Mixed natures of any kind seem, in truth, to have been little to his taste. Even if he could have apprehended the symbolical meanings underlying them in dim Oriental imaginations, he could scarcely have reconciled himself to the sacrifice of beauty which they involved. Men, horses, bulls, lions, were all separately admirable in his eyes; but to blend, he felt instinctively, was not to heighten their perfections. Thus, the hybrid nature of the Centaurs, if present to his mind, was left undefined as something ‘abominable, inutterable.’ The Harpies, realised by Hesiod as half-human fowls, remained with him barely personified tornadoes. Neither Pegasus nor the Minotaur, neither the bird-women of Stymphalis, nor the Griffons of the Rhipæan mountains, found mention in his song, and he admitted—and that in a family-legend—but one true specimen of the dragon-kind in the ‘Chimæra dire’ slain by Bellerophon. The monstrosity of Scylla is left purposely vague. She is a fancy-compound defying classification. She lived, too, in the outer world of the Odyssey, where ‘things strange and rare’ flourished in quiet disregard of laws binding elsewhere.
In the same region of wonderland occur the oxen of the Sun—the only sacred animals recognised by our poet. They had their pasturing-ground in the island of Thrinakie, whither Helios retired to divert himself with their frolics after each hard day of steady Mediterranean shining; and so keen was his indignation at their slaughter by the famished comrades of Odysseus, that a cosmical strike would have ensued but for the promise of Zeus to inflict condign punishment upon the delinquents. From the shipwreck by which this promise was fulfilled, Odysseus, alone exempt from guilt in the matter, was the solitary survivor.
The Homeric treatment of animals, compared with the extravagances prevalent in other primitive literature, is eminently sane and rational. Not through indifference to their perfections. A peculiar intensity of sympathy with brute-nature is, on the contrary, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Homeric poems. But that sympathy is based upon the appreciation of real, not upon the transference of imaginary qualities. Beasts are, on the whole, kept strictly in their proper places. The only genuine example of their sublimation into higher ones is afforded by the horses of Achilles, and this during a transport of epic excitement. Otherwise, the fabulous element admitted concerning animals—and it is just in their regard that fable commonly runs riot—is surprisingly small.
In its room, we find such a wealth of acute and accurate observation, as no poet, before or since, has had the capacity to accumulate, or the power to employ for purposes of illustration. It is unmistakably private property. Details appropriated at second-hand could never have fitted in so aptly with the needs of imaginative creation. Moreover, the conventional types of animal character were of later establishment. There was at that early time no recognised common stock of popular or proverbial wisdom on the subject to draw upon. The lion had not yet been raised to regal dignity; the fox was undistinguished for craft, as the goose for folly. Beasts and birds had their careers in literature before them. Their reputations were still to make. They carried about with them no formal certificates of character. The poet was accordingly unfettered in his dealings with them by preconceived notions; whence the delightful freshness of Homer’s zoological vignettes. The dew of morning, so to speak, is upon them. They are limned direct from his own vivid impressions of pastoral, maritime, and hunting scenes.
As to the locality of those scenes, some hints, but scarcely more than hints, can be derived. For in the course of nearly three thousand years, the circumstances of animal distribution have been affected by changes too considerable and too indeterminate to admit of confident argument from the state of things now to the state of things then; while the notices of the poet, incidental by their very nature, are of the utmost value for what they tell, but warrant only very hesitating inferences from what they leave untold. Thus, it does not follow that because Homer nowhere mentions the cuckoo, he was therefore unfamiliar with its note, which, from Hesiod’s time until now, has not failed to proclaim the advent of spring among the olive-groves of Bœotia, and must have been heard no less by Paris or Anchises than by the modern archæological traveller, along the oak-clad and willow-fringed valley of Scamander. Nor is the faintest presumption of a divided authorship supplied by the fact that the nightingale sings in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad. Nevertheless, analogous considerations should not be altogether neglected in Homeric criticism. They may possibly help towards the answering of questions both of time and place: of time, through allusions to domesticated animals; of place, by a comparison of the known range of wild species with the fauna of the two great epics. And, first, as regards domesticated animals.
The list of these is a short one. The Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad commanded the services of the horse in battle, of oxen and mules for draught; dogs were their faithful allies in hunting and cattle driving, and they kept flocks of sheep and goats. The ass appears only once, and then indirectly, on the scene, when the lethargic obstinacy of his behaviour serves to heighten the effect of Ajax’s stubbornness in fight. Thus:
And as when a lazy ass going past a field hath the better of the boys with him, an ass that hath had many a cudgel broken about his sides, and he fareth into the deep crop, and wasteth it, while the boys smite him with their cudgels, and feeble is the force of them, but yet with might and main they drive him forth when he hath had his fill of fodder; even so did the high-hearted Trojans and allies, called from many lands, smite great Aias, son of Telamon, with darts on the centre of his shield, and ever followed after him.[[136]]
[136]. Iliad, xi. 557-64.
The creature’s ‘little ways’ were then already notorious, although all mention of him or them is omitted from the Odyssey, as well as from the Hesiodic poems. His existence is indeed implied by the parentage of the mule. But mules were brought to the Troad ready-made from Paphlagonia.[[137]] It was not until later that they were systematically bred by the Greeks.
[137]. Hehn and Stallybrass, Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 110, 460.