The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

The region of legend expands with the expansion of geographical knowledge. Cities hasten, like Athens and Corinth, to attach themselves to sagas, as that of Argo, in which they had no original part. Hesiod extends the old saga, and carries descendants of the old characters, as of Odysseus, to Italy, to Latium and Etruria. "Eumelus" drags Corinth into the cycle of the Argonautic expedition: Athens, we have said, brings Medea to Athens, and into her Theseus fable. Later the logographers, in prose, continue the process and alter the genealogies to suit their historical theories.

From all these processes Homer stands apart. He has not any historical theory to prove. He seldom mentions an eponymous founder of a city, or ancestor of a people. Nausithous founds Phaeacia, his city is not called Nausithoa. Homer names Mykene (Odyssey, ii. 120), but does not say that she founded Mycenae, as "Eumelus" says that Ephyre founded the town of Ephyre (Corinth). You would not gather from Homer that the Achaeans were descendants of Achaeus, or the Danaans of Danaus.

All these things are obvious and undeniable. Homer is a poet: the genealogising writers in verse are aiming at constructing history (some history may be present), and at explaining the origins of peoples and cities.

But, according to some of the modern learned, our Homer contains borrowings from the Eumelian verses on Corinth. Thus Mr. Murray says that the Iliad and Odyssey "not only refer to other legends as already existing and treated by other poets; that every one admits; but they often in their digressions tell stories in a form which clearly suggests recapitulation or allusion. They imply the existence elsewhere of a completer poetical treatment of the same subject," as in the tale of Bellerophon, told to Diomede by Glaucus in Iliad, vi. "Is it not plain that the poet of Iliad, vi., is in the first place referring to an existing legend, and, secondly, one may almost say, quoting from an existing poem?"[8]

Certainly Homer is referring to an existing legend, and not improbably to a lay which in his time existed. But Mr. Murray goes on to suggest that the existing poem referred to is the Corinthiaca of "Eumelus," whom he takes to be a mythical name for the author of Corinthian traditional poetry; von Christ thinks Eumelus of the seventh century.

Mr. Murray's argument seems to be, Homer knew a legend, probably knew a poem, about Bellerophon, son of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, who dwelt in Ephyre (Corinth). "Eumelus" wrote a poem about Corinthian affairs. Therefore the poet who introduced the tale told by Glaucus into Iliad, vi., took it (textually, it seems to be suggested) from "Eumelus."[9] In the same way the author of Iliad, v. 395-400, and Panyassis, the uncle of Herodotus, presumably adapt from the same source. Mr. Leaf, on the other hand, supposes the poet-uncle to give an "echo" from the passage in the fifth book of the Iliad. There may be an echo, in Homer on Heracles, from an older poem on Heracles, but that poem is likely to be long anterior to the end of the sixth century.[10]

In any case the "Eumelus" known to us in Greek literary tradition was a tendenz poet, a poet with a purpose, with a pseudo-historical theory to prove; he used the method of the genealogisers, who turned into heroes and heroines men and women who were constructed out of place-names; and he, in certain places, did not borrow from Homer, nor Homer from him, for he and Homer flatly contradict each other. If all this be not post-Homeric, what is?

Pausanias, in discussing Eumelus's peculiar version of the relations of Medea to Corinth, quotes a "History of Corinth," in prose, by Eumelus, "if he is really the author of it."[11] "Eumelus is also said to have been a poet," and Pausanias avers that the only poem recognised as genuine of Eumelus is a processional ode to Delian Apollo.[12] There was a prose version of his other work, and Clemens Alexandrinus regarded Eumelus as a logographer like Acusilaus, who "turned the poems of Hesiod into prose."[13]

But, genuine or not, an "Eumelian" poem on a forged part of Corinthian legendary history did at some time exist, for the scholiast on Pindar (Ol. xiii.) cited eight lines of it; and these lines are manifestly complementary to the part of the prose history by "Eumelus" which Pausanias quotes. Taking the Eumelian verse and prose together, we find that "Eumelus" in his Corinthiaca appears in Greek literary tradition as a chronicler in verse, a genealogist, a maker of patriotic pseudo-history, and a narrator of a late version of the Argo story.

Now, as "Eumelus" began (as the Ram in the fairy story is requested to do) "at the beginning," at the founding of Ephyre, or Corinth; and as he told the Argonautic tale in full, including the aprocryphal adventures of Medea in what he chose to call her rightful kingdom in Corinth; and as the tale is a very long one, we may infer that this, and not the entire mass of Corinthian legend, was the topic of his book. If so, Bellerophon, though a Corinthian, was "out of the story"; for, by the Eumelian genealogies, he was four generations later than Medea's tenure of the Corinthian throne. She was succeeded by Sisyphus, whose exploits would fill a book; Sisyphus by Glaucus, and Glaucus by Bellerophon. But the aim of "Eumelus" was to glorify Corinth by attributing to her a share in the tale of Argo; its heroine, Medea, must therefore be of the Corinthian Royal House; and, after proving this, and telling the Argo saga, "Eumelus" must give her adventures, after Argo's return to Greece, in Corinth; and these were many and tragical.