By the discoveries of the last generation the ban of this isolation has been broken. Only by wilful blindness can the Ilium of Homer be dissociated from the Ilium restored to light on Hissarlik, though the remains of the latter go far back beyond the time of Homer and Priam. Not the age of the Homeric poets alone, but the age of the Homeric heroes rises up before us from these strongholds and tombs. The links that bind it to the older civilisation of Asia and of Egypt lie revealed, positive chronological data already enable us to determine the certainty of this or that. From these actual remains we begin to gain some conception of the history and the peoples whose poetic reflection shines for us in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
On the shores of the Ægean Sea, in the second half of the second thousand years before Christ, there existed a sumptuous civilisation which had received impulses from the East and from the South, but in which we nevertheless recognise the spirit of the Greece immortalised in the Homeric poems; and in the Asiatic home of Homer the connecting threads do not break off short as we trace them back. In the mother-country, on the other hand, other savage Greek tribes, whom we name after the Dorians, forced their way in; they destroyed the ancient superior civilisation, reduced some of its representatives to slavery, and drove the rest over into Asia. There was another immigration into Asia, this time of the Phrygio-Thracian tribes, the ancestors of the Armenians; such of the earlier population as were not reduced to slavery being driven south. These tribes we are wont to call after the Carians. There was a time when they reached out towards Europe, and in a few islands they continued for centuries to struggle against the Hellenising influence to which in the long run they completely succumbed. But as the study of this long and important period is still in its infancy, our main object should still be the collection of material; it will be one of the principal tasks of the next generation to sift and elaborate what has been accumulated. At the present time it is more important than any amount of detail for us to understand what is the historic background both for the subject-matter of the Homeric epics and for the practice of this form of poetry and the existence of the poets who used it.
The Homeric poems are a legacy from the first great period of Greek history. We may approximately fix the year 800 B.C. as their latest possible date. The subject-matter of the Epos, the Heroic legend, is the deposit of historical reminiscences of that earlier time. It was wholly fit that men should see in the epic heroes the founders of their own nation and of their own civilisation; but in point of fact it was through Homer that the Greek nation first acquired consciousness of itself, of its individuality and of the common blood in its veins. Not in the time of the heroes alone, but in that of the poets of the Epos, the Greeks had no national unity and less than no national feeling, and the same holds good of their civilisation. The tales which Homer tells are laid to a great extent in Argos, Thebes, and Sparta; all the heroes come from the country which we call Hellas and distinguish from Asia as their mother-country. Nearly all the Homeric gods have their homes there likewise. But now gods and heroes, like Agamemnon’s Achæan host, are taken across to the northwestern angle of Asia. Achilles has conquered Lesbos; the descendants of Agamemnon rule in Mytilene and Cyme. Cyme, Smyrna, and Chios are the reputed birth-places of Homer. Here, where later the Æolian dialect comes into collision with the mightier Ionian, was perfected the artificial dialect of the epic,—a dialect spoken in this form at no time and in no place,—and the heroic verse that was at no time and in no place a really popular form, and was first imported into Lesbos itself by the Ionian Epos. Here, side by side with the ruling class which claimed descent from the Homeric gods and heroes, was evolved a class of professional bards, and amongst them arose the gifted poets whose names have been forgotten in the fame of the one and only Homer. Let us hope that the real Homer was worthy of this pre-eminence. By these Homerides the Epos, first sung to the lute, and then recited, was carried farther and farther among the islands and along the coast. The subject-matter awakened interest everywhere; being, as it were, national history, the form won for itself an ever widening circle of appreciation. Gradually in the mother-country there were found native bards who learned from wandering rhapsodists the art of making poetry in the Homeric style, that is to say, of using a foreign language and a foreign art-form, but to express new matter, which was nevertheless invariably linked in some fashion with the world of Homeric heroes. Accordingly, the production of epic poems, ever based upon Homeric legend, was maintained in the mother-country for centuries after it had died out in Ionia, continuing into the sixth century. It is through these circles, in the main, that Homer has been preserved.
The cardinal point was that, in the Homeric Epos, the Greeks acquired an organ of speech capable of expressing all that men could say and hear. It was a well-defined and yet highly elastic style, not by any means exclusively adapted to narrative; on the contrary they never abandoned the practice of casting instruction of all kinds into this form, which was popularised and made generally intelligible by the school from the time there were schools at all. It was also used in incantations, in monumental inscriptions, and in the fleeting jest. The most abstract philosophy, the description of the starry heavens, the dogmatic side of astrology, nay even the Psalms and the Gospel of St. John, have been clothed in Homeric garb. In like manner it is characteristic of the genius of Greece that it begins its evolution by creating such a mode of expression, and for a thousand years does not grow weary of it. The instinct for form and the adherence to a form once discovered are likewise Greek; their combination begets at first an unparalleled achievement, but for centuries long it has to drudge in the service of imitative facility and orthodox formalism.
Homer, moreover, created for the Greeks their heroic legend. The whole wealth of scattered and desultory reminiscence and tradition among the various tribes and families, combined with all that occupied the memory and imagination of man, was gathered together in one by the art of the Epic poets. Thus another and more beautiful domain was built up in the imaginations of men, from which a light fell on the present so brilliant that the present paled before it, while even as children men began to make themselves at home in that domain. Here it was that the Greeks found their common fatherland, proud and united, whilst they were still at daggers drawn with one another upon earth, and once more when they were all subject to foreign lords; to this day all those of us who have drunk a draught from Homer’s spring, feel at home in this region. Their gods the Greeks, likewise, received from Homer; not the faith by which the heart is made heavy and light, rendered contrite and redeemed, but the names and the histories, the relations and the amours of their celestial host—that is to say, their mythology.
The name itself implies how far it was from anything like divine revelation and holiness. The muse has much to say that is untrue but resembles truth. Homeric art, however, understood the secret of humanising the stories of the gods as effectually as the stories of tribes and kings. And this Homeric art took captive the fancy of the listeners, that is, the fancy of the whole nation as soon as it gave ear to the poetry of Homer. Homer gave to the Greek his gods, and all the Greek gods turned into men with the gift. He gives us a complete picture of nature too, he teaches us to see what surrounds us, and the sorrows and joys that condition our brief life under the sun. The roseate flush of dawn, the twinkling of the dog-star, the rush of the hurricane, the babble of the mountain stream, the tops of the fir trees in the highland forest, and the clumps of asphodel on untilled ground; the lions and wolves in the Asiatic mountain country, the horse and the hound, the companions of man, he sees everything, shows everything, loves everything; above all, the sea, eternal, ever new, that has become a home to the Ionian in lieu of mother-earth. In the light in which he viewed Nature and set her forth the Greeks accustomed themselves to look upon her. Not only so, but whole generations took pleasure in the reproduction of what had once been done, and turned their eyes aside from the contemplation of the Real, the infinitude whereof no Homer can exhaust.
In fine, the judgment passed upon Homer by Horace, who repeats the verdict of the stoics, contains a large measure of truth:
“Qui, quid sit pulcrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
Planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.”
He gives us a complete picture of the doings of man, shows us princes and beggars, old men and boys, the budding maiden and the perfection of dæmonic beauty. So rich is this completeness, so profound the poet’s knowledge of life, that the thing we most clearly realise is the utter preposterousness of any attempt to compare Homer with any popular poetry whatsoever. Rather does Plato rightly name him the grandsire of tragedy, and only one picture of the world can claim a birthright equal to that of Homer—the picture set forth on the stage of William Shakespeare.