Of course it is impossible to justify this single passage upon its own merits: but there are many circumstances that ought to be borne in mind by those who wish to form an accurate judgment upon it in its connection with the morals either of the Poet himself, or of the age to which he belonged.
Of these the most important, in my view, is the tendency which the Pagan religion already powerfully showed to become itself the positive corrupter of morality, or, to speak perhaps more accurately, to afford the medium, through which the forces of evil and the downward inclination would principally act for the purpose of depraving it. Even in Homer’s time, the existing mythology contained ample warrant for the scene of indulgence here laid bare; and we see the remaining modesty and delicacy of mankind feebly resisting the torrent of passion, which ought to have been counteracted, but which, on the contrary, was principally swollen and impelled, by the agency of the acknowledged religion of the country.
It was impossible for Homer to be altogether above the operation of influences so closely allied with an origin believed to be celestial: nor could it be easy for the popular Poet wholly to disregard the tastes of his hearers: the Poet, whose strains swept over the whole height and depth of life and nature, both human and divine, could not absolutely shut out from his encyclopædic survey so marked a characteristic of Olympian habits. He has not omitted to mark as peculiar, in more ways than one, the licence he has assumed. The lay is sung in an assembly attended by men only: and it purports also to describe a scene, from which the goddesses intentionally kept away. The amusement of the deities present is not universal: Neptune, the senior one among them, does not laugh[888], but takes the matter gravely, and desires to put an end to the scandal, by promising to make to the injured husband a pecuniary reparation[889]. He evidently appears to act under an impulse of offended dignity at least, though not of modesty. Again, the Poet endeavours to give a ridiculous air, not only a laughable one, to the whole proceeding, through the extreme mortification of the guilty persons; who, when released, are made to disappear in real dismay and discomfiture[890]. In this point he altogether differs, undoubtedly, from the generality of the writers of licentious pieces, as materially as he does in the simplicity of his details; and that supposition of a partially moral aim on which some have ventured, is not so extravagant as to deserve total and absolute rejection.
It has been common to employ, in vindication of Homer, the supposition that the passage is spurious. There is something rather more marked in the personal agency of the Sun than the poems elsewhere present; and undoubtedly Apollo is made to assume a tone wholly singular, and unsupported by what is told of him in the rest of the poems. These are arguments, so far as they go, against it. But I do not venture to adopt this alluring expedient: for the general character of the colouring, diction, and incidents, appears to be Homeric enough. And again, if licentiousness was to come in, this was exactly the way for its entrance, because it was after a banquet; because it was among men exclusively, and not in the presence of women; because of the connection with mythology; and because the tale is thoroughly in keeping with the mythological character of the personages chiefly concerned.
The direct reference however of the evil to the influence of a perverted religion can be supported by distinct evidence from other parts of the poems. In the Iliad there appear to be but two passages, which can fairly be termed indelicate. One is the account of the proceeding of Juno, with the accompanying speech of Jupiter, in the Fourteenth Book[891]. This relation belongs strictly to the mythology of the poem, and it is evidently handled in an historical manner; for Jupiter’s details, at least as it seems to me, are introduced for the purpose of fixing ancient national legends, as much as the stories of Nestor and Phœnix. The other passage is that, which in a few words contains the sensual advice given by Thetis, as a mother, to her son Achilles in his grief, by way of comfort;
ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι
μίσγεσθ’[892].
This precisely exemplifies the relation of which I speak. The deity teaches the debased lesson: the human hero passes by the recommendation in silence. Homer would have put no such language as this into the mouth of one of his matrons.
When we come to pass sentence upon Homer, we must remember that, since in the Odyssey he represents the comic as well as the serious side of life, he ought in justice to be first compared with his successors. And here we not only shall find he gains by the comparison with Aristophanes or with Horace, but that he gains yet much more when tried by the standard of the other great school of poets which followed him in associating heroic subjects with wit and with amusement, namely, the poets of the Italian romance. There is hardly, perhaps, one of that whole school of Christian writers, who has not descended to licentiousness of far more malignant type. Nor let it be supposed that the Æneid shows in this respect any superiority in Virgil or in his hearers. As to Virgil, and as to his poems, if we take the whole of them into view, I am afraid that whatever the veil of words may do, the case was in reality bad enough: as to the hearers of the Æneid, we must remember that they were not a people, but a court: we must compare his Roman auditors with the hearers of Homer, not as to that particular only of their public amusements, but as to the whole; that is, we must compare the Homeric poems not with the Æneid alone, but with the Æneid and the Floralia. In Homer’s time, men had not learned to screen their vices behind walls which also serve to fortify them. And it still remains more than doubtful whether the appetite of Homeric Greece would have endured the garbage on which Christian Florence was content to feed, during its carnivals, in the period of its most famous civilization.
Evidence of comparative purity.