II
IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
I
When Dr. Schliemann with his little shovel uncovered the treasures of Mycenæ and Ilium, a good many timid souls rejoiced exceedingly over a convincing proof of the authenticity of the Homeric legends. There always will be those who find the proof of a spiritual fact in some corresponding material fact; who wish to see the bones of Agamemnon before they are quite ready to believe in the Agamemnon of the Iliad; to whom the Bible is not true until its truth has been confirmed by some external witness. But when science has done its utmost, there still remains in a work of art a certain testimony to truth, which may be illustrated by science, but cannot be superseded by it. Agamemnon has lived all these years in the belief of men without the aid of any cups, or saucers, or golden vessels, or even bones. Literature, and especially imaginative literature, is the exponent of the life of a people, and we must still go to it for our most intimate knowledge. No careful antiquarian research can reproduce for us the women of early Greece as Homer has set them before us in a few lines in his pictures of Helen and Penelope and Nausikaä. When, therefore, we ask ourselves of childhood in Greek life, we may reconstruct it out of the multitudinous references in Greek literature to the education of children, to their sports and games; and it is no very difficult task to follow the child from birth through the nursery to the time when it assumes its place in the active community: but the main inquiries must still be, What pictures have we of childhood? What part does the child play in that drama which is set before us in a microcosm by poets and tragedians?
The actions of Homer’s heroes are spiritualized by reflection. That is, as the tree which meets the eye becomes a spiritual tree when one sees its answering image in the pool which it overhangs, so those likenesses which Homer sets over against the deeds of his heroes release the souls of the deeds, and give them wings for a flight in the imagination. A crowd of men flock to the assembly: seen in the bright reflection of Homer’s imagination, they are a swarm of bees:—
“Being abroad, the earth was overlaid
With flockers to them, that came forth, as when of frequent bees
Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees
Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new
From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded, grew,
And never would cease sending forth her clusters to the spring,