Homer and His Age
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Title: Homer and His Age
Author: Andrew Lang
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HOMER AND HIS AGE
By Andrew Lang
[Illustration: ALGONQUINS UNDER SHIELD _Frontispiece_]
To R. W. RAPER IN ALL GRATITUDE
[Etext Editor's note: Due to unclear typesetting of the original work,
which contains unidentifiable characters and blank spaces, it has not
been possible to capture this text completely. Where we have been unable
to recover the meaning of the text, this has been indicated by the
annotation [sic] or [blank space]. We hope that in the future a complete
edition can be found and these gaps can be filled.]
PREFACE
In _Homer and the Epic_, ten or twelve years ago, I examined the
literary objections to Homeric unity. These objections are chiefly based
on alleged discrepancies in the narrative, of which no one poet, it
is supposed, could have been guilty. The critics repose, I venture
to think, mainly on a fallacy. We may style it the fallacy of "the
analytical reader." The poet is expected to satisfy a minutely critical
reader, a personage whom he could not foresee, and whom he did not
address. Nor are "contradictory instances" examined--that is, as Blass
has recently reminded his countrymen, Homer is put to a test which
Goethe could not endure. No long fictitious narrative can satisfy "the
analytical reader."
The fallacy is that of disregarding the Homeric poet's audience. He
did not sing for Aristotle or for Aristarchus, or for modern minute
and reflective inquirers, but for warriors and ladies. He certainly
satisfied them; but if he does not satisfy microscopic professors, he is
described as a syndicate of many minstrels, living in many ages.
In the present volume little is said in defence of the poet's
consistency. Several chapters on that point have been excised. The way
of living which Homer describes is examined, and an effort is made to
prove that he depicts the life of a single brief age of culture. The
investigation is compelled to a tedious minuteness, because the points
of attack--the alleged discrepancies in descriptions of the various
details of existence--are so minute as to be all but invisible.
The unity of the Epics is not so important a topic as the methods of
criticism. They ought to be sober, logical, and self-consistent. When
these qualities are absent, Homeric criticism may be described, in the
recent words of Blass, as "a swamp haunted by wandering fires, will o'
the wisps."
In our country many of the most eminent scholars are no believers in
separatist criticism. Justly admiring the industry and erudition of the
separatists, they are unmoved by their arguments, to which they do
not reply, being convinced in their own minds. But the number and
perseverance of the separatists make on "the general reader" the
impression that Homeric unity is chose _jugee_, that _scientia locuta
est_, and has condemned Homer. This is far from being the case: the
question is still open; "science" herself is subject to criticism; and
new materials, accruing yearly, forbid a tame acquiescence in hasty
theories.
May I say a word to the lovers of poetry who, in reading Homer, feel no
more doubt than in reading Milton that, on the whole, they are studying
a work of one age, by one author? Do not let them be driven from their
natural impression by the statement that Science has decided against
them. The certainties of the exact sciences are one thing: the opinions
of Homeric commentators are other and very different things. Among all
the branches of knowledge which the Homeric critic should have at his
command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called
"sciences"; and they are not exact sciences: they are but skirmishing
advances towards the true solution of problems prehistoric and
"proto-historic."
Our knowledge shifts from day to day; on every hand, in regard to almost
every topic discussed, we find conflict of opinions. There is no certain
scientific decision, but there is the possibility of working in the
scientific spirit, with breadth of comparison; consistency of logic;
economy of conjecture; abstinence from the piling of hypothesis on
hypothesis.
Nothing can be more hurtful to science than the dogmatic assumption that
the hypothesis most in fashion is scientific.
Twenty years ago, the philological theory of the Solar Myth was preached
as "scientific" in the books, primers, and lectures of popular science.
To-day its place knows it no more. The separatist theories of the
Homeric poems are not more secure than the Solar Myth, "like a wave
shall they pass and be passed."
When writing on "The Homeric House" (Chapter X.) I was unacquainted with
Mr. Percy Gardner's essay, "The Palaces of Homer" (_Journal of Hellenic
Studies_, vol. iii. pp. 264-282). Mr. Gardner says that Dasent's plan
of the Scandinavian Hall "offers in most respects not likeness, but a
striking contrast to the early Greek hall." Mr. Monro, who was not aware
of the parallel which I had drawn between the Homeric and Icelandic
houses, accepted it on evidence more recent than that of Sir George
Dasent. Cf. his _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 490-494.
Mr. R. W. Raper, of Trinity College, Oxford, has read the proof sheets
of this work with his habitual kindness, but is in no way responsible
for the arguments. Mr. Walter Leaf has also obliged me by mentioning
some points as to which I had not completely understood his position,
and I have tried as far as possible to represent his ideas correctly. I
have also received assistance from the wide and minute Homeric lore of
Mr. A. Shewan, of St. Andrews, and have been allowed to consult other
scholars on various points.
The first portion of the chapter on "Bronze and Iron" appeared in the
Revue _Archeologique_ for April 1905, and the editor, Monsieur Salomon
Reinach, obliged me with a note on the bad iron swords of the Celts as
described by Polybius.
The design of men in three shields of different shapes, from a Dipylon
vase, is reproduced, with permission, from the British Museum _Guide
to the Antiquities of the Iron Age_; and the shielded chessmen from
Catalogue of Scottish Society of Antiquaries. Thanks for the two ships
with men under shield are offered to the Rev. Mr. Browne, S.J., author
of _Handbook of Homeric Studies_ (Longmans). For the Mycenaean gold
corslet I thank Mr. John Murray (Schliemann's Mycenae and Tiryns), and
for all the other Mycenaean illustrations Messrs. Macmillan and Mr.
Leaf, publishers and author of Mr. Leaf's edition of the _Iliad_.
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I: THE HOMERIC AGE
CHAPTER II: HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
CHAPTER III: HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION
CHAPTER IV: LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
CHAPTER V: AGAMEMNON IN THE LATER "ILIAD"
CHAPTER VI: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE "ILIAD"--BURIAL AND CREMATION
CHAPTER VII: HOMERIC ARMOUR
CHAPTER VIII: THE BREASTPLATE
CHAPTER IX: BRONZE AND IRON
CHAPTER X: THE HOMERIC HOUSE
CHAPTER XI: NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"
CHAPTER XII: LINGUISTIC PROOFS OF VARIOUS DATES
CHAPTER XIII: THE "DOLONEIA"--"ILIAD," BOOK X.
CHAPTER XIV: THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR
CHAPTER XV: THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY EPICS
CHAPTER XVI: HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS
CHAPTER XVII: CONCLUSION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
ALGONQUINS UNDER SHIELD
THE VASE OF ARISTONOTHOS
DAGGER WITH LION-HUNTERS
RINGS: SWORDS AND SHIELDS
FRAGMENTS OF WARRIOR VASE
FRAGMENT OF SIEGE VASE
ALGONQUIN CORSLET
GOLD CORSLET
CHAPTER I
THE HOMERIC AGE
The aim of this book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and
apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly
harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single
age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as
mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all,
cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will
follow that the poems themselves, as wholes, are the product of a single
age, not a mosaic of the work of several changeful centuries.
This must be the case--if the life drawn is harmonious, the picture
must be the work of a single epoch--for it is not in the nature of early
uncritical times that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere,
to the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses,
and so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set
of subjects. Even less are poets in uncritical times inclined to
"archaise," either by attempting to draw fancy pictures of the manners
of the past, or by making researches in graves, or among old votive
offerings in temples, for the purpose of "preserving local colour." The
idea of such archaising is peculiar to modern times. To take an instance
much to the point, Virgil was a learned poet, famous for his antiquarian
erudition, and professedly imitating and borrowing from Homer. Now, had
Virgil worked as a man of to-day would work on a poem of Trojan times,
he would have represented his heroes as using weapons of bronze.
[Footnote: Looking back at my own poem, _Helen of Troy_ (1883), I find
that when the metal of a weapon is mentioned the metal is bronze.] No
such idea of archaising occurred to the learned Virgil. It is "the iron"
that pierces the head of Remulus (_Aeneid_, IX. 633); it is "the iron"
that waxes warm in the breast of Antiphates (IX. 701). Virgil's men,
again, do not wear the great Homeric shield, suspended by a baldric:
AEneas holds up his buckler (_clipeus_), borne "on his left arm" (X. 26
i). Homer, familiar with no buckler worn on the left arm, has no such
description. When the hostile ranks are to be broken, in the _Aeneid_ it
is "with the iron" (X. 372), and so throughout.
The most erudite ancient poet, in a critical age of iron, does not
archaise in our modern fashion. He does not follow his model, Homer, in
his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. But, according to
most Homeric critics, the later continuators of the Greek Epics, about
800-540 B.C., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round
bucklers worn on the left arm. Yet, unlike Virgil, they always give
their heroes arms of bronze, and, unlike Virgil (as we shall see),
they do not introduce the buckler worn on the left arm. They adhere
conscientiously to the use of the vast Mycenaean shield, in their time
obsolete. Yet, by the theory, in many other respects they innovate
at will, introducing corslets and greaves, said to be unknown to the
beginners of the Greek Epics, just as Virgil innovates in bucklers and
iron weapons. All this theory seems inconsistent, and no ancient poet,
not even Virgil, is an archaiser of the modern sort.
All attempts to prove that the Homeric poems are the work of several
centuries appear to rest on a double hypothesis: first, that the later
contributors to the _ILIAD_ kept a steady eye on the traditions of the
remote Achaean age of bronze; next, that they innovated as much as they
pleased.
Poets of an uncritical age do not archaise. This rule is overlooked by
the critics who represent the Homeric poems as a complex of the work of
many singers in many ages. For example, Professor Percy Gardner, in his
very interesting _New chapters in Greek History_ (1892), carries neglect
of the rule so far as to suppose that the late Homeric poets, being
aware that the ancient heroes could not ride, or write, or eat boiled
meat, consciously and purposefully represented them as doing none of
these things. This they did "on the same principle on which a writer of
pastoral idylls in our own day would avoid the mention of the telegraph
or telephone." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 142.] "A writer of our own
day,"--there is the pervading fallacy! It is only writers of the last
century who practise this archaeological refinement. The authors of
_Beowulf_ and the _Nibelungenlied_, of the Chansons de _Geste_ and of
the Arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the
details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and
armour of their own much later ages.
But Mr. Leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of the
metal lead in the Epics, that it is mentioned in similes only, as though
the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic age. [Footnote:
_Iliad_, Note on, xi. 237.] Here the poet is assumed to be a careful
but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes to give an accurate
representation of the past. Lead, in fact, was perfectly familiar to the
Mycenaean prime. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 73.] The critical
usage of supposing that the ancients were like the most recent
moderns--in their archaeological preoccupations--is a survival of the
uncritical habit which invariably beset old poets and artists. Ancient
poets, of the uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a
writer in our day," as regards archaeological precision; at least we are
acquainted with no example of such accuracy.
Let us take another instance of the critical fallacy. The age of the
Achaean warriors, who dwelt in the glorious halls of Mycenae, was
followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics found in
the older tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, an age beginning,
probably, about 900-850 B.C. The culture of this "Dipylon age," a
time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of human figures drawn in
geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the
Achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use
of iron for weapons. Mr. H. R. Hall, in his learned book, _The Oldest
Civilisation of Greece_ (1901), supposes the culture described in the
Homeric poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon
period in Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.] He says, "The
Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there
is no attempt to archaise here...." They do not archaise as to the
details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently
archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece,"
in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate
description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. [Footnote: Op.
cit., pp. 223, 225.]
We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political and
social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it
is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. Mr.
Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological
precision of the Asiatic poets of the ninth century. Now to any one
who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind,
this theory seems not easily tenable. The difficulty of the theory is
increased, if we suppose that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors
of the Mycenaeans. Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr.
Ridgeway, victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or
whether, with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan
conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean
civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval
by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there would be little
thought of archaising among Achaean poets. [Footnote: Mr. Hall informs
me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.]
A distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other
artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase-painter
reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent
a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times
gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these
heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his
way, of what we call 'local colour....' Thus the Homeric poet is a more
conscientious historian than Virgil!" [Footnote: La _Grete de l'Epopee_,
Perrot et Chipiez, p. 230.]
Now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique
"local colour" than any other artists did. M. Perrot himself says with
truth, "the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_, and all the _Gestes_ of the same cycle
explain for us the Iliad and the Odyssey." [Footnote: op. cit., p. 5.]
But the poet of the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_ accoutres his heroes of old time
in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the
same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for
"local colour" in the _CHANSON DE ROLAND_. The very words "local colour"
are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of
ancient uncritical ages. The Homeric poets, like the painters of the
Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their
own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms"
before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for
they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction
of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really
exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour
and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to
archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic revival of the past in
its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal.
We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such
inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as
uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which
they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is,
the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric
poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of
several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his _Prolegomena_ to [blank space] (1795) there was
little opposition to the old belief that the _ILIAD_ and Odyssey were,
allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets.
After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have
maintained, generally speaking, that the _ILIAD_ is either a collection
of short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an
ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout
some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last
arranged by a literary redactor or editor.
The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the _Iliad_ is
a work of at least four centuries. Some of the objections to this theory
were obvious to Wolf himself--more obvious to him than to his followers.
He was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction between
reading the _ILIAD_ as all poetic literature is naturally read, and by
all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it in
the spirit of "the analytical reader." As often as he read for pleasure,
he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which
he invented for Homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running
stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the _harmony_
of _colour_ and of characters in the Epic, no man could be more angry
with his own destructive criticism than himself. Wolf ceased to be a
Wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader or
the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal.
But he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view,
that of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period
concerning whose history he could know nothing. "How could the thing
be possible?" he asked himself. "How could a long poem like the _Iliad_
come into existence in the historical circumstances?" [Footnote, exact
place in paragraph unknown: Preface to Homer, p, xxii., 1794.]. Wolf was
unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances were. We
know how little we know, but we do know more than Wolf. He invented the
historical circumstances of the supposed poet. They were, he said, like
those of a man who should build a large ship in an inland place, with no
sea to launch it upon. The _Iliad_ was the large ship; the sea was the
public. Homer could have no _readers_, Wolf said, in an age that, like
the old hermit of Prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no knowledge
of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied them
to literature. In such circumstances no man could have a motive for
composing a long poem. [Footnote: _Prolegomena to the Iliad_, p. xxvi.]
Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part of the
songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way
of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as
conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not take the circumstances
of the poet as described in the Odyssey. Here a king or prince has a
minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the ancient Irish
books of law. His duty is to entertain the prince and his family and
guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no reason why
his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity
that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing
a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age, in the
Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at
feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but
snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet without
readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship of song,
and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. To this
point we return; but when once critics, following Wolf, had convinced
themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon found
abundant evidence that it had never existed.
They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane poet
could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the poems had
not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (_unus color_). Each
age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own
colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition
of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot
in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary
law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house.
But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later
novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later
religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an advanced
stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language.
The usual position of critics in this matter is stated by Helbig; and
we are to contend that the theory is contradicted by all experience of
ancient literatures, and is in itself the reverse of consistent. "The
_artists_ of antiquity," says Helbig, with perfect truth, "had no idea
of archaeological studies.... They represented legendary scenes in
conformity with the spirit of their own age, and reproduced the arms and
implements and costume that they saw around them." [Footnote: _L'Epopee
Homerique_, p. 5; _Homerische Epos_, p. 4.]
Now a poet is an _artist_, like another, and he, too--no less than the
vase painter or engraver of gems--in dealing with legends of times past,
represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the
religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own
period. We shall later prove that this is true by examples from the
early mediaeval epic poetry of Europe.
It follows that if the _Iliad_ is absolutely consistent and harmonious
in its picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the _Iliad_
is the work of a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet
describing his own environment. But Helbig, on the other hand, citing
Wilamowitz Moellendorff, declares that the _Iliad_--the work of four
centuries, he says--maintains its unity of colour by virtue of
an uninterrupted poetical tradition. [Footnote: _Homerische
Untersuchungen_, p. 292; _Homerische Epos_, p. I.] If so, the poets must
have archaeologised, must have kept asking themselves, "Is this or that
detail true to the past?" which artists in uncritical ages never do,
as we have been told by Helbig. They must have carefully pondered the
surviving old Achaean lays, which "were born when the heroes could
not read, or boil flesh, or back a steed." By carefully observing the
earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid
anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea
of the epic heroes." Such is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He
appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old
way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig,
did not occur. The poets often wandered from the way. [Footnote: Helbig,
_Homerische Epos,_ pp. 2, 3.] Thus old Mycenaean lays, if any existed,
would describe the old Mycenaean mode of burial. The Homeric poet
describes something radically different. We vainly ask for proof that
in any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the
colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved,
and of which old minstrels sang. The thing is without example: of this
proofs shall be offered in abundance.
Meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the _Iliad_ as the work of
four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout
these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details
of a life remote from their own, and also did not.
For Helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. On the other
hand, he says that the later poets of the _Iliad_ did not cling to
tradition. "They allowed themselves to be influenced by their own
environment: _this influence betrays ITSELF IN THE descriptions of
DETAILS_.... The rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the
poems at will), "did not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements
into the oldest parts of the Epic." [Footnote: _Homerische Epos,_ p. 2.]
At this point comes in a complex inconsistency. The Tenth Book of the
_Iliad_, thinks Helbig--in common with almost all critics--"is one of
the most recent lays of the _Iliad_." But in this recent lay (say of
the eighth or seventh century) the poet describes the Thracians as on
a level of civilisation with the Achaeans, and, indeed, as even more
luxurious, wealthy, and refined in the matter of good horses, glorious
armour, and splendid chariots. But, by the time of the Persian
wars, says Helbig, the Thracians were regarded by the Greeks as rude
barbarians, and their military equipment was totally un-Greek. They did
not wear helmets, but caps of fox-skin. They had no body armour; their
shields were small round bucklers; their weapons were bows and daggers.
These customs could not, at the time of the Persian wars, be recent
innovations in Thrace. [Footnote: Herodotus, vii. 75.]
Had the poet of _ILIAD_, Book X., known the Thracians in _this_
condition, says Helbig, as he was fond of details of costume and arms,
he would have certainly described their fox-skin caps, bows, bucklers,
and so forth. He would not here have followed the Epic tradition, which
represented the Thracians as makers of great swords and as splendidly
armed charioteers. His audience had met the Thracians in peace and war,
and would contradict the poet's description of them as heavily armed
charioteers. It follows, therefore, that the latest poets, such as the
author of Book X., did not introduce recent details, those of their
own time, but we have just previously been told that to do so was their
custom in the description of details.
Now Studniczka [Footnote: _Homerische Epos, pp. 7-11, cf._ Note I;
_Zeitschrift fur die Oestern Gymnasien_, 1886, p. 195.] explains the
picture of the Thracians in _Iliad_, Book X., on Helbig's _other_
principle, namely, that the very late author of the Tenth Book merely
conforms to the conventional tradition of the Epic, adheres to the model
set in ancient Achaean, or rather ancient Ionian times, and scrupulously
preserved by the latest poets--that is, when the latest poets do not
bring in the new details of their own age. But Helbig will not accept
his own theory in this case, whence does it follow that the author of
the Tenth Book must, in his opinion, have lived in Achaean times, and
described the Thracians as they then were, charioteers, heavily armed,
not light-clad archers? If this is so, we ask how Helbig can aver that
the Tenth Book is one of the latest parts of the _Iliad?_
In studying the critics who hold that the _Iliad_ is the growth of
four centuries--say from the eleventh to the seventh century B.C.--no
consistency is to be discovered; the earth is never solid beneath our
feet. We find now that the poets are true to tradition in the details of
ancient life--now that the poets introduce whatever modern details they
please. The late poets have now a very exact knowledge of the past; now,
the late poets know nothing about the past, or, again, some of the poets
are fond of actual and very minute archaeological research! The theory
shifts its position as may suit the point to be made at the moment by
the critic. All is arbitrary, and it is certain that logic demands a
very different method of inquiry. If Helbig and other critics of his
way of thinking mean that in the _Iliad_ (1) there are parts of genuine
antiquity; other parts (2) by poets who, with stern accuracy, copied the
old modes; other parts (3) by poets who tried to copy but failed; with
passages (4) by poets who deliberately innovated; and passages (5)
by poets who drew fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner
consciousness," while, finally (6), some poets made minute antiquarian
researches; and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six
elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in critical
powers of discrimination. The critical standard becomes arbitrary and
subjective.
It is our effort, then, in the following pages to show that the _unus_
color of Wolf does pervade the Epics, that recent details are not often,
if ever, interpolated, that the poems harmoniously represent one
age, and that a brief age, of culture; that this effect cannot, in
a thoroughly uncritical period, have been deliberately aimed at and
produced by archaeological learning, or by sedulous copying of poetic
tradition, or by the scientific labours of an editor of the sixth
century B.C. We shall endeavour to prove, what we have already
indicated, that the hypotheses of expansion are not self-consistent,
or in accordance with what is known of the evolution of early national
poetry. The strongest part, perhaps, of our argument is to rest on our
interpretation of archaeological evidence, though we shall not
neglect the more disputable or less convincing contentions of literary
criticism.
CHAPTER II
HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four
changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to
how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much
of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner
of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the
evolution of the Epics. Mr. Leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages
of "expansion," answers that "the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are essentially,
and above all, Court poems. They were composed to be sung in the palaces
of a ruling aristocracy ... the poems are aristocratic and courtly, not
popular." [Footnote: Companion to the _Iliad_, pp. 2,8. 1892.] They are
not _Volkspoesie_; they are not ballads. "It is now generally recognised
that this conception is radically false."
These opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic--were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" _Iliad_ and
Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the _Iliad_, as
it stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe,
not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering
minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a
military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] The poems
were _begun_, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living
on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by
contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and
altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who
amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian
democracy. [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. II.]
We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old
land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to admit
this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of
Greece and under every form of society. The real question is, would the
modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries
old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic
age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the
most primitive _Iliad_ may have been actually sung by the court minstrel
in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." [Footnote:
Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xv.] But, by the expansionist theory, even
the oldest parts of our _Iliad_ are now full of what we may call quite
recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak,
of omissions of old parts.
Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who
could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body of
ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there, altering
everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change. The ancient
Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. The
old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the Dorian
conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and
barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality.
The very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt
on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in Europe,
fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part,
with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war chariot the
huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. The early
vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from
war chariots. They had lost touch with that method. Fighting men now
carried relatively small round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly
employed for swords, spears, and arrow points. Would the new poets,
in deference to tradition, abstain from mentioning cavalry, or small
bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or would they avoid puzzling their
hearers by speaking of obsolete and unfamiliar forms of tactics and of
military equipment? Would they therefore sing of things familiar--of
iron weapons, small round shields, hoplites, and cavalry? We shall see
that confused and self-contradictory answers are given by criticism
to all these questions by scholars who hold that the Epics are not the
product of one, but of many ages.
There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and
of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding
to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and courts had passed
away; old Ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the Homeric
poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early
philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to
be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from
recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians
"did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to
them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous Ionic
genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature
or mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at
Mycenas." [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. 7.]
Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none
of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets
into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of
belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in
the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the _ILIAD_, which
were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the _ILIAD_
itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic
poems--authors contemporary with the makers of much of the
_ILIAD_--_were_ eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. [Footnote:
_Cf_. Monro, _The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey_, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.] They
had ideas very different from those of the authors of the _Iliad_ and
_ODYSSEY_, as these ideas have reached us.
Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from
many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during
the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth.
[Footnote: _Homerische Epos_, p. 3.] Thus a signet ring was mentioned
in the _Ilias Puma_, and there are no rings in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_.
But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here
encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were
grouping themselves around the _Iliad and _Odyssey, we meet data
absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives
three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics
of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such
cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if
poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had
wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their
notions do not occur in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. By his theory these
poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions,
at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies
were flourishing. If so, how were the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, unlike the
Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new
romantic ideas?
Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh
centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic tradition; their poems
make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries
were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of
the _Iliad_. How did _they_ abstain from the new or revived ideas, and
from the new _genre_ of romance? Are we to believe that one set of late
Ionian poets--they who added to and altered the Iliad--were true
to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the
Cyclics--authors of new Epics on Homeric themes--are known to have quite
lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual? The reply will
perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new
poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as
I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it
will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general
editor of the latter date, thought, _we_ are continuing an old set of
lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and
beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes
had only bronze, no iron,--and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made
iron a common commodity in the _Iliad_. Again, the rhapsodists knew that
the ancient heroes had no corslets--the old lays, we learn, never
spoke of corslets--but they made them wear corslets of much splendour.
[Footnote: The reader must remember that the view of the late poets
as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains
_sometimes_; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision
is _not_ preserved, and that the Ionic continuators introduced, for
example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which
represents much older weapons and equipments.] This theory does not help
us. In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of
romance and religion was alien from that of Homer.
To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators
of the _Iliad_, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the
authors of the Cyclic poems. How "non-Homeric" the authors of these
Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from
examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings
off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of the Dioscuri, who in Homer
(_Iliad_, III. 243) are merely dead men (_Cypria_). (2) Story of
Iphigenia _Cypria_. (3) Story of Palamedes, who is killed when angling
by Odysseus and Diomede (Cypria).
Homer's heroes never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the
Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop
to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's
recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the
Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis,
and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms,
a Maerchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic Maerchen, Mr. Leaf
would say. There is nothing like this in the Iliad and Odyssey. (5) They
call the son of Achilles, not Neoptolemus, as Homer does, but Pyrrhus.
(6) They represent the Achaean army as obtaining supplies through three
magically gifted maidens, who produce corn, wine, and oil at will, as in
fairy tales. Another Ionic non-Achaean Maerchen! They bring in ghosts of
heroes dead and buried. Such ghosts, in Homer's opinion, were impossible
if the dead had been cremated. All these non-Homeric absurdities, save
the last, are from the Cypria, dated by Sir Richard Jebb about 776 B.C.,
long before the Odyssey was put into shape, namely, after 660 B. C.
in his opinion. Yet the alleged late compiler of the Odyssey, in the
seventh century, never wanders thus from the Homeric standard in taste.
What a skilled archaeologist he must have been! The author of the Cypria
knew the Iliad, [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 354.] but his
knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) In the AEthiopis
(about 776 B.C.) men are made immortal after death, and are worshipped
as heroes, an idea foreign to Iliad and Odyssey. (8) There is a savage
ritual of purification from blood shed by a homicide (compare Eumenides,
line 273). This is unheard of in Iliad and Odyssey, though familiar to
Aeschylus. (9) Achilles, after death, is carried to the isle of Leuke.
(10) The fate of Ilium, in the Cyclic Little _Iliad_, hangs on the
Palladium, of which nothing is known in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. The
_Little Iliad_ is dated about 700 B.C. (11) The _Nostoi_ mentions
Molossians, not named by Homer (which is a trifle); it also mentions
the Asiatic city of Colophon, an Ionian colony, which is not a trivial
self-betrayal on the part of the poet. He is dated about 750 B.C.
Thus, more than a century before the _Odyssey_ received its final form,
after 660 B.C., from the hands of one man (according to the theory),
the other Ionian poets who attempted Epic were betraying themselves as
non-Homeric on every hand. [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp.
347-383.]
Our examples are but a few derived from the brief notices of the Cyclic
poets' works, as mentioned in ancient literature; these poets probably,
in fact, betrayed themselves constantly. But their contemporaries, the
makers of late additions to the _Odyssey_, and the later mosaic worker
who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the
fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the Cyclic poets. How, if the
true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the
Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian poets or
rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner?
The best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the Cyclic
poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all men who
botched at the _Iliad_ were very learned, and very careful to maintain
harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they
introduced changes in burial, bride-price, houses, iron, greaves, and
corslets, all of them things, by the theory, modern, and when they sang
in modern grammar.
Yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many
authors of our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were, by the theory, strolling
irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later _jongleurs_ of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in mediaeval France. How could these strollers
keep their modern Ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases
of belief, out of their lays, as far as they _did_ keep them out, while
the contemporary authors of the _Cypria_, _The Sack of Ilios_, and other
Cyclic poets were full of new ideas, legends, and beliefs, or primitive
notions revived, and, save when revived, quite obviously late and quite
un-Homeric in any case?
The difficulty is the greater if the Cyclic poems were long poems, with
one author to each Epic. Such authors were obviously men of ambition;
they produced serious works _de longue haleine_. It is from them that
we should naturally expect conservative and studious adhesion to the
traditional models. From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and
chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. _They_ might be
expected to introduce great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to
speak--men of the nameless [Greek: laos], the host, the foot men--who
in Homer are occasionally said to perish of disease or to fall under the
rain of arrows, but are never distinguished by name. The strollers, it
might be thought, would also be the very men to introduce fairy tales,
freaks of primitive Ionian myth, discreditable anecdotes of the princely
heroes, and references to the Ionian colonies.
But it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long Cyclic
poems do such un-Homeric things as these; the gay, irresponsible
strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there--lays now incorporated
in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--scrupulously avoid such faults. They never
even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of
the _Iliad_ as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody
explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the
difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the
idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm
of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth
century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining
why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives--Illiad and
Odyssey--are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all
the others. The Cyclic poems are certainly the production of a late and
changed age? [Footnote: For what manner of audience, if not for readers,
the Cyclic poems were composed is a mysterious question.] The _Iliad_ is
not in any degree--save perhaps in a few interpolated passages--touched
by the influences of that late age. It is not a complex of the work
of four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned--the
point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic character.
CHAPTER III
HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION
Whosoever holds that the Homeric poems were evolved out of the lays of
many men, in many places, during many periods of culture, must present a
consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they attained their present
plots and forms. These could not come by accident, even if the plots
are not good--as all the world held that they were, till after Wolf's
day--but very bad, as some critics now assert. Still plot and form,
beyond the power of chance to produce, the poems do possess. Nobody goes
so far as to deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of
the fact that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel"
altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a
constructive whole. If the hypotheses fail to account for the fact, we
have the more reason to believe that the poems are the work of one age,
and, mainly, of one man.
In criticising Homeric criticism as it is to-day, we cannot do better
than begin by examining the theories of Mr. Leaf which are offered by
him merely as "a working hypothesis." His most erudite work is based on
a wide knowledge of German Homeric speculation, of the exact science of
Grammar, of archaeological discoveries, and of manuscripts. [Footnote:
The Iliad. Macmillan & Co. 1900, 1902.] His volumes are, I doubt not, as
they certainly deserve to be, on the shelves of every Homeric student,
old or young, and doubtless their contents reach the higher forms in
schools, though there is reason to suppose that, about the unity of
Homer, schoolboys remain conservative.
In this book of more than 1200 pages Mr. Leaf's space is mainly
devoted to textual criticism, philology, and pure scholarship, but his
Introductions, Notes, and Appendices also set forth his mature ideas
about the Homeric problem in general. He has altered some of his
opinions since the publication of his _Companion to the Iliad_(1892),
but the main lines of his old system are, except on one crucial point,
unchanged. His theory we shall try to state and criticise; in general
outline it is the current theory of separatist critics, and it may
fairly be treated as a good example of such theories.
The system is to the following effect: Greek tradition, in the classical
period, regarded the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ as the work of one man,
Homer, a native of one or other of the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor.
But the poems show few obvious signs of origin in Asia. They deal with
dwellers, before the Dorian invasion (which the poet never alludes to),
on the continent of Europe and in Crete. [Footnote: If the poet sang
after the tempest of war that came down with the Dorians from the
north, he would probably have sought a topic in the Achaean exploits and
sorrows of that period. The Dorians, not the Trojans, would have been
the foes. The epics of France of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
dwell, not on the real victories of the remote Charlemagne so much as
on the disasters of Aliscans and Roncesvaux--defeats at Saracen hands,
Saracens being the enemies of the twelfth-century poets. No Saracens,
in fact, fought at Roncesvaux.] The lays are concerned with "good old
times"; presumably between 1500 and 1100 B.C. Their pictures of the
details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that
period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with
what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the
so-called "Dipylon" period of "geometrical" ornament considerably later.
In the Dipylon age though the use of iron, even for swords (made on the
lines of the old bronze sword), was familiar, art was on a most barbaric
level, not much above the Bed Indian type, as far, at least, as painted
vases bear witness. The human figure is designed as in Tommy Traddles's
skeletons; there is, however, some crude but promising idea of
composition.
The picture of life in the Homeric poems, then, is more like that of,
say, 1500-1100 B.C. than of, say, 1000-850 B.C. in Mr. Leaf's opinion.
Certainly Homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an
Over-Lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden Mycenae." We hear of
no such potentate in Ionia. Homer's accounts of contemporary art seem to
be inspired by the rich art generally dated about 1500-1200. Yet there
are "many traces of apparent anachronism," of divergence from the more
antique picture of life. In these divergences are we to recognise the
picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500-1200
B.C.? Or have elements of the life of a much later age of Greece (say,
800-550 B.C.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late
poets? Here Mr. Leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted,
and must keep insisting, for it is of the first importance. "It is _a
priori_ the most probable" supposition that, "in an uncritical age,"
poets do _not_ "reproduce the circumstances of the old time," but
"only clothe the old tale in the garb of their own days." Poets in an
uncritical age always, in our experience, "clothe old tales with the
garb of their own time," but Mr. Leaf thinks that, in the case of the
Homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts."
In fact, Mr. Leaf's hypothesis, like Helbig's, exhibits a come-and-go
between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so
kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite
the reverse in many cases. Of this frequent examples will occur. He
writes, "The Homeric period is certainly later than the shaft tombs"
(discovered at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann), "but it does not necessarily
follow that it is post-Mycenaean. It is quite possible that certain
notable differences between the poems and the monuments" (of Mycenae)
"in burial, for instance, and in women's dress may be due to changes
which arose within the Mycenaean age itself, in that later part of it
of which our knowledge is defective--almost as defective as it is of
the subsequent 'Dipylon' period. On the whole, the resemblance to
the typical Mycenaean culture is more striking than the difference."
[Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xiii.-xv. 1900.]
So far Mr. Leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. The
Homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs--so
rich in relics--of the Mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs
of the Dipylon of Athens. The poems thus spring out of an age of which,
except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because,
as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent Homeric
descriptions have ever been discovered--so relics corroborating Homeric
descriptions are to seek. But the age attaches itself in many ways to
the age of the Mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite
apart from the post-Dorian culture.
Where we differ from Mr. Leaf is in believing that the poems, as wholes,
were composed in that late Mycenaean period of which, from material
remains, we know very little; that "much new" was not added, as he
thinks, in "the Ionian development" which lasted perhaps "from the ninth
century B.C. to the seventh." We cannot agree with Mr. Leaf, when he,
like Helbig, thinks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the
poems had early become so "stereotyped" that no continuator, however
late, dared "intentionally to sap" the type, "though he slipped from
time to time into involuntary anachronism." Some poets are also asserted
to indulge in _voluntary_ anachronism when, as Mr. Leaf supposes, they
equip the ancient warriors with corslets and greaves and other body
armour of bronze such as, in his opinion, the old heroes never knew,
such as never were mentioned in the oldest parts or "kernel" of the
poems. Thus the traditional details of Mycenaean life sometimes are
regarded as "stereotyped" in poetic tradition; sometimes as subject to
modern alterations of a sweeping and revolutionary kind.
As to deliberate adherence to tradition by the poets, we have proved
that the Cyclic epic poets of 800-660 B.C. wandered widely from the
ancient models. If, then, every minstrel or rhapsodist who, anywhere,
added at will to the old "kernel" of the _Achilles_ was, so far as he
was able, as conscientiously precise in his stereotyped archaeological
details as Mr. Leaf sometimes supposes, the fact is contrary to general
custom in such cases. When later poets in an uncritical age take up and
rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to
the stories "a new costume," as M. Gaston Paris remarks in reference to
thirteenth century dealings with French epics of the eleventh century.
But, in the critics' opinion, the late rehandlers of old Achaean lays
preserved the archaic modes of life, war, costume, weapons, and
so forth, with conscientious care, except in certain matters to be
considered later, when they deliberately did the very reverse. Sometimes
the late poets devoutly follow tradition. Sometimes they deliberately
innovate. Sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine,
but by their time forgotten, Mycenaean things, and criticism can detect
their doings in each case.
Though the late continuators of the _Iliad_ were able, despite
certain inadvertencies, to keep up for some four centuries in Asia
the harmonious picture of ancient Achaean life and society in Europe,
critics can distinguish four separate strata, the work of many different
ages, in the _Iliad_. Of the first stratum composed in Europe, say about
1300-1150 B.C. (I give a conjectural date under all reserves), the topic
was _THE Wrath of ACHILLES_. Of this poem, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, (a)
the First Book and fifty lines of the Second Book remain intact or,
perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) The _Valour of Agamemnon_ and
_Defeat of THE Achaeans_. Of this there are portions in Book XI., but
they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, "down to the
latest period," namely, the age of Pisistratus in Athens, the middle of
the sixth century B.C. (c) The fight in which, after their defeat, the
Achaeans try to save the ships from the torch of Hector, and the _Valour
of Patroclus_ (but some critics do not accept this), with his death
(XV., XVI. in parts). (d) Some eighty lines on the _ARMING OF ACHILLES_
(XIX.). (e) Perhaps an incident or two in Books XX., XXI. (f) The
_Slaying HECTOR_ by Achilles, in Books XXI., XXII. (but some of the learned
will not admit this, and we shall, unhappily, have to prove that, if Mr.
Leaf's principles be correct, we really know nothing about the _SLAYING
OF HECTOR_ in its original form).
Of these six elements only did the original poem consist, Mr. Leaf
thinks; a rigid critic will reject as original even the _Valour of
Patroclus_ and the _DEATH OF HECTOR_, but Mr. Leaf refuses to go so far
as that. The original poem, as detected by him, is really "the work of
a single poet, perhaps the greatest in all the world's history." If the
original poet did no more than is here allotted to him, especially if he
left out the purpose of Zeus and the person of Thetis in Book I., we
do not quite understand his unapproachable greatness. He must certainly
have drawn a rather commonplace Achilles, as we shall see, and we
confess to preferring the _Iliad_ as it stands.
The brief narrative cut out of the mass by Mr. Leaf, then, was the
genuine old original poem or "kernel." What we commonly call the
_ILIAD_, on the other hand, is, by his theory, a thing of shreds and
patches, combined in a manner to be later described. The blend,
we learn, has none of the masterly unity of the old original poem.
Meanwhile, as criticism of literary composition is a purely literary
question, critics who differ from Mr. Leaf have a right to hold that
the _Iliad_ as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of
masterly perfection. We need not attend here so closely to Mr. Leaf's
theory in the matter of the First Expansions, (2) and the Second
Expansions, (3) but the latest Expansions (4) give the account of _The
EMBASSY_ to _Achilles_ with his refusal of _Agamemnon's APOLOGY_(Book
IX.), the [blank space] (Book XXIV.), the _RECONCILIATION OF ACHILLES
AND Agamemnon, AND the FUNERAL Games_ of _Patroclus_ (XXIII.). In all
these parts of the poem there are, we learn, countless alterations,
additions, and expansions, with, last of all, many transitional
passages, "the work of the editor inspired by the statesman," that is,
of an hypothetical editor who really by the theory made our _ILIAD_,
being employed to that end by Pistratus about 540 B.C. [Footnote: Leaf,
_Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. x., xiv. 1900.].
Mr. Leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect
the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by
discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion
no one sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are
discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to
be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's
supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words
and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and
armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original
minstrel.
Thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite
recent, from the mass, evolved through many centuries, which is called
the _Iliad_.
If the existing _ILIAD_ is a mass of "expansions," added at all sorts of
dates, in any number of places, during very different stages of culture,
to a single short old poem of the Mycenaean age, science needs an
hypothesis which will account for the _ILIAD_ "as it stands." Everybody
sees the need of the hypothesis, How was the medley of new songs by many
generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to
be reckoned fine? How were the manners, customs, and characters, _unus
color_, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? How was the
whole Greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions
and incongruous lays must, by the theory, have been current, induced to
accept the version which has been bequeathed to us? Why, and for what
audience or what readers, did somebody, in a late age of brief lyrics
and of philosophic poems, take the trouble to harmonise the body of
discrepant wandering lays, and codify them in the _Iliad_?
An hypothesis which will answer all these questions is the first thing
needful, and hypotheses are produced.
Believers like Mr. Leaf in the development of the _Iliad_ through
the changing revolutionary centuries, between say 1200 and 600 B.C.,
consciously stand in need of a working hypothesis which will account,
above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of
the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious,
of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law (such as the
bride-price in marriage), and of the details as to weapons, implements,
dress, art, houses, and so forth, when these are not (according to the
theory) deliberately altered by late poets.
Next, the hypothesis must explain, in Mr. Leafs own words, how a single
version of the _Iliad_ came to be accepted, "where many rival versions
must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side."
[Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii. 1900.]
Three hypotheses have, in fact, been imagined: the first suggests the
preservation of the original poems in very early written texts; not,
of course, in "Homer's autograph." This view Mr. Leaf, we shall see,
discards. The second presents the notion of one old sacred college for
the maintenance of poetic uniformity. Mr. Leaf rejects this theory,
while supposing that there were schools for professional reciters.
Last, there is the old hypothesis of Wolf: "Pisistratus" (about 540
B.C.) "was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and
brought into that order in which we now possess them."
This hypothesis, now more than a century old, would, if it rested on
good evidence, explain how a single version of the various lays came to
be accepted and received as authorised. The Greek world, by the theory,
had only in various places various sets of incoherent chants _orally_
current on the Wrath of The public was everywhere a public of listeners,
who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or
whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two,
at a street corner. There was, by the theory, no reading public for the
Homeric poetry. But, by the time of Pisistratus, a reading public was
coming into existence. The tyrant had the poems collected, edited,
arranged into a continuous narrative, primarily for the purpose of
regulating the recitals at the Panathenaic festival. When once they
were written, copies were made, and the rest of Hellas adopted these for
their public purposes.
On a small scale we have a case analogous. The old songs of Scotland
existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered
broadsheets. The airs were good, but the words were often silly, more
often they were Fescennine--"more dirt than wit." Burns rewrote the
words, which were published in handsome volumes, with the old airs, or
with these airs altered, and his became the authorised versions, while
the ancient anonymous chants were almost entirely forgotten.
The parallel is fairly close, but there are points of difference. Burns
was a great lyric poet, whereas we hear of no great epic poet in the
age of Pisistratus. The old words which Burns's songs superseded were
wretched doggerel; not such were the ancient Greek heroic lays. The old
Scottish songs had no sacred historic character; they did not contain
the history of the various towns and districts of Scotland. The heroic
lays of Greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of
Domesday book of ancient principalities, and cities, and worshipped
heroes. Thus it was much easier for a great poet like Burns to supersede
with his songs a mass of unconsidered "sculdudery" old lays, in which no
man or set of men had any interest, than for a mere editor, in the age
of Pisistratus, to supersede a set of lays cherished, in one shape or
another, by every State in Greece. This holds good, even if, prior to
Pisistratus, there existed in Greece no written texts of Homer, and no
reading public, a point which we shall show reasons for declining to
concede.
The theory of the edition of Pisistratus, if it rested on valid
evidence, would explain "how a single version of the poems came to be
accepted," namely, because the poem was now _written_ for the first
time, and oral versions fell out of memory. But it would not, of course,
explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of
change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each
adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such
modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the Homeric
picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly
exists.
To take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal
armorial bearings of the heroes. They are unknown to or unnamed by
Homer, but are very familiar on the shields in seventh century and sixth
century vases, and AEschylus introduces them with great poetic effect
in [blank space]. How did late continuators, familiar with the serpents,
lions, bulls' heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary
shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new
rhapsodies? In mediaeval France, we shall show, the epics (eleventh to
thirteenth centuries) deal with Charlemagne and his peers of the eighth
century A.D. But they provide these heroes with the armorial bearings
which came in during the eleventh to twelfth century A.D. The late
Homeric rhapsodists avoided such tempting anachronisms.
Wolf's theory, then, explains "how a single version came to be
accepted." It was the first _WRITTEN_ version; the others died out, like
the old Scots orally repeated songs, when Burns published new words to
the airs. But Wolf's theory does not explain the harmony of the picture
of life, the absence of post-Homeric ideas and ways of living, in the
first written version, which, practically, is our own version.
In 1892 (_COMPANION TO THE Iliad_) Mr. Leaf adopted a different theory,
the hypothesis of a Homeric "school" "which busied itself with the
tradition of the Homeric poetry," for there must have been some central
authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in
writing. Were there no such body to maintain a fixed standard, the poems
must have ended by varying indefinitely, according to the caprice of
their various reciters. This is perfectly obvious.
Such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in
fact, the Maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of
society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in
purity. The older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim
rehearsal of all the ancient lore." Proceedings were sanctioned by human
sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were
produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case.
Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests
or _tohunga_ [Footnote: White, _THE Ancient HISTORY OF THE Maori, VOL._
i. pp. 8-13.]. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and
Zunis, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and
keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. If this were
so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language
in the Homeric poems is explained. But Mr. Leaf has now entirely
and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is
unsupported by evidence, he says.'
"The great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual
growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to
understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival
versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by
side. The assumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and
Mr. Leaf, in 1892, made the assumption himself: "as some such hypothesis
we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory"
(1892). [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad, pp. 20, 21._]
But now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the assumption of a school or
guild of singers," that "the rare mention of [Greek: Homeridai] in
Chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other
confirmation." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.] He therefore
now adopts the Wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of Homer was
made in Athens at the time of Solon or Pisistratus," from the rhapsodies
existing in the memory of reciters. [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.]
But Mr. Leaf had previously said [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad_,
p. 190.] that "the legend which connects his" (Pisistratus's) "name
with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of
late date." Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought
"conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an
hypothesis of a Pisistratean editor of the Iliad, while the evidence for
an Homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in
1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself
remains just what it used to be.
This is not very satisfactory, and the Pisistratean hypothesis is much
less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an Homeric
school, for the Pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of
the characters and the details in the _Iliad_, nor the absence of
such glaring anachronisms as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general
"pre-Odyssean" character of the language and grammar. By the
Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly
deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout
the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many
generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. The hypothesis of
a school _was_ really that which, of the two, best explained the facts,
and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing
out of our _Iliad_ under Pisistratus than for the existence of a Homeric
school.
The evidence for the _Iliad_ edited for Pisistratus is examined in a
Note at the close of this chapter. Meanwhile Mr. Leaf now revives Wolf's
old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version"
(of the Homeric poems) "came to be accepted." His present theory, if
admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the
poems, the first standard _written_ version, but fails to explain how
"the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into
every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing
a chaos which no editor of about 540 A.D. could force into its present
uniformity.
Such an editor is now postulated by Mr. Leaf. If his editor's edition,
as being _written_, was accepted by Greece, then we "understand how a
single version came to be accepted." But we do not understand how
the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have
characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there
was an Homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." But now such
harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without
any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists,
many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several
centuries,
"Rave, recite, and madden through the land,"
with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard."
Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early
tradition: _that_ we cannot expect from them.
Again, no editor of about 540 B.C. could possibly bring harmony of
manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took
down in writing.
Let us think out the supposed editor's situation. During three centuries
nine generations of strollers have worked their will on one ancient
short poem, _The Wrath_ of _Achilles_. This is, in itself, an unexampled
fact. Poets turn to new topics; they do not, as a rule, for centuries
embroider one single situation out of the myriads which heroic legend
affords. Strolling reciters are the least careful of men, each would
recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly
evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and
weapons of his time. When war chariots became obsolete, he would bring
in cavalry; when there was no Over-Lord, he would not trouble himself
to maintain correctly the character and situation of Agamemnon. He would
speak of coined money, in cases of buying and selling; his European
geography would often be wrong; he would not ignore the Ionian cities
of Asia; most weapons would be of iron, not bronze, in his lays. Ionian
religious ideas could not possibly be excluded, nor changes in customary
law, civil and criminal. Yet, we think, none of these things occurs in
Homer.
The editor of the theory had to correct all these anachronisms and
discrepancies. What a task in an uncritical age! The editor's materials
would be the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered,
in Athens, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival. The _repertoire_ of each
stroller would vary indefinitely from those of all the others. One man
knew this chant, as modified or made by himself; other men knew others,
equally unsatisfactory.
The editor must first have written down from recitation all the passages
that he could collect. Then he was obliged to construct a narrative
sequence containing a plot, which he fashioned by a process of selection
and rejection; and then he had to combine passages, alter them, add
as much as he thought fit, remove anachronisms, remove discrepancies,
accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave
transitional passages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too
manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the [blank
space]. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task,
and succeeded so well as to impose on Aristotle and all the later Greek
critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of
letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time.
The editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what Loennrot, in the
nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the Finnish _Kalewala_.
[Footnote: See Comparetti, _The Kalewala_.]
Centuries later than Pisistratus, in a critical age, Apollonius Rhodius
set about writing an epic of the Homeric times. We know how entirely he
failed, on all hands, to restore the manner of Homer. The editor of 540
B.C. was a more scientific man. Can any one who sets before himself the
nature of the editor's task believe in him and it? To the master-less
floating jellyfish of old poems and new, Mr. Leaf supposes that "but
small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth
century or thereabouts," especially as "the creative and imaginative
forces of the Ionian race turned to other forms of expression," to
lyrics and to philosophic poems. But the able Pisistratean editor, after
all, we find, introduced quantities of new matter into the poems--in the
middle of the sixth century; that kind of industry, then, did not cease
towards the end of the eighth century, as we have been told. On the
other hand, as we shall learn, the editor contributed to the _Iliad_,
among other things, Nestor's descriptions of his youthful adventures,
for the purpose of flattering Nestor's descendant, the tyrant
Pisistratus of Athens.
One hypothesis, the theory of an Homeric school--which would answer our
question, "How was the harmony of the picture of life in remote ages
preserved in poems composed in several succeeding ages, and in totally
altered conditions of life?"--Mr. Leaf, as we know, rejects. We might
suggest, again, that there were written texts handed down from an early
period, and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. Mr.
Leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. "The poems were
all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers
(_sic_), who used to wander over Greece reciting them at popular
festivals. Writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic
development" (some four centuries at least), "but it is in the highest
degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the
Epic or _ANY_ part of it. There can hardly have been any standard text;
at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems
which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable
asset to the professional reciter."
Now we would not contend for the existence of any [blank space] text
much before 600 B.C., and I understand Mr. Leaf not to deny, now, that
there may have been texts of the _ODYSSEY_ and _Iliad_ before, say,
600-540 B.C. If cities and reciters had any ancient texts, then texts
existed, though not "standard" texts: and by this means the harmony of
thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. We do
not think that it is "in the highest degree unlikely" that there were no
texts. Is this one of the many points on which every savant must rely on
his own sense of what is "likely"? To this essential point, the almost
certain existence of written texts, we return in our conclusion.
What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of
anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at
least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the _CHARACTERS_
in subtle details. Some of the characters will be dealt with later;
meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea
of written texts prior to 600-540 B.C., and also the idea of a school
charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a
terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which,
he says--if unpreserved by text or school--"must have ended by varying
infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters."
[Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad, p. 21._]
On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no
harmony, no _unus_ color, could have survived in the poems till the days
of the sixth century editor.
Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the
_Iliad_ is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to
understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker
it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many
absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to
prove that they do not exist.
NOTE
THE LEGEND OF THE MAKING OF THE "ILIAD" UNDER PISISTRATOS
It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story
about the making of the _Iliad_ under Pisistratus, a legend without
authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school
as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in
order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely
reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of
Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various
legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the
_Iliad_, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence
of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines
in the _Iliad_ which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a
political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments
have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition
of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known
the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle
writes (_Rhetoric_, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth
century, quoted _Iliad_, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis.
Aristarchus also discussed _Iliad_, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans
appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus,
vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached
us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said
by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus
(Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus"
never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the
_Iliad_. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of
argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written
out by order of Pisistratus.
It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus
said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can
never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about
Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter
of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf's conversion to belief in the
story that our _Iliad_ was practically edited and first committed to
writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that
Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no
proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in
fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He
had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for "Wilamowitz has shown that
Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i.
p. xix.] But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the
_Iliad_ was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century
B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas
said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.
The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of
the _Iliad_, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in
the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical
authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of
the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid
their differences before the Spartans (_cir._ 600-580 B.C.). Each party
quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale
(Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited _Iliad_,
II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the
Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far
as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians
had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it
inconsistent with _Iliad_, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ
from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with
the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain
occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian
interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in
support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has
reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in
the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek,
residing in Athens), on a fragmentary passage of Diogenes Laertius
(third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer's being cited
about 600-580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis.
In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about
Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really
said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.
The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): "He (Solon)
decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists [Greek
text: ex hypobolaes]" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first
reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather
Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ([Greek text:
ephotisen]), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his _Megarica_.
And _the lines_ were _especially these_: "They who held Athens," &c.
(_Iliad_, II. 546-558), the passage on which the Athenians rested in
their dispute with the Megarians.
And _what_ "lines were especially these"? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap
in the sense, after "Pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (Solon) "who
interpolated lines in the _Catalogue_, and not Pisistratus." He says:
"The natural sense of the passage as it stands" (in Diogenes Laertius)
"is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon
_who collected the scattered Homer_ of _his_ day, for he it was who
interpolated the lines in the _Catalogue of the Ships_".... But Diogenes
neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about
"collecting the scattered Homer of his day." That Pisistratus did so
is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting
anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the
gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who _collected_ the
Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But
Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." Then why does he
adopt, as "the natural sense of the passage," "it was not Peisistratos
but Solon who _collected_ the scattered Homer of his day?" [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. xviii.] The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we
can see in the state of the text, "refers," as Mr. Monro says, "to
the _interpolation_ that has just been mentioned, and need not extend
further back." "Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in
which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if I understand
Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the
editor for Pisistratus. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410,
especially pp. 408-409.] Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the
Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." If,
so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of
any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of
the _Iliad_. [Footnote: Mr. Leaf adds that, except in one disputed
line (_Iliad_, II. 558) Aias "is not, in the _Iliad_, encamped next
the Athenians." His proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent
interpolator, who should have altered the line, are _Iliad_, IV. 327 ff,
and XII. 681 ff. In the former passage we find Odysseus stationed next
to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In
the second passage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians
and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The
arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he
was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with
"the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the
Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the passage.
The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian
interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them.
Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original,
as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the _Iliad_ is not
encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do
not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these passages. But
why argue at all about the Megarian story if it be a fiction? Mr. Leaf
takes the brief bald mention of Aias in _Iliad_, II. 558 as "a mocking
cry from Athens over the conquest of the island of the Aiakidai."
But as, in this same _Catalogue_, Aias is styled "by far the best of
warriors" after Achilles (II. 768), while there is no more honourable
mention made of Diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (II. 568),
or of Menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while Nestor, the
ancestor of Pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line
601), "the mocking cry from Athens" appears a vain imagination.]
The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the _Catalogue_, and, as
to the date and original purpose of the _Catalogue_, the most various
opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf's earlier edition of the _Iliad_ (vol. i.
p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that
the _Catalogue_ is "of late origin." We know, from the story of Solon
and the Megarians, that the _Catalogue_ "was considered a classical
work--the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date"--say 600-580
B.C. "It agrees with the poems in being pre-Dorian" (except in lines
653-670).
"There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like
the bulk of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, was composed in Achaean times,
and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor...."
In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the
_Catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle," the
compiling of "the whole Cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late
indeed, on any theory. The author "studiously preserves an ante-Dorian
standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of
the material, at least, is old."
These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in
1886. He cannot now give "even an approximate date for the composition
of the _Catalogue_" which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in
Homer, if it was composed "for that portion of the whole Cycle which, as
worked up in a separate poem, was called the _Kypria_" for the _Kypria_
is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the _Iliad_.
I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if
rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century
B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric
poems--in fact, made "a standard text."
The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but
in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf.
[Footnote: _Iliad_, i. p. XIX.]
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who,
with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd
legend." [Footnote: Blass, Die _Interpolationen_ in der _Odyssee_,
pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.] Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the
Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf
and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible
that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off
a Homer on them. [Footnote: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 390,
391. 1893.]
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean
editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a
fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds
him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together
the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which
Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about
Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric
mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are
on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the _Iliad_ before Homer.'" [Footnote:
_Classical Review_ xviii. 148.]
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no
importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and,
as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him
by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do
with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and
do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian
theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of
the first written text at Athens in the sixth century--a theory which
fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems,
and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks
evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or
Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens
was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters,
each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole
_Iliad_ in due sequence. "But the unity existed before the mangling.
That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit
to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless
and arbitrary theorising on the other!" We are not solitary sceptics
when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed
on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to
say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse
than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while
the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four
or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence,
the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence,
was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but
was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here
judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my
statement of Mr. Leaf's opinions. He and I both think an early Attic
"recension" probable, or almost certain. But (see' "Conclusion") I
regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of
Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the "edition" as having
"made" the _Iliad_; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods
of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of
our _Iliad_ as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf's Introduction
to _Iliad_, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the
first _written_ text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems
to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric "school" of
paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession,
there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the
nature of their teaching. The Beauvais "school" of _jongleurs_ in Lent
(fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of
strollers.
CHAPTER IV
LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
We now try to show that the Epics present an historical unity, a
complete and harmonious picture of an age, in its political, social,
legal, and religious aspects; in its customs, and in its military
equipment. A long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas
if it be the work of one age. Wandering minstrels, living through a
succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could
not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place,
of the poet of feudal princes towards an Over-Lord who rules them by
undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being
subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. Late poets
not living in feudal society, and unfamiliar alike with its customary
law, its jealousy of the Over-Lord, its conservative respect for his
consecrated function, would inevitably miss the proper tone, and fail in
some of the many [blank space] of the feudal situation. This is all the
more certain, if we accept Mr. Leaf's theory that each poet-rhapsodist's
_repertoire_ varied from the _repertoires_ of the rest. There could be
no unity of treatment in their handling of the character and position of
the Over-Lord and of the customary law that regulates his relations with
his peers. Again, no editor of 540 B.C. could construct an harmonious
picture of the Over-Lord in relation to the princes out of the
fragmentary _repertoires_ of strolling rhapsodists, which now lay before
him in written versions. If the editor could do this, he was a man of
Shakespearian genius, and had minute knowledge of a dead society.
This becomes evident when, in place of examining the _Iliad_ through
microscopes, looking out for discrepancies, we study it in its large
lines as a literary whole. The question being, Is the _Iliad_ a
literary whole or a mere literary mosaic? we must ask "What, taking it
provisionally as a literary whole, are the qualities of the poet as a
painter of what we may call feudal society?"
Choosing the part of the Over-Lord Agamemnon, we must not forget that he
is one of several analogous figures in the national poetry and romance
of other feudal ages. Of that great analogous figure, Charlemagne,
and of his relations with his peers in the earlier and later French
mediaeval epics we shall later speak. Another example is Arthur, in some
romances "the blameless king," in others _un roi faineant_.
The parallel Irish case is found in the Irish saga of Diarmaid and
Grainne. We read Mr. O'Grady's introduction on the position of Eionn Mac
Cumhail, the legendary Over-Lord of Ireland, the Agamemnon of the Celts.
"Fionn, like many men in power, is variable; he is at times magnanimous,
at other times tyrannical and petty. Diarmaid, Oisin, Oscar, and Caoilte
Mac Rohain are everywhere the [Greek: kaloi kachotoi] of the Fenians;
of them we never hear anything bad." [Footnote: _Transactions of the
Ossianic_ Society, vol. iii. p. 39.]
Human nature eternally repeats itself in similar conditions of society,
French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of
Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to
a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural
and pardonable in his circumstances.
The poet's view of Agamemnon is expressed in the speeches and conduct
of the peers. In Book I. we see the bullying truculence of Agamemnon,
wreaked first on the priest of Apollo, Chryses, then in threats against
the prophet Chalcas, then in menaces against any prince on whom he
chooses to avenge his loss of fair Chryseis, and, finally, in the
Seizure of Briseis from Achilles.
This part of the First Book of the _Iliad_ is confessedly original, and
there is no varying, throughout the Epic, from the strong and delicate
drawing of an historical situation, and of a complex character.
Agamemnon is truculent, and eager to assert his authority, but he is
also possessed of a heavy sense of his responsibilities, which often
unmans him. He has a legal right to a separate "prize of honour" (geras)
after each capture of spoil. Considering the wrath of Apollo for the
wrong done in refusing his priest's offered ransom for his daughter,
Agamemnon will give her back, "if that is better; rather would I see my
folks whole than perishing." [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 115-117.]
Here we note points of feudal law and of kingly character. The giving
and taking of ransom exists as it did in the Middle Ages; ransom is
refused, death is dealt, as the war becomes more fierce towards its
close. Agamemnon has sense enough to waive his right to the girlish
prize, for the sake of his people, but is not so generous as to demand
no compensation. But there are no fresh spoils to apportion, and the
Over-Lord threatens to take the prize of one of his peers, even of
Achilles.
Thereon Achilles does what was frequently done in the feudal age of
western Europe, he "renounces his fealty," and will return to Phthia. He
adds insult, "thou dog-face!" The whole situation, we shall show, recurs
again and again in the epics of feudal France, the later epics of feudal
discontent. Agamemnon replies that Achilles may do as he pleases. "I
have others by my side that shall do me honour, and, above all, Zeus,
Lord of Counsel" (I. 175). He rules, literally, by divine right, and we
shall see that, in the French feudal epics, as in Homer, this claim of
divine right is granted, even in the case of an insolent and cowardly
Over-Lord. Achilles half draws "his great sword," one of the long,
ponderous cut-and-thrust bronze swords of which we have actual examples
from Mycenae and elsewhere. He is restrained by Athene, visible only to
him. "With words, indeed," she says, "revile him .... hereafter shall
goodly gifts come to thee, yea, in threefold measure...."
Gifts of atonement for "surquedry," like that of Agamemnon, are given
and received in the French epics, for example, in the [blank space].
The _Iliad_ throughout exhibits much interest in such gifts, and in the
customary law as to their acceptance, and other ritual or etiquette
of reconciliation. This fact, it will be shown, accounts for a passage
which critics reject, and which is tedious to our taste, as it probably
was tedious to the age of the supposed late poets themselves. (Book
XIX.). But the taste of a feudal audience, as of the audience of the
Saga men, delighted in "realistic" descriptions of their own customs
and customary law, as in descriptions of costume and armour. This is
fortunate for students of customary law and costume, but wearies hearers
and readers who desire the action to advance. Passages of this kind
would never be inserted by late poets, who had neither the knowledge of,
nor any interest in, the subjects.
To return to Achilles, he is now within his right; the moral goddess
assures him of that, and he is allowed to give the reins to his
tongue, as he does in passages to which the mediaeval epics offer many
parallels. In the mediaeval epics, as in Homer, there is no idea of
recourse to a duel between the Over-Lord and his peer. Achilles accuses
Agamemnon of drunkenness, greed, and poltroonery. He does not
return home, but swears by the sceptre that Agamemnon shall rue his
_outrecuidance_ when Hector slays the host. By the law of the age
Achilles remains within his right. His violent words are not resented by
the other peers. They tacitly admit, as Athene admits, that Achilles has
the right, being so grievously injured, to "renounce his fealty," till
Agamemnon makes apology and gives gifts of atonement. Such, plainly, is
the unwritten feudal law, which gives to the Over-Lord the lion's share
of booty, the initiative in war and council, and the right to command;
but limits him by the privilege of the peers to renounce their fealty
under insufferable provocation. In no Book is Agamemnon so direfully
insulted as in the First, which is admitted to be of the original
"kernel." Elsewhere the sympathy of the poet occasionally enables him to
feel the elements of pathos in the position of the over-tasked King of
Men.
As concerns the apology and the gifts of atonement, the poet has feudal
customary law and usage clearly before his eyes. He knows exactly what
is due, and the limits of the rights of Over-Lord and prince, matters
about which the late Ionian poets could only pick up information by
a course of study in constitutional history--the last thing they were
likely to attempt--unless we suppose that they all kept their eyes
on the "kernel," and that steadily, through centuries, generations of
strollers worked on the lines laid down in that brief poem.
Thus the poet of Book IX.--one of "the latest expansions,"--thoroughly
understands the legal and constitutional situation, as between Agamemnon
and Achilles. Or rather all the poets who collaborated in Book IX.,
which "had grown by a process of accretion," [Footnote: Leaf, Iliad,
vol. i. p. 371.] understood the legal situation.
Returning to the poet's conception of Agamemnon, we find in the
character of Agamemnon himself the key to the difficulties which critics
discover in the Second Book. The difficulty is that when Zeus, won over
to the cause of Achilles by Thetis, sends a false Dream to Agamemnon,
the Dream tells the prince that he shall at once take Troy, and bids him
summon the host to arms. But Agamemnon, far from doing that, summons
the host to a peaceful assembly, with the well-known results of
demoralisation.
Mr. Leaf explains the circumstances on his own theory of expansions
compiled into a confused whole by a late editor. He thinks that probably
there were two varying versions even of this earliest Book of the poem.
In one (A), the story went on from the quarrel between Agamemnon and
Achilles, to the holding of a general assembly "to consider the altered
state of affairs." This is the Assembly of Book H, but debate, in
version A, was opened by Thersites, not by Agamemnon, and Thersites
proposed instant flight! That was probably the earlier version.
In the other early version (B), after the quarrel between the chiefs,
the story did not, as in A, go on straight to the Assembly, but Achilles
appealed to his mother, the fair sea-goddess, as in our Iliad, and she
obtained from Zeus, as in the actual _Iliad_, his promise to honour
Achilles by giving victory, in his absence, to the Trojans. The poet of
version B, in fact, created the beautiful figure of Thetis, so essential
to the development of the tenderness that underlies the ferocity of
Achilles. The other and earliest poet, who treated of the Wrath of
the author of version A, neglected that opportunity with all that it
involved, and omitted the purpose of Zeus, which is mentioned in the
fifth line of the Epic. The editor of 540 B.C., seeing good in both
versions, A and B, "combined his information," and produced Books I. and
II. of the _ILIAD_ as they stand. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
47.]
Mr. Leaf suggests that "there is some ground for supposing that the
oldest version of the Wrath of Achilles did not contain the promise of
Zeus to Thetis; it was a tale played exclusively on the earthly stage."
[Footnote: _Ibid_, vol. i. p. xxiii.] In that case the author of the
oldest form (A) must have been a poet very inferior indeed to the later
author of B who took up and altered his work. In _his_ version, Book
I. does not end with the quarrel of the princes, but Achilles receives,
with all the courtesy of his character, the unwelcome heralds of
Agamemnon, and sends Briseis with them to the Over-Lord. He then with
tears appeals to his goddess-mother, Thetis of the Sea, who rose from
the grey mere like a mist, leaving the sea deeps where she dwelt beside
her father, the ancient one of the waters. Then sat she face to face
with her son as he let the tears down fall, and caressed him, saying,
"Child, wherefore weepest thou, for what sorrow of heart? Hide it
not, tell it to me; that I may know it as well as thou." Here the poet
strikes the keynote of the character of Achilles, the deadly in war, the
fierce in council, who weeps for his lost lady and his wounded honour,
and cries for help to his mother, as little children cry.
Such is the Achilles of the _Iliad_ throughout and consistently, but
such he was not to the mind of Mr. Leaf's probably elder poet, the
author of version A. Thetis, in version B, promises to persuade Zeus to
honour Achilles by making Agamemnon rue his absence, and, twelve days
after the quarrel, wins the god's consent.
In Book II. Zeus reflects on his promise, and sends a false Dream to
beguile Agamemnon, promising that now he shall take Troy. Agamemnon,
while asleep, is full of hope; but when he wakens he dresses in mufti,
in a soft doublet, a cloak, and sandals; takes his sword (swords were
then worn as part of civil costume), and the ancestral sceptre, which he
wields in peaceful assemblies. Day dawns, and "he bids the heralds...."
A break here occurs, according to the theory.
Here (_Iliad_, Book II., line 50) the kernel ceases, Mr. Leaf says, and
the editor of 540 B.C. plays his pranks for a while.
The kernel (or one of the _two_ kernels), we are to take up again at
Book II., 443-483, and thence "skip" to XI. 56, and now "we have a
narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution," [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. i. p. 47.] says Mr. Leaf. This kernel is kernel B,
probably the later kernel of the pair, that in which Achilles appeals to
his lady mother, who wins from Zeus the promise to cause Achaean defeat,
till Achilles is duly honoured. The whole Epic turns on this promise of
Zeus, as announced in the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines of the very
first Book. If kernel A is the first kernel, the poet left out the
essence of the plot he had announced. However, let us first examine
probable kernel B, reading, as advised, Book II. 1-50, [blank space];
XI. 56 ff.
We left Agamemnon (though the Dream bade him summon the host to arms)
dressed in _civil costume_. His ancestral sceptre in his hand, he is
going to hold a deliberative assembly of the unarmed host. His attire
proves that fact ([Greek: _prepodaes de ae stolae to epi Boulaen
exionti_], says the scholiast). Then if we skip, as advised, to II.
443-483 he bids the heralds call the host not to peaceful council, for
which his costume is appropriate, but to _war_! The host gathers, "and
in their midst the lord Agamemnon,"--still in civil costume, with his
sceptre (he has not changed his attire as far as we are told)--"in face
and eyes like Zeus; in waist like Ares" (god of war); "in breast like
Poseidon,"--yet, for all that we are told, entirely unarmed! The host,
however, were dressed "in innumerable bronze," "war was sweeter to them
than to depart in their ships to their dear native land,"--so much did
Athene encourage them.
But nobody had been speaking of flight, in THE KERNEL B: THAT proposal
was originally made by Thersites, in kernel A, and was attributed to
Agamemnon in the part of Book II. where the editor blends A and B.
This part, at present, Mr. Leaf throws aside as a very late piece of
compilation. Turning next, as directed, to XI. 56, we find the Trojans
deploying in arms, and the hosts encounter with fury--Agamemnon still,
for all that appears, in the raiment of peace, and with the sceptre of
constitutional monarchy. "In he rushed, first of all, and slew Bienor,"
and many other gentlemen of Troy, not with his sceptre!
Clearly all this is the reverse of "a narrative masterly in conception
and smooth in execution:" it is an impossible narrative.
Mr. Leaf has attempted to disengage one of two forms of the old original
poem from the parasitic later growths; he has promised to show us a
smooth and masterly narrative, and the result is a narrative on which
no Achasan poet could have ventured. In II. 50 the heralds are bidden
[Greek: _kurussein_], that is to summon the host--to _what_? To a
peaceful assembly, as Agamemnon's costume proves, says the next line
(II. 51), but that is excised by Mr. Leaf, and we go on to II. 443, and
the reunited passage now reads, "Agamemnon bade the loud heralds" (II.
50) "call the Achaeans to battle" (II. 443), and they came, in harness,
but their leader--when did he exchange chiton, cloak, and sceptre for
helmet, shield, and spear? A host appears in arms; a king who set out
with sceptre and doublet is found with a spear, in bronze armour: and
not another word is said about the Dream of Agamemnon.
It is perfectly obvious and certain that the two pieces of the broken
kernel B do not fit together at all. Nor is this strange, if the kernel
was really broken and endured the insertion of matter enough to fill
nine Books (IL-XL). If kernel B really contained Book II., line 50,
as Mr. Leaf avers, if Agamemnon, as in that line (50) "bade the
clear-voiced heralds do...." something--what he bade them do was,
necessarily, as his peaceful costume proves, to summon the peaceful
assembly which he was to moderate with his sceptre. At such an assembly,
or at a preliminary council of Chiefs, he would assuredly speak of his
Dream, as he does in the part excised. Mr. Leaf, if he will not have a
peaceful assembly as part of kernel B, must begin his excision at the
middle of line 42, in II., where Agamemnon wakens; and must make him
dress not in mufti but in armour, and call the host of the Achaeans to
arm, as the Dream bade him do, and as he does in II. 443. Perhaps we
should then excise II. 45 2, 45 3, with the reference to the plan of
retreat, for _THAT_ is part of kernel A where there was no promise of
Zeus, and no Dream sent to Agamemnon. Then from II. 483, the description
of the glorious armed aspect of Agamemnon, Mr. Leaf may pass to XI. 56,
the account of the Trojans under Hector, of the battle, of the prowess
of Agamemnon, inspired by the Dream which he, contrary to Homeric and
French epic custom, has very wisely mentioned to nobody--that is, in the
part not excised.
This appears to be the only method by which Mr. Leaf can restore the
continuity of his kernel B.
Though Mr. Leaf has failed to fit Book XI. to any point in Book II., of
course it does not follow that Book XI. cannot be a continuation of the
original _Wrath_ of _Achilles_ (version B). If so, we understand why
Agamemnon plucks up heart, in Book XI., and is the chief cause of a
temporary Trojan reverse. He relies on the Dream sent from Zeus in the
opening lines of Book II., the Dream which was not in kernel A; the
Dream which he communicated to nobody; the Dream conveying the promise
that he should at once take Troy. This is perhaps a tenable theory,
though Agamemnon had much reason to doubt whether the host would obey
his command to arm, but an alternative theory of why and wherefore
Agamemnon does great feats of valour, in Book XI., will later be
propounded. Note that the events of Books XL.-XVIII., by Mr. Leaf's
theory, all occur on the very day after Thetis (according to kernel
B)' [79] obtains from Zeus his promise to honour Achilles by the
discomfiture of the Achaeans; they have suffered nothing till that
moment, as far as we learn, from the absence of Achilles and his 2500
men: allowing for casualties, say 2000.
So far we have traced--from Books I. and II. to Book XI.--the fortunes
of kernel B, of the supposed later of two versions of the opening of the
_Iliad_. But there may have been a version (A) probably earlier, we have
been told, in which Achilles did not appeal to his mother, nor she to
Zeus, and Zeus did not promise victory to the Trojans, and sent no false
Dream of success to Agamemnon. What were the fortunes of that oldest
of all old kernels? In this version (A) Agamemnon, having had no Dream,
summoned a peaceful assembly to discuss the awkwardness caused by the
mutiny of Achilles. The host met (_Iliad,_ II. 87-99). Here we pass from
line 99 to 212-242: Thersites it is who opens the debate, (in version A)
insults Agamemnon, and advises flight. The army rushed off to launch the
ships, as in II. 142-210, and were brought back by Odysseus, who made a
stirring speech, and was well backed by Agamemnon, urging to battle.
Version A appears to us to have been a version that no heroic audience
would endure. A low person like Thersites opens a debate in an assembly
called by the Over-Lord; this could not possibly pass unchallenged among
listeners living in the feudal age. When a prince called an assembly,
he himself opened the debate, as Achilles does in Book I. 54-67. That
a lewd fellow, the buffoon and grumbler of the host, of "the people,"
nameless and silent throughout the Epic, should rush in and open debate
in an assembly convoked by the Over-Lord, would have been regarded
by feudal hearers, or by any hearers with feudal traditions, as an
intolerable poetical license. Thersites would have been at once pulled
down and beaten; the host would not have rushed to the ships on _his_
motion. Any feudal audience would know better than to endure such
an impossibility; they would have asked, "How could Thersites
speak--without the sceptre?"
As the poem stands, and ought to stand, nobody less than the Over-Lord,
acting within his right, ([Greek: ae themis esti] II. 73), could suggest
the flight of the host, and be obeyed.
It is the absolute demoralisation of the host, in consequence of the
strange test of their Lord, Agamemnon, making a feigned proposal to fly,
and it is their confused, bewildered return to the assembly under the
persuasions of Odysseus, urged by Athene, that alone, in the poem, give
Thersites his unique opportunity to harangue. When the Over-Lord had
called an assembly the first word, of course, was for to speak, as
he does in the poem as it stands. That Thersifes should rise in the
arrogance bred by the recent disorderly and demoralised proceedings is
one thing; that he should open the debate when excitement was eager to
hear Agamemnon, and before demoralisation set in, is quite another. We
never hear again of Thersites, or of any one of the commonalty, daring
to open his mouth in an assembly. Thersites sees his one chance, the
chance of a life time, and takes it; because Agamemnon, by means of the
test--a proposal to flee homewards--which succeeded, it is said, in the
case of Cortes,--has reduced the host, already discontented, to a mob.
Before Agamemnon thus displayed his ineptitude, as he often does later,
Thersites had no chance. All this appears sufficiently obvious, if we
put ourselves at the point of view of the original listeners. Thersites
merely continues, in full assembly, the mutinous babble which he has
been pouring out to his neighbours during the confused rush to launch
the ships and during the return produced by the influence of Odysseus.
The poet says so himself (_Iliad_, II. 212). "The rest sat down ...
only Thersites still chattered on." No original poet could manage the
situation in any other way.
We have now examined Mr. Leaf's two supposed earliest versions of the
beginning of the _Iliad_. His presumed earlier version (A), with no
Thetis, no promise of Zeus, and no Dream, and with Thersites opening
debate, is jejune, unpoetical, and omits the gentler and most winning
aspect of the character of Achilles, while it could not possibly have
been accepted by a feudal audience for the reasons already given. His
presumed later version (B), with Thetis, Zeus, and the false Dream,
cannot be, or certainly has not been, brought by Mr. Leaf into congruous
connection with Book XI., and it results in the fighting of the
_unarmed_ Agamemnon, which no poet could have been so careless as to
invent. Agamemnon could not go into battle without helmet, shield, and
spears (the other armour we need not dwell upon here), and Thersites
could not have opened a debate when the Over-Lord had called the
Assembly, nor could he have moved the chiefs to prepare for flight,
unless, as in the actual _Iliad_, they had already been demoralised
by the result of the feigned proposal of flight by Agamemnon, and its
effect upon the host. Probably every reader who understands heroic
society, temper, and manners will, so far, agree with us.
Our own opinion is that the difficulties in the poem are caused partly
by the poet's conception of the violent, wavering, excitable,
and unstable character of Agamemnon; partly by some accident, now
indiscoverable, save by conjecture, which has happened to the text.
The story in the actual _Iliad_ is that Zeus, planning disaster for the
Achaeans, in accordance with his promise to Thetis, sends a false Dream,
to tell Agamemnon that he will take Troy instantly. He is bidden by the
Dream to summon the host to arms. Agamemnon, _still asleep_, "has in his
mind things not to be fulfilled: Him seemeth that he shall take Priam's
town that very day" (II. 36, 37). "Then he awoke" (II. 41), and,
obviously, was no longer so sanguine, once awake!
Being a man crushed by his responsibility, and, as commander-in-chief,
extremely timid, though personally brave, he disobeys the Dream, dresses
in civil costume, and summons the host to a _peaceful_ assembly, not
to war, as the Dream bade him do. Probably he thought that the host was
disaffected, and wanted to argue with them, in place of commanding.
Here it is that the difficulty comes in, and our perplexity is increased
by our ignorance of the regular procedure in Homeric times. Was the host
not in arms and fighting every day, when there was no truce? There seems
to have been no armistice after the mutiny of Achilles, for we are
told that, in the period between his mutiny and the day of the Dream of
Agamemnon, Achilles "was neither going to the Assembly, nor into battle,
but wasted his heart, abiding there, longing for war and the slogan"
(I. 489, 492). Thus it seems that war went on, and that assemblies were
being held, in the absence of Achilles. It appears, however, that the
fighting was mere skirmishing and raiding, no general onslaught was
attempted; and from Book II. _73_, 83 it seems to have been a matter
of doubt, with Agamemnon and Nestor, whether the army would venture a
pitched battle.
It also appears, from the passage cited (I. 489, 492) that assemblies
were being regularly held; we are told that Achilles did not attend
them. Yet, when we come to the assembly (II. 86-100) it seems to have
been a special and exciting affair, to judge by the brilliant picture
of the crowds, the confusion, and the cries. Nothing of the sort is
indicated in the meeting of the assembly in I. _54-5_ 8. Why is there
so much excitement at the assembly of Book II.? Partly because it was
summoned _at_ dawn, whereas the usual thing was for the host to meet
in arms before fighting on the plain or going on raids; assemblies were
held when the day's work was over. The host, therefore, when summoned
to an assembly _at dawn_, expects to hear of something out of the
common--as the mutiny of Achilles suggests--and is excited.
We must ask, then, why does Agamemnon, after the Dream has told him
merely to summon the host to arm--a thing of daily routine--call a
deliberative morning assembly, a thing clearly not of routine? If
Agamemnon is really full of confidence, inspired by the Dream, why does
he determine, not to do what is customary, call the men to arms, but
as Jeanne d'Arc said to the Dauphin, to "hold such long and weary
councils"? Mr. Jevons speaks of Agamemnon's "confidence in the delusive
dream" as at variance with his proceedings, and would excise II. 35-41,
"the only lines which represent Agamemnon as confidently believing in
the Dream." [Footnote: _Journal_ of _Hellenic_ Studies, vol. vii. pp.
306, 307.] But the poet never once says that Agamemnon, awake, did
believe confidently in the Dream! Agamemnon dwelt with hope _while_
asleep; when he wakened--he went and called a peaceful morning assembly,
though the Dream bade him call to arms. He did not dare to risk his
authority. This was exactly in keeping with his character. The poet
should have said, "When he woke, the Dream appeared to him rather poor
security for success" (saying so in poetic language, of course), and
then there would be no difficulty in the summoning of an assembly at
dawn. But either the poet expected us to understand the difference
between the hopes of Agamemnon sleeping, and the doubts of Agamemnon
waking to chill realities--an experience common to all of us who
dream--or some explanatory lines have been dropped out--one or two would
have cleared up the matter.
If I am right, the poet has not been understood. People have not
observed that Agamemnon hopes while asleep, and doubts, and acts on his
doubt, when awake. Thus Mr. Leaf writes: "Elated by the dream, as we are
led to suppose, Agamemnon summons the army--to lead them into battle?
Nothing of the sort; he calls them to assembly." [Footnote: _Iliad_,
vol. ii. p. 46.] But we ought not to have been led to suppose that
the waking Agamemnon was so elated as the sleeping Agamemnon. He was
"disillusioned" on waking; his conduct proves it; he did not know what
to think about the Dream; he did not know how the host would take the
Dream; he doubted whether they would fight at his command, so he called
an assembly.
Mr. Jevons very justly cites a parallel case. Grote has remarked that in
Book VII. of Herodotus, "The dream sent by the Gods to frighten Xerxes
when about to recede from his project," has "a marked parallel in the
_Iliad_." Thus Xerxes, after the defection of Artabanus, was despondent,
like Agamemnon after the mutiny of Achilles, and was about to recede
from his project. To both a delusive dream is sent urging them to
proceed. Xerxes calls an assembly, however, and says that he will
not proceed. Why? Because, says Herodotus, "when day came, he thought
nothing of his dream." Agamemnon, once awake, thought doubtfully of
_his_ dream; he called a Privy Council, told the princes about his
dream--of which Nestor had a very dubious opinion--and said that he
would try the temper of the army by proposing instant flight: the chiefs
should restrain the men if they were eager to run away.
Now the epic prose narrative of Herodotus is here clearly based on
_Iliad_, II., which Herodotus must have understood as I do. But in
Homer there is no line to say--and one line or two would have been
enough--that Agamemnon, when awake, doubted, like Xerxes, though
Agamemnon, when asleep, had been confident. The necessary line, for all
that we know, still existed in the text used by Herodotus. Homer
may lose a line as well as Dieuchidas of Megara, or rather Diogenes
Laertius. Juvenal lost a whole passage, re-discovered by Mr. Winstedt
in a Bodleian manuscript. If Homer expected modern critics to note the
delicate distinction between Agamemnon asleep and Agamemnon awake, or to
understand Agamemnon's character, he expected too much. [Footnote: Cf.
Jevons, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. vii. pp. 306, 307.] The poet
then treats the situation on these lines: Agamemnon, awake and free from
illusion, does not obey the dream, does _not_ call the army to war; he
takes a middle course.
In the whole passage the poet's main motive, as Mr. Monro remarks with
obvious truth, is "to let his audience become acquainted with the temper
and spirit of the army as it was affected by the long siege ... and by
the events of the First Book." [Footnote: Monro, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
261.] The poet could not obtain his object if Agamemnon merely gave the
summons to battle; and he thinks Agamemnon precisely the kind of waverer
who will call, first the Privy Council of the Chiefs, and then an
assembly. Herein the homesick host will display its humours, as it does
with a vengeance. Agamemnon next tells his Dream to the chiefs (if he
had a dream of this kind he would most certainly tell it), and adds (as
has been already stated) that he will first test the spirit of the
army by a feigned proposal of return to Greece, while the chiefs are to
restrain them if they rush to launch the ships. Nestor hints that there
is not much good in attending to dreams; however, this is the dream of
the Over-Lord, who is the favoured of Zeus.
Agamemnon next, addressing the assembly, says that posterity will think
it a shameful thing that the Achaeans raised the siege of a town with a
population much smaller than their own army; but allies from many
cities help the Trojans, and are too strong for him, whether posterity
understands that or not. "Let us flee with our ships!"
On this the host break up, in a splendid passage of poetry, and rush
to launch the ships, the passion of _nostalgie_ carrying away even
the chiefs, it appears--a thing most natural in the circumstances.
But Athene finds Odysseus in grief: "neither laid he any hand upon his
ship," as the others did, and she encouraged him to stop the flight.
This he does, taking the sceptre of Agamemnon from his unnerved hand.
He goes about reminding the princes "have we not heard Agamemnon's real
intention in council?" (II. 188-197), and rating the common sort. The
assembly meets again in great confusion; Thersites seizes the chance to
be insolent, and is beaten by Odysseus. The host then arms for battle.
The poet has thus shown Agamemnon in the colours which he wears
consistently all through the _Iliad_. He has, as usual, contrasted with
him Odysseus, the type of a wise and resolute man. This contrast the
poet maintains without fail throughout. He has shown us the temper of
the weary, home-sick army, and he has persuaded us that he knows how
subtle, dangerous, and contagious a thing is military panic. Thus, at
least, I venture to read the passage, which, thus read, is perfectly
intelligible. Agamemnon is no personal coward, but the burden of the
safety of the host overcomes him later, and he keeps suggesting flight
in the ships, as we shall see. Suppose, then, we read on from II. 40
thus: "The Dream left him thinking of things not to be, even that on
this day he shall take the town of Priam.... But he awoke from sleep
with the divine voice ringing in his ears. (_Then it seemed him that
some dreams are true and_ some _false, for all do_ not _come through the
Gate of_ Horn.) So he arose and sat up and did on his soft tunic, and
his great cloak, and grasped his ancestral sceptre ... and bade the
clear-voiced heralds summon the Achaeans of the long locks to the
deliberative assembly." He then, as in II. 53-75 told his Dream to the
preliminary council, and proposed that he should try the temper of
the host by proposing flight--which, if it began, the chiefs were to
restrain--before giving orders to arm. The test of the temper of the
host acted as it might be expected to act; all rushed to launch the
ships, and the princes were swept away in the tide of flight, Agamemnon
himself merely looking on helpless. The panic was contagious; only
Odysseus escaped its influence, and redeemed the honour of the Achaeans,
as he did again on a later day.
The passage certainly has its difficulties. But Erhardt expresses the
proper state of the case, after giving his analysis. "The hearer's
imagination is so captured, first by the dream, then by the brawling
assembly, by the rush to the ships, by the intervention of Odysseus, by
the punishment of Thersites--all these living pictures follow each
other so fleetly before the eyes that we have scarcely time to make
objections." [Footnote: _Die Enstehung der Homerische Gedichte_, p.
29.]. The poet aimed at no more and no less effect than he has
produced, and no more should be required by any one, except by
that anachronism--"the analytical reader." _He_ has "time to make
objections": the poet's audience had none; and he must be criticised
from their point of view. Homer did not sing for analytical readers,
for the modern professor; he could not possibly conceive that Time would
bring such a being into existence.
To return to the character of Agamemnon. In moments of encouragement
Agamemnon is a valiant fighter, few better spearmen, yet "he attains not
to the first Three," Achilles, Aias, Diomede. But Agamemnon is unstable
as water; again and again, as in Book II., the lives and honour of the
Achaeans are saved in the Over-Lord's despite by one or other of the
peers. The whole _Iliad_, with consistent uniformity, pursues the scheme
of character and conduct laid down in the two first Books. It is guided
at once by feudal allegiance and feudal jealousy, like the _Chansons de
Geste_ and the early sagas or romances of Ireland. A measure of respect
for Agamemnon, even of sympathy, is preserved; he is not degraded as the
kings and princes are often degraded on the Attic stage, and even in the
Cyclic poems. Would wandering Ionian reciters at fairs have maintained
this uniformity? Would the tyrant Pisistratus have made his literary man
take this view?
CHAPTER V
AGAMEMNON IN THE LATER "ILIAD"
In the Third Book, Agamemnon receives the compliments due to his
supremacy, aspect, and valour from the lips of Helen and Priam. There
are other warriors taller by a head, and Odysseus was shorter than he by
a head, so Agamemnon was a man of middle stature. He is "beautiful and
royal" of aspect; "a good king and a mighty spearman," says Helen.
The interrupted duel between Menelaus and Paris follows, and then the
treacherous wounding of Menelaus by Pandarus. One of Agamemnon's most
sympathetic characteristics is his intense love of his brother, for
whose sake he has made the war. He shudders on seeing the arrow wound,
but consoles Menelaus by the certainty that Troy will fall, for the
Trojans have broken the solemn oath of truce. Zeus "doth fulfil at last,
and men make dear amends." But with characteristic inconsistency he
discourages Menelaus by a picture of many a proud Trojan leaping on
his tomb, while the host will return home-an idea constantly present to
Agamemnon's mind. He is always the first to propose flight, though he
will "return with shame" to Mycenae. Menelaus is of much better cheer:
"Be of good courage, [blank space] ALL THE HOST OF THE [misprint]"--a
thing which Agamemnon does habitually, though he is not a personal
poltroon. As Menelaus has only a slight flesh wound after all, and
as the Trojans are doomed men, Agamemnon is now "eager for glorious
battle." He encourages the princes, but, of all men, rebukes Odysseus as
"last at a fray and first at a feast": such is his insolence, for which
men detest him.
This is highly characteristic in Agamemnon, who has just been redeemed
from ruin by Odysseus. Rebuked by Odysseus, he "takes back his word" as
usual, and goes on to chide Diomede as better at making speeches than at
fighting! But Diomede made no answer, "having respect to the chiding
of the revered King." He even rebukes the son of Capaneus for answering
Agamemnon haughtily. Diomede, however, does not forget; he bides his
time. He now does the great deeds of his day of valour (Book V.).
Agamemnon meanwhile encourages the host.
During Books V., VI. Agamemnon's business is "to bid the rest keep
fighting." When Hector, in Book VII., challenges any Achaean, nobody
volunteers except Menelaus, who has a strong sense of honour. Agamemnon
restrains him, and lots are cast: the host pray that the lot may fall
on Aias, Diomede, or Agamemnon (VII. 179-180). Thus the Over-Lord is
acknowledged to be a man of his hands, especially good at hurling the
spear, as we see again in Book XXIII.
A truce is proposed for the burial of the dead, and Paris offers to give
up the wealth that he brought to Troy, and more, if the Achaeans will
go home, but Helen he will not give up. We expect Agamemnon to answer as
becomes him. But no! All are silent, till Diomede rises. They will not
return, he says, even if Helen be restored, for even a fool knows that
Troy is doomed, because of the broken oath. The rest shout acquiescence,
and Agamemnon refuses the compromise. Apparently he would not have
disdained it, but for Diomede's reply.
On the following day the Trojans have the better in the battle, and
Agamemnon "has no heart to stand," nor have some of his peers. But
Diomede has more courage, and finally Agamemnon begins to call to
the host to fight, but breaks down, weeps, and prays to Zeus "that
we ourselves at least flee and escape;" he is not an encouraging
commander-in-chief! Zeus, in pity, sends a favourable omen; Aias fights
well; night falls, and the Trojans camp on the open plain.
Agamemnon, in floods of tears, calls an assembly, and proposes to
"return to Argos with dishonour." "Let us flee with our ships to our
dear native land, for now shall we never take wide-wayed Troy," All are
silent, till Diomede rises and reminds Agamemnon that "thou saidst I was
no man of war, but a coward." (In Book V.; we are now in Book IX.) "Zeus
gave thee the honour of the sceptre above all men, but valour he gave
thee not.... Go thy way; thy way is before thee, and thy ships stand
beside the sea. But all the other flowing-haired Achaeans will tarry
here until we waste Troy."
Nestor advises Agamemnon to set an advanced guard, which that martialist
had never thought of doing, and to discuss matters over supper. A force
of 700 men, under Meriones and the son of Nestor, was posted between the
foss and the wall round the camp; the council met, and Nestor advised
Agamemnon to approach Achilles with gentle words and gifts of atonement.
Agamemnon, full of repentance, acknowledges his folly and offers
enormous atonement. Heralds and three ambassadors are sent; and how
Achilles received them, with perfect courtesy, but with absolute
distrust of Agamemnon and refusal of his gifts, sending the message that
he will fight only when fire comes to his own ships, we know.
Achilles is now entirely in the wrong, and the Over-Lord is once more
within his right. He has done all, or more than all, that customary
law demands. In Book IX. Phoenix states the case plainly. "If Agamemnon
brought thee not gifts, and promised thee more hereafter, ... then
were I not he that should bid thee cast aside thine anger, and save the
Argives...." (IX. 515-517). The case so stands that, if Achilles later
relents and fights, the gifts of atonement will no longer be due to him,
and he "will not be held in like honour" (IX. 604).
The poet knows intimately, and, like his audience, is keenly interested
in the details of the customary law. We cannot easily suppose this
frame of mind and this knowledge in a late poet addressing a late Ionian
audience.
The ambassadors return to Agamemnon; their evil tidings are received in
despairing silence. But Diomede bids Agamemnon take heart and fight next
day, with his host arrayed "before the ships" (IX. 708). This appears to
counsel defensive war; but, in fact, and for reasons, when it comes to
fighting they do battle in the open.
The next Book (X.) is almost universally thought a late interpolation;
an opinion elsewhere discussed (see [blank space]). Let us, then, say
with Mr. Leaf that the Book begins with "exaggerated despondency" and
ends with "hasty exultation," in consequence of a brilliant camisade,
wherein Odysseus and Diomede massacre a Thracian contingent. Our point
is that the poet carefully (see _The Doloneia_) continues the study of
Agamemnon in despondency, and later, by his "hasty exultation," preludes
to the valour which the Over-Lord displays in Book XI.
The poet knows that something in the way of personal valour is due to
Agamemnon's position; he fights brilliantly, receives a flesh wound,
retires, and is soon proposing a general flight in his accustomed way.
When the Trojans, in Book XIV., are attacking the ships, Agamemnon
remarks that he fears the disaffection of his whole army (XIV. 49, 51),
and, as for the coming defeat, that he "knew it," even when Zeus helped
the Greeks. They are all to perish far from Argos. Let them drag the
ships to the sea, moor them with stones, and fly, "For there is no shame
in fleeing from ruin, even in the night. Better doth he fare who flees
from trouble than he that is overtaken." It is now the turn of Odysseus
again to save the honour of the army. "Be silent, lest some other of the
Achaeans hear this word, that no man should so much as suffer to pass
through his mouth.... And now I wholly scorn thy thoughts, such a word
hast thou uttered." On this Agamemnon instantly repents. "Right sharply
hast thou touched my heart with thy stern reproof:" he has not even the
courage of his nervousness.
The combat is now in the hands of Aias and Patroclus, who is slain.
Agamemnon, who is wounded, does not reappear till Book XIX., when
Achilles, anxious to fight and avenge Patroclus at once, without
formalities of reconciliation, professes his desire to let bygones be
bygones. Agamemnon excuses his insolence to Achilles as an inspiration
of Ate: a predestined fault--"Not I am the cause, but Zeus and Destiny."
Odysseus, to clinch the reunion and fulfil customary law, advises
Agamemnon to bring out the gifts of atonement (the gifts prepared in
Book IX.), after which the right thing is for him to give a feast of
reconciliation, "that Achilles may have nothing lacking of his right."
[Footnote: Book XIX. 179, 180.] The case is one which has been provided
for by customary law in every detail. Mr. Leaf argues that all this part
must be late, because of the allusion to the gifts offered in Book IX.
But we reply, with Mr. Monro, that the Ninth Book is "almost necessary
to any Achilleis." The question is, would a late editor or poet know
all the details of customary law in such a case as a quarrel between
Over-Lord and peer? would a feudal audience have been satisfied with
a poem which did not wind the quarrel up in accordance with usage? and
would a late poet, in a society no longer feudal, know how to wind it
up? Would he find any demand on the part of his audience for a long
series of statements, which to a modern seem to interrupt the story?
To ourselves it appears that a feudal audience desired the customary
details; to such an audience they were most interesting.
This is a taste which, as has been said, we find in all early poetry
and in the sagas; hence the long "runs" of the Celtic sagas, minutely
repeated descriptions of customary things. The Icelandic saga-men never
weary, though modern readers do, of legal details. For these reasons we
reckon the passages in Book XIX. about the reconciliation as original,
and think they can be nothing else. It is quite natural that, in a
feudal society of men who were sticklers for custom, the hearers should
insist on having all things done duly and in order--the giving of the
gifts and the feast of reconciliation--though the passionate Achilles
himself desires to fight at once. Odysseus insists that what we may call
the regular routine shall be gone through. It is tedious to the modern
reader, but it is surely much more probable that a feudal poet thus
gratified his peculiar audience (he looked for no other) than that a
late poet, with a different kind of audience, thrust the Reconciliation
in as an "after-thought." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 317.]
The right thing must be done, Odysseus assures Achilles, "for I was
born first, and know more things." It is not the right thing to fight
at once, unfed, and before the solemn sacrifice by the Over-Lord,
the prayer, the Oath of Agamemnon, and the reception of the gifts by
Achilles; only after these formalities, and after the army has fed, can
the host go forth. "I know more than you do; you are a younger man,"
says Odysseus, speaking in accordance with feudal character, at the risk
of wearying later unforeseen generations.
This is not criticism inspired by mere "literary feeling," for "literary
feeling" is on the side of Achilles, and wishes the story to hurry to
his revenge. But ours is [blank space] criticism; we must think of the
poet in relation to his audience and of their demands, which we can
estimate by similar demands, vouched for by the supply, in the early
national poetry of other peoples and in the Icelandic sagas.
We hear no more of Agamemnon till, in Book XXIII, 35-38, after the
slaying of Hector, Achilles "was brought to noble Agamemnon" (for that,
as Odysseus said, was the regular procedure) "by the Achaean chiefs,
hardly persuading him thereto, for his heart was wroth for his comrade."
Here they feast, Achilles still full of grief and resentment. He merely
goes through the set forms, much against his will. It does appear to us
that the later the poet the less he would have known or cared about
the forms. An early society is always much interested in forms and in
funerals and funeral games, so the poet indulges their taste with the
last rites of Patroclus. The last view of Agamemnon is given when,
at the end of the games, Achilles courteously presents him with the
flowered _lebes_, the prize for hurling the spear, without asking him to
compete, since his superior skill is notorious. This act of courtesy is
the real reconciliation; previously Achilles had but gone reluctantly
through the set forms in such cases provided. Even when Agamemnon
offered the gifts of atonement, Achilles said, "Give them, as is
customary, or keep them, as you please" (XIX. 146, 148). Achilles, young
and passionate, cares nothing for the feudal procedure.
This rapid survey seems to justify the conclusion that the poet presents
an uniform and historically correct picture of the Over-Lord and of
his relations with his peers, a picture which no late editor could
have pieced together out of the widely varying _repertoires_ of late
strolling reciters. Such reciters would gladly have forgotten, and such
an editor would gladly have "cut" the "business" of the reconciliation.
They would also, in a democratic spirit, have degraded the Over-Lord
into the tyrant, but throughout, however low Agamemnon may fall, the
poet is guided by the knowledge that his right to rule is _jure divino_,
that he has qualities, that his responsibilities are crushing, "I, whom
among all men Zeus hath planted for ever among labours, while my
breath abides within me, and my limbs move," says the Over-Lord (X.
Sg, go.[sic]). In short, the poet's conception of the Over-Lord is
throughout harmonious, is a contemporary conception entertained by a
singer who lives among peers that own, and are jealous of, and obey an
Over-Lord. The character and situation of Agamemnon are a poetic work of
one age, one moment of culture.
CHAPTER VI
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE "ILIAD". BURIAL AND CREMATION
In archaeological discoveries we find the most convincing proofs that
the _Iliad_, on the whole, is the production of a single age, not the
patchwork of several changeful centuries. This may seem an audacious
statement, as archaeology has been interpreted of late in such a manner
as to demand precisely the opposite verdict. But if we can show, as we
think we can, that many recent interpretations of the archaeological
evidence are not valid, because they are not consistent, our contention,
though unexpected, will be possible. It is that the combined testimony
of archaeology and of the Epic proves the _Iliad_ to represent, as
regards customs, weapons, and armour, a definite moment of evolution; a
period between the age recorded in the art of the Mycenaean shaft graves
and the age of early iron swords and the "Dipylon" period.
Before the discoveries of the material remains of the "Mycenzean"
times, the evidence of archaeology was seldom appropriately invoked
in discussions of the Homeric question. But in the thirty years since
Schliemann explored the buried relics of the Mycenzean Acropolis,
his "Grave of Agamemnon," a series of excavations has laid bare the
interments, the works of art, and the weapons and ornaments of years
long prior to the revolution commonly associated with the "Dorian
Invasion" of about 1100-1000 B.C. The objects of all sorts which have
been found in many sites of Greece and the isles, especially of Cyprus
and Crete, in some respects tally closely with Homeric descriptions,
in others vary from them widely. Nothing can be less surprising, if the
heroes whose legendary feats inspired the poet lived centuries before
his time, as Charlemagne and his Paladins lived some three centuries
before the composition of the earliest extant _Chansons de Geste_ on
their adventures. There was, in such a case, time for much change in the
details of life, art, weapons and implements. Taking the relics in the
graves of the Mycenaean Acropolis as a starting-point, some things would
endure into the age of the poet, some would be modified, some would
disappear.
We cannot tell how long previous to his own date the poet supposes the
Achaean heroes to have existed. He frequently ascribes to them feats of
strength which "no man of such as now are" could perform. This gives
no definite period for the interval; he might be speaking of the great
grandfathers of his own generation. But when he regards the heroes as
closely connected by descent of one or two generations with the gods,
and as in frequent and familiar intercourse with gods and goddesses, we
must suppose that he did not think their period recent. The singers
of the _Chansons de Geste_ knew that angels' visits were few and far
between at the period, say, of the Norman Conquest; but they allowed
angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as
freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably
treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of
Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as indefinitely
remote.
It is impossible here to discuss in detail the complex problems of
Mycenaean chronology. If we place the Mycenaean "bloom-time" from
"the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C.," [Footnote:
Tsountas and Manatt, p. 322.] it is plain that there is space to spare,
between the poet's age and that of his heroes, for the rise of changes
in war, weapons, and costume. Indeed, there are traces enough of change
even in the objects and art discovered in the bloom-time, as represented
by the Mycenaean acropolis itself and by other "Mycenaean" sites. The
art of the fragment of a silver vase in a grave, on which a siege is
represented, is not the art, the costumes are not the costumes, of
the inlaid bronze dagger-blade. The men shown on the vase and the
lion-hunters on the dagger both have their hair close cropped, but on
the vase they are naked, on the dagger they wear short drawers. On the
Vaphio cups, found in a _tholos_ chamber-tomb near Amyclae, the men are
"long-haired Achaeans," with heavy, pendent locks, like the man on a
pyxis from Knossos, published by Mr. Evans; they are of another period
than the close-cropped men of the vase and dagger. [Footnote: _Journal
of Hellenic Studies_, vol. xvi. p. 102.] Two of the men on the silver
vase are covered either with shields of a shape and size elsewhere
unknown in Mycenaean art, or with cloaks of an unexampled form. The
masonry of the city wall, shown on the vase in the Mycenaean grave,
is not the ordinary masonry of Mycenae itself. On the vase the wall is
"isodomic," built of cut stones in regular layers. Most of the Mycenaean
walls, on the other hand, are of "Cyclopean" style, in large irregular
blocks.
Art, good and very bad, exists in many various stages in Mycenaean
relics. The drawing of a god, with a typical Mycenaean shield in the
form of a figure 8, on a painted sarcophagus from Milato in Crete,
is more crude and savage than many productions of the Australian
aboriginals, [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xvi. _p._
174, fig. 50._ Grosse. _Les Debuts de l'Art,_ pp. 124-176.] the thing is
on the level of Red Indian work. Meanwhile at Vaphio, Enkomi, Knossos,
and elsewhere the art is often excellent.
In one essential point the poet describes a custom without parallel
among the discovered relics of the Mycenaean age--namely, the disposal
of the bodies of the dead. They are neither buried with their arms, in
stately _tholos_ tombs nor in shaft graves, as at Mycenae: whether
they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. A pyre of wood is
built; on this the warrior's body is laid, the pyre is lighted, the body
is reduced to ashes, the ashes are placed in a vessel or box of gold,
wrapped round with precious cloths (no arms are buried, as a general
rule), and a mound, howe, barrow, or tumulus is raised over all. Usually
a _stele_ or pillar crowns the edifice. This method is almost uniform,
and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the _Iliad_
and _Odyssey_ whenever a burial is described. Now this mode of
interment must be the mode of a single age in Greek civilisation. It is
confessedly not the method of the Mycenaeans of the shaft grave, or of
the latter _tholos_ or stone beehive-shaped grave; again, the Mycenaeans
did not burn the dead; they buried. Once more, the Homeric method is not
that of the Dipylon period (say 900-750 B.C.) represented by the tombs
outside the Dipylon gate of Athens. The people of that age now buried,
now burned, their dead, and did not build cairns over them. Thus the
Homeric custom comes between the shaft graves and the latter _tholos_
graves, on the one hand, and the Dipylon custom of burning or burying,
with sunk or rock-hewn graves, on the other.
The Homeric poets describe the method of their own period. They
assuredly do not adhere to an older epic tradition of shaft graves or
_tholos_ graves, though these must have been described in lays of the
period when such methods of disposal of the dead were in vogue. The
altar above the shaft-graves in Mycenae proves the cult of ancestors in
Mycenae; of this cult in the _Iliad_ there is no trace, or only a
dim trace of survival in the slaughter of animals at the funeral. The
Homeric way of thinking about the state of the dead, weak, shadowy
things beyond the river Oceanus, did not permit them to be worshipped
as potent beings. Only in a passage, possibly interpolated, of the
_Odyssey_, do we hear that Castor and Polydeuces, brothers of Helen,
and sons of Tyndareus, through the favour of Zeus have immortality, and
receive divine honours. [Footnote: Odyssey, XI. 298-304.]
These facts are so familiar that we are apt to overlook the strangeness
of them in the history of religious evolution. The cult of ancestral
spirits begins in the lowest barbarism, just above the level of the
Australian tribes, who, among the Dieri, show some traces of the
practice, at least, of ghost feeding. [Footnote: Howitt, _Native
Tribes of South-Eastern Australia,_ p. 448. There are also traces of
propitiation in Western Australia (MS. of Mrs. Bates).] Sometimes, as in
many African tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical
cult. Usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower
plane. It was prevalent in the Mycenae of the shaft graves; in Attica
it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in Greece from the ninth century
onwards. But it is unknown to or ignored by the Homeric poets, though it
can hardly have died out of folk custom. Consequently, the poems are
of one age, an age of cremation and of burial in barrows, with no ghost
worship. Apparently some revolution as regards burial occurred between
the age of the graves of the Mycenaean acropolis and the age of Homer.
That age, coming with its form of burning and its absence of the cult
of the dead, between two epochs of inhumation, ancestor worship, and
absence of cairns, is as certainly and definitely an age apart, a
peculiar period, as any epoch can be.
Cremation, with cairn burial of the ashes, is, then, the only form of
burial mentioned by Homer, and, as far as the poet tells us, the period
was not one in which iron was used for swords and spears. At Assarlik
(Asia Minor) and in Thera early graves, prove the use of cremation,
but also, unlike Homer, of iron weapons. [Footnote: Paton, Journal _of
Hellenic Studies,_ viii. 64_ff_. For other references, cf. Poulsen, _Die
Dipylongraeben_, p. 2, Notes. Leipzig 1905.] In these graves the ashes
are inurned. There are examples of the same usage in Salamis, without
iron. In Crete, in graves of the period of geometrical ornament
("Dipylon"), burning is more common than inhumation. Cremation is
attested in a _tholos_ or beehive-shaped grave in Argos, where the vases
were late Mycenaean. Below this stratum was an older shaft grave, as is
usual in _tholos_ interments; it had been plundered? [Footnote: Poulsen,
p.2.]
The cause of the marked change from Mycenaean inhumation to Homeric
cremation is matter of conjecture. It has been suggested that burning
was introduced during the migrations after the Dorian invasion. Men
could carry the ashes of their friends to the place where they finally
settled. [Footnote: Helbig, _Homerische Epos,_ p.83] The question may,
perhaps, be elucidated by excavation, especially in Asia Minor, on
the sites of the earliest Greek colonies. At Colophon are many cairns
unexplored by science. Mr. Ridgeway, as is well known, attributes the
introduction of cremation to a conquering northern people, the Achaeans,
his "Celts." It is certain that cremation and urn burial of the ashes
prevailed in Britain during the Age of Bronze, and co-existed with
inhumation in the great cemetery of Hallstatt, surviving into the Age of
Iron. [Footnote: Cf. _Guide to Antiquities of Early Iron Age,_ British
Museum, 1905, by Mr. Reginald A. Smith, under direction of Mr. Charles
H. Read, for a brief account of Hallstatt culture.] Others suppose a
change in Achaean ideas about the soul; it was no longer believed to
haunt the grave and grave goods and be capable of haunting the living,
but to be wholly set free by burning, and to depart for ever to the
House of Hades, powerless and incapable of hauntings.
It is never easy to decide as to whether a given mode of burial is the
result of a definite opinion about the condition of the dead, or
whether the explanation offered by those who practise the method is an
afterthought. In Tasmania among the lowest savages, now extinct,
were found monuments over cremated human remains, accompanied with
"characters crudely marked, similar to those which the aborigines
tattooed on their forearms." In one such grave was a spear, "for the
dead man to fight with when he is asleep," as a native explained. Some
Tasmanian tribes burned the dead and carried the ashes about in amulets;
others buried in hollow trees; others simply inhumed. Some placed the
dead in a hollow tree, and cremated the body after lapse of time. Some
tied the dead up tightly (a common practice with inhumation), and
then burned him. Some buried the dead in an erect 'posture. The common
explanation of burning was that it prevented the dead from returning,
thus it has always been usual to burn the bodies of vampires. Did a race
so backward hit on an idea unknown to the Mycenaean Greeks?
[Footnote: Ling Roth., _The Tasmanians_, pp. 128-134. Reports of Early
Discoverers.] If the usual explanation be correct--burning prevents
the return of the dead--how did the Homeric Greeks come to substitute
burning for the worship and feeding of the dead, which had certainly
prevailed? How did the ancient method return, overlapping and blent with
the method of cremation, as in the early Dipylon interments? We can
only say that the Homeric custom is definite and isolated, and that but
slight variations occur in the methods of Homeric burial.
(1)In _Iliad_, VI, 4 I 6 _ff_, Andromache _SAYS_ that Achilles slew her
father, "yet he despoiled him not, for his soul had shame of that; but
he burnt him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." We are
not told that the armour was interred with the ashes of Eetion. This is
a peculiar case. We always hear in the that the dead are burned, and
the ashes of princes are placed in a vessel of gold within an artificial
hillock; but we do not hear, except in this passage, that they are
burned in their armour, or that it is burned, or that it is buried with
the ashes of the dead. The invariable practice is for the victor, if he
can, to despoil the body of the fallen foe; but Achilles for some reason
spared that indignity in the case of Eetion. [Footnote: German examples
of burning the amis of the cremated dead and then burying them are given
by Mr. Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece,_ vol. i. pp. 498, 499.]
(2) _ILIAD,_ VII. 85. Hector, in his challenge to a single combat, makes
the conditions that the victor shall keep the arms and armour of the
vanquished, but shall restore his body to his friends. The Trojans
will burn him, if he falls; if the Achaean falls, the others will do
something expressed by the word [Greek: tarchuchosi] probably a word
surviving from an age of embalment. [Footnote: Helbig, _Homerische
Epos,_ pp. 55, 56.] It has come to mean, generally, to do the funeral
rites. The hero is to have a barrow or artificial howe or hillock built
over him, "beside wide Hellespont," a memorial of him, and of Hector's
valour.
On the River Helmsdale, near Kildonan, on the left bank, there is such
a hillock which has never, it is believed, been excavated. It preserves
the memory of its occupant, an early Celtic saint; whether he was
cremated or not it is impossible to say. But his memory is not lost,
and the howe, cairn, or hillock, in Homer is desired by the heroes as a
MEMORIAL.
On the terms proposed by Hector the arms of the dead could not be either
burned or buried with him.
(3) Iliad, IX. 546. Phoenix says that the Calydonian boar "brought many
to the mournful pyre." All were cremated.
(4) _Iliad_, XXII 50-55. Andromache in her dirge (the _regret_ of the
French mediaeval epics) says that Hector lies unburied by the ships and
naked, but she will burn raiment of his, "delicate and fair, the work of
women ... to thee no profit, since thou wilt never lie therein, yet this
shall be honour to thee from the men and women of Troy." Her meaning
is not very clear, but she seems to imply that if Hector's body were in
Troy it would be clad in garments before cremation.
Helbig appears to think that to clothe the dead in _garments_ was an
Ionian, not an ancient epic custom. But in Homer the dead always wear at
least one garment, the [Greek: pharos], a large mantle, either white or
purple, such as Agamemnon wears in peace (Iliad, II 43), except when,
like Eetion and Elpenor in the Odyssey, they are burned in their armour.
In _Iliad,_ XXIII. 69 _ff_., the shadow of the dead unburned Patroclus
appears to Achilles in his sleep asking for "his dues of fire." The
whole passage, with the account of the funeral of Patroclus, must be
read carefully, and compared with the funeral rites of Hector at the
end of Book XXIV. Helbig, in an essay of great erudition, though perhaps
rather fantastic in its generalisations, has contrasted the burials of
the two heroes. Patroclus is buried, he says, in a true portion of the
old Aeolic epic (Sir Richard Jebb thought the whole passage "Ionic"),
though even into this the late Ionian _bearbeiter_ (a spectral figure),
has introduced his Ionian notions. But the Twenty-fourth Book itself
is late and Ionian, Helbig says, not genuine early Aeolian epic poetry.
[Footnote: Helbig, _Zu den Homerischen Bestattungsgebrauechen_. Aus den
Sitzungsberichten der philos. philol. und histor. Classe der Kgl. bayer.
Academie der Wissenschaften. 1900. Heft. ii. pp. 199-299.] The burial of
Patroclus, then, save for Ionian late interpolations, easily detected by
Helbig, is, he assures us, genuine "kernel," [Footnote: 2 Op. _laud._,
p. 208.] while Hector's burial "is partly Ionian, and describes the
destiny of the dead heroes otherwise than as in the old Aeolic epos."
Here Helbig uses that one of his two alternate theories according to
which the late Ionian poets do not cling to old epic tradition, but
bring in details of the life of their own date. By Helbig's other
alternate theory, the late poets cling to the model set in old epic
tradition in their pictures of details of life.
Disintegrationists differ: far from thinking that the late Ionian poet
who buried Hector varied from the AEolic minstrel who buried Patroclus
(in Book XXIII.), Mr. Leaf says that Hector's burial is "almost an
abstract" of that of Patroclus. [Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, XXII Note to
791.] He adds that Helbig's attempts "to distinguish the older AEolic
from the newer and more sceptical 'Ionic' faith seem to me visionary."
[Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii. p. 619. Note 2] Visionary, indeed, they do
seem, but they are examples of the efforts made to prove that the Iliad
bears marks of composition continued through several centuries. We must
remember that, according to Helbig, the Ionians, colonists in a new
country, "had no use for ghosts." A fresh colony does not produce
ghosts. "There is hardly an English or Scottish castle without its spook
(_spuck_). On the other hand, you look in vain for such a thing in the
United States"--spiritualism apart. [Footnote: Op. _laud._, p. 204.]
This is a hasty generalisation! Helbig will, if he looks, find ghosts
enough in the literature of North America while still colonial, and in
Australia, a still more newly settled country, sixty years ago Fisher's
ghost gave evidence of Fisher's murder, evidence which, as in another
Australian case, served the ends of justice. [Footnote: See, in _The_
Valet's Tragedy (A. L.): "Fisher's Ghost."] More recent Australian
ghosts are familiar to psychical research.
This colonial theory is one of Helbig's too venturous generalisations.
He studies the ghost, or rather dream-apparition, of Patroclus after
examining the funeral of Hector; but we shall begin with Patroclus.
Achilles (XXIII. 4-16) first hails his friend "even in the House of
Hades" (so he believes that spirits are in Hades), and says that he
has brought Hector "raw for dogs to devour," and twelve Trojans of good
family "to slaughter before thy pyre." That night, when Achilles is
asleep (XXIII. 65) the spirit ([Greek: psyche]) of Patroclus appears to
him, says that he is forgotten, and begs to be burned at once, that he
may pass the gates of Hades, for the other spirits drive him off and
will not let him associate with them "beyond the River," and he wanders
vaguely along the wide-gated dwelling of Hades. "Give me thy hand, for
never more again shall I come back from Hades, when ye have given me my
due of fire." Patroclus, being newly discarnate, does not yet know
that a spirit cannot take a living man's hand, though, in fact, tactile
hallucinations are not uncommon in the presence of phantasms of the
dead. "Lay not my bones apart from thine ... let one coffer" ([Greek:
soros]) "hide our bones."
[Greek: Soros], like _larnax_, is a coffin (_Sarg_), or
what the Americans call a "casket," in the opinion of Helbig: [Footnote:
OP. _laud_., p.217.] it is an oblong receptacle of the bones and dust.
Hector was buried in a _larnax_; SO will Achilles and Patroclus be
when Achilles falls, but the dust of Patroclus is kept, meanwhile, in a
golden covered cup (phialae) in the quarters of Achilles; it is not laid
in howe after his cremation (XXIII. 243).
Achilles tries to embrace Patroclus, but fails, like Odysseus with the
shade of his mother in Hades, in the _ODYSSEY_. He exclaims that "there
remaineth then even in the House of Hades a spirit and phantom of the
dead, albeit the life" (or the wits) "be not anywise therein, for all
night hath the spirit of hapless Patroclus stood over me...."
In this speech Helbig detects the hand of the late Ionian poet. What
goes before is part of the genuine old Epic, the kernel, done at a time
when men believed that spooks could take part in the affairs of the
upper world. Achilles therefore (in his dream), thought that he
could embrace his friend. It was the sceptical Ionian, in a fresh and
spookless colony, who knew that he could not; he thinks the ghost a mere
dream, and introduces his scepticism in XXIII. 99-107. He brought
in "the ruling ideas of his own period." The ghost, says the Ionian
_bearbeiter_, is intangible, though in the genuine old epic the ghost
himself thought otherwise--he being new to the situation and without
experience. This is the first sample of the critical Ionian spirit,
later so remarkable in philosophy and natural science, says Helbig.
[Footnote: Op. laud., pp. 233,234.]
We need not discuss this acute critical theory. The natural
interpretation of the words of Achilles is obvious; as Mr. Leaf remarks,
the words are "the cry of sudden personal conviction in a matter which
has hitherto been lazily accepted as an orthodox dogma." [Footnote:
_Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 620.] Already, as we have seen, Achilles has made
promises to Patroclus in the House of Hades, now he exclaims "there
really is something in the doctrine of a feeble future life."
It is vain to try to discriminate between an old epic belief in
able-bodied ghosts and an Ionian belief in mere futile _shades_, in
the Homeric poems. Everywhere the dead are too feeble to be worth
worshipping after they are burned; but, as Mr. Leaf says with obvious
truth, and with modern instances, "men are never so inconsistent as in
their beliefs about the other world." We ourselves hold various beliefs
simultaneously. The natives of Australia and of Tasmania practise, or
did practise, every conceivable way of disposing of the dead--burying,
burning, exposure in trees, carrying about the bodies or parts of them,
eating the bodies, and so forth. If each such practice corresponded, as
archaeologists believe, to a different opinion about the soul, then
all beliefs were held together at once, and this, in fact, is the case.
There is not now one and now another hard and fast orthodoxy of belief
about the dead, though now we find ancestor worship prominent and now in
the shade.
After gifts of hair and the setting up of jars full of oil and honey,
Achilles has the body laid on the top of the pyre in the centre. Bodies
of sheep and oxen, two dogs and four horses, are strewed around: why, we
know not, for the dead is not supposed to need food: the rite may be
a survival, for there were sacrifices at the burials of the Mycenaean
shaft graves. Achilles slays also the twelve Trojans, "because of mine
anger at thy slaying," he says (XXIII. 23). This was his reason, as far
as he consciously had any reason, not that his friend might have twelve
thralls in Hades. After the pyre is alit Achilles drenches it all night
with wine, and, when the flame dies down, the dead hero's bones are
collected and placed in the covered cup of gold. The circle of the
barrow is then marked out, stones are set up round it (we see them round
Highland tumuli), and earth is heaped up; no more is done; the tomb is
empty; the covered cup holding the ashes is in the hut of Achilles.
We must note another trait. After the body of Patroclus was recovered,
it was washed, anointed, laid on a bier, and covered from head to foot
[Greek: heano liti], translated by Helbig, "with a linen sheet" (cf.
XXIII. 254). The golden cup with the ashes is next wrapped [Greek: heano
liti]; here Mr. Myers renders the words "with a linen veil." Scottish
cremation burials of the Bronze Age retain traces of linen wrappings
of the urn. [Footnote: _Proceedings of the Scottish society of
Antiquaries_, 1905, p. 552. For other cases, _cf._ Leaf, _Iliad_, XXIV.
796. Note.] Over all a white [Greek: pharos] (mantle) was spread. In
_Iliad_, XXIV. 231, twelve [Greek: pharea] with chitons, single cloaks,
and other articles of dress, are taken to Achilles by Priam as part of
the ransom of Hector's body. Such is the death-garb of Patroclus; but
Helbig, looking for Ionian innovations in Book XXIV., finds that the
death-garb of Hector is not the same as that of Patroclus in Book XXIII.
One difference is that when the squires of Achilles took the ransom of
Hector from the waggon of Priam, they left in it two [Greek: pharea] and
a well-spun chiton. The women washed and anointed Hector's body; they
clad him in the chiton, and threw one [Greek: pharos] over it; we are
not told what they did with the other. Perhaps, as Mr. Leaf says, it was
used as a cover for the bier, perhaps it was not, but was laid under the
body (Helbig). All we know is that Hector's body was restored to Priam
in a chiton and a [Greek: pharos], which do not seem to have been
removed before he was burned; while Patroclus had no chiton in death,
but a [Greek: pharos] and, apparently, a linen sheet.
To the ordinary reader this does not seem, in the circumstances, a
strong mark of different ages and different burial customs. Priam did
not bring any linen sheet--or whatever [Greek: heanos lis] may be--in
the waggon as part of Hector's ransom; and it neither became Achilles
to give nor Priam to receive any of Achilles's stuff as death-garb for
Hector. The squires, therefore, gave back to Priam, to clothe his dead
son, part of what he had brought; nothing can be more natural, and
there, we may say, is an end on't. They did what they could in the
circumstances. But Helbig has observed that, in a Cean inscription of
the fifth century B.C., there is a sumptuary law, forbidding a corpse to
wear more than three white garments, a sheet under him, a chiton, and a
mantle cast over him. [Footnote: op. _laud_., p. 209.] He supposes that
Hector wore the chiton, and had one [Greek: pharos] over him and the
other under him, though Homer does not say that. The Laws of Solon also
confined the dead man to three articles of dress. [Footnote: Plutarch,
Solon, 21.] In doing so Solon sanctioned an old custom, and that Ionian
custom, described by the author of Book XXIV., bewrays him, says Helbig,
for a late Ionian _bearbeiter_, deserting true epic usages and inserting
those of his own day. But in some Attic Dipylon vases, in the pictures
of funerals, we see no garments or sheets over the corpses.
Penelope also wove a [Greek: charos] against the burial of old Laertes,
but surely she ought to have woven for him; on Helbig's showing Hector
had _two_, Patroclus had only one; Patroclus is in the old epic, Hector
and Laertes are in the Ionian epics; therefore, Laertes should have had
two [Greek: charea] but we only hear of one. Penelope had to finish the
[Greek: charos] and show it; [Footnote: Odyssey, XXIV. 147.] now if she
wanted to delay her marriage, she should have begun the second [Greek:
charos] just as necessary as the first, if Hector, with a pair of
[Greek: charea] represents Ionian usage. But Penelope never thought of
what, had she read Helbig, she would have seen to be so obvious. She
thought of no funeral garments for the old man but one shroud [Greek:
speiron] (Odyssey, II. 102; XIX. 147); yet, being, by the theory, a
character of late Ionian, not of genuine old AEolic epic, she should
have known better. It is manifest that if even the acuteness and vast
erudition of Helbig can only find such invisible differences as
these between the manners of the genuine old epic and the late Ionian
innovations, there is really no difference, beyond such trifles as
diversify custom in any age.
Hector, when burned and when his ashes have been placed in the casket,
is laid in a [Greek: kapetos], a ditch or trench (_Iliad_, XV. 356;
XVIII. 564); but here (XXIV. 797) [Greek: kapetos] is a chamber covered
with great stones, within the howe, the casket being swathed with purple
robes, and this was the end. The ghost of Hector would not revisit the
sun, as ghosts do freely in the Cyclic poems, a proof that the Cyclics
are later than the Homeric poems. [Footnote: Helbig, op. _laud_., pp.
240, 241.]
If the burning of the weapons of Eetion and Elpenor are traces of
another than the _old_ AEolic epic faith, [Footnote: Ibid., p. 253.]
they are also traces of another than the late _Ionic_ epic faith, for no
weapons are burned with Hector. In the _Odyssey_ the weapons of Achilles
are not burned; in the _Iliad_ the armour of Patroclus is not burned.
No victims of any kind are burned with Hector: possibly the poet was not
anxious to repeat what he had just described (his last book is already
a very long book); possibly the Trojans did not slay victims at the
burning.
The howes or barrows built over the Homeric dead were hillocks high
enough to be good points of outlook for scouts, as in the case of the
barrow of AEsyetes (_Iliad_, II. 793) and "the steep mound," the howe of
lithe Myrine (II. 814). We do not know that women were usually buried
in howe, but Myrine was a warrior maiden of the Amazons. We know, then,
minutely what the Homeric mode of burial was, with such variations as
have been noted. We have burning and howe even in the case of an obscure
oarsman like Elpenor. It is not probable, however, that every peaceful
mechanic had a howe all to himself; he may have had a small family
cairn; he may not have had an expensive cremation.
The interesting fact is that no barrow burial precisely of the Homeric
kind has ever been discovered in Greek sites. The old Mycenaeans buried
either in shaft graves or in a stately _tholos_; and in rock chambers,
later, in the town cemetery: they did not burn the bodies. The people of
the Dipylon period sometimes cremated, sometimes inhumed, but they built
no barrow over the dead. [Footnote: _Annal. de l'Inst.,_ 1872, pp. 135,
147, 167. Plausen, _ut supra_.] The Dipylon was a period of early iron
swords, made on the lines of not the best type of bronze sword. Now, in
Mr. Leaf's opinion, our Homeric accounts of burial "are all late; the
oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii.
p. 619. Note 2. While Mr. Leaf says that "the oldest parts of the poems
tell us nothing" of burial, he accepts XXII. 342, 343 as of the oldest
part. These lines describe cremation, and Mr. Leaf does not think them
borrowed from the "later" VII. 79, 80, but that VII. 79, 80 are "perhaps
borrowed" from XXII. 342, 343. It follows that "the oldest parts of the
poems" do tell us of cremation.] We shall show, however, that Mr. Leaf's
"kernel" alludes to cremation. What is "late"? In this case it is not
the Dipylon period, say 900-750 B.C. It is not any later period; one or
two late barrow burials do not answer to the Homeric descriptions. The
"late" parts of the poems, therefore, dealing with burials, in Books
VI., VII., XIX., XXIII., XXIV., and the Odyssey, are of an age not
in "the Mycenaean prime," not in the Dipylon period, not in any later
period, say the seventh or sixth centuries B.C., and, necessarily, not
of any subsequent period. Yet nobody dreams of saying that the poets
describe a purely fanciful form of interment. They speak of what they
know in daily life. If it be argued that the late poets preserve, by
sheer force of epic tradition, a form of burial unknown in their own
age, we ask, "Why did epic tradition not preserve the burial methods
of the Mycenaean prime, the shaft grave, or the _tholos_, without
cremation?"
Mr. Leaf's own conclusion is that the people of Mycenae were "spirit
worshippers, practising inhumation, and partial mummification;" the
second fact is dubious. "In the post-Mycenaean 'Dipylon' period, we
find cremation and sepulture practised side by side. In the interval,
therefore, two beliefs have come into conflict. [Footnote: All
conceivable beliefs, we have said, about the dead are apt to coexist.
For every conceivable and some rather inconceivable contemporary
Australian modes of dealing with the dead, see Howitt, _Native Tribes of
South-East Australia_; Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central
Australia_.] It seems that the Homeric poems mark this intermediate
point...." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 622.] In that case
the Homeric poems are of one age, or, at least, all of them save "the
original kernel" are of one age, namely, a period subsequent to the
Mycenaean prime, but considerably prior to the Dipylon period, which
exhibits a mixture of custom; cremation and inhumation coexisting,
without barrows or howes.
We welcome this conclusion, and note that (whatever may be the case
with the oldest parts of the poems which say nothing about funerals) the
latest expansions must be of about 1100-1000 B.C. (?). The poem is so
early that it is prior to hero worship and ancestor worship; or it
might be more judicious to say that the poem is of an age that did not,
officially, practise ancestor worship, whatever may have occurred in
folk-custom. The Homeric age is one which had outgrown ancestor and hero
worship, and had not, like the age of the Cyclics, relapsed into it.
_Enfin_, unless we agree with Helbig as to essential variations of
custom, the poems are the work of one age, and that a brief age, and an
age of peculiar customs, cremation and barrow burial; and of a religion
that stood, without spirit worship, between the Mycenzean period and the
ninth century. That seems as certain as anything in prehistoric times
can be, unless we are to say, that after the age of shaft graves and
spirit worship came an age of cremation and of no spirit worship; and
that late poets consciously and conscientiously preserved the tradition
of _this_ period into their own ages of hero worship and inhumation,
though they did not preserve the tradition of the shaft-grave period.
We cannot accept this theory of adherence to stereotyped poetical
descriptions, nor can any one consistently adopt it in this case.
The reason is obvious. Mr. Leaf, with many other critics, distinguishes
several successive periods of "expansion." In the first stratum we have
the remains of "the original kernel." Among these remains is The Slaying
of Hector (XXII. 1-404), "with but slight additions." [Footnote: Leaf,
_Iliad_, vol. ii. p. xi.] In the Slaying of Hector that hero indicates
cremation as the mode of burial. "Give them my body back again, that
the Trojans and Trojans' wives grant me my due of fire after my death."
Perhaps this allusion to cremation, in the "original kernel" in the
Slaying of Hector, may be dismissed as a late borrowing from Book VII.
79, 80, where Hector makes conditions that the fallen hero shall be
restored to his friends when he challenges the Achaeans to a duel. But
whoever knows the curious economy by way of repetition that marks early
national epics has a right to regard the allusion to cremation (XXII,
342,343) as an example of this practice. Compare _La Chancun de
Williame_, lines 1041-1058 with lines 1140-1134. In both the dinner of
a knight who has been long deprived of food is described in passages
containing many identical lines. The poet, having found his formula,
uses it whenever occasion serves. There are several other examples in
the same epic. [Footnote: _Romania_, xxxiv. PP. 245, 246.] Repetitions
in Homer need not indicate late additions; the artifice is part of the
epic as it is of the ballad manner. If we are right, cremation is the
mode of burial even in "the original kernel." Hector, moreover, in the
kernel (XXII. 256-259) makes, before his final fight with Achilles,
the same proposal as he makes in his challenge to a duel (VII. 85 et
_seqq_.). The victor shall give back the body of the vanquished to his
friends, but how the friends are to bury it Hector does not say--in this
place. When dying, he does say (XXII. 342, 343).
In the kernel and all periods of expansion, funeral rites are described,
and in all the method is cremation, with a howe or a barrow. Thus the
method of cremation had come in as early as the "kernel," The Slaying
of Hector, and as early as the first expansions, and it lasted till the
period of the latest expansions, such as Books XXIII., XXIV.
But what is the approximate date of the various expansions of the
original poem? On that point Mr. Leaf gives his opinion. The Making of
the Arms of Achilles (Books XVIII., XIX. 1-39) is, with the Funeral of
Patroclus (XXIII. 1-256), in the second set of expansions, and is thus
two removes later than the original "kernel." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_,
vol. ii. p. xii.] Now this is the period--the Making of the Shield for
Achilles is, at least, in touch with the period--of "the eminently free
and naturalistic treatment which we find in the best Mycenaean work,
in the dagger blades, in the siege fragment, and notably in the Vaphio
cups," (which show long-haired men, not men close-cropped, as in the
daggers and siege fragment). [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p, 606.]
The poet of the age of the second expansions, then,' is at least
in touch with the work of the shaft grave and ages. He need not be
contemporary with that epoch, but "may well have had in his mind the
work of artists older than himself." It is vaguely possible that he may
have seen an ancient shield of the Mycenaean prime, and may be inspired
by that. [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii. pp. 606, 607.]
Moreover, and still more remarkable, the ordinary Homeric form of
cremation and howe-burial is even older than the period which, if not
contemporary with, is clearly reminiscent of, the art of the shaft
graves. For, in the period of the first expansions (VII. 1-3 I 2),
the form of burial is cremation, with a barrow or tumulus. [Footnote:
_Ibid_., vol. ii. p. xi. and pp. 606, 607.] Thus Mr. Leaf's opinion
might lead us to the conclusion that the usual Homeric form of burial
occurs in a period _PRIOR_ to an age in which the poet is apparently
reminiscent of the work of two early epochs--the epoch of shaft graves
and that of _THOLOS_ graves. If this be so, cremation and urn burial in
cairns may be nearly as old as the Mycenaean shaft graves, or as old
as the _THOLOS_ graves, and they endure into the age of the latest
expansions.
We must not press, however, opinions founded on the apparent technical
resemblance of the free style and coloured metal work on the shield of
Achilles, to the coloured metal work and free design on the daggers
of the Mycenaean shaft graves. It is enough for us to note that the
passages concerning burial, from the "kernel" itself, and also from the
earliest to the latest expansions, are all perfectly harmonious, and of
a single age--unless we are convinced by Helbig's objections. That age
must have been brief, indeed, for, before it arrives, the period of
_tholos_ graves, as at Vaphio, must expire, on one hand, while the
blending of cremation with inhumation, in the Dipylon age, must have
been evolved after the cremation age passed, on the other. That brief
intervening age, however, was the age of the _ILIAD_ and Odyssey. This
conclusion can only be avoided by alleging that late poets, however
recent and revolutionary, carefully copied the oldest epic model of
burial, while they innovated in almost every other point, so we are
told. We can go no further till we find an unrifled cairn burial
answering to Homeric descriptions. We have, indeed, in Thessaly, "a
large tumulus which contained a silver urn with burned remains." But
the accompanying pottery dated it in the second century B.C. [Footnote:
Ridgeway, _Early Age Of Greece_, vol. i. p. 491; _Journal of Hellenic
Studies, vol. xx_. pp. 20-25.] It is possible enough that all tumuli of
the Homeric period have been robbed by grave plunderers in the course
of the ages, as the Vikings are said to have robbed the cairns of
Sutherlandshire, in which they were not likely to find a rich reward
for their labours. A conspicuous howe invites robbery--the heroes of the
Saga, like Grettir, occasionally rob a howe--and the fact is unlucky for
the Homeric archaeologist.
We have now tried to show that, as regards (1) to the absence from
Homer of new religious and ritual ideas, or of very old ideas revived
in Ionia, (2) as concerns the clear conception of a loose form of
feudalism, with an Over-Lord, and (3) in the matter of burial, the
_Iliad_ and Odyssey are self-consistent, and bear the impress of a
single and peculiar moment of culture.
The fact, if accepted, is incompatible with the theory that the poets
both introduced the peculiar conditions of their own later ages and
also, on other occasions, consciously and consistently "archaised." Not
only is such archaising inconsistent with the art of an uncritical age,
but a careful archaiser, with all the resources of Alexandrian criticism
at his command, could not archaise successfully. We refer to Quintus
Smyrnaeus, author of the _Post Homerica_, in fourteen books. Quintus
does his best; but we never observe in him that _naif_ delight in
describing weapons and works of art, and details of law and custom which
are so conspicuous in Homer and in other early poets. He does give us
Penthesilea's great sword, with a hilt of ivory and silver; but of what
metal was the blade? We are not told, and the reader of Quintus will
observe that, though he knows [Greek: chalkos], bronze, as a synonym
for weapons, he scarcely ever, if ever, says that a sword or spear or
arrow-head was of bronze--a point on which Homer constantly insists.
When he names the military metal Quintus usually speaks of iron. He has
no interest in the constitutional and legal sides of heroic life, so
attractive to Homer.
Yet Quintus consciously archaises, in a critical age, with Homer as
his model. Any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists
archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the _ILIAD_
must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the
style of the Border ballads. If he succeeds in producing nothing that
will at once mark his work as modern, he will be more successful than
any poet who has made the experiment, and more successful than the most
ingenious modern forgers of gems, jewels, and terra-cottas. They seldom
deceive experts, and, when they do, other experts detect the deceit.
CHAPTER VII
HOMERIC ARMOUR
Tested by their ideas, their picture of political society, and their
descriptions of burial rites, the presumed authors of the alleged
expansions of the _Iliad_ all lived in one and the same period of
culture. But, according to the prevalent critical theory, we read in
the _Iliad_ not only large "expansions" of many dates, but also briefer
interpolations inserted by the strolling reciters or rhapsodists. "Until
the final literary redaction had come," says Mr. Leaf--that is about 540
B.C.--"we cannot feel sure that any details, even of the oldest work,
were secure from the touch of the latest poet." [Footnote: Leaf,
_Iliad_, vol. ii. p. ix.]
Here we are far from Mr. Leaf's own opinion that "the whole scenery of
the poems, the details of armour, palaces, dress, decoration ... had
become stereotyped, and formed a foundation which the Epic poet dared
not intentionally sap...." [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. i. p. xv.] We now
find [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii. p. ix.] that "the latest poet" saps
as much as he pleases down to the middle of the sixth century B.C.
Moreover, in the middle of the sixth century B.C., the supposed
editor employed by Hsistratus made "constant additions of transitional
passages," and added many speeches by Nestor, an ancestor of
Pisistratus.
Did these very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce
modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the _unus_ color?
We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That
the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual
custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of
centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, and Reichel
and his followers. [Footnote: Homerische Waffen. Von Wolfgang Reichel.
Wien, 1901.]
Reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no
defensive armour except the great Mycenaean shields; that the ponderous
shield made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the
Mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy
shield; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century
B.C., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that
new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old.
How the new poets could conceive of warriors as always in chariots,
whereas in practice they knew no war chariots, and yet could not
conceive of them without corslets which the original poet never saw, is
Reichel's secret. The new poets had in the old lays a plain example to
follow. They did follow it as to chariots and shields; as to corslets
and greaves they reversed it. Such is the Reichelian theory.
THE SHIELD
As regards armour, controversy is waged over the shield, corslet, and
bronze greaves. In Homer the shield is of leather, plated with bronze,
and of bronze is the corslet. No shields of bronze plating and no bronze
corslets have been found in Mycenaean excavations.
We have to ask, do the Homeric descriptions of shields tally with the
representations of shields in works of art, discovered in the graves
of Mycenae, Spata in Attica, Vaphio in Sparta, and elsewhere? If the
descriptions in Homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they
vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes
consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused
by late rhapsodists in the Iron Age, who keep the great obsolete shields
and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day,
say 800-600 B.C.--gear unknown to the early singers?
It may be best to inquire, first, what does the poet, or what do
the poets, say about shields? and, next, to examine the evidence of
representations of shields in Mycenaean art; always remembering that the
poet does not pretend to live, and beyond all doubt does not live, in
the Mycenaean prime, and that the testimony of the tombs is liable to be
altered by fresh discoveries.
In _Iliad_, II. 388, the shield (_aspis_) is spoken of as "covering a
man about" ([Greek: _amphibrotae_]), while, in the heat of battle, the
baldric (_telamon_), or belt of the shield, "shall be wet with sweat."
The shield, then, is not an Ionian buckler worn on the left arm, but is
suspended by a belt, and covers a man, or most of him, just as Mycenaean
shields are suspended by belts shown in works of art, and cover the
body and legs. This (II. 388) is a general description applying to the
shields of all men who fight from chariots. Their great shield answers
to the great mediaeval shield of the knights of the twelfth century, the
"double targe," worn suspended from the neck by a belt. Such a shield
covers a mounted knight's body from mouth to stirrup in an ivory
chessman of the eleventh to twelfth century A.D., [Footnote: _Catalogue
of Scottish National Antiquities_, p. 375.] so also in the Bayeux
tapestry, [Footnote: Gautier, _Chanson de Roland_. Seventh edition, pp.
393, 394.] and on seals. Dismounted men have the same shield (p. 132).
The shield of Menelaus (III. 348) is "equal in all directions," which we
might conceive to mean, mathematically "circular," as the words do mean
that. A shield is said to have "circles," and a spear which grazes
a shield--a shield which was _[Greek: panton eesae]_, "every way
equal"--rends both circles, the outer circle of bronze, and the inner
circle of leather (_Iliad_, XX. 273-281). But the passage is not
unjustly believed to be late; and we cannot rely on it as proof
that Homer knew circular shields among others. The epithet _[Greek:
eukuklykos]_, "of good circle," is commonly given to the shields, but
does not mean that the shield was circular, we are told, but merely that
it was "made of circular plates." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
573.] As for the shield of Menelaus, and other shields described in the
same words, "every way equal," the epithet is not now allowed to mean
"circular." Mr. Leaf, annotating _Iliad_, I. 306, says that this sense
is "intolerably mathematical and prosaic," and translates _[Greek:
panton eesae]_ as "well balanced on every side." Helbig renders the
epithets in the natural sense, as "circular." [Footnote: Helbig,
_Homerische Epos_, p. 315; cf., on the other hand, p. 317, Note I.]
To the rendering "circular" it is objected that a circular shield of,
say, four feet and a half in diameter, would be intolerably heavy and
superfluously wide, while the shields represented in Mycenaean art are
not circles, but rather resemble a figure of eight, in some cases, or a
section of a cylinder, in others, or, again, a door (Fig. 5, p. 130).
What Homer really meant by such epithets as "equal every way," "very
circular," "of a good circle," cannot be ascertained, since Homeric
epithets of the shield, which were previously rendered "circular," "of
good circle," and so on, are now translated in quite other senses, in
order that Homeric descriptions may be made to tally with Mycenaean
representations of shields, which are never circular as represented in
works of art. In this position of affairs we are unable to determine the
shape, or shapes, of the shields known to Homer.
A scholar's rendering of Homer's epithets applied to the shield is
obliged to vary with the variations of his theory about the shield.
Thus, in 1883, Mr. Leaf wrote, "The poet often calls the shield by names
which seem to imply that it was round, and yet indicates that it was
large enough to cover the whole body of a man.... In descriptions the
round shape is always implied." The words which indicated that the
shield (or one shield) "really looked like a tower, and really reached
from neck to ankles" (in two or three cases), were "received by the poet
from the earlier Achaean lays." "But to Homer the warriors appeared as
using the later small round shield. His belief in the heroic strength of
the men of old time made it quite natural to speak of them as bearing
a shield which at once combined the later circular shape and the old
heroic expanse...." [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies, iv. pp._
283-285.]
Here the Homeric words which naturally mean "circular" or "round" are
accepted as meaning "round" or "circular." Homer, it is supposed, in
practice only knows the round shields of the later age, 700 B.C., so he
calls shields "round," but, obedient to tradition, he conceives of them
as very large.
But, after the appearance of Reichel's speculations, the Homeric words
for "round" and "circular" have been explained as meaning something
else, and Mr. Leaf, in place of maintaining that Homer knew no shields
but round shields, now writes (1900), "The small circular shield of
later times...is equally unknown to Homer, with a very few curious
exceptions," which Reichel discovered--erroneously, as we shall later
try to show. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.]
Thus does science fluctuate! Now Homer knows in practice none but light
round bucklers, dating from about 700 B.C.; again, he does not know
them at all, though they were habitually used in the period at which
the later parts of his Epic were composed. We shall have to ask, how
did small round bucklers
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