Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey

by W. Lucas Collins

It is something in favour of a tender side to the hero’s character, that the “fair-cheeked” Briseis, spoil of war though she was, parts from him very reluctantly. Achilles, for his share, fairly weeps: but not the most romantic reader of the story dares nurse the idea that it is for his Briseis. They who bring with them, to the pages of classical fiction, a taste which has been built up by modern song and romance, must be warned at once that there is no love-story in either Iliad or Odyssey. Indeed, one remarkable point of difference between the imaginative writers of antiquity and those of our own days, lies in the absence of that which is the motive and the key-note of five-sixths of our modern tales in prose and verse. Love between unmarried persons, in the sense in which we commonly use the word, seems very much the product of modern civilisation. There is indeed a passion which we name by the same English word—the mere animal passion, which Homer, to do him justice, deals with but as a matter of fact, and never paints in attractive colours. There is again a love of another kind—the love of the husband for his wife and of the wife for her husband—which the old poet also well understood, and which furnishes him with scenes of the highest pathos and beauty. But as to the sentiment which forms the common staple of modern romance and drama, Homer certainly did not know what it meant, nor Achilles or Briseis either. As for the latter, if she shed tears, it was no doubt because she had found in Achilles a kind and generous lord and master, who had made her captive lot (which might chance to come to the turn of any lady or princess in those warlike times) as tolerable as such a life could be; and because Agamemnon—if she had heard his character from Achilles—did not promise a very favourable change in that respect.

Achilles weeps—but not for Briseis. He is touched in a point where he is far more sensitive—his honour. He has been robbed of the guerdon of valour, bestowed on him in full conclave of the chiefs of the army. He has been robbed of it by Agamemnon—the man for whose especial sake, to avenge whose family wrongs, he has come on this long expedition from his home. This was his indignant protest in their dispute at the council—

“Well dost thou know that ’twas no feud of mine
With Troy’s brave sons, that brought me here in arms;
They never did me wrong; they never drove
My cattle, or my horses; never sought
In Phthia’s fertile life-sustaining fields
To waste the crops; for wide between us lay
The shadowy mountains and the roaring sea.
With thee, O void of shame! with thee we sailed,
For Menelaüs and for thee, ingrate,
Glory and fame on Trojan crests to win.” (D.)

And now this is his reward! And the whole Greek army, too, have made themselves partakers in the wrong, inasmuch as they have tamely looked on, and allowed the haughty king thus to override honour, gratitude, and justice. His indignation is intense. He wanders away, and sits alone on the sea-beach, “gazing vacantly on the illimitable ocean.” Soon there comes a change upon his spirit; and now, with a childlike petulance—these Homeric heroes, with all their fierce ways, are still so very childlike, and therefore so human and so interesting—he cries to his mother. True, that mother is, as we remember, a goddess—Thetis, daughter of the great Jupiter, and of potent influence in the waters beneath the earth. To her he bemoans himself. That his days were to be few, he knew when he came here to Troy; but she had promised him undying renown. It has failed him: his “one crowded hour of glorious life” is darkened in dishonour. He cries, and his goddess-mother hears him—

“Beside her aged father where she sat,
In the deep ocean-caves.”

It is the original of our own Milton’s beautiful invocation in Comus—the rough simple outline on which he has painted with a grace and fulness which make it all his own—

“Sabrina fair!
Listen, where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen, and save!”

Thetis hears, and rises on the sea—“like as it were a mist”—(the “White Lady of Avenel”) caresses him soothingly with her hand, as though the stalwart warrior were still a child indeed, and asks him the simple question which all mothers, goddesses or not, would put into much the same words—“My son, why weepest thou?” He tells his tale of wrong; and she proceeds to give him, in the first place, advice certainly not wiser than that of some earthly mothers. She does not advise him to make up his quarrel with Agamemnon, but to nurse his wrath, and withdraw himself wholly from the siege. She, meanwhile, will intercede with Jupiter, and beseech him to grant the Trojans victory for a while, that so the Greeks may learn to feel the loss of the hero whom they have insulted.

There is an obstacle, however, in the way of the immediate performance of her promise—a ludicrous obstacle, to our modern taste, though the poet does not so intend it. The King of the Gods has gone out to dinner—or rather to a continuous festival of twelve days, to which he has been invited by “the blameless Ethiopians;”[11] a race with whom the Immortals of Olympus have some mysterious connection, which has been held to imply an Eastern origin for the Greek religion and race. With the dawn of the twelfth morning, however, Thetis presents herself in the “brazen-floored” halls of Jupiter, and we are introduced to the Olympian court and household. A strange picture it is—such a travesty of a divine life as makes us wonder what the poet himself really conceived of the gods of his adoption. The life of mortal heroes in the world below is grandeur and nobleness itself compared with that of the Olympian heaven. Its pleasures indeed are much the same—those of sensual gratification; the feast, the wine-cup, music and song, are what gods and goddesses delight in as much as those whom the poet pathetically calls “the creatures of a day.” But all their passions are incomparably meaner. The wrath of Achilles is dignified—Juno’s anger against Troy is mere vicious spite. The subtle craft of Ulysses is at least exercised for the benefit of his countrymen and their cause; but the shifty counsels of Jupiter are the mere expedients of a cunning despot who, between queen and ministers and favourites, finds it difficult, in spite of his despotism, to have his own way. The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is tragedy: the domestic wrangles of the Thunderer and his queen are in the very spirit of low comedy, and not even the burlesques of Life in Olympus, which some years ago were popular on our English stage, went far beyond the recognised legends of mythology. In fact, the comic element, what little there is of it in the Iliad, is supplied (with the single exception of the incident of Thersites) by the powers whom the poet recognises as divinities. The idea of rival wills and influences existing in the supernatural world led the poet necessarily to represent his gods as quarrelling; and quarrels in a primitive age are perhaps hardly compatible with dignity. But the conception of gods in human shape has always a tendency to monstrosities and caricature. How close, too, the supernatural and the grotesque seem to lie together may be seen even in the existing sculptures and carvings of ancient Christendom, and still more remarkably in the old Miracle-Plays, which mix buffoonery with the most sacred subjects in a manner which it is hard to reconcile with any real feeling of reverence.

Thetis throws herself at the feet of her father Jupiter, and begs of him, as a personal favour, the temporary humiliation of Agamemnon and his Greeks. For a while the Thunderer is silent, and hesitates; Thetis perseveringly clings to his knees. At last he confides to her his dread lest a compliance with her petition should involve him in domestic difficulties.