I venture one remark, however, upon Hesiod’s very beautiful account of the Ages. None can fail to be struck by the order in which he places them. Beginning with the Golden, he comes next to the Silver age, and then to Brass. But, instead of descending forthwith the fourth and last step to the Iron age, he very singularly retraces his steps, and breaks the downward chain by an age of heroes, of whom he says that it was
δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἱ καλέονται
ἡμίθεοι προτέρῃ γενεᾷ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν[112].
These, he goes on to explain, were the men, partly slain in the Theban and Trojan wars, partly translated by Jupiter to the ends of the earth, the islands of the blest. After this, the scale drops, at once, to the lowest point, the Iron age, the age without either Νέμεσις or Αἰδὼς, the age of sheer wickedness and corruption.
This very curious turn in the arrangement of the Hesiodic Ages, and especially the insertion, in a regular figurative series taken from the metals, of a completely heterogeneous passage, calls for explanation; and I venture to suggest that this passage should be construed as disclosing to us that brilliant halo, which the Homeric poems had cast over an age still recent, so as not only to hold it above the one that followed, but also to raise it even above that which had preceded it; above the age of Bellerophon, of Tantalus, of Sisyphus, of Minos, and even of Hercules. The splendour of the fame of heroes really depended on the Bard. The great Bard of Greece had lifted Achilles and Ulysses to a height surpassing that of the older Heroes, who remained unsung by him; and he had promised Menelaus, in the Fourth Odyssey[113], that very seat in the regions of the blest, to which allusion is here made by Hesiod. While the apparent poetic solecism of this passage is thus accounted for, it becomes, at once, both an emphatic testimony to the immense power exercised by the verse of Homer, and a distinct declaration by Hesiod of the wide social interval, by which he was himself separated from the heroic period; a declaration entirely accordant with the internal evidence of the poems of Hesiod generally, and amounting by implication to the double statement from this poet, that Homer belonged to the heroic age, and that he himself did not belong to it.
The tradition of Hellen and his sons, then, exhibits one of the cases in which we must take our choice between the testimony of Homer, and what are apparently the inventions of the later Greeks.
Another of these cases, which will be my second and last illustration, relates to Helen of Troy.
It has been much disputed whether this celebrated character is to be regarded as historical or fictitious. A writer of no less judgment and authority than the Bishop of St. David’s, adopts the latter alternative, upon various grounds. The strongest among them all, in his view, is, that ‘in the abduction of Helen, Paris only repeats an exploit, also attributed to Theseus[114].’ This exploit, the Bishop thinks, was known to Homer, as he introduces Æthra, the mother of Theseus, in the company of Helen at Troy. And other writers have further developed these ideas, by finding absurdity in the Homeric tale of Helen, on the ground that she must have been eighty years old when the supposed abduction by Paris took place.
Now, the basis of these statements entirely depends upon the assumption that the later traditions are entitled to be treated either as upon a par, or, at any rate, as homogeneous with those of Homer. The tradition which assigns a rape of Helen to Theseus, is only available to discredit the tale of Homer, on the supposition that it rests upon authority like that of Homer. But if it was a late invention, then it is more probably to be regarded as a witness to the fame of the Homeric personages, and the anxiety of Attica to give her hero the advantage of similar embellishments, than as an original tradition which Homer copied, or as a twin report with that which he has handed down.
The tradition of the rape of Helen by Theseus is mentioned by Herodotus[115] as a tale current among the Athenians. He testifies apparently to the fact, that the Deceleans of Attica enjoyed certain immunities in Sparta, and were spared by the Lacedæmonian forces when they invaded Attica; which was ascribed by the Athenians to their having assisted in the recovery of Helen from Theseus, by pointing out to the Tyndaridæ the place of her concealment. Herodotus, however, does not affirm the cause stated by the Athenians, nor the abduction by Theseus, which afterwards became, or had even then become, an established tradition. Isocrates[116] handles it without misgiving, and it is methodized in Plutarch, with a multitude of other particulars, our acceptance of which absolutely requires the rejection of Homer’s historical authority.
And so again with regard to Æthra, the daughter of Pittheus, whom the later ages have connected with Theseus. We have no right to treat her introduction in the company of Helen[117], as a proof that Homer knew of a story connecting Helen with Theseus, unless we knew, which we do not, from Homer, or from authority entitled to compete with Homer, that there was a relation between Æthra and Theseus.