GREEK COURT.—South Side-Court.
POETS AND DRAMATISTS.
[28]1. Homer. Great Epic Poet of Greece.
[Born, probably B.C. 850. Place of birth unknown.]
A majestic antique Bust. The kingly and venerated Patriarch of all Poets, for the western civilization—or, the sound of a Name! The two wonderful poems which bear down this name—whatever signifying—through the lapse and revolutions of time, preserve, as it were, the image of an extinct world: although of a world, perhaps less than half real, and more than half ideal:—for the manners were: the persons and events may, or may not have been: and the gods and goddesses of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were, we know, only a believed-in, waking dream. But, by the potency of the song, the picture lives! The war, imaginary or no, raging between the Hellespont and the foot of Mount Ida, remains, to the educated memory of the nations, like the beginning—if not of the world’s, yet of its western half’s—history. And those heroes and heroines, with their high actions and their deep passions—the unrolling, embroidered web of their fortunes and fates:—the king of men, Agamemnon,—the swift-footed son of the sea-goddess, Achilles,—-the sage, long-lived Nestor,—the shrewd, enduring Ulysses,—Ajax, a tower in the fight,—Diomed, favoured of Minerva present beside him in the storm of spears;—and that grey-headed, imperial sire of Troy, with all his falling sons, Priam,—the gallant and good Hector,—the loving and faithful Andromache,—the aged, too fruitful mother, Hecuba;—even the fatal and criminal, but divinely beautiful Helen—Is it not a strange magic that dwells in the creative thought of the poet, and in his modulated words, and that thus, in a language, and with manners, a faith, an age—all so long since dead and gone—can, as if reviving all, render those Shadows, to us—now, here—the earliest objects of a wondering and aspiring enthusiasm:—the first enkindlers in our bosoms of that glowing, intense, comprehensive, and intelligent sympathy, which transports us out of the central self, and beyond the close-drawn horizon of our own particular life, to feel the conditions and to understand the spirits of all our fellow men? Let the theory be true, which denies to these incomparable works an individual author—which supposes them woven together of many songs, first sung in many places, by many singers; let the benignly august, fillet-bound head before us, be—that which only at last it can be—a conjecture of the Grecian chisel;—we see at least here how the consummated art of sculpture has chosen to express, in corporeal form, the one soul of power which animates those immortal twins of poesy. We see in what shape of a human head, crowned with its own irradiations, the fountains of all song might have sprang. We see what the living and wandering minstrel of Greece, beloved and honoured wheresoever, in hall or on green, he and his harp came,—what the individual Homer, for whose birth seven cities contended, and whom in the after-day the land numbered amongst her half-divine and worshipped heroes—WOULD HAVE BEEN:—or, WAS!
[Although modern antiquaries agree with Pliny that busts of Homer are apocryphal, yet there can be no doubt this is the true Greek conventional portrait of that poet. A headless marble was dug up inscribed with his name and shortly afterwards the head itself was found in the same hole, and it fitted precisely to the marble previously discovered. The bust, so found, is now in the Naples Museum. The same head is constantly found in other representations of the ancient poet. The head is bound with the “strophium,” an ornament given by the Greek artists to their gods and heroes. The attitude of the head would seem to express the blindness with which Homer, according to tradition, was afflicted. This bust is from the marble in the Stanza dei Filosofi of the Capitoline Museum, Rome.]
[28] The objects forming the Portrait Gallery in the Crystal Palace, are numbered in red figures throughout.
2. Archilochus. Greek Poet.
[Born at Paros, about B.C. 700. Killed in battle, about B.C. 635]