And Aristotle thought, as is thought now, that weeping was unfit for men. The wise man, he conceives[906], cannot incite others to mourn with him, διὰ τὸ μηδ’ αὐτὸς εἶναι θρηνητικός: but women, and woman-like men, γύναια καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἄνδρες, are glad of such companionship in sorrow.
There are indeed three most important points of the Homeric poems, in which it would appear that the Greek character greatly hardened, and greatly sank, as the nation advanced in its career. One of them is the principle of sympathy. Another is that of placability, which Homer has very powerfully exhibited in Achilles. The third is that of humility, of which we have an example in Helen, in the Helen of Troy and the Helen of Sparta, such as heathenism nowhere else, I believe, presents to us.
It has thus appeared that if we take the state of morality as it appears among mankind in the poems of Homer, and compare it with that of Greece in its highest civilization, we find before us two grand differences. Those offences against the moral law, which constitute crimes of violence, were more justly appreciated at the later period; but as to those which constitute, in the language of Christianity, the lusts of the mind and of the flesh, a great preference is due to the former.
We are naturally led to inquire, Whence these two movements in opposite directions? That mankind should either lose ground or gain it, in morality as a whole, is far less startling at first sight, than that, at one and the same time, with respect to one great portion of the moral law there should be progress, and with respect to another, retrogression.
In reality, however, this was the condition of man: retrogression as to his spiritual life, but advance and development, up to a certain point, with regard to the intellectual and the social career. Sins of the flesh lay chiefly between God and the individual conscience: the social results did not palpably and immediately reach beyond the persons immediately concerned. But crimes of violence struck directly at the fabric of society by destroying security of person and property; and robbed mankind, especially the ruling part of mankind, of the immense advantages and enjoyments which they reaped from civilized life. Thus, the moral sense was quick, and even grew quicker with the lapse of time, when it was fed and prompted by such motives of self-interest as lay within its appreciation, like those which the desire to enjoy the commodities of life supplied. But it languished and all but died, when its business was to maintain those virtues which involve severe self-denial, and of which the reward never can be fully appreciated except by those who are so favoured as to practise them in the highest degree.
Nor must we overlook some special bearings of the institution of slavery upon this question. As it grew and was consolidated, it of course entailed an increased necessity for laws to defend life and goods against violence. But as regarded the other class of offences, its influence was all in the sense of more and more relaxation. For beauty and defencelessness, when they were combined in slaves, at once wrought up attraction to the uttermost, and removed all obstacles to enjoyment. While at the same time the partial indulgence, which at all periods has commonly attended such commerce between slaves and their masters, operated as a safety valve to let off the political dangers of that system: so that, on the one hand, slavery was a feeder to lust, and, on the other, lust was a buttress to slavery.
That it was not on moral grounds that in the later times of Greece life and property were better defended than in the former, we may partly judge from finding that, though it is in the nature of all society that a nation should rather incline to gild the days of its forefathers with ornaments beyond the truth, the later Greek traditions crammed the heroic age with a mass of crimes of which Homer knows nothing. He sets Minos and Rhadamanthus before us as characters positively good: Thyestes and others are at worst neutral in character: but all these, according to the later tradition, were either accessory to, or contaminated with, the most horrible enormities.
Notes in the Poems of commencing decline.