The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

Having fashioned such a character as Achilles, no poet equal to the task could leave him in the course of cruelty and shame which is his in the opening of the last Book of the Iliad. No hand but that which created the Achilles of the first Book could so restore him to himself that the Achaeans might again "see the great Achilles whom they knew." Only that one genius could conceive and achieve the immortal scene wherein Priam kisses "the hands of Achilles, terrible, manslaying, that slew so many of his sons."

"Fear thou the gods, Achilles, and have compassion on me, even me, bethinking thee of thy father. Lo, I am more piteous yet than he, and have braved what none other man on earth hath braved before, to stretch forth my hand toward the face of the slayer of my sons." There follows the lament of Achilles, for the father whom he, in search of honour, "may not tend as he groweth old, since very far from my own country I am dwelling in Troyland, to vex thee and thy children."

Even here, Achilles feels that he dares hardly trust himself, so strong is the wild beast of passion within him. So consistent, so delicate, so strong a delineation of character, I cannot conceive to be the work of more hands than one, it is the work of the hand of Homer. Throughout the whole poem every person is drawn with equal firmness, delicacy, and consistency. The study of Agamemnon is the most complex (see Homer and his Age, pp. 50-81). The foil to Agamemnon, the good Menelaus, the kindest and most chivalrously honourable of men, always conscious of his debt to the Achaeans, always eager to dare beyond his strength, is a worthy pendant. Odysseus throughout the poem is the poet's most admired hero; the wisest and most steadfast, here as in the Odyssey. It is so with the rest, with all of them; and this with the unity of ethos, of temper, of thought on human destinies, is the great argument for the unity and single authorship of the Iliad in the main. To others, probably, as to Wolf, this consistency is apparent when they read the Iliad, as alone it was meant to be read or heard, "for human pleasure," without constantly dwelling on "oppositions of science falsely so called," and hunting for discrepancies which often are not discrepant.

It is not an article of my faith that there is no non-original matter in the Iliad. In another book, Homer and the Epic, I mentioned the passages which, to me, seem probably alien, for one reason or another. About the authorship of the Catalogue I do not know enough to be able to form an opinion. In the dream of Agamemnon and what follows, in Book ii., I might guess that two or three lines have been omitted, though on the whole the waverings of Agamemnon are thoroughly consistent with his character, and are meant to throw into light the steadfastness of Odysseus. I think that Phoenix is not properly introduced in Book ix., but there he is a necessary character; his warning to Achilles, not to fight before receiving atonement, has an influence throughout, backed as it is later by the counsels of Odysseus. The battles between Troy and the Ships, in Books xii.-xv., might be more lucid; but so might Napier's account of the battle of Salamanca, and Lord Roberts's of the Siege of Delhi. I understand Homer better than I do either of these military historians; but I have taken more pains to understand him. I would rather believe the Aristeia of Idomeneus to be by another hand; it is perfunctory; and the proceedings of Poseidon are perplexing, like the doings of Ares and Athene in the first fifty lines of Book v. The Gods always, by the infinite inconsistencies of mythology, cause confusion, but the text itself has an air of dislocation. The arming of Agamemnon in the opening of Book xi., seems to me non-authentic, as far as our knowledge of Homeric armature goes. The whole passage about the destruction of the Achaean wall by the Gods, in the after time, reads to me like a pedantic later explanation of the absence of traces of the works.

The meeting of Aeneas and Achilles in Book xx. would seem more suspicious than, to me, it does, if Aeneas were not, throughout, a special sort of person, the son of a goddess, and not a good Trojan, because of Priam's suspicion of "the Orleans branch." I am inclined to think that the poet knows, all through, a "saga" of Aeneas as preserving the seed of the Royal House of Troy. In Book v., and elsewhere, he is always under divine protection, that of Apollo or of Aphrodite, "only Zeus shielded thee, and other gods," says Achilles. "It is appointed for him to escape that the race of Dardanus perish not," says Poseidon in Book xx.; and were the passage solitary, I should think it all an interpolation. But the poet always, probably for traditional reasons, takes very good care of Aeneas. The last bouts in the Funeral Games seem unlike Homer.

In the Odyssey, the passages about the concealing of the arms (xvi., xix.) are dislocated, to say the least; and all the close of the poem, especially the second Nekyia, has always lain under suspicion in critical times. Sainte-Beuve would not abandon, but admired it; I only feel that, if all this be later, it has taken the place of lost earlier material, for the poem could not conceivably close till the blood feud of Odysseus and the kin of the Wooers was appeased. An Achaean like a Scandinavian audience understood the rules, and insisted that the settlement of the blood-feud must be explained.

These are the main points at which, as far as I can judge, something has gone wrong. There are others: the interchange of shields between Nestor and Thrasymedes in the opening of Book xiv. had probably some lines of explanation given to it, though, as Mr. She wan was the first to perceive, the exchange was the necessary consequence of the manoeuvres in Book x. Here Thrasymedes lent his shield to Diomede for his night reconnaissance, Thrasymedes would then send for and use Nestor's shield, while Nestor would obtain the shield of Thrasymedes next morning from Diomede.[1]

Nothing can be more simple and natural; but the thing was so obvious as to escape attention till Mr. She wan read Homer in a Homeric spirit. No doubt there are other passages with which I am dissatisfied, but the curious may refer for them to my earlier book, Homer and the Epic.

It is not so strange that there are dislocations ill patched up, as that far more of extraneous matter, especially of Ionian matter, has not found an entry into the Epics. How the text has been so well guarded I cannot explain; Mr. Murray's theory of expurgation of certain beliefs, ways and manners, is examined in Appendix B.

As to how the Epic was evolved, I am unable to say anything precise for want of evidence. Analogy from other early national epic poetry fails us here, because nowhere is there any early national poetry of the same scope and the same consistency. Again, in such epics as the Chanson de Roland, and even in Beowulf, mythical as it is, there are actual traces of historic events. We know that, because we have chronicles and official annals corroborating parts of the Chanson de Roland, or proving the historic existence of a few characters in the Volsunga Saga, and Beowulf; but in the case of the Homeric poems we have no evidence of the actual existence of any personage.