Now, though Homer has practically represented the gods as avenging the pollution of the nuptial bed, it may be observed that he nowhere seems to put prominently forward the adultery of Paris as the main gist of his offence. In fact, the idea of adultery is very much absorbed, as we shall see, according to the poems, in the act of violent abduction. The Greeks on their side, with the single exception of Menelaus himself, treat Paris as a robber, or else a coward; not as one who had, like Ægisthus with Clytemnestra, corrupted the wife of one of their princes. And so Hector is, I think, not quite accurately criticized by Mure[750] for failing to find fault with Paris on the ground of adultery. Hector does reproach his brother for having abused the friendly intercourse of life to carry off another man’s wife, and then not having the courage to meet the husband in the field. This seems to me in perfect keeping with the ideas of the time, especially if I am right in the view, which I shall endeavour to sustain by argument, that Hector himself is not the elder, but the younger brother of the two. What did the Greeks aim at avenging? Not, we shall find, the wrong done to Menelaus in his conjugal character, but the sorrows and sufferings of Helen were evidently the prominent and conspicuous idea in the mind of the Poet, and in the mind, as he represents it, of the Greeks. So that, while Menelaus himself is the only person who in the Iliad shows a resentment of his own conjugal wrongs, the Greeks appear to think partly of Helen, partly of their nation’s honour, partly of their allegiance to the Pelopids; and partly, perhaps chiefly, of the booty which, in requital of their arduous labours, they are to gain upon the sack of Troy[751].
The defence, therefore, of the heathen deities which St. Augustine notices as having been put forward, was a late afterthought. The Poet appears indeed to treat the lustful effeminacy of Paris in general with a grave and marked contempt; but this is rather his own personal sentiment, than a result directly connected with his religious belief or system. And, more at large, I do not find it clear that in any place of the Poems any deity appears, either as the guardian of purity, or as the avenger of its infraction. Under these circumstances we shall have the more cause to wonder, that that virtue could still have been held, as it was held, by Homer and the Greeks, in partial but evidently real admiration.
Although retribution was limited to public and social sins, and did not touch the inner and finer parts of human conduct, it is not difficult to trace the advantages which flowed from that sensible remainder of religion which still subsisted in the Heroic age; not from those parts of the system which were due to human invention, but from the elements which it still contained of the ancient theism, and which invention had not yet wholly smothered.
Thus, for example, it was thought that the anger of the gods might be brought down upon a country by the misconduct of its governors[752];
οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολιὰς κρίνωσι θέμιστας·
and the fear of the temporal calamities thus to be incurred would, naturally, tend to the maintenance of integrity in the administration of justice.
As between governors and governed, so between rich and poor. We cannot doubt that the worthy Eumæus expresses the general sentiment of his age, when, having been reproached by the haughty Suitor Antinous with having invited a beggar into the palace of Ulysses, he answers, not by denial, but by showing that the idea is self-condemned by its absurdity. Those indeed, he replies, may be solicited to come to a house who exercise the agreeable or the useful professions; the Seer, the Doctor, the Artificer, the Bard, these are the people who get invited all over the world;
πτωχὸν δ’ οὐκ ἄν τις καλέοι, τρύξοντα ἓ αὐτόν;
Who would be such a fool as to invite a beggar?[753]
With this standard of sentiment, not peculiar to that age, except in the simple frankness with which it is avowed, it was surely of the utmost importance for the needy and afflicted, that they should be placed by the popular belief in the special charge of the deity;