HOMER AND "THE SAGA"
Every reader of the Iliad perceives that the poet knows an immense mass of legend and tradition. Thus, like Shakespeare, and our great masters of fiction, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, he rarely introduces a minor character without marking the individuality in some memorable way. Often he does this by some line or two on the ancestry of the personage, and we are for a moment brought into touch with "old unhappy far-off things," or meet some notable trait of character. Thus Theano, daughter of Kisseus of Thrace, priestess of Athene in Troy, and wife of Antenor, is only introduced to utter the prayer of the women to the relentless goddess (Iliad, vi. 302-310). Yet we know her when we meet her, for (Iliad, v. 69-71) we have already heard of her goodness of heart. She reared Meges, a bastard of Antenor, "kindly, like her own children, to please her lord." Here we have probably no more than a touch of Homer's genial and discriminating art; it is not probable that the poet took this trait from any traditional "saga."
On the other hand, when in a digression he makes Nestor speak of old heroes, Epeians and Lapithae; or when Glaucus tells the tale of Bellerophon and the wife of Proetus; or Phoenix touches on the tragedy of fair-haired Meleager of Aetolia; or Agamemnon speaks of the birth of Heracles, or, in several other references to Theban wars, to the Amazons, and so forth, Homer is clearly drawing from the great legendary store of Achaeans or Pelasgians (to use that term for the earlier people).
All this matter is called "the saga" by the critics. As Homer comes at the crowning period of epic poetry, as his instrument, the hexameter, is delicately tempered by long processes, it seems probable that his mind was full of ancient lays on legendary themes as well, probably, as of Märchen and traditions told orally in prose. These things are to him what ballads and oral traditions were to Scott. Though he only once, in a suspected passage, touches on the Choice of Paris (Iliad, xxiv, 25-30), he must have known some tale which accounted for the enmity of Hera to Ilios, and the hatred of Athene to the Asian city of which she was patroness. Zeus himself (Iliad, iv. 31-33) seems puzzled by the fury of Hera against Troy. Quo numine laeso? The cause of wrath is, in fact, spretae injuria formae, the spite of neglected beauty. No other reason (setting aside the favour of Ganymede, to whom Homer only refers in the most casual way) has ever been given.
As to the Trojan affairs, Homer knows many things on which he only touches briefly. It is clear that he knew a great saga about Trojan legendary history; for example, about the wall built by the Trojans and Pallas Athene to shelter Heracles when he fought a monster that ravaged the land (Iliad, xx. 146). He also knows that Apollo was made thrall to Laomedon, and built the city wall of Troy, but was defrauded of his reward (xxi. 441-455). That Apollo and Poseidon therefore sent the monster to which Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, was exposed, Homer does not say; he commonly ignores the märchenhaft, the fairy-tale points in a legend, but he knows that Heracles was also defrauded, and avenged himself by sacking Ilios (v. 638641). Manifestly there was a rich growth of Märchen and legends clustered round Troy, and known to the Achaeans; Homer merely alludes to it, and to events posterior to the death of Hector.
He knows how Achilles fell in the Scaean gate, slain by Paris and Apollo; he knows the Sack of Troy, the wooden horse; the Returns, prosperous, troubled, or fatal, of the heroes; he knows Memnon's part in the war, and the end of Aias; he knows that Philoctetes is to be needed, and that Eurypylus fought and fell, and so forth. Concerning some of these things he may have heard lays; others he may have learned merely through oral tradition in prose.
Now it is at this point, namely, Homer's peculiar treatment of the legendary material which reached him, whether in verse or in prose Märchen, that his art stands especially apart from the art of poets who followed him, whether the authors of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, or the Athenian tragedians, or the dim genealogisers in verse of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Homer deliberately selects from the "saga," or folk-tale, or bardic tradition, what is noble, heroic, possible, and human. He also, in the Iliad, deliberately rejects what is märchenhaft; the situations which belong to the datelessly old popular Märchen, or "fairy tale." Later poets put these things prominently forward; Homer ignores them. This is to be proved later in detail: meanwhile here is another mark of the aloofness of Homer, of his high aristocratic genius.
It seems certain that the Trojan legend, with the legends of the Theban wars and tragedies, of the voyage of Argo, and of the hunt of the Calydonian boar, existed in some consecutive form, and was supposed to be record of historical facts before our Homeric poems were composed. Actual history it was not, any more than the Chansons de Geste, the poem of Beowulf, the two Irish cycles of Cuchullin and of Fian, or the Volsunga Saga, or the romances of Arthur, are records of actual history.
In some of these cycles of western Europe we know that historical personages are involved,—about Charlemagne, of course, there is no doubt; and there really were wars of the Cymri of Strathclyde against the English invaders; and the romances appear to contain fanciful accounts of actual battles of Arthur fought in Cumberland, Lothian, Ettrick Forest, and the Lennox. But when King Loth of Lothian, whose house plays so great a part in the romances, appears, we see that he is only an "eponymous hero," his name being derived by legend from the name of his realm, Lothian. About any real characters whose fame may echo in the ancient Irish bardic traditions nothing can be known.
Homer's heroes are in the same case. There may have been a very early Achaean attempt against the northern Asiatic shore of the Aegean. There may have been wars of several States against Thebes. The voyage of the Argo, on the other hand, is nothing but a tissue of diverse Märchen, adroitly fitted into each other, as most formulae can glide into any other Märchen formula and be prolonged almost infinitely. The Argo saga, as currently told, begins apparently with the tale of the man who weds a fairy bride or a swan nymph, and later loses her, like the Eskimo Bird Bride, the Sanskrit Urvasi and Pururavas. In the saga the man is Athamas, king of the Minyae of Orchomenos, or of Halos in Thessalian Phthiotis, or of Phthia. The bride is Nephele the Cloud-maiden. The pair have two children, Phrixus and Helle. The king takes another wife, and has another child by her. We now have the stepmother formula. Ino ill-treats Phrixus and Helle. Nephele returns to the house disguised as an old nurse (East Lynne formula). She deceives Ino into slaying her own children in place of her step-children (Hop o' my thumb formula; but this is not the most current version). Ino roasts the seed corn; there is no harvest, she sends messengers to the Delphic oracle to bring back the false answer that Phrixus must be sacrificed. When Athamas is about to sacrifice him, or both him and Helle, Nephele produces as substitute the golden (or white, or purple) ram, a gift of Hermes. On his back Phrixus, or both Helle and Phrixus, escape.
This is merely the formula of the two children flying from cannibal parents by the aid of a friendly animal, often a sheep; in Samoyed a beaver which can speak.[1] In many variants of Cinderella the helpful sheep is the dead mother in that form. In Asterinos and Pulja, a tale from Epirus,[2] a dog is the helpful animal; but the boy is turned into a sheep, is slain by the girl's jealous mother-in-law, and from his bones grows a wonderful apple-tree. The girl is thrown into the deep water, but revives. In the Greek saga, Helle falls into the Hellespont off the ram's back: her name is eponymous, derived from the Hellespont. In some variants she does not escape on the ram. The later fortunes of Athamas and Ino are variously told.
But the Argo saga is continued by making the heroes of all Hellas join in "the classical Quest of the Grail," the search for the fleece of the Golden Ram. Where it was, Homer, we shall see, clearly did not know: the place was still in fairyland, unlocalised. Jason, as in a very common Märchen formula, collects companions with marvellous gifts, Keen Eye (Lynceus), the Strong Man (Heracles), the prophet (Orpheus), the winged men, sons of the North Wind, and so on. There is nothing historic here; even thus, in Celtic saga, the miraculously gifted heroes hunted the Twrch Trywyth, the boar. Even thus the miraculously gifted Finnish heroes seek for the mystic Sampo in the Kalewala. The Achaean heroes find the fleece in the hands of King Aietes, who represents the giant of fairy tale, and has a fair daughter (Medea) that aids the young adventurer, and enables him to plough the perilous field with the untamable bulls, like Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalewala (Rune 19), like the hero of Kilwch and Olwen in the Welsh Mabinogion. She flees, as usual, with her lover from her father. Here this formula ends; the return voyage and the later adventures of the pair were fantastically told as geographical knowledge increased, after the home of Medea had been located at Aia in Colchis, at the east of the Euxine. Other formulae of Märchen were introduced, the venomed robe that burned up Glauce, the magic cauldron of youth that, in the wrong hands, is deadly. Medea is taken here and there, to Corinth, to Athens, mixed with the Theseus set of Märchen, made the eponymous heroine of the Medes.
The Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, again, is of the same character as the mythic boar hunt that ended in upper Ettrick; as the boar hunt of Diarmaid, in Irish; and the hunt of the Welsh Mabinogion, where Keen Eye and the rest reappear, in the Twrch Trywyth.
The growth of "Saga," or bardic tradition, is the same in all countries. First we have the Märchen, told in prose, as they still exist among European peasants and in many "non-Aryan" peoples, from the Samoyeds of the frozen north to the Red Indians, the Huarochiri of Southern America, the Samoans, the Bechuanas, the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the Santhals, and so forth. In the Märchen the characters are usually anonymous, a boy, a girl, a witch, a king, and the rest; real characters, as Charlemagne, may appear. The events are not localised. The situations are efforts of the primal romantic fancy; like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, they fall into any number of patterns.
As civilisation advances and a class of professional sennachies appears, they give names to the characters; the anonymous young adventurer becomes Jason or Theseus; the cunning man who plays tricks on Death becomes Sisyphus; the monster, giant or beast, who sets impossible tasks to the adventurer, becomes Minos or Aietes; his wife or fair daughter, who baffles him and helps the hero, becomes Ariadne or Medea. In place of the helpful old woman of fairy tale comes Hera, whom Jason carries across the ford; or it is Athene, who gives Bellerophon the golden bit that tames the magical horse; here he is Pegasus. The rescuer of the girl exposed to a ravening monster is now named Perseus or Heracles. The brother and sister who flee from cannibal parents, with the aid of a friendly animal, are named Phrixus and Helle. In place of throwing behind them combs or stones which baffle the pursuer by changing into forests or mountains, Medea and Jason leave the mangled limbs of Medea's brother Absyrtus.
The lad who effects wonders by knowing the language of beasts, is in Greece named Melampus; the giant, whose life-token is a lock of his hair, becomes Nisus of Megara; his daughter, who loves the adventurer, and cuts the giant's lock, purple or golden, so that he is defeated, becomes Scylla; and Minos, who answers to the giant of fairy tale in the Theseus Attic legend, in the Megarian fable is himself the adventurer aided by the giant's daughter.[3] He does not marry the treacherous daughter, but puts her to death; as Achilles, in the Lesbian story, does not marry Pisidice, who for love of him has betrayed her city, but has her slain. The man who, to fulfil a prophecy, unwittingly weds his mother (a favourite character in Märchen, as Comparetti has shown), becomes Oedipous: he is also the answerer of riddles, a character of Märchen found everywhere.[4]
Out of these originally anonymous and unlocalised personages and romantic situations of Märchen, the Greek States made the heroes and events of their legendary history. That history, as of Theseus, Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Sisyphus, even Odysseus, Pelops, Oenomaus, Athamas, Laomedon, is but a series of Märchen localised; while, in place of fairy godmothers, or anonymous benefactors, the old man or old woman of Märchen, the Olympian gods are introduced, with their fairy gifts, the cap of darkness, the winged shoon, the sword of sharpness (Perseus), the power of taking all animal disguises. Homer knows the attack of Heracles on the father and brothers of Nestor. Hesiod knew the cause of the feud, Neleus refused to purify Heracles who had slain his host under the hospitable roof. Hesiod knows that Poseidon had given to Periclymenus, brother of Nestor, the power to appear in any animal shape, eagle, ant, snake, or bee; and that while Periclymenus lived, Heracles failed in the fight, and could not take Pylos. But when Periclymenus, as a bee, settled on the chariot of Heracles, Athene shot that bee with an arrow (see fragment of the Eoiai 14 (33), with the scholia).[5] Other examples of the wildest absurdities of Märchen, retained and rejoiced in by the Ionic epic poets, are given later ("Homer and the Ionian Cyclic Poets"). But Homer, in the Iliad, takes his heroes forth from the prison of Märchen: whether the fairy tales had not yet become attached to Bellerophon, Achilles, and Meleager in his time, or whether his genius ignored such fanciful elements of tradition, Homer does not speak of the invulnerability of Achilles, save on his heel; or tell the wooing by his father, Peleus, of Thetis as she takes a variety of bestial forms. Either these situations had not yet become attached to the story of Achilles, or Homer chooses to ignore them. Such things do not come into the natural objective world of the Iliad. In the digression of Bellerophon he recurs to the human natural side of Märchen, the story of the woman who, vainly attacking a man's virtue, accuses him falsely; the message or letter of death,[6] his three strange adventures to achieve, that of the Chimaera and others, and his winning of the king's daughter. This Märchen, localised, is in a digression; but Homer usually keeps his Märchen for the Odyssey, and the incidents occur beyond the bounds of the world he knows.
Now, even when Homer touches on the tale of Meleager, he says nothing of that fairy property the "soul-box" or "life-token," the brand snatched from the burning; or of the visit of the Spaewives, the Fates, and their prophecy. He actually does not seem to know that incident. Althaea, mother of Meleager, in Homer (Iliad, ix. 565-572), prays to the Erinnyes and they hear her. She has not her son's "soul-box" or "life-token" in her hands to burn it, and slay him. In Pausanias (x. 31. 3), Meleager is killed by Apollo, who is fighting for the Curetes against the Aetolians. Meleager died, like Achilles, by Apollo's hand, though Paris was an accomplice of the God in the case of Achilles. Pausanias follows the Hesiodic Eoiai, which Kuhnert supposes to have known the same story as Homer.[7]
As Kuhnert justly observes, the poetry of Homer is knightly. "An der Hofen wurden die homerische Gedichte versungen ... the hero must find his death at a divine hand in glorious warfare." The Athenian tragedians are our oldest source for the Moirae and the fatal life-token: a property very common in Märchen; but when the incident first attached itself to Meleager we cannot know. This avoidance of the folk-element, the Märchen, in the Iliad is one of the things that distinguishes Homer from the Ionian Cyclic poets, the Hesiodic school, and the Athenian tragedians.
Homer, again, in another way, stands apart from the genealogising poets of the eighth to seventh century (such as the school of "Hesiod," and "Eumelus" of Corinth) by his method of handling tradition or saga. These genealogising poets aimed at constructing history, and preluded to the "logographers" in prose of the sixth century. Both they and the logographers have the same simple method, that of the would-be historic early mediaeval writers on Scotland and Ireland. Their plan is to invent for each town or people an eponymous hero, whose name is simply the name of the city or people (as, in Scotland, Fib for Fife, Loth for Lothian, Scota for the Scoti). The hero, or heroine, founds the city, or is first ancestor of the people. Next follow the legends about heroic characters, as Perseus, Athamas, Pelops, Theseus, Aietes, Phrixus, which are mere Märchen of world-wide diffusion, localised, with named persons for the characters.
The region of legend expands with the expansion of geographical knowledge. Cities hasten, like Athens and Corinth, to attach themselves to sagas, as that of Argo, in which they had no original part. Hesiod extends the old saga, and carries descendants of the old characters, as of Odysseus, to Italy, to Latium and Etruria. "Eumelus" drags Corinth into the cycle of the Argonautic expedition: Athens, we have said, brings Medea to Athens, and into her Theseus fable. Later the logographers, in prose, continue the process and alter the genealogies to suit their historical theories.
From all these processes Homer stands apart. He has not any historical theory to prove. He seldom mentions an eponymous founder of a city, or ancestor of a people. Nausithous founds Phaeacia, his city is not called Nausithoa. Homer names Mykene (Odyssey, ii. 120), but does not say that she founded Mycenae, as "Eumelus" says that Ephyre founded the town of Ephyre (Corinth). You would not gather from Homer that the Achaeans were descendants of Achaeus, or the Danaans of Danaus.
All these things are obvious and undeniable. Homer is a poet: the genealogising writers in verse are aiming at constructing history (some history may be present), and at explaining the origins of peoples and cities.
But, according to some of the modern learned, our Homer contains borrowings from the Eumelian verses on Corinth. Thus Mr. Murray says that the Iliad and Odyssey "not only refer to other legends as already existing and treated by other poets; that every one admits; but they often in their digressions tell stories in a form which clearly suggests recapitulation or allusion. They imply the existence elsewhere of a completer poetical treatment of the same subject," as in the tale of Bellerophon, told to Diomede by Glaucus in Iliad, vi. "Is it not plain that the poet of Iliad, vi., is in the first place referring to an existing legend, and, secondly, one may almost say, quoting from an existing poem?"[8]
Certainly Homer is referring to an existing legend, and not improbably to a lay which in his time existed. But Mr. Murray goes on to suggest that the existing poem referred to is the Corinthiaca of "Eumelus," whom he takes to be a mythical name for the author of Corinthian traditional poetry; von Christ thinks Eumelus of the seventh century.
Mr. Murray's argument seems to be, Homer knew a legend, probably knew a poem, about Bellerophon, son of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, who dwelt in Ephyre (Corinth). "Eumelus" wrote a poem about Corinthian affairs. Therefore the poet who introduced the tale told by Glaucus into Iliad, vi., took it (textually, it seems to be suggested) from "Eumelus."[9] In the same way the author of Iliad, v. 395-400, and Panyassis, the uncle of Herodotus, presumably adapt from the same source. Mr. Leaf, on the other hand, supposes the poet-uncle to give an "echo" from the passage in the fifth book of the Iliad. There may be an echo, in Homer on Heracles, from an older poem on Heracles, but that poem is likely to be long anterior to the end of the sixth century.[10]
In any case the "Eumelus" known to us in Greek literary tradition was a tendenz poet, a poet with a purpose, with a pseudo-historical theory to prove; he used the method of the genealogisers, who turned into heroes and heroines men and women who were constructed out of place-names; and he, in certain places, did not borrow from Homer, nor Homer from him, for he and Homer flatly contradict each other. If all this be not post-Homeric, what is?
Pausanias, in discussing Eumelus's peculiar version of the relations of Medea to Corinth, quotes a "History of Corinth," in prose, by Eumelus, "if he is really the author of it."[11] "Eumelus is also said to have been a poet," and Pausanias avers that the only poem recognised as genuine of Eumelus is a processional ode to Delian Apollo.[12] There was a prose version of his other work, and Clemens Alexandrinus regarded Eumelus as a logographer like Acusilaus, who "turned the poems of Hesiod into prose."[13]
But, genuine or not, an "Eumelian" poem on a forged part of Corinthian legendary history did at some time exist, for the scholiast on Pindar (Ol. xiii.) cited eight lines of it; and these lines are manifestly complementary to the part of the prose history by "Eumelus" which Pausanias quotes. Taking the Eumelian verse and prose together, we find that "Eumelus" in his Corinthiaca appears in Greek literary tradition as a chronicler in verse, a genealogist, a maker of patriotic pseudo-history, and a narrator of a late version of the Argo story.
Now, as "Eumelus" began (as the Ram in the fairy story is requested to do) "at the beginning," at the founding of Ephyre, or Corinth; and as he told the Argonautic tale in full, including the aprocryphal adventures of Medea in what he chose to call her rightful kingdom in Corinth; and as the tale is a very long one, we may infer that this, and not the entire mass of Corinthian legend, was the topic of his book. If so, Bellerophon, though a Corinthian, was "out of the story"; for, by the Eumelian genealogies, he was four generations later than Medea's tenure of the Corinthian throne. She was succeeded by Sisyphus, whose exploits would fill a book; Sisyphus by Glaucus, and Glaucus by Bellerophon. But the aim of "Eumelus" was to glorify Corinth by attributing to her a share in the tale of Argo; its heroine, Medea, must therefore be of the Corinthian Royal House; and, after proving this, and telling the Argo saga, "Eumelus" must give her adventures, after Argo's return to Greece, in Corinth; and these were many and tragical.
Wishing, then, to attach Corinth to the Argonautic story, the genealogiser manages matters thus. Helios, the Sun, he says, had two sons by Antiope (daughter of the river god Asopus); the sons were Aloeus and Aietes. Homer does not borrow those facts from "Eumelus"; Homer tells a different story, but the historical effort of "Eumelus" constrains him to make his local nymph, Antiope, mother of Aietes. That is the basis of his forgery. Meanwhile Homer tells a contradictory story about this Antiope (Od. xi. 260). Her lover was not Helios, but Zeus. Her sons were not Aietes and Aloeus, but Amphion and Zethus. Homer is not borrowing from this genealogiser! The heroine Ephyre founded Ephyre. (She was daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and wife of Epimetheus, or daughter of Epimetheus, an un-Homeric kind of person.) The river Asopus, father of Antiope (who was mother, says "Eumelus," by the Sun of Aloeus and Aietes), gave his name as "Asopia" to what was later Sicyon. The Sun gave to his son, Aloeus, "the land held by Asopus, to his son Aietes he gave Ephyre" (Corinth). Aietes goes to Colchis (a place necessarily unnamed by Homer, for it is at the extreme east of the Euxine); but previously had arranged that Bounos is to be regent of Ephyre till Aietes, or a descendant of his, returns and claims it.[14] Medea is to be that descendant.
So far we have Eumelian verse. How the story went on we learn from the prose version cited by Pausanias. Bounos died as king of Ephyre, and was succeeded by the nephew of Aietes (a son of his brother Aloeus), named Epopeus.[15] Epopeus was harsh to his son Marathon, and Marathon fled to Attica and founded the famous deme of Marathon. He had two sons, Sicyon, to whom, on the death of his own father, Epopeus, he gave Sicyon; while Ephyre he gave to his son Corinthus; hence Ephyre came to be called Corinth. When Corinthus died childless, the Corinthians sent to Colchis for Medea, in accordance with the entail made by Aietes (as "Eumelus" has told us in verse), when he left Ephyre for Colchis.[16] Nothing can be less Homeric.
The "Eumelus" of whom we have reports wrote pseudo-history in verse, for he has to make Medea survive Aietes, Bounos, Epopeus, Marathon, and Corinthus, and then, in the prime of beauty, succeed to the realm of Corinthus as Queen of Corinth. Leaving Corinth for Athens under a cloud, Medea gives Corinth to Sisyphus.[17]
"Eumelus," as Seeliger observes,[18] knows the Argo story in the common late expanded form, Colchis and all; but chooses to make Aietes, contrary to all other authorities, a king of Corinth. Attica, too, must needs attach herself to the story of Argo, by making Medea seduce King Aegeus, the father of Theseus, and try to poison Theseus himself: she also made Aegeus send him on the desperate adventure of fighting the Bull of Marathon.[19] This Bull of Marathon donne à penser. In one legend Aegeus, father of Theseus, sent Androgeos, son of Minos, to fight the bull, which killed him. It was therefore but tit-for-tat when Minos sent Athenian tributary boys and girls to fight his bull, the bullheaded Minotaur.[20]
"Eumelus," as far as our evidence goes, stands for the school who, for every town, supposed an eponymous person as founder, for Ephyre (Corinth) he gives the nymphe Ephyre. Now Homer does not work on these lines. When "Eumelus" had got his pseudo-history and false genealogies to his taste, he must have told at full length the tale of Argo, for we have five lines of his describing the terror caused in Aietes and the Colchians by the throwing of the weight by Jason among the armed brood born of the plain, which Jason ploughed with fire-breathing bulls.
These things, then, are what Greek literary tradition reports about a pseudo-historical genealogist, and teller of the tale of Argo with a purpose. That he ever mentioned Bellerophon we have no proof: Pausanias does not cite Eumelus for Bellerophon. Homer, as usual, omits the Märchen of the winged horse Pegasus, whereby, in later poems, Bellerophon accomplishes his feats. Pindar is copious about Pegasus: that noble animal. The peculiarly gifted horse, hard to bridle, is common property of "fairy tales." Usually some friendly person tells the adventurous lad to use a peculiar bridle without which the steed is untamable. The boy can always sell the horse, but keep the bridle; the purchaser returns the nag, and the hero keeps the money. In Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode, Athene is the benevolent person of the Märchen. Bellerophon, wanting to break in Pegasus, sleeps in her temple; she presents him with the magical golden bit and head-stall. Dropping Pegasus, magical bridle and all, Homer only says that the gods "gave Bellerophon friendly convoy to Lycia."[21] Mr. Murray asks, "What blameless guiding of the gods led Bellerophon to Lycia?" Clearly he flew thither through upper air on Pegasus, like Commodore Trunnion leaping a sunken way on the road to the hymeneal altar, "to the unspeakable terror and amazement" of a waggoner below, says Smollett. But Homer is not Smollett, and does not send Bellerophon flying through air on a horse. Pindar saw no objections to the incident.[22]
Here we must try to explain a point on which Mr. Murray remarks, "There has been an extraordinary reluctance among scholars to ... admit the possibility of 'Homer,' as the phrase is, borrowing from the supposed later author 'Eumelus,' or even from 'Hesiod.'" The reluctance is natural and justifiable; because when we say "Eumelus" or "Hesiod," we mean just what we have received from antiquity under the names of these men. Their work, as it reaches us, is un-Homeric, is later, we say, than the Iliad. But if "Eumelus" be a mythical name for a supposed author of a body of Corinthian heroic poetry: if the Eumelian matter which we have received was not that, then we know nothing about that, and cannot say whether our Homer borrowed from some other Eumelian epê or not. Mr. Murray, as to Homer's debt to "Eumelus," writes: "If anything were needed to make it clearer still, it would be that the Verses of Eumelus are quoted as the earliest authority for the story of the Argo and Medea, and the composer of our Odyssey speaks of the Argo as a subject of which 'all minds are full'"[23] The reader naturally gathers that our Homer took his information about Argo from "Eumelus." We can only say, "not from the Eumelus known to us in Greek literary tradition." Thus Hesiod[24] tells of the birth of Circe and Aietes her brother (the father of Medea) in precisely the same terms as Homer does, and as Eumelus does not.[25] Both poets say that Helios, by Perses (Homer), or Perseis (Hesiod), a daughter of Oceanus, was the father of Circe and Aietes. Homer does not mention Medea, but Hesiod says that she was the daughter of Aietes. Now Eumelus, in what we have of him, says nothing of Circe, but makes Aietes the son of Helios and Antiope, not of Perses as in Homer. Manifestly, then, Homer did not take his version from this Eumelus; while, when Homer and Hesiod precisely agree, if either borrowed from the other, it were quite arbitrary to say that Homer borrowed from Hesiod, who knows Latium and Etruria.
Homer certainly did not borrow here from our Eumelus, for he differs from Eumelus; nor is Eumelus quoted, as far as I am aware, "as the earliest authority for" the story of Argo. The scholiast on Pindar, as I, for one, understand him, quotes Eumelus for something quite different, namely, for his peculiar account (adopted by Pindar when praising a Corinthian athlete) of Medea as rightful Queen of Corinth; a point on which no Greeks agreed with the patriotic chronicler, the Corinthian Eumelus, as Pausanias observes.
Homer knows about the ship Argo, and her escape from the clash of the Rocks Wandering, through the favour of Hera.[26] The dangers of these rocks are described by Circe to Odysseus, for he must pass by that perilous path of the sea; and Circe ought to know, for she is sister of King Aietes, from whose land Argo was sailing when she met the rocks. But where did Aietes dwell? On that point Homer says nothing and knew nothing.
It is manifest that Homer neither knows where Aiaie, the isle of Circe, is, nor where the home of King Aietes is. To him Aiaie is "an unsubstantial fairy place." In the Odyssey (xii. 3, 4), Circe's isle is "near the home and dancing-places of the Dawn, and the land of sunrising." You cannot go farther east in a black ship. But in Hesiod,[27] Circe's Aia must be in the west, for her sons by Odysseus (unheard of by Homer) rule over Latins and Tyrsenians. Later poets placed the Aia of Circe's brother, Aietes, in the east, in Colchis, at the eastern limit of the Euxine; and Circe's Aia they located in the west, at the promontory of Circeei in Italy. Homer himself shows no knowledge of Italy, on one side, or of the extremity of the Euxine on the other.[28] Even Mimnermus places the city of Aietes vaguely "at the limit of Oceanus."[29] By way of finding reason where there is none, Apollonius Rhodius explains that Circe originally lived in the Aia of the east, as in the Odyssey, but was transported by Helios to the Aia in the west.[30] Homer being so vague, we do not say he is borrowing from our Eumelus, who locates Aietes in Colchis, under Caucasus, which Homer, if pre-Ionian, never knew. Had Homer, or any of the supposed late contributors to the Iliad and Odyssey, lived in the eighth to seventh centuries, and studied our Eumelus, or even our Hesiod, the Iliad and Odyssey would have had much more extensive geographical knowledge than they possess. No one will say that our Homer borrows from a genealogiser like our Eumelus, when Eumelus does not even agree with Homer about the mother of Aietes.
The Iliad does know that Jason, in the isle of Lemnos, had a son by Hypsipyle;[31] and the adventures of the Argonauts in Lemnos are part of the story of Argo. But Lemnos is well within Homer's geographical knowledge, while the homes of Aietes and Circe are far beyond its limits.
The confusion of early mythical geography is inextricable. In the Odyssey the ship Argo met the Rocks Wandering on her way home from Aietes. Odysseus meets the rocks on his way home from Circe. She dwells in the farthest east; so then, it seems, did Aietes. In Pindar,[32] Argo encounters the rocks on her outward and eastward way, before she enters the Euxine. Homer knows that Jason loved Hypsipyle in Lemnos, whether on his way to or his return from Aietes. Pindar says on his return westward to Greece, after he has visited Oceanus, the Red Sea, and Africa. The common story, as in Apollonius Rhodius, makes Jason love Hypsipyle in Lemnos as he sails eastwards and outward bound to Colchis. If he wooed her thus, on his way home, with Medea, as Pindar tells, one can only say that he was a brave man.
Let us next, before going deeper into the "Saga," examine the case of Thersites, the impudent demagogue of Iliad, ii., never again mentioned by Homer. Mr. Murray is rather surprised "to find that Thersites is really an independent saga-figure with a life of his own, and very distinguished relations. He was a son of Agrios, the savage Aetolian king, and first cousin once removed of the great Diomedes. His mother was Dia, a palpable goddess." He was killed by Achilles for jeering at his grief over the slain Amazon, Penthesilea. Achilles was purified by Odysseus, but Diomede took up his feud.[33]
In Pherecydes (fr. 82), Thersites is an Aetolian, thrown over a rock by Meleager for his cowardice in the boar hunt, but not killed.[34]
All this about Thersites is really "saga" stuff,—invented about the date of the Aethiopis. But Thersites was no hero of "saga" in the time of Homer. Had he been the son of a goddess (otherwise unknown) and of "a savage Aetolian king" (Homer's Aetolians are as civilised as his other peoples), the poet would have said so. He is most careful, we saw, to tell us who his heroes are (except the Athenians), even when they only appear for the purpose of being slain. But he says not a word about the genealogy and antecedents of Thersites, who is only a man of the λαός or host, food for bronze. "The savage king of the Aetolians," Agrios, has been picked out by some one suffering from la manie cyclique, who was anxious to tell "what became of them all," from Iliad, xiv. 114-125: "no doubt an interpolation," says Mr. Leaf, "like many others, of the genealogical school connected with the name of Hesiod."
Here, at all events, whether the genealogy be late and Hesiodic or not, Diomede gives to Agamemnon his genealogy, in Aetolia.
The manie cyclique inserted
Agrios
|
Thersites, for it was desired to tell what became of Thersites; and—not to lose sight of a person so notable as Thersites—the poet made Achilles kill him, a much older man than Achilles, for his mockery. Then Diomede (who does not remonstrate when Odysseus calls him the basest, socially, of the host, and beats him) takes up his feud when he is slain.[35]
Homer has plainly no idea that Thersites is of royal and divine lineage, all that is a later invention of "the cyclic mania," and is as old, at least, as the age of the Ionian cyclic poet of the Aethiopis.[36] The very scholiasts said that Homer marked the base birth of Thersites by saying nothing about his parentage and home.
In Homer, as in the earliest Chansons de Geste, there is the knightly poetic legend; and in the Cyclics, at least in the case of Thersites, there are the later expansions and continuations made under the influence of la manie cyclique. The dénouement of the Telegonia, the last of the Cyclics, is purely absurd. Telegonus marries his aged stepmother, Penelope, and Telemachus marries his father's mistress, Circe!
To explore the relations of Homer and of "saga" to Märchen, or popular tales, attached to real or fabulous heroes and heroines of the past, would require a volume.[37] Almost all Greek pseudo-historical tradition consists of a string of Märchen, known all over the world: any student of folk-lore who reads the Achaean legends in Grote can identify the masterless Märchen which have been attached to the heroic figures. In exactly the same way, Märchen are attached to Charlemagne in the Chansons de Geste; to Arthur in the romances; and we might as well look to them for political and personal history as to Homer. Naimes, Ganelon, Olivier, the expedition of Charlemagne to Constantinople, his wars with the Saracens, and other persons and events in the Chansons de Geste, yield no material to the historian; nor do Lancelot, Galahad, Palamedes, and Tristram, and Arthur's foreign conquests in the romances. What history there is rests obscure.
On the other hand, an attempt has recently been made to extract some grains of "tribal" history, before and after the Achaean migration to Asia, from the names of the heroes in the Iliad, and from the places where, in post-Homeric Greece, they received worship. This effort is made by Dr. Erich Bethe, in his Homer und die Heldensage, and Mr. Murray follows Bethe in The Rise of the Greek Epic. We may take a notable example of the method in the case of Hector. "Hector seems to belong to Boeotia." It may be worth while to examine the reasoning on which this most unexpected opinion is based. The idea was first propounded by Ferdinand Dümmler in a short Anhang to Studniczka's Cyrene. "Hector was worshipped as a hero in Boeotian Thebes," says Mr. Murray, quoting Dümmler, and Dümmler's source is apparently Pausanias.[38] If the Boeotians in the time of Pausanias regarded Hector as of Boeotian birth, the fact would be curious. But they did nothing of the kind. "The Thebans show the tomb of Hector near the Well of Oedipous. They say that Hector's remains were brought here from Ilium in accordance with the following oracle: "Ye Thebans, if you wish your country to be wealthy, bring to your city from Asia the bones of Hector the son of Priam, and respect the hero at the bidding of Zeus."[39]
This was a real or an imaginary case of the body-snatching of which Herodotus speaks frequently. The relics of St. Hector would be valuable to Thebes. The Thebans, in fact, may have wished to propitiate a hero who had slain, according to Homer, many Boeotians in battle, and who might still be hostile, and even fight against them in battle, as dead heroes were apt to do. Pausanias (ix. 4. 3, ix. 39. 3) mentions also the graves of certain Boeotian heroes, one of them wounded, the other slain by Hector, as still honoured in Boeotia. Hector slew, or wounded, or fought Homeric heroes from Phocis and from Boeotia; and Epeigeus, a suppliant of Peleus (Iliad, xvi. 570 et seqq.), and an Aetolian hero, an Athenian, a Mycenaean, an Elian, and so on. What follows? These names of heroes slain by Hector, Thessalians, Aetolians, Phocians, and Boeotians, are thought to suggest that, as Mr. Murray translates Dr. Bethe, "Hector, or rather the tribe which honoured Hector as their hero, migrated by this road,"—by the road on which these Aetolians, Thessalians, Phocians, and Boeotians—or the tribes which honoured them as heroes—used to live. "More accurately, the tribe gradually, in how many centuries none can tell, moved in a south-easterly direction, driven by a pressure which was no doubt exerted by the Aeolic tribe represented in the Epos by Achilles." "These are no pictures of phantasy that I let loose to play about here," says Dr. Bethe (p. 16).
What else but phantasies can we possibly call them? That Hector's tomb was shown in Thebes, does by no means prove that he, or a tribe which was the Hector tribe, once lived in Boeotia. Heroes, like saints, had tombs and chapels in many regions where they were not born, and which they never visited. The grave of St. James was shown—in Spain! Ariadne's ashes had been shown in Argos. Hector, in the Iliad, killed the men in his way. In addition to the victims chosen out by Dr. Bethe, he slew Stichios, an Athenian; Amphimachus, an Elian, and Periphetes of Mycenae.[40]
This does no more prove that Hector was a Boeotian than that he was an Athenian. He slew Schedios, a Phocian, yet he was no more a Phocian than an Athenian, he merely killed the men whom he met. If we are to argue, that he or the tribe which honoured him was driven out of Aetolia and Thessaly down to Boeotia, Phocis, and Attica, we must, by parity of reasoning, argue that the Hector tribe (in Gaelic, the MacEachans), were driven into Peloponnesus, to Mycenae and Elis, for Hector slew Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus, of Elis.[41] The Mycenaean, Elian, and Athenian are not mentioned by Dr. Bethe. Nor can Hector be converted into a Boeotian by the circumstance that he fought a kind of courteous duel with Aias, while Aias was really the Locrian Aias, we are told, and so a neighbour of the Boeotian Hector.[42] Hector's relations with Aias[43] are far from neighbourly and friendly.
This instance of Hector is one of many in which the names of heroes are taken to represent "tribes" which had a cult of these heroes, though Homer knows nothing about this cult as practised in heroic Greece, except in Athens. We learn nothing from Homer about "tribes" or clans with a sacred eponymous hero, or with any "hero" in the sense of the word as used in the Greece of history. We cannot assume that the Iliad introduces, in the combats of heroes, memories of tribal wars in Greece in the pre-Homeric age, and transfers them, in the shape of single combats, to the plain of Troy!
Heroic relationships were claimed long after Homer by peoples like the Dorians and Romans and English and many others, merely to connect themselves with the great legend of Troy; and the Greek cults of heroes, a religion unknown to Homer, were carried into regions with which Homer's men had no connection. We might as well look for Cymric tribal wars in the feuds and names of the knights in the Arthurian romances, or for Irish tribal feuds in the names of Ferdiad and Cuchullain, as for prehistoric migrations in the names of Hector, Leltus, Stichios of Attica, Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus of Elis.
"Hector," we are told, "was a great 'slayer of men,' and his victims in the Iliad make a sort of road from Thebes upward to the bounds of Achilles' region."[44] They also "make a sort of road" to Mycenae and Elis by way of Athens: that is the history of the tribe, preserved in the names of his victims,—names which, it appears, "are short" for defeated tribes. As for the evidence of a Helen tribe at Sparta, because Helen had a shrine and worship there, we have no evidence that the Achaeans had any heroic shrines or hero-worship,—the evidence is that they had none,—but the assumption is that Homer represents "another stream of history," and, apparently, that his people turned tribal names and tribal gods of an unknown past, into heroic men and women. The opposite theory is that the hero-worshipping people of historic Greece devoted themselves to such patron saints as they knew through Homer, as the Arabs have saints whom they know about through the Hebrew Scriptures.
I am not aware that in the bardic history, or "saga" of any people, tribes are spoken of under the names of their tribal heroes in such a way as to cause confusion. None is caused by Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, and so on in the Old Testament, but in other Biblical cases there may be trouble. Local tribes, as far as I am aware, are nowhere named by patronymics; certainly they are not in Australia, India, America, and Africa, except, among the Zulus, by the name of a man plus Ama, AmaFinn, and so forth. Thus the theory that Hector is the name of a prehistoric Boeotian local tribe seems to me fantastic. We might as well look for remnants of tribal history in Kay, Gawaine, Naimes, and Ganelon.
Surely it is an error in historical method to reason as if pre-Homeric Greeks were as addicted to divinising men, building their shrines, and sacrificing to them, as the post-Homeric Greeks were in the seventh and all later centuries. We might as well argue that the apostolic Christians practised mediaeval saint-worship, and adored and built innumerable chapels to dead Saints, because this was the custom of mediaeval Christianity.
To sum up, we have proved that our Homer, in his treatment of old tradition, is a noble poet, that he stands aloof from all the others of Greece in his refusal (save in the Odyssey, a romance) to introduce the wild elements of Märchen, the childish miracles; while he is equally remote from the methods of the pseudo-historians like Eumelus as known to us, and all the Hesiodic genealogisers and inventors of eponymous heroes; and from the manie cyclique of the Ionian Cyclic poets. Really no fact can be more certain; and this fact, even if it were not corroborated by all the others, would prove our Homer to be "alone, aloof, sublime."
[1] Castren, Ethnol. Vorlesungen, pp. 164-169.
[2] Von Hahn, Griechische Märchen, 1.
[3] Pausanias, i. 19, ii. 34.
[4] Child, English and Scottish Ballads, vol. i., "Riddles wisely Answered."
[5] Yen. A., Iliad, ii. 336. Rzach, Hesiod, p. 326.
[6] For many cases in Märchen, see Mr. Crookes' Folk-Lore, vol. xix. p. 156.
[7] Roscher's Lexikon, vol ii. p. 2594.
[8] R. G. E. pp. 161, 162.
[9] Textually, for, in Iliad, vi. 200, 'Ἀλλ' ὄτε δὴ καὶ κεῑνος ἀπήχθετο πᾱσι θεοῑσιν (referring to Bellerophon), Mr. Murray renders, "But when he also was hated of all the gods," and asks, "Why the phrase, 'when he also'?" Homer is, "one may almost say, quoting from an existing poem." Now I understand Glaucus in this "he also" to refer to the remark of Diomede (vi. 140) on Lycurgus's being "hated of all the gods." He repeats the very words of Diomede. "Here is another man who, like Lycurgus in your story, was hated of all the gods." Consulting Mr. Leaf's note (vi. 200), I find that this is also the opinion of Ameis: Mr. Leaf thinks it "too far-fetched." The distance is sixty lines (vi. 140-200). In his translation of the passage in Leaf, Lang, and Myers, Mr. Leaf translates, with Monro, "even he," even Bellerophon, whom the gods had loved. Surely no textual quotations by Homer from the so-called "Eumelus" need be imagined.
[10] R. G. E. pp. 164, 165.
[11] Pausanias, I. I.
[12] Ibid. iv. 4. 1.
[13] Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 2, citing Clemens, Strom. i. 398, ed. Potter.
[14] Eumelus in Kinkel, p. 188.
[15] Pausanias, ii. 3. 10.
[16] Pausanias, ii. i. i.
[17] Ibid. ii. 3. 10, 11.
[18] "Medea," Reseller's Lexikon, ii. 2. 2492.
[19] Seeliger, Roscher's Lexikon, ii. 2. 2496.
[20] Roscher, Lexikon, vol. i. 342.
[21] Iliad, vi. 171.
[22] "Pegasus is omitted by Homer as a monster," Mr. Murray justly observes (R. G. E. p. 162, note I). No other poet omitted "monsters"; not Pindar for one, or Hesiod.
[23] R. G. E. p. 163.
[24] Theogony, 956-962.
[25] Odyssey, x. 137.
[26] Odyssey, xii. 57-62.
[27] Theogony, 1011-1015.
[28] Roscher, Lexikon, vol. i. pp. 108, 109.
[29] Mimnermus, Fragment 11. Bergk.
[30] Argonautica, iii. 309 ff.
[31] Iliad, vii. 468, 469, xxi. 41, xxiii. 747.
[32] Pythian Odes, iv.
[33] R. G. E. pp. 185, 186. All this comes from the Aethiopis, or Sack of Ilios, followed by Chairemon in his tragedy, Achilles Thersitoctonos, with scholia on the Philoctetes (445), Quintus Smyrnaeus (of the fourth century a.d.). Dictys Cretensis, the prose compiler of the second century a.d., does not mention Thersites.
[34] do not enter into the theory of his relations (1) to the pharmakos, driven out of Athens as a human scape-goat, and whipped, perhaps sacrificed; or (2) with Theritas, a name of Ares in Laconia, according to Pausanias. Homer in his Achaean way never alludes to the cruel and lewd, or magical affair of the pharmakos.
[35] Iliad, ii. 246-248. "I deem that no baser-born man (χερειότερον) came with Agamemnon." χερειότερον "virtually = χερείονα, see Iliad, i. 80" (Leaf), where a king is contrasted with ἀνδρὶ χέρηῑ, "a meaner man" (Leaf, in Leaf, Lang, Myers, The Iliad, p. 3).
[36] The Cyclic story also demonstrates its un-Homeric origin by dragging in "the hocus-pocus of purification" (R. G. E. p. 134). But Usener, seeing, in Sir Walter Scott's words, "further into a millstone than the nature of the millstone permits," makes Thersites = Theritas = Enyalios (Hesychius), and suggests that two sacrifices by Spartan lads to Enyalius and Achilles, after a fight with fisticuffs, and ducking of the vanquished, may be "the ritual form of the old battle of Achilles and Thersites" =(?) "the common annual rites of the slaying of Winter by Summer, or of one vegetation god by another" (R. G. E. pp. 186, 187). There was not much of a "battle" between Thersites and Achilles! The millstone, really, has a hole through it. To Homer, Thersites is a nobody. His rank, relationships, and fate are due to the later "Cyclic mania," and to "poetic justice."
[37] Will nobody write it?
[38] R. G. E. p. 196.
[39] Pausanias, ix. 18
[40] Iliad, xiii. 185, xv. 329, 638.
[41] xv. 636-644.
[42] Bethe, p. 15.
[43] Iliad, xiii. 801-832 and passim.
[44] R. G. E. p. 197.