Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

The first book describes the quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon and his secession from the war. The next seven books and a half, from the second to the middle of the ninth, are occupied with the fortunes of the Greeks and Trojans in the field, the exploits of Diomede and Ajax, and Hector's attack upon the camp. In the middle of the ninth book Achilles reappears upon the scene. Agamemnon sends Ulysses and Phœnix to entreat him to relax his wrath and save the Greeks; but the hero remains obdurate. He has resolved that his countrymen shall pay the uttermost penalty for the offense of their king. The poet having foredetermined that Achilles shall only consent to fight in order to revenge Patroclus, is obliged to show the inefficacy of the strongest motives from without; and this he has effected by the episode of the embassy. The tenth book relates the night attack upon the camp of the Trojan allies and the theft of the horses of Rhesus. The next five books contain a further account of the warfare carried on among the ships between the Achaians and their foes. It is in the course of these events that Patroclus comes into prominence. We find him attending on the wounded Eurypylus and warning Achilles of the imminent peril of the fleet. At last, in the sixteenth book, when Hector has carried fire to the ship of Protesilaus, Achilles commands Patroclus to assume the armor of Peleus and lead his Myrmidons to war. The same book describes the repulse of Hector and the death of Patroclus, while the seventeenth is taken up with the fight for the body of Achilles' friend. But from the eighteenth onward the true hero assumes his rank as protagonist, making us feel that what has gone before has only been a preface to his action. His seclusion from the war has not only enabled the poet to vary the interest by displaying other characters, but has also proved the final intervention of Achilles to be absolutely necessary for the success of the Greek army. All the threads of interest are gathered together and converge on him. Whatever we have learned concerning the situation of the war, the characters of the chiefs, and the jealousies of the gods, now serves to dignify his single person and to augment the terror he inspires. With his mere shout he dislodges the Trojans from the camp. The divine arms of Hephæstus are fashioned for him, and forth he goes to drive the foe like mice before him. Then he contends with Simoeis and Scamander, the river-gods. Lastly, he slays Hector. What follows in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books seems to be intended as a repose from the vehement action and high-wrought passion of the preceding five. Patroclus is buried, and his funeral games are celebrated. Then, at the very end, Achilles appears before us in the interview with Priam, no longer as a petulant spoiled child or fiery barbarian chief, but as a hero, capable of sacrificing his still fierce passion for revenge to the nobler emotion of reverence for the age and sorrow of the sonless king.

The centralization of interest in the character of Achilles constitutes the grandeur of the Iliad. It is also by this that the Iliad is distinguished from all the narrative epics of the world. In the case of all the rest there is one main event, one deed which has to be accomplished, one series of actions with a definite beginning and ending. In none else are the passions of the hero made the main points of the movement. This may be observed at once by comparing the Iliad with the chief epical poems of European literature. To begin with the Odyssey. The restoration, after many wanderings, of Odysseus to his wife and kingdom forms the subject of this romance. When that has been accomplished, the Odyssey is completed. In the same way the subject of the Æneid is the foundation of the Trojan kingdom in Italy. Æneas is conducted from Troy to Carthage, from Carthage to Latium. He flies from Dido, because fate has decreed that his empire should not take root in Africa. He conquers Turnus because it is destined that he, and not the Latin prince, should be the ancestor of Roman kings. As soon as Turnus has been killed and Lavinia has been wedded to Æneas, the action of the poem is accomplished and the Æneid is completed. When we pass to modern epics, the first that meets us is the Niebelungen Lied. Here the action turns upon the murder of Sigfrit by Hagen, and the vengeance of his bride, Chriemhilt. As soon as Chriemhilt has assembled her husband's murderers in the halls of King Etzel, and there has compassed their destruction, the subject is complete, the Niebelungen is at an end. The British epic of the Round Table, if we may regard Sir Thomas Mallory's Mort d'Arthur as a poem, centres in the life and predestined death of King Arthur. Upon the fate of Arthur hangs the whole complex series of events which compose the romance. His death is its natural climax, for with him expires the Round Table he had framed to keep the pagans in awe. After that event nothing remains for the epic poet to relate. Next in date and importance is the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. The action of this poem is bound up with the destinies of Ruggiero and Bradamante. Their separations and wanderings supply the main fabric of the plot. When these are finally ended, and their marriage has been consummated, nothing remains to be related. The theme of the Gerusalemme Liberata, again, is the conquest of the Holy City from the Saracens. When this has been described, there is nothing left for Tasso to tell. The Paradise Lost, in spite of its more stationary character, does not differ from this type. It sets forth the single event of the fall. After Adam and Eve have disobeyed the commands of their Maker and have been expelled from Eden, the subject is exhausted, the epic is at an end.

Thus each of these great epic poems has one principal event, on which the whole action hinges and which leaves nothing more to be narrated. But with the Iliad it is different. At the end of the Iliad we leave Achilles with his fate still unaccomplished, the Trojan war still undecided. The Iliad has no one great external event or series of events to narrate. It is an episode in the war of Troy, a chapter in the life of Peleus's son. But it does set forth, with the vivid and absorbing interest that attaches to true æsthetic unity, the character of its hero, selecting for that purpose the group of incidents which best display it.

The Iliad, therefore, has for its whole subject the passion of Achilles—that ardent energy or ΜΗΝΙΣ of the hero, which displayed itself first as anger against Agamemnon, and afterwards as love for the lost Patroclus. The truth of this was perceived by one of the greatest poets and profoundest critics of the modern world, Dante. When Dante, in the Inferno, wished to describe Achilles, he wrote, with characteristic brevity:

Achille,
Che per amore al fine combatteo.

Achilles,
Who at the last was brought to fight by love.

In this pregnant sentence Dante sounded the whole depth of the Iliad. The wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon, which prevented him at first from fighting; the love of Achilles, passing the love of women, for Patroclus, which induced him to forego his anger and to fight at last—these are the two poles on which the Iliad turns. Two passions—heroic anger and measureless love—in the breast of the chief actor, are the motive forces of the poem. It is this simplicity in the structure of the Iliad which constitutes its nobleness. There is no double plot, no attempt to keep our interest alive by misunderstandings, or treacheries, or thwartings of the hero in his aims. These subtleties and resources of art the poet, whom we will call Homer, for the sake of brevity, discards. He trusts to the magnitude of his chief actor, to the sublime central figure of Achilles, for the whole effect of his epic. It is hardly necessary to insist upon the highly tragic value of this subject. The destinies of two great nations hang trembling in the balance. Kings on the earth below, gods in the heavens above, are moved to turn this way or that the scale of war. Meanwhile the whole must wait upon the passions of one man. Nowhere else, in any work of art, has the relation of a single heroic character to the history of the world been set forth with more of tragic pomp and splendid incident. Across the scene on which gods and men are contending in fierce rivalry moves the lustrous figure of Achilles, ever potent, ever young, but with the ash-white aureole of coming death around his forehead. He too is in the clutch of destiny. As the price of his decisive action, he must lay his life down and retire with sorrow to the shades. It is thus that in the very dawn of civilization the Greek poet divined the pathos and expounded the philosophy of human life, showing how the fate of nations may depend upon the passions of a man, who in his turn is but the creature of a day, a ripple on the stream of time. Nothing need be said by the æsthetic critic about the solar theory, which pretends to explain the tale of Troy. The mythus of Achilles may possibly in very distant ages have expressed some simple astronomical idea. But for a man to think of this with the actual Iliad before his eyes would be about as bad as botanizing on his mother's grave. Homer was not thinking of the sun when he composed the Iliad. He wove, as in a web, all elements of tragic pity and fear, pathos and passion, and fateful energy which constitute the dramas of nations and of men.

In the two passions, anger and love, which form the prominent features of the character of Achilles, there is nothing small or mean. Anger has scarcely less right than ambition to be styled the last infirmity of noble minds. And love, when it gives the motive force to great action, is sublime. The love of Achilles had no softness or effeminacy. The wrath of Achilles never degenerated into savagery. Both of these passions, instead of weakening the hero, add force to his activity. Homer has traced the outlines of the portrait of Achilles so largely that criticism can scarcely avoid dwarfing them. In looking closely at the picture, there is a danger lest, while we examine the parts, we should fail to seize the greatness of the whole. It is better to bring together in rapid succession those passages of the Iliad which display the character of Achilles under the double aspect of anger and love. The first scene (i. 148-246) shows us Agamemnon surrounded by the captains of the Greek host, holding the same position among them as Charlemagne among his peers, or King John among the English barons. They recognize his heaven-descended right of monarchy; but their allegiance holds by a slight thread. They are not afraid of bearding him, browbeating him with threats, and roundly accusing him of his faults. This turbulent feudal society has been admirably sketched by Marlowe in Edward II., and by Shakespeare in Richard II. And it must be remembered that between Agamemnon and the Hellenic βασιλεῖς there was not even so much as a feudal bond of fealty. Calchas has just told Agamemnon that, in order to avert the plague, Chryseis must be restored to her father. The king has answered that if he is forced to relinquish her, the Greeks must indemnify him richly. Then the anger of Achilles boils over:

"Ah, clothed upon with impudence and greedy-souled! How, thinkest thou, can man of the Achaians with glad heart follow at thy word to take the field or fight the foe? Not for the quarrel of the warlike Trojans did I come unto these shores, for they had wronged me not. They never drove my cattle nor my steeds, nor ever, in rich, populous Phthia, did they waste the corn; since far between us lie both shadowy mountains and a sounding sea: but following thee, thou shameless king, we came to gladden thee, for Menelaus and for thee, thou hound, to win you fame from Troy. Of this thou reckest not and hast no care. Yea, and behold thou threatenest even from me to wrest my guerdon with thy hands, for which I sorely strove, and which the sons of the Achaians gave to me. Never, in sooth, do I take equally with thee, when Achaians sack a well-walled Trojan town. My hands do all the work of furious war; but when division comes, thy guerdon is far greater, and I go back with small but well-loved treasure to the ships, tired out with fighting. Now, lo! I am again for Phthia; for better far, I ween, it is homeward to sail with beaked ships: nor do I think that if I stay unhonored wilt thou get much wealth and gain.

"Him, then, in answer, Agamemnon, king of men, bespake: