An inquiry, however, which seems to be most curious, is suggested by the passages in which Hecuba wishes that she could eat Achilles[860], Achilles that he could find it in his heart to devour Hector[861]; and again in which Jupiter[862] suggests to Juno, that nothing could satiate her spite against Troy so well as if she were to eat up Priam and his whole family. For the question arises, how is it that we find these remains of the wildest savagery in company with a refinement of manners and feeling, which the poems very frequently exhibit, and which even reaches in some important points to a degree never exceeded in any country or any period of the world?
The answer I presume to be this: that the civilization of the Greeks in the heroic age, though as to the mind it was really a very high, was yet also a very young civilisation. Its path was marked and decided, but it had not had time to travel far from barbarism. It was not safe by distance, nor defended by the ramparts of long tradition, nor strengthened by the force of continuing bent, and consolidated immemorial habit. The Homeric gentleman, with his civilization, stood, in respect to barbarism, like him who voyages by sea,
digitis a morte remotus
Quatuor aut septem;
only the thickness of the plank is between him and the wilderness which he has left: and if passion makes a breach, the mood of the wild beast reappears. We may account for the cannibalish observation of Jupiter by the fact that he has no self-control in Homer: but that of Hecuba is to be accounted for on the principle I have endeavoured to describe. So it is with Achilles: and so, too, when the wise Ulysses, slaughtering the wretched women of his household who had erred, seems tinged for once with a flush of barbarism. When we let loose the tiger within us, his range is limited not by any force springing from our own will or choice, but by the strong dikes and barriers of social wont, and by habits of thought as well as action, which have been accumulated by the long labours of many successive generations of mankind.
We have already[863] noticed something that will well bear comparison with this state of things in the reports which are made to us respecting modern Persia, the cradle in all likelihood of the family of Achilles.
At the same time it is to be borne in mind that this cannibalism, of which we have glimpses in Homer, in the first place was limited, even in speculation, to enemies; and in the second place, existed in speculation only. Of this we have pretty strong proof from the case of the crew of Ulysses in the Twelfth Odyssey. They did not touch the oxen of the Sun, until death from hunger stared them in the face. Then Eurylochus made a manful speech on the subject of the option before them, between dying on the one side, and the slaughter of some of the animals on the other. But those circumstances of the last extremity, to which they were reduced, were the very circumstances in which the fortitude even of Christians[864] has given way, and with respect to which no prudent man dares to pronounce a judgment upon persons that so succumb. Yet there is not in the case before us the slightest hint at a resort to this most horrible remedy.
Not unfamiliar to later Greece.
Besides the circumstance, that in Homer the cannibal dicta, abstractedly so shocking, are the mere words of phrensied passion, and that there are no corresponding acts, we have to observe that the Poet is never found exhibiting the sentiment of joy in connection with the positive infliction of suffering upon an enemy. It was by no means so among the later Greeks. Too many instances might, indeed, be supplied of the increase of cruelty with the lapse of time.
Homer, again, has nowhere made woman to be even the sorrowing minister of justice: as if he felt that there was a radical incompatibility between the proper gentleness of her nature, and the use of the sword of punishment. But in the Hecuba of Euripides, after the aged matron, exasperated by the treacherous murder of her son Polydorus, has put to death the two children of the assassin Polymestor, and has likewise put out his eyes, he addresses to her these words (v. 1233),