The Hero’s Home
In Crete art dwelt in palaces; in classical Greece it haunted the market-place and the temple. For the present art is confined to the home. If we may judge by the charming “interior” pictures which Homer most skilfully introduces as a counterfoil to the everlasting clash of arms in the Iliad, domestic life was at its richest and best in the age of the epics. Every one has been struck with the dignified and important part played by women in Homer, contrasted with their seclusion and neglect in historical Greece. No one but Shakespeare has given us so charming a series of feminine portraits as Andromache, Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa, Thetis, and Calypso. The ingenious Samuel Butler actually attempted to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman, so sympathetic is the poet’s insight into the feminine point of view. But the same is equally true of the Iliad; and, indeed, the respect for women becomes part of the heroic tradition even in Attic tragedy, so that the audience in the theatre of Athens must have seen the heroines on their stage acting with a freedom and treated with a deference which was quite alien to their own homes.
But even at this, its highest point, the domesticity of Greek life falls far short of modern ideas, and the dignity of the heroes’ wives is somewhat illusory. Possibly the inconsistencies are due once more to the many hands and many successive generations which have had their part in building up the epic. Certainly, for monogamists, the matrimonial ideas of the heroes are far from exclusive. Agamemnon announces his intention of taking Chryseis home, for he likes her better than his dear wife Clytæmnestra, and makes no secret of the position she is to occupy. He does actually take Cassandra home to his wife. In the Odyssey, too, we get a hint of arrangements decidedly Oriental in what Penelope says about her son and the fifty handmaidens. Again, there is a singular contrast between the tender conjugal devotion of Hector and Andromache, or Odysseus and Penelope, and the extraordinary callousness sometimes indicated with regard to feminine charms. It is often remarked as an instance of Homer’s subtlety that he nowhere describes the beauty of Helen, whose face
“Launched a thousand ships
And shook the topmost towers of Ilium,”
only indicating it by making the old men of Troy look at her as she walks past and say to one another, “No wonder that the Greeks and Trojans should suffer pain so long for such a woman. Her countenance is wondrous like the immortal goddesses.” These traditions of the power of love and beauty must belong to the original epic story; for the whole plot of the Iliad, so far as it has a plot, turns on the beauty of Helen, as the whole plot of the Odyssey depends on the love of Odysseus for his wife and the constancy of Penelope. Thus both epics have a basis which might be the foundation of modern romantic fiction. Nevertheless, the spirit of romance is as completely absent from Homer as it is from all true Greek art and literature. Though Agamemnon is very angry at losing Chryseis he has no love for her. Odysseus simply gets tired of the lovely nymph Calypso, and parts from the charming Nausicaa without a pang. Such shocks as these are constantly in store for the modern reader, who is fed upon romance in the nursery.
If we look at the houses in which the domestic scenes of Homer are set we shall find that they are of a simplicity in strong contrast with the elaborate palaces of Crete or Tiryns; and this in spite of the obvious intention of the bard to depict them on a scale of heroic magnificence. They are mainly built of wood. The palace of Paris consists of three parts—thalamos, dōma, and aule. The thalamos is the private part of the house, and contains the marriage-bed of the royal couple. The dōma, or megaron, is the public hall for meals and receptions. The aule is the court with colonnades surrounding it. Priam had a large family: fifty sons slept with their wives in fifty thalamoi of polished stone built outside his court, while his daughters slept with their husbands in twelve roofed chambers within the court. The palace of Odysseus is more elaborate, and is so intended, for the disguised wanderer says: “Verily, this is the fair house of Odysseus, and easily may it be known and distinguished even among many. For there is building beyond building, and the court of the house is cunningly wrought with a wall and copings, and there are well-fitting double doors.” Standing outside the front door he can perceive by the smell of roast meat that there is a banquet going on. No great magnificence here. In front of the “well-fitting doors” there is a heap of manure, with an aged hound asleep upon it (a similar dung-heap, it may be remarked, graces the court of the palace of Priam in Troy City). Inside the doors there is the megaron, where the banquet is going on. Odysseus sits down on the ashen threshold, leaning against a pillar of cypress wood, specially commended for its straightness. Telemachus takes a lump of meat, “as much as his two hands can grasp,” and a whole loaf out of the fair basket, and Odysseus (who is disguised as a beggar) devours it on his dirty wallet as he sits on the threshold. This threshold under the portico of the hall is the regular meeting-place of beggars, and it is there that strangers are put to sleep. Within the hall there is an upper chamber where Penelope sleeps and lives with her maidens. The wooers set up three braziers in the hall to give them light, and heap them with wood and pine-brands; consequently the hall is so full of smoke that the weapons have to be removed to a storeroom to keep them useful. Odysseus, sleeping in the “prodomos” of the hall, can hear a remark made by one of the twelve grinding-women who have their hand-mills in the house next door. Under the same echoing colonnade where Odysseus sleeps goats and cattle are tethered by day. The walls of the hall itself are of wood, the ceiling is of wood, and the floor is of stamped earth, for it is cleaned with a spade, and fires are raked out of the braziers on to the floor. As for the bridal chamber, Odysseus had built it himself with stone, and it contained a marvellous bed wrought by the hero out of a living olive-tree. Finally, there was a rather obscure postern-gate set high in the wall of the hall above a stone threshold, and opening on to an open gallery. Thus the feature of the house of Odysseus is that it is of two stories; otherwise it consists, as usual, of three parts—hall, court, and chamber.
Our learned archæologists have been setting their intellects to the task of making these Homeric houses fit in with the palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns, but they have found it hard work. They have had to admit that the palace of Odysseus is a good deal simpler than the meanest of the Ægean palaces. And yet our poet has deliberately advertised it as something out of the common. Does not that betray singular poverty of imagination? He could not even make his heroic domiciles as splendid as the actual buildings in which he sang his lays. What should we think of a novelist who professed to write about duchesses and described them as sitting in sumptuous front parlours? Of course we know the explanation. It is hopeless to attempt to synchronise the Homeric age with the ages of Ægean palaces. Homer lived in an altogether lower civilisation as regards wealth and comfort. Just as we saw that his “kings” were only country squires, so his “palaces” are no more than farmhouses, with all their picturesque squalor and simplicity. Dirt and magnificence may go hand in hand, as in our own mediæval halls, but in the Homeric civilisation the magnificence is only in the poet’s heart. His material surroundings are fitly typified by the Dipylon vases.