To two swift bearers gave him then in charge,
To Sleep and Death, twin brothers; in their arms
They bore him safe to Lycia’s widespread plains.[[11]]
[11]. Iliad, xvi. 676-88 (Lord Derby’s translation).
The Mycenæan custom of embalming corpses was not, then, strange to Homer; and the Homeric custom of burning them has perhaps—for the evidence is indecisive—left traces in the more recent graves of the Mycenæan people. What is certain is that simple interment was everywhere primitively in use, and that the pyre was a subsequent innovation, at first only partially adopted, and perhaps nowhere exclusively in vogue.
The plastic art of Mycenæ seems to have been on the decline when the ‘sovran poet’ arose. This can be inferred from the wondering admiration displayed in his verses for what must once have been its ordinary performances, as well as from the marked superiority assigned in them to foreign over native artists. They include besides no allusion to the signet-rings so plentiful at Mycenæ, no notice, in any connexion, of the art of gem-engraving, nor of the indispensable luxury—to ladies of high degree—of toilet-mirrors. Active intercourse with Egypt, again, had evidently ceased long prior to the Homeric age. The Nile is, in the poems, not even known by name, but only as the ‘river of Egypt;’ and the country is reached, not in the ordinary course of navigation, but through recklessness or ill-luck, by adventurers or castaways.
We can now gather the following indications regarding the date of the Homeric poems. They must have originated during the interval between the Trojan War—which, in some shape, may be accepted as an historical event—and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. They probably originated not very long before the latter event, when the Mycenæan monarchy was of itself tottering towards a fall precipitated by the frequently repeated incursions of ruder tribes from the north. The generally accepted date for the final event is eighty years after the taking of Troy, or 1104 B.C. But this rests on no authentic circumstance, and may very well be a century or more in error. A preferable chronological arrangement would place Homer’s flourishing in the eleventh century, and the overthrow of Mycenæ near its close. Difficulties of sundry kinds can thus be, in a measure, evaded or conciliated, without encroaching overmuch on the voiceless centuries available for the unrecorded readjustment of the disturbed elements of Greek polity.
As to the mode of origin of the two great poems which have come down to us from so remote an age, much might be said; but a few words must here suffice. It is a topic on which the utmost diversity of opinion has prevailed since F. A. Wolf published, in 1795, his famous ‘Prolegomena,’ and as to which unity of views seems now for ever unattainable. For demonstrative evidence is naturally out of the question, and estimates of opposing probabilities are apt to be strongly tinctured with ‘personality.’ Prepossessions of all kinds warp the judgment, even in purely literary matters, and, in this case especially, have led to the learned advocacy of extreme opinions. Thus, partisans of destructive criticism have carried the analysis of the Homeric poems to the verge of annihilation; while ultra-conservatives insist upon a seamless whole, and regard the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of Homer, in the same sense and with the same implicit confidence that they hold the Æneid and the Eclogues to be Virgilian, or ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’ to be Miltonic productions. Between these widely diverging paths, however, there is a middle way laid down by common sense, which it is tolerably safe to follow. A few simple considerations may help us to find it.
We must remember, in the first place, that the Homeric poems were composed, not to be privately read, but to be publicly recited. They remained unwritten during at least a couple of centuries, flung on the waves of unaided human memory. Oral tradition alone preserved them; and not the punctilious oral tradition of a sacerdotal caste like the Brahmins, but that of a bold and innovating class of ‘rhapsodes,’ themselves aspiring to some share in the Muse’s immediate favours, and prompt to flatter the local vanities and immemorial susceptibilities of their varied audiences. Within very wide limits, they were free to ‘improve’ what long training had enabled them to appropriate. Their licence infringed no literary property; there was no authorised text to be corrupted; one man’s version was as good as another’s. It is not, then, surprising that the primitive order of the Epics became here and there disarranged, or that interpolated and substituted passages usurped positions from which they could not afterwards easily be expelled. Expository efforts have, indeed, sometimes succeeded only in adding fresh knots to the already tangled skein. Pisistratus, however, did good service by for the first time editing the Homeric poems.[[12]] Scattered manuscripts of them had doubtless existed long previously; but it was their collection and collation at Athens, and the disposal in a determinate succession of the still disjointed materials they afforded, which placed the Greek people in the earliest full possession of their epical inheritance.
[12]. German critics doubt the fact. See Niese, Die Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, p. 5.