I speak here, as everywhere, of the adjustment of acts and motives in the poem as poetical facts, that is to say, as placed relatively to one another with care and accuracy in order to certain effects; and as liable to be tried under the law of effect, just as, in a simple history, all particulars alleged are liable to be tried under the law of fact. The assumption of truth or fable in the poem does not materially widen or narrow the field of poetical discussion. The critic looks for consistency as between motive and action, causes and effects, in the voyage to Lilliput or Laputa, as well as in Thucydides or Clarendon. The difference is that, in the one case, our discussion terminates with the genius of the inventor; in the other we are verifying the life and condition of mankind.
If then we admit the abduction, and inquire for what probable cause it is that the wrong, being so obvious and gross, was not more prominent in the mind of the people who had endured it, a part at least of the answer is this. We do not require to go back three thousand years in the history of the world in order to learn how often it happens that, when a conflict has arisen between nations, the original causes of quarrel tend irresistibly to become absorbed and lost in its incidents. As long as honour and security are held to depend more on strength than on right, relative strength must often prevail over relative right in the decision of questions, where the arbitrement of battle has been invoked. Both the willingness of the Trojans to restore, and the willingness of the Greeks to accept the atonement, may be expedients of the Poet to give a certain moral harmony to his work; of which it is a marked feature that it artfully divides our sympathies throughout, so far at least as is needed for the interest of the poem. On the one side, the ambition and rapacity of Agamemnon may have induced him not only not to seek, but even to decline or discourage accommodation; which, we may observe, he never promotes in the Iliad. Having got a fair cause of war, he may have been bent on making the most of it, and confident, as Thucydides believes he was, in his power to turn it to account. While, on the other hand, Troy was not so far from or so strange to Greece, as to be exempt from the fear of appearing afraid; and, until it had become too late, she may have thought her safety would be compromised by the surrender of Helen.
Here may be reasons why restitution was neither given on the one side, nor steadily kept in view on the other: especially as it was of course included in the idea of the capture of the city. But it is not clear that this was enough to account for the apathy of the Greeks in general with respect to the crime of Paris, which we might have expected to find a favourite and familiar topic with his enemies at large, instead of being confined, as it is, to the immediate sufferer by the wrong.
Its relation to prevailing views of marriage.
Now, the answer to this question must after all be sought partly in the prevalent ideas of the heroic age; and partly in those which were peculiar more or less to the Greek people.
According to Christian morality, the abduction and appropriation of a married woman is not simply a crime when committed, but it is a crime that is aggravated by every day, during which her relation with her seducer or ravisher is continued. This was not so in the heroic age.
We have examples in the poems of what Homer considers to be a continued course of crime. Such is the conduct of the Suitors in the Odyssey, who for years together waste the substance of Ulysses, woo his wife, oppress his son, and cohabit with the servants. This was habitual crime, crime voluntarily and deliberately persevered in, when it might at any time have been renounced.
This vicious course of the Suitors is never called by Homer an ἄτη; it is described by the names of ἀτασθαλίαι and ὑπερβασίη[422]. So likewise the series of enormities committed by Ægisthus, the corruption of Clytemnestra, the murder of her husband, the expulsion of Orestes and prolonged usurpation of the throne; these are never called by the name of ἄτη; but ἄτη, and not one of the severer names quoted above, is the appellation always given by Homer to the crime of Paris.
The ἄτη of a man is a crime so far partaking of the nature of error, that it is done under the influence of passion or weakness; perhaps excluding premeditation, perhaps such that its consequences follow spontaneously in its train, without a new act of will to draw them, so that the act, when once committed, is practically irretrievable. Something, according to Homer, was evidently wanting in the crime of Paris, to sink it to the lower depths of blackness. Perhaps we may find it partly in the nature of marriage, as it was viewed by his age.
Having taken Helen to Troy, he made her his wife, and his wife she continued until the end of the siege. We should of course say he did not make her his wife, for she was the wife of another man. But the distinction between marriage de facto and marriage de jure, clear to us in the light of Divine Revelation, was less clear to the age of Homer. Helen was to Paris the mistress of his household; the possessor of his affections, such as they were; the sole sharer, apparently, of his dignities and of his bed. To the mind of that period there was nothing dishonourable in the connection itself, apart from its origin; while, to our mind, every day of its continuance was a fresh accumulation of its guilt. The higher wrong of wounded and defrauded affections was personal to Menelaus. In the aspect it presented to the general understanding, the act of Paris, once committed, and sealed by the establishment of the de facto conjugal relation, remained an act of plunder and nothing else.