The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

"The Epos" has "its prevailing Achaean tone," owing to "the prestige of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of the Saga and the Bard," and "the partial return to the migratory life" (p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent, the "Cyclic" poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations of Homeric poems leave them alone? Because already selected for recitation?

If the Achaean or Northern spirit, "the clean and lordly Northern spirit," made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to do in the way of purification?

It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. "As the population became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion, re-emerged" (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is un-Homeric and un-Achaean.

Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic populations inserted the superstitions into the Iliad where they had not been previously, and then cut them out again.

It is not easy to understand how stories "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer" "had been expurgated from Homer centuries back" (p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in his Prometheus. If Homer or the Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have dealt at all in a story "far too primitive and monstrous for Homer," or for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions, why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?

Then the old questions re-arise, why were the "Cyclic" poems of the heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric recitations at Athens (see "The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer"). Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: "The recitation was established about the end of the sixth century ... so much seems historically clear." (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!) "It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants." Now, as our authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain that they had no good authority. "The Solonian laws and constitution were promulgated in 594 B.C.," says Grote; that was at least eighty years before a date "about the end of the sixth century." The men are far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in the thirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody, not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.

All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died "not easily," if he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if they found such matter in Homer.

Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaic festival.

How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations contributed to the expurgation of the Iliad and Odyssey, must be stated in Mr. Murray's own words. I may first observe that, in his opinion, "the body of the poem" (the Iliad), "even in the latest parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else, something older and more Northern."[12] How, if this be true, the Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!

A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted: