It seems unlikely. Moreover, if the Northern or Achaean spirit had ignored or pruned away these things, they could give no trouble to the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations.
When we come to consider examples of expurgation, we may prefer to pass by the odious vices reprobated by the code of Australian savages, but highly popular in historic Greece. They do not occur in our Homer, and I know but one allusion to them in the Icelandic sagas, and that is in a mere impossible taunt about a Bogle. But no one can say that Homer never heard of such things; we might as well say that, because nobody coughs in Homer, no Achaean ever condescended to cough. The profession of Rahab cannot have been unknown, though Homer never mentions it. In short, a high ideal tone is preserved, Homer is not Monsieur Zola; an epic is not a "naturalistic" novel.
When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation might be later inserted. Thus, in Odyssey, vii. 54, Alcinous and Arete are "of the self-same parents." Later, a genealogy makes them uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-known Märchen, a tale of No Man's Land, as in his mention of the adelphic marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of Theocritus.[17]
I am following Mr. Murray's examples of expurgation. The spirit of the battles in the Iliad "is chivalrous," he says. "No enemy is ever tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18]
One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever they were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In the Tain Bo Cualgne, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly, on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred a more horrible story—not, of course, because they approved of such proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his sources, in Märchen and chronicles. He followed a French story in Sidney's Arcadia, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings" Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a living enemy.
There is a passage in the Iliad (xiii. 573) in which a man, speared from behind through the bowels, "where a wound is most baneful to wretched mortals, writhes about the spear ... for a moment, not for long"; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the line which he renders "he struggled quite a little while, not at all long," to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so, or may not; the fact that the line is a formula, like those of our ballads, makes me incline to think it ancient. The point is not of much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in the Odyssey, is a proof that Homer's men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In the Iliad there is no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been treated like Melanthius.
I understand Mr. Murray to argue that the Iliad has been expurgated, but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while the Odyssey (l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray's arguments that such words as ἄφυκτος, not "to be escaped," applied to arrows in the Iliad, and "bitter" (πικρός) and "groanful" and "not long to be supported" as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows, I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary. Πικρός means "sharp," according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause groans enough; the heroes "do not long support" flesh-wounds from spears, but "retire hurt." That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die (iv. 134) when arrow—smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh arrow, "unused before," "whose poison has not been rubbed off." I reply that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would use a new spear in a tournament.
In the Iliad, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points. People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone, corrupt human bones by preference.
As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think that it was expurgated from the Iliad by men who let it stand in the Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas of Iliad, i. 74-83, who dare not name the cause of Apollo's wrath unless Achilles will guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord's three daughters, in the Iliad.