I take the word γενεὴ to mean here, ‘the term of thirty years,’ but with the necessary qualification of ‘or thereabouts;’ and for the following reasons:
Nestor is represented in the Iliad as the oldest of the Greek chieftains of the first order. Yet Ulysses[825] was elderly, ὠμογέρων. Idomeneus, again, was older than Ulysses, as is plain from the more marked manner in which his advance in years is described. He is μεσαιπόλιος[826], and not fully ablebodied, as appears from his somewhat limited share in military operations; but Nestor is evidently older than Idomeneus, as he always addresses the whole body with the authority that belongs to the most extended experience, and as he never takes an active part, either in battle or in the games. We must, accordingly, suppose Nestor to be represented as at this time an old man of seventy, or from that to seventy-five.
Now the passage implies that he was in the third γενεὴ, and in the midst, i. e. not at either extremity, of it: the words are μετὰ τριτάτοισιν. No lower number than thirty years will place Nestor fairly among, or in the midst of, the third generation from his birth. If, for example, we take five and twenty years as the term, he would have been not so much among the third as on the eve of arriving within the fourth generation. But neither can we assign to γενεὴ any meaning, which shall make it sensibly exceed thirty years. For as we may say with confidence that the Nestor of the Iliad is over seventy, so, on the other hand, we may fairly compute that he is under eighty; inasmuch as, though he takes no part in exertions actually athletic, he spares himself nothing else. He is found by Agamemnon, when the commander in chief goes his rounds, on the field and at the head of his division: he is wakeful for the night council, and he goes about awaking others[827]. Retaining so large a share of bodily activity, he is still not represented as possessed of strength in such a degree as to border upon the marvellous; he is simply, in regard to corporal qualities, what would now be called a remarkably fine old gentleman. But if instead of thirty we were to take forty years, then, in order to have well entered into the third term he must have been already much beyond eighty, indeed, probably beyond ninety, in the Iliad, and above an hundred in the Odyssey; an age, which, as he retains in that poem all his mental powers, we may be quite sure Homer did not mean to assign to him. If, then, γενεὴ meant any term of years, it must, in all likelihood, have been somewhere about thirty years.
Homer has been careful, in the case of Nestor, to mark, by an appropriate change of expressions, the difference between his age in the two poems respectively. In the Iliad he is exercising the kingly office among the third generation since his birth. In the Odyssey he is said to have exhausted the three terms[828];
τρὶς γὰρ δή μίν φασιν ἀνάξασθαι γενε’ ἀνδρῶν.
That lucidity and accuracy in Homer’s expressions, to which we are so often beholden, may stand us yet further in good stead. Two γενεαὶ had passed, not of men at large, but of the men οἵ οἱ πρόσθεν ἅμα τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντο, of those who were bred and born with him, of his contemporaries. Now this proves that by γενεὴ Homer does not mean the full duration of human life, but that average interval between the successions of men, which general experience places at about thirty years. For if Homer had meant by γενεὴ the whole time required for the dying out of a generation, Nestor could not have outlived two generations of contemporaries. In this sense, his contemporaries were manifestly not two generations, but one, or little more. But if the Poet meant the usual interval at which child succeeds to, or rather follows upon, father, the expression is clear; for the meaning is, that he had seen two of these terms of years, or successions, pass over those who were born at the same time with himself. And in fact this sense of the term γενεὴ is much closer to its etymology than any other. We may, then, on the whole, pretty safely assume it to be a term of years, having the number thirty, so to speak, for its pivot. And thus the three decades of the war become yet more inadmissible as historical expressions, because they are under the strongest suspicion of being poetically employed in order to make up the γενεὴ, so far at least as they and it can be considered to approximate to an actual number at all.
In full conformity with this reasoning, it has been shown by Mure, that the events of the third decade, with their times, instead of ten years only, make up eight years and seven months[829]: and he proceeds in the same direction with the foregoing argument so far, at least, as to observe, that the decades and their arrangement are conceived ‘in a mixed spirit of hyperbole and method,’ which commonly marks the genius of heroic romance[830].
That, however, which enables me with great confidence at once to urge Homer’s historical authority, and yet to decline recognising him as a chronologist at all, is the fact, that he nowhere founds his history at all in chronology, or in the numbering of events by years, more than he numbers distances by miles, but that he arranges the succession of occurrences by the γενεαὶ or succession of human generations. On these generations we must look as the real time-keeping organism of his works: and the time with its elastic periods, although indeterminate in its details, is kept by him most accurately and effectually as a whole; so that his generations, which are dispersedly recorded in various parts of the poems, always tally when they meet. This is not the place for the proof of the assertion: I only refer to it, because it may help to dispel the illusion apt to possess the mind with respect to Homer’s decades. We, with our definite numerical ideas, may naturally consider that if an author of our own day had said a war lasted in preparation, action, and return, each ten years, and if it was afterwards found perhaps to have lasted (say) only for ten years altogether or little more, such an author would have proved himself unworthy of belief: he would have broken faith with us. But Homer does not break faith with us in using numbers poetically; they belong to his pictorial and not to his historical apparatus, and in connection with this pictorial apparatus it is that he constantly employs them. I doubt if there is any exception to be made to the broad assertion, that, unless in the single case of the war, with the preceding and following decades, Homer never applies number to narrative. And yet the poems are full of independent narratives. Of all these, very few indeed are left unfixed in date; and in every case the date, when found, is found, of course with a certain margin, by means of the order of generations.
Difficulties of the literal interpretation.