CHAPTER XI
NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"
If the Homeric descriptions of details of life contain anachronisms, points of detail inserted in later progressive ages, these must be peculiarly conspicuous in the Odyssey. Longinus regarded it as the work of Homer's advanced life, the sunset of his genius, and nobody denies that it assumes the existence of the Iliad and is posterior to that epic. In the Odyssey, then, we are to look, if anywhere, for indications of a changed society. That the language of the Odyssey, and of four Books of the Iliad (IX., X., XXIII., XXIV.), exhibits signs of change is a critical commonplace, but the language is matter for a separate discussion; we are here concerned with the ideas, manners, customary laws, weapons, implements, and so forth of the Epics.
Taking as a text Mr. Monro's essay, The Relation of the Odyssey to the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, seqq.} we examine the notes of difference which he finds between the twin Epics. As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the Iliad by the poet of the Odyssey, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results. For example, we could show that the Klôthes, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier than "the simple Aisa of the Iliad." {Footnote: Odyssey, VII. 197; Iliad, xx. 127.} But our proof would require an excursion into the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their Klôthes, spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed the idea of Aisa or Fate.
We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued, fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the Odyssey borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the Iliad, where the fall is in keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. {Footnote: Monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.}
The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a cento—making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the Odyssey which do not occur in the Iliad was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor.
It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all.
Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original Achilleis—"the kernel"—the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the Odyssey!
In the original oldest part of the Iliad, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven.... Their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.} It is the later poets of the Iliad, in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the Iliad had the nobler religious conceptions.