The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

Thus the Ionian makes us certain that he was of an un-Homeric state of society. He dates himself in similar fashion, when he makes Memnon (who, as in the Odyssey, slays Antilochus) receive after death the gift of immortality; and when he makes Thetis carry the body of Achilles (burned in the Odyssey) to be the worshipped hero of the isle of Leuke in the Euxine. There, when Ionian colonists reached the Euxine, Achilles became a ruling religious hero, recognised by Alcaeus (Fr. 49). "The Locrians in Italy," according to Pausanias, had a cult of Aias, whose armed ghost wounded Leonymus of Croton in battle. (In post-Homeric Greece the ghosts of heroes appeared in mortal wars, as St. James fought for Cortes against the Aztecs. Homer could conceive no such folly.) The Delphic oracle dispatched Leonymus to Leuke, where he found Achilles happily married to Helen, who sent by Leonymus a message to the poet Stesichorus, that had libelled her. Patroclus and Antilochus were with Achilles in Leukê, etc. etc.[30]

If the Aethiopis is earlier than these Ionian colonies, if Leuke in fable meant "the isle of light," then the colonists identified the Euxine isle with the isle of light, and so worshipped the dead Achilles of Leuke. The Ionian trading cities, of which Miletus was chief, had begun to adopt the new religious ideas that grew up, after the Homeric age, in honour of the national heroes.[31] It is more probable that the Ionians had never dropped the rites and religions of the conquered races, and merely added Achilles to Erechtheus. They had no spite against Achilles, who had never, like Agamemnon and Diomede, been their master.

For the rest, the story of the Aethiopis is conducted on the lines of the Iliad, as far as the events included in the poems, ending with the death of Achilles in the Scaean gate, permit imitation; and all concludes with a lament or regret, a funeral, and funeral games, as in the Iliad.

The Little Iliad contains several main incidents, of which seven were, or may have been, expansions of hints in the Odyssey and Iliad. The additions are the theft of the Palladium, a kind of fetich ignored by Homer; the magical power of the arrows of Philoctetes over the fate of Troy; the introduction of Sinon, as followed by Virgil in the Aeneid; and a long story about Aethra, mother of Theseus and slave of Helen in Troy, and about her grandsons, sons of Theseus, whose presence in the Achaean host is unknown to Homer. In Iliad, iii. 144, Helen has, in an interpolated line, an attendant, "Aethra, daughter of Pittheus." This was enough for the Ionian poets; for, as Aethra was the name of the mother of Theseus, "naturally the later poets took advantage of it in order to find a place for the Attic heroes in the main body of epic narrative."[32]

Mr. Leaf makes Iliad, iii. 144, "a clear case of an interpolation of a later myth," a myth introduced here to please the Athenians. Aethra and the rape of Helen by Theseus, to avenge which the brothers of Helen carried the mother of Theseus away, were depicted and described on the chest of Cypselus,[33] and painted by Polygnotus, following the Little Iliad of Lesches, on the Leschê at Delphi. But here Aethra was with the Homeric maids of Helen (Panthalis and Electra), but was being recognised by her un-Homeric grandson, son of Theseus, Demophon. According to the Little Iliad, Aethra escaped to the Greek camp: by permission of Helen, Agamemnon restores Aethra to her grandsons.[34]

Ionia could only drag fair Helen into the Athenian legend of Theseus by averring that he carried her off when she was a child, and that she was brought back to the house of Tyndareus her sire by her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces. They also seized Aethra, the mother of Theseus, who accompanied Paris and Helen to Troy, and was still in Helen's service after the ten years of the leaguer. Now as Theseus in his prime was contemporary with the youth of Nestor, and as Nestor was, say, seventy in the tenth year of the war, the mother of Theseus must have been more than a centenarian when she was the suivante of Helen, in Iliad, Book iii. But Ionians stuck at nothing in the effort to bring themselves into touch with the great Achaean enterprise; that is, stuck at nothing except at interpolating their fables into the Iliad. They could perhaps insert, as in Iliad, iii. 144, a mention or two of Theseus, and some lines on Attic heroines in Odyssey, xi.

There can be no more conclusive proof that Ionians did not possess the power of adding what they pleased to the Achaean epics.

The Ilion Persis, or Sack of Troy, was a poem attributed, like the Aethiopis, to Arctinus of Miletus. Herein occurs the affair of the Wooden Horse, familiar to readers of the Odyssey in the lay of Demodocus at the board of Alcinous.[35] Demodocus tells enough to serve Arctinus with a theme which only needs expansion. The story was given much as Virgil and Quintus Smyrnaeus render it; we have the portent of Laocoon and the serpents, which causes Aeneas and his men (not as in Virgil) to retire to Mount Ida. In the song of Demodocus, Odysseus gets most of the credit of success; the hero in Odyssey, xi. 504-537, gives the glory to Neoptolemus—and himself. In Arctinus, Odysseus murders the child of Hector, Astyanax (an un-Homeric cruelty); Odysseus is always degraded by the Ionians and usually by the Attic tragedians. Aias Oileus's son enrages Athene by dragging down her image while struggling with Cassandra; hence the sorrows of the Achaeans on their way home. The sons of Theseus carry to Athens their aged grandmother, Aethra. Could anything be more characteristic of the Athenians than the fact that the heroes looking out from the Horse, in a bronze group on the Acropolis, were Attic, the two apocryphal sons of Theseus, the Athenian Menestheus, and Teucer, "who expresses the Athenian claim to Salamis"?[36]

By a truly Ionian touch, Polyxena, daughter of Priam, is sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. It seems probable that the Iliou Persis really took up the story with the suicide of Aias (from this part of the poem a fragment is quoted in the scholia to Iliad, xi. 515),[37] and that the poem contained the whole prowess of Neoptolemus at Troy, and the affair of the bringing back of Philoctetes from Lemnos. The prominence of Aeneas expands the hint in Iliad, xx. 307, 308, the prophecy of Poseidon that he and his children will long rule over the Trojans. Throughout the Iliad, Aeneas is protected by Aphrodite, and is looked on jealously by Priam, as a Stewart might look on a Hamilton; for, failing issue of Priam, Aeneas succeeds to the Trojan crown. The whole poem, wherever Aeneas appears, is affected by the tradition that he did continue the Trojan line.

The sacrifice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles appears to be peculiar to Arctinus. It would be interesting to know whether or not any Ionian poem was the source of the story of Polyxena as given by Dictys Cretensis. In Dictys, Patroclus moves Achilles to be reconciled to Agamemnon: the army goes into winter quarters, and Trojans and Achaeans meet on friendly terms in the grove of Thymbraean Apollo; Achilles sees Polyxena at a sacrifice, and falls in love with her. Hector offers her as the price of his treason to the Achaeans, which annoys Achilles. At Polyxena's request he later restores the body of Hector to Priam. At a subsequent meeting in Apollo's temple, Paris stabs Achilles to death. After the capture of Troy, Odysseus advises the sacrifice of Polyxena to the ghost of Achilles, but Euripides and later writers make the ghost or voice of Achilles demand her death. In other respects, as to the fate of the Trojan ladies, Dictys follows Arctinus.