The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

FAMILIAR STUDIES IN HOMER

PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

LONDON

FAMILIAR STUDIES

IN

HOMER

BY

AGNES M. CLERKE

AB HOMERO OMNE PRINCIPIUM

LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET

1892

All rights reserved

PREFACE.

Homeric archæology has, within the last few years, finally left the groove of purely academic discussion to advance along the new route laid down for it by practical methods of investigation. The results are full of present interest, and of future promise. They already imply a reconstruction of the Hellenic past; they vitalise the Homeric world, bringing it into definite relations with what went before, and with what came after, and transforming it from a poetical creation into an historical reality. Excavations and explorations in Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor, have thus entirely changed the aspect of the perennial Homeric problem, and afford reasonable hope of providing it with a satisfactory solution.

These remarkable, and promptly-gathered fruits of an experimental system of inquiry deserve the attention, not of scholars alone, but of every educated person; nevertheless, their value has as yet been realised by a very limited class. The following chapters may then, it is hoped, usefully serve to illustrate some of them for the benefit of the general reading public, while making no pretension to discuss, formally or exhaustively, the wide subject of Homeric antiquities. For the proper discharge of that task, indeed, qualifications would be needed to which the writer lays no claim. The object of the present little work will be attained if it contribute to stir a wider interest in the topics it discusses; above all, should it in any degree help to promote a non-erudite study of the noble poetical monuments it is concerned with. Greek enough to read the Iliad and Odyssey in the original can be learned with comparative ease; and what trouble there may be in its acquisition meets an ample reward in mental profit and enjoyment of a high order. These ancient epics have a unique freshness about them; they are still open founts of animating pleasure for all who choose to apply to them; one cannot, then, but regret that so few have intellectual energy to do so.

The author’s best thanks are due to Messrs. Macmillan, and to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, for their courteous permission to reprint the chapters entitled ‘Homeric Astronomy,’ ‘Homer’s Magic Herbs,’ and ‘The Dog in Homer,’ originally published in the pages of Nature, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the British Quarterly Review respectively.

In quoting illustrative passages from the Homeric poems, considerable use has been made of the admirable prose version of the Iliad by Messrs. Lang, Leaf, and Myers, and of the Odyssey by Messrs. Butcher and Lang. With the object, however, of securing a certain variety of effect, versified translations have also been resorted to, their authors being duly specified in foot-notes. The citations of Helbig’s valuable work, Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmälern erläutert, refer to the second enlarged edition published in 1887.

CONTENTS.

FAMILIAR STUDIES IN HOMER.

CHAPTER I.
HOMER AS A POET AND AS A PROBLEM.

The perennial youth of the Homeric poems is without a parallel in the history of art. No other imaginative works have so nearly succeeded in bidding defiance to the ‘tooth of time.’ Like the golden watch-dogs of Alcinous, they seem destined to be ‘deathless and ageless all their days.’ Nor is theirs the faded immortality of Tithonus—the bare preservation of a material form emptied of the glow of vitality, and grown out of harmony with its environment. Their survival is not even that of an ‘Attic shape’ whose undeniable beauty has, in our eyes, assumed somewhat of a recondite coldness, very different from the loveliness of old, when connoisseurship was not needed for appreciation. The Iliad and Odyssey are still auroral. They have the charm of an ‘unpremeditated lay,’ springing from the very source of our own life; they appeal alike to rude sensibilities and to cultivated tastes; their splendour and pathos, their powerful vitality, the strength and swiftness of their numbers, require to be accentuated by no critical notes of admiration; they strike of themselves the least tutored native perception. These vigorous growths out of the deep soil of humanity have not yet been transported from the open air of indiscriminate enjoyment into the greenhouse of æstheticism; delight in them lays hold of any schoolboy capable of reading them fluently in the original as naturally as enthralment with ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ commands the unreflecting nursery. For they combine, as no other primitive poetry does, imaginative energy with sobriety of thought and diction. The ne quid nimis regulates all their scenes. They are simple without being archaic, fervid without extravagance, fanciful, yet never grotesque. The strict proprieties of classic form effectually restrain in them the exuberance of romantic invention. Not that any such distinctions in the mode of composition had then begun to be thought of. The poet was unconsciously a ‘law unto himself.’ Indeed the very potency of his creative faculty prescribed retrenchment and moderation; the images conjured up by it with much of the plastic reality of sculpture subjecting themselves spontaneously to the laws of sculpturesque fitness. Clear-cut and firm of outline, they move in the transparent ether of definite thought. Projected into the vaporous atmosphere of a riotous fancy, they might show vaster, but they could hardly be equally impressive.

But these matchless productions are not merely the ‘wood-notes wild’ of untrained inspiration. They imply a long course of free development under favourable conditions. The vehicle of expression used in them might alone well be the product of centuries of pre-literary culture. Greek hexameter verse was by no means an obvious contrivance. It is an exceedingly subtle structure, depending for its effect—nay, for its existence—upon unvarying obedience to a complex set of metrical rules. These could not have originated all at once, by the decree of some poetical law-giver. They must have been arrived at more or less tentatively by repeated experiments, the recognised success of which led, in the slow course of time, to their general adoption.

Moreover, the legendary materials of the Epics were not dug straight out of the mine of popular fancy and tradition. They had doubtless been elaborated and manipulated, before Homer took them in hand, by generations of singers and reciters. The ‘tale of Troy divine’ was already a full-leaved tree when he plucked from it and planted the branches destined to flourish through the ages. His verses display or betray acquaintance with many ‘other stories’ of public notoriety besides those completely unfolded in them. The fate of Agamemnon, the death of Achilles, the madness of Ajax, the advent of Neoptolemus, the slaying of Memnon, son of the Morning, the ambush in the Wooden Horse, the mysterious wanderings of Helen, the last journey of Odysseus, furnished themes of surpassing interest, all or most of which had been made into songs for the pastime of lordly feasters and the solace of noble dames, before the wrath of Achilles suggested a more adventurous flight. Inexhaustible, indeed, was the store of romantic adventure furnished by the famous ten years’ siege.

A castle built in cloudland, or at most

A crumbling clay-fort on a windy hill,

Where needy men might flee a robber-host,

This, this was Troy! and yet she holds us still.[[1]]

[1]. Lang’s Helen of Troy, vi. 21.

But the saga-literature of the Greeks did not begin with the mustering of the fleet at Aulis. The ‘ante-Troica’ were not neglected. Many a ballad was chanted about the doings of those ‘strong men’ who ‘lived before Agamemnon,’ although it was not their fortune to be commemorated by a supreme singer. That supreme singer, however, knew much concerning the Argonauts, the War of Thebes, the Calydonian Boar-hunt, the sorrows of Niobe, and the betrayal of Bellerophon; ante-Trojan lays served as parables for the instruction of Clytemnestra, and the recreation of Achilles in that disastrous interval when he doffed his armour and strung his lyre. And a small but privileged class of the community was devoted, under the presumed tuition of the Muses, to the perfecting and perpetuation of these treasures of poetic lore.

Homer was accordingly no unprepared phenomenon. He rose in a sky already luminous. The flowering of his genius, indeed, marked the close of an epoch. His achievements were of the definitive and synthetic kind; they summed up and surpassed what had previously been accomplished; they were the outcome—although not the necessary outcome—of a multitude of minor performances.

Now it is impossible to admit the prevalence of such sustained poetical activity as the Homeric Epics by their very nature postulate, apart from the existence of a tolerably widespread and well-regulated social organisation. They besides describe a polity which was certainly not imaginary, and thus lead us back to a pre-Hellenic world, different in many ways from historical Greece, and separated from it by several blank and silent centuries. The people who moved and suffered, and nurtured their loves and grudges in it, were called ‘Achæans’—the ethnical title given by Homer to his countrymen from all parts of the Greek peninsula and its adjacent islands. Homer himself was evidently an Achæan; Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus, Helen and Penelope, sprang from the same race, which was an offshoot from the general Hellenic stock. They were a seafaring people, but not much given to commerce; active, energetic, sensitive, highly imaginative, they showed, nevertheless, receptivity rather than inventiveness as regards the practical arts of life. Their great national exploit was probably that bellicose expedition to the Troad upon which the Ilian legend, with all its mythical accretions, was founded; and some records of attacks by them on Egypt have been deciphered on hieroglyphically-inscribed monuments; but they can claim no assured place in history. As a nation, they ceased indeed to exist before the dim epoch of fables came to an end; the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus brought about their political annihilation and social disintegration, impelling them, nevertheless, to establish new settlements in Asia Minor, and thus setting on foot the long process by which Greek culture became cosmopolitan.

Homeric conditions do not then represent simply an initial stage in classic Greek civilisation. There was no continuous progress from the one state of things to the other. Development was interrupted by revolution. Hence, much irretrievable loss and prolonged seething confusion; until, out of the chaos, a renovated order emerged, and the Greece of the Olympiads comes to view in the year 776 B.C.

For this reason Homeric Greece is strange to history; the relative importance of the states included in it, the centre of gravity of its political power, the modes of government and manners of men it displays, are all very different from what they had become in the time of Herodotus. But it is only of late that these differences have come to have an intelligible meaning. Until expounded by archæological research, they were a source of unmixed perplexity to the learned. The state of society described by Homer could certainly not be regarded as fictitious; yet it hung suspended, as it were, in the air, without definite limitations of time or place. These uncertainties have now been removed. The excavations at Mycenæ, undertaken by Dr. Schliemann in 1876, may be said to have had for their upshot the rediscovery of the old Achæan civilisation, the material relics of which have been brought to light from the ‘shaft-tombs’ of Agamemnon’s citadel, the ‘bee-hive tombs’ of the lower city, in the palaces and other coeval buildings of Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Orchomenos. The points of agreement between Homeric delineations and Mycenæan antiquities are, in fact, too numerous to permit the entertainment of any reasonable doubt that the poet’s experience lay in the daily round of Mycenæan life—of life, that is to say, governed by the same ideas and carried on under approximately the same conditions with those prevailing through the ancient realm of the sons of Atreus.

The detection of this close relationship has lent a totally new aspect to what is called the Homeric Question, widening its scope at the same time that it provides a sure basis for its discussion. For this can no longer be disconnected from inquiries into the status and fortunes of the great confederacy, out of the wreck of which the splendid fabric of Hellenic society arose. The civilisation centred at Mycenæ covered a wide range; how wide we do not yet fully know: the results of future explorations must be awaited before its limits can be fixed. It undoubtedly spread, however, beyond Greece proper through the Sporades to Crete, Rhodes, the coasts of Asia Minor, and even to Egypt. The traces left behind by it in Egypt are of particular importance.[[2]] From the Mycenæan pottery discovered in the Fayûm, tangible proof has been derived that the Græco-Libyan assaults upon that country were to some extent effective, and that the seafaring people who took part in them were no other than the Homeric Achæans, then in an early stage of their career. The fact of their having secured a foothold in the Nile Valley accounts, too, for the strong Egyptian element in Mycenæan art; and the evidence of habitual intercourse is further curiously strengthened by the presence of an ostrich egg amid the other antique remains in the Myceneæan citadel graves.[[3]] Above all, the Egypto-Mycenæan pottery, from its association with other objects of known dates, is determinable as to time. And it appears, as the outcome of Mr. Flinders Petrie’s careful comparisons, that one class of vases, adorned with linear patterns, goes back to about 1400 B.C., while those exhibiting naturalistic designs were freely manufactured in 1100. The culminating period, however, of pre-Hellenic fictile art is placed considerably earlier, in 1500-1400 B.C., and there are indications that its development had occupied several previous centuries. Mr. Petrie, indeed, finds himself compelled to believe that the Græco-Libyan league was already active in or before the year 2000 B.C. Achæan predominance may, then, very well have boasted a millennium of antiquity when the Dorians crossed the Gulf of Corinth. Its subversion drove many of the leading native families over the Ægean, where they found seats already doubtless familiar to them through their own and their ancestors’ maritime and piratical adventures, and the colonising impulse once given, did not soon cease to promote the enlargement of the Greek domain. But the mass of the Achæan people lived on in their old homes, in a state of subjection resembling that of the Saxons in England after the Norman Conquest. They were designated ‘Periœci’ by their Dorian rulers.

[2]. Flinders Petrie, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vols. xi. p. 271; xii. p. 199.

[3]. Schuchhardt and Sellers, Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 268.

Archæological discoveries have thus shown the largeness of the historical issues embraced in the Homeric Question; they also afford the possibility, and still more, the promise, of satisfactorily answering it. The problem is threefold. It includes the consideration of where, when, and how the great Epics were composed.

Seven cities—

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ—

competed for the honour of having given birth to their author. Wherever, in short, their study was localised by the foundation of a school of ‘Homerids,’ there was asserted to be the native place of the eponymous bard. The truth is that no really authentic tradition regarding him reached posterity. The very name of ‘Homer,’ or the ‘joiner together,’ is obviously rather typical than personal; and it gradually came to aggregate round it all that was antique and unclaimed in the way of verse. The aggregation, it is true, was presumably formed in Asiatic Ionia; the ‘Cyclic Poems,’ supplementary to the Iliad, were mainly the work of Ionic poets; and the Epic was substantially an Ionic dialect. Yet the inference of an Asiatic origin thence naturally arising now clearly appears to be invalid. The linguistic argument, to begin with, has been completely disposed of by Fick’s remarkable demonstration that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent an early process of Ionicisation.[[4]] So far as metrical considerations permitted, they were actually translated from the Æolic, or rather Achæan tongue, in which they were composed, into the current idiom of Colophon and Miletus. Objections urged from this side against their production in Europe have accordingly lost their force; and the reasons favouring it, always strong, have of late grown to be well-nigh irresistible. Some of the more cogent were briefly stated by Mr. D. B. Monro in 1886;[[5]] and others might now be added. One only, but one surely conclusive, need here be mentioned. It is this. Homer could not have been an Asiatic Greek, because Asiatic Greece did not exist in Homer’s time. He was aware of no Achæan settlements in Asia Minor; not one of the twelve cities of the Ionian confederacy emerges in the Catalogue, Miletus only excepted, and Miletus with a special note of ‘barbarian’ habitation attached to it.[[6]] The Ionian name is, in the Iliad, once applied to the Athenians[[7]] (presumably), but does not occur at all in the Odyssey; where, on the other hand, Dorians, unknown in the Iliad, are casually named as forming an element in the mixed population of Crete.[[8]] The reputed birthplaces of Homer, then, on the eastern coast of the Ægean, were, when he had reached his singing prime, still occupied by Carians and Mæonians; and we must accordingly look for his origin in the West. There is no escape from this conclusion except by the subterfuge of imagining the geography of the Epics to be artificially archaic. They related to a past time, it might be said, they should then reproduce the conditions of the past. But this is a notion essentially modern. No primitive poet ever troubled himself about such scruples of congruity. Nor if he did, could the requisite detailed information by possibility be at his command, while his painful care to avoid what we call anachronisms would cause nothing but perplexity to his unsophisticated audience. Homer’s map of Greece must accordingly be accepted as a true picture of what came under his personal observation. It is, indeed, as Mr. Freeman says, ‘so different from the map of Greece at any later time that it is inconceivable that it can have been invented at any later time.’[[9]] Since, however, it affords the Greek race no Asiatic standing ground, it follows of necessity that Homer was a European.

[4]. Die Homerische Odyssee in der ursprünglichen Sprachforme wiedergestellt, 1883.

[5]. English Historical Review, January, 1886.

[6]. Iliad, ii. 868.

[7]. Ib. xiii. 685.

[8]. Od. xix. 177.

[9]. Historical Geography, p. 25.

This same consideration helps to determine the age in which he lived. Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. Not a hint betrays acquaintance with the fact that the polity described in them had, in the meantime, been overturned by external violence. A silence so remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition that when they were composed, the revolution in question had not yet occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view. Practical explorations have shown pre-Hellenic Greece to have been the seat of a rich, enterprising, and cultivated nation. They have hence removed objections on the score of savagery, inevitably to be encountered, formerly urged against pushing the age of Homer very far back into the past. The life carried on at Mycenæ, in fact, twelve or thirteen centuries before the Christian era, was in many respects more refined than that depicted in the poems. It was known to their author only after it had lost something of its pristine splendour. But the Mycenæan civilisation of his experience, if a trifle decayed, was complete and dominant; and this it never was subsequently to the Dorian conquest. To have collected, however, into an imaginary organic whole the fragments into which it had been shattered by that catastrophe, would assuredly have been a task beyond his powers. Nothing remains, then, but to admit that he lived in the pre-Dorian Greece which he portrayed. Moreover, the state of seething unrest ensuing upon the overthrow of the Mycenæan order must have been absolutely inconsistent with the development of a great school of poetry. If Homer, then, was a European—as appears certain—the inference is irresistible that he flourished before the society to which he belonged was thrown by foreign invaders into irredeemable disarray—that is, at some section of the Mycenæan epoch.

There are many convincing reasons for holding that section to have been a late one. One of the principal is the familiar use of iron in the poems, although none has been met with in the old shaft-tombs within the citadel of Mycenæ, and only small quantities in the less distinguished graves below. It is, to be sure, conceivable that a substance introduced as a vulgar novelty devoid of traditional or ancestral associations might have been employed for the ordinary purposes of everyday life long before it was allowed to form part of sepulchral equipments; a similar motive prescribing its virtual exclusion from the Homeric Olympus. Still, the discrepancy can hardly be explained away without the concession of some lapse of time as well.

The Homeric and Mycenæan modes of burial, too, were different. Cremation is practised throughout the Epics; the Mycenæan dead were preserved intact. ‘The contrast,’ Dr. Leaf remarks,[[10]] ‘is a striking one; but it is easy to lay too much stress upon it. It may well be that the conditions of sepulture on a campaign were perforce different from those usual in times of peace at home. The mummifying of the body and the carrying of it to the ancestral burying-place in the royal citadel were not operations such as could be easily effected amidst the hurry of marches or the privations of a siege; least of all after the slaughter of a pitched battle. It is therefore quite conceivable that two methods of sepulture may of necessity have been in use at the same time. And for this assumption the Iliad itself gives us positive grounds. One warrior who falls is taken home to be buried; for to a dead son of Zeus means of carriage and preservation can be supplied which are not for common men. Sarpedon is cleansed by Apollo, and borne by Death and Sleep to his distant home in Lycia, not that his body may be burnt, but that his brethren and kinsfolk may preserve it ‘with a tomb and gravestone, for such is the due of the dead.’

[10]. Introduction to Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 26.

He said; obedient to his father’s words,

Down to the battle-field Apollo sped

From Ida’s height; and from amid the spears

Withdrawn, he bore Sarpedon far away,

And lav’d his body in the flowing stream;

Then with divine ambrosia all his limbs

Anointing, cloth’d him in immortal robes;

To two swift bearers gave him then in charge,

To Sleep and Death, twin brothers; in their arms

They bore him safe to Lycia’s widespread plains.[[11]]

[11]. Iliad, xvi. 676-88 (Lord Derby’s translation).

The Mycenæan custom of embalming corpses was not, then, strange to Homer; and the Homeric custom of burning them has perhaps—for the evidence is indecisive—left traces in the more recent graves of the Mycenæan people. What is certain is that simple interment was everywhere primitively in use, and that the pyre was a subsequent innovation, at first only partially adopted, and perhaps nowhere exclusively in vogue.

The plastic art of Mycenæ seems to have been on the decline when the ‘sovran poet’ arose. This can be inferred from the wondering admiration displayed in his verses for what must once have been its ordinary performances, as well as from the marked superiority assigned in them to foreign over native artists. They include besides no allusion to the signet-rings so plentiful at Mycenæ, no notice, in any connexion, of the art of gem-engraving, nor of the indispensable luxury—to ladies of high degree—of toilet-mirrors. Active intercourse with Egypt, again, had evidently ceased long prior to the Homeric age. The Nile is, in the poems, not even known by name, but only as the ‘river of Egypt;’ and the country is reached, not in the ordinary course of navigation, but through recklessness or ill-luck, by adventurers or castaways.

We can now gather the following indications regarding the date of the Homeric poems. They must have originated during the interval between the Trojan War—which, in some shape, may be accepted as an historical event—and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. They probably originated not very long before the latter event, when the Mycenæan monarchy was of itself tottering towards a fall precipitated by the frequently repeated incursions of ruder tribes from the north. The generally accepted date for the final event is eighty years after the taking of Troy, or 1104 B.C. But this rests on no authentic circumstance, and may very well be a century or more in error. A preferable chronological arrangement would place Homer’s flourishing in the eleventh century, and the overthrow of Mycenæ near its close. Difficulties of sundry kinds can thus be, in a measure, evaded or conciliated, without encroaching overmuch on the voiceless centuries available for the unrecorded readjustment of the disturbed elements of Greek polity.

As to the mode of origin of the two great poems which have come down to us from so remote an age, much might be said; but a few words must here suffice. It is a topic on which the utmost diversity of opinion has prevailed since F. A. Wolf published, in 1795, his famous ‘Prolegomena,’ and as to which unity of views seems now for ever unattainable. For demonstrative evidence is naturally out of the question, and estimates of opposing probabilities are apt to be strongly tinctured with ‘personality.’ Prepossessions of all kinds warp the judgment, even in purely literary matters, and, in this case especially, have led to the learned advocacy of extreme opinions. Thus, partisans of destructive criticism have carried the analysis of the Homeric poems to the verge of annihilation; while ultra-conservatives insist upon a seamless whole, and regard the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of Homer, in the same sense and with the same implicit confidence that they hold the Æneid and the Eclogues to be Virgilian, or ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’ to be Miltonic productions. Between these widely diverging paths, however, there is a middle way laid down by common sense, which it is tolerably safe to follow. A few simple considerations may help us to find it.

We must remember, in the first place, that the Homeric poems were composed, not to be privately read, but to be publicly recited. They remained unwritten during at least a couple of centuries, flung on the waves of unaided human memory. Oral tradition alone preserved them; and not the punctilious oral tradition of a sacerdotal caste like the Brahmins, but that of a bold and innovating class of ‘rhapsodes,’ themselves aspiring to some share in the Muse’s immediate favours, and prompt to flatter the local vanities and immemorial susceptibilities of their varied audiences. Within very wide limits, they were free to ‘improve’ what long training had enabled them to appropriate. Their licence infringed no literary property; there was no authorised text to be corrupted; one man’s version was as good as another’s. It is not, then, surprising that the primitive order of the Epics became here and there disarranged, or that interpolated and substituted passages usurped positions from which they could not afterwards easily be expelled. Expository efforts have, indeed, sometimes succeeded only in adding fresh knots to the already tangled skein. Pisistratus, however, did good service by for the first time editing the Homeric poems.[[12]] Scattered manuscripts of them had doubtless existed long previously; but it was their collection and collation at Athens, and the disposal in a determinate succession of the still disjointed materials they afforded, which placed the Greek people in the earliest full possession of their epical inheritance.

[12]. German critics doubt the fact. See Niese, Die Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, p. 5.

As the general result of a century of Homeric controversy, instinctive appreciation may be said broadly to have got the better of verbal criticism. Not but that the latter has done valuable work; but it is now pretty plainly seen to have been, in some quarters, carried considerably too far. The triumphs enjoyed by German advocates of the ‘Kleinliedertheorie’—of the disjunction, that is to say, of the Epics into numerous separate lays—are generally recognised to have been merely temporary. A large body of opinion was, at the outset, captivated by their arguments; it has of late tended to swing back towards some approximation to the old orthodoxy. There is, indeed, much difficulty in conceiving the profound and essential unity apparent to unprejudiced readers of the Iliad and Odyssey to be illusory; nor should it be forgotten that the evoking of a cosmos from a chaos implies a single regulative intelligence. And a cosmos each poem might very well be called; while the ‘embryon atoms’ from which they sprang, of legends, stories, myths, and traditions, constituted scarcely less than an

Ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time, and place, are lost.

The Odyssey and the Iliad, however, stand in this respect by no means on the same footing. In the former, fundamental unity is obvious; the development of the plot is logical and continuous; there are no considerable redundancies, no superfluous adventures, no oblivious interludes; the sense of progress towards a purposed end pervades the whole. Careful scrutiny, it is true, detects, in the details of the narrative, some few trifling discrepancies; but attempts to remove them by tampering with the general plan of its structure lead at once to intolerable anomalies. So much cannot be said for the Iliad. Here the component strata are manifestly dislocated, and some intruded masses can be clearly identified. Thus the Tenth Book at once detaches itself both in substance and style from the remaining cantos. It narrates an adventure wholly disconnected from the main action unfolded in them, and narrates it with a coolness and easy fluency very unlike the rush and glow of genuine Iliadic verse. Few, accordingly, are the critics who venture to claim the episode, brilliant and interesting though it be, as an integral part of the original poem. Yet even when it has been set aside, things do not go altogether straight. The basis of the story is furnished by the wrath of Achilles and its direful consequences; but while the hero sulks in his tent, a good deal of miscellaneous and largely irrespective fighting proceeds, during which he sinks out of sight, and is only transiently kept in mind. Zeus himself is allowed to forget his solemn promise to Thetis of avenging, through the defeat of the Greeks, the injury done to her son by Agamemnon; and the Olympian machinery generally works in an ill-regulated and haphazard fashion. Moreover, the embassy of conciliation in the Ninth Book is ignored later on; while the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Books, devoted mainly to the obsequies of Patroclus and Hector, have by some critics been deemed superfluous, by others inconsistent with an exordium announcing—as Pope has it—

The wrath that hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign

The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,

Whose limbs unburied by the naked shore,

Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.

Through the weight of these objections, Mr. Grote felt compelled to dissever the Iliad into a primitive part, which he called the Achilleid, and a mass of accessional poetry, most likely of diverse origin and date. And a similar view still prevails. Only that the Achilleid has been cut down, by further retrenchments, to the compass of a somewhat prolix Lay, treating, as its express subject, of the ‘Wrath’ of Achilles. Dr. Leaf indeed accentuates the separation by upholding the probable origin, on opposite sides of the Ægean, of the nuclear and adventitious portions of the Epic.

The force of some of the arguments urging to this analysis cannot be denied, yet there are others, perhaps of a higher order of importance, which indicate the former predominance of a partially destroyed entirety of design through by far the larger portion of this wonderful prehistoric work. Speaking broadly, an identical spirit pervades the whole. The Tenth Book, and a few notoriously interpolated passages, such as the feeble and futile Theomachy, make the sole exceptions to this rule of ethical homogeneity. Elsewhere, from beginning to end, we meet the same spontaneous fervour of expression, the same magnificent energy kept in hand like a spirited steed; an unfailing sense of the splendour of heroic achievement, and a glowing joy in human existence, tempered by the heart-thrilling remembrance of its pathetic mystery of sorrow. This prevalent uniformity in manner and spirit is certainly unfavourable to the hypothesis of divided authorship.

The marvellous beauty and power of those sections of the poem believed to be adventitious is also a circumstance to be considered. They include many of its most famous scenes—the parting of Hector and Andromache, the arming of Athene, the meeting of Glaucus and Diomed, and the whole vivid interlude of Diomed’s prowess, the orations in the tent of Achilles, the chariot-race, the reception of Priam as his suppliant by the fierce slayer of his son. To them exclusively, above all, belongs the personal presentation of Helen; outside their limits, she has no place in the Iliad.

These same accretions are not merely magnificent in themselves, and rich in shining incidents, but they add incalculably to the general effect of the Epic. They contribute, in fact, a great part of its dramatic force and the whole of its moral purport. Without them it would be a bald and unfinished performance—the abortive realisation of a sublime conception. The arming of Agamemnon, for instance, and his feats of private valour, could never have been designed as the immediate sequel to the Promise of Zeus; while they constitute a most fitting climax to the series of the baffled Greek efforts for victory. They are admirably prepared for by the stories of the duel between Menelaus and Paris, of the broken pact, of the prowess of Diomed, of the nocturnal embassy to Achilles. Moreover, the irresistible might of Pelides is brought with tenfold impressiveness on the scene after the fighting powers of each of the other Achæan chiefs have been fully displayed, and proved fruitless. Above all, the Achillean drama itself would lose its profound significance by the retrenchment of the Ninth and two closing Books. For it was the implacability of the ‘swift-footed’ hero that was justly punished by the calamity of the death of Patroclus; and he showed himself implacable only when he haughtily rejected a formal offer of ample reparation.[[13]] At that point he became culpable; and might only win revenge at the cost of the acutest anguish of which his nature was capable. The Ninth Book, in short, constitutes the ethical crisis of the Iliad; and the moralising at second-hand, to the innermost core of its structure, of a work purporting to be already complete, is certainly a unique, if not an impossible phenomenon.

[13]. Mr. A. Lang urges this point with great effect in an article on ‘Homer and the Higher Criticism’ (National Review, Feb. 1892), published after the present Chapter had been sent to press.

Nor is it easily credible that the ransom of the body of Hector made no part of its fundamental plan. Greek feelings of propriety would have been outraged—and outraged in the most distasteful way—by disregard of the dying petition of so spotless and disinterested a champion, albeit of a lost cause, and by the abandonment of his body as carrion to unclean beasts and birds. And Achilles, without the elevating traits of his courtesies in the Games, and his pity for Priam, would have remained colossal only in brutality, a blind instrument of fury, an example of the triumph of ignoble instincts. But such a presentation of his character could never have been purposed by the author of the First Iliad. Not of this base stamp was the hero whom Thetis rose from the sea to comfort. For even in the first rush of his tremendous passion, he still saw the radiant eyes and listened to the voice of Athene; he did not wholly desert celestial wisdom; and celestial wisdom could never have suffered the balance of his stormy soul to be finally overthrown. But just the needed compensatory touches are supplied by his noble bearing in the Patroclean celebration, and far more, by his chivalrous compassion for the hapless old king of Troy. They could not have been omitted by a poet of supreme genius—could not, since the imagination has its logical necessities, among which may be reckoned that of equilibration. There is accordingly no possibility of founding a truly great poem, wholly, or mainly, on the crude brutalities of actual warfare. Humanity revolts from them in the long run; and humanity prescribes its laws to art. The slaughtering rage of Achilles demands a corresponding height of generosity and depth of pity; it would else be atrocious. His wrath, in fact, postulates his tenderness; and hence the great difficulty in believing that the singer of the First Book failed to insert the Ninth, or stopped short at the Twenty-second Book of the Iliad.

The upshot of our little discussion, then, is to assign both to the Iliad and Odyssey a European origin, in the pre-Dorian time, when Mycenæ was the political centre of the Achæan world. Provisionally, they may be said to date from the eleventh century B.C. Moreover, the Odyssey in its essential integrity, and the Iliad in large part, are each the work of one master-mind. The Iliad, none the less, can no longer be said to present a poem ‘of one projection’; it shows seams, and junctures, and discrepancies; its mass has, perhaps, been broken up and awkwardly pieced together again; it is a building, in fact, which has suffered extensive restoration.

The further question remains as to the united or divided authorship of these antique monuments, regarded as separate wholes. Are they twin-productions, or did they spring up independently, favoured by the same prevailing climate, from a soil similarly prepared? The answer may be left to the dispassionate judgment of any ordinary, uncritical reader. Supposing his mind, per impossibile, a blank on the point, it would certainly not occur to him to attribute the two poems to a single individual. They are probably as unlike in style as, under the circumstances, it was possible for them to be. A great deal, indeed, belongs to them in common. They were rooted in the same traditions; they arose under the same sky and in the same ideal atmosphere; the inexhaustible storehouse of their legendary raw material was the same. Strictly analogous conditions of politics and society are depicted in them; they were addressed to similarly constituted audiences; their verses were constructed on the same rhythmical model. Moreover, the author of one was familiar with the grand example set him by the other. Yet the temper and spirit of each are profoundly different. In the Iliad, a magnificent ardour prevails; the singer is aflame with his theme; his words glow; vivid impressions crowd upon his mind; it takes all the power of his genius to restrain their riotous audacity and marshal them into orderly succession. The author of the Odyssey, on the other hand, is in no danger of being swept away by the impetuosity of his thoughts. He is always collected and at leisure; he has even esprit, which implies a low mental temperature; he can stand by with a smile, and look on, while his characters unfold themselves; his passion never blazes; it is smouldering and sustained, like that of his protagonist.

Numerous small discrepancies, besides, seem to betray a personal diversity of origin. So Iris, the frequent, indeed the all but invariable messenger of the gods in the Iliad, drops into oblivion in the Odyssey, and is replaced by Hermes; Charis is the wife of Hephæstus in the Iliad, Aphrodite in the Odyssey; Neleus has twelve sons in the Iliad, three in the Odyssey; Pylos is a district in the Iliad, a town in the Odyssey; the oracle of the Dodonæan Zeus is located in Thessaly in the Iliad, in Epirus in the Odyssey, and so on.[[14]] The Odyssey, moreover, is obviously junior to the Iliad. It gives evidence of an appreciable development of the arts of life relatively to their state in the rival poem; the processes of verbal contraction have advanced in the interval; the ethical standard has become more refined; while formulaic and other expressions common to both are unmistakably ‘in place,’ as geologists say, in the Iliad, ‘erratic,’ or ‘transported,’ in the Odyssey.

[14]. See an article on the ‘Doctrine of the Chorizontes,’ in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 133.

A difference in the place of origin, perhaps, helps to accentuate the effect due to a difference of time. The thread of tradition regarding these extraordinary works is indeed hopelessly broken. Their prehistoric existence is divided from their historical visibility by the chasm opened when the civilisation of which they were the choicest flowers was subverted by the irrepressible Dorians. The Iliad, however, contains strong internal evidence of owning Thessaly as its native region. The vast pre-eminence of the local hero, the Olympian seat of the gods, the partiality displayed for the horse, intimacy with Thessalian traditions and topography, all suggest the relationship. The name of Thessaly, it is true, does not occur either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey; nor had the semi-barbarous Thessalians, when they were composed, as yet crossed the mountains from Thesprotia to trample down the Achæan culture of the land of Achilles. It thus became, after Homer’s time, the scene of a revolution analogous in every respect to that which overwhelmed the Peloponnesus.

The Homer of the Odyssey, who was not improbably of Peloponnesian birth, must have travelled widely. He had undeniably some personal acquaintance with Ithaca, his topographical indications, apart from the gross blunder of planting the little island west, instead of east of Cephalonia, corresponding on the whole quite closely with reality. And he knew something besides of most parts of the mainland of Greece, of Crete, Delos, Chios, and the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. The experience of the Iliadic bard was doubtless somewhat, though not greatly, more limited. Its range extended, at any rate, from ‘Pelasgic Argos’ to the Troad, familiarity with which is shown in all sections of the Trojan epic. The cosmopolitan character of both poets is only indeed what might have been expected. The privileged members of an Achæan community must have enjoyed wide opportunities of observation. For Mycenæan culture was strongly eclectic. Elements from many quarters were amalgamated in it, Asiatic influences, however, predominating. The men of genius who acted as the interpreters of its typical ideas would hence have been unfit for their task unless they had personally tried and proved all such elements and influences. They were presumably to some extent adventurers by sea and land. But, further than this, their individuality remains shrouded in the impenetrable veil of their silence.

CHAPTER II.
HOMERIC ASTRONOMY.

The Homeric ideas regarding the heavenly bodies were of the simplest description. They stood, in fact, very much on the same level with those entertained by the North American Indians, when first brought into European contact. What knowledge there was in them was of that ‘broken’ kind which (in Bacon’s phrase) is made up of wonder. Fragments of observation had not even begun to be pieced in one with the other, and so fitted, ill or well, into a whole. In other words, there was no faintest dawning of a celestial science.

But surely, it may be urged, a poet is not bound to be an astronomer. Why should it be assumed that the author (or authors) of the Iliad and Odyssey possessed information co-extensive on all points with that of his fellow-countrymen? His profession was not science, but song. The argument, however, implies a reflecting backward of the present upon the past. Among unsophisticated peoples, specialists, unless in the matter of drugs or spells, or some few practical processes, do not exist. The scanty stock of gathered knowledge is held, it might be said, in common. The property of one is the property of all.

More especially of the poet. His power over his hearers depends upon his presenting vividly what they already perceive dimly. It was part of the poetical faculty of the Ithacan bard Phemius that he ‘knew the works of gods and men.’[[15]] His special function was to render them famous by his song. What he had heard concerning them he repeated; adding, of his own, the marshalling skill, the vital touch, by which they were perpetuated. He was no inventor: the actual life of men, with its transfiguring traditions and baffled aspirations, was the material he had to work with. But the life of men was very different then from what it is now. It was lived in closer contact with Nature; it was simpler, more typical, consequently more susceptible of artistic treatment.

[15]. Odyssey, i. 338.

It was accordingly looked at and portrayed as a whole; and it is this very wholeness which is one of the principal charms of primitive poetry—an irrecoverable charm; for civilisation renders existence a labyrinth of which it too often rejects the clue. In olden times, however, its ways were comparatively straight, and its range limited. It was accordingly capable of being embraced with approximate entirety. Hence the encyclopædic character of the early epics. Humani nihil alienum. Whatever men thought, and knew, and did, in that morning of the world when they spontaneously arose, found a place in them.

Now, some scheme of the heavens must always accompany and guide human existence. There is literally no choice for man but to observe the movements, real or apparent, of celestial objects, and to regulate his actions by the measure of time they mete out to him. Nor had he at first any other means of directing his wanderings upon the earth save by regarding theirs in the sky. They are thus to him standards of reference and measurement as regards both the fundamental conditions of his being—time and space.

This intimate connexion, and, still more, the idealising influence of the remote and populous skies, has not been lost upon the poets in any age. It might even be possible to construct a tolerably accurate outline-sketch of the history of astronomy in Europe without travelling outside the limits of their works. But our present concern is with Homer.

To begin with his mode of reckoning time. This was by years, months, days, and hours.[[16]] The week of seven days was unknown to him; but in its place we find[[17]] the triplicate division of the month used by Hesiod and the later Attics, implying a month of thirty, and a year of 360 days, corrected, doubtless, by some rude process of intercalation. These ten-day intervals were perhaps borrowed at an early stage of Achæan civilisation from Egypt, where they correspond to the Chaldean ‘decans’—thirty-six minor astral divinities presiding over as many sections of the Zodiac.[[18]] But no knowledge of the Signs accompanied the transfer. A similar apportionment of the hours of night into three watches (as amongst the Jews before the Captivity), and of the hours of day into three periods or stages, prevails in both the Iliad and Odyssey. The seasons of the year, too, were three—spring, summer, and winter—like those of the ancient Egyptians and of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers;[[19]] for the Homeric Opora was not, properly speaking, an autumnal season, but merely an aggravation of summer heat and drought, heralded by the rising of Sirius towards the close of July. It, in fact, strictly matched our ‘dog-days,’ the dies caniculares of the Romans. The first direct mention of autumn is in a treatise of the time of Alcibiades ascribed to Hippocrates.[[20]] This rising of the dog-star is the only indication in the Homeric poems of the use of a stellar calendar such as we meet full-grown in Hesiod’s Works and Days. The same event was the harbinger of the Nile-flood to the Egyptians, serving to mark the opening of their year as well as to correct the estimates of its length.

[16]. Odyssey, x. 469; xi. 294.

[17]. Ib. xix. 307.

[18]. Brugsch, Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Bd. ix. p. 513.

[19]. Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 11. Tacitus says of the Germans, ‘Autumni perinde nomen ac bona ignorantur’ (Germania, cap. xxvi.)

[20]. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, article ‘Astronomy.’

The annual risings of stars had formerly, in the absence of more accurate means of observation, an importance they no longer possess. Mariners and husbandmen, accustomed to watch, because at the mercy of the heavens, could hardly fail no less to be struck with the successive effacements by, and re-emergences from, the solar beams, of certain well-known stars, as the sun pursued his yearly course amongst them, than to note the epochs of such events. Four stages in these periodical fluctuations of visibility were especially marked by primitive observers. The first perceptible appearance of a star in the dawn was known as its ‘heliacal rising.’ This brief glimpse extended gradually as the star increased its seeming distance from the sun, the interval of precedence in rising lengthening by nearly four minutes each morning. At the end of close upon six months occurred its ‘acronycal rising,’ or last visible ascent from the eastern horizon after sunset. Its conspicuousness was then at the maximum, the whole of the dark hours being available for its shining. To these two epochs of rising succeeded and corresponded two epochs of setting—the ‘cosmical’ and the ‘heliacal.’ A star set cosmically when, for the first time each year, it reached the horizon long enough before break of day to be still distinguishable; it set heliacally on the last evening when its rays still detached themselves from the background of illuminated western sky, before getting finally immersed in twilight. The round began again when the star had arrived sufficiently far on the other side of the sun to show in the morning—in other words, to rise heliacally.

Wide plains and clear skies gave opportunities for closely and continually observing these successive moments in the revolving relations of sun and stars, which were soon found to afford a very accurate index to the changes of the seasons. By them, for the most part, Hesiod’s prescriptions for navigation and agriculture are timed; and although Homer, in conformity with the nature of his subject, is less precise, he was still fully aware of the association.

His sun is a god—Helios—as yet unidentified with Apollo, who wears his solar attributes unconsciously. Helios is also known as Hyperion, ‘he who walks on high,’ and Elector, ‘the shining one.’ Voluntarily he pursues his daily course in the sky, and voluntarily he sinks to rest in the ocean-stream—subject, however, at times to a higher compulsion; for, just after the rescue of the body of Patroclus, Heré favours her Achæan clients by precipitating at a critical juncture the descent of a still unwearied and unwilling luminary.[[21]] On another occasion, however, Helios memorably asserts his independence, when, incensed at the slaughter of his sacred cattle by the self-doomed companions of Ulysses, he threatens to ‘descend into Hades, and shine among the dead.’[[22]] And Zeus, in promising the required satisfaction, virtually admits his power to abdicate his office as illuminator of gods and men.

[21]. Iliad, xviii, 239.

[22]. Odyssey, xii. 383.

Once only, the solstice is alluded to in Homeric verse. The swineherd Eumæus, in describing the situation of his native place, the Island of Syriê, states that it is over against Ortygia (Delos), ‘where are the turning-places of the sun.’[[23]] The phrase was probably meant to indicate that Delos lay just so much south of east from Ithaca as the sun lies at rising on the shortest day of winter. But it must be confessed that the direction was not thus very accurately laid down, the comprised angle being 15⅓°, instead of 23½°.[[24]] To those early students of nature, the travelling to and fro of the points of sunrise and sunset furnished the most obvious clue to the yearly solar revolution; so that an expression, to us somewhat recondite, conveyed a direct and unmistakable meaning to hearers whose narrow acquaintance with the phenomena of the heavens was vivified by immediate personal experience of them. And in point of fact, the idea in question is precisely that conveyed by the word ‘tropic.’

[23]. Ib. xv. 404.

[24]. Sir W. Geddes believes that the solstitial place of the setting sun, as viewed from the Ionic coast, is that used to define the position of Ortygia.—Problem of the Homeric Poems, p. 294.

Selene first takes rank as a divine personage in the pseudo-Homeric Hymns. No moon-goddess is recognised in the Iliad or Odyssey. Nor does the orbed ruler of ‘ambrosial night,’ regarded as a mere light-giver or time-measurer, receive all the attention that might have been expected. A full moon is, however, represented with the other ‘heavenly signs’ on the shield of Achilles, and figures somewhat superfluously in the magnificent passage where the Trojan watch-fires are compared to the stars in a cloudless sky:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse, the steeds,

Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.[[25]]

[25]. Iliad, viii. 551-61 (Tennyson’s translation).

Here, as elsewhere, the simile no sooner presents itself than the poet’s imagination seizes upon and develops it without overmuch regard to the illustrative fitness of its details. The multitudinous effect of a thousand fires blazing together on the plain inevitably suggested the stars. But with the stars came the complete nocturnal scene in its profound and breathless tranquillity. The ‘rejoicing shepherd,’ meantime, who was part of it, would have been ill-pleased with the darkness required for the innumerable stellar display first thought of. And since, to the untutored sense, landscape is delightful only so far as it gives promise of utility, brilliant moonlight was added, for his satisfaction and the safety of his flock, as well as for the perfecting of that scenic beauty felt to be deficient where human needs were left uncared for. Just in proportion, however, as rocks, and peaks, and wooded glens appeared distinct, the lesser lights of heaven, and with them the fundamental idea of the comparison, must have become effaced; and the poet, accordingly, as if with a misgiving that the fervour of his fancy had led him to stray from the rigid line of his purpose, volunteered the assurance that ‘all the stars were visible’—as, to his mind’s eye, they doubtless were.

Of the ‘vivid planets’ thrown in by Pope there is no more trace in the original, than of the ‘glowing pole.’ Nor could there be; since Homer was totally ignorant that such a class of bodies existed. This curious fact affords (if it were needed) conclusive proof of the high antiquity of the Homeric poems. Not the faintest suspicion manifests itself in them that Hesperus, ‘fairest of all stars set in heaven,’ is but another aspect of Phosphorus, herald of light upon the earth, ‘the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth over the salt sea.’[[26]] The identification is said by Diogenes Laertius to have been first made by Pythagoras; and it may at any rate be assumed with some confidence that this elementary piece of astronomical knowledge came to the Greeks from the East, with others of a like nature, in the course of the seventh or sixth century B.C. Astonishing as it seems that they should not have made the discovery for themselves, there is no evidence that they did so. Hesiod appears equally unconscious with Homer of the distinction between ‘fixed’ and ‘wandering’ stars. According to his genealogical information, Phosphorus, like the rest of the stellar multitude, sprang from the union of Astræus with the Dawn,[[27]] but no hint is given of any generic difference between them.

[26]. Iliad, xxiii. 226-27.

[27]. Theogony, 381.

There is a single passage in the Iliad, and a parallel one in the Odyssey, in which the constellations are formally enumerated by name. Hephæstus, we are told, made for the son of Thetis a shield great and strong, whereon, by his exceeding skill, a multitude of objects were figured.

‘There wrought he the earth, and the heavens, and the sea, and the unwearying sun, and the moon waxing to the full, and the signs every one wherewith the heavens are crowned, Pleiads, and Hyads, and Orion’s might, and the Bear that men call also the Wain, her that turneth in her place, and watcheth Orion, and alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean.’[[28]]

[28]. Iliad, xviii. 483-89.

The corresponding lines in the Odyssey occur in the course of describing the hero’s voyage from the isle of Calypso to the land of the Phæacians. Alone, on the raft he had constructed of Ogygian pine-wood, he sat during seventeen days, ‘and cunningly guided the craft with the helm; nor did sleep fall upon his eyelids, as he viewed the Pleiads and Boötes, that setteth late, and the Bear, which they likewise call the Wain, which turneth ever in one place, and keepeth watch upon Orion, and alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean.’[[29]]

[29]. Odyssey, v. 271-75.

The sailing-directions of the goddess were to keep the Bear always on the left—that is, to steer due east.

It is clear that one of these passages is an adaptation from the other; nor is there reason for hesitation in deciding which was the model. Independently of extrinsic evidence, the verses in the Iliad have the strong spontaneous ring of originality, while the Odyssean lines betray excision and interpolation. The ‘Hyads and Orion’s might’ are suppressed for the sake of introducing Boötes. Variety was doubtless aimed at in the change; and the conjecture is at least a plausible one, that the added constellation may have been known to the poet of the Odyssey (admitting the hypothesis of a divided authorship), though not to the poet of the Iliad—known, that is, in the sense that the stars comprising the figure of the celestial Husbandman had not yet, at the time and place of origin of the Iliad, become separated from the anonymous throng circling in the ‘murk of night.’

The constellation Boötes—called ‘late-setting,’ probably from the perpendicular position in which it descends below the horizon—was invented to drive the Wain, as Arctophylax to guard the Bear, the same group in each case going by a double name. For the brightest of the stars thus designated we still preserve the appellation Arcturus (from arktos, bear, oûros, guardian), first used by Hesiod, who fixed upon its acronycal rising, sixty days after the winter solstice, as the signal for pruning the vines.[[30]] It is not unlikely that the star received its name long before the constellation was thought of, forming the nucleus of a subsequently formed group. This was undoubtedly the course of events elsewhere; the Great and Little Dogs, for instance, the Twins, and the Eagle (the last with two minute companions) having been individualised as stars previous to their recognition as asterisms.

[30]. Works and Days, 564-70.

There is reason to believe that the stars enumerated in the Iliad and Odyssey constituted the whole of those known by name to the early Greeks. This view is strongly favoured by the identity of the Homeric and Hesiodic stars. It is difficult to believe that, had there been room for choice, the same list precisely would have been picked out for presentation in poems so widely diverse in scope and origin as the Iliad and Odyssey on the one side, and the Works and Days on the other. As regards the polar constellations, we have positive proof that none besides Ursa Major had been distinguished. For the statement repeated in both the Homeric epics, that the Bear alone was without part in the baths of Ocean, implies, not that the poet veritably ignored the unnumbered stars revolving within the circle traced out round the pole by the seven of the Plough, but that they still remained a nameless crowd, unassociated with any terrestrial object, and therefore attracting no popular observation.

The Greeks, according to a well-attested tradition, made acquaintance with the Lesser Bear through Phœnician communication, of which Thales was the medium. Hence the designation of the group as Phoinike. Aratus (who versified the prose of Eudoxus) has accordingly two Bears, lying (in sailors’ phrase) ‘heads and points’ on the sphere; while he expressly states that the Greeks still (about 270 B.C.) continued to steer by Helike (the Twister, Ursa Major), while the expert Phœnicians directed their course by the less mobile Kynosoura (Ursa Minor). The absence of any mention of a Pole-star seems at first sight surprising. Even the Iroquois Indians directed their wanderings from of old by the one celestial luminary of which the position remained sensibly invariable.[[31]] Yet not the gods themselves, in Homer’s time, were aware of such a guide. It must be remembered, however, that the axis of the earth’s rotation pointed, 2800 years ago, towards a considerably different part of the heavens from that now met by its imaginary prolongation. The precession of the equinoxes has been at work in the interval, slowly but unremittingly shifting the situation of this point among the stars. Some 600 years before the Great Pyramid was built, it was marked by the close vicinity of the brightest star in the Dragon. But this in the course of ages was left behind by the onward-travelling pole, and further ages elapsed before the star at the tip of the Little Bear’s tail approached its present position. Thus the entire millennium before the Christian era may count for an interregnum as regards Pole-stars. Alpha Draconis had ceased to exercise that office; Alruccabah had not yet assumed it.

[31]. Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages Américains, p. 240.

The most ancient of all the constellations is probably that which Homer distinguishes as never-setting (it then lay much nearer to the pole than it now does). In his time, as in ours, it went by two appellations—the Bear and the Wain. Homer’s Bear, however, included the same seven bright stars constituting the Wain, and no more; whereas our Great Bear stretches over a sky-space of which the Wain is only a small part, three of the striding monster’s far-apart paws being marked by the three pairs of stars known to the Arabs as the ‘gazelle’s springs.’ How this extension came about, we can only conjecture; but there is evidence that it was fairly well established when Aratus wrote his description of the constellations. Aratus, however, copied Eudoxus, and Eudoxus used observations made—doubtless by Accad or Chaldean astrologers—above 2000 B.C.[[32]] We infer, then, that the Babylonian Bear was no other than the modern Ursa Major.[[33]]

[32]. According to Mr. Proctor’s calculation. See R. Brown, Eridanus: River and Constellation, p. 3.

[33]. See Houghton, Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch. vol. v. p. 333.

But the primitive asterism—the Seven Rishis of the old Hindus, the Septem Triones of the Latins, the Arktos of Homer—included no more than seven stars. And this is important as regards the origin of the name. For it is impossible to suppose a likeness to any animal suggested by the more restricted group. Scarcely the acquiescent fancy of Polonius could find it ‘backed like a weasel,’ or ‘very like a whale.’ Yet a weasel or a whale would match the figure equally well with, or better than, a bear. Probably the growing sense of incongruity between the name and the object it signified may have induced the attempt to soften it down by gathering a number of additional stars into a group presenting a distant resemblance to a four-legged monster.

The name of the Bear, this initial difficulty notwithstanding, is prehistoric and quasi-universal. It was traditional amongst the American-Indian tribes, who, however, sensible of the absurdity of attributing a conspicuous protruding tail to an animal almost destitute of such an appendage, turned the three stars composing it into three pursuing hunters. No such difficulty, however, presented itself to the Aztecs. They recognised in the seven ‘Arctic’ stars the image of a Scorpion,[[34]] and named them accordingly. No Bear seems to have bestridden their sky.

[34]. Bollaert, Memoirs Anthrop. Society, vol. i. p. 216.

The same constellation figures, under a divinified aspect, with the title Otawa, in the great Finnish epic, the ‘Kalevala.’ Now, although there is no certainty as to the original meaning of this word, which has no longer a current application to any terrestrial object, it is impossible not to be struck with its resemblance to the Iroquois term Okowari, signifying ‘bear,’ both zoologically and astronomically.[[35]] The inference seems justified that Otawa held the same two meanings, and that the Finns knew the great northern constellation by the name of the old Teutonic king of beasts.

[35]. Lafitau, op. cit. p. 236.

It was (as we have seen) similarly designated on the banks of the Euphrates; and a celestial she-bear, doubtfully referred to in the Rig-Veda, becomes the starting-point of an explanatory legend in the Râmâyana.[[36]] Thus, circling the globe from the valley of the Ganges to the great lakes of the New World, we find ourselves confronted with the same sign in the northern skies, the relic of some primeval association of ideas, long since extinct.

[36]. Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. ii. p. 109.

Extinct even in Homer’s time. For the myth of Callisto (first recorded in a lost work by Hesiod) was a subsequent invention—an effect, not a cause—a mere embroidery of Hellenic fancy over a linguistic fact, the true origin of which was lost in the mists of antiquity.

There is, on the other hand, no difficulty in understanding how the Seven Stars obtained their second title of the Wain, or Plough, or Bier. Here we have a plain case of imitative name-giving—a suggestion by resemblance almost as direct as that which established in our skies a Triangle and a Northern Crown. Curiously enough, the individual appellations still current for the stars of the Plough, include a reminiscence of each system of nomenclature—the legendary and the imitative. The brightest of the seven, α Ursæ Majoris, the Pointer nearest the Pole, is designated Dubhe, signifying, in Arabic, ‘bear’; while the title Benetnasch—equivalent to Benât-en-Nasch, ‘daughters of the bier’—of the furthest star in the plough-handle, perpetuates the lugubrious fancy, native in Arabia, by which the group figures as a corpse attended by three mourners.

Turning to the second great constellation mentioned in both Homeric epics, we again meet traces of remote and unconscious tradition: yet less remote, probably, than that concerned with the Bear—certainly less inscrutable; for recent inquiries into the lore and language of ancient Babylon have thrown much light on the relationships of the Orion fable.

There seems no reason to question the validity of Mr. Robert Brown’s interpretation of the word by the Accadian Ur-ana, ‘light of heaven.’[[37]] But a proper name is significant only where it originates. Moreover, it is considered certain that the same brilliant star-group known to Homer no less than to us as Orion, was termed by Chaldeo-Assyrian peoples ‘Tammuz,’[[38]] a synonym of Adonis. Nor is it difficult to divine how the association came to be established. For, about 2000 B.C., when the Euphratean constellations assumed their definitive forms, the belt of Orion began to be visible before dawn in the month of June, called ‘Tammuz,’ because the death of Adonis was then celebrated. It is even conceivable that the heliacal rising of the asterism may originally have given the signal for that celebration. We can at any rate scarcely doubt that it received the name of ‘Tammuz’ because its annual emergence from the solar beams coincided with the period of mystical mourning for the vernal sun.

[37]. Myth of Kirke, p. 146.

[38]. Lenormant, Origines de l’Histoire, t. 1. p. 247.

Orion, too, has solar connexions. In the Fifth Odyssey (121-24), Calypso relates to Hermes how the love for him of Aurora excited the jealousy of the gods, extinguished only when he fell a victim to it, slain by the shafts of Artemis in Ortygia. Obviously, a sun-and-dawn myth slightly modified from the common type. The post-Homeric stories, too, of his relations with Œnopion of Chios, and of his death by the bite of a scorpion (emblematical of darkness, like the boar’s tusk in the Adonis legend), confirm his position as a luminous hero.[[39]] Altogether, the evidence is strongly in favour of considering Orion as a variant of Adonis, imported into Greece from the East at an early date, and there associated with the identical group of stars which commemorated to the Accads of old the fate of Dumuzi (i.e. Tammuz), the ‘Only Son of Heaven.’

[39]. R. Brown, Archælogia, vol. xlvii. p. 352; Great Dionysiak Myth, chap. x. § v.

It is remarkable that Homer knows nothing of stellar mythology. He nowhere attempts to account for the names of the stars. He has no stories at his fingers’ ends of translations to the sky as a ready means of exit from terrestrial difficulties. The Orion of his acquaintance—the beloved of the Dawn, the mighty hunter, surpassing in beauty of person even the divinely-born Aloidæ—died and descended to Hades like other mortals, and was there seen by Ulysses, a gigantic shadow ‘driving the wild beasts together over the mead of asphodel, the very beasts which he himself had slain on the lonely hills, with a strong mace all of bronze in his hand, that is ever unbroken.’[[40]] His stellar connexion is treated as a fact apart. The poet does not appear to feel any need of bringing it into harmony with the Odyssean vision.

[40]. Odyssey, xi. 572-75.

The brightest star in the heavens is termed by Homer the ‘dog of Orion.’ The name Seirios (significant of sparkling), makes its début in the verses of Hesiod. To the singer of the Iliad the dog-star is a sign of fear, its rising giving presage to ‘wretched mortals’ of the intolerable, feverish blaze of late summer (opora). The deadly gleam of its rays hence served the more appropriately to exemplify the lustre of havoc-dealing weapons. Diomed, Hector, Achilles, ‘all furnish’d, all in arms,’ are compared in turn, by way of prelude to an ‘aristeia,’ or culminating epoch of distinction in battle, to the same brilliant but baleful object. Glimmering fitfully across clouds, it not inaptly typifies the evanescent light of the Trojan hero’s fortunes, no less than the flashing of his armour, as he moves restlessly to and fro.[[41]] Of Achilles it is said:

[41]. Iliad, xi. 62-66.

Him the old man Priam first beheld, as he sped across the plain, blazing as the star that cometh forth at harvest-time, and plain seen his rays shine forth amid the host of stars in the darkness of night, the star whose name men call Orion’s Dog. Brightest of all is he, yet for an evil sign is he set, and bringeth much fever upon hapless men. Even so on Achilles’ breast the bronze gleamed as he ran.[[42]]

[42]. Iliad, xxii. 25-32.

In the corresponding passage relating to Diomed (v. 4-7), the naïve literalness with which the ‘baths of Ocean’ are thought of is conveyed by the hint that the star shone at rising with increased brilliancy through having newly washed in them.

Abnormal celestial appearances are scarcely noticed in the Homeric poems. Certain portentous darknesses, reinforcing the solemnity of crises of battle, or impending doom,[[43]] are much too vaguely defined to be treated as indexes to natural phenomena of any kind. Nevertheless, Professor Stockwell finds that, by a curious coincidence, Ajax’s Prayer to Father Zeus for death—if death was decreed—in the light, might very well have been uttered during a total eclipse of the sun, the lunar shadow having passed centrally over the Hellespont at 2h. 21 min. P.M. on August 28, 1184 B.C.[[44]] Comets, however, have left not even the suspicion of a trace in these early songs; nor do they embody any tradition of a star shower, or of a display of Northern Lights. The rain of blood, by which Zeus presaged and celebrated the death of Sarpedon,[[45]] might, it is true, be thought to embody a reminiscence of a crimson aurora, frequently, in early times, chronicled under that form; but the portent indicated is more probably an actual shower of rain tinged red by a microscopic alga. An unmistakable meteor, however, furnishes one of the glowing similes of the Iliad. By its help the irresistible swiftness and unexpectedness of Athene’s descent from Olympus to the Scamandrian plain are illustrated.

[43]. Iliad, xv. 668; xvii. 366; Odyssey, xx. 356.

[44]. Astronomical Journal, Nos. 220, 221.

[45]. Iliad, xvi. 459; also xi. 53.

Even as the son of Kronos the crooked counsellor sendeth a star, a portent for mariners or a wide host of men, bright shining, and therefrom are scattered sparks in multitude; even in such guise sped Pallas Athene to earth, and leapt into their midst.[[46]]

[46]. Iliad, iv. 75-79.

In the Homeric verses the Milky Way—the ‘path of souls’ of prairie-roving Indians, the mediæval ‘way of pilgrimage’[[47]]—finds no place. Yet its conspicuousness, as seen across our misty air, gives an imperfect idea of the lustre with which it spans the translucent vault which drew the wondering gaze of the Achæan bard.

[47]. To Compostella. The popular German name for the Milky Way is still Jakobsstrasse, while the three stars of Orion’s belt are designated, in the same connexion, Jakobsstab, staff of St James.

The point of most significance about Homer’s scanty astronomical notions is that they were of home growth. They are precisely such as would arise among a people in an incipient stage of civilisation, simple, direct, and childlike in their mode of regarding natural phenomena, yet incapable of founding upon them any close or connected reasoning. Of Oriental mysticism there is not a vestige. No occult influences rain from the sky. Not so much as a square inch of foundation is laid for the astrological superstructure. It is true that Sirius is a ‘baleful star’; but it is in the sense of being a harbinger of hot weather. Possibly, or probably, it is regarded as a concomitant cause, no less than as a sign of the August droughts; indeed the post hoc and the propter hoc were, in those ages, not easily separable; the effect, however, in any case, was purely physical, and so unfit to become the starting-point of a superstition.

The Homeric names of the stars, too, betray common reminiscences rather than foreign intercourse. They are all either native, or naturalised on Greek soil. The transplanted fable of Orion has taken root and flourished there. The cosmopolitan Bear is known by her familiar Greek name. Boötes is a Greek husbandman, variously identified with Arcas, son of Callisto, or with Icarus, the luckless mandatory of Dionysus. The Pleiades and the Hyades are intelligibly designated in Greek. The former word is usually derived from pleîn, to sail; the heliacal rising of the ‘tangled’ stars in the middle of May having served, from the time of Hesiod, to mark the opening of the season safe for navigation, and their cosmical setting, at the end of October, its close. But this etymology was most likely an after-thought. Long before rules for navigating the Ægean came to be formulated, the ‘sailing-stars’ must have been designated by name amongst the Achæan tribes. Besides, Homer is ignorant of any such association. Now in Arabic the Pleiades are called Eth Thuraiyâ, from therwa, copious, abundant. The meaning conveyed is that of many gathered into a small space; and it is quite similar to that of the Biblical kîmah, a near connexion of the Assyrian kimtu, family.[[48]] Analogy, then, almost irresistibly points to the interpretation of Pleiades by the Greek pleiones, many, or pleîos, full; giving to the term, in either case, the obvious signification of a ‘cluster.’

[48]. R. Brown, Phainomena of Aratus, p. 9; Delitzsch, The Hebrew Language, p. 69.

Of the Hyades, similarly, the ‘rainy’ association seems somewhat far-fetched. They rise and set respectively about four days later than the Pleiades; so that, as prognostics of the seasons, it would be difficult to draw a permanent distinction between the two groups; yet one was traditionally held to bring fair, the other foul weather. There can be little doubt that an etymological confusion lay at the bottom of this inconsistency. ‘To rain,’ in Greek is huein; but hus (cognate with ‘sow’) means a ‘pig.’ Moreover, in old Latin, the Hyades were called Suculæ (‘little pigs’); although the misapprehension which he supposed to be betrayed by the term was rebuked by Cicero.[[49]] Possibly the misapprehension was the other way. It is quite likely that ‘Suculæ’ preserved the original meaning of ‘Hyades,’ and that the pluvious derivation was invented at a later time, when the conception of the seven stars in the head of the Bull as a ‘litter of pigs’ had come to appear incongruous and inelegant. It has, nevertheless, just that character of naïveté which stamps it as authentic. Witness the popular names of the sister-group—the widely-diffused ‘hen and chickens,’ Sancho Panza’s ‘las siete cabrillas,’ met and discoursed with during his famous aërial voyage on the back of Clavileño, the Sicilian ‘seven dovelets,’—all designating the Pleiades. Still more to the purpose is the Anglo-Saxon ‘boar-throng,’ which, by a haphazard identification, has been translated as Orion, but which Grimm, on better grounds, suggests may really apply to the Hyades.[[50]] It is scarcely credible that any other constellation can be indicated by a term so manifestly reproducing the ‘Suculæ’ of Latin and Sabine husbandmen.

[49]. De Naturâ Deorum, lib. ii. cap. 43.

[50]. Teutonic Mythology (Stallybrass), vol. ii. p. 729.

The Homeric scheme of the heavens, then (such as it is), was produced at home. No stellar lore had as yet been imported from abroad. An original community of ideas is just traceable in the names of some of the stars; that is all. The epoch of instruction by more learned neighbours was still to come. The Signs of the Zodiac were certainly unknown to Homer, yet their shining array had been marshalled from the banks of the Euphrates at least 2000 years before the commencement of the Christian era. Their introduction into Greece is attributed to Cleostratus of Tenedos, near, or shortly after, the end of the sixth century B.C. By that time, too, acquaintance had been made with the ‘Phœnician’ constellation of the Lesser Bear, and with the wanderings of the planets. Astronomical communications, in fact, began to pour into Hellas from Egypt, Babylonia, and Phœnicia about the seventh century B.C. Now, if there were any reasonable doubt that ‘blind Melesigenes’ lived at a period anterior to this, it would be removed by the consideration of what he lets fall about the heavenly bodies. For, though he might have ignored formal astronomy, he could not have remained unconscious of such striking and popular facts as the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus, the Sidonian pilots’ direction of their course by the ‘Cynosure,’ or the mapping-out of the sun’s path among the stars by a series of luminous figures of beasts and men.

Thus the hypothesis of a late origin for the Iliad and Odyssey is negatived by the astronomical ignorance betrayed in them. It has, however, gradations; whence some hints as to the relative age of the two epics may be derived. The differences between them in this respect are, it is true, small, and they both stand approximately on the same astronomical level with the poems of Hesiod. Yet an attentive study of what they have to tell us about the stars affords some grounds for placing the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Works and Days in a descending series as to time.

In the first place, the division of the month into three periods of ten days each is unknown in the Iliad, is barely hinted at in the Odyssey, but is brought into detailed notice in the Hesiodic calendar. Further, the ‘turning-points of the sun’ are unmentioned in the Iliad, but serve in the Odyssey, by their position on the horizon, to indicate direction; while the winter solstice figures as a well-marked epoch in the Works and Days. Hesiod, moreover, designates the dog-star (not expressly mentioned in the Odyssey) by a name of which the author of the Iliad was certainly ignorant. Besides which an additional constellation (Boötes) to those named in the Iliad appears in the Odyssey and the Works and Days; while the title ‘Hyperion,’ applied substantively to the sun in the Odyssey, is used only adjectivally in the Iliad. Finally, stellar mythology begins with Hesiod; Homer (whether the Iliadic or the Odyssean) takes the names of the stars as he finds them, without seeking to connect them with any sublunary occurrences.

To be sure, differences of place and purpose might account for some of these discrepancies, yet their cumulative effect in fixing relative epochs is considerable; and, even apart from chronology, it is something to look towards the skies with the ‘most high poet,’ and to retrace, with the aid of our own better knowledge, the simple meanings their glorious aspect held for him.

CHAPTER III.
THE DOG IN HOMER.

Two sets of strongly contrasted, nay, one might beforehand have thought mutually exclusive qualities, go to make up the canine character. In all ages, and amongst all nations, the dog has become a byword for its uncleanly habits, disgusting voracity, its quarrelsome and aggressive selfishness. The cynic, or ‘dog-like’ philosopher, is a type of what is unamiable in human nature. Growling, snarling, whining, barking, snapping and biting, crouching and fawning, constitute a vocabulary descriptive of canine deportment conveying none but repulsive and odious associations. Our language pursues the animal through its different varieties and stages of existence in order to find varying epithets of contumely and reproach. The universal and almost prehistoric term of abuse formed by the simple patronymic—so to speak—has lost little of its pristine favour, and none of its pristine force; while amongst ourselves ‘hound,’ ‘puppy,’ ‘cur,’ ‘whelp,’ and ‘cub,’ come in as harmonics of the fundamental note of insult.

On the other hand, some millenniums of experience have constituted the dog a type of incorruptible fidelity, patient abnegation, devoted attachment reaching unto and beyond the grave. Many animals have been made the slaves and victims of man; some have been found capable of becoming his willing allies; none, save the dog, affords to his master a true and intelligent companionship. Other members of the brute creation are subdued by domestication; the dog is, it might be said, transfigured by it. A new nature awakes in him. A higher ideal presents itself to him. His dormant affections are kindled; his latent intelligence develops. The overwhelming fascination of humanity submerges his native ignoble instincts, evokes virtues which man himself admires rather than practises, engages a pathetic confidence, inspires an indomitable love. Literature teems with instances of canine constancy and self-devotion. The long life-in-death of ‘Grey Friars Bobby’ forms no prodigy in the history of his race. From the dog of Colophon to the dog of Bairnsdale, man’s four-footed friend has been found capable of the supreme sacrifice which one living creature can make for another. Even in the dim dawnings of civilisation this animal was chosen as the symbol of watchful attendance and untiring subordination. The bright star Sirius, owing to its close waiting on the ‘giant’ of the skies, was from the earliest time known as the ‘dog of Orion.’ A brace of hounds typified to the ardent imagination of the Vedic poets the inseparable association with the sun of the morning and evening twilight. Æschylus elevates and enlarges the idea of divine companionship in the eagle by calling it the ‘winged dog of Zeus.’[[51]] Clytemnestra, in her hypocritical protestations before the elders of Argos, could find no more striking image of fidelity than that of a house-dog left by its master to guard his hearth and possessions.[[52]]

[51]. Agamemnon, 133; and Prometheus, 1057.

[52]. Agamemnon, 520.

Two opposing currents of sentiment regarding the animal have thus from the first set strongly in—one of repulsion verging towards abhorrence, the other of sympathy touched by the yearning pity which a superior being cannot choose but feel towards an inferior laying at his feet the priceless gift of love. But since his higher qualities develop, as it would seem, exclusively under the stimulation of human influence, it might have been anticipated, and it is actually the case, that in those countries where the dog is neglected, he is also despised, as by an inevitable reaction it must follow that where he is despised, he will also be neglected. It is accordingly among peoples whose pursuits repel his co-operation that the sinister view prevails, while in hunting and pastoral regions his credit grows as his faculties are cultivated, and from the minister and delegate, he creeps by insensible gradations into the place of canine beatitude as the friend of man. The attitude of repulsion is, as is well known, general amongst Mahometan populations, and may be described—although with notable exceptions, such as of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, the modern Parsees and Japanese—as the Oriental position towards the species; while a benevolent sentiment is, on the whole, characteristic of Western nations.

Now each of these opposite views is strongly and characteristically represented in the Homeric poems; represented not as the mere reflection of a popular instinct, but with a certain ardour of personal feeling which now and again seems for a moment to draw back the veil of epic impersonality from before the living face of the poet. To the bigoted believers in an indivisible Homer the fact is, no doubt, of most perplexing import, and we leave them to account for it as best they may; but to impartial inquirers it affords at once a clue and an illumination. For the Epic of Troy is not more sharply characterised by canine antipathy than the Song of Ulysses by canine sympathy; while, to enhance the contrast, dislike to the dog is most remarkably associated with a vivid and untiring enthusiasm for the horse; and deep feeling for the dog with comparative indifference to the equine race. More effectually than the most elaborate arguments of the Separatists, this innate disparity of sentiment appears to shiver the long contested unity of Homeric authorship.

To descend, however, to particulars. Homeric dogs may be divided into four categories. (1) Dogs used in the chace; (2) shepherds’ dogs; (3) watch-dogs and house-dogs; (4) scavenger dogs. In the Iliad, the first two classes occur incidentally only, either by way of illustration or in the course of some episodical narrative, such as that of the Calydonian boar-hunt in the Ninth Book. The plastic circumference of the Shield of Achilles includes a cameo of dog-life; but it is noticeable that the position there assigned to the animal is of a somewhat ignominious character, and is indicated with a perceptible touch of contempt. The scene is depicted in the following lines:—

Of straight-horn’d cattle too a herd was grav’n;

Of gold and tin the heifers all were wrought;

They to the pasture from the cattle-yard,

With gentle lowings, by a babbling stream,

Where quiv’ring reed-beds rustled, slowly moved.

Four golden shepherds walk’d beside the herd,

By nine swift dogs attended; then amid

The foremost heifers sprang two lions fierce

Upon the lordly bull; he, bellowing loud,

Was dragg’d along, by dogs and youths pursu’d.

The tough bull’s hide they tore, and gorging lapp’d

Th’ intestines and dark blood; with vain attempt

The herdsmen following closely, to th’ attack

Cheer’d their swift dogs; these shunn’d the lions’ jaws,

And close around them baying, held aloof.[[53]]

[53]. Iliad, xviii. 573-86 (Lord Derby’s translation). For illustrations drawn from the dog’s instinctive fear of the lion, see also v. 476; xvii. 65-67.

It can scarcely be maintained that a lover of the species would have selected the incident for typical representation in his great world-picture.

The direct Iliadic references to dogs, on the other hand, show clearly that they were domesticated in Troy, that they lived in the tents of the Achæan chiefs, (probably with a guarding office), and that they roamed the camp, devouring offal, and hideously contending with vultures and other feathered rivals for the human remains left unburied on the field of battle. The circumstance that in this revolting capacity they were predominantly present to the mind of the poet unveils the secret of his profound aversion. Not as the humble and faithful minister of man, hearkening to his voice, hanging on his looks, holding his life at a pin’s fee in comparison with his service, the author of the Iliad conceived of the dog; but as a filthy and bloodthirsty beast of prey, the foul outrager of the sanctities of death, the ravenous and undiscriminating violator of the precious casket of the human soul. In the tragic appeal of Priam to Hector as he awaits the onslaught of Achilles beneath the walls of Troy, this aversion touches its darkest depth, and obtains an almost savage completeness of expression. Anticipating the imminent catastrophe of his house and kingdom, the despairing old man thus portrays his own approaching doom—

Me last, when by some foeman’s stroke or thrust

The spirit from these feeble limbs is driv’n,

Insatiate dogs shall tear at my own door;

The dogs my care has rear’d, my table fed.

The guardians of my gates shall lap my blood,

And crave and madden, crouching in the porch.[[54]]

[54]. Book xxii. 66-71. (Author.)

Is it credible that the same mind which was capable of conjuring up this abhorrent vision should have conceived the pathetic picture of the faithful hound in the Odyssey? Nor can there be found, in the wide range of the great Ilian epic, a single passage inconsistent in spirit with the lines cited above. Throughout its cantos, in which the usefulness of the animal is nevertheless amply recognised, and his peculiarities sketched with graphic power and truthfulness, runs, like a dark thread, the remembrance of his hateful office as the inflictor of the last and most atrocious insult upon ‘miserable humanity.’[[55]] One of the leading ‘motives’ of the poem is, indeed, the fate of the body after death. The overmastering importance attached to its honourable interment forms the hinge upon which a considerable portion of the action turns. The dread of its desecration continually haunts the imagination of the poet, and broods alike over the ramparts of Ilium and the tents of Greece. From the first lines almost to the last the loathsome processes of canine sepulture stand out as the direst result of defeat—the crowning terror of death. Among the disastrous effects of the wrath of Achilles foreshadowed in the opening invocation, the visible and tangible horror is afforded by ‘devouring dogs and hungry vultures’ exercising their revolting function on the corpses of the slain; before the dying eyes of Hector rises, like a nightmare, the horrible anticipation of becoming the prey of ‘Achæan hounds,’[[56]] while his fierce adversary refuses to impair the gloomy perfection of his vengeance by remitting that supreme penalty;[[57]] next to the honours of his funeral-pyre, the chiefest consolation offered to the Shade of Patroclus is the promise to make the body of his slayer food for curs;[[58]] in her despair, Hecuba shrieks that she brought forth her son to ‘glut swift-footed dogs,’[[59]] and bids Priam not seek to avert the abhorred doom. These instances, which it would be easy to multiply, are unmodified by a solitary expression of tenderness towards canine nature, or a single example of canine affection towards man.

[55]. Book xxii. 76.

[56]. Iliad, xxii. 339.

[57]. Ib. 348.

[58]. Ib. xxiii. 183.

[59]. Ib. xxiv. 211.

It is true that a different view has been advocated by Sir William Geddes, who, in his valuable work, ‘The Problem of the Homeric Poems,’ first dwelt in detail on the contrasted treatment of the horse and dog in those early epics. He did not, however, stop there. A theory, designed to solve the secular puzzle of Homeric authorship, had presented itself to him, and demanded for its support a somewhat complex marshalling of facts. His contention was briefly this:—that the Odyssey, with the ten books of the Iliad[[60]] amputated by Mr. Grote’s critical knife from the trunk of a supposed primitive Achilleid, are the work of one and the same author, an Ionian of Asia Minor, to whom the venerable name of Homer properly belongs; while the fourteen books constituting the nucleus and main substance of our Iliad are abandoned to an unknown Thessalian bard. He has not, indeed, succeeded in engaging on his side the general opinion of the learned, yet it cannot be denied that his ingenious and patient analysis of the Homeric texts has served to develop some highly suggestive minor points. The validity of his main argument obviously depends, in the first place, upon the discovery of striking correspondences between the Odyssey and the non-Achillean cantos of the Iliad; in the second, upon the exposure of irreconcilable discrepancies between the Odyssey and the Grotean Achilleid. But the attempt is really hopeless to transplant the canine sympathy manifest in the Odyssey to any part of the Iliad, or to localise in any particular section of the Iliad the equine sympathies displayed throughout the many-coloured tissue of its composition.

[60]. These are Books ii. to vii. inclusive, ix. x. xxiii. and xxiv. The Achilleid thus consists of Books i. viii. and xi.-xxii.

Everywhere alike enthusiasm for the horse is evoked, vividly and spontaneously, on all suitable occasions. Ardent admiration is uniformly bestowed upon his powers and faculties. He is nowhere passed by with indifference. The verses glow with a kind of rapture of enjoyment that describe his strength and beauty, his eager spirit and fine nervous organisation, his intelligent and disinterested participation in human struggles and triumphs. In the region of the Iliad claimed for the Odyssean Homer, it suffices to point to the episode of the capture by Diomed and Sthenelus of the divinely-descended steeds of Æneas;[[61]] to the careful provision of ambrosial forage for the horses of Heré along the shores of Simoeis;[[62]] to the resplendent simile of Book vi.;[[63]] to the gleeful zeal with which Odysseus and Diomed secure, as the fruit and crown of their nocturnal expedition, the milk-white coursers of Rhesus;[[64]] to the living fervour imported into the chariot-race at the funeral games of Patroclus; to the tender pathos with which Achilles describes the grief of his immortal horses for their well-loved charioteer.[[65]] The enumeration of similar examples from non-Achillean cantos might be carried much further, but where is the use of ‘breaking in an open door’? The evidence is overwhelming as to homogeneity of sentiment, in this important respect, through the entire Iliad. If more than one author was concerned in its production, the coadjutors were at least unanimous in their glowing admiration for the heroic animal of battle.

[61]. Iliad, v. 267.

[62]. Ib. 775-77.

[63]. This is certainly original in book vi. It comes in as an awkward interpolation at xv. 263.

[64]. Iliad, x. 474-569.

[65]. Ib. xxiii. 280-84.

Nor can the search, in the same ten cantos, for indications of a sympathetic feeling towards the dog consonant to that displayed in the Odyssey, be pronounced successful. Certainly much stress cannot be laid, for the purpose, upon the striking passage in the Twenty-third Book, descriptive of the cremation of Patroclus; yet it makes the nearest discoverable approach to the desired significance. It runs as follows in Lord Derby’s translation:

A hundred feet each way they built the pyre,

And on the summit, sorrowing, laid the dead.

Then many a sheep and many a slow-pac’d ox

They flay’d and dress’d around the fun’ral pyre;

Of all the beasts Achilles took the fat,

And covered o’er the dead from head to foot,

And heap’d the slaughter’d carcases around;

Then jars of honey plac’d, and fragrant oils,

Resting upon the couch; next, groaning loud,

Four pow’rful horses on the pyre he threw;

Then, of nine[[66]] dogs that at their master’s board

Had fed, he slaughter’d two upon his pyre;

Last, with the sword, by evil counsel sway’d,

Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.

The fire’s devouring might he then applied,

And, groaning, on his lov’d companion call’d.[[67]]

[66]. The number nine is curiously associated with the canine species. The herdsmen’s pack on the Shield of Achilles consists of nine; nine were the dogs of Patroclus; and we learn from Mr. Richardson (Dogs: their Origin and Varieties, p. 37), that Fingal kept nine great dogs, and nine smaller game-starting dogs.

[67]. Iliad, xxiii. 164-78.

These sanguinary rites have been thought to afford proof that canine companionship was necessary to the happiness of a Greek hero in the other world. For, amongst rude peoples, from the Scythians of Herodotus[[68]] to the Indians of Patagonia, such sacrifices have been a common mode of testifying respect to the dead. And it may readily be admitted that their originally inspiring idea was that of continued association after death with the objects most valued in life. But such an idea appears to have been very remotely, if at all, present to the mind of our poet. The Ghost of Patroclus, at any rate, though sufficiently communicative, expresses no desire for canine, equine, bovine, or ovine society, although specimens of all four species were immolated in its honour. The purpose of Achilles in instituting the ghastly solemnity was, as he himself expressed it,

[68]. Book iv. 71, 72.

That with provision meet the dead may pass

Down to the realms of night.[[69]]

[69]. Geddes, Problem, &c., p. 227.

But the motives that crowded upon his fierce soul were probably in truth as multitudinous as the waves of passion which rolled over it. He desired to appease the parted spirit of his friend with a sacrifice matching his own pride and the extent of his bereavement. Still more, he sought to glut his vengeance, and allay, if possible, the intolerable pangs of his grief. He perhaps dimly imaged to himself a pompous funeral throng accompanying the beloved soul even to the gates of Hades, provision for the way being supplied by the flesh of sheep and oxen, an escort by horses and dogs, while an air of gloomy triumph was imparted to the shadowy procession by the hostile presence of outraged and indignant human shades. A similar ceremony was put in practice, by comparison recently, in Lithuania. When the still pagan Grand Duke Gedimin died in 1341, his body was laid on a pyre and burned with two hounds, two falcons, his horse saddled and still living, and a favourite servant.[[70]] But here the disembodied company was altogether friendly, and may have been thought of as willingly paying a last tribute of homage to their lord.

[70]. Hehn and Stallybrass, Wanderings of Plants and Animals, p. 417.

The information is in any case worth having that Patroclus, like Priam, kept a number of ‘table-dogs,’ whose presence doubtless contributed in some degree to the stateliness of his surroundings. It is, however, given casually, without a word of comment, as if the bard instinctively shrank from dwelling on the intimate personal relations of the animal to man. The son of Menœtius had a gentle soul, and we cannot doubt, although no hint of such affection is communicated, that he loved his dogs, and was loved by them. Of the horses accustomed to his guidance—the immortal pair of Achilles—we indeed hear how they stood, day after day, with drooping heads and silken manes sweeping the ground, in sorrow for his and their lost friend; but no dog is permitted to whine his sense of bereavement beside the body of Patroclus; no dog misses the vanished caress of his master’s hand; no dog crouches beside Achilles in his solitude, or offers to his unsurpassed grief the dumb and wistful consolation of his sympathy. The privilege of sharing the sorrows, as of winning the applause of humanity, is, in the Iliad, reserved exclusively for the equine race.

Turning to the Odyssey, we find ourselves in a changed world. Ships have here become the ‘chariots of the sea’;[[71]] navigation usurps the honour and interest of charioteering; a favourable breeze imparts the cheering sense of companionship felt by a practised rider with his trusty steed. The scenery on shore leaves this sentiment undisturbed. Rocky Ithaca, Telemachus informs Menelaus,[[72]] contains neither wide tracks for chariot-driving, nor deep meadows for horse-pasture; it is a goat-feeding land, though more beautiful, to his mind, in its ruggedness than even the ‘spacious plain’ of Sparta, with its rich fields of lotus-grass, its sedgy flats, its waving tracts of ‘white barley,’ wheat, and spelt. A suitable habitat is thus, in his native island, wanting for the horse, who is accordingly relegated to an obscure corner of the stage, while the foreground of animal life is occupied by his less imposing rival in the regard of man. The dog is, in fact, the characteristic and conspicuous animal of the Odyssey, as the horse is of the Iliad. Xanthus and Balius, the wind-begotten steeds bestowed by Poseidon upon the sire of Achilles, who own the sorrowful human gift of tears, and the superhuman gift of prophetic speech, are replaced[[73]] by the more homely, but not less pathetic, figure of Argus, the dog of Odysseus, whose fidelity through a score of years we feel to be no poetical fiction, but simply a poetical enhancement of a familiar fact. Canine society is, indeed, placed by the author of the Odyssey on a higher level than it occupies, perhaps, in any other work of the imagination. When Telemachus, starting into sudden manhood under the tutelage of Athene, goes forth to lay his wrongs before the first Assembly convened in Ithaca since his father’s ‘hollow ships’ sailed for Troy, we are told that he carried in his hand a brazen spear, and that the goddess poured out upon him a divine radiance of beauty such that the people marvelled as they gazed on him. But the most singular and significant part of the description lies in the statement (thrice repeated on similar occasions[[74]]) that he went ‘not alone; two swift-footed dogs followed him.’ Alone indeed he was, as far as human companionship was concerned—a helpless youth, isolated and indignant in the midst of a riotous and overbearing crew, intent not less upon wasting his substance than upon wooing his unwidowed mother. Comrade or attendant he had none, but instead of both, a pair of four-footed sympathisers, evidently regarded as adding dignity to his appearance in public, as well as imparting the strengthening consciousness of social support. The conjunction, as Mr. Mahaffy well remarks, shows an intense appreciation of dog-nature.

[71]. Odyssey, iv. 708; cf. Geddes, Problem, &c., p. 215.

[72]. Odyssey, iv. 605.

[73]. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, pp. 57, 63.

[74]. Odyssey, ii. 11; xvii. 62; xx. 145.

In the cottage of Eumæus the swineherd, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, weary with long wanderings, a stranger in peril of his life in his own islet-kingdom, finds his first hospitable refuge. Here again we are met by graphic and frequent sketches of canine manners and character. In the office of guarding and governing the 960 porkers composing his herd, Eumæus had the aid of four dogs reared by himself. They were large and fierce, ‘like wild beasts’;[[75]] but the savage instincts even of these half-reclaimed creatures are discovered to be directed towards duty, to be subdued by affection, nay, to be elevated by a touch of supersensual awe. If they erred, it was by excess of zeal in the cause of law and order. For when Odysseus (it must be remembered, in extremely disreputable guise) approached the thorn-hedged enclosure, they set upon him together, barking furiously, and threatening to tear him to pieces on the spot. He had not, however, edged his way between Scylla and Charybdis to perish thus ingloriously. With unfailing presence of mind he instantly took up an attitude of non-resistance, stood still and laid aside his staff. This passivity doubtless produced some hesitation on the part of his assailants, for when the swineherd hurried out to the rescue, he was still unhurt. No small amount of compulsion, both moral and physical—exerted by means of objurgatory remonstrance, coupled with plentiful stone-pelting—was, however, required to calm the ardour of such impetuous allies.

[75]. Odyssey, xiv. 21.

Nevertheless, their ferocity is represented as far from undiscriminating. It is, in fact, strictly limited by their official responsibilities. They know how to suit their address to their company, from an Olympian denizen to a homeless tramp, and get unexpected opportunities of displaying these social accomplishments. For the rustic dwelling of Eumæus becomes a rendezvous for the principal personages of the story, and the demeanour of the four dogs is a leading incident, carefully recorded, connected with the arrival of each. We have just seen what an obstreperous reception they gave to the disguised king of Ithaca. Telemachus, on the other hand, they rushed to welcome, fawning and wagging their tails without barking,[[76]] as that quick-witted vagrant, whose arrival had preceded his, was the first to observe. But when Athene visited the farm for the purpose of bringing about the recognition of the father by the son, which was the first step towards retribution upon their common enemies, while Telemachus remained unconscious of her presence—’for not to all do the gods manifest themselves openly’—it is said, with a very remarkable coupling of man and beast, that ‘Odysseus and the dogs saw her’;[[77]] and the mysterious sense of the supernatural attributed in much folk-lore to the canine species found vent in whimperings of fear and panic-stricken withdrawal.

[76]. Odyssey, xvi. 4-10.

[77]. Odyssey, xvi. 162.

We are next transported to the scene of the revellings of the Suitors, and the fortitude of Penelope. The sight of the once familiar turreted enclosure of his palace, and the sound of the well-remembered voice and lyre of the minstrel Phemius, proclaiming the progress of the festivities, all but overturned the equanimity of the counterfeit mendicant. His practised powers of dissimulation, however, came to his aid; and grasping the hand of his unsuspecting retainer, he brought, with a cunningly devised speech, his tell-tale emotion into harmony with his assumed character. They advanced to the threshold, and there, on a dung-heap, half devoured with insect parasites, lay a dog—the dog Argus. But we must allow the poet to tell the story in his own way.

Thus as they spake, a dog that lay apart,

Lifted his head, and pricked his list’ning ears,

Argus, whom erst Odysseus patient bred,

But use of him had none; for ere that day,

He sailed for sacred Troy; and other men

Had trained and led him forth o’er field and fell,

To chase wild goats, hares, and the pricket deer.

But now, his master gone, in foul neglect,

On dung of ox and mule he made his couch;

Fattening manure, heaped at the palace-gate,

Till spread to enrich Odysseus’ wide domain;

Thus stretched, with vermin swarming, Argus lay.

But when he saw Odysseus close approach,

He knew, and wagged his tail, and dropped his ears,

Yet could not rise to fawn upon his lord,

Who paused, and stood, and brushed aside a tear,

Hiding his grief. Then thus with crafty speech: