The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

Every reader of the Iliad perceives that the poet knows an immense mass of legend and tradition. Thus, like Shakespeare, and our great masters of fiction, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, he rarely introduces a minor character without marking the individuality in some memorable way. Often he does this by some line or two on the ancestry of the personage, and we are for a moment brought into touch with "old unhappy far-off things," or meet some notable trait of character. Thus Theano, daughter of Kisseus of Thrace, priestess of Athene in Troy, and wife of Antenor, is only introduced to utter the prayer of the women to the relentless goddess (Iliad, vi. 302-310). Yet we know her when we meet her, for (Iliad, v. 69-71) we have already heard of her goodness of heart. She reared Meges, a bastard of Antenor, "kindly, like her own children, to please her lord." Here we have probably no more than a touch of Homer's genial and discriminating art; it is not probable that the poet took this trait from any traditional "saga."

On the other hand, when in a digression he makes Nestor speak of old heroes, Epeians and Lapithae; or when Glaucus tells the tale of Bellerophon and the wife of Proetus; or Phoenix touches on the tragedy of fair-haired Meleager of Aetolia; or Agamemnon speaks of the birth of Heracles, or, in several other references to Theban wars, to the Amazons, and so forth, Homer is clearly drawing from the great legendary store of Achaeans or Pelasgians (to use that term for the earlier people).

All this matter is called "the saga" by the critics. As Homer comes at the crowning period of epic poetry, as his instrument, the hexameter, is delicately tempered by long processes, it seems probable that his mind was full of ancient lays on legendary themes as well, probably, as of Märchen and traditions told orally in prose. These things are to him what ballads and oral traditions were to Scott. Though he only once, in a suspected passage, touches on the Choice of Paris (Iliad, xxiv, 25-30), he must have known some tale which accounted for the enmity of Hera to Ilios, and the hatred of Athene to the Asian city of which she was patroness. Zeus himself (Iliad, iv. 31-33) seems puzzled by the fury of Hera against Troy. Quo numine laeso? The cause of wrath is, in fact, spretae injuria formae, the spite of neglected beauty. No other reason (setting aside the favour of Ganymede, to whom Homer only refers in the most casual way) has ever been given.

As to the Trojan affairs, Homer knows many things on which he only touches briefly. It is clear that he knew a great saga about Trojan legendary history; for example, about the wall built by the Trojans and Pallas Athene to shelter Heracles when he fought a monster that ravaged the land (Iliad, xx. 146). He also knows that Apollo was made thrall to Laomedon, and built the city wall of Troy, but was defrauded of his reward (xxi. 441-455). That Apollo and Poseidon therefore sent the monster to which Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, was exposed, Homer does not say; he commonly ignores the märchenhaft, the fairy-tale points in a legend, but he knows that Heracles was also defrauded, and avenged himself by sacking Ilios (v. 638641). Manifestly there was a rich growth of Märchen and legends clustered round Troy, and known to the Achaeans; Homer merely alludes to it, and to events posterior to the death of Hector.

He knows how Achilles fell in the Scaean gate, slain by Paris and Apollo; he knows the Sack of Troy, the wooden horse; the Returns, prosperous, troubled, or fatal, of the heroes; he knows Memnon's part in the war, and the end of Aias; he knows that Philoctetes is to be needed, and that Eurypylus fought and fell, and so forth. Concerning some of these things he may have heard lays; others he may have learned merely through oral tradition in prose.

Now it is at this point, namely, Homer's peculiar treatment of the legendary material which reached him, whether in verse or in prose Märchen, that his art stands especially apart from the art of poets who followed him, whether the authors of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, or the Athenian tragedians, or the dim genealogisers in verse of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Homer deliberately selects from the "saga," or folk-tale, or bardic tradition, what is noble, heroic, possible, and human. He also, in the Iliad, deliberately rejects what is märchenhaft; the situations which belong to the datelessly old popular Märchen, or "fairy tale." Later poets put these things prominently forward; Homer ignores them. This is to be proved later in detail: meanwhile here is another mark of the aloofness of Homer, of his high aristocratic genius.

It seems certain that the Trojan legend, with the legends of the Theban wars and tragedies, of the voyage of Argo, and of the hunt of the Calydonian boar, existed in some consecutive form, and was supposed to be record of historical facts before our Homeric poems were composed. Actual history it was not, any more than the Chansons de Geste, the poem of Beowulf, the two Irish cycles of Cuchullin and of Fian, or the Volsunga Saga, or the romances of Arthur, are records of actual history.

In some of these cycles of western Europe we know that historical personages are involved,—about Charlemagne, of course, there is no doubt; and there really were wars of the Cymri of Strathclyde against the English invaders; and the romances appear to contain fanciful accounts of actual battles of Arthur fought in Cumberland, Lothian, Ettrick Forest, and the Lennox. But when King Loth of Lothian, whose house plays so great a part in the romances, appears, we see that he is only an "eponymous hero," his name being derived by legend from the name of his realm, Lothian. About any real characters whose fame may echo in the ancient Irish bardic traditions nothing can be known.

Homer's heroes are in the same case. There may have been a very early Achaean attempt against the northern Asiatic shore of the Aegean. There may have been wars of several States against Thebes. The voyage of the Argo, on the other hand, is nothing but a tissue of diverse Märchen, adroitly fitted into each other, as most formulae can glide into any other Märchen formula and be prolonged almost infinitely. The Argo saga, as currently told, begins apparently with the tale of the man who weds a fairy bride or a swan nymph, and later loses her, like the Eskimo Bird Bride, the Sanskrit Urvasi and Pururavas. In the saga the man is Athamas, king of the Minyae of Orchomenos, or of Halos in Thessalian Phthiotis, or of Phthia. The bride is Nephele the Cloud-maiden. The pair have two children, Phrixus and Helle. The king takes another wife, and has another child by her. We now have the stepmother formula. Ino ill-treats Phrixus and Helle. Nephele returns to the house disguised as an old nurse (East Lynne formula). She deceives Ino into slaying her own children in place of her step-children (Hop o' my thumb formula; but this is not the most current version). Ino roasts the seed corn; there is no harvest, she sends messengers to the Delphic oracle to bring back the false answer that Phrixus must be sacrificed. When Athamas is about to sacrifice him, or both him and Helle, Nephele produces as substitute the golden (or white, or purple) ram, a gift of Hermes. On his back Phrixus, or both Helle and Phrixus, escape.