Again, how remarkable it is that Alcinous, far from being surprised that his maiden daughter should have entered into conversation with a stranger, is actually on the point of finding fault with her for not having shown a greater forwardness, and brought him home in her own company: a reproach, from which Ulysses saves her by his intercession[956].
Social position of the wife.
It is not only from this or that particular, but it is from the whole tone of the intercourse maintained between men and women, that we are really to judge what is the social position of the latter.
And this tone it is which supplies such conclusive evidence with respect to the age of Homer. Achilles observes, that love and care[957] towards a wife are a matter of course with every right-minded man. Love and care, indeed, may be shown to a pet animal. It is not on the mere words, therefore, that we must rest our conclusions; but upon the spirit in which they are spoken, and the whole circle of signs with which they are associated. It is on the reciprocity of all those sentiments between man and wife, father and daughter, son and mother, which are connected with the moral dignity of the human being. It is on the confidence exchanged between them, and the loving liberty of advice and exhortation from the one to the other. The social equality of man and woman is of course to be understood with reserves, as is that other equality, which nevertheless indicates a political truth of the utmost importance, the equality of all classes in the eye of the law. There are differences in the nature and constitution of the two great divisions of the race, to be met by adaptations of treatment and of occupation; without such adaptations, the seeming equality would be partiality alike dangerous and irrational. But, subject to those reserves, we find in Homer the fulness of moral and intelligent being alike consummate, alike acknowledged, on the one side and on the other. The conversation of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, of Ulysses and Penelope in the Twenty-third Odyssey, the position of Arete at the court of Alcinous, and that of Helen in the palace of Menelaus, all tell one and the same tale. Ulysses, for example, where he wishes to convey his supplication in Scheria to the King, does it by falling at the Queen’s feet: but she does not supplicate her husband: the address to her seems to have sufficed. And Helen appears, in the palace of Menelaus, on such a footing relatively to her husband, as would perfectly befit the present relations of man and woman. Nay, we may take the speech of Helen in the Sixth Iliad, addressed to Hector, where she touches on the character of Paris, as equal to any of them by way of social indication. What we there read is not the sagacity or intelligence of the speaker, but it is the right of the wife (so to call her) to speak about the character of her husband and its failings, her acknowledged possession of the standing ground from which she can so speak, and speak with firmness, nay, even with an authority of her own.
When we see Briseis, the widow of a prince, sharing the bed of Achilles, and delivered over as a slave into the hands of Agamemnon, when we find Hector anticipating that Andromache might be required to perform menial offices for a Greek mistress, and Nestor encouraging the army not to quit Troy until they had forced the Trojan matrons into their embraces, we are struck with pity and horror. But we must separate between the danger and suffering which uniformly dogs the weak in times of violence, most of all, too, after the sack of a city, and what belongs to the age of Homer in particular. After this separation has been effected, there remains nothing which ought to depress our views of the position of woman in the heroic age. The sons of Priam, princes of Troy, were sold into captivity by Achilles as he took them[958]: of course the purchasers put them to menial employments. Not only so, but Eumæus, the faithful swineherd and slave of Ulysses, was by birth royal: his father Ctesios was king of two wealthy and happy cities[959]. From the name Εὐρυμέδουσα, it would appear probable that she also, the chamber-woman of the palace of Alcinous, though a captive, was of noble birth[960].
There is not in the whole of the poems an instance of rude or abusive manners towards woman as such, or of liberties taken with them in the course of daily life. If Melantho gets hard words, it is not as a woman, but for her vice and insolence. The conduct of the Ithacan Suitors to Penelope, as it is represented in the Odyssey, affords the strongest evidence of the respect in which women were held. Her son had been a child: there was no strong party of adherents to the family; yet the highflown insolence of the Suitors, demanding that she should marry again, is kept at bay for years, and never proceeds to violence.
Force of conjugal attachments.
We find throughout the poems those signs of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which, from all that has preceded, we might expect. While admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an Immortal, Ulysses frankly owns to her that his heart is pining every day for Penelope[961]. It is the highest honour of a hero to die fighting on behalf of his wife and children. The continuance of domestic happiness, and the concord of man and wife, is a blessing so great, that it excites the envy of the gods, and they interrupt it by some adverse dispensation[962]. And no wonder; for nothing has earth to offer better, than when man and wife dwell together in unity of spirit: their friends rejoice, their foes repine: the human heart has nothing more to desire[963]. There is here apparently involved that great and characteristic idea of the conjugal relation, that it includes and concentrates in itself all other loves. And this very idea is expressed by Andromache, where, after relating the slaughter of her family by Achilles, she tells Hector, ‘Hector, nay but thou art for me a father, and a mother, and a brother, as well as the husband of my youth[964].’ To which he in the same spirit of enlarged attachment replies, by saying that neither the fate of Troy, which he sees approaching, nor of Hecuba, nor of Priam, nor of his brothers, can move his soul like the thought, that Andromache will as a captive weave the web, and bear the pitcher, for some dame of Messe or of Hypereia[965].
Woman-characters of Homer.
With the pictures which we thus find largely scattered over the poems, of the relations of woman to others, the characters which Homer has given us of woman herself are in thorough harmony. Among his living characters we do not find the viragos, the termagants, the incarnate fiends, of the later legends. Nay, the woman of Homer never dreams of using violence, even as a protection against wrong. It must be admitted, that he does not even present to us the heroine in any more pronounced form, than that of the moral endurance of Penelope. The heroine proper, the Joan of Arc, is certainly a noble creation: but yet one perhaps implying a state of things more abnormal, than that which had been reached by the Greeks of the Homeric age. The pictures of women, which Homer presents to us, are perfect pictures; but they are pictures simply of mothers, matrons, sisters, daughters, maidens, wives. The description which the Poet has given us of the violence and depravity of Clytemnestra, is the genuine counterpart of his high conception of the nature of woman[966]: