LECTURE II
HOMER AND ANTHROPOLOGY
In B. R.’s Elizabethan translation of the two first books of Herodotus a marginal note to a startling statement about Egyptian manners begs us to ‘Observe ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen’. Though Anthropology, as its name indicates, takes all that is human for its province, it certainly pays most attention to ‘Ye Devices’—beastly or not—of the savage or barbarian, and to their survival in civilized societies, ancient and modern. Now, as far as these primaeval devices go, Homer has wonderfully little to tell us. Though he is by far the most ancient Greek author extant, it is in all the literature which follows after him that we find most survivals of the barbarian and the savage. Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets (800-650 b.c.?), and in the sketches of the plots of the Cyclic poems which have reached us, there are survivals of barbaric customs—for example, of human sacrifice, and the belief in phantasms of the dead, even when the dead have been properly burned and buried—which do not appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The tragedians, the lyric poets, and the rest, all allude to vices which Homer never mentions—to amours of the gods in bestial forms (in all probability a survival of Totemism in myth), to a revolting rite of sanguinary purification from the guilt of homicide, and to many other distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism in the society of ancient Greece. We do not find these things in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age. But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience. No incest or cannibalism, in Iliad and Odyssey, is reported concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse. Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends, almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent.
Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only of the Iliad and Odyssey. I wish I could keep clear of the complex ‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that, since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to the Iliad, at the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite opinions as to the origin of the Iliad and Odyssey. Poets, and almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand, and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority of scholars and special students who have written on the subject maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that the Iliad and Odyssey had their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’, and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even Wolf recognized as their unus color, the harmony of their picture of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms, and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly, have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature, of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied other early poetic literature—say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest Irish romances—they would learn that minute variations in such matters of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony, unus color, prevails in the Iliad and Odyssey, which must therefore be the product of one age.
But to this some adverse critics reply that harmony, indeed, there may be, but that it results, first from the influence of tradition—each new poet adhered to the old formulae without conscious effort—and, next, that the later poets deliberately and learnedly archaized, consciously studied the descriptions, and maintained the tone of their predecessors, while at the same time they as deliberately introduced the novelties of their own time. This is their logic. Their double theory is untenable—first, because it is self-contradictory; next, because in all known early art and literature the poet or painter, treating ancient themes, dresses the past in the costume of the present with which he is familiar. To archaize is a very modern effort in art, as all early literature and every large picture-gallery prove. As for unconscious adherence to tradition, it leads to the repetition of epic formulae and standing epithets; but later poets, and uncritical ages, when they describe a more ancient life, always copy the life of their own time. We see too that late learned poets who archaized—Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, even Quintus Smyrnaeus—while they do their best to imitate Homer, cannot keep up the unus color, but betray themselves in a myriad details: for example, Virgil arms his Greeks and Trojans with iron weapons, and Apollonius introduces the ritual purification of blood with blood, ignored by Homer.
Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’, of the Iliad and Odyssey. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice, gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’, so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct bodies, such as Iliad, Odyssey, Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Nostoi, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned Athenians, about 600-500 b.c., or if we suppose, with others, that the Ionians, for educational purposes, Bowdlerized Iliad and Odyssey, at an earlier date, we ask, Why were Iliad and Odyssey expurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by ‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic poems? Was it because the Iliad and Odyssey alone were cut out of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which the Iliad and Odyssey omit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence, with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There is no inscription bearing witness to it—that, and that alone, would be ‘record’—there is only a late and shifting tradition that, about the time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For all old epic poetry, or only for the Iliad and Odyssey? If for them alone, why for them alone?
I am thus constrained to suppose that the Iliad and the Odyssey, on the whole, are the fruit of a single age, a peculiar age, an age prior to the earliest period of Greek life as historically known to us. If it be not so, if these epics are mosaics of life in four or five centuries of change, compiled for purposes of education by learned Athenians, it seems that they are worthless to the anthropologist and to the historical student of manners and institutions. If the poems contain scores of archaized passages, in which the poets deliberately neglect the life which they know (while at the same time in other passages they deliberately innovate), then the poems are of no anthropological value. The statements of the critics are self-contradictory, which I still think proves them to be illogical; and in speaking of Homer I shall treat him as a witness to a genuine stage of society in prehistoric Greece and Asia.
As to date, the poems quite undeniably are derived from that late stage of Mycenaean or Minoan civilization which has been revealed by the excavations of Mr. Arthur Evans in Crete, and Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, and of many other explorers of Homeric sites. The decoration of the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus; the art of the goldsmith, the use of chariots in war, the shape and size of the huge Homeric shield; the cuirass, zoster, and mitrê of the warriors, the weapons of bronze described in Homer, all correspond with objects discovered or delineated in works of art of the late Minoan period in Greece and Crete. But Homeric customs of all sorts also vary much from the facts of the Minoan archaeologist. The monuments of the late Minoan Age reveal modes of burial wholly unlike the Homeric practice of cremation and interment of the bones in lofty tumuli or barrows. They prove the existence of sacrifice to the dead, which Homer ignores. They display fashions of costume quite alien to the Homeric world. They yield none of the iron tools of peaceful purpose with which Homer is perfectly familiar. They furnish abundance of stone arrowheads, which are never mentioned in the Epics.
The conclusion suggested is that Homer knew a people living on the ancient Minoan sites, and retaining much of the Minoan art, much of the military material, but advanced into a peculiar form of the Early Bronze Age; clad in quite a new fashion, practising another form of burial, entertaining other beliefs about death and the dead, but still retaining the flowing locks often represented in pictures of men in Minoan art.