[20] Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 524.
[21] Odyssey, xix. 13.
[22] Mr. Murray, R. G. E. p. 154, note 1, writes that when I regard the proverb that "iron of itself draws a man on" as an interpolation, "this seems like giving up most of the case." But it is no part of my case that not a single interpolation exists in either the Iliad or Odyssey. There is scarcely a critic, whatever his views, who does not suspect the passages which we have been discussing. If Mr. Murray does not see evidence of un-Homeric confusion in the passages, his view is peculiar; and if I am biassed, when I see those signs, by my ideas about iron, he may be also unconsciously biassed by his opposite ideas. If a critic desires to prove that iron was in common use for weapons during the evolution of the Odyssey, will he aver that—were no iron in question—he would see nothing suspicious in the passages?
[CHAPTER XI]
BURIAL AND THE FUTURE LIFE
The most perplexing questions in Homer's picture of life are connected with the disposal of the dead. It is just here, where archaeology as a rule gives the surest evidence from the examination of graves, that archaeology so far seems to fail us. Yet Homer speaks with no uncertain voice. From the fifty-second line of the first book of the Iliad to the funeral of Hector in the twenty-fourth book, Homer always tells of cremation, "and ever the pyres of the dead burned in multitude." There may be slight variations in practice, as regards burning his armour with the dead warrior; and the funeral of Patroclus, in which the love and the rage of Achilles expended themselves, has features not usually recorded by Homer,—the circumstances being peculiar,—but there is always cremation, always the urn-burial of the bones, always the cairn piled above them with its pillar on the summit; yet no such Homeric cairn has yet been discovered.
Yet Homer certainly describes no invented rites: cremation, urn-burial, the linen wrapping of the urn (gold, bronze, or of pottery), and the cairn are familiar from remains of the Bronze and early Iron Age in northern and central Europe: the custom in our islands appears to have survived the dawn of Christianity, and is perfectly well remembered by the Christian author of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. Contrasting pagan times with his own, he writes: "Woe is his who is destined, through savage hate, to thrust his soul into the fire's embrace, to hope for no comfort, in no wise to change."