The mildest manners with the bravest mind.’
The disposition of the Trojan chief to brag is, however, the more offensive, because it vents itself so much in the first person singular; because in the case of Patroclus it seems to be associated with an act at least unmanly; and because upon many occasions Hector shows even more than a prudential regard to his personal safety.
What is more strange is, that his ordinary strain of boasting is chequered with passages of more genuine modesty and humility than are to be found in the speech of any other chieftain on either side. As for example, when he acknowledges his marked inferiority to Achilles;
οἶδα δ’ ὅτι σὺ μὲν ἐσθλὸς, ἐγὼ δὲ σέθεν πολὺ χείρων[988].
But above all, in the incomparable verse of his prayer over his infant son;
καὶ ποτέ τις εἴπῃ, πατρός γ’ ὅδε πολλὸν ἀμείνων[989].
Hector’s moral character.
Homer is of all poets the most free from any thing that can be called trick; but perhaps it may be that the same necessity of his position, which obliged him to magnify Trojan prowess in words, while it falls so short in deeds, has found its way from the narrative into the dramatic part of the poem. If so, then in Hector’s boasts we may recognise Homer working out his own general purpose rather than conforming with perfect fidelity to tradition, or finishing an ideally perfect portrait with the power and exactitude, which he has applied to his greater Grecian heroes. Yet, be the cause what it may that has led Homer to exhibit in Hector the disagreeable gift of a bragging disposition, Mure appears to show less than his usual precision when he ascribes to Hector in one place a partial[990], and in another a total, indifference to the moral guilt of his brother Paris.
Whatever may be the reason, the fact undoubtedly is, that neither on the Trojan, nor even on the Greek side, do we find displayed such a sense of the shameful crime of Paris as we might have anticipated from a first view of the manners and feelings of the age. As far as regards the Poet himself, we may read his indignant sense of it in the portraiture he has been careful to give of Paris himself, and of his ill fame among his countrymen; but, undoubtedly, although his act is everywhere described as the cause of war, it is nowhere spoken of, among those who had suffered by it, with the passion and indignation which we might suppose it would have aroused. Of all the Greeks, only Menelaus alludes to it as an act of guilt. Various causes may be assigned for this with more or less confidence. A probable one is, as we have seen[991], that the act partook of the character of an abduction or rape, in which enterprise and force gild or hide the ugly features of crime. An unpopular form of criminality might then, as now, come off the more easily from being covered by another which is popular. It also without doubt appears, that another reason may be the length of time which, in any view of the case, must have elapsed since the act had taken place. But perhaps the solution of the question is to be mainly found in this consideration, common to modern with ancient times, that the causes of war are apt to be swallowed up in its circumstances. In entering upon the arbitrement of the sword, men do not choose a fixed position, but they embark upon a stream, always powerful and often ungovernable. When once the armament was on the shores of the Hellespont, there would be on both sides the motive of military honour, and, besides this, with the Trojans, the defence of their families and homes, with the Greeks the hope of plunder and of license. Hence, even after the Greeks are weakened and discouraged by the secession of Achilles, it is not from them, but from the Trojans, that a proposal proceeds for deciding the case of Helen by single combat. Hence, upon the shameful escape of Paris from fulfilling this engagement, after his defeat by Menelaus, we find little expression of indignation on one side, and no confession of wrong on the other. But the criticism of Mure seems to amount to this; that it was a capital fault on the part of Hector, not to have his mind constantly full of a question, which was rarely thought of at all by any one on either side, except Paris and Menelaus, the persons most directly interested.