It seems, indeed, as if Homer had himself lived to note the signs of moral degeneracy. In part, we may perhaps say, it is inseparably associated with that deterioration in the character and idea of government, which begins to be traceable in the Odyssey. But in that poem he has given us another indication of it, unlike any thing in the Iliad, where he never contrasts the present unfavourably with the past, except as to mere corporal strength. For he makes Minerva as Mentor deliver to Telemachus the sentiment, that among sons a small number only are equal to their fathers[907], a very few indeed excelling them, but the greater part falling short of them. In later times, we have come to associate threnodies of this kind with the notion that they are complaints of course, formulæ taken up and reiterated successively from generation to generation. It may or may not be just thus to view them: but whether it be just or not for later times, I think that we ought not so to limit the force of the idea when it meets us in the age of Homer: the world was then young, and human society had not so learned its ‘ancient saws or modern instances,’ as to separate them from the truths of experience and of observation. The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.
SECT. IX.
Woman in the Homeric age.
No view of a peculiar civilization can on its ethical side be satisfactory, unless it include a distinct consideration of the place held in it by woman. And, besides, the position of the Greek woman of the heroic age is in itself so remarkable, as even on special grounds to require separate and detailed notice. It is likewise so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the historic ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization, as to form in itself a sufficient confutation of the theories of those writers who can see in the history of mankind only the development of a law of continual progress from intellectual darkness into light, and from moral degradation up to virtue.
The idea and place of woman have been slowly and laboriously elevated by the Gospel: and their full development has constituted the purest and most perfect protest, that the world has ever seen, against the sovereignty of force. For it is not alone against merely physical, but also against merely intellectual strength, that this protest has been lodged. To the very highest range of intellectual strength known among the children of Adam, woman seems never to have ascended, but in every or almost every case to have fallen somewhat short of it. But when we look to the virtues, it seems probable both that her average is higher, and that she also attains in the highest instances to loftier summits. Certainly there is no proof here of her inferiority to man. Now it is nowhere written in Holy Scripture that God is knowledge, or that God is power; while it is written that God is love: words which appear to set forth love as the central essence, and all besides as attributes. Woman then holds of God, and finds her own principal development in that which is most God-like. Thus, therefore, when Christianity wrought out for woman, not a social identity, but a social equality, not a rivalry with the function of man, but an elevation in her own function reaching as high as his, it made the world and human life in this respect also a true image of the Godhead.
Within the pale of that civilization which has grown up under the combined influence of the Christian religion as paramount, and of what may be called the Teutonic manners as secondary, we find the idea of woman and her social position raised to a point even higher than in the poems of Homer. But it would be hard to discover any period of history or country of the world, not being Christian, in which they stood so high as with the Greeks of the heroic age.
There are various heads under which we may inquire into the subject before us.
One is the law of marriage in the heroic age, and the state of the specific relation between the sexes.
A second is the employments assigned to women; how high did they reach, and how low did they descend?
A third is the social footing on which they stood, as tested by manners.