As far as studied delineation of character goes, Briseis is still more a silhouette than Andromache. We know her as the fair-cheeked damsel who was fain to stay with Achilles, and who loved Patroclus because he kept for her a soothing word. In her threnos for Patroclus she exclaims, "How one woe after another takes me! I saw my husband slain before our city, and my three brethren; but you, Patroclus, then comforted me, and said I should be Achilles' wife: you were ever gentle." This is really all we know about her. Yet Briseis lives in our memory by virtue of the great passions gathered round her, and the weighty actions in which she plays her part.
In course of years the heroes of the Homeric romances came to be worshipped, not exactly like gods with θυσίαι, but like the more than mortal dead with ἐναγίσματα. They had their chapels and their hearths, distinct from the temples and the altars of the deities. These were generally raised upon the supposed spot of their sepulture, or in places which owed them special reverence as œkists or as ancestors. In the case of Œdipus, the translation of the hero to the company of gods secured for him a cultus in Colonos. It was supposed that heroes exercised a kindly influence over the people among whom they dwelt; haunting the neighborhood in semi-corporeal visitations, conferring benefits upon the folk, and exhibiting signs of anger when neglected. Thus Philostratus remarks that Protesilaus had a fane in Thessaly, "and many humane and favorable dealings doth he show the men of Thessaly, yea, and angerly also if he be neglected."[31] The same Philostratus, whose works are a treasure-house of information respecting the latest forms of Hellenic paganism, reports the actual form of prayer used by Appollonius of Tyana at the tomb of Palamedes,[32] and makes the ghost of Achilles complain: "The Thessalians for a long time have remitted my offerings; still I am not yet minded to display my wrath against them." Achilles, who has been evoked above his tomb in the Troad by the prayers of Apollonius, proceeds to remark that even the Trojans revere him more than his own people, but that he cannot restore the town of Troy to its old prosperity. He hints, however, pretty broadly, that if the Thessalians do not pay him more attention, he will reduce them to the same state of misery as the Trojans. The dæmon, it may be said in passing, vanishes, like a mediæval ghost, at cockcrow.[33]
This cultus of the Homeric heroes was, of course, inseparable from a corresponding growth of artistic associations; and here it is not a little curious to compare our own indefinite conceptions of the outward form of the heroic personages with the very concrete incarnation they received from Greek sculptors and painters. The first memorable attempt to express the heroes of Homer in marble was upon the pediment at Ægina; the first elaborate pictorial representation was that of Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi. A Greek Lesche was not unlike an Italian or Oriental café, extended to suffice for the requirements of a whole city. What has been discovered at Pompeii, in addition to the full description of the Delphian Lesche by Pausanias, inclines us to believe that the walls of these public places of resort were not unfrequently decorated with Homeric pictures. The beautiful frescos of Achilles among the daughters of Lycomedes, of Achilles bathed by Thetis in the Styx, of Briseis led forth by Patroclus into the company of the Achaian chiefs, and of Penelope questioning the disguised Odysseus about her husband, which have been discovered in various parts of Pompeii, sufficiently illustrate to modern minds the style of this wall-painting. The treatise surnamed Εἰκόνες of Philostratus is an elaborate critical catalogue of a picture-gallery of this sort; and from many indications contained in it we learn how thoroughly the heroes of Homer had acquired a fixed corporeal personality. In describing, for example, a picture of the lamentation for Antilochus, he says: "These things are Homer's paintings, but the painter's action." Then he goes on to point out the chief persons: "You can distinguish Odysseus at once by his severe and wideawake appearance, Menelaus by his gentleness, Agamemnon by his inspired look; while Tydeus is indicated by his freedom, the Telamonian Ajax by his grimness, and the Locrian by his activity."[34] In another place he tells us that Patroclus was of an olive-pale complexion (μελίχλωρος), with black eyes and rather thick eyebrows; his head was erect upon the neck, like that of a man who excels in athletic exercises, his nose straight, with wide nostrils, like an eager horse. These descriptions occur in the Heroic Dialogue. They are supposed to have been communicated by the dæmon Protesilaus to a vine-dresser who frequented his tomb. Achilles, on the other hand, had abundant hair, more pleasant to the sight in hue than gold, with a nose inclining to the aquiline, angry brows, and eyes so bright and lively that the soul seemed leaping from them in fire. Hector, again, had a terrible look about him, and scorned to dress his hair, and his ears were crushed, not indeed by wrestling, for barbarians do not wrestle, but by the habit of struggling for mastery with wild bulls.[35]
Some of the women of Homeric story, Helen for example, and Iphigenia, received divine honors, together with suitable artistic personification. But women were not closely connected with the genealogical and gentile foundations of the Greek cultus; only a few, therefore, were thus distinguished. What has here been said about the superstition that gave form and distinctness to the creatures of Homeric fancy may be taken as applying in general to the attitude assumed by ancient art. The persons of a poem or a mythus were not subjected to critical analysis as we dissect the characters of Hamlet or of Faust. But they were not on that account the less vividly apprehended. They tended more and more to become external realities—beings with a definite form and a fixed character. In a word, through sculpture, painting, and superstition, they underwent the same personifying process as the saints of mediæval Italy. To what extent the Attic drama exercised a disturbing influence and interrupted this process has been touched upon with reference to the Euripidean Helen.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] I take this occasion of calling attention to the essay on Helen considered as an allegory of Greek Beauty, by Paul de St. Victor in his Hommes et Dieux.
[18] "Not true is that tale; nor didst thou journey in benched ships, or come to towers of Troy."
She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate,
Made frantic by their city's fate,
Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,
The vengeance of her injured lord:
She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend,
Sat cowering, by the altar screened.—Conington.