We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character?
The answer is that just as the second type of Charles is the result of
feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of Agamemnon reflects
the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of Greece. The
masterly portrait of Agamemnon could only have been designed to win
the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an Over-Lord whom they
cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence,
but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and
character some of them can barely tolerate.
{blank space} an historical unity. The poem deals with
what may be called a feudal society, and the attitudes of the Achaean
Bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the Iliad and
in every Book of it, those of the peers and king in the later Chansons
de Geste.
Returning to the decadent Charles of the French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the Nestor of the French epics, cries: "It is for you that we have left our lands and fiefs, our fair wives and our children ... But, by the Apostle to whom they pray in Rome, were it not that we should be guilty before God we would go back to sweet France, and thin would be your host." {Footnote: Chevalerie Ogier, 1510-1529. Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. iii. pp. 156-157.} In the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the angered Achilles: "We came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless one, but to please thee! But now go I back to Phthia with my ships—the better part." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 158-169.}
Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry Naismes admits that duty to God demands obedience to Charles. There cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born in similar historical conditions.
In Guide Bourgogne, a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, "They say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and myself. As to Charles, he eats." Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, "Thou, heavy with wine, with dog's eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host ..." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 227, 228. Gui de Bourgogne, pp. 37-41.} It is Achilles or Roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who camps by the wine. Charles, in the Chanson de Saisnes, abases himself before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of atonement to Achilles. {Footnote: Épopées Françaises, Léon Gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.} Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. {Footnote: Entrée en Espagne.}
The poet of the Iliad is a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.
The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St. Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland, and in the "later" parts of the Iliad were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent Chanson de Geste. In the Iliad Agamemnon's character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe. The Ionians—"democratic to the core," says Mr. Leaf—would either have taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest Chansons. Or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait.
The conditions under which the Chansons arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: cared vate sacro. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.
It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our Iliad is only a very late remaniement, like the fourteenth century Chansons de Geste, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age of remaniement, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in gauloiseries of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the Iliad is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the Iliad.