[134]. Ib. xv. 263.
The makers of the Iliad, whether few or many, were at least unanimous in their fervid admiration for the horse. The verses glow with a kind of rapture of enjoyment that describe his strength, beauty, and swiftness, his eager spirit and fine nervous organisation, his docility to trusted guidance, his intelligent participation in human contentions and pursuits. No animal has elsewhere achieved true epic personality;[[135]] no animal has been raised to so high a dignity in art. The whole Iliad might be called an ‘Aristeia’ or eulogistic celebration of the species.
[135]. Cf. Milchhöfer, Die Anfänge der Kunst, p. 57.
CHAPTER V.
HOMERIC ZOOLOGY.
The establishment of a clear distinction between men and beasts might seem a slight effort of defining intellect, yet it has not been quite easily made. In children the instinct of assimilation long survives the experience of difference. A little boy of six, asked by the present writer what profession he thought of adopting, replied with alacrity that he ‘would like to be a bird,’ and it was only on being reminded of the diet of grubs associated with that state of life, that he began to waver as to its desirability. The same incapacity for drawing a boundary-line between the realm of their own imperfect consciousness and the mysterious encompassing region of animal life, is visible in the grown-up children of the wilds. Hence the zoological speculations of primitive man inevitably take the form of a sort of projection of human faculties into animal natures. Now human faculties, released from the control of actuality, spontaneously expand. In a vague and vaporous way, they transcend the low level of hard fact, and become pleasantly diffused in the ‘ampler ether’ of the unknown. Beasts thus transfigured are incapable, it may be said, of simple rationality. The powers transferred to them grow like Jack’s Beanstalk, beyond the range of sight.
Universal folk-lore, in all its tangled ramifications, bears witness to the truth of this remark. Tutelary animals, of the Puss in Boots type, abound and expatiate there. They are all-contriving and infallible. Their favour leads to fortune and power. They hold the clue to the labyrinth of human destinies. Through their protection the oppressed are rescued, the ragged are clothed in golden raiments, the outwardly despicable win princely honours, and have their names inscribed in the ‘Almanach de Gotha’ of fairy-land. No wonder that such beneficent potentates, albeit feathered or furry, should have been claimed as ancestors and hereditary protectors by human beings full of untutored yearnings for the unattainable. To our ideas, indeed, there seems little comfort or credit to be got out of counting kinship with a beaver, a bear, or an opossum; but things looked differently when the world was young; nor has it yet everywhere grown old. In Australia, black bipeds still own themselves the cousins and clients of kangaroos. American Indians pay homage to ‘manitous’ personally, as well as to ‘totems’ tribally associated with them; and twilight tales are perhaps to this hour whispered in Ireland, about a certain ‘Master of the Rats,’ whose hostility it is eminently undesirable though lamentably easy to incur.
Even among Greeks and Romans of the classical age, to say nothing of Aztecs and Alemanni, belief lurked in the preternatural wisdom of certain animals. Their formal worship, most fully elaborated in Egypt, but diffused over ‘Tellus’ orbed ground,’ sprang from the same stock of ideas. To a remarkable extent, the Greeks were exempt from its degrading associations. Their partial survival on Greek soil, as in the veneration at Phigaleia, of the horse-headed Demeter, represented, without doubt, an under-current of aboriginal tradition, reaching back to the Pelasgic fore-time.
Now it might have been anticipated that the earliest literature would have been the most deeply permeated by these primitive reminiscences. But this is very far from being the case. Their influence is scarcely perceptible in the two great epics of Troy and Ithaca; and indeed the modes of thought from which they originated were completely alien to the ethical sentiments pervading those marvellous first-fruits of Greek genius. Neither poem includes the smallest remnant of zoolatry. The Homeric divinities are absolutely anthropomorphic. They are men and women, exempt from the limitations, unscathed by the ills of humanity, and radiant with the infinite sunshine of immortal happiness. Of infra-human relationships they exhibit no trace. They are far less concerned with the animal kingdom than they grew to be in classical times. Typical beasts or birds have not yet become attached to them. The eagle, though once in the Iliad called the ‘swift messenger’ of Zeus, is altogether detached from his throne and his thunder-bolt; Heré has not developed her preference for the peacock—a bird introduced much later from the East; Athene is without the companionship of her owl; no doves flutter about the fair head of the ‘golden Aphrodite’; Artemis needs no dogs to bring down her game. The Olympian menagerie, in short, has not been constituted. On the ‘many-folded’ mountain of the gods, no beasts are maintained save the half-dozen horses strictly necessary for the purposes of divine locomotion.
Very significant, too, is Homer’s ignorance of the semi-bestial, semi-divine beings who figure in subsequent Greek mythology. ‘Great Pan’ has no place in his verse; Satyrs and Tritons are equally unrecognised by him; his Nereids are ‘silver-footed sea-nymphs,’ with no fishy tendencies.