The Authoress of the Odyssey / Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands

by Samuel Butler

Eumæus was so young when he was carried off that even though Greek was not his native language, he would have become Grecised in a few years; I incline to think, however, that the writer of the Odyssey would have said something about his being a Sicel if she had so conceived of him in her own mind. She seems to think of him as a Greek by birth.

The Sicels, however, also probably spoke Greek. The inhabitants of Temesa, on the toe of Italy, do not indeed seem to have done so (Od. i. 183); but we do not know that they were Sicels. No writing has been found at Plemmirio nor yet at Cozzo Pantano; we have therefore very little to go upon.

But postulating that we may accept Thucydides—whose accuracy as regards Syracusan details proves that even though he had not been at Syracuse himself, he had at any rate means of informing himself on Sicilian history—who is evidently taking pains, and whose reputation is surpassed by that of no other historian—postulating that we may accept his statement (vi. 2) that the great irruption of Sicels which changed the name of the country from Sicania to Sicelia took place about 300 years before B.C. 734, I think we may safely put back the date of the Odyssey to a time before B.C. 1000.

For the Odyssey conveys no impression as though Sicily at large had been lately subdued and overrun by Sicels. Locally, indeed, the city at the top of Mt. Eryx had, as we have seen (Od. vii. 60), been conquered and overthrown; but I shall bring Thucydides, as well as other evidence, to show that in this case the victors are more likely to have been Asiatic Greeks than Sicels. The poem indicates a time of profound present peace and freedom from apprehension, and on the one occasion in which the writer speaks of Sicily under its own name, she calls it by its pre-Sicelian name of Sicania.[3] The old Sicel woman who waited on Laertes (xxiv. 211 and elsewhere) is not spoken of as though there were any ill-will on the part of the writer towards the Sicels, or as though they were a dominant race. Lastly, one of the suitors (xx. 382) advises Telemachus to ship Theoclymenus and Ulysses off to the Sicels. Now if the writer had the real Ithaca in her mind, the Sicels could only have been reached by sea, whether they were in Italy or Sicily; but I have already shown that she never pictured to herself any other Ithaca than the one she had created at Trapani; the fact, therefore, that Theoclymenus and Ulysses were to be put on board ship before they could reach the Sicels, shows that she imagined these last as (except for an occasional emigrant) outside the limits of her own island.

If the foregoing reasoning is admitted, 1050 B.C. will be about as late as it is safe to place the date of the Odyssey; but a few years later is possible, though hardly, I think, probable. Unfortunately this date will compel us to remove the fall of Troy to a time very considerably earlier than the received date. For a hundred years is, one would think, the shortest interval that can be allowed between the Odyssey and the Iliad. The development of myth and of the Epic cycle, of which we find abundant traces in the Odyssey, is too considerable to render any shorter period probable. I therefore conclude that 1150 B.C. is the latest date to which we should assign the Iliad.

The usually received date for the fall of Troy is 1184 B.C. This is arrived at from a passage in Thucydides (i. 12) which says that sixty years after the fall of Troy, the Bœotians were driven from Arne and settled in what was originally called Cadmeis, but subsequently Bœotia. Twenty years later, he tells us, the Dorians and the Heraclidæ became masters of the Peloponese; but as he does not fix this last date, probably because he could not, so neither does he fix that of the fall of Troy.

The date commonly accepted for the return of the Heraclidæ and their conquest of the Peloponese is 1104,[4] but those who turn to Müller's History of the Doric Race,[5] Vol. I., p. 53, will see that there is no authority for this date which is worth a moment's consideration; and with the failure of authority here, we are left absolutely without authority for 1184 B.C. as the date of the fall of Troy.

Admitting for the moment 1150 B.C. as the latest date to which we should assign the Iliad, the question arises: How much later than the fall of Troy did Homer write? Mr. Gladstone has argued very ably in support of the view that he wrote only some forty or fifty years after the events he is recording, in which case it would seem that he must date the Iliad hardly at all later than the latest date to which I would assign it, for he does not appear to dispute the received date for the fall of Troy, though he does not say that he accepts it. I should be only too glad to find that I can claim Mr. Gladstone's support so far, but farther I cannot expect to do so; for the impression left upon me by the Iliad is that Homer was writing of a time that was to him much what the middle ages are to ourselves.

If he had lived as near the Trojan War as Mr. Gladstone supposes, he would surely have given us some hint of the manner in which Troy fell, whereas he shows no signs of knowing more than the bare fact that the city had fallen. He repeatedly tells us this much, but always more curtly and drily than we should expect him to do, and his absolute silence as to the way in which the capture of the city was effected, goes far to prove either that all record of the modus in quo had perished—which would point to a very considerable lapse of time—or else to suggest a fact which, though I have often thought it possible, I hardly dare to write—I mean that Troy never fell at all, or at any rate that it did not fall with the close of the Trojan War, and that Homer knew this perfectly well.

The infinite subtlety of the Iliad is almost as unfathomable as the simplicity of the Odyssey has so far proved itself to be, and its author, writing for a Greek audience whom he obviously despised, and whom he was fooling to the top of their bent though always sailing far enough off the wind to avoid disaster, would take very good care to tell them that—if I may be allowed the anachronism—Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo, though he very well knew that it was won by Wellington. It is certain that no even tolerably plausible account of the fall of Troy existed among the Greeks themselves; all plausibility ends with their burning their tents and sailing away baffled (Od. viii. 500, 501)—see also the epitome of the Little Iliad, given in the fragment of Proclus. The wild story of the wooden horse only emphasises the fact that nothing more reasonable was known.