ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ’ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην.
Directly that we pass beyond the household and its affections intertwined by habit, the aspect of the case alters. Out of six instances of unpremeditated homicide in Homer, three[882] are committed upon relations by blood or by affinity, though not very near ones. Medon, the bastard of Oileus, kills a relation of the lawful wife. Tlepolemus the son of Hercules kills his grand-uncle Licymnius. Epeigeus of Budeum kills his cousin.
Relationships close, not wide.
This marked line of distinction, between the homicides of crime and the homicides of misfortune, illustrates another point in the structure of Greek society. Relationships do not appear to have been reckoned by them as subsisting beyond a rather narrow range. We cannot trace any defined idea of kin more remote than the first cousin. The lexicographers treat the term ἀνέψιος as capable of a wider sense; but the only individuals named as ἀνέψιοι by Homer, whose relationships we can follow, are first cousins: namely, Caletor son of Clytius, and Dolops son of Lampus, both first cousins of Hector[883]. There are also persons named in the poems, whose consanguinity we can trace, while it is nowhere noticed by the Poet: for instance, Eumelus is first cousin, once removed, to Nestor. Priam and Anchises are second cousins: Æneas and Hector third. These relationships are never referred to. Thus then society is not arranged in clans, but in tribes, united by the general sense of a common name, a common abode, a common history, a common religion, and a remote sense of a common tribal stock, without any sense of personal affinity in each individual case. Again, it is curious to observe that the xenial relation was not less vivacious than that of blood. The tie of blood subsists in the second generation from the common ancestor; and Diomed and Glaucus similarly own one another as ξεῖνοι, because two generations before Œneus had entertained Bellerophon[884].
Purity in the heroic age.
The elevated and free social position of womankind in the Homeric times of itself implies a great purity of ideas respecting them. This subject, however, will receive a separate discussion.
There is a passage of Athenæus which conveys to us a tradition of no ordinary beauty, and effectually severs for us ideas and objects which only a corrupt bias has associated. He tells us that Zeno of Citium[885], whatever the practice of the Stoic leader may have been, conceived of Ἔρως, the God of Love, as a deity of friendship, liberty, concord, and public happiness, and of nothing else. So likewise his antecessors in philosophy taught that this deity was as a being perfectly pure: σεμνόν τινα καὶ παντὸς αἰσχροῦ κεχωρισμένον. This idea took refuge in the Venus Οὐρανία, the opposite one in the Πάνδημος, or promiscuous[886]. In the later ages of Greece, the distinction of these two characters one from the other feebly lived on: but there was no subjective basis for the separate existence of the former, and it was practically eclipsed, if not absorbed. The true severance of the ideas probably was effected before the time of Homer; and they were lodged in separate impersonations. The effective form of the Celestial Venus is to be sought most probably in Diana, though it was natural for Plato and the philosophers to keep alive the memory of the distinction by way of apology for the popular religion. The traces of this unstained conception were in later times only to be found in the sphere of art, and were even there not always visible: but in the Homeric poems, and probably in the Homeric period, this purity of admiring sentiment towards beautiful form appears to have been a living reality.
Our inquiry on this subject must have reference partly to the Poet, and partly to his period and nation. I will first deal with the points which have a bearing upon the age as well as the bard: and will thereafter subjoin what appears to touch Homer only.
Lay of the Net of Vulcan.
Let us commence, then, by considering that one and only case, in the whole compass of twenty-eight thousand lines, which might lead to an opposite conclusion: the case of the second Lay of Demodocus, or the adultery of Mars and Venus[887].