Or read this description of Menelaus (Act v. sc. I):
"And the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother the bull, the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg—to what form but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus! I would conspire against destiny. Ask me not what I would be if I were not Thersites; for I care not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus."
One can by no means accept this as merely the outburst of a brawling slave's hatred of his superiors, for the entirely unprejudiced Diomedes expresses himself in the same spirit to Paris (Act iv. sc. I):
"Paris. And tell me, noble Diomede, faith, tell me true,
Even in the soul of sound good fellowship,
Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen best,
Myself or Menelaus.
Diomedes. Both alike:
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge;
And you as well to keep her, that defend her,
Not palating her dishonour,
With such a costly load of wealth and friends:
He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up
The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors:
Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more;
But he as he, the heavier for a whore.
Paris. You are too bitter to your countrywoman.
Diomedes. She's bitter to her country: hear me, Paris:
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As for her Greeks and Trojans have suffered death."
In the Iliad these forms represent the outcome of the imagination of the noblest people of the Mediterranean shores, unaffected by religious terrors and alcohol; they are bright, glad, reverential fantasies, born in a warm sun under a deep blue sky. From Shakespeare they step forth travestied by the gloom and bitterness of a great poet of a Northern race, of a stock civilised by Christianity, not by culture; a stock which, despite all the efforts of the Renaissance to give new birth to heathendom, has become, once for all, disciplined and habituated to look upon the senses as tempters which lead down into the mire; to which the pleasurable is the forbidden and sexual attraction a disgrace.
How significant it is that Shakespeare only sees Greek love as scourged by the lash of venereal diseases. Throughout the entire play a pestilential breath of innuendo is blown with outbursts of cursing, all centering on a contagion which first showed itself some thousand years after the Homeric times. As Homeric friendships are bestialised, so is Greek love profaned to suit modern circumstances. To Thersites, the Greek princes are, every one of them, scandalous rakes. "Here's Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not as much brain as earwax" (Act v. sc. I). "That same Diomed's a false-hearted rogue, a most unjust knave.... They say he keeps a Trojan drab and uses the traitor Calchas' tent.—Nothing but lechery; all incontinent varlets" (Act v. sc. I). Achilles, that "idol of idiot worshippers," that "full dish of fool," has Queen Hecuba's daughter as a concubine, and has treacherously promised her to leave his fellow-countrymen in the lurch. "Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore: the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery still, nothing else holds fashion." Of Menelaus and Paris, "cuckold and cuckold-maker," enough has already been said. Helen has been sternly condemned, and of Cressida with her two adorers, Troilus and Diomedes, "How the devil luxury, with his fat rump and potato-fingers, tickles these two together! Fry lechery, fry" (Act v. sc. 2).
It is clear that the Christian conception of faithlessness in love has displaced the old Hellenic innocence and naïveté. How fervent is Achilles' love for Briseis in Homer; how honest, warm, and indignant he is when he asks Agamemnon's messengers if among the children of men only the Atrides love their wives, and he himself answers that every man who is brave and of good understanding loves and shelters his wife, as he of his inmost heart loved and would shelter Briseis, prisoner of war though she was. None the less does Homer tell us how immediately after Achilles has ended his speech and dismissed his guests, he stretches himself upon his couch, "in the inner room of his tent, richly wrought, and that fair lady by his side that he from Lesbos brought, bright Diomeda." It never occurs to the Greek poet that this implies any faithlessness to the absent Briseis, but Shakespeare's standard is thoroughly and mediævally rigorous.
On two points the comparison between Homer and Shakespeare is inevitable. The first is the farewell between Hector and Andromache. There is nothing finer in Greek poetry (which is to say, any poetry) than this tragic idyl, so profoundly human and movingly beautiful as it is. The pure womanliness which out of deep grief and pain utters a complaint without weakness, and expresses without sentimentality a boundless love poured out upon this one object: "Thy life makes still my father be, my mother, brother, and besides thou art my husband too. Most loved, most worthy."
In contrast to this womanliness stands the man's strength, untouched by harshness, stirred by the deepest tenderness, but fixed in immovable determination. The picture of the child, too, frightened by the nodding plumes upon his father's helm, until Hector sets the casque upon the ground and kisses the tears from the eyes of his boy. The scene takes place in the sixth book of the Iliad; and could not have been known to Shakespeare, inasmuch much as it was as yet untranslated by Chapman. See what he sets in its place:
"Andromache. Unarm, unarm, and do not fight to-day.
Hector. You train me to offend you: get you in: By all the everlasting gods I'll go!
Andromache. My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day.
Hector. No more, I say."