The Achaean invaders from the colder north had practically
worn smock and plaid, chiton and chlaina. In the warmer south they
found the tight and curt _cypassis_ more suitable. In the sixth to
fifth century the chiton gradually reasserts itself, as we see in the
late black figure, and still more manifestly in the red figure vases.
The chiton is a more graceful, decent, and civilised dress than the
short tight _cypassis_.

Either this was the course of evolution, or "late" poets inserted the
chiton as worn both in peace and war into every part of the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_; though, in fact, they saw only old men, or men on formal
occasions, wearing the chiton. Or they applied the word "chiton," in
poetry, to the tight curt garments which were not in the least like the
chiton of Homer.

The alternative explanation is that Homer's men actually wore the
fairly long smock which needed to be girdled up for active work; and
that the word and the thing itself survived in the poems through an age
when men in general wore the tight curt jerkin, or even the loin-cloth
or bathing-drawers.

The _chlaina_ of the Homeric men was a mantle, usually of wool,
fastened with a golden fibula, like that of Odysseus. On the cover
of the pin was represented to the life a hound catching a fawn.[6]
This _chlaina_ was red in colour and was double-folded. The great
overgarment, the _pharos_, was usually of linen; and both these
articles were unshaped and unsewn, mere pieces of material, also used
for blankets in bed.

[Illustration: Fig. 2.--Dagger with Lion-Hunters--Mycenaean Shield]

However we account for it, there was a long period in which Greek
prehistoric and proto-historic dress was not the free-flowing costume
which Homer describes, and which the appearance of safety pins, or
fibulae, after 1400 B.C. attests. They are but rarely found in graves
till the Dipylon age of Iron.

Now no critic has had the heart to say that the costume described by
Homer, the loose chiton, was "written into" early epic lays (which
originally knew it not), at the moment when it came into fashion in the
sixth to fifth centuries. But criticism has taken a similar course in
regard to Homeric armour. This armour, like Homeric male costume, is
in essence, we shall show, that of the sixth to fifth centuries B.C.
with the exception of the shield,--a huge body-covering shield in Homer
(a shield probably of various shapes, circular, oblong, cylindrical or
like a figure of 8),[7] suspended by a baldric (see fig. 2),--while in
the seventh to fifth centuries we find a round or oval blazoned buckler
worn on the left arm. While critics, following Reich el, attribute the
Homeric body armour to Ionian interpolations of the seventh century,
they have also followed him in not observing that Homeric body armour
is not that of the seventh, but rather of the sixth to fifth centuries,
as we shall prove.

We find, in art of the sixth to fifth centuries, or at least in the end
of the sixth and the opening of the fifth centuries, such hauberks as
Homer describes; they have variegated patterns of bronze scales; they
are clasped down the front, and below are the bronze belt (_zoster_)
and πτέρυγες, or mailed flaps.

On the other hand, the Ionic corslet of the seventh and earlier
sixth century is made of plain plates of bronze, fastened at the
sides--back-plate and breastplate--with a short projecting metallic
rim to protect the hip-joints. There is no mailed kirtle, no decorated
belt. The whole equipment, with the addition of mailed flaps to the
plain corslet, is well rendered on a scaraboid gem.[8] In fact, this
kind of plain corslet, with back-plate and breast-plate, fastened
at the sides, is the regular Ionian or seventh to sixth century
body armour, while the hauberk, of metal scales, or small plates,
probably fixed on leather, begins to come in towards the end of the
sixth century. Early in the fifth century, Polygnotus decorated the
Lesche or lounge at Delphi with pictures of the Trojan affairs, mainly
illustrating the _Little Iliad_, an Ionian cyclic poem attributed to
Lesches. Among the pictures, says Pausanias, was represented an altar,
and on it was a "bronze corslet, such as was worn of old, for now we
seldom see them. It consisted of two pieces called _guala_, one to
cover breast and belly, the other for the back, fastened by clasps."
Unconsciously anticipating Reichel, Pausanias says that this piece
of armour would be protection enough, "without a shield," as if a
shield could simultaneously protect both back and front. "And so Homer
represents Phorcys the Phrygian without a shield,"[9] "because he wore
this kind of corslet."[10] Homer says that the spear of Aias burst
the _gualon_ of Phorcys, and the bronze let out the entrails.[11] The
shield of Phorcys, if he wore one, must have been slung over his back
or side at the moment. But in these two passages Homer seems to have in
his mind a corslet of but two _guala_, back-plate and breast-plate
fastened at the sides, like the eighth to sixth century corslet. If
so, he knew both the corslet of two plates, fastened at the sides, and
also the hauberk of scales or small plates of metal fastened in the
centre of front and back. This is not impossible, for, as we shall
prove, the corslet of metal plate was worn even in pre-Homeric Crete;
while the hauberk is represented, if I am right, in art of the Dipylon,
or pre-Dipylon period. Art in the late sixth century proves that both
the corslet of back-plate and breast-plate, and the hauberk of small
plates, fastening at back and in front, were worn.

[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Tirynthian Vase: Man in Hauberk _By permission
of John Murray, Esq_. Schliemann's _Tiryns_, plate xvii. b]

We have some red figure vases with the plain plate corslet, and some
black figure vases with the decorated corslet or rather hauberk of
scales, and mailed flaps; but the set of fashion is away from the plain
plate corslet fastened at the sides, to the decorative hauberk of
scale-mail, fastening in front,--Homer's type of corslet (at least in
some cases), and the corslet of two very early Tirynthian vases.

As far as we can trust such crude art[12] (fig. 3), the Tirynthian
body-covering was a jack or _jaseran_ of rings or scales, probably
fastened on leather, not the back-plate and breast-plate of the eighth
to early sixth centuries. Why, before the Persian war, Greek warriors
adopted the hauberk of scale-armour in place of the back-plate and
breast-plate, is unknown; probably it was borrowed from the late
Assyrian hauberk of scales, of which many examples occur in Layard's
_Monuments_. Judging from the later black figure vases, the process
was gradual; some warriors wear the old back-plate, breast-plate,
and jutting rim of metal; some the scaled hauberk, shoulder pieces,
and plated πτέρυγες, or flaps, with or without the bronze girdle or
_zoster_ of Homer. A number of the scales, iron or bronze, of the
hauberks have been found in the palace of the Egyptian king Apries, of
the first part of the sixth century.

In archaic art, and in early sixth century black figure vases, the
warrior wears the tight, un-Homeric, _cypassis_ under his corslet. In
later black figure vases, he wears the fluttering tails of his flowing
Homeric chiton under his mailed kirtle. Thus the dress of men, in
Homer, and the armour, in cases to be proved, are like those of the
later sixth and early fifth centuries, rather than of the eighth to
early sixth centuries.

Yet modern criticism, while it finds no fault with the sixth to fifth
century costume of Homer's men, excises their sixth century hauberks,
clasping down the middle, their _zoster_, or mailed girdle, their
mitre, which served the purpose of the sixth to fifth century mailed
flaps or mailed kirtle, and their greaves, as Ionian interpolations of
the seventh century. We shall show that the back-plate and breast-plate
of the seventh century are not the hauberk, clasping down the middle,
of some passages in Homer; and that the jutting bronze rim of the
seventh century is not the _mitrê_ of Homer. Thus, if there were late
interpolations of armour into Homer, they cannot have been made, as
Reichel thought, in the seventh century, but very late, say 540-470
B.C., when armour shifted from bronze back-plate, breast-plate, and
rim, to scaled hauberk, shoulder pieces, _zoster_, and metal plated
flaps, equivalent in protective purpose to the _mitrê_.

The modern theory that Homeric armour is of the seventh century,
which it demonstrably is not, starts from the late Dr. Reichel's
essay on Homeric armour.[13] Reichel built on very slender and sandy
foundations. He supposed that in the oldest parts of the Epics men
fought _in battle_ as six or seven men, in Aegean art, fight in _chance
encounters_ (that is, almost naked, or with shields which conceal the
body, also taken for granted as naked). He did not know the proof of
the existence of Aegean body armour, which we shall cite, and he really
evolved things "out of his inner consciousness."

Reichel, we must add, could not argue securely from the absence of
actual corslets in grave-furniture of the Aegean age. Though hauberks
occur constantly in the art, they are not found in the _graves_ of
the sixth to fifth centuries, in Greece; and even plate corslets are
extremely rare. In Reichel's second edition, which he, unfortunately,
left incomplete at his regretted death, "he contemplated an important
change of ground.... He regards the thin gold plates found on
the breasts of the skeletons at Mykene as possibly the funereal
representatives of metal sewn on to the chiton, and thus forming a
prae-Ionic corslet."[14]

Had he lived, he would have seen an undeniable "prae-Ionic corslet,"
no hauberk but a cuirass of plate, on the Minoan seal impressions of
Haghia Triada.

But the evidence for the non-existence of prae-Ionic corslets based on
their absence from tombs, even if it were absolute, which it is not,
would have been of little avail. How many Ionic plate corslets are in
actual existence, to our knowledge? Only fragments of one, as far as I
am aware, and that one is not "Ionic," it was found at Olympia, and is
"archaic." The fragments are of bronze plate, with decorations in the
archaic style, figures of men and women in archaic costume.[15] Thus
the non-existence of objects represented often in the art of remote
ages cannot be demonstrated by our failure to discover specimens of
them.

Reichel proceeds from the imaginary postulate that a man who has
a body-covering shield dispenses with body armour. As a matter of
historical fact he often does not.[16] Next, the Aegean shield, being
heavy, made chariots necessary. (But chariots have been used in war by
races with small shields, and the great shield is worn by Aias and
Odysseus who had no chariots.) Next, says Reichel, parrying bucklers
coming in as early as the archaic art (say 700-620 B.C.), big shields
went out, and for protection the corslet, metal girdle, and _mitrê_, a
mailed kirtle, were adopted about 700 B.C. As it was now ridiculous,
says Reichel, to think of a man fighting only in his shirt, late poets
introduced body armour into old portions of the _Iliad_, made when body
armour was unknown.

Of course, by parity of reasoning, the new poets ought also to have
got rid of chariots, bronze weapons, cairn-burial, the bride-price,
Homeric chitons, and so forth, all of them obsolete or little used
things in the age (700-600 B.C.) of corslets, greaves, and body armour.
Their warriors should also have worn the contemporary tight fleshings,
with the _cypassis_, and _parameridia, cuisses_, tight thigh pieces
(the "taslets" of 1640 A.D.). That did not happen; Homer knows no
thigh pieces or _parameridia_, so common in Greek armour of the sixth
century; but, says Mr. Murray, "all the heroes were summarily provided
with breast-plates, _θώρηκες_."[17] Mr. Leaf, on the other hand,
denies this; "the corslet is given to some only, and that in the most
capricious fashion."[18]

Mr. Leaf's contention (Mr. Murray's is an _obiter dictum_) rests on the
postulate that, when the corslet is not explicitly named in connection
with a hero, he has no corslet; he has only a shield. If so, why are
his "pieces of armour" (_τέυχεα_), whether he is putting them on or
off, whether he is being stripped of them or is stripping others,
always called τέυχεα in the plural? Aias is not explicitly said to have
a corslet, but the space of time occupied by his arming he asks the
Achaeans to devote to prayer to Zeus. "So said they, while Aias arrayed
him in flashing bronze. And when he had now clothed upon his flesh all
his armour...."[19] The time required, and the phrase "all his armour"
which "clothes his flesh," cannot possibly apply to slinging on or off
a shield, and donning or doffing a helmet, the work of five seconds.
The sword was always worn, in peace and in war.

This is so certain that we waste no more space over the matter. All
the gentry wear τέυχεα, "pieces of armour," which they all take off
and lay on the ground while they watch a duel, and which they always,
when they can, strip from a fallen foe. Thus, before the duel between
Paris and Menelaus, the men-at-arms dismount, take off their armour,
and lay it on the ground.[20] They themselves "are leaning on their
great shields," which are not their armour.[21] This use of τέυχεα is
universal in Homer, and so, for men-at-arms, is the possession of body
armour.[22]

The difficulties which critics find in the details and mechanism of the
armour cannot be impossibilities, for the "later poets" were familiar
with corslets, and would not write nonsense about them. The opposing
theory is that Ionian minstrels introduced the corslet of their own
age, seventh century, (corslets not uniformly to be found in Homer), to
satisfy the practical warriors who wore it. Yet, in doing so, the poets
made incoherent nonsense. As Miss Stawell writes, "a warlike audience,
versed in the use of the corslet, insisted on its introduction in the
poems,--and yet never objected to the absurdities it introduced,--such
a theory cannot bear thinking out."[23] When we came to discuss Homeric
tactics, we found precisely the same objection to the German theories;
they represent the poets as pleasing military experts by writing
nonsense.

The body armour is thus an integral part of the poem. The word
_θωρήσσεσθαι_, to put on the _thorex_ or breast covering, is constantly
employed in the general sense of arming, both in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_
though in the latter no corslet is specifically named. It would have
been as easy to coin a verb for arming from _ἀσπίς_, the shield, in an
age when shields were the only armour. That _θώρηξ_ should ever have
been a term for the shield seems to me incredible.

The corslet has many epithets, expressing the elaborateness of its
decoration, such as _ποικίλος, παναίολος, πολυδαίδαλος_; and no such
words apply to the plain metal plates of corslets in archaic Greek
art of the eighth to early sixth centuries, as shown in art. At most
they were etched with designs of men and women, as in the example from
Olympia, or have two volutes. The corslet was made of _γύαλα_ whatever
they may have precisely been, for sometimes the epithets applied to the
Homeric corslet do not suit plate but mailed armour.

[Illustration: Fig. 4.--CRETAN SEAL-IMPRESSION, MINOAN ARMOUR From the
_Annual of the British School at Athens, No. XII_. (_Macmillan_ & _Co.
Ltd_.)]

Reichel argued from the absence of corslet, belt, greaves, and mailed
kirtle in the few pieces of Aegean art known to him, that no such
armour was used by Aegeans, and, again, that no such armour was
known to the Achaeans. He was unacquainted with the scores of seal
impressions which have been found at Haghia Triada in Crete.[24] The
seals, it has been said, show a man in what Dr. Halbherr recognises as
a heavy decorated _plate_ corslet, with an obviously metallic belt, and
below it a mailed kilt or apron, the Homeric _mitrê_. Dr. Mackenzie,
too, recognises the armour.[25], It is unmistakable, and the corslet is
so very wide, considering the wasp-like Mycenaean waist, that a spear
could penetrate the side of it without wounding the wearer, a great
puzzle of the critics when the fact occurs in Homer. (See fig. 4 A).

The armour is out of drawing, the man's head is given in profile, his
armour is given full face. The same error is made by the painter of
Menelaus fighting Hector on an archaic dish from Camirus. Euphorbus is
lying on his back, but his corslet is given in full face, while his
head is in profile (fig. 5). This is common in archaic Greek art. The
arms of the man on the seal are not shown, just as the arms of women
on some Laconian figurines are omitted.[26] There also occurs on the
vase of Haghia Triada, a jovial figure in a very loose thick piece
of armour, as some hold,[27] or "a Minoan cope," as others maintain.
Beneath it is a short jutting ribbed kirtle, as in the seal. I am
unable to decide between cope and cuirass in this instance,[28] but the
bosses appear to be of hard material.

An easy mode of comparing various costumes and pieces of armour as
illustrated in archaic and early Greek art, is to glance at Engelmann
and Anderson's _Pictorial Atlas of Iliad and Odyssey_, 1895. It is
prior to the Cretan discoveries, but is useful to students remote from
collections of Greek works of art.

We shall first take the evidence of the black figure vases of the sixth
century, and then that of the red figure vases which came in near the
end of that age. In one (Atlas, fig. 43) the armour is of a sort more
common by far in red figure vases. The corslet of a warrior has broad
shoulder pieces, and is decorated with three stars, like "the decorated
starry corslet" of Achilles.[29] These stars appear on an Assyrian
corslet in Layard's _Monuments_. There is a belt and a mailed kirtle
or mailed flaps; below appears the tight _cypassis_, not the flowing
chiton.

Next, in a Corinthian black figure vase (Atlas, fig. 45) the charioteer
wears the plain corslet of two plates with projecting rim (no _zoster_
and _mitrê_); the dress is a tight jerkin. The women wear large mantles
over what appear to be long tight-fitting chitons. In "Carving Meat"
the cook and his servant wear the tight _cypassis_ (fig. 51). In three
combats (figs. 63, 64, 65) the warriors wear the _cypassis_, or are
naked (65), but (64) one has the plate corslet with projecting rim.
In the well-known archaic pyxis from Camirus (see fig. 5), Menelaus,
Hector, and Euphorbus wear, over the cypassis, plain corslets, with a
hatched projecting rim.

In "Death of Antilochus" (Part II. fig. 15) the plain plate corslet is
worn over the flowing chiton, there is no mailed kirtle and belt. In
the "Death of Achilles" (fig. 14) we have the plain corslet over the
cypassis. In "Departure of Amphiaraus" the hero wears the plain plate
corslet, and no mailed kirtle (fig. 73).

[Illustration: Fig. 5--Menelaus and Hector fighting over Euphorbus
--Vase-painting from Camirus, Rhodes, in British Museum.]

So much for these black figure vases. The older they are, the more they
favour the plain plate corslet fastened at the sides, and the cypassis;
and the less they favour the decorated hauberk, mailed kirtle, and free
flowing chiton. But the two styles overlap.

In the later red figure vases, the plain corslet sometimes occurs, but
the vast majority show the flowing chiton, under the richly variegated
hauberk of mail, clasping in front, and having broad shoulder plates
coming over from behind and fastened in front; with the plated flaps,
and below them the flowing chiton, as a general rule. It is this later
style, or something very like it, that Homer usually describes.

If the armour was written into the poem late, if in the earliest
lays the men wore no armour but the shield, the change to hauberk,
zoster, and plated flaps was made by late poets about the end of the
sixth century or the beginning of the fifth, but the old huge shield
with baldric was left unchanged. Meanwhile, as the tight cypassis
scarcely reaching below the buttocks is the usual warrior's costume
of the seventh to early or mid-sixth century, the loose chiton, like
the variegated hauberk,--the chiton being "a loosely fitting garment,
reaching apparently as low as the knees, but gathered up into the belt
for active exertion,"[30]--must also have been interpolated into the
poems about the middle of the sixth century, when the cypassis was
beginning to go out of favour.

It is strange that these facts--the seventh century armour and costume
are un-Homeric (though we cannot prove that Homer knew _only_ the
hauberk clasped in front), the sixth to fifth century armour and
costume answer closely to Homeric descriptions--have not been observed
either by Reichel or his English following. Nor do they notice that the
thigh pieces of seventh to sixth century art never occur in Homer, as,
on the Reichelian theory, they ought to do; practical warriors would
expect to hear of them from the late minstrels. We now prove Homer's
knowledge of the hauberk, clasped at front and back.

There is a passage in the _Iliad_ (iv. 132-140) which vexes critics;
we give it in Mr. Leaf's translation. To ruin the Trojans, Athene
makes Pandarus break the oath of truce, and shoot at Menelaus. She
then guides the arrow so that it may merely draw blood. "Her own hand
guided it where the golden buckles of the belt were clasped and the
doubled breast-plate met them. So the bitter arrow lighted (ἔπεσε) upon
the firm belt; through the inwrought (δαιδαλέοιο) belt it sped, and
through the curiously wrought breast-plate it pressed on, and through
the taslet"[31] (μίτρη, plated kirtle) "he wore to shield his flesh,
a barrier against darts; and this best shielded him, yet it passed on
even through this," and drew blood.

The arrow-head was of iron, not bronze, as was usual, and of a
primitive pattern, inserted into the wood of the shaft, and "whipped"
with sinew (νεῦρον, Iliad, iv. 151). When the arrow is extracted (line
216) the corslet is not mentioned, as I suppose because the arrow
passed through the place where the corslet clasped in front. When the
corslet was unclasped, the arrow had only to be pulled out of the belt
and kirtle.

[Illustration: Fig. 6.--Warriors arming--Red Figure Vase, Vienna Museum]

Now the whole passage is explained by a red figure vase in the Vienna
Museum (Atlas, figs. 71 a, b, c) (fig. 6). Here we see first, a warrior
in helmet and flowing chiton, putting on his greaves. Next him is a
warrior clasping his variegated hauberk of scales, or small plates,
_in front_, above his mailed kirtle, or flaps; below which floats the
lower part of his chiton; the shoulder-plates of his corslet are still
unclasped, and stand up behind his shoulders. For this arrangement see
also Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 176, fig. 137.
In _Iliad_, xx. 413-417, Achilles sends his spear through the clasping
plate of belt, buckle, and hauberk at the back.

In the third picture (fig. 7), a warrior, fully armed, has his hand
in the richly adorned belt (_zoster_) which he is fixing over the
juncture of corslet and mailed kirtle. If an arrow lights on the
central clasp of this belt (1) it will pass through the meeting-place
in front of his corslet, (2) and then will encounter, especially if it
be a dropping arrow, (3) his mailed flaps or kirtle, exactly as in the
case of Menelaus.[32] Nothing of this kind could occur with the plain
plate corslets of the seventh to sixth centuries, which laced at the
sides, and had no mailed kirtle or flaps, and no belt or _zoster_. Thus
Homer's armour, in this passage, is precisely that of, say, 520-470
B.C. Meanwhile the arrow-head, whipped with sinew into the wooden
shaft, is of a primitive pattern; and the accompanying reference to the
art of Maeonian and Carian women, in staining ivory red, "a treasure
for a king," shows no notion of the Ionians in Maeonia and Caria, or of
the republics of 510-470 B.C.[33]

If, then, in the late sixth or early fifth century, a poet introduced
the latest type of armour, he also preserved the primitive arrow,
and the political and geographical conditions prior to the Ionian
settlements in Asia. This combined innovation and conservatism are
incredible.[34]

The general conclusion seems to be that there was, in men's dress and
armour, a break of several centuries during which un-Homeric costume
and armour existed, and that--about the time just preceding the Persian
wars and later--Greece reverted to the Homeric types or men's dress
and body armour, while the Homeric shield was _never_ revived. It was
invented as an umbrella against arrows in far off days, when the bow,
rather than the spear, was the chief weapon of attack, when arrow-heads
were of stone; and it went out when glory was only to be won at close
quarters.

Why the plain plate corslet tended to go out, about the time of the
Persian war, while the flimsy but highly decorated mail hauberk came
in, a mere _jascran_, it is not easy to conjecture; but probably the
hauberk was adapted from Assyrian and Egyptian armour of the period.
The _jaseran_ went out again, and the plate corslets of our Museums
came in again, in the fifth to fourth centuries.

[Illustration: Fig. 7.--Lady Pouring out Wine for Warrior--R. F.
Vase-Painting by Duris, in Vienna]

It is manifestly open to critics to argue that Homeric armour never
existed, in Greece, before the sixth to fifth centuries, and that it
was then interpolated into the Epics. But if they say this, must they
not apply the same argument to Homeric costume, loose and free flowing?
Was that attire also interpolated into the poems at the date when it
first appears in art? Or are we to say that the artists who represent
it were "archaising," were making a guess at what the costume of the
heroic age might have been?

This cannot be, for the dress is the historic Greek costume which they
then wore. As Panathenaic vases maintained archaic costume long out of
date, I have not appealed to their evidence as to costume and armour,
but have relied on other vases,--on a vase from Sparta with warriors
rendered in relief,[35] on a gem cited, on a remarkable bronze in the
British Museum of a mounted man, and so forth.[36]

I cannot say that Homer always has hauberks, not corslets of back-plate
and breast-plate in his mind. The two passages in which the front
_gualon_ is pierced over the belly, look as if Homer knew both corslet
and hauberk. On the other hand, the epithets of the corslet commonly
used, _ποικίλος, παναίολος, πολυδαίδαλος_, suit the hauberk, not the
plain back-plate and breast-plate, as may be seen by looking at both
kinds of armour as illustrated on countless vases, while the _zoster_
and _mitrê_ are common in Homer, and were never worn, as far as art
shows, with the Ionian back-plate and breast-plate, though they both
appear with the plate cuirass on the seal impressions of Haghia Triada.


NOTE

_Body-covering shield with corslet_.--Reichel's argument is that a man
with a body-covering needs no corslet. I have shown (_Homer and His
Age_, pp. 132-136) that warriors of the eleventh century A.D. and later
employed the great shield reaching from neck to ankles, and also wore
breast-plates. Again, Champlain (_Les Voyages de M. de Champlain_,
Paris, 1620; Dix's _Champlain_, p. 113, New York, 1903; Laverdière's
_Champlain_, vol. iv., 1870, opposite p. 85) shows Algonquins with
shields cylindrical and covering the body from neck to feet, while
both Champlain and modern authors, especially Mr. Hill-Tout, describe
North American corslets of various materials, hide, wood, wicker-work,
and copper, "the last armour was everywhere used," in addition to the
great shields. For the eleventh to twelfth century of our era, see _La
Chancun de Willame_, 716-726.

Reichel's argument against the combination of huge shield with corslet
is thus historically valueless, though "the ancient Celts used no
defensive armour but the long shield, and fought from chariots."[37]

If we only look at the Celts, Reichel seems justified, but we look
also at the North Americans and at mediaeval Europe. Down to 1424,
the fighting man in full body armour used large shields in attacking
fortified positions _se couvrant de sa targecte pour doubte des
pierres._ (D'Aulon, in _Procès de Jeanne d'Arc_, vol. iii. p. 216).


[1] _Iliad_, xvi. 803 (the shield); _Odyssey_, xix. 242 (the chiton).

[2] _Odyssey_, xiv. 72.

[3] Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 200.

[4] See Studniczka, _Geschichte der altgriechischen Tracht_, p. 21, and
notes.

[5] See Layard, _Monuments_, in many plates.

[6] Odyssey, cxix, 225 _et seqq_.

[7] See three sorts on the dagger from a tomb in the Mycenaean
acropolis.

[8] _Catalogue of British Museum Gems_, 1888, No. 294.

[9] _Iliad_, xvii. 312-315.

[10] Pausanias, x. 26.

[11] So, too, _Iliad_, xiii. 507, 508.

[12] Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii. b.

[13] _Homerische Waffen_, 2nd edition, Vienna, 1901.

[14] Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. 629.

[15] I have seen another archaic bronze plate corslet, with engraved
designs, but do not know where it now is.

[16] See Note to this chapter, "Shield and Body Armour."

[17] _R. G. E._ p. 143.

[18] _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 576.

[19] _Ibid._ vii. 206-209. Mr. Leaf's translation, 1906, p. 134.

[20] Iliad, iii. 114, 115.

[21] iii. 134, 135.

[22] Against this opinion may be cited Odyssey, xxii. 108-114, where
the only protective armour used by the men of Odysseus is helmets and
shields, yet the formulae of "doing on bronze over the flesh," and
"donning the fair pieces of armour" are employed. To myself it may
seem that these are epic formulae which arose in a period of corslets
but are used where no corslets were being worn, in the fight with the
Wooers. Mr. Murray, however, takes the absence of specific mention
of corslets in the Odyssey generally as a proof of his theory that
"the _Odyssey_ has been altogether less worked over, expurgated,
and modernised than what books still persist in calling without
qualification 'the older poem'" (_R. G. E._ pp. 145, 146). Here he
has to discover why the Odyssey, according to critics, has (in his
view) been "worked over and modernised" as regards the house and the
bride-price, while in a few fighting passages the warriors are left in
the supposed state of Aegean nakedness, save for the shield, which,
unlike Mycenaean shields, has a bronze plating, as in the _Iliad_. Mr.
Murray (_R. G. E._ p. 137, note 1) grants that armour of bronze "may
have been, in some elements, a revival of something long forgotten...."
but was still unaware that the seals of Haghia Triada represent a man
in a cuirass of plate, a thick belt of plate, and a mailed kirtle.

[23] _Homer and the Iliad_, p. 212.

[24] _Monumenti Antichi_, vol. xiii., 1903, pp. 42, 114.

[25] _B. S. A_., vol. xii. p. opposite plate A.

[26] _Ibid._., vol. xiv., plate vii. A.

[27] Savignoni, _Mon. Ant._, 1903, p. 114.

[28] When disposing, in sixteen lines (_R. G. E_. 154, note I), of my
_Homer and his Age_, Mr. Murray oddly represents me as maintaining
that the body armour of Paris and Hector was "soft and very baggy like
a Minoan cope." As at that time I had never consciously heard of this
famous "Minoan cope," I never dreamed of such a thing as "soft and
very baggy" armour in the _Iliad_, though I know the Protestant silk
armour during "the Popish Plot." In fact, judging from the designs in
_Monumenti Antichi_, the Minoan cope was of hard material.

Messrs. Hogarth and Bosanquet also report on "a very remarkable
'Mycenaean' bronze breast-plate" from Crete, which "shows four female
draped figures, the two central are holding a wreath over a bird,
below which is a sacred tree. The two outer figures are dancing. It is
probably a ritual scene, and may help to elucidate the nature of early
Aegean cults, in which female worshippers and sacred trees and birds
are common." _J. H. S_., vol. xix., 1899, p. 322.

[29] _Iliad_, xvi. 134.

[30] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 580, citing Studniczka, p. 59.

[31] The "taslets" of Dugald Dalgetty (1645) were thigh pieces
(cuisses), as in seventh to sixth century Greek art.

[32] I had written this before the publication of Miss Stawell's _Homer
and the Iliad_. In pp. 204-206, she has taken the word out of my mouth.

[33] _Iliad_, iv. 141-144.

[34] On the affair of Menelaus, see Leaf, vol. i. p. 581, and note
I, where Mr. Leaf thinks the clasping of the corslet in front "an
unreasonable arrangement." Mr. Murray (_R. G. E_. pp. 144, 145)
also takes it that there was "a solid metal breast-plate." The term
_γύαλον_ (_Iliad_, v. 99), where an arrow hits "hard by Diomede's
right shoulder the plate of his corslet," may refer to the broad plate
over the shoulder-strap; some of the corslets of two metal plates have
shoulder-straps in art. We really cannot expect to understand every
detail with certainty, while we have no actual examples of the corslets
and shields of many early centuries before our eyes. Mr. Ridgeway
believes the body armour of the Achaeans to have been hauberks of
bronze scales or small plates, not back-and breast-plates as in seventh
and early sixth century art. He illustrates by many bronze studs found
at Koracev and Ilijak in Bosnia, of the Glasinatz epoch (_Early Age of
Greece_, vol. i. pp. 435, 436). Such a hauberk would well correspond
to that worn by "the bronze-shirted Achaeans." The hauberk would be "a
shirt of leather," with "small pieces of bronze, either in the form
of studs, or scales, or rings, or by the addition of plates of larger
size" (_Ibid_. p. 310). The hauberk made of metal studs on leather
seems to be illustrated in Schliemann's copy of a man on a very old
vase from Tiryns, of a style apparently earlier than the art of the
Dipylon (Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii.).

[35] Frontispiece.

[36] _B. S. A_., vol. xii., plate A.

[37] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 573, note I, citing M. d'Arbois
de Jubainville, _La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l'Epopée
Homerique_, p. 349, Paris, 1899.




CHAPTER IX

WOMEN'S COSTUME


As to the evolution of feminine costume, I speak with the greatest
diffidence. Homer's women wore the loose brooched peplos, with brooch,
pin, clasp, and over it the _pharos_. Women of the later dark age and
the Dipylon period apparently dressed otherwise. In the archaic period
the brooched peplos, girdled at the waist, was worn; but I think that
there was also a revival or survival of Aegean sewn and shaped bodices,
jackets, and skirts. Lastly, historic Greece reverted to the Homeric
peplos and _chlaina_.

The discussion is, inevitably, concerned with minutiae in details
about which our actual information is far from being minute. We must
therefore state here explicitly the conclusions to which we are led:
namely, that neither the male nor female dress nor the armour described
in the Epics was introduced, at any period, by the Ionians employed
in any one of the four or five "recensions" which are postulated by
certain critics, as in the "first _Iliad_" of Robert, and his "second,
third, and fourth _Iliads_"[1] On the other hand, we contend that
both the costume and the armour in Homer are of a single period,
earlier than the Dipylon and barbaric Tirynthian age of art, while
historic Greece from the middle of the sixth century began to revert to
something like the Homeric type.

We must remember that hitherto no representations of Homer's people
in the free art of the Aegeans have been discovered, and thence no
light can be derived. When the crude art of Tiryns and, later (?) of
the "Geometric" school of ornament comes into view (1000-800 B.C.?),
the designs of men and women are childish. In painted vases which may
represent the palsied decadence of the Aegean age, the human figures
are simply absurd, still they are recognisably human; though in vases
of what may be called the "dotted" style of outline, they have heads
like birds, as on dotted bronzes of northern Italy in the Early Age
of Iron. In the "Dipylon" style, again, as soon as human beings are
represented, the heads of the men are like potatoes set on sticks; the
torso is an inverted isosceles triangle, with the pointed waist for
apex; and the naked legs are enormously thick in thighs and calves. The
women's bodies also are often equilateral triangles; the parts below
the waist are clothed in tight skirts, as a general rule; the breasts,
when the bust is represented, are either bare, or clad in a very tight
bodice, or are hidden by a hood which falls below the shoulders like
a cape. In one Tirynthian fragment we see a stout lady in a "princess
frock" tight, "of the Menzies tartan,"[2] and all of one piece; another
design shows a waist no thicker than a broomstick[3] (figs. 8, 9).
These costumes of women, in Tirynthian and Dipylon art, are un-Homeric
and post-Homeric. I doubt if we find such female costumes as Homer
apparently describes recognisably represented in Greek art till the
sixth and fifth centuries.

[Illustration: Fig. 8--Princess Frock: Tiryns--_By permission of John
Murray_, Schliemann's _Tiryns_, plate xxv. c]

This seems to be stated with unnecessary force, because, it may well be
said, the meaning of the sentence turns on the words "_recognisably_
represented." How are we to "recognise," in art, costumes of which
Homer gives us only brief verbal descriptions? Are we not deceived by
the free and vivid style of Homer? All his human beings and gods come
in such living forms before us, that we see the flowing, glistening
garments of Nausicaa and Athene swaying with their motions. We can see
nothing like this represented in Greek art till the late sixth century
and onwards; because, it may be said, till that date Greek art is hard,
prim, constrained, conventional,--in fact, archaic. It is therefore,
we may be told, a kind of logical illusion which prevents us from
recognising the costumes of Homer's women in Greek plastic art, till
that art itself is beginning to attain Homeric freedom.

These considerations must be kept in mind. But another error is apt to
be suggested when we read that the historic Hellenic costume, or that
part of it styled "the Doric peplos," "is implied by the allusions
of Homer," the view of the ingenious Studniczka.[4] The remark is
illustrated by fig. 10, in which we see a lady in "a Doric peplos,"
though how Achaean women of Homer's time could wear the dress of the
Dorians whom Homer ignores is not apparent. This graceful and breezy
costume is, in fact, like what we suppose Homer to have had in his
mind, and to have seen. But it is not in the least like the dress shown
in the art which is immediately subsequent to his age, the art of
Tiryns and of the Dipylon; and, as far as I can ascertain, it is not
the costume displayed in the archaic art up to the middle of the sixth
century. Archaic Greek female costume, however, has this much in common
with Homeric and later Greek costume, that it essentially differs,
often, from Aegean or Mycenaean dress.

In describing the contrast of styles between the pre-Homeric Aegean
dress and the Homeric costume for women, Mr. Leaf says that the
Mykenaean (Aegean) women wore "a close fitting bodice, sharply marked
off from the full skirt..."; and though there were many changes of
fashion in the Aegean world, this account holds good for its later
periods. "The dress of Greek women in historic times is of a totally
different kind. It is marked by simplicity and flowing vertical
lines.... The peplos is, in fact, no more than a square woollen blanket
... taken up round the middle by a girdle and retained in its place
on the shoulders by pins." The Aegean female dress, sewn and fitted,
did not need pins or brooches, _περόναι, ἐνεταί, πόρται_.[5] On the
other hand, "no pins or fibulae have been found among the remains of
the Mykenaean prime," while they are common in the latter "lower city"
below the acropolis of Mycenae.

Mr. Leaf therefore conceives that "during the prime of Mykene fashion
was dominated by a non-Hellenic influence," perhaps Oriental. Bodices
and separate flounced skirts were in, "but for some reason which we
cannot expect to guess, fashion returned, at the end of the Mykenaean
age, to the older and simpler dress" (the Homeric), "which held its
ground till classical times."[6] The usual explanation is that the
fibulae and the pinned peplos were brought in from the north by Achaean
invaders; in the north the fibulae had long been common;[7] and that
the style of costume persisted continuously into historic times, being
the familiar classical Greek dress.

[Illustration: Fig. 9--Costume of Women--Tirynthian Vase By permission
of John Murray, Esq. Schliemann's _Tiryns_, plate. xvii. a]

Now undoubtedly the fibula, and therefore the unsewn and unshaped
female attire, did come in at the close of the Aegean or Mycenaean
period in Greece; but, as far as I can interpret the art of very old
Tirynthian and some Dipylon vases, there was an early post-Homeric
period wherein women adopted the short hood-capes, the tight waists,
the heavy skirts, and the princess frock.[8] This attire more
resembles the Aegean than the Homeric and Hellenic. The "hood-cape"
of Tirynthian art may conceivably be the κρήδεμνον, καλύπτρα or
κάλυμμα of Homer; but if so, it reveals below it a waist of more than
Aegean tightness, not the belted peplos. Such are the characteristics
of Dipylon art, and of Tirynthian art which may have arisen before
900 B.C. It is hardly possible that if, in that age, women wore the
loose Homeric peplos, the artists should have represented them with
impossibly narrow waists, with the bosom fully displayed, and with
heavy skirts. The women of this dark age, as far as art can enlighten
us, had broken away from, or at all events are not wearing, the Homeric
peplos.

This is, at least, my private interpretation of the Dipylon and the
Tirynthian representation. But it is offered with diffidence, and is
not shared by Mr. R. M. Dawkins, the Director of the British School
of Athens. He "does not believe that the Dipylon women's dress is
necessarily a tight one," and attributes the wasp waists to the limited
skill of the early artist, thinking that if he had to draw a woman in
a loose flowing dress he would still give her a tiny waist, because a
small waist is one of the conspicuous points in the female figure. In
the effort to give as much information as possible he would draw the
small waist even if it were concealed by a loose dress. The primitive
artist draws not from models, but from mental images.

There is much truth in this; for example, the ladies in a palaeolithic
rock-painting[9] have very slim waists, clearly exaggerated, above
skirts with a crescentine scoop at the bottom. But the primitive artist
certainly draws under the domination of a convention which differs
in different places. The woman whose figure is repeated in the clay
disk from Phaestus[10] has no more waist than the stout person in
a princess frock from Tiryns. The Dipylon artists may be continuing
the Aegean convention of the wasp waist; though the designer of the
princess frock is as candid as the Phaestos artist. Thus the reader
must interpret the Dipylon waist as he pleases.

We next reach the "archaic" art of, say, the seventh to sixth
centuries. The chief article of female dress, as described by Homer,
was the peplos, "a square or rectangular piece of material which,"
like the men's outer mantle, "could be used for various purposes." It
was fastened by pins or brooches (_περόναι, ἐνεταί_), and the _περόνη_
was sometimes a fibula or safety pin, the cover adorned by art, as in
the case of the _περόνη_ of Odysseus (_Od_. xix.). But when (_Iliad_,
v. 425) Athene mockingly tells Zeus that the wounded Aphrodite must
have scratched her hand, while caressing some Achaean woman, on her
_περόνη_, the term "_safety_ pin," or _fibula,_ does not apply. We
think rather of one of the long sharp stiletto-like pins found in
Egyptian deposits of from about 1450 to 1200 B.C. and also at Enkomi
in Cyprus, and at Sparta in the Orthia sanctuary from 900 to 500
B.C.[11] Fibulae of the same date also occur. These great pins had
ribbed handles, and below the handle was a perforation or a metallic
loop.[12] Now very long pins, also with ribbed handles, but without the
aperture in the middle, fasten the peplos of one of the Fates on the
Francis vase, which Mr. Evans dates in "the seventh century," but Mr.
Walters--from the characters in the inscriptions on the vase--dates
about 570-550 B.C.[13] The Spartan evidence for the pin and fibulae
covers the later range of dates.

[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Metope of Athene, Olympia _Photo: English
Photographic Co., Athens._]

Much turns on the date of the François vase, for many critics, with
Studniczka, consider that the costume of the female figures is like
that which Homer's women wear, and is a "Doric peplos." Thus Miss
Abrahams, in her Greek Dress (1908, pp. 29, 30) studies the arraying
of Hera.[14] Of her dress Homer says, χρυσείῃς δ' ἐνετῇσι κατὰ στῆθος
περονᾶτο: "And she fastened it _over her breast_ with clasps of gold."
"We gather from this passage," says Miss Abrahams, "that the garment
was fastened _on the shoulders_ by brooches or pins inserted κατὰ
στῆθος, which Studniczka rightly interprets as '_down towards the
breast_,' a method of fastening which is represented on the François
vase and elsewhere." "The material," Miss Abrahams goes on, "is drawn
from the back, and wraps over that which covers the front, _the pins
are then inserted downwards_, and hold the two thicknesses of material
together...."

But (see fig. 11) the pins are inserted _upwards_; we observe the
long ribbed head of the pin, of known form like that of the 1450-1200
B.C. pins of Egypt and Enkomi, stuck into the fabric above the right
breast. It penetrates the fabric, and passes upwards into a large
oval shoulder piece, perhaps the tail of the piece of cloth which
covers the decorated collar over the shoulder-joint. The Homeric
phrase "pins inserted _down towards_ the _breast_" does not indicate
this mode of fastening, which is _upwards from_ the breast. "A method
practically impossible--the pin would fall out," says Mr. Dawkins.
"If so, blame the artist." Neither the "overfold" (ἀπόπτυγμα) nor the
curious oval piece on the shoulder-joint (perhaps a portion of the
fabric) is mentioned by Homer. Again, when we read,[15] "the dress is
held into the figure by a girdle worn round the waist, over which any
superfluous length of material could be drawn, forming a κόλπος or
pouch," we must remember that in the dress on the François vase _there
is no superfluous material_. The dress ends just above the heels,
there is no "tunic-trailing"; as in Homer. A woman who drew her dress
up to form a κόλπος or pouch, would show much more of her legs than
was fashionable in the archaic period, and would destroy the collant
fit over the breast. The costume fits tightly to the bust; and in art
of 600-550 B.C. this is the rule. We see no women "with deep κόλπος
or pouch," whereas the nurse of Eumaeus could conceal three cups in
her pouch. Here, again, Mr. Dawkins thinks that the limitations of
the artist cause the absence of the _kolpos_. "He made any dress
look tight, because he could only draw his idea of the body and then
indicate dress on the body. The artist has two mental images, one of
the natural body and the other of the dress, and he could only carry
out his work by combining the two."

But I must reply that, in the François vase, we are far from the
"primitive" artist. The artist knows very well what he is about. He
draws short skirts and over the bust the dress is _collant_, because
that is the fashion. The painter no longer draws impossible waists,
they are in good proportion for girls. Moreover, artists of the same
period when they design a woman in a mantle do so in the modern way.
The bust is indicated; the mantle does not cover it, but covers the
waist, and no attempt is made to show what the artist knows is there:
he does not design what is not in sight. Even an Australian black
fellow drew what he saw, not what he knew was there, in sketches
of white ladies.[16] We must not explain the François vase by the
limitations of "primitive art."

[Illustration: Fig. 11.--The Fates on the François Vase--From Miss
Abraham's _Greek Dress_ (_J. Murray_)]

My impression is that in the eighth to seventh centuries women still
did, at least occasionally, wear a costume consisting, as in Aegean
times, of separate bodices and skirts. Thus in an archaic Corinthian
gold jewel we see an Ariadne naked from the belt upwards, beneath is
a skirt falling to the instep. Skirts were therefore separate, and
imply a separate bodice, if the upper body is to be covered[17] (fig.
12).

[Illustration: Fig. 12.--Ariadne, Theseus, and Minotaur From a
Corinthian Gold Ornament From _Arch. Ztg._., 1884]

The pouch is Homeric, but in art of 600-550 B.C. no woman, as far as I
have observed, has any "superfluous length of material," or, at least,
almost none draws it up through the girdle to form such a pouch as
we see on Miss Abrahams's fig. 10 (Metope from the temple of Zeus at
Olympia). The wearer could hide the family plate in her pouch, not so
the women of the Francois vase. Such a costume cannot be called, as a
rule, τανυπέπλος, or ἑλκεσίπεπλος, "trailing robed," like Homer's women.

Thus the Greek dress of the seventh to sixth century, when many artists
drew what they saw under no "primitive" limitations, is not Homeric.
Homeric female dress is loose and flowing, and trailing. Archaic Greek
female dress is tight, not flowing, not trailing. Historic Hellenic
female dress is loose, flowing, and trailing; it returns to the Homeric
type. In holding these opinions we are not, then, deluded by the
freedom of Homer's art; he insists on the _kolpos_, or loose fold which
makes a pouch, and on the trailing loose peplos; nor, at least in my
opinion, are we deluded by the stiffness of archaic art, which really
represents the brevity and tightness of the prevailing fashion.

Thus we cannot cite the François vase "in illustration of the Homeric
peplos."[18] The François dress is not trailing, nor is it pouched,
nor is it Homeric. A thick, round, embroidered collar with no apparent
breach in its continuity is either pinned or sewn over the François
peplos, and the overlap is tight enough to indicate the bust very
gracefully. Moreover, the costume of Athene[19] is not that of the
François vase (fig. 13). _Both_, I think, cannot be "the closed Doric
dress." Athene has a garment much more flowing than that of the
François dress; and, unlike that costume, it has a pouch, though her
dress falls rather lower than that of the François ladies; and she
has no thick collar, and no long pins thrust up from the breast.[20]
Athene's dress would be long and trailing, if it were not drawn up
through the girdle. By the date of the Olympian figure of Athene, Greek
female dress had moved back from the fashion of the François costume
towards that which Homer knew and described.

We now reach the strange story which Herodotus tells to account for the
alleged enforced change of Athenian women's costume from the peplos
fastened with long stiletto-like pins, as in the François vase (an
Athenian work of art), to the Ionic dress, which had no long pins.
The women, he says, slew, with their long pins, a messenger who bore
the tale of the massacre of their husbands; and the men therefore
compelled them to wear the Ionian linen chiton, which does not require
the _περόνη_, the stiletto pin.[21] The event was of the first half
of the sixth century; 568 B.C. is the date conjectured, which tallies
fairly with Mr. Walters's dating of the François vase made while long
pins were still fashionable. But if the wearing of Ionic costume were,
as Miss Abrahams supposes, one of the luxuries which Solon (594 B.C.)
tried to check, then we must date the François vase in the seventh
century. Yet the costume of the vase, with its expensive embroideries,
is much more "luxurious" than the linen Ionian chiton or smock. In any
case it is certain, from the dangerous long pins of, say, 1200 B.C. at
Enkomi and in Greek deposits in Egypt, that women wore these stiletto
pins five centuries before they did so at Athens, in, say, 620-560 B.C.
So Homer had his mind, when Aphrodite scratched her hand with an
Achaean woman's pin, on Achaean female dress, not on that of Athenians
of the seventh or sixth century.

[Illustration: Fig. 13.--Historic Greek Costume From Leaf's _Homer's
Iliad_ vol. ii. (_Macmillan & Co. Ltd_.)]

In short, Homeric female dress was not introduced into the Epics by any
"recension," by any interpolators of any post-Achaean date, as Pinza
argues that it was.[22] He supposes the Ionian female costume to be a
long linen smock with short sleeves.

Pinza argues that the costume of women in Homer "is wholly different
from that of Spartan ladies of archaic and classical times; and, on the
other hand, exhibits many analogies with the more antique linen chiton
with short sleeves, certainly of Asiatico-Semitic origin, as is proved
by the etymology of the name" (chiton).[23] He supposes the Ionian
costume of women, described as a long linen smock with short sleeves,
to be derived, through Phoenicia, from the Syria of, say, 690 B.C.,
citing Hebrew female captives in Layard's _Monuments of Nineveh_ (i.
plates 61, 83, and others). In plate 61 we see a tall female captive,
wearing a long garment, with a broad fringe over her head, and below it
another long garment with short tight sewn sleeves, and a broad border
which falls over the legs, leaving them bare from the calf. There are
no pins or fibulae visible; the upper garment hides the girdle, if
girdle there be. In plate 65 two figures of goddesses are carried, on
chairs, in a procession. They wear long sewn smocks, with sewn sleeves
ending above the elbows, and with very broad belts. The dresses end
above the ankle bones. They are far from being loose or trailing; no
pins or fibulae appear. The same costume, without any girdle, is worn
by two women in a kitchen: they seem to have bodices and skirts (plate
30). The sleeves have no small round brooches like the Ionian chiton,
which, like the Assyrian dresses, reached the feet (ποδήρης).

Miss Abrahams remarks that it is a mistake to suppose the Doric chiton
to have been always fastened by pins or brooches, the Ionic always
sewn on the shoulders (like those quoted from Assyrian monuments).
In many Greek works of art, a chiton, clearly Ionic, is not sewn on
the shoulders, but fastened down the upper arm by a series of small
brooches.[24] The Assyrian dresses often answer to the Ionic chiton
as thus described, but are _without any brooches_; and they are much
shorter than the Ionic chiton, which, as thus described, is always
longer than the height of the wearer; "the superfluous length is
drawn up through the girdle to form a _kolpos_, which varies in depth
according to the length of the chiton."[25] Not so in archaic Greek
art! In any case, the Ionic dress as described is much longer than that
of the Assyrian designs, has a kolpos, where they have none, and may
either be sewn, like them, over the shoulder, or, unlike them, may be
fastened over the upper arm with small brooches. Thus the Ionic, _as
described_, is not the same as the Syrian, when the Ionic has brooches;
nor is it, in my opinion the female costume of the Greek vases of the
seventh and early sixth centuries.

In Layard's plate 67 A, from the Assyrian monuments, we see two of the
captive women from Lachish kneeling and giving suck to their children.
Their smocks are tight, girdled, and reach the heels. The dress of
the upper woman has short sleeves on both arms, and the line where
it crosses below the neck is perfectly well marked. How the infant,
in these circumstances, reaches the natural source of nourishment is
a deep mystery. In the figure of the lower woman certain faint lines
appear to indicate that the dress has been opened at the centre of the
neck and drawn aside over one breast. In neither case is there any
trace of fibula, pin, button, or hook and eye, or loose hanging flap.

Pinza, however,[26] finds here an exact parallel to Hera's peplos in
_Iliad_, xiv. 175, "fastened over her breast with clasps of gold,"
that is, "fastened on the shoulders by brooches or pins inserted down
towards the breast"; and this, again, is said to be illustrated (as
above) by the François vase. In answer, it may suffice to look at the
two pictures, Layard 67 A and the Fates on the François vase. A simple
button and button-hole, as Pinza remarks, in the dress below the centre
of the neck, would, if withdrawn, do all that these Hebrew babies need.
A man may illustrate this for himself by opening his shirt at the
collar stud. The lower Hebrew woman might even be naked above the belt,
like the kneeling woman just beneath her, were it not for the line of
her dress across her neck. She has no sleeves. There is no sign of any
openings at the shoulders or _precisaménte come l' ἑανός della Epopea_.

These Assyrian designs do not, it seems to me, encourage the opinion
that Hebrew female costume of the date of Hezekiah, say, 690 B.C.,
was thrust into Homer about that period, at an Ionian "recension,"
and remained there unaltered by later "recensions."[27] The brooched
costume of Homeric women is not the sewn costume of the Assyrian art.
Other Hebrew ladies from Lachish wear the long piece of cloth over
their heads, falling to the top of the ankle, and under that a tight
smock of the same length. There is no girdle, the arms are bare, no
fibulae are shown.[28] As the Syrian female costume never shows brooch,
pin, or fibula, it certainly cannot be the origin of the Homeric or the
Doric peplos, or of the brooched historical costume of Hellas.

Meanwhile a mere untutored man who looks at the Fates on the François
vase thinks, I find, that the embroidered overlap is simply a short
jacket worn over the peplos, This appears to be an error. But I had,
as an amateur, come to the conclusion that the dress of the women
in archaic Greek art often consists of sewn bodice and skirt, or of
a tight jacket with a separate skirt, not of the peplos. Mr. Myres
had already expressed similar opinions as to the late survival (or
revival?) of that Aegean costume.[29]

Moreover, Mr. Walters, judging from vase-paintings, says, "The Ionic
costume is introduced about 500 B.C., but its vogue does not seem to
have lasted long at Athens."[30]

Perdrizet thought that the archaic costume more resembled the Mycenaean
(or Aegean) than the Doric style; while Mr. Wace (in the catalogue of
the museum at Sparta), Mr. Leaf, Mr. Dawkins, and others hold that the
archaic dress is merely a long chiton tied at the waist. This question
of the late survival, or revival, of non-Homeric Aegean female costume
is thus delicate and obscure, though I have little or no doubt that it
did in many cases survive or was revived.

The woman in the archaic sepulchral monument from Etruria (British
Museum) wears a short jacket, and a very brief skirt; and a woman in
a leaden figurine of Sparta wears only a girdle and a kirtle. She is
running, and has thrown off her jacket or bodice. An archaic Victory, a
terra cotta in the British Museum, wears only a very short skirt.[31]
The Ariadne of an archaic Corinthian jewel, in a belted skirt, with no
bodice, has already been cited.

Thus the evidence of art, in the dark period of, say, 900-700 B.C.,
inclines me to believe that women sometimes wore shaped and sewn
bodices and skirts, or jackets and skirts; sometimes a strait brooched
and girdled peplos, not flowing, not trailing, not Homeric; that there
was none of the Homeric uniformity of attire. Varieties of fashion are
not discordant with feminine nature.


[1] _Studien zur Ilias_, von Carl Robert, Berlin, 1901.

[2] The Menzies tartan is of white and pink checks, which the artist
renders lovingly.

[3] Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii. Studniczka, _Altgr. Tracht_.

[4] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 596.

[5] _Iliad_, v. 425, xiv. 180, xviii. 401.

[6] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. 595-598.

[7] Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. pp. 553-577.

[8] _Tiryns_, plate xvii.

[9] In northern Aragon.

[10] _Scripta Minoa_, vol. i. p. 282.

[11] _B. S. A_., vol. xiii. pp. no, 113.

[12] _Journal of the Anthrop. Institute_, vol. xxx., 1900, p. 203, fig.
2. Evans on "Mycenaean Cyprus."

[13] Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 270.

[14] _Iliad_, xiv. 175 _et seqq_.

[15] _Greek Dress_, p. 30.

[16] Mrs. Langloh Parker, _Australian Legendary Tales_.

[17] See fig. 2 in Roscher's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 3007.

[18] _Greek Dress_, p. 44.

[19] _Ibid_., fig. 10.

[20] Here, it must be said, Mr. Dawkins dissents, not seeing any
difference in the two costumes. I think that is because he supposes the
François artist not to be able to draw what he sees; for the dresses
seem, in fact, to me different.

[21] Herodotus, v. 87.

[22] Pinza, _Hermes_, 1909, p. 526.

[23] _Ibid._ pp. 527, 528.

[24] _Greek Dress_, p. 60.

[25] _Greek Costume_, p. 60.

[26] Pinza, _Hermes_, p. 538.

[27] _Ibid_. p. 526.

[28] Layard, _Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 152.

[29] _Proceedings British School of Athens_, vol. ix. p. 386, citing
the difference of colour, and we may add of decorative design, on
the part of the costume above, and the part below the girdle. This
difference could not always occur in a dress all of one piece. For
example, see the female figures incised on the fragments of a corslet
of bronze plates at Olympia (_Bronzen_, plate lix.). But this question
is _sub judice_; it is argued that the difference of pattern and colour
in upper and lower parts of the dress is a decorative caprice of the
artist, and corresponds to nothing that he saw in women's costume. It
is impossible to deny that Ariadne in the archaic Corinthian piece of
gold-work has come to see the Minotaur killed, wearing her skirt, and
leaving her bodice in her bedroom (Roscher's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 3007,
fig. 2).

[30] _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 200.

[31] Cf. _B.S.A._, vol. xii. p. 323, fig. K.




CHAPTER X

BRONZE AND IRON. WEAPONS AND TOOLS


The Aegean civilisation, till its last age of decadence in art, knew
nothing about the use of iron for weapons or tools: at least no such
relics have been discovered. Homer, on the other hand, is thoroughly
familiar with iron as a commodity. A recurrent formula describes
wealthy men as rich in gold, bronze, women, and iron.[1]

Iron, bronze, slaves, and hides were bartered for wine, at the siege of
Troy, when a large trading fleet came in from Lemnos, sent by Euneos,
son of Jason and Hypsipyle, a princess of that island.[2] Lemnos seems
to have been rich in wine, which provoked the heroes to utter _gabes_
(as in the _Chansons de Geste_) about their future triumphs in the
war.[3]

Thus iron is abundant, but its uses are strangely restricted. All
careful readers must perceive that Homer lives in an age of "overlap."
Remains of such ages are common on European sites almost everywhere;
the explorer finds in the overlap iron and bronze things together, iron
comes gradually 

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