Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 2 of 3 / Olympus; or, the Religion of the Homeric Age

by W. E. Gladstone

Again, in the meeting of the gods, he describes Hector[759] as dear to them for his regular and abundant sacrifices, taking no note whatever of his personal virtues. Of the three deities who were actively hostile to Troy, Neptune, Juno, and Minerva, all had personal causes of offence: the first, the fraud of Laomedon, which, however, was also an offence against the moral law; both the others had the spretæ injuria formæ, and Juno had also special predilections to gratify. The fall of Ilios, and the death of Hector, are just: but the wonder is, with the favourable relations that subsisted between the Trojans and the father of gods, as well as men, which were in no respect impaired by crime, how Hector came to die, or Troy to fall. While the fall of Troy is justice, it does not seem to come about because it is agreeable to justice, but rather as the result of the balance of force among the gods, and of their remembrance of personal injuries. It appears all along, as though it were the right-mindedness of the Poet which keeps the wheels of the machine going, while those who should be the drivers are at fault.

Again, in the Odyssey, the Providence of the poem, if we may so speak, is on the side of Virtue; and a prosperous remainder of life, with a happy death, is promised to the hero. Of this providence Minerva, with the approval of Jupiter, is the wise and indefatigable organ. But while the general idea of providence moves in the right direction, the polytheistic formations work powerfully in a wrong one. David and his companions ate the show-bread in the temple, and were blameless, because it was to relieve a hunger that they had no other means of satisfying: but even impending famine does not excuse or palliate the offence of the companions of Ulysses, who use for food a portion of the oxen of the Sun. The jealousy and cruelty of Neptune, the gifts of Mercury to Autolycus, the savage crimes of Polyphemus, which do not detract from his relation to a deity of the highest rank, the disparagement of the highest human virtues in Calypso, the hostility to human peace and happiness in Circe and the Sirens, place the divine life of the Odyssey on a much lower level than the human and heroic, and to a certain extent depress by their admixture the sound ethical tone of the poem. All along, while Homer luxuriates, poetically, in the abundance and brilliancy of his materials, he has morally to repair their deficiencies, and to contend with and overrule their bias.

I cannot therefore but differ greatly from Nitzsch, who, in his Essay on the Anger of Neptune[760], seems to elevate it to the dignity of a providential resentment, and to conceive of the sufferings of Ulysses as a punishment for a moral offence in the treatment of Polyphemus. In this way I grant that a sort of parallel is established between his case and the chastisements which Achilles receives in the Iliad, through the death of Patroclus, and the surrender of the body of Hector. Both heroes seem thus to stand upon a level: both favoured children of the gods, honoured in the main, but chastised for their faults. But even this seeming parallelism fails when we remember the respective sequels. The curtain of the Iliad falls on the eve of the premature death of Achilles: as that of the Odyssey is dropping over the head of Ulysses, we perceive, in perspective, the picture of his serene old age.

As regards the important question of purity, the impression made on my own mind in reading the poems of Homer is this: that, but for his mythology, they would have been unimpeachable, at least in one point of virtue; they would have been absolutely pure. Whatever is dissolute in their moral tendency as regards this particular subject, evidently and directly flows from that source. We rarely meet a sentiment that can arouse anything like revulsion: the worst by far that has struck me is the advice given to Achilles by his mother Thetis (Il. xxiv. 130), as a mode of solace for his grief. The narrative of the Net of Vulcan in the Odyssey is one, that Homer would have been far too modest to recite with reference to human beings: and the only other passage, which seems to be marked with a tinge of grossness, is that which relates to the stratagem of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad.

Its bearing as to poetic effect.

We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation, to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution. Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if the scene were too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.

Its earliest and latest forms.

It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already risen Sun.

In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active share in the government of the world, and men look up to them, collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed, both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force, and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.