HOMER AND THE CYCLIC POEMS
Few subjects are more recalcitrant to lucidity of treatment than the so-called "Cyclic poems." On the various meanings of the word "Cyclic" as applied to poetry by the ancients, very much has been written.[1] Into that question we need not enter, as we here call "Cyclic" all these old epics on the Trojan theme (outside of the Iliad and Odyssey) of which we have only fragments, in quotations by later Greek writers, and in fragmentary epitomes. Though these remains, including the prose of the Greek authors who cite and comment on them, occupy but forty-five pages of a book in small octavo,[2] the fragments suffice to prove that the lost epics are far apart as the poles from the Iliad and Odyssey in taste, tone, narrative art, descriptions of religious rites, customs, usages, and treatment of the heroic characters. This was plain to Greek commentators, and is even more obvious to modern criticism.
The questions, therefore, arise, were these Cyclic epics older in matter (as representing a more archaic tradition) than our Homer; are they older, or more recent, in composition, or are they and our Homer coeval? Mr. Monro expresses decisively the general opinion on these points. The Cyclic poems are by "the poets who carried on the traditions of Homeric art in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C."[3] He collects from them many incidents, beliefs, usages, and proofs of geographical knowledge "of a post-Homeric type."[4] Of these, from one poem, the Cypria, he selects five sets of examples. These represent (i) human sacrifice; (2) geographical knowledge much beyond that exhibited in Iliad and Odyssey; (3) interest in magic, which is un-Homeric; (4) the introduction of a non-Homeric hero, Palamedes, of the first rank, of essential importance, and the "Cause of Wrath" of Zeus against the Achaeans; (5) hero-worship; (6) I add, introduction of a goddess unknown to Homer, but "a concrete figure of ancient Attic religion;"[5] (7) introduction of the puerile fairy element in Märchen or folk-tales. Of this trait, and of magical incidents, there are several examples. (8) loves of gods and goddesses, who take the forms of various animals. From other Cyclic poems he selects other instances of these non-Homeric types, and also un-Homeric apparitions of men who have been duly burned and buried; and cases of the purification of homicides by blood of pigs, wholly unknown to Homer.
All these traits of the Cyclic poems, with others, such as the invention of pseudo-historic genealogies, as of Thersites, are non-Homeric. Some, such as the genealogy of Thersites, due to the manie cyclique, with the extended geographical outlook, are post-Homeric. But the others, the religious and magical notions— hero-worship, the ghost belief, blood-purification,—though later in record than our Homer (we assume), are even earlier in development, and are beliefs and rites of the pre-Homeric population. (See "Who were the Ionians?" and Appendix, On "Expurgation.")
Now much confusion is caused by the term "old." The poems earlier in composition may represent Achaean ideas then new to Greece; the poems later in composition may, and do, contain ideas old in Greece, but alien to Homer's Achaeans. Meanwhile, Mr. Monro, as we saw, regards the actual Cyclic poems as works of poets of the eighth to seventh centuries B.C., who carried "on the traditions of Homeric art" in Ionia. This means that they take up Achaean themes and traditions and heroic characters, and use them in new poems "composed with direct reference to the Iliad."[6] They lead up to the Iliad by a long chronicle of previous events in the Cypria, and continue the Homeric narrative in their other epics. But they interlard the narrative with their own rites, beliefs, their own Attic goddess (Nemesis of Rhamnus), and their own non-Achaean heroes, such as the Attic sons of Theseus, and the great Nauplian, Palamedes. They also add silly elements of Märchen, and pseudo-historic genealogies. They carve and cook the great Achaean joint, and serve up with Attic and Ionian sauce and trimmings.
This is natural, for the Attic people, of the pre-Achaean population, had not, as far as I know, any epic tradition of their own. They knew that they were not engaged in any one of the alleged great collective efforts and expeditions with which the Achaeans credited themselves. Some legends were dynastic adaptations of Märchen, with kings and princesses changed into birds; or accounts of their relations with Thrace, or explanations of the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries. They had, too, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, an adventure of an individual hero of Märchen; but that ran contrary to all Achaean and Cretan traditions, as we have seen. The Cyclic poets were mere imitators of the Achaean epic: epic tradition of their own, the people of Attica and their Ionian colonists (confessedly mixed with a mongrel multitude) had none.
Mr. Leaf takes the same view. He speaks of the Cyclic epics as "the imitative poems which dealt with the old Tale of Troy, and essayed to complete Homer."[7]
But a contradictory opinion seems to be held by von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and, as I understand, by Mr. Murray. The celebrated German scholar argued thus: Before criticism arose in Greece, almost all ancient Epic poetry, and the Hymns, were attributed to "Homer." As early as Herodotus, however, we find that historian regarding the Cypria (a chronicle of the whole events before the opening of the Iliad) as not by the author of the Iliad.
As time went on, and criticism advanced, the Iliad and Odyssey alone were assigned to Homer, while the Cyclic poems were attributed to various authors, such as Arctinus, Stasinus, and Lesches. The attributions are late, various, perhaps never "evidential"; but criticism came to recognise our Iliad and Odyssey as alone Homeric. The other epics, the Cyclics, were thought to be of a later age, and by inferior hands.
This view was evolved by Greek critics from Herodotus to Aristotle and Aristarchus.
On the other hand, according to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Homer and the Cyclic poems were all qualitatively equivalent, and more or less contemporaneous. A statement of this hypothesis, which deliberately rejects the views of Greek criticism, shall be quoted from von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.[8]
"The epos" (the whole mass of early epic poetry) "is by Homer," so says tradition. "The criticism of the subsequent centuries broke off from the mass of epos one portion after another: one after another must go, because it is inconsistent with the conception which has been framed of Homer. At last the Iliad alone abides. The only step that remained to be taken was to reject (athetiren) the Iliad also: this step the ancients refused to take, for fear of falling into the abyss. But the step has been taken long ago. The Iliad, as it stands, is not the work of one man, or of one century: it is not one work at all. The Iliad is nothing but a κυκλικὸν ποίημα. But we are in no abyss, no bottomless pit. On the other hand, we regain firm ground, which ancient criticism had in childish rashness abandoned. The Iliad is just as much and as little Homeric as the Cypria. There is no qualitative difference between ὁμηρικόν and κυκλικόν."
Now that careless child, Aristotle, was of a different opinion. He saw that the Iliad varies absolutely in nature from some of the Cyclics, and the fact is conspicuous. The Iliad also varies, as the scholiasts observed, from the Cyclics historically; varies in manners, rites, religion, taste, and geographical knowledge. All these facts are absolutely demonstrable. So great a critic as Aristotle, and, we may add, so unprejudiced a critic, for he lived long before Wolf, could not but remark the essential differences between the Iliad, on the one hand, and some of the Ionian Cyclic poems on the other, as far as quality is concerned. Into the differences which archaeology and anthropology detect, Aristotle did not enter, for he was writing on the Art of Poetry. Unity in a poem, he said, is not obtained merely by the selection of a single hero (the Cypria is so far like Vanity Fair that it is a chronicle "without a hero," unless the hero be Paris or Palamedes). Unity of action is, says Aristotle, essential to an Epic, and Homer observes this unity, grouping all the events round one motif, the Wrath of Achilles, or the Return of Odysseus. The Cypria has no such unity; it simply ends where the Iliad begins.
Unity, concentration, "with beginning, middle, and end," is as necessary, Aristotle holds, to epic as to dramatic poetry. The Trojan war, to be sure, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but the whole could not be treated in an Epic under poetic conditions of space. One motif is therefore selected by Homer, with diversifying episodes. The author of the Cypria did not adopt the true method of epic: in the Iliad and Odyssey are subjects but for one or two tragedies; whereas the Cypria, extending over many years and dealing with many regions, yields subjects for many, and the Little Iliad for eight or more plays, which are enumerated.[9]
We would not now state the case precisely in the terms of Aristotle: and the Attic tragedians possibly chose so many topics from the Cyclics, so few from the Iliad, partly because the Athenians, as chiefs of the Ionian name, preferred Ionian versions of the legends; while, as Republicans, they used the Ionian term for Agamemnon and Menelaus as "tyrants"; and kept up the singular Ionian feud against Odysseus, preferring to him Aias, a neighbour of Athens; Philoctetes, oppressed by the "tyrants"; and Palamedes, the victim of the tyrants and of their minion Odysseus.
Such were the tastes of the Athenians; but we see that Aristotle observes the essential difference in poetic quality between the Iliad and Odyssey, which are Epics, while some of the Cyclic poems are mere metrical chronicles.
The difference between epic and versified chronicle is, I think, that which divides Barbour's The Brus and the Wallace of Blind Harry (poetical chronicles like the Heracleis, the late poem on the history of Heracles), from epics like the Chanson de Roland with its one motive, "The Wrath of Ganelon," its origins and consequences. Our Iliad, in Aristotle's opinion, then, is an epic; the Cypria, the Heracleis, and so on, are not epics, but rather are versified chronicles. In Mr. Murray's opinion, too, the Iliad is an epic, the Cypria is "an old chronicle poem." But this only proves, to his mind, that the Iliad is the further developed.[10] "They grew together side by side" or centuries; but the Iliad, as we have it, is, he thinks, of later and more accomplished art. Mr. Murray writes: "In its actual working up, however, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term."[11]
Now, as far as analogy serves our turn, the "poetic chronicle" is in a later stage of development than the epic. Thus Barbour's The Brus, or the Argonautic poem of the very late Apollonius, is in a much later stage of development than the old Germanic epics, or Beowulf, which selects two main events from the career of the hero. Again, versified chronicles in France are much later in development than the epic, the Chanson de Roland, "The Wrath of Ganelon."
However, as analogies are never satisfactory, let us be content to note that the Iliad confessedly differs in character from the Cypria, as the epic differs from the verse-chronicle. On this point von Wilamowitz Moellendorff appears to agree, as does Mr. Murray, who studies the subject in the spirit of the learned German. To repeat his statement, he writes, "These various books or masses of tradition in verse form were growing up side by side for centuries."[12]
Now, "masses of tradition" certainly grew up through many centuries, before and after Homer's time; but the Iliad is not merely "a mass of tradition." It is a splendid work of art, fashioned, in our view, by a great poet, out of masses of tradition, while what we know of the Cypria is a compilation, partly from hints in the Iliad and Odyssey, with popular tales or Märchen thrown in; and is animated by a distinct tendenz, a partisan desire to debase the favourite heroes of Homer, and to exalt a hero, Palamedes, who, to myself, seems intended to represent the Ionian share in the Trojan war, neglected as it is by Homer. To justify these criticisms as most probable on the evidence, it is necessary to offer an analysis of the Cypria, as far as its contents are known to us from fragments and epitomes.
The Cypria opened thus: Zeus takes counsel on the problem of over-population. He "resolves to relieve of her burden Earth that nourishes all, by raising the great strife of the Ilian war, that death may lighten the weight: the heroes were slain in Troyland, but the Will of Zeus was accomplished."[13]
The following account of the early part of the Cypria is given by the Scholiast in the famous "Venice A" manuscript of the Iliad. He enters here into more details than Proclus in his epitome of the work. "They say that Earth, burdened by the abundance of men, all impious as they were, prayed to Zeus to be relieved. Zeus then caused the Theban war, whereby he destroyed many. Later again he called Momus (Mockery) into council, 'the counsel of Zeus,' Homer styles it, though he might have destroyed the human race altogether by deluges and thunderbolts. But Momus prevented this, and suggested to Zeus the marriage of Thetis with a mortal, and the begetting of a beautiful daughter from these two causes arose war involving both Hellenes and barbarians, from which time Earth was lightened of her burden, so many men were slain. The narrative is by Stasinus, the author of the Cypria..."[14]
In this version Themis is not mentioned as the adviser of Zeus; perhaps she suggested the Theban, and Momus the Trojan war.
In the epitome of Proclus, Eris (Strife) comes among the Gods at the bridal feast of Peleus and Thetis. Of this feast one detail remains in a fragment of the Cypria, which the Scholiast gives in prose. Cheiron the Centaur cut an ash-tree for a spear, as a wedding present to Peleus. Athene polished it, and Hephaestus forged the point. This spear, which Achilles alone could wield, is mentioned as the gift of Cheiron to Achilles in the Iliad (xvi. 143, 144, and xix. 389-90). If, then, we find in the Cypria decisive proof that there it is later than the Iliad, we may suppose the author to borrow here from our Homer, and to add the previous division of labour in the spear-making. As a bronze-smith Hephaestus only makes the metal point of the weapon. At the bridal feast, Eris rouses a dispute between Aphrodite, Athene, and Hera as to superiority in beauty.
To return to the Epitome of Proclus. The three contending goddesses are led by Hermes to Mount Ida, and Paris pronounces Aphrodite to be the most beautiful; he has been won by her promise of Helen as his wife. This is suggested by Iliad, xxiv. 29, 30, where the passage, according to some, suggests that all three goddesses wooed Paris, and that he preferred Aphrodite. But this is wholly out of keeping with the Greek conception of Hera and Athene; and the lines in Iliad, xxiv., must refer to the cause of the ferocity with which these two slighted goddesses persecute Troy, though Athene was its patron. No other cause has been adduced.
The counsel of Zeus could not have caused the Trojan war merely by making the goddesses quarrel. It was necessary to beget "the beautiful daughter," whom Aphrodite was to offer as a bride to Paris. According to the Cypria, this fairest of women, Helen, wife of Menelaus, was not the daughter of Zeus and Leda, but of Zeus and Nemesis; in Homer, Nemesis is little more than the emotion of virtuous indignation, she is not, as in the Cypria, a chaste and pretty nymph, "fair-tressed Nemesis." Her does Zeus pursue and, says the inept author of the Cypria, "the feelings of Nemesis were torn by shame and nemesis" (indignation). Mr. Murray devotes eight pages to the ethical meaning of Αὶδώς (shame) and of Νέμεσις (righteous indignation).[15] Surely we must recognise a great difference in manner between Homer, to whom nemesis means "righteous indignation," and the author of the Cypria, to whom Nemesis is a fair-tressed nymph? Homer, it is true, knows themis as customary law, and Themis, a goddess. But she is not a fair-tressed being who flees from her lover in a series of animal disguises.
Later Greeks, puzzled by the contending versions of our Homer and of the Cypria, declared that Nemesis was, indeed, the mother of Helen, but that Leda, wife of Tyndareus, was her foster-mother and brought her up.[16] Meanwhile Nemesis, in the Cypria, is not a mere personification of the sentiment of nemesis, or righteous indignation, but is, as we know, "a concrete figure of ancient Attic tradition," "a primitive goddess of Rhamnus," in Attica, associated with, or a local form of, "the wild Artemis" of pre-Achaean religion, "with deep roots in local worship." Nemesis had a famous statue at Rhamnus, attributed by Pausanias to Pheidias; a fragment of the face, in the British Museum, proves that it was at least of the school of Pheidias. She held in her hand a spray of the apple-tree, an attribute of Aphrodite, and the stag of Artemis was an ornament of her crown. She was also "a queen over death and the dead," a chthonic characteristic.[17] The Nemesis of Rhamnus was thus like the very primitive Artemis of Brauron in Attica. At Smyrna, where the population was very mixed, Pausanias mentions two Nemeses.[18]
We see that all this of Nemesis, in the Cypria, is at once apart as the poles from the Nemesis of Homer, virtuous indignation personified, and is also an Ionian celebration of an Attic goddess of the pre-Achaean faith.
In the Cypria, Aphrodite, mother of Aeneas (in Homer), sends him with Paris. Landing in Lacedaemon, Paris is welcomed by the brothers of Helen, and in Sparta by Menelaus, who then sails to Crete. (Different reasons for this voyage are given by later writers.) Paris then seduces Helen, who is brought to him by Aphrodite (as in Iliad, iii.); they take away property of Menelaus (as in Iliad, vii.). (The italics mark probable hints from the Iliad.)
The pair are wedded in Troy, where the story leaves them, and very needlessly goes back to Lacedaemon. Here are Helen's brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, who fall into a feud about cattle with Idas and Lynceus, the keen-eyed. Lynceus is merely the Keen-Eye, who can see through everything, a common personage in Märchen. The brothers of Helen hide themselves in a hollow tree, but Lynceus climbs to the crest of Mount Taygetus and "looks over all the isle of Pelops," that is, Peloponnesus. Homer never speaks of the country as a geographical unity, nor uses the word "Peloponnesus"; this is manifestly a post-Homeric term.[19] Idas slays Castor; Polydeuces slays both Lynceus and Idas, and Zeus assigns to Castor and Polydeuces immortality on alternate days. This is wholly unknown to the Iliad, both heroes are dead and buried in Iliad, iii. 243, 244. Their alternate immortality with their divine honours, mentioned in Odyssey, xi. 298-304, may be an interpolation (a kind of footnote in verse); it is, at all events, non-Iliadic. Homer knows the deaths of the two brothers, at home in Lacedaemon: we cannot tell whether he knew about the Keen-Eye of Märchen, Lynceus.
In the Cypria, Menelaus is now informed, in Crete, about the flight of Helen: he returns to the isle of Pelops and consults Agamemnon about collecting an army. Nestor, called to council, abounds in anecdotic digressions (whether the author borrows this trait from the Iliad or the Iliad from him, it is not hard to guess!). Among Nestor's themes—for he simply poured out stories—are Epopeus and his seduction of the daughter of Lycus; Oedipous; the madness of Heracles; and the tale of Theseus (whom Homer steadily avoids), and Ariadne. Theseus, as an Athenian, is dear to the Ionian poet: Homer ignores him.
The Atridae go through Greece collecting the heroes. Odysseus feigns madness with a view to shirking the war; he ploughs the sand, and Palamedes detects his sanity by placing the child Telemachus in the way of the plough. Here we have a hero, Palamedes, unknown to Homer, and an equally unknown Odysseus who is a coward, but is baffled by the superior wisdom of Palamedes. It is obvious that the poet of the Cypria is here introducing an un-Homeric character to serve his private ends: his methods are unveiled in Chapter XVII., "The Story of Palamedes."
The Cypria now relates the First gathering of the Greek forces at Aulis, with the story from the Iliad of the serpent and the sparrows, and the prophecy of Calchas. The ships, says the Iliad, "had been gathering but a day or two at Aulis," and the host was at a sacrifice, when a wonderful serpent came forth from the altar and killed eight nestlings of a sparrow, with their mother. Zeus then turned the serpent into a stone. Calchas prophesied, "we shall fight nine years there (αῢθι, at Troy), but take the city in the tenth year."[20]
Such was Homer's opinion, the Greeks were warring in Troyland against Ilios for nine years and more. But the author of the Cypria desired to fill up the nine years before the Iliad opens in some way, and this is how he did it. (Italics mark possible hints from Homer.) Learning from the Odyssey (xi. 519-521) that Eurypylus, a Mysian chief, son of Telephus, came to the aid of Troy after the death of Achilles, he makes the Achaeans land in Teuthrania, and supposing the town to be Troy, they attack it. But Telephus comes to the rescue, and is wounded by Achilles. A storm falls on the fleet, and the ships are scattered. Achilles arrives in Scyros and weds Deidameia. The storm that sends Achilles to marry and beget a son in Scyros was an easy explanation of Achilles' own statement,[21] that he had a son at Scyros.[22]
In the Cypria, Achilles later returns from Scyros to Argos, apparently "Pelasgic Argos," that is, Phthia, to his home. The wounded Telephus, as advised by prophecy, follows Achilles thither, and Achilles' spear, or rust from the spear, in Dictys, heals the wound it had inflicted: by "sympathetic magic," unknown to Homer. Achilles did the healing, because it was prophesied that Telephus would pilot the fleet to Troy; whereas, in Homer, Calchas directs the voyage.
The author of the Cypria, who is filling up his nine imaginary years of the wanderings of the Greeks, now adopts the very stupid device of mustering the scattered fleet at Aulis for the second time. This enables him to please an Ionian audience by introducing their favourite incident, the sacrifice of a princess: Attic traditions harp eternally on this un-Homeric horror. Agamemnon shoots a stag, and boasts himself a better shot than Artemis. The angry goddess sends a tempest unceasing, the ships cannot sail, and Calchas (who dared not do such a thing, Iliad, i. 78, 79) says that a daughter of Agamemnon must be sacrificed, Iphigeneia. This name was, at least in later days, a name of the homicidal Artemis of Tauris, on the north shore of the Euxine. But Tauris, as Mr. Monro justly observes, was not known to Homer. In the Cypria, Artemis substitutes a fawn for Iphigeneia, and carries the maid "to the Tauroi," making her immortal. "This form of the story," the form in the Cypria, "is necessarily later than the Greek settlements on the northern coasts of the Euxine."[23] The connection between Iphigeneia and a Tauric Artemis is thus late, un-Homeric, and Ionian. Homer (Iliad, ix. 145) knows no Iphigeneia, but the daughters of Agamemnon are Chrysothemis, Laodice, and Iphianassa. Even so early a poet as Stesichorus could not account for Iphigeneia as a daughter of Agamemnon. He therefore, says Pausanias, made her a foster-child of Clytaemnestra, a child of Helen by Theseus (who, in Attic myth, captured her), and Helen hands her baby over to the wife of Agamemnon. Euphorion of Chalcis, Alexander of Pleuron, and the people of Argos generally, maintained this theory, and at Argos they showed a temple of Ilithyia, founded by Helen after her safe delivery![24] Tzetzes, the father of nonsense, makes Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon and Chryseis; she is sacrificed, or threatened with sacrifice, during the return from Troy.
However, the Ionian author of the Cypria cannot deny himself an allusion to human sacrifice. Iphigeneia was brought to Aulis, he says, under the pretence that she was to wed Achilles. (See Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis. He may be following the Cypria.) She was tempted by letters forged by Odysseus, says Dictys Cretensis, who may be following the Cypria.
The Greeks, the storm abating, sail to Tenedos, where Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and carried away to howl in Lemnos. This might be taken from Iliad, ii. 718-725. At Troy on landing, the Greeks lose Protesilaus, slain by Hector. Here again the Iliad may supply the fact, not naming Hector. The author of the Cypria has now, we see, filled up his empty nine years by various expedients and delays. He next tells of the embassy to ask for the return of Helen and the stolen property; the embassy he could get from Iliad, iii. 204-207: a subsequent fight at the wall of Troy from Iliad, vi. 435-439, where it is described briefly by Andromache.
At what precise period the Greek commissariat took the form of three girls with fairy gifts, who produced corn, wine, and oil, is uncertain; but the incident was in the Cypria, on the authority of Pherecydes.[25]
The Cypria says that Aphrodite contrived an interview between Helen and Achilles, Thetis was chaperon, and that Achilles restrained the Greeks, who wished to go home. That Achilles sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus, and sent Lykaon captive to Lemnos, was to be read in the Iliad (xx. 92, xxi. 55 ff.), where also the story of Briseis and Chryseis, given in the Cypria, was to be found. But not in the Iliad was Palamedes, with his murder by Odysseus and Diomede, whence, in the Cypria, came the will of Zeus to sunder Achilles from the Achaean host.[26]
We now perceive how much of his material the Ionian author of the Cypria could obtain from out Homer. We note the marks of non-Achaeanism and lateness, and of Ionian geographical knowledge, in the reference to Tauris; in the Attic Nemesis; in the per-sonifications of moral qualities; in the intended human sacrifice; in the Märchen; in the telling of the tale of Theseus and Ariadne; in the hero-worship; and in the introduction of the Nauplian anti—Odyssean Palamedes. The lateness of the poem declares itself also in the naming of the Peloponnesus. The use of very childish Märchen is un-Homeric: Homer uses Märchen to better purpose. (See "Homer and the Saga.")
Perhaps few who have had the patience to read through this tedious analysis of the vast and wandering metrical pseudo-chronicle, the Cypria, with its marks of bad taste, Ionicism, and lateness, will maintain that, in character, it is on a level with our Homer, or is in age contemporary with his society.
Weary as is the task, we must in conscience expose the similar lateness and Ionic character of the other Cyclic poems on the Trojan affairs.
The authorship of the Aethiopis was attributed to Arctinus of Miletus. Tradition called him "Homer's pupil."[27] As condensed in the summary of Proclus, the Aethiopis was a mere doppelgänger of the Iliad. Taking up the tale after Hector's death, and under the shadow of Hector's prophecy of the doom of Achilles, "in the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee in the Scaean gate,"[28] the Aethiopis fills out the story.
The Amazon, Penthesilea, comes to aid Troy, and is slain by Achilles, who is stirred by pity for the beauty of his victim. For this Thersites taunts him, and he slays the wretch: so he needs purification, in accordance with Ionian ideas.
The Aethiopis went on to mark the usual distinction between the Homeric and Ionian epic. Diomede took up the blood-feud for Thersites, and, in Homeric law, Achilles must have paid the blood-wyte, or gone into exile, or "tholed the feud." Even the Scholiast[29] knew that this was the Homeric (as it was the Icelandic) law. But the Ionian makes Achilles sail to Lesbos, to sacrifice to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, and be purified (in pig's blood probably) by Odysseus.
Thus the Ionian makes us certain that he was of an un-Homeric state of society. He dates himself in similar fashion, when he makes Memnon (who, as in the Odyssey, slays Antilochus) receive after death the gift of immortality; and when he makes Thetis carry the body of Achilles (burned in the Odyssey) to be the worshipped hero of the isle of Leuke in the Euxine. There, when Ionian colonists reached the Euxine, Achilles became a ruling religious hero, recognised by Alcaeus (Fr. 49). "The Locrians in Italy," according to Pausanias, had a cult of Aias, whose armed ghost wounded Leonymus of Croton in battle. (In post-Homeric Greece the ghosts of heroes appeared in mortal wars, as St. James fought for Cortes against the Aztecs. Homer could conceive no such folly.) The Delphic oracle dispatched Leonymus to Leuke, where he found Achilles happily married to Helen, who sent by Leonymus a message to the poet Stesichorus, that had libelled her. Patroclus and Antilochus were with Achilles in Leukê, etc. etc.[30]
If the Aethiopis is earlier than these Ionian colonies, if Leuke in fable meant "the isle of light," then the colonists identified the Euxine isle with the isle of light, and so worshipped the dead Achilles of Leuke. The Ionian trading cities, of which Miletus was chief, had begun to adopt the new religious ideas that grew up, after the Homeric age, in honour of the national heroes.[31] It is more probable that the Ionians had never dropped the rites and religions of the conquered races, and merely added Achilles to Erechtheus. They had no spite against Achilles, who had never, like Agamemnon and Diomede, been their master.
For the rest, the story of the Aethiopis is conducted on the lines of the Iliad, as far as the events included in the poems, ending with the death of Achilles in the Scaean gate, permit imitation; and all concludes with a lament or regret, a funeral, and funeral games, as in the Iliad.
The Little Iliad contains several main incidents, of which seven were, or may have been, expansions of hints in the Odyssey and Iliad. The additions are the theft of the Palladium, a kind of fetich ignored by Homer; the magical power of the arrows of Philoctetes over the fate of Troy; the introduction of Sinon, as followed by Virgil in the Aeneid; and a long story about Aethra, mother of Theseus and slave of Helen in Troy, and about her grandsons, sons of Theseus, whose presence in the Achaean host is unknown to Homer. In Iliad, iii. 144, Helen has, in an interpolated line, an attendant, "Aethra, daughter of Pittheus." This was enough for the Ionian poets; for, as Aethra was the name of the mother of Theseus, "naturally the later poets took advantage of it in order to find a place for the Attic heroes in the main body of epic narrative."[32]
Mr. Leaf makes Iliad, iii. 144, "a clear case of an interpolation of a later myth," a myth introduced here to please the Athenians. Aethra and the rape of Helen by Theseus, to avenge which the brothers of Helen carried the mother of Theseus away, were depicted and described on the chest of Cypselus,[33] and painted by Polygnotus, following the Little Iliad of Lesches, on the Leschê at Delphi. But here Aethra was with the Homeric maids of Helen (Panthalis and Electra), but was being recognised by her un-Homeric grandson, son of Theseus, Demophon. According to the Little Iliad, Aethra escaped to the Greek camp: by permission of Helen, Agamemnon restores Aethra to her grandsons.[34]
Ionia could only drag fair Helen into the Athenian legend of Theseus by averring that he carried her off when she was a child, and that she was brought back to the house of Tyndareus her sire by her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces. They also seized Aethra, the mother of Theseus, who accompanied Paris and Helen to Troy, and was still in Helen's service after the ten years of the leaguer. Now as Theseus in his prime was contemporary with the youth of Nestor, and as Nestor was, say, seventy in the tenth year of the war, the mother of Theseus must have been more than a centenarian when she was the suivante of Helen, in Iliad, Book iii. But Ionians stuck at nothing in the effort to bring themselves into touch with the great Achaean enterprise; that is, stuck at nothing except at interpolating their fables into the Iliad. They could perhaps insert, as in Iliad, iii. 144, a mention or two of Theseus, and some lines on Attic heroines in Odyssey, xi.
There can be no more conclusive proof that Ionians did not possess the power of adding what they pleased to the Achaean epics.
The Ilion Persis, or Sack of Troy, was a poem attributed, like the Aethiopis, to Arctinus of Miletus. Herein occurs the affair of the Wooden Horse, familiar to readers of the Odyssey in the lay of Demodocus at the board of Alcinous.[35] Demodocus tells enough to serve Arctinus with a theme which only needs expansion. The story was given much as Virgil and Quintus Smyrnaeus render it; we have the portent of Laocoon and the serpents, which causes Aeneas and his men (not as in Virgil) to retire to Mount Ida. In the song of Demodocus, Odysseus gets most of the credit of success; the hero in Odyssey, xi. 504-537, gives the glory to Neoptolemus—and himself. In Arctinus, Odysseus murders the child of Hector, Astyanax (an un-Homeric cruelty); Odysseus is always degraded by the Ionians and usually by the Attic tragedians. Aias Oileus's son enrages Athene by dragging down her image while struggling with Cassandra; hence the sorrows of the Achaeans on their way home. The sons of Theseus carry to Athens their aged grandmother, Aethra. Could anything be more characteristic of the Athenians than the fact that the heroes looking out from the Horse, in a bronze group on the Acropolis, were Attic, the two apocryphal sons of Theseus, the Athenian Menestheus, and Teucer, "who expresses the Athenian claim to Salamis"?[36]
By a truly Ionian touch, Polyxena, daughter of Priam, is sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. It seems probable that the Iliou Persis really took up the story with the suicide of Aias (from this part of the poem a fragment is quoted in the scholia to Iliad, xi. 515),[37] and that the poem contained the whole prowess of Neoptolemus at Troy, and the affair of the bringing back of Philoctetes from Lemnos. The prominence of Aeneas expands the hint in Iliad, xx. 307, 308, the prophecy of Poseidon that he and his children will long rule over the Trojans. Throughout the Iliad, Aeneas is protected by Aphrodite, and is looked on jealously by Priam, as a Stewart might look on a Hamilton; for, failing issue of Priam, Aeneas succeeds to the Trojan crown. The whole poem, wherever Aeneas appears, is affected by the tradition that he did continue the Trojan line.
The sacrifice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles appears to be peculiar to Arctinus. It would be interesting to know whether or not any Ionian poem was the source of the story of Polyxena as given by Dictys Cretensis. In Dictys, Patroclus moves Achilles to be reconciled to Agamemnon: the army goes into winter quarters, and Trojans and Achaeans meet on friendly terms in the grove of Thymbraean Apollo; Achilles sees Polyxena at a sacrifice, and falls in love with her. Hector offers her as the price of his treason to the Achaeans, which annoys Achilles. At Polyxena's request he later restores the body of Hector to Priam. At a subsequent meeting in Apollo's temple, Paris stabs Achilles to death. After the capture of Troy, Odysseus advises the sacrifice of Polyxena to the ghost of Achilles, but Euripides and later writers make the ghost or voice of Achilles demand her death. In other respects, as to the fate of the Trojan ladies, Dictys follows Arctinus.
All this tale deeply affected the mediaeval tale of Troy. Meanwhile, we do not know why in Arctinus, Polyxena was chosen as the γέρας, or honourable gift, of the dead Achilles. The idea may only have been that, while surviving leaders received each a damsel, the spirit of the great chief should not be deprived of its reward. No idea can be less Achaean, less Homeric, but it is congenial to the Ionian spirit.
The fact of the sacrifice would easily suggest, to still later writers, that in his life days Achilles loved Polyxena, and was loved by her; for Philostratus and Tzetzes aver that heart-broken by the murder of Achilles, she slew herself above his tomb.
Thus we see how, in the Ionian epics, and onwards through Stesichorus, the tragedians, the Roman poets, Dictys, and the mediaeval makers, the poetic consciousness played freely round the Homeric data, colouring them with the rainbow hues of changing beliefs and changing tastes. There is at least as wide a gulf between the tastes and ideas of Homer, on one side, and of the Ionians on the other, as between Arctinus, on one hand, and Benoit de Troyes and Boccaccio, on the other.
That the Ionian ideas, tastes, rites, and legends, as of Theseus and Palamedes, never were intruded into the Iliad and Odyssey, considering that for so long Homer was "taught, recited, imitated in Ionia,"[38] is an undeniable and amazing fact. How were Ionian hands restrained from touching the substance of the Achaean epics? This is, in the strict sense, a paradox, but the facts are undeniable: the epics were never Ionised. Homer was falsely claimed by Athens as an Ionian poet. Is there some basis of truth in the idea that the Aeolian Homeridae of Chios guarded their own?[39]
I have now given my view of the Cyclic poems as late, post-Homeric, and Ionian in (i) geographical knowledge; (2) in hero-worship; (3) in rites of human sacrifice and purification; (4) in the mania for inventing genealogies, as of Thersites, basest born of the host; (5) in partisan attacks on great Achaeans; (6) in silly Märchen; (7) in efforts to introduce representatives of Athens, the grandsons of Theseus, into the war; (8) the Attic goddess, Nemesis.
Of these eight proofs of lateness and Ionicism, Mr. Murray takes no notice: on the whole, he thinks our Homer later than some state of the lost Epics. He supposes parts of the Iliad to be borrowed from these Epics. "We happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis—the so-called Cypria or Cyprian verses."[40] This piece of information may be correct, I know not; but no authority is cited for the statement that the Cypria contained a catalogue of the ships, and no such authority is known to me.[41] Von Wilamowitz—Moellendorff conjectures that the Cypria contained a catalogue of the Achaeans, but that is not evidence.
In support of his theory that our Iliad is "in a further state of development" than some poetic chronicles, Mr. Murray writes that passages in the Iliad "seem to be derived from the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Acthiopis.... These, then, are all pieces of supposed history taken over from one traditional poem into another."[42]
This appears to mean that the poems named were complete before the Iliad was complete, though all of them "were growing side by side for centuries." Indeed, Mr. Murray might seem to change his ground in a later statement of his opinions. In The Rise of the Greek Epic we hear of borrowings by the Iliad from several Cyclic poems made in Asia, and from the "Eumelian" verses in Europe. (For "Eumelus," see "Homer and the Saga.") Of borrowings by the Cyclics and "Eumelus" from the Iliad we do not hear. On the other hand, in Anthropology and the Classics (lectures by various students), Mr. Murray writes, "the extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing the Iliad, just as the Iliad here and there shows signs of presupposing them...."[43] But, R. G. E. p. 160, meets the charge of changed views.
If the Cypria be earlier than the Iliad, yet presupposes the Iliad (about Palamedes it does not), I presume it may also borrow from the Iliad; whereas, previously, the Iliad was mainly credited with the borrowings from the Cyclics. Perhaps we are intended to understand that "had we seen these poems before they were made," we would find that they all borrowed from each other. My mind is not metaphysical enough to conceive what the poems were "before they were made." To me it seems that they must, before they were made, have been mere masses of materials, traditions, legends, lays of unknown extent, and Märchen that had no original connection with definite places and persons. There was no Cypria, no Iliad, no Little Iliad, no Aethiopis before these poems were made. We should not, I think, speak of any unmade poem in the making as borrowing matter from another poem which, by our theory, is also still unmade.
We can only speak of the poets as selecting, each for himself, from the same mass of materials. If we conceive one poem to have been made before another, then the author or authors of that other may borrow from the earlier work. Thus, when the Cypria or other Cyclic poems coincide in topic with the Iliad and Odyssey, that may be (1) because the authors work out hints given in these finished poems; or (2) the authors may have had recourse to the same "masses of tradition" as were open to the author of the Iliad. But the Cyclic poets do not often appear to know Achaean traditions, of the Trojan affair outside of our Homer. We have shown that Palamedes was not originally an Achaean of the Achaeans, but a culture hero. The legend of Telephus, with its sympathetic magic, is wholly un-Achaean; so is Iphigeneia; so are the sons of Theseus; so is the Attic Nemesis.
As we shall show in an Appendix, Mr. Murray accounts for the non-Achaean elements so conspicuous in the Cyclic poems, by the theory that they once also appeared in the lays whence our Iliad arose, but were expurgated by the clear Hellenic spirit of Greece in the sixth century, because these lays alone were recited at Panionian and Panathenaean festivals. Our own conclusion is that the Muses befriended Homer when they permitted the fragments of the Cyclic poems to escape the tooth of time. For these fragments suffice to prove that the Ionian poets could take up an Achaean theme, but in a score of ways, in their epics, betrayed themselves as non-Achaean.
Their poems are not sections cut out of an Achaean mass of lays, and our Homer is not a similar section, is not Cyclic. It has now been proved, I think, that in no point or trait of life, religion, legends, armour, tactics, rites, taste, poetic method, or anything else, is Homer affected by Ionian influences. The Iliad, and mainly the Odyssey, are entirely distinct in all their contents from Ionian work. They are much older, and are the fruit of the brief-lived flower of Achaean culture.[44]
[1] In English the best critical treatises are Homer and the Cyclic Poems, by the late Mr. Binning Monro in his Odyssey, Books xiii.-xxiv. pp. 340-384, with his "On the Fragment of Proclus's Abstract of the Epic Cycle," Journal of Hellenic Society, vol. iv. pp. 305-334. The discussion of the whole topic by Mr. T. W. Allen in The Classical Quarterly (1908) leaves no hint of ancient evidence unexplored, however remote and obscure its lurking place. Mr. Allen specially criticises the ingenious inferences of von Wilamowitz Moellendorff in his Homerische Untersuchungen, inferences which appear to be accepted by Mr. Murray in his Rise of the Greek Epic, and his lecture, "Anthropology in the Greek Epic Tradition outside of Homer," in Anthropology and the Classics, 1908.
[2] Kinkel, Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 1898.
[3] J. H. S., vol. iv p. 305.
[4] Odyssey, vol. ii pp. 352-354.
[5] Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii pp. 488-493. Mr. Monro seems to have been unaware of these facts. Odyssey, vol. ii p. 354.
[6] Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 350.
[7] Companion to the Iliad, p. 46.
[8] Homerische Untersuchungen, pp. 374, 375. On Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's opinion that the Cyclics were lost before the time of Pausanias, see Mr. Allen, Classical Quarterly, January, April, 1908. The Iliad, as it stands, appears to be regarded as later and more artistic than the rest.
[9] Aristotle, Poetics, ch. xxiv.
[10] R. G. E. p. 165.
[11] Ibid. p. 165.
[12] Ibid. p. 163.
[13] The seven Greek verses to this effect are preserved by the Venice Scholiast on Iliad, i. 5, 6. The words Διὸς δ'ἐτελείετο βουλή are also in Iliad, i. 5, whether the author of the Cypria borrowed them, or whether they were an old epic formula.
[14] Schol. Ven., Iliad, i, 5, 6.
[15] R. G. E. pp. 80-88.
[16] Pausanias, i. 33.
[17] Bekk. Anecdot. p. 282. 32. Pausanias, i. 33. 2.
[18] Pausanias, vii. 5. 3. See Farnell, Cults of Greek States, vol. ii. pp. 487-495. 594. 595.
[19] Kinkel, Ep. Graec. Frag. p. 25 9.
[20] Iliad, ii. 326-329.
[21] xix. 326, 327.
[22] The common tale that Achilles was sent to Scyros to avoid the war, in girl's dress; that he there begat Neoptolemus, and was then unmasked by Odysseus, was in contradiction with Iliad, xi. 766-785, where Nestor tells how he summoned Achilles at the house of Peleus, his father.
[23] Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 352.
[24] Pausanias, ii. 22.
[25] Kinkel, p. 29.
[26] See "The Story of Palamedes."
[27] Welcker, Das Ep. Kyk., vol. i. pp. 211, 212.
[28] Iliad, xx ii. 358-360.
[29] Iliad, xi. 690.
[30] Pausanias, iii. 19.
[31] Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 361.
[32] Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 370.
[33] Pausanias, v. 19.
[34] Pausanias, x. 25.
[35] Odyssey, viii. 492-520.
[36] Pausanias, 1. 23. 10.
[37] Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 372, 373.
[38] Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 476.
[39] Cf. Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 398-402. He is sceptical, as is Mr. Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xviii, xix. But see Mr. Allen in Classical Quarterly, i. 135 ff.
[40] R. G. E. p. 164.
[41] Mr. Leaf writes (Iliad, vol. i. p. 86): "The conclusion is that the Catalogue" (of Iliad, ii.) "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle, and was composed for that part of it which, as worked up into a separate poem, was called the Kypria, and related the beginning of the Tale of Troy, and the mustering of the ships at Aulis." I do not quite know what Mr. Leaf means; but the evidence is that the Cypria contained "a Catalogue of the allies of the Trojans" (Kinkel, p. 20). Nothing is said of its containing a Catalogue of the Achaeans. Mr. Monro (Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 351) justly remarks that the Trojan Catalogue in the Cypria was intended to supplement the short Catalogue of the allies of Troy given in the Iliad: "Such an enlarged roll would be the natural fruit of increased acquaintance" (on the part of Greek settlers in Asia) "with the non-Hellenic races of Asia Minor."
[42] R. G. E. p. 165.
[43] Anthropology and the Classics, 1908, p. 67.
[44] See Appendix, "Homeric Epics, Lost Epics, and 'Traditional Books.'"