Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey

by W. Lucas Collins

The preservation of poems of such great length (the Iliad alone contains between fifteen and sixteen thousand lines) in days when writing, even if invented, was in its infancy, has been the subject of much speculation. That they were publicly recited at great national festivals in all parts of Greece, is undoubted. Professional minstrels, or “rhapsodists,” as they were called, chanted certain selected portions which suited their own taste or that of their audience—often such as contained the exploits of some national hero. They followed possibly in this the example of the great bard himself; just as certain of our own popular writers have lately taken to read, to an admiring public, some favourite scenes and chapters from their own works. Lycurgus is said to have brought the collected poems from Asia to Sparta; Solon, at Athens, to have first obliged the minstrels to recite the several portions in due order, so as to preserve the continuity of the narrative. Pisistratus, the great Athenian ruler, has the reputation of having first reduced the whole into a collected shape, and of having thus far settled the “text” of Homer, employing in this work the most eminent men of letters of his day. There is a legend of a Homeric ‘Septuagint:’ of seventy learned scribes employed in the great work, as in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures. From the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were reduced to writing, their popularity rather increased than waned. They were the storehouse of Greek history, genealogy, and antiquity—the models and standards of literary taste. To be unacquainted with these masterpieces, was to be wholly without culture and education: and, thanks to their continual and public recital, this want was perhaps less prevalent amongst the Greeks than amongst ourselves. The young Alcibiades, when receiving the usual education of a Greek gentleman, is said to have struck his tutor one day in a burst of righteous indignation, for having made the confession—certainly inexcusable in his vocation—that he did not possess a copy of the great poet. Alexander the Great carried always with him the copy which had been corrected by his master Aristotle, preserved in a jewelled casket taken amongst the spoils of Darius. No pains were spared in the caligraphy, or costliness in the mountings, of favourite manuscripts of the Homeric poems. They continued to be regarded with almost a superstitious reverence even during the middle ages of Christendom. Men’s future destinies were discovered, by a sort of rude divination, in verses selected at hap-hazard. Fantastic writers saw in the two poems nothing more or less than allegorical versions of Hebrew history; and grave physicians recommended as an infallible recipe for a quartan ague, the placing every night a copy of the fourth book of the Iliad under the patient’s head. Modern critical speculations have gone quite as far in another direction. In the eyes of some ingenious theorists, this siege of Troy is but “a repetition of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West;”[2] and the Homeric heroes and their exploits all represent allegorically, in one form or another, the great conflict between Light and Darkness. But such questions are beyond the scope of these pages; we are content here to take the tale of Troy as the poet tells it.

The supposed date of the story may be taken as some fifteen centuries before the Christian era. The great City of Troy, or Ilium, lay on the coast of Asia Minor—its reputed site still bearing the name of the Troad, a broad well-watered champaign, with a height still recognised as the citadel towering above it. “No royal seat of the ancient world,” says a modern visitor to the spot, “could boast a grander situation than the Trojan citadel.”[3] As to its actual locality and existence, there is little ground for scepticism. The tradition of the name and place was unbroken in the early historical ages of Greece. Xerxes, king of Persia, in his expedition, is said to have visited the citadel, and to have offered there a thousand oxen to the tutelary goddess; possibly, it has been suggested, claiming to be the avenger of the Asiatic kings on their European enemies.[4] Mindarus, the Lacedæmonian admiral, seventy years later, sacrificed there also: and Alexander, when he crossed the Hellespont, not only did the same, but took from the temple some of the sacred arms which were hung there (said to be those of the heroes of the great siege), offering up his own in exchange. The founder of the city was Ilus, son of Tros, and from these mythical heroes it took its two names. But its walls were built by the grandson, Laomedon. He employed some remarkable workmen. In one of the most striking and suggestive fables of the Greek mythology, certain of the gods are represented as being condemned by Zeus (or Jupiter) to a period of servitude upon earth. Poseidon (Neptune) and Apollo were under this condemnation, and undertook, for certain rewards, to help Laomedon in his fortifications. But when the work was finished, the ungrateful king repudiated his bargain. As a punishment, a sea-monster is sent to ravage his dominions, who can only be appeased by the sacrifice of a maiden of noble blood. The lot falls upon the king’s own daughter, Hesione. It is the original version of St George and the Dragon. Laomedon offers his daughter, and certain horses of immortal breed (which he seems to count even a more valuable prize), to the champion who will deliver her and slay the monster. Hercules comes to the rescue; but a second time Laomedon breaks his word. He substitutes mortal horses, and refuses his daughter. Hercules attacks the city, kills Laomedon, and carries off the princess Hesione, whom he gives to his comrade Telamon. From this union are born two heroes, Ajax and his brother Teucer, whom we shall meet in the second and great Siege of Troy, which forms the subject of Homer’s Iliad.

This double perjury of Laomedon’s is one supposed cause of the wrath of Heaven resting on the town and its people. Yet Apollo, forgetful, it would seem, of his former unworthy treatment, and only remembering with affection the walls which he had helped to build, is represented as taking part with the Trojans in the great struggle, in which the deities of Olympus are bitterly divided amongst themselves.

But Homer’s Tale of Troy says nothing of Laomedon and his broken faith. His poem is built upon a later legend. This legend embraces in the whole a period of thirty years, divided exactly, in a manner very convenient for both poet and reader, into complete decades; ten years of preparation for the siege, ten occupied in the siege itself (with which alone the Iliad has to do), and ten consumed in the weary wanderings and final return home of the surviving Greek heroes who had taken part in the expedition.

The first decade begins with the carrying off from the court of Menelaus, king of Sparta, of his wife Helen, by a young Asiatic prince whom he has entertained in his travels. Helen is the reputed daughter of Jupiter by Leda, and upon her Venus has bestowed the fatal endowment of matchless and irresistible beauty. The young prince whom she unhappily captivates is Paris or Alexander, son of Priam, king of Troy. Terrible oracles had accompanied the birth of him who was to prove the curse of his father’s people. His mother Hecuba dreamed that she gave birth to a flaming brand. The child when born was exposed on Mount Ida, so as to insure his death in infancy without incurring the guilt of blood. But, as in similar legends, the precaution did but help to fulfil the prophecy. In the solitudes of the mountain he grew up, a boy of wondrous beauty, the nursling and the favourite of Venus. There he was called upon to decide to whom the “Prize of Beauty”—the golden apple thrown by Discord into the feast of the Immortals, with that insidious legend inscribed on it—should be awarded. Three competing goddesses—Juno, Venus, and Minerva, who at least, as the goddess of wisdom, ought to have known better—appeared before the young shepherd in all the simplicity of immortal costume, in order that he might decide which of them was “the fairest.” Each tried to bribe him to adjudge the prize to herself. The Queen of Heaven offered him power in the future; Minerva, wisdom; Venus, the loveliest woman upon earth. Paris chose the last. It was Helen; for Venus took it very little into her account that she had a husband already. It involved also, according to the most picturesque of the legends, a somewhat similar breach of troth on Paris’s part. In the valleys of Ida he had already won the love of the nymph Œnone, but he deserts her without scruple under the new temptation.[5] He has learnt the secret of his royal birth, and is acknowledged by his father Priam. In spite of the warnings of his sister Cassandra, who has a gift of prophecy, and foresees evil from the expedition; in spite, too, of the forsaken Œnone’s wild denunciations, he fits out ships and sets sail for Greece. Admitted as a guest to the hospitable court of Menelaus at Sparta, he charms both him and Helen by his many accomplishments. The king, gallant and unsuspicious, and of somewhat easy temperament, as appears from several passages of Homer, leaves him still an inmate of his palace, while he himself makes a voyage to Crete. In the husband’s absence, Paris succeeds—not without some degree of violence, according to some of the legends—in carrying off the wife, loading his ships at the same time (to give emphatic baseness to the exploit) with a rich freight of gold and treasures, the spoils of his absent host. So Venus’s promise is made good, and Priam weakly receives into his palace the fatal beauty who is to prove the ruin of the Trojan fortunes.

The outrage rouses all Greece to arms. Menelaus appeals to his brother Agamemnon, king of Argos and Mycenæ, who held some sort of suzerainty over the whole of Greece. The brother-kings were the sons of Atreus, of the great house of Pelops, who gave his name to the peninsula known as the Peloponnesus, and now the Morea. It was a house eminent for wealth and splendour and influence. According to an old proverb, valour and wisdom were given by the gods to other names in larger measure, but wealth and power belonged of divine right to the Atridæ. This power must not be hastily pronounced fabulous. There yet remain traces of the mural and sepulchral architecture of Agamemnon’s capital, Mycenæ, which are strongly significant of a pre-historical civilisation—an “iron age” of massive strength and no mean resources.[6] Agamemnon, in Homer’s poem, carries a sceptre which had literally, not metaphorically, come down to him as an heirloom from the king of the gods. Vulcan himself had wrought it for Jupiter; Jupiter had given it to Hermes, Hermes to Pelops, and so it had been handed on. It was in some sort the prototype of those more than mortal weapons wielded by the heroes of medieval romance, which were one secret of their invincible prowess, and which had come from the hand of no human armourer; like the sword Durentaille, which belonged to Charlemagne, and was by him given to his nephew Roland; like Arthur’s Excalibur; or the marvellous blade Recuite, which passed from the hands of Alexander the Great to Ptolemy, from Ptolemy to Judas Maccabæus, and so, through many intermediate owners, to the Emperor Vespasian. To the monarchs of the house of Pelops, then, belonged in uncommon degree “the divinity that doth hedge a king;” and Agamemnon is recognised, throughout the whole of the Homeric story, as pre-eminently “King of Men.” But a terrible curse rested on the house—a curse connected with a revolting legend, which, as not recognised by Homer, needs no further notice here, but which was to find ample fulfilment in the sequel of Agamemnon’s history.

The royal sons of Atreus take hasty counsel with such of the neighbouring kings and chiefs as they can collect, how they may avenge the wrong. One legend tells us that Tyndarus, the reputed father of Helen, before he gave her in marriage to Menelaus, had pledged all her suitors, among whom were the noblest names of Greece, to avenge any such attempt against the honour of the husband he should choose for her, whichever of them he might be: and that they now redeemed that pledge when called upon by the king of Sparta. Nestor, king of Pylos, and a chief named Palamedes, went through the coasts of Greece, denouncing the perfidy of the foreign adventurer, and rousing the national feeling of the Greeks, or, as Homer prefers to call them, the Achæans. The chiefs did not all obey the summons willingly. Odysseus—better known to us under the Latin form of his name as Ulysses—king of the rocky island of Ithaca, feigned madness to escape from his engagement. But the shrewd Palamedes detected the imposture. He went to the field where the king, after the simple fashion of the times, was ploughing, carrying with him from the house his infant child Telemachus, and laid him down in the furrow which Ulysses was moodily driving, apparently insensible to all other sights and sounds. The father turned the plough aside, and his assumed madness was at once detected. In some cases, where there were several sons of military age in the same family, lots were cast for the unwelcome honour of serving against Troy. Some even sent bribes to Agamemnon to induce him to set them free from their engagement. Echepolus of Sicyon, loath to leave his vast possessions, sent to the great king his celebrated mare Œthe, the fleetest of her kind, as his personal ransom. The bribe was accepted, and Œthe went to Troy instead of her luxurious master. The story has been adduced in proof of Agamemnon’s greediness in thus preferring private gain to the public interests: but no less a critic than Aristotle has sagaciously observed, that a good horse was a far more valuable conscript than an unwilling soldier. Some heroes, on the other hand, went resolutely to the war, though the fates foretold that they should never return from it alive. Euchenor of Corinth, though rich like Echepolus, could not be persuaded to remain at home, even when his aged father, who was a seer himself, forewarned him of his doom; he boldly dared his fate, and fell at the close of the siege by the hand of Paris.

Under somewhat similar auguries the great hero of Homer’s tale left his home for Troy. Achilles, said the legends, was the son of the ocean-goddess Thetis by a mortal lover, Peleus son of Æacus. The gods had honoured the marriage with their personal presence—

“For in that elder time, when truth and worth
Were still revered and cherished here on earth,
The tenants of the skies would oft descend
To heroes’ spotless homes, as friend to friend;
There meet them face to face, and freely share
In all that stirred the hearts of mortals there.”[7]

The Roman poet Catullus tells us in the same beautiful ode, how mortals and immortals alike brought their wedding gifts: Chiron the centaur (“that divine beast,” as Pindar calls him) comes from the mountains laden with coronals of flowers for the banquet, and Peneus, the Thessalian river-god, brings whole trees of beech and bay and cypress to shade the guests. Even the three weird sisters, the inexorable Fates, tune their voices for this once into a nuptial hymn, and while their spindles “run and weave the threads of doom,” they chant the future glories of the child that shall be born from this auspicious union. Neptune presents the fortunate bridegroom with two horses of divine breed—Xanthus and Balius—and Chiron gives him a wondrous ashen spear. Both these gifts passed afterwards as heirlooms to Achilles, the offspring of this marriage, and were carried by him to Troy.