The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

I also entirely agree that "the later literary whole" (by which I at least mean Hesiod, the "Cyclic" fragment, and much of Greek tragedy, not to speak of antiquarian learning) "contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion." But the theory that these things were once in, but were purged out of, the Iliad and Odyssey, still baffles me. If they were usages peculiar to the conquered races, how could they appear in the poetry of the uncontaminated Northern or Achaean conquerors?

How, again, can we say that "the great mass of saga poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century"? Notoriously the "Cyclic" poems, or the legends which were given in those poems, were greatly preferred as subjects of art by the Athenian vase-painters of the sixth century, and by Polygnotus when he decorated the Lesche at Delphi. The stories, I have shown, reached the Middle Ages through Rome and through Graeco-Roman literature, and eclipsed our Homer. To them we owe the unhappy Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare.

We have no evidence known to me that proves the selection, "at some early time for public recitation," of "two poems," at the solemn four-yearly meeting of "All Ionians" and afterwards of "all Athenians." Mr. Verrall supposes the "Cyclic" poems, as well as our Homer, to have been recited at the Panathenaea. I know no evidence that they were, and none proving that they were not. I am unaware of any reason for which our Iliad should have been specially selected for education in the Ionia of the eighth century, and for public recitation. The reason is the further to seek if the Iliad and Odyssey, when thus selected, "were demonstrably still in a fluid condition"; indeed, while they were still in a fluid condition, I do not know how they could have been deemed so much more choiceworthy than other poems still (I presume) fluidic.

If "the intellect of Greece was focussed upon" Iliad and Odyssey while they were still fluidic, but already selected, then the expurgation was due, not to Achaean poets who ignored and pruned away the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, but to les intellectuels of Greece, who (whatever their private opinions might be) saw hero-worship in daily practice; and if they killed any one, were purified by pigs' blood. Hesiod stood high in universal knowledge, was a consecrated authority; if he could be purged, why was he not purged? Because he was not recited? Yet he was part of education, and needed a Bowdler much more than Homer.

The practices and beliefs expurgated from Homer were not "done in a corner" in historic Greece.

So "primitive," so barbaric was the intellect of historic Greece even in the sixth century and in the age of Pericles, and later, in regard to heroic tombs, for example, that the heroic ghosts were supposed to inhabit their sepulchres in the shape of rather harmless snakes, like the Idhlozi of the Zulus. "In Snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb," says Miss Harrison.[14]

Miss Harrison publishes reproductions of works of Greek art from the sixth century (when all ugly things of this kind, we are told, were drastically rejected from the Odyssey and Iliad) to the fourth century. We see the dead, a male and a female ghost, receiving offerings. The artist is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chairs of the holy heroes is a huge snake with a man's beard. He is a human snake, the incarnation of the dead man's ghost. This is the belief of the Baronga of Delagoa and of the Zulus.[15]

In a vase, a lecythus, of the fifth century, the worshippers surround a tumulus with a phallus-shaped pillar on top. A huge snake occupies the tumulus; he is the ghost's incarnation.[16]

Not in glens of mountainous Arcadia, or in recesses of rural chapels alone, were these things done. The theatre showed sacred tombs; each place of periodical games had its presiding hero; relics were in high request, living men, conquerors or athletes, came to be divinised; at the Eleusinia the initiates saw rites of savage origin; oracles of the dead were publicly consulted; the purification rites went on as law demanded—all publicly, all unrebuked.

Does any one suppose that priapic images like those of the Admiralty Islands were features in Homer's conception of a street in Mycenae or Ilios? These images were sacred in the Athens of Pericles, the Hermae were not like Homer's Hermes. Is it likely that, if the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations found such things as these in Homer, they would cut them out as too naughty to be mentioned, or for some other reason not to be mentioned, at a public festival of men and women familiar with all these things, and seeing in them nothing but good?