Initiation into Literature

by Émile Faguet

HOMER.—The most ancient Greek writer known is Homer, and it cannot be absolutely stated in what epoch he lived.

Since the seventeenth century it has even been asked if he ever existed and if his poems are not collections of epic songs which had circulated in ancient Greece and which at a very recent epoch, that of Pisistratus, had been gathered into two grand consecutive poems, thanks to some rearrangement and editing. At the commencement of the nineteenth century the erudite were generally agreed that Homer had never existed. Now they are reverting to the belief that there were only two Homers, one the author of the Iliad and the other of the Odyssey.

THE ILIAD.—The Iliad is the story of the wrath of Achilles, of his retreat far from his friends who were endeavouring to capture Troy and of his return to them.

It is the poem of patriotism. It is filled with the spirit that when a people is divided against itself, all misfortunes fall on and overwhelm it. Achilles, unjustly offended, deprived his fellow-countrymen of his support; they are all on the point of perishing; he returns to them in order to avenge the death of his dearest friend and they are saved.

The Iliad is almost entirely filled with battles, which are very skillfully diversified. Some episodes, such as the farewell of Hector to his wife Andromache when he quits her for the fight, or King Priam coming, in tears, to ask Achilles for the corpse of his son Hector that he may piously inter it, are among the most beautiful passages that ever came from a human inspiration.

THE ODYSSEY.—The Odyssey is also the poem of patriotism, of the little homeland, of the native land. It is the story of Ulysses, after the siege of Troy, reconquering Ithaca, the small island of which he is king, and taking ten years to acquire it. What makes the unity of the poem, what forms the backbone of the poem, is the smoke which rises above the house of Ulysses, which he always perceives in the dream of his hopes and desires, which invincibly attracts him, which he desires to see again before he dies, and the thought of which sustains him in his trials and causes him to scorn all joys on his road thither. The thousand adventures of Ulysses, his sojourn with the nymph Calypso, his terrible perils in the cave of the giant Polyphemus and near the isle of the Sirens, the tempests which he survives, the hospitality he receives from King Alcinoüs, the visit he pays to the dead—among whom is Achilles regretting the earth and preferring to be a ploughman among the living rather than king among the dead; these are vigorous, curious, interesting, touching, picturesque scenes from which all subsequent literatures have drawn inspiration and which still delight all races.

HESIOD.—Posterior, very probably, to Homer, Hesiod has left two great poems, one on the families of the gods (Theogenia) and the other on the works of man (Works and Days). The Theogenia is very valuable to us because we learn from it and it makes us understand how the Greeks understood the divinity, its different manifestations, and, so to say, its evolution through the world. Works and Days is a poem filled with both sadness and courage, the author finding the world wicked and men unjust; but always concluding that with energy, perseverance, and obstinacy it is possible to save oneself from anything, and that there is only one real misfortune, which is to know despair.

ELEGIACAL AND LYRICAL POETS.—Almost from the most remote antiquity, from the seventh century, perhaps the eighth century before the Christian era, the Greeks possessed elegiacal and lyrical poets—that is to say, poets who put into verse their personal sentiments, the joys and sorrows which they felt as men. Such were Callinos, the satiric Archilochus, the satiric Simonides of Amorgos, the martial Tyrtaeus. Then there were the poets who made verses to be set to music: Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, Alcman. Alcaeus appears to have been the greatest lyrical Greek poet judging by the fragments we possess by him and by the lyrical poems of Horace, which there are reasons for believing were imitated from Alcaeus.

Of the poetess Sappho we have too little to enable us to judge her very exactly; but throughout antiquity she enjoyed a glory equal to that of the greatest. She specially sang of love and in such a manner as to lead to the belief that she herself had not escaped the passion.

Anacreon sang after the same fashion and with a charm, a grace, a witty ingenuity which are fascinating. He was the epicurean of poetry (before the birth of Epicurus) and from him was born a type of literature known as anacreonotic, which extended right through ancient times and has been prolonged to modern times.