Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design, at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter. Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a divine αοιδος, a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again. The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses. It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we have scarcely added.

For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room, settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials. Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay, who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies, wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and only covered with a girdle of leaves—standing still to meet him when the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them, Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt in the way which he has described.

Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer, about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C. We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals, until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own land—Alcæus, for instance—should have left such a work to be done by a foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us, therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are the work of the same is yet sub judice. The Greeks believed they were; and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style, yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage where the grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but there are θητες, or serfs, an order with which we are familiar in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the Trojans are called επιβητορες ἱππων, which must mean riders. In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.

Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of Achilles; but singularly not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses. Ulysses to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at Troy than he appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him—his soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence—they are held in very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and then to add—

αλλα τον υἱον

γεινατο εἱο χερηα μαχη, αγορη δε τ' αμεινω

But the Phœacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. 'The gods,' Ulysses says, 'do not give all good things to all men, and often a man is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to look on him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the multitude. As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a god.'

Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps the following may be of more importance:—

In both poems there are 'questionings of destiny,' as the modern phrase goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face—this little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of Ecclesiastes, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.' But the world bears a different aspect, and the answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for anything beyond—nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men, the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of 'suffering being the lot of mortals,' as if it had been abused already for ungodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals, those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor divine—at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus, or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.

But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose. What are those Phœacian ships meant for, which required neither sail nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried, and bore them wherever they would go?—or the wild end of the ship which carried Ulysses home?—or that terrible piece of second sight in the Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?—or those islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into being to complete the number?—or those mystical sheep and oxen, which knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?—or Helen singing round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear wife far away beyond the sea?