HOMER AND HIS AGE
By Andrew Lang
To R. W. RAPER IN ALL GRATITUDE
{Etext Editor's note: Due to unclear typesetting of the original work, which contains unidentifiable characters and blank spaces, it has not been possible to capture this text completely. Where we have been unable to recover the meaning of the text, this has been indicated by the annotation {sic} or {blank space}. We hope that in the future a complete edition can be found and these gaps can be filled.}
PREFACE
In Homer and the Epic, ten or twelve years ago, I examined the literary objections to Homeric unity. These objections are chiefly based on alleged discrepancies in the narrative, of which no one poet, it is supposed, could have been guilty. The critics repose, I venture to think, mainly on a fallacy. We may style it the fallacy of "the analytical reader." The poet is expected to satisfy a minutely critical reader, a personage whom he could not foresee, and whom he did not address. Nor are "contradictory instances" examined—that is, as Blass has recently reminded his countrymen, Homer is put to a test which Goethe could not endure. No long fictitious narrative can satisfy "the analytical reader."
The fallacy is that of disregarding the Homeric poet's audience. He did not sing for Aristotle or for Aristarchus, or for modern minute and reflective inquirers, but for warriors and ladies. He certainly satisfied them; but if he does not satisfy microscopic professors, he is described as a syndicate of many minstrels, living in many ages.
In the present volume little is said in defence of the poet's consistency. Several chapters on that point have been excised. The way of living which Homer describes is examined, and an effort is made to prove that he depicts the life of a single brief age of culture. The investigation is compelled to a tedious minuteness, because the points of attack—the alleged discrepancies in descriptions of the various details of existence—are so minute as to be all but invisible.
The unity of the Epics is not so important a topic as the methods of criticism. They ought to be sober, logical, and self-consistent. When these qualities are absent, Homeric criticism may be described, in the recent words of Blass, as "a swamp haunted by wandering fires, will o' the wisps."
In our country many of the most eminent scholars are no believers in separatist criticism. Justly admiring the industry and erudition of the separatists, they are unmoved by their arguments, to which they do not reply, being convinced in their own minds. But the number and perseverance of the separatists make on "the general reader" the impression that Homeric unity is chose jugée, that scientia locuta est, and has condemned Homer. This is far from being the case: the question is still open; "science" herself is subject to criticism; and new materials, accruing yearly, forbid a tame acquiescence in hasty theories.
May I say a word to the lovers of poetry who, in reading Homer, feel no more doubt than in reading Milton that, on the whole, they are studying a work of one age, by one author? Do not let them be driven from their natural impression by the statement that Science has decided against them. The certainties of the exact sciences are one thing: the opinions of Homeric commentators are other and very different things. Among all the branches of knowledge which the Homeric critic should have at his command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called "sciences"; and they are not exact sciences: they are but skirmishing advances towards the true solution of problems prehistoric and "proto-historic."
Our knowledge shifts from day to day; on every hand, in regard to almost every topic discussed, we find conflict of opinions. There is no certain scientific decision, but there is the possibility of working in the scientific spirit, with breadth of comparison; consistency of logic; economy of conjecture; abstinence from the piling of hypothesis on hypothesis.
Nothing can be more hurtful to science than the dogmatic assumption that the hypothesis most in fashion is scientific.
Twenty years ago, the philological theory of the Solar Myth was preached as "scientific" in the books, primers, and lectures of popular science. To-day its place knows it no more. The separatist theories of the Homeric poems are not more secure than the Solar Myth, "like a wave shall they pass and be passed."
When writing on "The Homeric House" (Chapter X.) I was unacquainted with Mr. Percy Gardner's essay, "The Palaces of Homer" (Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. iii. pp. 264-282). Mr. Gardner says that Dasent's plan of the Scandinavian Hall "offers in most respects not likeness, but a striking contrast to the early Greek hall." Mr. Monro, who was not aware of the parallel which I had drawn between the Homeric and Icelandic houses, accepted it on evidence more recent than that of Sir George Dasent. Cf. his Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 490-494.
Mr. R. W. Raper, of Trinity College, Oxford, has read the proof sheets of this work with his habitual kindness, but is in no way responsible for the arguments. Mr. Walter Leaf has also obliged me by mentioning some points as to which I had not completely understood his position, and I have tried as far as possible to represent his ideas correctly. I have also received assistance from the wide and minute Homeric lore of Mr. A. Shewan, of St. Andrews, and have been allowed to consult other scholars on various points.
The first portion of the chapter on "Bronze and Iron" appeared in the Revue Archéologique for April 1905, and the editor, Monsieur Salomon Reinach, obliged me with a note on the bad iron swords of the Celts as described by Polybius.
The design of men in three shields of different shapes, from a Dipylon vase, is reproduced, with permission, from the British Museum Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age; and the shielded chessmen from Catalogue of Scottish Society of Antiquaries. Thanks for the two ships with men under shield are offered to the Rev. Mr. Browne, S.J., author of Handbook of Homeric Studies (Longmans). For the Mycenaean gold corslet I thank Mr. John Murray (Schliemann's Mycenae and Tiryns), and for all the other Mycenaean illustrations Messrs. Macmillan and Mr. Leaf, publishers and author of Mr. Leaf's edition of the Iliad.
CONTENTS
[ NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY" ]
DETAILED CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I: THE HOMERIC AGE
CHAPTER II: HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
CHAPTER III: HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION
CHAPTER IV: LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
CHAPTER V: AGAMEMNON IN THE LATER "ILIAD"
CHAPTER VI: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE "ILIAD"—BURIAL AND CREMATION
CHAPTER VII: HOMERIC ARMOUR
CHAPTER VIII: THE BREASTPLATE
CHAPTER IX: BRONZE AND IRON
CHAPTER X: THE HOMERIC HOUSE
CHAPTER XI: NOTES OF CHANGE IN THE "ODYSSEY"
CHAPTER XII: LINGUISTIC PROOFS OF VARIOUS DATES
CHAPTER XIII: THE "DOLONEIA"—"ILIAD," BOOK X.
CHAPTER XIV: THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR
CHAPTER XV: THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY EPICS
CHAPTER XVI: HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS
CHAPTER XVII: CONCLUSION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (not available in this file):
ALGONQUINS UNDER SHIELD
THE VASE OF ARISTONOTHOS
DAGGER WITH LION-HUNTERS
RINGS: SWORDS AND SHIELDS
FRAGMENTS OF WARRIOR VASE
FRAGMENT OF SIEGE VASE
ALGONQUIN CORSLET
GOLD CORSLET
CHAPTER I
THE HOMERIC AGE
The aim of this book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all, cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will follow that the poems themselves, as wholes, are the product of a single age, not a mosaic of the work of several changeful centuries.
This must be the case—if the life drawn is harmonious, the picture must be the work of a single epoch—for it is not in the nature of early uncritical times that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere, to the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses, and so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set of subjects. Even less are poets in uncritical times inclined to "archaise," either by attempting to draw fancy pictures of the manners of the past, or by making researches in graves, or among old votive offerings in temples, for the purpose of "preserving local colour." The idea of such archaising is peculiar to modern times. To take an instance much to the point, Virgil was a learned poet, famous for his antiquarian erudition, and professedly imitating and borrowing from Homer. Now, had Virgil worked as a man of to-day would work on a poem of Trojan times, he would have represented his heroes as using weapons of bronze. {Footnote: Looking back at my own poem, Helen of Troy (1883), I find that when the metal of a weapon is mentioned the metal is bronze.} No such idea of archaising occurred to the learned Virgil. It is "the iron" that pierces the head of Remulus (Aeneid, IX. 633); it is "the iron" that waxes warm in the breast of Antiphates (IX. 701). Virgil's men, again, do not wear the great Homeric shield, suspended by a baldric: AEneas holds up his buckler (clipeus), borne "on his left arm" (X. 26 i). Homer, familiar with no buckler worn on the left arm, has no such description. When the hostile ranks are to be broken, in the Aeneid it is "with the iron" (X. 372), and so throughout.
The most erudite ancient poet, in a critical age of iron, does not archaise in our modern fashion. He does not follow his model, Homer, in his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. But, according to most Homeric critics, the later continuators of the Greek Epics, about 800-540 B.C., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round bucklers worn on the left arm. Yet, unlike Virgil, they always give their heroes arms of bronze, and, unlike Virgil (as we shall see), they do not introduce the buckler worn on the left arm. They adhere conscientiously to the use of the vast Mycenaean shield, in their time obsolete. Yet, by the theory, in many other respects they innovate at will, introducing corslets and greaves, said to be unknown to the beginners of the Greek Epics, just as Virgil innovates in bucklers and iron weapons. All this theory seems inconsistent, and no ancient poet, not even Virgil, is an archaiser of the modern sort.
All attempts to prove that the Homeric poems are the work of several centuries appear to rest on a double hypothesis: first, that the later contributors to the ILIAD kept a steady eye on the traditions of the remote Achaean age of bronze; next, that they innovated as much as they pleased.
Poets of an uncritical age do not archaise. This rule is overlooked by the critics who represent the Homeric poems as a complex of the work of many singers in many ages. For example, Professor Percy Gardner, in his very interesting New chapters in Greek History (1892), carries neglect of the rule so far as to suppose that the late Homeric poets, being aware that the ancient heroes could not ride, or write, or eat boiled meat, consciously and purposefully represented them as doing none of these things. This they did "on the same principle on which a writer of pastoral idylls in our own day would avoid the mention of the telegraph or telephone." {Footnote: Op. cit., p. 142.} "A writer of our own day,"—there is the pervading fallacy! It is only writers of the last century who practise this archaeological refinement. The authors of Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, of the Chansons de Geste and of the Arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and armour of their own much later ages.
But Mr. Leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of the metal lead in the Epics, that it is mentioned in similes only, as though the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic age. {Footnote: Iliad, Note on, xi. 237.} Here the poet is assumed to be a careful but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes to give an accurate representation of the past. Lead, in fact, was perfectly familiar to the Mycenaean prime. {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 73.} The critical usage of supposing that the ancients were like the most recent moderns—in their archaeological preoccupations—is a survival of the uncritical habit which invariably beset old poets and artists. Ancient poets, of the uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a writer in our day," as regards archaeological precision; at least we are acquainted with no example of such accuracy.
Let us take another instance of the critical fallacy. The age of the Achaean warriors, who dwelt in the glorious halls of Mycenae, was followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics found in the older tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, an age beginning, probably, about 900-850 B.C. The culture of this "Dipylon age," a time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of human figures drawn in geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the Achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use of iron for weapons. Mr. H. R. Hall, in his learned book, The Oldest Civilisation of Greece (1901), supposes the culture described in the Homeric poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon period in Greece. {Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.} He says, "The Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there is no attempt to archaise here...." They do not archaise as to the details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece," in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. {Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 223, 225.}
We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political and social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. Mr. Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological precision of the Asiatic poets of the ninth century. Now to any one who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind, this theory seems not easily tenable. The difficulty of the theory is increased, if we suppose that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors of the Mycenaeans. Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr. Ridgeway, victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or whether, with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there would be little thought of archaising among Achaean poets. {Footnote: Mr. Hall informs me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.}
A distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase-painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his way, of what we call 'local colour....' Thus the Homeric poet is a more conscientious historian than Virgil!" {Footnote: La Grète de l'Epopée, Perrot et Chipiez, p. 230.}
Now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique "local colour" than any other artists did. M. Perrot himself says with truth, "the CHANSON DE ROLAND, and all the Gestes of the same cycle explain for us the Iliad and the Odyssey." {Footnote: op. cit., p. 5.} But the poet of the CHANSON DE ROLAND accoutres his heroes of old time in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for "local colour" in the CHANSON DE ROLAND. The very words "local colour" are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of ancient uncritical ages. The Homeric poets, like the painters of the Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms" before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the Iliad and Odyssey. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic revival of the past in its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal.
We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is, the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his Prolegomena to {blank space} (1795) there was little opposition to the old belief that the ILIAD and Odyssey were, allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets. After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have maintained, generally speaking, that the ILIAD is either a collection of short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last arranged by a literary redactor or editor.
The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the Iliad is a work of at least four centuries. Some of the objections to this theory were obvious to Wolf himself—more obvious to him than to his followers. He was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction between reading the ILIAD as all poetic literature is naturally read, and by all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it in the spirit of "the analytical reader." As often as he read for pleasure, he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which he invented for Homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the harmony of colour and of characters in the Epic, no man could be more angry with his own destructive criticism than himself. Wolf ceased to be a Wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader or the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal.
But he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view, that of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period concerning whose history he could know nothing. "How could the thing be possible?" he asked himself. "How could a long poem like the Iliad come into existence in the historical circumstances?" {Footnote, exact place in paragraph unknown: Preface to Homer, p, xxii., 1794.}. Wolf was unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances were. We know how little we know, but we do know more than Wolf. He invented the historical circumstances of the supposed poet. They were, he said, like those of a man who should build a large ship in an inland place, with no sea to launch it upon. The Iliad was the large ship; the sea was the public. Homer could have no readers, Wolf said, in an age that, like the old hermit of Prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no knowledge of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied them to literature. In such circumstances no man could have a motive for composing a long poem. {Footnote: Prolegomena to the Iliad, p. xxvi.}
Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part of the songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not take the circumstances of the poet as described in the Odyssey. Here a king or prince has a minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the ancient Irish books of law. His duty is to entertain the prince and his family and guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no reason why his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age, in the Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet without readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship of song, and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. To this point we return; but when once critics, following Wolf, had convinced themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon found abundant evidence that it had never existed.
They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane poet could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the poems had not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (unus color). Each age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house. But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an advanced stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language.
The usual position of critics in this matter is stated by Helbig; and we are to contend that the theory is contradicted by all experience of ancient literatures, and is in itself the reverse of consistent. "The artists of antiquity," says Helbig, with perfect truth, "had no idea of archaeological studies.... They represented legendary scenes in conformity with the spirit of their own age, and reproduced the arms and implements and costume that they saw around them." {Footnote: L'Épopée Homerique, p. 5; Homerische Epos, p. 4.}
Now a poet is an artist, like another, and he, too—no less than the vase painter or engraver of gems—in dealing with legends of times past, represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own period. We shall later prove that this is true by examples from the early mediaeval epic poetry of Europe.
It follows that if the Iliad is absolutely consistent and harmonious in its picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the Iliad is the work of a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet describing his own environment. But Helbig, on the other hand, citing Wilamowitz Moellendorff, declares that the Iliad—the work of four centuries, he says—maintains its unity of colour by virtue of an uninterrupted poetical tradition. {Footnote: Homerische Untersuchungen, p. 292; Homerische Epos, p. I.} If so, the poets must have archaeologised, must have kept asking themselves, "Is this or that detail true to the past?" which artists in uncritical ages never do, as we have been told by Helbig. They must have carefully pondered the surviving old Achaean lays, which "were born when the heroes could not read, or boil flesh, or back a steed." By carefully observing the earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea of the epic heroes." Such is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig, did not occur. The poets often wandered from the way. {Footnote: Helbig, Homerische Epos, pp. 2, 3.} Thus old Mycenaean lays, if any existed, would describe the old Mycenaean mode of burial. The Homeric poet describes something radically different. We vainly ask for proof that in any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved, and of which old minstrels sang. The thing is without example: of this proofs shall be offered in abundance.
Meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the Iliad as the work of four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life remote from their own, and also did not.
For Helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. On the other hand, he says that the later poets of the Iliad did not cling to tradition. "They allowed themselves to be influenced by their own environment: this influence betrays ITSELF IN THE descriptions of DETAILS.... The rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the poems at will), "did not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements into the oldest parts of the Epic." {Footnote: Homerische Epos, p. 2.}
At this point comes in a complex inconsistency. The Tenth Book of the Iliad, thinks Helbig—in common with almost all critics—"is one of the most recent lays of the Iliad." But in this recent lay (say of the eighth or seventh century) the poet describes the Thracians as on a level of civilisation with the Achaeans, and, indeed, as even more luxurious, wealthy, and refined in the matter of good horses, glorious armour, and splendid chariots. But, by the time of the Persian wars, says Helbig, the Thracians were regarded by the Greeks as rude barbarians, and their military equipment was totally un-Greek. They did not wear helmets, but caps of fox-skin. They had no body armour; their shields were small round bucklers; their weapons were bows and daggers. These customs could not, at the time of the Persian wars, be recent innovations in Thrace. {Footnote: Herodotus, vii. 75.}
Had the poet of ILIAD, Book X., known the Thracians in this condition, says Helbig, as he was fond of details of costume and arms, he would have certainly described their fox-skin caps, bows, bucklers, and so forth. He would not here have followed the Epic tradition, which represented the Thracians as makers of great swords and as splendidly armed charioteers. His audience had met the Thracians in peace and war, and would contradict the poet's description of them as heavily armed charioteers. It follows, therefore, that the latest poets, such as the author of Book X., did not introduce recent details, those of their own time, but we have just previously been told that to do so was their custom in the description of details.
Now Studniczka {Footnote: Homerische Epos, pp. 7-11, cf. Note I; Zeitschrift fur die Oestern Gymnasien, 1886, p. 195.} explains the picture of the Thracians in Iliad, Book X., on Helbig's other principle, namely, that the very late author of the Tenth Book merely conforms to the conventional tradition of the Epic, adheres to the model set in ancient Achaean, or rather ancient Ionian times, and scrupulously preserved by the latest poets—that is, when the latest poets do not bring in the new details of their own age. But Helbig will not accept his own theory in this case, whence does it follow that the author of the Tenth Book must, in his opinion, have lived in Achaean times, and described the Thracians as they then were, charioteers, heavily armed, not light-clad archers? If this is so, we ask how Helbig can aver that the Tenth Book is one of the latest parts of the Iliad?
In studying the critics who hold that the Iliad is the growth of four centuries—say from the eleventh to the seventh century B.C.—no consistency is to be discovered; the earth is never solid beneath our feet. We find now that the poets are true to tradition in the details of ancient life—now that the poets introduce whatever modern details they please. The late poets have now a very exact knowledge of the past; now, the late poets know nothing about the past, or, again, some of the poets are fond of actual and very minute archaeological research! The theory shifts its position as may suit the point to be made at the moment by the critic. All is arbitrary, and it is certain that logic demands a very different method of inquiry. If Helbig and other critics of his way of thinking mean that in the Iliad (1) there are parts of genuine antiquity; other parts (2) by poets who, with stern accuracy, copied the old modes; other parts (3) by poets who tried to copy but failed; with passages (4) by poets who deliberately innovated; and passages (5) by poets who drew fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner consciousness," while, finally (6), some poets made minute antiquarian researches; and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in critical powers of discrimination. The critical standard becomes arbitrary and subjective.
It is our effort, then, in the following pages to show that the unus color of Wolf does pervade the Epics, that recent details are not often, if ever, interpolated, that the poems harmoniously represent one age, and that a brief age, of culture; that this effect cannot, in a thoroughly uncritical period, have been deliberately aimed at and produced by archaeological learning, or by sedulous copying of poetic tradition, or by the scientific labours of an editor of the sixth century B.C. We shall endeavour to prove, what we have already indicated, that the hypotheses of expansion are not self-consistent, or in accordance with what is known of the evolution of early national poetry. The strongest part, perhaps, of our argument is to rest on our interpretation of archaeological evidence, though we shall not neglect the more disputable or less convincing contentions of literary criticism.
CHAPTER II
HYPOTHESES AS TO THE GROWTH OF THE EPICS
A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the evolution of the Epics. Mr. Leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages of "expansion," answers that "the Iliad and Odyssey are essentially, and above all, Court poems. They were composed to be sung in the palaces of a ruling aristocracy ... the poems are aristocratic and courtly, not popular." {Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, pp. 2,8. 1892.} They are not Volkspoesie; they are not ballads. "It is now generally recognised that this conception is radically false."
These opinions, in which we heartily agree—there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic—were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" Iliad and
Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the Iliad, as
it stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe,
not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering
minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a
military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.} The poems
were begun, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living
on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by
contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and
altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who
amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian
democracy. {Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. II.}
We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old
land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to admit
this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of
Greece and under every form of society. The real question is, would the
modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries
old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic
age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the
most primitive Iliad may have been actually sung by the court minstrel
in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." {Footnote:
Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. xv.} But, by the expansionist theory, even
the oldest parts of our Iliad are now full of what we may call quite
recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak,
of omissions of old parts.
Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer who could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a vast body of ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here, lopping there, altering everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change. The ancient Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. The old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the Dorian conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality. The very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part, with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war chariot the huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. The early vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from war chariots. They had lost touch with that method. Fighting men now carried relatively small round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly employed for swords, spears, and arrow points. Would the new poets, in deference to tradition, abstain from mentioning cavalry, or small bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or would they avoid puzzling their hearers by speaking of obsolete and unfamiliar forms of tactics and of military equipment? Would they therefore sing of things familiar—of iron weapons, small round shields, hoplites, and cavalry? We shall see that confused and self-contradictory answers are given by criticism to all these questions by scholars who hold that the Epics are not the product of one, but of many ages.
There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel and of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves in adding to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and courts had passed away; old Ionian myths and religious usages, unknown to the Homeric poets, had come out into the light; commerce and pleasure and early philosophies were the chief concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to be aristocratic in manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians "did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous Ionic genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature or mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at Mycenas." {Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. 7.}
Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the ILIAD, which were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the ILIAD itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic poems—authors contemporary with the makers of much of the ILIAD—were eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. {Footnote: Cf. Monro, The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.} They had ideas very different from those of the authors of the Iliad and ODYSSEY, as these ideas have reached us.
Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth. {Footnote: Homerische Epos, p. 3.} Thus a signet ring was mentioned in the Ilias Puma, and there are no rings in Iliad or Odyssey. But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were grouping themselves around the Iliad and Odyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the Iliad and Odyssey. By his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the Iliad and Odyssey, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas?
Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic tradition; their poems make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of the Iliad. How did they abstain from the new or revived ideas, and from the new genre of romance? Are we to believe that one set of late Ionian poets—they who added to and altered the Iliad—were true to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the Cyclics—authors of new Epics on Homeric themes—are known to have quite lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual? The reply will perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general editor of the latter date, thought, we are continuing an old set of lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes had only bronze, no iron,—and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made iron a common commodity in the Iliad. Again, the rhapsodists knew that the ancient heroes had no corslets—the old lays, we learn, never spoke of corslets—but they made them wear corslets of much splendour. {Footnote: The reader must remember that the view of the late poets as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains sometimes; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision is not preserved, and that the Ionic continuators introduced, for example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which represents much older weapons and equipments.} This theory does not help us. In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of romance and religion was alien from that of Homer.
To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators of the Iliad, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the authors of the Cyclic poems. How "non-Homeric" the authors of these Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of the Dioscuri, who in Homer (Iliad, III. 243) are merely dead men (Cypria). (2) Story of Iphigenia Cypria. (3) Story of Palamedes, who is killed when angling by Odysseus and Diomede (Cypria).
Homer's heroes never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a Märchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic Märchen, Mr. Leaf would say. There is nothing like this in the Iliad and Odyssey. (5) They call the son of Achilles, not Neoptolemus, as Homer does, but Pyrrhus. (6) They represent the Achaean army as obtaining supplies through three magically gifted maidens, who produce corn, wine, and oil at will, as in fairy tales. Another Ionic non-Achaean Märchen! They bring in ghosts of heroes dead and buried. Such ghosts, in Homer's opinion, were impossible if the dead had been cremated. All these non-Homeric absurdities, save the last, are from the Cypria, dated by Sir Richard Jebb about 776 B.C., long before the Odyssey was put into shape, namely, after 660 B. C. in his opinion. Yet the alleged late compiler of the Odyssey, in the seventh century, never wanders thus from the Homeric standard in taste. What a skilled archaeologist he must have been! The author of the Cypria knew the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 354.} but his knowledge could not keep him true to tradition. (7) In the AEthiopis (about 776 B.C.) men are made immortal after death, and are worshipped as heroes, an idea foreign to Iliad and Odyssey. (8) There is a savage ritual of purification from blood shed by a homicide (compare Eumenides, line 273). This is unheard of in Iliad and Odyssey, though familiar to Aeschylus. (9) Achilles, after death, is carried to the isle of Leuke. (10) The fate of Ilium, in the Cyclic Little Iliad, hangs on the Palladium, of which nothing is known in Iliad or Odyssey. The Little Iliad is dated about 700 B.C. (11) The Nostoi mentions Molossians, not named by Homer (which is a trifle); it also mentions the Asiatic city of Colophon, an Ionian colony, which is not a trivial self-betrayal on the part of the poet. He is dated about 750 B.C.
Thus, more than a century before the Odyssey received its final form, after 660 B.C., from the hands of one man (according to the theory), the other Ionian poets who attempted Epic were betraying themselves as non-Homeric on every hand. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 347-383.}
Our examples are but a few derived from the brief notices of the Cyclic poets' works, as mentioned in ancient literature; these poets probably, in fact, betrayed themselves constantly. But their contemporaries, the makers of late additions to the Odyssey, and the later mosaic worker who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the Cyclic poets. How, if the true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian poets or rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner?
The best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the Cyclic poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all men who botched at the Iliad were very learned, and very careful to maintain harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they introduced changes in burial, bride-price, houses, iron, greaves, and corslets, all of them things, by the theory, modern, and when they sang in modern grammar.
Yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many authors of our Iliad and Odyssey were, by the theory, strolling irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later jongleurs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in mediaeval France. How could these strollers keep their modern Ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases of belief, out of their lays, as far as they did keep them out, while the contemporary authors of the Cypria, The Sack of Ilios, and other Cyclic poets were full of new ideas, legends, and beliefs, or primitive notions revived, and, save when revived, quite obviously late and quite un-Homeric in any case?
The difficulty is the greater if the Cyclic poems were long poems, with one author to each Epic. Such authors were obviously men of ambition; they produced serious works de longue haleine. It is from them that we should naturally expect conservative and studious adhesion to the traditional models. From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. They might be expected to introduce great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to speak—men of the nameless {Greek: laos}, the host, the foot men—who in Homer are occasionally said to perish of disease or to fall under the rain of arrows, but are never distinguished by name. The strollers, it might be thought, would also be the very men to introduce fairy tales, freaks of primitive Ionian myth, discreditable anecdotes of the princely heroes, and references to the Ionian colonies.
But it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long Cyclic poems do such un-Homeric things as these; the gay, irresponsible strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there—lays now incorporated in the Iliad and Odyssey—scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the Iliad as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives—Illiad and Odyssey—are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others. The Cyclic poems are certainly the production of a late and changed age? {Footnote: For what manner of audience, if not for readers, the Cyclic poems were composed is a mysterious question.} The Iliad is not in any degree—save perhaps in a few interpolated passages—touched by the influences of that late age. It is not a complex of the work of four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned—the point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic character.
CHAPTER III
HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION
Whosoever holds that the Homeric poems were evolved out of the lays of many men, in many places, during many periods of culture, must present a consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they attained their present plots and forms. These could not come by accident, even if the plots are not good—as all the world held that they were, till after Wolf's day—but very bad, as some critics now assert. Still plot and form, beyond the power of chance to produce, the poems do possess. Nobody goes so far as to deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of the fact that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel" altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a constructive whole. If the hypotheses fail to account for the fact, we have the more reason to believe that the poems are the work of one age, and, mainly, of one man.
In criticising Homeric criticism as it is to-day, we cannot do better than begin by examining the theories of Mr. Leaf which are offered by him merely as "a working hypothesis." His most erudite work is based on a wide knowledge of German Homeric speculation, of the exact science of Grammar, of archaeological discoveries, and of manuscripts. {Footnote: The Iliad. Macmillan & Co. 1900, 1902.} His volumes are, I doubt not, as they certainly deserve to be, on the shelves of every Homeric student, old or young, and doubtless their contents reach the higher forms in schools, though there is reason to suppose that, about the unity of Homer, schoolboys remain conservative.
In this book of more than 1200 pages Mr. Leaf's space is mainly devoted to textual criticism, philology, and pure scholarship, but his Introductions, Notes, and Appendices also set forth his mature ideas about the Homeric problem in general. He has altered some of his opinions since the publication of his Companion to the Iliad(1892), but the main lines of his old system are, except on one crucial point, unchanged. His theory we shall try to state and criticise; in general outline it is the current theory of separatist critics, and it may fairly be treated as a good example of such theories.
The system is to the following effect: Greek tradition, in the classical period, regarded the Iliad and Odyssey as the work of one man, Homer, a native of one or other of the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor. But the poems show few obvious signs of origin in Asia. They deal with dwellers, before the Dorian invasion (which the poet never alludes to), on the continent of Europe and in Crete. {Footnote: If the poet sang after the tempest of war that came down with the Dorians from the north, he would probably have sought a topic in the Achaean exploits and sorrows of that period. The Dorians, not the Trojans, would have been the foes. The epics of France of the eleventh and twelfth centuries dwell, not on the real victories of the remote Charlemagne so much as on the disasters of Aliscans and Roncesvaux—defeats at Saracen hands, Saracens being the enemies of the twelfth-century poets. No Saracens, in fact, fought at Roncesvaux.} The lays are concerned with "good old times"; presumably between 1500 and 1100 B.C. Their pictures of the details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the so-called "Dipylon" period of "geometrical" ornament considerably later. In the Dipylon age though the use of iron, even for swords (made on the lines of the old bronze sword), was familiar, art was on a most barbaric level, not much above the Bed Indian type, as far, at least, as painted vases bear witness. The human figure is designed as in Tommy Traddles's skeletons; there is, however, some crude but promising idea of composition.
The picture of life in the Homeric poems, then, is more like that of, say, 1500-1100 B.C. than of, say, 1000-850 B.C. in Mr. Leaf's opinion. Certainly Homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an Over-Lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden Mycenae." We hear of no such potentate in Ionia. Homer's accounts of contemporary art seem to be inspired by the rich art generally dated about 1500-1200. Yet there are "many traces of apparent anachronism," of divergence from the more antique picture of life. In these divergences are we to recognise the picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500-1200 B.C.? Or have elements of the life of a much later age of Greece (say, 800-550 B.C.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late poets? Here Mr. Leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted, and must keep insisting, for it is of the first importance. "It is a priori the most probable" supposition that, "in an uncritical age," poets do not "reproduce the circumstances of the old time," but "only clothe the old tale in the garb of their own days." Poets in an uncritical age always, in our experience, "clothe old tales with the garb of their own time," but Mr. Leaf thinks that, in the case of the Homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts."
In fact, Mr. Leaf's hypothesis, like Helbig's, exhibits a come-and-go between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite the reverse in many cases. Of this frequent examples will occur. He writes, "The Homeric period is certainly later than the shaft tombs" (discovered at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann), "but it does not necessarily follow that it is post-Mycenaean. It is quite possible that certain notable differences between the poems and the monuments" (of Mycenae) "in burial, for instance, and in women's dress may be due to changes which arose within the Mycenaean age itself, in that later part of it of which our knowledge is defective—almost as defective as it is of the subsequent 'Dipylon' period. On the whole, the resemblance to the typical Mycenaean culture is more striking than the difference." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xiii.-xv. 1900.}
So far Mr. Leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. The Homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs—so rich in relics—of the Mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs of the Dipylon of Athens. The poems thus spring out of an age of which, except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because, as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent Homeric descriptions have ever been discovered—so relics corroborating Homeric descriptions are to seek. But the age attaches itself in many ways to the age of the Mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite apart from the post-Dorian culture.
Where we differ from Mr. Leaf is in believing that the poems, as wholes, were composed in that late Mycenaean period of which, from material remains, we know very little; that "much new" was not added, as he thinks, in "the Ionian development" which lasted perhaps "from the ninth century B.C. to the seventh." We cannot agree with Mr. Leaf, when he, like Helbig, thinks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the poems had early become so "stereotyped" that no continuator, however late, dared "intentionally to sap" the type, "though he slipped from time to time into involuntary anachronism." Some poets are also asserted to indulge in voluntary anachronism when, as Mr. Leaf supposes, they equip the ancient warriors with corslets and greaves and other body armour of bronze such as, in his opinion, the old heroes never knew, such as never were mentioned in the oldest parts or "kernel" of the poems. Thus the traditional details of Mycenaean life sometimes are regarded as "stereotyped" in poetic tradition; sometimes as subject to modern alterations of a sweeping and revolutionary kind.
As to deliberate adherence to tradition by the poets, we have proved that the Cyclic epic poets of 800-660 B.C. wandered widely from the ancient models. If, then, every minstrel or rhapsodist who, anywhere, added at will to the old "kernel" of the Achilles was, so far as he was able, as conscientiously precise in his stereotyped archaeological details as Mr. Leaf sometimes supposes, the fact is contrary to general custom in such cases. When later poets in an uncritical age take up and rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to the stories "a new costume," as M. Gaston Paris remarks in reference to thirteenth century dealings with French epics of the eleventh century. But, in the critics' opinion, the late rehandlers of old Achaean lays preserved the archaic modes of life, war, costume, weapons, and so forth, with conscientious care, except in certain matters to be considered later, when they deliberately did the very reverse. Sometimes the late poets devoutly follow tradition. Sometimes they deliberately innovate. Sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine, but by their time forgotten, Mycenaean things, and criticism can detect their doings in each case.
Though the late continuators of the Iliad were able, despite certain inadvertencies, to keep up for some four centuries in Asia the harmonious picture of ancient Achaean life and society in Europe, critics can distinguish four separate strata, the work of many different ages, in the Iliad. Of the first stratum composed in Europe, say about 1300-1150 B.C. (I give a conjectural date under all reserves), the topic was THE Wrath of ACHILLES. Of this poem, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, (a) the First Book and fifty lines of the Second Book remain intact or, perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) The Valour of Agamemnon and Defeat of THE Achaeans. Of this there are portions in Book XI., but they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, "down to the latest period," namely, the age of Pisistratus in Athens, the middle of the sixth century B.C. (c) The fight in which, after their defeat, the Achaeans try to save the ships from the torch of Hector, and the Valour of Patroclus (but some critics do not accept this), with his death (XV., XVI. in parts). (d) Some eighty lines on the ARMING OF ACHILLES (XIX.). (e) Perhaps an incident or two in Books XX., XXI. (f) The Slaying HECTOR by Achilles, in Books XXI., XXII. (but some of the learned will not admit this, and we shall, unhappily, have to prove that, if Mr. Leaf's principles be correct, we really know nothing about the SLAYING OF HECTOR in its original form).
Of these six elements only did the original poem consist, Mr. Leaf thinks; a rigid critic will reject as original even the Valour of Patroclus and the DEATH OF HECTOR, but Mr. Leaf refuses to go so far as that. The original poem, as detected by him, is really "the work of a single poet, perhaps the greatest in all the world's history." If the original poet did no more than is here allotted to him, especially if he left out the purpose of Zeus and the person of Thetis in Book I., we do not quite understand his unapproachable greatness. He must certainly have drawn a rather commonplace Achilles, as we shall see, and we confess to preferring the Iliad as it stands.
The brief narrative cut out of the mass by Mr. Leaf, then, was the genuine old original poem or "kernel." What we commonly call the ILIAD, on the other hand, is, by his theory, a thing of shreds and patches, combined in a manner to be later described. The blend, we learn, has none of the masterly unity of the old original poem. Meanwhile, as criticism of literary composition is a purely literary question, critics who differ from Mr. Leaf have a right to hold that the Iliad as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of masterly perfection. We need not attend here so closely to Mr. Leaf's theory in the matter of the First Expansions, (2) and the Second Expansions, (3) but the latest Expansions (4) give the account of The EMBASSY to Achilles with his refusal of Agamemnon's APOLOGY(Book IX.), the {blank space} (Book XXIV.), the RECONCILIATION OF ACHILLES AND Agamemnon, AND the FUNERAL Games of Patroclus (XXIII.). In all these parts of the poem there are, we learn, countless alterations, additions, and expansions, with, last of all, many transitional passages, "the work of the editor inspired by the statesman," that is, of an hypothetical editor who really by the theory made our ILIAD, being employed to that end by Pistratus about 540 B.C. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. pp. x., xiv. 1900.}.
Mr. Leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion no one sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original minstrel.
Thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite recent, from the mass, evolved through many centuries, which is called the Iliad.
If the existing ILIAD is a mass of "expansions," added at all sorts of dates, in any number of places, during very different stages of culture, to a single short old poem of the Mycenaean age, science needs an hypothesis which will account for the ILIAD "as it stands." Everybody sees the need of the hypothesis, How was the medley of new songs by many generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to be reckoned fine? How were the manners, customs, and characters, unus color, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? How was the whole Greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions and incongruous lays must, by the theory, have been current, induced to accept the version which has been bequeathed to us? Why, and for what audience or what readers, did somebody, in a late age of brief lyrics and of philosophic poems, take the trouble to harmonise the body of discrepant wandering lays, and codify them in the Iliad?
An hypothesis which will answer all these questions is the first thing needful, and hypotheses are produced.
Believers like Mr. Leaf in the development of the Iliad through the changing revolutionary centuries, between say 1200 and 600 B.C., consciously stand in need of a working hypothesis which will account, above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious, of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law (such as the bride-price in marriage), and of the details as to weapons, implements, dress, art, houses, and so forth, when these are not (according to the theory) deliberately altered by late poets.
Next, the hypothesis must explain, in Mr. Leafs own words, how a single version of the Iliad came to be accepted, "where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xviii. 1900.}
Three hypotheses have, in fact, been imagined: the first suggests the preservation of the original poems in very early written texts; not, of course, in "Homer's autograph." This view Mr. Leaf, we shall see, discards. The second presents the notion of one old sacred college for the maintenance of poetic uniformity. Mr. Leaf rejects this theory, while supposing that there were schools for professional reciters.
Last, there is the old hypothesis of Wolf: "Pisistratus" (about 540 B.C.) "was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them."
This hypothesis, now more than a century old, would, if it rested on good evidence, explain how a single version of the various lays came to be accepted and received as authorised. The Greek world, by the theory, had only in various places various sets of incoherent chants orally current on the Wrath of The public was everywhere a public of listeners, who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two, at a street corner. There was, by the theory, no reading public for the Homeric poetry. But, by the time of Pisistratus, a reading public was coming into existence. The tyrant had the poems collected, edited, arranged into a continuous narrative, primarily for the purpose of regulating the recitals at the Panathenaic festival. When once they were written, copies were made, and the rest of Hellas adopted these for their public purposes.
On a small scale we have a case analogous. The old songs of Scotland existed, with the airs, partly in human memory, partly in scattered broadsheets. The airs were good, but the words were often silly, more often they were Fescennine—"more dirt than wit." Burns rewrote the words, which were published in handsome volumes, with the old airs, or with these airs altered, and his became the authorised versions, while the ancient anonymous chants were almost entirely forgotten.
The parallel is fairly close, but there are points of difference. Burns was a great lyric poet, whereas we hear of no great epic poet in the age of Pisistratus. The old words which Burns's songs superseded were wretched doggerel; not such were the ancient Greek heroic lays. The old Scottish songs had no sacred historic character; they did not contain the history of the various towns and districts of Scotland. The heroic lays of Greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of Domesday book of ancient principalities, and cities, and worshipped heroes. Thus it was much easier for a great poet like Burns to supersede with his songs a mass of unconsidered "sculdudery" old lays, in which no man or set of men had any interest, than for a mere editor, in the age of Pisistratus, to supersede a set of lays cherished, in one shape or another, by every State in Greece. This holds good, even if, prior to Pisistratus, there existed in Greece no written texts of Homer, and no reading public, a point which we shall show reasons for declining to concede.
The theory of the edition of Pisistratus, if it rested on valid evidence, would explain "how a single version of the poems came to be accepted," namely, because the poem was now written for the first time, and oral versions fell out of memory. But it would not, of course, explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the Homeric picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly exists.
To take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal armorial bearings of the heroes. They are unknown to or unnamed by Homer, but are very familiar on the shields in seventh century and sixth century vases, and AEschylus introduces them with great poetic effect in {blank space}. How did late continuators, familiar with the serpents, lions, bulls' heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new rhapsodies? In mediaeval France, we shall show, the epics (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) deal with Charlemagne and his peers of the eighth century A.D. But they provide these heroes with the armorial bearings which came in during the eleventh to twelfth century A.D. The late Homeric rhapsodists avoided such tempting anachronisms.
Wolf's theory, then, explains "how a single version came to be accepted." It was the first WRITTEN version; the others died out, like the old Scots orally repeated songs, when Burns published new words to the airs. But Wolf's theory does not explain the harmony of the picture of life, the absence of post-Homeric ideas and ways of living, in the first written version, which, practically, is our own version.
In 1892 (COMPANION TO THE Iliad) Mr. Leaf adopted a different theory, the hypothesis of a Homeric "school" "which busied itself with the tradition of the Homeric poetry," for there must have been some central authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in writing. Were there no such body to maintain a fixed standard, the poems must have ended by varying indefinitely, according to the caprice of their various reciters. This is perfectly obvious.
Such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in fact, the Maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in purity. The older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient lore." Proceedings were sanctioned by human sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case. Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests or tohunga {Footnote: White, THE Ancient HISTORY OF THE Maori, VOL. i. pp. 8-13.}. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and Zuñis, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. If this were so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language in the Homeric poems is explained. But Mr. Leaf has now entirely and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is unsupported by evidence, he says.'
"The great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side. The assumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and Mr. Leaf, in 1892, made the assumption himself: "as some such hypothesis we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory" (1892). {Footnote: COMPANION TO THE Iliad, pp. 20, 21.}
But now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the assumption of a school or guild of singers," that "the rare mention of {Greek: Homeridai} in Chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other confirmation." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.} He therefore now adopts the Wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of Homer was made in Athens at the time of Solon or Pisistratus," from the rhapsodies existing in the memory of reciters. {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xix.} But Mr. Leaf had previously said {Footnote: COMPANION TO THE Iliad, p. 190.} that "the legend which connects his" (Pisistratus's) "name with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of late date." Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought "conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an hypothesis of a Pisistratean editor of the Iliad, while the evidence for an Homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in 1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself remains just what it used to be.
This is not very satisfactory, and the Pisistratean hypothesis is much less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an Homeric school, for the Pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of the characters and the details in the Iliad, nor the absence of such glaring anachronisms as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general "pre-Odyssean" character of the language and grammar. By the Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. The hypothesis of a school was really that which, of the two, best explained the facts, and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing out of our Iliad under Pisistratus than for the existence of a Homeric school.
The evidence for the Iliad edited for Pisistratus is examined in a Note at the close of this chapter. Meanwhile Mr. Leaf now revives Wolf's old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version" (of the Homeric poems) "came to be accepted." His present theory, if admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the poems, the first standard written version, but fails to explain how "the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing a chaos which no editor of about 540 A.D. could force into its present uniformity.
Such an editor is now postulated by Mr. Leaf. If his editor's edition, as being written, was accepted by Greece, then we "understand how a single version came to be accepted." But we do not understand how the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there was an Homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." But now such harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists, many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several centuries,
"Rave, recite, and madden through the land,"
with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard." Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early tradition: that we cannot expect from them.
Again, no editor of about 540 B.C. could possibly bring harmony of manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took down in writing.
Let us think out the supposed editor's situation. During three centuries nine generations of strollers have worked their will on one ancient short poem, The Wrath of Achilles. This is, in itself, an unexampled fact. Poets turn to new topics; they do not, as a rule, for centuries embroider one single situation out of the myriads which heroic legend affords. Strolling reciters are the least careful of men, each would recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and weapons of his time. When war chariots became obsolete, he would bring in cavalry; when there was no Over-Lord, he would not trouble himself to maintain correctly the character and situation of Agamemnon. He would speak of coined money, in cases of buying and selling; his European geography would often be wrong; he would not ignore the Ionian cities of Asia; most weapons would be of iron, not bronze, in his lays. Ionian religious ideas could not possibly be excluded, nor changes in customary law, civil and criminal. Yet, we think, none of these things occurs in Homer.
The editor of the theory had to correct all these anachronisms and discrepancies. What a task in an uncritical age! The editor's materials would be the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered, in Athens, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival. The répertoire of each stroller would vary indefinitely from those of all the others. One man knew this chant, as modified or made by himself; other men knew others, equally unsatisfactory.
The editor must first have written down from recitation all the passages that he could collect. Then he was obliged to construct a narrative sequence containing a plot, which he fashioned by a process of selection and rejection; and then he had to combine passages, alter them, add as much as he thought fit, remove anachronisms, remove discrepancies, accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave transitional passages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the {blank space}. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task, and succeeded so well as to impose on Aristotle and all the later Greek critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time. The editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what Lönnrot, in the nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the Finnish Kalewala. {Footnote: See Comparetti, The Kalewala.}
Centuries later than Pisistratus, in a critical age, Apollonius Rhodius set about writing an epic of the Homeric times. We know how entirely he failed, on all hands, to restore the manner of Homer. The editor of 540 B.C. was a more scientific man. Can any one who sets before himself the nature of the editor's task believe in him and it? To the master-less floating jellyfish of old poems and new, Mr. Leaf supposes that "but small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth century or thereabouts," especially as "the creative and imaginative forces of the Ionian race turned to other forms of expression," to lyrics and to philosophic poems. But the able Pisistratean editor, after all, we find, introduced quantities of new matter into the poems—in the middle of the sixth century; that kind of industry, then, did not cease towards the end of the eighth century, as we have been told. On the other hand, as we shall learn, the editor contributed to the Iliad, among other things, Nestor's descriptions of his youthful adventures, for the purpose of flattering Nestor's descendant, the tyrant Pisistratus of Athens.
One hypothesis, the theory of an Homeric school—which would answer our question, "How was the harmony of the picture of life in remote ages preserved in poems composed in several succeeding ages, and in totally altered conditions of life?"—Mr. Leaf, as we know, rejects. We might suggest, again, that there were written texts handed down from an early period, and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. Mr. Leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. "The poems were all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers (sic), who used to wander over Greece reciting them at popular festivals. Writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic development" (some four centuries at least), "but it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or ANY part of it. There can hardly have been any standard text; at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable asset to the professional reciter."
Now we would not contend for the existence of any {blank space} text much before 600 B.C., and I understand Mr. Leaf not to deny, now, that there may have been texts of the ODYSSEY and Iliad before, say, 600-540 B.C. If cities and reciters had any ancient texts, then texts existed, though not "standard" texts: and by this means the harmony of thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. We do not think that it is "in the highest degree unlikely" that there were no texts. Is this one of the many points on which every savant must rely on his own sense of what is "likely"? To this essential point, the almost certain existence of written texts, we return in our conclusion.
What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the CHARACTERS in subtle details. Some of the characters will be dealt with later; meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea of written texts prior to 600-540 B.C., and also the idea of a school charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which, he says—if unpreserved by text or school—"must have ended by varying infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters." {Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. 21.}
On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no harmony, no unus color, could have survived in the poems till the days of the sixth century editor.
Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the Iliad is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to prove that they do not exist.
NOTE
THE LEGEND OF THE MAKING OF THE "ILIAD" UNDER PISISTRATOS
It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story about the making of the Iliad under Pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the Iliad, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines in the Iliad which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (Rhetoric, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted Iliad, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis. Aristarchus also discussed Iliad, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus (Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus" never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the Iliad. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written out by order of Pisistratus.
It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf's conversion to belief in the story that our Iliad was practically edited and first committed to writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for "Wilamowitz has shown that Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xix.} But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the Iliad was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.
The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of the Iliad, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (cir. 600-580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited Iliad, II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with Iliad, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek, residing in Athens), on a fragmentary passage of Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer's being cited about 600-580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis. In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.
The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): "He (Solon) decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists {Greek text: ex hypobolaes}" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ({Greek text: ephotisen}), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his Megarica. And the lines were especially these: "They who held Athens," &c. (Iliad, II. 546-558), the passage on which the Athenians rested in their dispute with the Megarians.
And what "lines were especially these"? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap in the sense, after "Pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (Solon) "who interpolated lines in the Catalogue, and not Pisistratus." He says: "The natural sense of the passage as it stands" (in Diogenes Laertius) "is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day, for he it was who interpolated the lines in the Catalogue of the Ships".... But Diogenes neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about "collecting the scattered Homer of his day." That Pisistratus did so is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who collected the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." Then why does he adopt, as "the natural sense of the passage," "it was not Peisistratos but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day?" {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xviii.} The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, "refers," as Mr. Monro says, "to the interpolation that has just been mentioned, and need not extend further back." "Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if I understand Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the editor for Pisistratus. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410, especially pp. 408-409.} Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." If, so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of the Iliad. {Footnote: Mr. Leaf adds that, except in one disputed line (Iliad, II. 558) Aias "is not, in the Iliad, encamped next the Athenians." His proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent interpolator, who should have altered the line, are Iliad, IV. 327 ff, and XII. 681 ff. In the former passage we find Odysseus stationed next to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In the second passage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with "the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the passage. The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them. Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original, as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the Iliad is not encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these passages. But why argue at all about the Megarian story if it be a fiction? Mr. Leaf takes the brief bald mention of Aias in Iliad, II. 558 as "a mocking cry from Athens over the conquest of the island of the Aiakidai." But as, in this same Catalogue, Aias is styled "by far the best of warriors" after Achilles (II. 768), while there is no more honourable mention made of Diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (II. 568), or of Menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while Nestor, the ancestor of Pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line 601), "the mocking cry from Athens" appears a vain imagination.}
The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the Catalogue, and, as to the date and original purpose of the Catalogue, the most various opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf's earlier edition of the Iliad (vol. i. p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that the Catalogue is "of late origin." We know, from the story of Solon and the Megarians, that the Catalogue "was considered a classical work—the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date"—say 600-580 B.C. "It agrees with the poems in being pre-Dorian" (except in lines 653-670).
"There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor...."
In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the Catalogue "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle," the compiling of "the whole Cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. The author "studiously preserves an ante-Dorian standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of the material, at least, is old."
These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in 1886. He cannot now give "even an approximate date for the composition of the Catalogue" which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in Homer, if it was composed "for that portion of the whole Cycle which, as worked up in a separate poem, was called the Kypria" for the Kypria is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the Iliad.
I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric poems—in fact, made "a standard text."
The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf. {Footnote: Iliad, i. p. XIX.}
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who, with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd legend." {Footnote: Blass, Die Interpolationen in der Odyssee, pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.} Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off a Homer on them. {Footnote: Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 390, 391. 1893.}
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the Iliad before Homer.'" {Footnote: Classical Review xviii. 148.}
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth century—a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole Iliad in due sequence. "But the unity existed before the mangling. That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!" We are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence, the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence, was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my statement of Mr. Leaf's opinions. He and I both think an early Attic "recension" probable, or almost certain. But (see' "Conclusion") I regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the "edition" as having "made" the Iliad; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of our Iliad as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf's Introduction to Iliad, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the first written text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric "school" of paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession, there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the nature of their teaching. The Beauvais "school" of jongleurs in Lent (fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of strollers.
CHAPTER IV
LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
We now try to show that the Epics present an historical unity, a complete and harmonious picture of an age, in its political, social, legal, and religious aspects; in its customs, and in its military equipment. A long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas if it be the work of one age. Wandering minstrels, living through a succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place, of the poet of feudal princes towards an Over-Lord who rules them by undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. Late poets not living in feudal society, and unfamiliar alike with its customary law, its jealousy of the Over-Lord, its conservative respect for his consecrated function, would inevitably miss the proper tone, and fail in some of the many {blank space} of the feudal situation. This is all the more certain, if we accept Mr. Leaf's theory that each poet-rhapsodist's répertoire varied from the répertoires of the rest. There could be no unity of treatment in their handling of the character and position of the Over-Lord and of the customary law that regulates his relations with his peers. Again, no editor of 540 B.C. could construct an harmonious picture of the Over-Lord in relation to the princes out of the fragmentary répertoires of strolling rhapsodists, which now lay before him in written versions. If the editor could do this, he was a man of Shakespearian genius, and had minute knowledge of a dead society. This becomes evident when, in place of examining the Iliad through microscopes, looking out for discrepancies, we study it in its large lines as a literary whole. The question being, Is the Iliad a literary whole or a mere literary mosaic? we must ask "What, taking it provisionally as a literary whole, are the qualities of the poet as a painter of what we may call feudal society?"
Choosing the part of the Over-Lord Agamemnon, we must not forget that he is one of several analogous figures in the national poetry and romance of other feudal ages. Of that great analogous figure, Charlemagne, and of his relations with his peers in the earlier and later French mediaeval epics we shall later speak. Another example is Arthur, in some romances "the blameless king," in others un roi fainéant.
The parallel Irish case is found in the Irish saga of Diarmaid and Grainne. We read Mr. O'Grady's introduction on the position of Eionn Mac Cumhail, the legendary Over-Lord of Ireland, the Agamemnon of the Celts. "Fionn, like many men in power, is variable; he is at times magnanimous, at other times tyrannical and petty. Diarmaid, Oisin, Oscar, and Caoilte Mac Rohain are everywhere the {Greek: kaloi kachotoi} of the Fenians; of them we never hear anything bad." {Footnote: Transactions of the Ossianic Society, vol. iii. p. 39.}
Human nature eternally repeats itself in similar conditions of society, French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural and pardonable in his circumstances.
The poet's view of Agamemnon is expressed in the speeches and conduct of the peers. In Book I. we see the bullying truculence of Agamemnon, wreaked first on the priest of Apollo, Chryses, then in threats against the prophet Chalcas, then in menaces against any prince on whom he chooses to avenge his loss of fair Chryseis, and, finally, in the Seizure of Briseis from Achilles.
This part of the First Book of the Iliad is confessedly original, and there is no varying, throughout the Epic, from the strong and delicate drawing of an historical situation, and of a complex character. Agamemnon is truculent, and eager to assert his authority, but he is also possessed of a heavy sense of his responsibilities, which often unmans him. He has a legal right to a separate "prize of honour" (geras) after each capture of spoil. Considering the wrath of Apollo for the wrong done in refusing his priest's offered ransom for his daughter, Agamemnon will give her back, "if that is better; rather would I see my folks whole than perishing." {Footnote: Iliad, I. 115-117.}
Here we note points of feudal law and of kingly character. The giving and taking of ransom exists as it did in the Middle Ages; ransom is refused, death is dealt, as the war becomes more fierce towards its close. Agamemnon has sense enough to waive his right to the girlish prize, for the sake of his people, but is not so generous as to demand no compensation. But there are no fresh spoils to apportion, and the Over-Lord threatens to take the prize of one of his peers, even of Achilles.
Thereon Achilles does what was frequently done in the feudal age of western Europe, he "renounces his fealty," and will return to Phthia. He adds insult, "thou dog-face!" The whole situation, we shall show, recurs again and again in the epics of feudal France, the later epics of feudal discontent. Agamemnon replies that Achilles may do as he pleases. "I have others by my side that shall do me honour, and, above all, Zeus, Lord of Counsel" (I. 175). He rules, literally, by divine right, and we shall see that, in the French feudal epics, as in Homer, this claim of divine right is granted, even in the case of an insolent and cowardly Over-Lord. Achilles half draws "his great sword," one of the long, ponderous cut-and-thrust bronze swords of which we have actual examples from Mycenae and elsewhere. He is restrained by Athene, visible only to him. "With words, indeed," she says, "revile him .... hereafter shall goodly gifts come to thee, yea, in threefold measure...."
Gifts of atonement for "surquedry," like that of Agamemnon, are given and received in the French epics, for example, in the {blank space}. The Iliad throughout exhibits much interest in such gifts, and in the customary law as to their acceptance, and other ritual or etiquette of reconciliation. This fact, it will be shown, accounts for a passage which critics reject, and which is tedious to our taste, as it probably was tedious to the age of the supposed late poets themselves. (Book XIX.). But the taste of a feudal audience, as of the audience of the Saga men, delighted in "realistic" descriptions of their own customs and customary law, as in descriptions of costume and armour. This is fortunate for students of customary law and costume, but wearies hearers and readers who desire the action to advance. Passages of this kind would never be inserted by late poets, who had neither the knowledge of, nor any interest in, the subjects.
To return to Achilles, he is now within his right; the moral goddess assures him of that, and he is allowed to give the reins to his tongue, as he does in passages to which the mediaeval epics offer many parallels. In the mediaeval epics, as in Homer, there is no idea of recourse to a duel between the Over-Lord and his peer. Achilles accuses Agamemnon of drunkenness, greed, and poltroonery. He does not return home, but swears by the sceptre that Agamemnon shall rue his outrecuidance when Hector slays the host. By the law of the age Achilles remains within his right. His violent words are not resented by the other peers. They tacitly admit, as Athene admits, that Achilles has the right, being so grievously injured, to "renounce his fealty," till Agamemnon makes apology and gives gifts of atonement. Such, plainly, is the unwritten feudal law, which gives to the Over-Lord the lion's share of booty, the initiative in war and council, and the right to command; but limits him by the privilege of the peers to renounce their fealty under insufferable provocation. In no Book is Agamemnon so direfully insulted as in the First, which is admitted to be of the original "kernel." Elsewhere the sympathy of the poet occasionally enables him to feel the elements of pathos in the position of the over-tasked King of Men.
As concerns the apology and the gifts of atonement, the poet has feudal customary law and usage clearly before his eyes. He knows exactly what is due, and the limits of the rights of Over-Lord and prince, matters about which the late Ionian poets could only pick up information by a course of study in constitutional history—the last thing they were likely to attempt—unless we suppose that they all kept their eyes on the "kernel," and that steadily, through centuries, generations of strollers worked on the lines laid down in that brief poem.
Thus the poet of Book IX.—one of "the latest expansions,"—thoroughly understands the legal and constitutional situation, as between Agamemnon and Achilles. Or rather all the poets who collaborated in Book IX., which "had grown by a process of accretion," {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 371.} understood the legal situation.
Returning to the poet's conception of Agamemnon, we find in the character of Agamemnon himself the key to the difficulties which critics discover in the Second Book. The difficulty is that when Zeus, won over to the cause of Achilles by Thetis, sends a false Dream to Agamemnon, the Dream tells the prince that he shall at once take Troy, and bids him summon the host to arms. But Agamemnon, far from doing that, summons the host to a peaceful assembly, with the well-known results of demoralisation.
Mr. Leaf explains the circumstances on his own theory of expansions compiled into a confused whole by a late editor. He thinks that probably there were two varying versions even of this earliest Book of the poem. In one (A), the story went on from the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, to the holding of a general assembly "to consider the altered state of affairs." This is the Assembly of Book H, but debate, in version A, was opened by Thersites, not by Agamemnon, and Thersites proposed instant flight! That was probably the earlier version.
In the other early version (B), after the quarrel between the chiefs, the story did not, as in A, go on straight to the Assembly, but Achilles appealed to his mother, the fair sea-goddess, as in our Iliad, and she obtained from Zeus, as in the actual Iliad, his promise to honour Achilles by giving victory, in his absence, to the Trojans. The poet of version B, in fact, created the beautiful figure of Thetis, so essential to the development of the tenderness that underlies the ferocity of Achilles. The other and earliest poet, who treated of the Wrath of the author of version A, neglected that opportunity with all that it involved, and omitted the purpose of Zeus, which is mentioned in the fifth line of the Epic. The editor of 540 B.C., seeing good in both versions, A and B, "combined his information," and produced Books I. and II. of the ILIAD as they stand. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 47.}
Mr. Leaf suggests that "there is some ground for supposing that the oldest version of the Wrath of Achilles did not contain the promise of Zeus to Thetis; it was a tale played exclusively on the earthly stage." {Footnote: Ibid, vol. i. p. xxiii.} In that case the author of the oldest form (A) must have been a poet very inferior indeed to the later author of B who took up and altered his work. In his version, Book I. does not end with the quarrel of the princes, but Achilles receives, with all the courtesy of his character, the unwelcome heralds of Agamemnon, and sends Briseis with them to the Over-Lord. He then with tears appeals to his goddess-mother, Thetis of the Sea, who rose from the grey mere like a mist, leaving the sea deeps where she dwelt beside her father, the ancient one of the waters. Then sat she face to face with her son as he let the tears down fall, and caressed him, saying, "Child, wherefore weepest thou, for what sorrow of heart? Hide it not, tell it to me; that I may know it as well as thou." Here the poet strikes the keynote of the character of Achilles, the deadly in war, the fierce in council, who weeps for his lost lady and his wounded honour, and cries for help to his mother, as little children cry.
Such is the Achilles of the Iliad throughout and consistently, but such he was not to the mind of Mr. Leaf's probably elder poet, the author of version A. Thetis, in version B, promises to persuade Zeus to honour Achilles by making Agamemnon rue his absence, and, twelve days after the quarrel, wins the god's consent.
In Book II. Zeus reflects on his promise, and sends a false Dream to beguile Agamemnon, promising that now he shall take Troy. Agamemnon, while asleep, is full of hope; but when he wakens he dresses in mufti, in a soft doublet, a cloak, and sandals; takes his sword (swords were then worn as part of civil costume), and the ancestral sceptre, which he wields in peaceful assemblies. Day dawns, and "he bids the heralds...." A break here occurs, according to the theory.
Here (Iliad, Book II., line 50) the kernel ceases, Mr. Leaf says, and the editor of 540 B.C. plays his pranks for a while.
The kernel (or one of the two kernels), we are to take up again at Book II., 443-483, and thence "skip" to XI. 56, and now "we have a narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution," {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. 47.} says Mr. Leaf. This kernel is kernel B, probably the later kernel of the pair, that in which Achilles appeals to his lady mother, who wins from Zeus the promise to cause Achaean defeat, till Achilles is duly honoured. The whole Epic turns on this promise of Zeus, as announced in the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines of the very first Book. If kernel A is the first kernel, the poet left out the essence of the plot he had announced. However, let us first examine probable kernel B, reading, as advised, Book II. 1-50, {blank space}; XI. 56 ff.
We left Agamemnon (though the Dream bade him summon the host to arms) dressed in civil costume. His ancestral sceptre in his hand, he is going to hold a deliberative assembly of the unarmed host. His attire proves that fact ({Greek: prepodaes de ae stolae to epi Boulaen exionti}, says the scholiast). Then if we skip, as advised, to II. 443-483 he bids the heralds call the host not to peaceful council, for which his costume is appropriate, but to war! The host gathers, "and in their midst the lord Agamemnon,"—still in civil costume, with his sceptre (he has not changed his attire as far as we are told)—"in face and eyes like Zeus; in waist like Ares" (god of war); "in breast like Poseidon,"—yet, for all that we are told, entirely unarmed! The host, however, were dressed "in innumerable bronze," "war was sweeter to them than to depart in their ships to their dear native land,"—so much did Athene encourage them.
But nobody had been speaking of flight, in THE KERNEL B: THAT proposal was originally made by Thersites, in kernel A, and was attributed to Agamemnon in the part of Book II. where the editor blends A and B. This part, at present, Mr. Leaf throws aside as a very late piece of compilation. Turning next, as directed, to XI. 56, we find the Trojans deploying in arms, and the hosts encounter with fury—Agamemnon still, for all that appears, in the raiment of peace, and with the sceptre of constitutional monarchy. "In he rushed, first of all, and slew Bienor," and many other gentlemen of Troy, not with his sceptre!
Clearly all this is the reverse of "a narrative masterly in conception and smooth in execution:" it is an impossible narrative.
Mr. Leaf has attempted to disengage one of two forms of the old original poem from the parasitic later growths; he has promised to show us a smooth and masterly narrative, and the result is a narrative on which no Achasan poet could have ventured. In II. 50 the heralds are bidden {Greek: kurussein}, that is to summon the host—to what? To a peaceful assembly, as Agamemnon's costume proves, says the next line (II. 51), but that is excised by Mr. Leaf, and we go on to II. 443, and the reunited passage now reads, "Agamemnon bade the loud heralds" (II. 50) "call the Achaeans to battle" (II. 443), and they came, in harness, but their leader—when did he exchange chiton, cloak, and sceptre for helmet, shield, and spear? A host appears in arms; a king who set out with sceptre and doublet is found with a spear, in bronze armour: and not another word is said about the Dream of Agamemnon.
It is perfectly obvious and certain that the two pieces of the broken kernel B do not fit together at all. Nor is this strange, if the kernel was really broken and endured the insertion of matter enough to fill nine Books (IL-XL). If kernel B really contained Book II., line 50, as Mr. Leaf avers, if Agamemnon, as in that line (50) "bade the clear-voiced heralds do...." something—what he bade them do was, necessarily, as his peaceful costume proves, to summon the peaceful assembly which he was to moderate with his sceptre. At such an assembly, or at a preliminary council of Chiefs, he would assuredly speak of his Dream, as he does in the part excised. Mr. Leaf, if he will not have a peaceful assembly as part of kernel B, must begin his excision at the middle of line 42, in II., where Agamemnon wakens; and must make him dress not in mufti but in armour, and call the host of the Achaeans to arm, as the Dream bade him do, and as he does in II. 443. Perhaps we should then excise II. 45 2, 45 3, with the reference to the plan of retreat, for THAT is part of kernel A where there was no promise of Zeus, and no Dream sent to Agamemnon. Then from II. 483, the description of the glorious armed aspect of Agamemnon, Mr. Leaf may pass to XI. 56, the account of the Trojans under Hector, of the battle, of the prowess of Agamemnon, inspired by the Dream which he, contrary to Homeric and French epic custom, has very wisely mentioned to nobody—that is, in the part not excised.
This appears to be the only method by which Mr. Leaf can restore the continuity of his kernel B.
Though Mr. Leaf has failed to fit Book XI. to any point in Book II., of course it does not follow that Book XI. cannot be a continuation of the original Wrath of Achilles (version B). If so, we understand why Agamemnon plucks up heart, in Book XI., and is the chief cause of a temporary Trojan reverse. He relies on the Dream sent from Zeus in the opening lines of Book II., the Dream which was not in kernel A; the Dream which he communicated to nobody; the Dream conveying the promise that he should at once take Troy. This is perhaps a tenable theory, though Agamemnon had much reason to doubt whether the host would obey his command to arm, but an alternative theory of why and wherefore Agamemnon does great feats of valour, in Book XI., will later be propounded. Note that the events of Books XL.-XVIII., by Mr. Leaf's theory, all occur on the very day after Thetis (according to kernel B)' {79} obtains from Zeus his promise to honour Achilles by the discomfiture of the Achaeans; they have suffered nothing till that moment, as far as we learn, from the absence of Achilles and his 2500 men: allowing for casualties, say 2000.
So far we have traced—from Books I. and II. to Book XI.—the fortunes of kernel B, of the supposed later of two versions of the opening of the Iliad. But there may have been a version (A) probably earlier, we have been told, in which Achilles did not appeal to his mother, nor she to Zeus, and Zeus did not promise victory to the Trojans, and sent no false Dream of success to Agamemnon. What were the fortunes of that oldest of all old kernels? In this version (A) Agamemnon, having had no Dream, summoned a peaceful assembly to discuss the awkwardness caused by the mutiny of Achilles. The host met (Iliad, II. 87-99). Here we pass from line 99 to 212-242: Thersites it is who opens the debate, (in version A) insults Agamemnon, and advises flight. The army rushed off to launch the ships, as in II. 142-210, and were brought back by Odysseus, who made a stirring speech, and was well backed by Agamemnon, urging to battle.
Version A appears to us to have been a version that no heroic audience would endure. A low person like Thersites opens a debate in an assembly called by the Over-Lord; this could not possibly pass unchallenged among listeners living in the feudal age. When a prince called an assembly, he himself opened the debate, as Achilles does in Book I. 54-67. That a lewd fellow, the buffoon and grumbler of the host, of "the people," nameless and silent throughout the Epic, should rush in and open debate in an assembly convoked by the Over-Lord, would have been regarded by feudal hearers, or by any hearers with feudal traditions, as an intolerable poetical license. Thersites would have been at once pulled down and beaten; the host would not have rushed to the ships on his motion. Any feudal audience would know better than to endure such an impossibility; they would have asked, "How could Thersites speak—without the sceptre?"
As the poem stands, and ought to stand, nobody less than the Over-Lord, acting within his right, ({Greek: ae themis esti} II. 73), could suggest the flight of the host, and be obeyed.
It is the absolute demoralisation of the host, in consequence of the strange test of their Lord, Agamemnon, making a feigned proposal to fly, and it is their confused, bewildered return to the assembly under the persuasions of Odysseus, urged by Athene, that alone, in the poem, give Thersites his unique opportunity to harangue. When the Over-Lord had called an assembly the first word, of course, was for to speak, as he does in the poem as it stands. That Thersifes should rise in the arrogance bred by the recent disorderly and demoralised proceedings is one thing; that he should open the debate when excitement was eager to hear Agamemnon, and before demoralisation set in, is quite another. We never hear again of Thersites, or of any one of the commonalty, daring to open his mouth in an assembly. Thersites sees his one chance, the chance of a life time, and takes it; because Agamemnon, by means of the test—a proposal to flee homewards—which succeeded, it is said, in the case of Cortès,—has reduced the host, already discontented, to a mob.
Before Agamemnon thus displayed his ineptitude, as he often does later, Thersites had no chance. All this appears sufficiently obvious, if we put ourselves at the point of view of the original listeners. Thersites merely continues, in full assembly, the mutinous babble which he has been pouring out to his neighbours during the confused rush to launch the ships and during the return produced by the influence of Odysseus. The poet says so himself (Iliad, II. 212). "The rest sat down ... only Thersites still chattered on." No original poet could manage the situation in any other way.
We have now examined Mr. Leaf's two supposed earliest versions of the beginning of the Iliad. His presumed earlier version (A), with no Thetis, no promise of Zeus, and no Dream, and with Thersites opening debate, is jejune, unpoetical, and omits the gentler and most winning aspect of the character of Achilles, while it could not possibly have been accepted by a feudal audience for the reasons already given. His presumed later version (B), with Thetis, Zeus, and the false Dream, cannot be, or certainly has not been, brought by Mr. Leaf into congruous connection with Book XI., and it results in the fighting of the unarmed Agamemnon, which no poet could have been so careless as to invent. Agamemnon could not go into battle without helmet, shield, and spears (the other armour we need not dwell upon here), and Thersites could not have opened a debate when the Over-Lord had called the Assembly, nor could he have moved the chiefs to prepare for flight, unless, as in the actual Iliad, they had already been demoralised by the result of the feigned proposal of flight by Agamemnon, and its effect upon the host. Probably every reader who understands heroic society, temper, and manners will, so far, agree with us.
Our own opinion is that the difficulties in the poem are caused partly by the poet's conception of the violent, wavering, excitable, and unstable character of Agamemnon; partly by some accident, now indiscoverable, save by conjecture, which has happened to the text.
The story in the actual Iliad is that Zeus, planning disaster for the Achaeans, in accordance with his promise to Thetis, sends a false Dream, to tell Agamemnon that he will take Troy instantly. He is bidden by the Dream to summon the host to arms. Agamemnon, still asleep, "has in his mind things not to be fulfilled: Him seemeth that he shall take Priam's town that very day" (II. 36, 37). "Then he awoke" (II. 41), and, obviously, was no longer so sanguine, once awake!
Being a man crushed by his responsibility, and, as commander-in-chief, extremely timid, though personally brave, he disobeys the Dream, dresses in civil costume, and summons the host to a peaceful assembly, not to war, as the Dream bade him do. Probably he thought that the host was disaffected, and wanted to argue with them, in place of commanding.
Here it is that the difficulty comes in, and our perplexity is increased by our ignorance of the regular procedure in Homeric times. Was the host not in arms and fighting every day, when there was no truce? There seems to have been no armistice after the mutiny of Achilles, for we are told that, in the period between his mutiny and the day of the Dream of Agamemnon, Achilles "was neither going to the Assembly, nor into battle, but wasted his heart, abiding there, longing for war and the slogan" (I. 489, 492). Thus it seems that war went on, and that assemblies were being held, in the absence of Achilles. It appears, however, that the fighting was mere skirmishing and raiding, no general onslaught was attempted; and from Book II. 73, 83 it seems to have been a matter of doubt, with Agamemnon and Nestor, whether the army would venture a pitched battle.
It also appears, from the passage cited (I. 489, 492) that assemblies were being regularly held; we are told that Achilles did not attend them. Yet, when we come to the assembly (II. 86-100) it seems to have been a special and exciting affair, to judge by the brilliant picture of the crowds, the confusion, and the cries. Nothing of the sort is indicated in the meeting of the assembly in I. 54-5 8. Why is there so much excitement at the assembly of Book II.? Partly because it was summoned at dawn, whereas the usual thing was for the host to meet in arms before fighting on the plain or going on raids; assemblies were held when the day's work was over. The host, therefore, when summoned to an assembly at dawn, expects to hear of something out of the common—as the mutiny of Achilles suggests—and is excited.
We must ask, then, why does Agamemnon, after the Dream has told him merely to summon the host to arm—a thing of daily routine—call a deliberative morning assembly, a thing clearly not of routine? If Agamemnon is really full of confidence, inspired by the Dream, why does he determine, not to do what is customary, call the men to arms, but as Jeanne d'Arc said to the Dauphin, to "hold such long and weary councils"? Mr. Jevons speaks of Agamemnon's "confidence in the delusive dream" as at variance with his proceedings, and would excise II. 35-41, "the only lines which represent Agamemnon as confidently believing in the Dream." {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. vii. pp. 306, 307.} But the poet never once says that Agamemnon, awake, did believe confidently in the Dream! Agamemnon dwelt with hope while asleep; when he wakened—he went and called a peaceful morning assembly, though the Dream bade him call to arms. He did not dare to risk his authority. This was exactly in keeping with his character. The poet should have said, "When he woke, the Dream appeared to him rather poor security for success" (saying so in poetic language, of course), and then there would be no difficulty in the summoning of an assembly at dawn. But either the poet expected us to understand the difference between the hopes of Agamemnon sleeping, and the doubts of Agamemnon waking to chill realities—an experience common to all of us who dream—or some explanatory lines have been dropped out—one or two would have cleared up the matter.
If I am right, the poet has not been understood. People have not observed that Agamemnon hopes while asleep, and doubts, and acts on his doubt, when awake. Thus Mr. Leaf writes: "Elated by the dream, as we are led to suppose, Agamemnon summons the army—to lead them into battle? Nothing of the sort; he calls them to assembly." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii. p. 46.} But we ought not to have been led to suppose that the waking Agamemnon was so elated as the sleeping Agamemnon. He was "disillusioned" on waking; his conduct proves it; he did not know what to think about the Dream; he did not know how the host would take the Dream; he doubted whether they would fight at his command, so he called an assembly.
Mr. Jevons very justly cites a parallel case. Grote has remarked that in Book VII. of Herodotus, "The dream sent by the Gods to frighten Xerxes when about to recede from his project," has "a marked parallel in the Iliad." Thus Xerxes, after the defection of Artabanus, was despondent, like Agamemnon after the mutiny of Achilles, and was about to recede from his project. To both a delusive dream is sent urging them to proceed. Xerxes calls an assembly, however, and says that he will not proceed. Why? Because, says Herodotus, "when day came, he thought nothing of his dream." Agamemnon, once awake, thought doubtfully of his dream; he called a Privy Council, told the princes about his dream—of which Nestor had a very dubious opinion—and said that he would try the temper of the army by proposing instant flight: the chiefs should restrain the men if they were eager to run away.
Now the epic prose narrative of Herodotus is here clearly based on Iliad, II., which Herodotus must have understood as I do. But in Homer there is no line to say—and one line or two would have been enough—that Agamemnon, when awake, doubted, like Xerxes, though Agamemnon, when asleep, had been confident. The necessary line, for all that we know, still existed in the text used by Herodotus. Homer may lose a line as well as Dieuchidas of Megara, or rather Diogenes Laertius. Juvenal lost a whole passage, re-discovered by Mr. Winstedt in a Bodleian manuscript. If Homer expected modern critics to note the delicate distinction between Agamemnon asleep and Agamemnon awake, or to understand Agamemnon's character, he expected too much. {Footnote: Cf. Jevons, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. vii. pp. 306, 307.} The poet then treats the situation on these lines: Agamemnon, awake and free from illusion, does not obey the dream, does not call the army to war; he takes a middle course.
In the whole passage the poet's main motive, as Mr. Monro remarks with obvious truth, is "to let his audience become acquainted with the temper and spirit of the army as it was affected by the long siege ... and by the events of the First Book." {Footnote: Monro, Iliad, vol. i. p. 261.} The poet could not obtain his object if Agamemnon merely gave the summons to battle; and he thinks Agamemnon precisely the kind of waverer who will call, first the Privy Council of the Chiefs, and then an assembly. Herein the homesick host will display its humours, as it does with a vengeance. Agamemnon next tells his Dream to the chiefs (if he had a dream of this kind he would most certainly tell it), and adds (as has been already stated) that he will first test the spirit of the army by a feigned proposal of return to Greece, while the chiefs are to restrain them if they rush to launch the ships. Nestor hints that there is not much good in attending to dreams; however, this is the dream of the Over-Lord, who is the favoured of Zeus.
Agamemnon next, addressing the assembly, says that posterity will think it a shameful thing that the Achaeans raised the siege of a town with a population much smaller than their own army; but allies from many cities help the Trojans, and are too strong for him, whether posterity understands that or not. "Let us flee with our ships!"
On this the host break up, in a splendid passage of poetry, and rush to launch the ships, the passion of nostalgie carrying away even the chiefs, it appears—a thing most natural in the circumstances. But Athene finds Odysseus in grief: "neither laid he any hand upon his ship," as the others did, and she encouraged him to stop the flight. This he does, taking the sceptre of Agamemnon from his unnerved hand.
He goes about reminding the princes "have we not heard Agamemnon's real intention in council?" (II. 188-197), and rating the common sort. The assembly meets again in great confusion; Thersites seizes the chance to be insolent, and is beaten by Odysseus. The host then arms for battle.
The poet has thus shown Agamemnon in the colours which he wears consistently all through the Iliad. He has, as usual, contrasted with him Odysseus, the type of a wise and resolute man. This contrast the poet maintains without fail throughout. He has shown us the temper of the weary, home-sick army, and he has persuaded us that he knows how subtle, dangerous, and contagious a thing is military panic. Thus, at least, I venture to read the passage, which, thus read, is perfectly intelligible. Agamemnon is no personal coward, but the burden of the safety of the host overcomes him later, and he keeps suggesting flight in the ships, as we shall see. Suppose, then, we read on from II. 40 thus: "The Dream left him thinking of things not to be, even that on this day he shall take the town of Priam.... But he awoke from sleep with the divine voice ringing in his ears. (Then it seemed him that some dreams are true and some false, for all do not come through the Gate of Horn.) So he arose and sat up and did on his soft tunic, and his great cloak, and grasped his ancestral sceptre ... and bade the clear-voiced heralds summon the Achaeans of the long locks to the deliberative assembly." He then, as in II. 53-75 told his Dream to the preliminary council, and proposed that he should try the temper of the host by proposing flight—which, if it began, the chiefs were to restrain—before giving orders to arm. The test of the temper of the host acted as it might be expected to act; all rushed to launch the ships, and the princes were swept away in the tide of flight, Agamemnon himself merely looking on helpless. The panic was contagious; only Odysseus escaped its influence, and redeemed the honour of the Achaeans, as he did again on a later day.
The passage certainly has its difficulties. But Erhardt expresses the proper state of the case, after giving his analysis. "The hearer's imagination is so captured, first by the dream, then by the brawling assembly, by the rush to the ships, by the intervention of Odysseus, by the punishment of Thersites—all these living pictures follow each other so fleetly before the eyes that we have scarcely time to make objections." {Footnote: Die Enstehung der Homerische Gedichte, p. 29.}. The poet aimed at no more and no less effect than he has produced, and no more should be required by any one, except by that anachronism—"the analytical reader." He has "time to make objections": the poet's audience had none; and he must be criticised from their point of view. Homer did not sing for analytical readers, for the modern professor; he could not possibly conceive that Time would bring such a being into existence.
To return to the character of Agamemnon. In moments of encouragement Agamemnon is a valiant fighter, few better spearmen, yet "he attains not to the first Three," Achilles, Aias, Diomede. But Agamemnon is unstable as water; again and again, as in Book II., the lives and honour of the Achaeans are saved in the Over-Lord's despite by one or other of the peers. The whole Iliad, with consistent uniformity, pursues the scheme of character and conduct laid down in the two first Books. It is guided at once by feudal allegiance and feudal jealousy, like the Chansons de Geste and the early sagas or romances of Ireland. A measure of respect for Agamemnon, even of sympathy, is preserved; he is not degraded as the kings and princes are often degraded on the Attic stage, and even in the Cyclic poems. Would wandering Ionian reciters at fairs have maintained this uniformity? Would the tyrant Pisistratus have made his literary man take this view?
CHAPTER V
AGAMEMNON IN THE LATER "ILIAD"
In the Third Book, Agamemnon receives the compliments due to his supremacy, aspect, and valour from the lips of Helen and Priam. There are other warriors taller by a head, and Odysseus was shorter than he by a head, so Agamemnon was a man of middle stature. He is "beautiful and royal" of aspect; "a good king and a mighty spearman," says Helen.
The interrupted duel between Menelaus and Paris follows, and then the treacherous wounding of Menelaus by Pandarus. One of Agamemnon's most sympathetic characteristics is his intense love of his brother, for whose sake he has made the war. He shudders on seeing the arrow wound, but consoles Menelaus by the certainty that Troy will fall, for the Trojans have broken the solemn oath of truce. Zeus "doth fulfil at last, and men make dear amends." But with characteristic inconsistency he discourages Menelaus by a picture of many a proud Trojan leaping on his tomb, while the host will return home-an idea constantly present to Agamemnon's mind. He is always the first to propose flight, though he will "return with shame" to Mycenae. Menelaus is of much better cheer: "Be of good courage, {blank space} ALL THE HOST OF THE {misprint}"—a thing which Agamemnon does habitually, though he is not a personal poltroon. As Menelaus has only a slight flesh wound after all, and as the Trojans are doomed men, Agamemnon is now "eager for glorious battle." He encourages the princes, but, of all men, rebukes Odysseus as "last at a fray and first at a feast": such is his insolence, for which men detest him.
This is highly characteristic in Agamemnon, who has just been redeemed from ruin by Odysseus. Rebuked by Odysseus, he "takes back his word" as usual, and goes on to chide Diomede as better at making speeches than at fighting! But Diomede made no answer, "having respect to the chiding of the revered King." He even rebukes the son of Capaneus for answering Agamemnon haughtily. Diomede, however, does not forget; he bides his time. He now does the great deeds of his day of valour (Book V.). Agamemnon meanwhile encourages the host.
During Books V., VI. Agamemnon's business is "to bid the rest keep fighting." When Hector, in Book VII., challenges any Achaean, nobody volunteers except Menelaus, who has a strong sense of honour. Agamemnon restrains him, and lots are cast: the host pray that the lot may fall on Aias, Diomede, or Agamemnon (VII. 179-180). Thus the Over-Lord is acknowledged to be a man of his hands, especially good at hurling the spear, as we see again in Book XXIII.
A truce is proposed for the burial of the dead, and Paris offers to give up the wealth that he brought to Troy, and more, if the Achaeans will go home, but Helen he will not give up. We expect Agamemnon to answer as becomes him. But no! All are silent, till Diomede rises. They will not return, he says, even if Helen be restored, for even a fool knows that Troy is doomed, because of the broken oath. The rest shout acquiescence, and Agamemnon refuses the compromise. Apparently he would not have disdained it, but for Diomede's reply.
On the following day the Trojans have the better in the battle, and Agamemnon "has no heart to stand," nor have some of his peers. But Diomede has more courage, and finally Agamemnon begins to call to the host to fight, but breaks down, weeps, and prays to Zeus "that we ourselves at least flee and escape;" he is not an encouraging commander-in-chief! Zeus, in pity, sends a favourable omen; Aias fights well; night falls, and the Trojans camp on the open plain.
Agamemnon, in floods of tears, calls an assembly, and proposes to "return to Argos with dishonour." "Let us flee with our ships to our dear native land, for now shall we never take wide-wayed Troy," All are silent, till Diomede rises and reminds Agamemnon that "thou saidst I was no man of war, but a coward." (In Book V.; we are now in Book IX.) "Zeus gave thee the honour of the sceptre above all men, but valour he gave thee not.... Go thy way; thy way is before thee, and thy ships stand beside the sea. But all the other flowing-haired Achaeans will tarry here until we waste Troy."
Nestor advises Agamemnon to set an advanced guard, which that martialist had never thought of doing, and to discuss matters over supper. A force of 700 men, under Meriones and the son of Nestor, was posted between the foss and the wall round the camp; the council met, and Nestor advised Agamemnon to approach Achilles with gentle words and gifts of atonement. Agamemnon, full of repentance, acknowledges his folly and offers enormous atonement. Heralds and three ambassadors are sent; and how Achilles received them, with perfect courtesy, but with absolute distrust of Agamemnon and refusal of his gifts, sending the message that he will fight only when fire comes to his own ships, we know.
Achilles is now entirely in the wrong, and the Over-Lord is once more within his right. He has done all, or more than all, that customary law demands. In Book IX. Phoenix states the case plainly. "If Agamemnon brought thee not gifts, and promised thee more hereafter, ... then were I not he that should bid thee cast aside thine anger, and save the Argives...." (IX. 515-517). The case so stands that, if Achilles later relents and fights, the gifts of atonement will no longer be due to him, and he "will not be held in like honour" (IX. 604).
The poet knows intimately, and, like his audience, is keenly interested in the details of the customary law. We cannot easily suppose this frame of mind and this knowledge in a late poet addressing a late Ionian audience.
The ambassadors return to Agamemnon; their evil tidings are received in despairing silence. But Diomede bids Agamemnon take heart and fight next day, with his host arrayed "before the ships" (IX. 708). This appears to counsel defensive war; but, in fact, and for reasons, when it comes to fighting they do battle in the open.
The next Book (X.) is almost universally thought a late interpolation; an opinion elsewhere discussed (see {blank space}). Let us, then, say with Mr. Leaf that the Book begins with "exaggerated despondency" and ends with "hasty exultation," in consequence of a brilliant camisade, wherein Odysseus and Diomede massacre a Thracian contingent. Our point is that the poet carefully (see The Doloneia) continues the study of Agamemnon in despondency, and later, by his "hasty exultation," preludes to the valour which the Over-Lord displays in Book XI.
The poet knows that something in the way of personal valour is due to Agamemnon's position; he fights brilliantly, receives a flesh wound, retires, and is soon proposing a general flight in his accustomed way. When the Trojans, in Book XIV., are attacking the ships, Agamemnon remarks that he fears the disaffection of his whole army (XIV. 49, 51), and, as for the coming defeat, that he "knew it," even when Zeus helped the Greeks. They are all to perish far from Argos. Let them drag the ships to the sea, moor them with stones, and fly, "For there is no shame in fleeing from ruin, even in the night. Better doth he fare who flees from trouble than he that is overtaken." It is now the turn of Odysseus again to save the honour of the army. "Be silent, lest some other of the Achaeans hear this word, that no man should so much as suffer to pass through his mouth.... And now I wholly scorn thy thoughts, such a word hast thou uttered." On this Agamemnon instantly repents. "Right sharply hast thou touched my heart with thy stern reproof:" he has not even the courage of his nervousness.
The combat is now in the hands of Aias and Patroclus, who is slain. Agamemnon, who is wounded, does not reappear till Book XIX., when Achilles, anxious to fight and avenge Patroclus at once, without formalities of reconciliation, professes his desire to let bygones be bygones. Agamemnon excuses his insolence to Achilles as an inspiration of Ate: a predestined fault—"Not I am the cause, but Zeus and Destiny."
Odysseus, to clinch the reunion and fulfil customary law, advises Agamemnon to bring out the gifts of atonement (the gifts prepared in Book IX.), after which the right thing is for him to give a feast of reconciliation, "that Achilles may have nothing lacking of his right." {Footnote: Book XIX. 179, 180.} The case is one which has been provided for by customary law in every detail. Mr. Leaf argues that all this part must be late, because of the allusion to the gifts offered in Book IX. But we reply, with Mr. Monro, that the Ninth Book is "almost necessary to any Achilleis." The question is, would a late editor or poet know all the details of customary law in such a case as a quarrel between Over-Lord and peer? would a feudal audience have been satisfied with a poem which did not wind the quarrel up in accordance with usage? and would a late poet, in a society no longer feudal, know how to wind it up? Would he find any demand on the part of his audience for a long series of statements, which to a modern seem to interrupt the story? To ourselves it appears that a feudal audience desired the customary details; to such an audience they were most interesting.
This is a taste which, as has been said, we find in all early poetry and in the sagas; hence the long "runs" of the Celtic sagas, minutely repeated descriptions of customary things. The Icelandic saga-men never weary, though modern readers do, of legal details. For these reasons we reckon the passages in Book XIX. about the reconciliation as original, and think they can be nothing else. It is quite natural that, in a feudal society of men who were sticklers for custom, the hearers should insist on having all things done duly and in order—the giving of the gifts and the feast of reconciliation—though the passionate Achilles himself desires to fight at once. Odysseus insists that what we may call the regular routine shall be gone through. It is tedious to the modern reader, but it is surely much more probable that a feudal poet thus gratified his peculiar audience (he looked for no other) than that a late poet, with a different kind of audience, thrust the Reconciliation in as an "after-thought." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. 317.} The right thing must be done, Odysseus assures Achilles, "for I was born first, and know more things." It is not the right thing to fight at once, unfed, and before the solemn sacrifice by the Over-Lord, the prayer, the Oath of Agamemnon, and the reception of the gifts by Achilles; only after these formalities, and after the army has fed, can the host go forth. "I know more than you do; you are a younger man," says Odysseus, speaking in accordance with feudal character, at the risk of wearying later unforeseen generations.
This is not criticism inspired by mere "literary feeling," for "literary feeling" is on the side of Achilles, and wishes the story to hurry to his revenge. But ours is {blank space} criticism; we must think of the poet in relation to his audience and of their demands, which we can estimate by similar demands, vouched for by the supply, in the early national poetry of other peoples and in the Icelandic sagas.
We hear no more of Agamemnon till, in Book XXIII, 35-38, after the slaying of Hector, Achilles "was brought to noble Agamemnon" (for that, as Odysseus said, was the regular procedure) "by the Achaean chiefs, hardly persuading him thereto, for his heart was wroth for his comrade." Here they feast, Achilles still full of grief and resentment. He merely goes through the set forms, much against his will. It does appear to us that the later the poet the less he would have known or cared about the forms. An early society is always much interested in forms and in funerals and funeral games, so the poet indulges their taste with the last rites of Patroclus. The last view of Agamemnon is given when, at the end of the games, Achilles courteously presents him with the flowered lebes, the prize for hurling the spear, without asking him to compete, since his superior skill is notorious. This act of courtesy is the real reconciliation; previously Achilles had but gone reluctantly through the set forms in such cases provided. Even when Agamemnon offered the gifts of atonement, Achilles said, "Give them, as is customary, or keep them, as you please" (XIX. 146, 148). Achilles, young and passionate, cares nothing for the feudal procedure.
This rapid survey seems to justify the conclusion that the poet presents an uniform and historically correct picture of the Over-Lord and of his relations with his peers, a picture which no late editor could have pieced together out of the widely varying repertoires of late strolling reciters. Such reciters would gladly have forgotten, and such an editor would gladly have "cut" the "business" of the reconciliation. They would also, in a democratic spirit, have degraded the Over-Lord into the tyrant, but throughout, however low Agamemnon may fall, the poet is guided by the knowledge that his right to rule is jure divino, that he has qualities, that his responsibilities are crushing, "I, whom among all men Zeus hath planted for ever among labours, while my breath abides within me, and my limbs move," says the Over-Lord (X. Sg, go.{sic}). In short, the poet's conception of the Over-Lord is throughout harmonious, is a contemporary conception entertained by a singer who lives among peers that own, and are jealous of, and obey an Over-Lord. The character and situation of Agamemnon are a poetic work of one age, one moment of culture.
CHAPTER VI
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE "ILIAD". BURIAL AND CREMATION
In archaeological discoveries we find the most convincing proofs that the Iliad, on the whole, is the production of a single age, not the patchwork of several changeful centuries. This may seem an audacious statement, as archaeology has been interpreted of late in such a manner as to demand precisely the opposite verdict. But if we can show, as we think we can, that many recent interpretations of the archaeological evidence are not valid, because they are not consistent, our contention, though unexpected, will be possible. It is that the combined testimony of archaeology and of the Epic proves the Iliad to represent, as regards customs, weapons, and armour, a definite moment of evolution; a period between the age recorded in the art of the Mycenaean shaft graves and the age of early iron swords and the "Dipylon" period.
Before the discoveries of the material remains of the "Mycenzean" times, the evidence of archaeology was seldom appropriately invoked in discussions of the Homeric question. But in the thirty years since Schliemann explored the buried relics of the Mycenzean Acropolis, his "Grave of Agamemnon," a series of excavations has laid bare the interments, the works of art, and the weapons and ornaments of years long prior to the revolution commonly associated with the "Dorian Invasion" of about 1100-1000 B.C. The objects of all sorts which have been found in many sites of Greece and the isles, especially of Cyprus and Crete, in some respects tally closely with Homeric descriptions, in others vary from them widely. Nothing can be less surprising, if the heroes whose legendary feats inspired the poet lived centuries before his time, as Charlemagne and his Paladins lived some three centuries before the composition of the earliest extant Chansons de Geste on their adventures. There was, in such a case, time for much change in the details of life, art, weapons and implements. Taking the relics in the graves of the Mycenaean Acropolis as a starting-point, some things would endure into the age of the poet, some would be modified, some would disappear.
We cannot tell how long previous to his own date the poet supposes the Achaean heroes to have existed. He frequently ascribes to them feats of strength which "no man of such as now are" could perform. This gives no definite period for the interval; he might be speaking of the great grandfathers of his own generation. But when he regards the heroes as closely connected by descent of one or two generations with the gods, and as in frequent and familiar intercourse with gods and goddesses, we must suppose that he did not think their period recent. The singers of the Chansons de Geste knew that angels' visits were few and far between at the period, say, of the Norman Conquest; but they allowed angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as indefinitely remote.
It is impossible here to discuss in detail the complex problems of Mycenaean chronology. If we place the Mycenaean "bloom-time" from "the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C.," {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 322.} it is plain that there is space to spare, between the poet's age and that of his heroes, for the rise of changes in war, weapons, and costume. Indeed, there are traces enough of change even in the objects and art discovered in the bloom-time, as represented by the Mycenaean acropolis itself and by other "Mycenaean" sites. The art of the fragment of a silver vase in a grave, on which a siege is represented, is not the art, the costumes are not the costumes, of the inlaid bronze dagger-blade. The men shown on the vase and the lion-hunters on the dagger both have their hair close cropped, but on the vase they are naked, on the dagger they wear short drawers. On the Vaphio cups, found in a tholos chamber-tomb near Amyclae, the men are "long-haired Achaeans," with heavy, pendent locks, like the man on a pyxis from Knossos, published by Mr. Evans; they are of another period than the close-cropped men of the vase and dagger. {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xvi. p. 102.} Two of the men on the silver vase are covered either with shields of a shape and size elsewhere unknown in Mycenaean art, or with cloaks of an unexampled form. The masonry of the city wall, shown on the vase in the Mycenaean grave, is not the ordinary masonry of Mycenae itself. On the vase the wall is "isodomic," built of cut stones in regular layers. Most of the Mycenaean walls, on the other hand, are of "Cyclopean" style, in large irregular blocks.
Art, good and very bad, exists in many various stages in Mycenaean relics. The drawing of a god, with a typical Mycenaean shield in the form of a figure 8, on a painted sarcophagus from Milato in Crete, is more crude and savage than many productions of the Australian aboriginals, {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xvi. p. 174, fig. 50. Grosse. Les Debuts de l'Art, pp. 124-176.} the thing is on the level of Red Indian work. Meanwhile at Vaphio, Enkomi, Knossos, and elsewhere the art is often excellent.
In one essential point the poet describes a custom without parallel among the discovered relics of the Mycenaean age—namely, the disposal of the bodies of the dead. They are neither buried with their arms, in stately tholos tombs nor in shaft graves, as at Mycenae: whether they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. A pyre of wood is built; on this the warrior's body is laid, the pyre is lighted, the body is reduced to ashes, the ashes are placed in a vessel or box of gold, wrapped round with precious cloths (no arms are buried, as a general rule), and a mound, howe, barrow, or tumulus is raised over all. Usually a stele or pillar crowns the edifice. This method is almost uniform, and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the Iliad and Odyssey whenever a burial is described. Now this mode of interment must be the mode of a single age in Greek civilisation. It is confessedly not the method of the Mycenaeans of the shaft grave, or of the latter tholos or stone beehive-shaped grave; again, the Mycenaeans did not burn the dead; they buried. Once more, the Homeric method is not that of the Dipylon period (say 900-750 B.C.) represented by the tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens. The people of that age now buried, now burned, their dead, and did not build cairns over them. Thus the Homeric custom comes between the shaft graves and the latter tholos graves, on the one hand, and the Dipylon custom of burning or burying, with sunk or rock-hewn graves, on the other.
The Homeric poets describe the method of their own period. They assuredly do not adhere to an older epic tradition of shaft graves or tholos graves, though these must have been described in lays of the period when such methods of disposal of the dead were in vogue. The altar above the shaft-graves in Mycenae proves the cult of ancestors in Mycenae; of this cult in the Iliad there is no trace, or only a dim trace of survival in the slaughter of animals at the funeral. The Homeric way of thinking about the state of the dead, weak, shadowy things beyond the river Oceanus, did not permit them to be worshipped as potent beings. Only in a passage, possibly interpolated, of the Odyssey, do we hear that Castor and Polydeuces, brothers of Helen, and sons of Tyndareus, through the favour of Zeus have immortality, and receive divine honours. {Footnote: Odyssey, XI. 298-304.}
These facts are so familiar that we are apt to overlook the strangeness of them in the history of religious evolution. The cult of ancestral spirits begins in the lowest barbarism, just above the level of the Australian tribes, who, among the Dieri, show some traces of the practice, at least, of ghost feeding. {Footnote: Howitt, Native Tribes of South-Eastern Australia, p. 448. There are also traces of propitiation in Western Australia (MS. of Mrs. Bates).} Sometimes, as in many African tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical cult. Usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower plane. It was prevalent in the Mycenae of the shaft graves; in Attica it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in Greece from the ninth century onwards. But it is unknown to or ignored by the Homeric poets, though it can hardly have died out of folk custom. Consequently, the poems are of one age, an age of cremation and of burial in barrows, with no ghost worship. Apparently some revolution as regards burial occurred between the age of the graves of the Mycenaean acropolis and the age of Homer. That age, coming with its form of burning and its absence of the cult of the dead, between two epochs of inhumation, ancestor worship, and absence of cairns, is as certainly and definitely an age apart, a peculiar period, as any epoch can be.
Cremation, with cairn burial of the ashes, is, then, the only form of burial mentioned by Homer, and, as far as the poet tells us, the period was not one in which iron was used for swords and spears. At Assarlik (Asia Minor) and in Thera early graves, prove the use of cremation, but also, unlike Homer, of iron weapons. {Footnote: Paton, Journal of Hellenic Studies, viii. 64ff. For other references, cf. Poulsen, Die Dipylongräben, p. 2, Notes. Leipzig 1905.} In these graves the ashes are inurned. There are examples of the same usage in Salamis, without iron. In Crete, in graves of the period of geometrical ornament ("Dipylon"), burning is more common than inhumation. Cremation is attested in a tholos or beehive-shaped grave in Argos, where the vases were late Mycenaean. Below this stratum was an older shaft grave, as is usual in tholos interments; it had been plundered? {Footnote: Poulsen, p.2.}
The cause of the marked change from Mycenaean inhumation to Homeric cremation is matter of conjecture. It has been suggested that burning was introduced during the migrations after the Dorian invasion. Men could carry the ashes of their friends to the place where they finally settled. {Footnote: Helbig, Homerische Epos, p.83} The question may, perhaps, be elucidated by excavation, especially in Asia Minor, on the sites of the earliest Greek colonies. At Colophon are many cairns unexplored by science. Mr. Ridgeway, as is well known, attributes the introduction of cremation to a conquering northern people, the Achaeans, his "Celts." It is certain that cremation and urn burial of the ashes prevailed in Britain during the Age of Bronze, and co-existed with inhumation in the great cemetery of Hallstatt, surviving into the Age of Iron. {Footnote: Cf. Guide to Antiquities of Early Iron Age, British Museum, 1905, by Mr. Reginald A. Smith, under direction of Mr. Charles H. Read, for a brief account of Hallstatt culture.} Others suppose a change in Achaean ideas about the soul; it was no longer believed to haunt the grave and grave goods and be capable of haunting the living, but to be wholly set free by burning, and to depart for ever to the House of Hades, powerless and incapable of hauntings.
It is never easy to decide as to whether a given mode of burial is the result of a definite opinion about the condition of the dead, or whether the explanation offered by those who practise the method is an afterthought. In Tasmania among the lowest savages, now extinct, were found monuments over cremated human remains, accompanied with "characters crudely marked, similar to those which the aborigines tattooed on their forearms." In one such grave was a spear, "for the dead man to fight with when he is asleep," as a native explained. Some Tasmanian tribes burned the dead and carried the ashes about in amulets; others buried in hollow trees; others simply inhumed. Some placed the dead in a hollow tree, and cremated the body after lapse of time. Some tied the dead up tightly (a common practice with inhumation), and then burned him. Some buried the dead in an erect 'posture. The common explanation of burning was that it prevented the dead from returning, thus it has always been usual to burn the bodies of vampires. Did a race so backward hit on an idea unknown to the Mycenaean Greeks? {Footnote: Ling Roth., The Tasmanians, pp. 128-134. Reports of Early Discoverers.} If the usual explanation be correct—burning prevents the return of the dead—how did the Homeric Greeks come to substitute burning for the worship and feeding of the dead, which had certainly prevailed? How did the ancient method return, overlapping and blent with the method of cremation, as in the early Dipylon interments? We can only say that the Homeric custom is definite and isolated, and that but slight variations occur in the methods of Homeric burial.
(1)In Iliad, VI, 4 I 6 ff, Andromache SAYS that Achilles slew her father, "yet he despoiled him not, for his soul had shame of that; but he burnt him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." We are not told that the armour was interred with the ashes of Eetion. This is a peculiar case. We always hear in the that the dead are burned, and the ashes of princes are placed in a vessel of gold within an artificial hillock; but we do not hear, except in this passage, that they are burned in their armour, or that it is burned, or that it is buried with the ashes of the dead. The invariable practice is for the victor, if he can, to despoil the body of the fallen foe; but Achilles for some reason spared that indignity in the case of Eetion. {Footnote: German examples of burning the amis of the cremated dead and then burying them are given by Mr. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. i. pp. 498, 499.}
(2) ILIAD, VII. 85. Hector, in his challenge to a single combat, makes the conditions that the victor shall keep the arms and armour of the vanquished, but shall restore his body to his friends. The Trojans will burn him, if he falls; if the Achaean falls, the others will do something expressed by the word {Greek: tarchuchosi} probably a word surviving from an age of embalment. {Footnote: Helbig, Homerische Epos, pp. 55, 56.} It has come to mean, generally, to do the funeral rites. The hero is to have a barrow or artificial howe or hillock built over him, "beside wide Hellespont," a memorial of him, and of Hector's valour.
On the River Helmsdale, near Kildonan, on the left bank, there is such a hillock which has never, it is believed, been excavated. It preserves the memory of its occupant, an early Celtic saint; whether he was cremated or not it is impossible to say. But his memory is not lost, and the howe, cairn, or hillock, in Homer is desired by the heroes as a MEMORIAL.
On the terms proposed by Hector the arms of the dead could not be either burned or buried with him.
(3) Iliad, IX. 546. Phoenix says that the Calydonian boar "brought many to the mournful pyre." All were cremated.
(4) Iliad, XXII 50-55. Andromache in her dirge (the regret of the French mediaeval epics) says that Hector lies unburied by the ships and naked, but she will burn raiment of his, "delicate and fair, the work of women ... to thee no profit, since thou wilt never lie therein, yet this shall be honour to thee from the men and women of Troy." Her meaning is not very clear, but she seems to imply that if Hector's body were in Troy it would be clad in garments before cremation.
Helbig appears to think that to clothe the dead in garments was an Ionian, not an ancient epic custom. But in Homer the dead always wear at least one garment, the {Greek: pharos}, a large mantle, either white or purple, such as Agamemnon wears in peace (Iliad, II 43), except when, like Eetion and Elpenor in the Odyssey, they are burned in their armour. In Iliad, XXIII. 69 ff., the shadow of the dead unburned Patroclus appears to Achilles in his sleep asking for "his dues of fire." The whole passage, with the account of the funeral of Patroclus, must be read carefully, and compared with the funeral rites of Hector at the end of Book XXIV. Helbig, in an essay of great erudition, though perhaps rather fantastic in its generalisations, has contrasted the burials of the two heroes. Patroclus is buried, he says, in a true portion of the old Aeolic epic (Sir Richard Jebb thought the whole passage "Ionic"), though even into this the late Ionian bearbeiter (a spectral figure), has introduced his Ionian notions. But the Twenty-fourth Book itself is late and Ionian, Helbig says, not genuine early Aeolian epic poetry. {Footnote: Helbig, Zu den Homerischen Bestattungsgebraüchen. Aus den Sitzungsberichten der philos. philol. und histor. Classe der Kgl. bayer. Academie der Wissenschaften. 1900. Heft. ii. pp. 199-299.} The burial of Patroclus, then, save for Ionian late interpolations, easily detected by Helbig, is, he assures us, genuine "kernel," {Footnote: 2 Op. laud., p. 208.} while Hector's burial "is partly Ionian, and describes the destiny of the dead heroes otherwise than as in the old Aeolic epos."
Here Helbig uses that one of his two alternate theories according to which the late Ionian poets do not cling to old epic tradition, but bring in details of the life of their own date. By Helbig's other alternate theory, the late poets cling to the model set in old epic tradition in their pictures of details of life.
Disintegrationists differ: far from thinking that the late Ionian poet who buried Hector varied from the AEolic minstrel who buried Patroclus (in Book XXIII.), Mr. Leaf says that Hector's burial is "almost an abstract" of that of Patroclus. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, XXII Note to 791.} He adds that Helbig's attempts "to distinguish the older AEolic from the newer and more sceptical 'Ionic' faith seem to me visionary." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii. p. 619. Note 2} Visionary, indeed, they do seem, but they are examples of the efforts made to prove that the Iliad bears marks of composition continued through several centuries. We must remember that, according to Helbig, the Ionians, colonists in a new country, "had no use for ghosts." A fresh colony does not produce ghosts. "There is hardly an English or Scottish castle without its spook (spuck). On the other hand, you look in vain for such a thing in the United States"—spiritualism apart. {Footnote: Op. laud., p. 204.}
This is a hasty generalisation! Helbig will, if he looks, find ghosts enough in the literature of North America while still colonial, and in Australia, a still more newly settled country, sixty years ago Fisher's ghost gave evidence of Fisher's murder, evidence which, as in another Australian case, served the ends of justice. {Footnote: See, in The Valet's Tragedy (A. L.): "Fisher's Ghost."} More recent Australian ghosts are familiar to psychical research.
This colonial theory is one of Helbig's too venturous generalisations.
He studies the ghost, or rather dream-apparition, of Patroclus after
examining the funeral of Hector; but we shall begin with Patroclus.
Achilles (XXIII. 4-16) first hails his friend "even in the House of
Hades" (so he believes that spirits are in Hades), and says that he
has brought Hector "raw for dogs to devour," and twelve Trojans of good
family "to slaughter before thy pyre." That night, when Achilles is
asleep (XXIII. 65) the spirit ({Greek: psyche}) of Patroclus appears to
him, says that he is forgotten, and begs to be burned at once, that he
may pass the gates of Hades, for the other spirits drive him off and
will not let him associate with them "beyond the River," and he wanders
vaguely along the wide-gated dwelling of Hades. "Give me thy hand, for
never more again shall I come back from Hades, when ye have given me my
due of fire." Patroclus, being newly discarnate, does not yet know
that a spirit cannot take a living man's hand, though, in fact, tactile
hallucinations are not uncommon in the presence of phantasms of the
dead. "Lay not my bones apart from thine ... let one coffer" ({Greek:
soros}) "hide our bones."
{Greek: Soros}, like larnax, is a coffin (Sarg), or
what the Americans call a "casket," in the opinion of Helbig: {Footnote:
OP. laud., p.217.} it is an oblong receptacle of the bones and dust.
Hector was buried in a larnax; SO will Achilles and Patroclus be
when Achilles falls, but the dust of Patroclus is kept, meanwhile, in a
golden covered cup (phialae) in the quarters of Achilles; it is not laid
in howe after his cremation (XXIII. 243).
Achilles tries to embrace Patroclus, but fails, like Odysseus with the shade of his mother in Hades, in the ODYSSEY. He exclaims that "there remaineth then even in the House of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, albeit the life" (or the wits) "be not anywise therein, for all night hath the spirit of hapless Patroclus stood over me...."
In this speech Helbig detects the hand of the late Ionian poet. What goes before is part of the genuine old Epic, the kernel, done at a time when men believed that spooks could take part in the affairs of the upper world. Achilles therefore (in his dream), thought that he could embrace his friend. It was the sceptical Ionian, in a fresh and spookless colony, who knew that he could not; he thinks the ghost a mere dream, and introduces his scepticism in XXIII. 99-107. He brought in "the ruling ideas of his own period." The ghost, says the Ionian bearbeiter, is intangible, though in the genuine old epic the ghost himself thought otherwise—he being new to the situation and without experience. This is the first sample of the critical Ionian spirit, later so remarkable in philosophy and natural science, says Helbig. {Footnote: Op. laud., pp. 233,234.}
We need not discuss this acute critical theory. The natural interpretation of the words of Achilles is obvious; as Mr. Leaf remarks, the words are "the cry of sudden personal conviction in a matter which has hitherto been lazily accepted as an orthodox dogma." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii. p. 620.} Already, as we have seen, Achilles has made promises to Patroclus in the House of Hades, now he exclaims "there really is something in the doctrine of a feeble future life."
It is vain to try to discriminate between an old epic belief in able-bodied ghosts and an Ionian belief in mere futile shades, in the Homeric poems. Everywhere the dead are too feeble to be worth worshipping after they are burned; but, as Mr. Leaf says with obvious truth, and with modern instances, "men are never so inconsistent as in their beliefs about the other world." We ourselves hold various beliefs simultaneously. The natives of Australia and of Tasmania practise, or did practise, every conceivable way of disposing of the dead—burying, burning, exposure in trees, carrying about the bodies or parts of them, eating the bodies, and so forth. If each such practice corresponded, as archaeologists believe, to a different opinion about the soul, then all beliefs were held together at once, and this, in fact, is the case. There is not now one and now another hard and fast orthodoxy of belief about the dead, though now we find ancestor worship prominent and now in the shade.
After gifts of hair and the setting up of jars full of oil and honey, Achilles has the body laid on the top of the pyre in the centre. Bodies of sheep and oxen, two dogs and four horses, are strewed around: why, we know not, for the dead is not supposed to need food: the rite may be a survival, for there were sacrifices at the burials of the Mycenaean shaft graves. Achilles slays also the twelve Trojans, "because of mine anger at thy slaying," he says (XXIII. 23). This was his reason, as far as he consciously had any reason, not that his friend might have twelve thralls in Hades. After the pyre is alit Achilles drenches it all night with wine, and, when the flame dies down, the dead hero's bones are collected and placed in the covered cup of gold. The circle of the barrow is then marked out, stones are set up round it (we see them round Highland tumuli), and earth is heaped up; no more is done; the tomb is empty; the covered cup holding the ashes is in the hut of Achilles.
We must note another trait. After the body of Patroclus was recovered, it was washed, anointed, laid on a bier, and covered from head to foot {Greek: heano liti}, translated by Helbig, "with a linen sheet" (cf. XXIII. 254). The golden cup with the ashes is next wrapped {Greek: heano liti}; here Mr. Myers renders the words "with a linen veil." Scottish cremation burials of the Bronze Age retain traces of linen wrappings of the urn. {Footnote: Proceedings of the Scottish society of Antiquaries, 1905, p. 552. For other cases, cf. Leaf, Iliad, XXIV. 796. Note.} Over all a white {Greek: pharos} (mantle) was spread. In Iliad, XXIV. 231, twelve {Greek: pharea} with chitons, single cloaks, and other articles of dress, are taken to Achilles by Priam as part of the ransom of Hector's body. Such is the death-garb of Patroclus; but Helbig, looking for Ionian innovations in Book XXIV., finds that the death-garb of Hector is not the same as that of Patroclus in Book XXIII. One difference is that when the squires of Achilles took the ransom of Hector from the waggon of Priam, they left in it two {Greek: pharea} and a well-spun chiton. The women washed and anointed Hector's body; they clad him in the chiton, and threw one {Greek: pharos} over it; we are not told what they did with the other. Perhaps, as Mr. Leaf says, it was used as a cover for the bier, perhaps it was not, but was laid under the body (Helbig). All we know is that Hector's body was restored to Priam in a chiton and a {Greek: pharos}, which do not seem to have been removed before he was burned; while Patroclus had no chiton in death, but a {Greek: pharos} and, apparently, a linen sheet.
To the ordinary reader this does not seem, in the circumstances, a strong mark of different ages and different burial customs. Priam did not bring any linen sheet—or whatever {Greek: heanos lis} may be—in the waggon as part of Hector's ransom; and it neither became Achilles to give nor Priam to receive any of Achilles's stuff as death-garb for Hector. The squires, therefore, gave back to Priam, to clothe his dead son, part of what he had brought; nothing can be more natural, and there, we may say, is an end on't. They did what they could in the circumstances. But Helbig has observed that, in a Cean inscription of the fifth century B.C., there is a sumptuary law, forbidding a corpse to wear more than three white garments, a sheet under him, a chiton, and a mantle cast over him. {Footnote: op. laud., p. 209.} He supposes that Hector wore the chiton, and had one {Greek: pharos} over him and the other under him, though Homer does not say that. The Laws of Solon also confined the dead man to three articles of dress. {Footnote: Plutarch, Solon, 21.} In doing so Solon sanctioned an old custom, and that Ionian custom, described by the author of Book XXIV., bewrays him, says Helbig, for a late Ionian bearbeiter, deserting true epic usages and inserting those of his own day. But in some Attic Dipylon vases, in the pictures of funerals, we see no garments or sheets over the corpses.
Penelope also wove a {Greek: charos} against the burial of old Laertes, but surely she ought to have woven for him; on Helbig's showing Hector had two, Patroclus had only one; Patroclus is in the old epic, Hector and Laertes are in the Ionian epics; therefore, Laertes should have had two {Greek: charea} but we only hear of one. Penelope had to finish the {Greek: charos} and show it; {Footnote: Odyssey, XXIV. 147.} now if she wanted to delay her marriage, she should have begun the second {Greek: charos} just as necessary as the first, if Hector, with a pair of {Greek: charea} represents Ionian usage. But Penelope never thought of what, had she read Helbig, she would have seen to be so obvious. She thought of no funeral garments for the old man but one shroud {Greek: speiron} (Odyssey, II. 102; XIX. 147); yet, being, by the theory, a character of late Ionian, not of genuine old AEolic epic, she should have known better. It is manifest that if even the acuteness and vast erudition of Helbig can only find such invisible differences as these between the manners of the genuine old epic and the late Ionian innovations, there is really no difference, beyond such trifles as diversify custom in any age.
Hector, when burned and when his ashes have been placed in the casket, is laid in a {Greek: kapetos}, a ditch or trench (Iliad, XV. 356; XVIII. 564); but here (XXIV. 797) {Greek: kapetos} is a chamber covered with great stones, within the howe, the casket being swathed with purple robes, and this was the end. The ghost of Hector would not revisit the sun, as ghosts do freely in the Cyclic poems, a proof that the Cyclics are later than the Homeric poems. {Footnote: Helbig, op. laud., pp. 240, 241.}
If the burning of the weapons of Eetion and Elpenor are traces of another than the old AEolic epic faith, {Footnote: Ibid., p. 253.} they are also traces of another than the late Ionic epic faith, for no weapons are burned with Hector. In the Odyssey the weapons of Achilles are not burned; in the Iliad the armour of Patroclus is not burned. No victims of any kind are burned with Hector: possibly the poet was not anxious to repeat what he had just described (his last book is already a very long book); possibly the Trojans did not slay victims at the burning.
The howes or barrows built over the Homeric dead were hillocks high enough to be good points of outlook for scouts, as in the case of the barrow of AEsyetes (Iliad, II. 793) and "the steep mound," the howe of lithe Myrine (II. 814). We do not know that women were usually buried in howe, but Myrine was a warrior maiden of the Amazons. We know, then, minutely what the Homeric mode of burial was, with such variations as have been noted. We have burning and howe even in the case of an obscure oarsman like Elpenor. It is not probable, however, that every peaceful mechanic had a howe all to himself; he may have had a small family cairn; he may not have had an expensive cremation.
The interesting fact is that no barrow burial precisely of the Homeric kind has ever been discovered in Greek sites. The old Mycenaeans buried either in shaft graves or in a stately tholos; and in rock chambers, later, in the town cemetery: they did not burn the bodies. The people of the Dipylon period sometimes cremated, sometimes inhumed, but they built no barrow over the dead. {Footnote: Annal. de l'Inst., 1872, pp. 135, 147, 167. Plausen, ut supra.} The Dipylon was a period of early iron swords, made on the lines of not the best type of bronze sword. Now, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, our Homeric accounts of burial "are all late; the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii. p. 619. Note 2. While Mr. Leaf says that "the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing" of burial, he accepts XXII. 342, 343 as of the oldest part. These lines describe cremation, and Mr. Leaf does not think them borrowed from the "later" VII. 79, 80, but that VII. 79, 80 are "perhaps borrowed" from XXII. 342, 343. It follows that "the oldest parts of the poems" do tell us of cremation.} We shall show, however, that Mr. Leaf's "kernel" alludes to cremation. What is "late"? In this case it is not the Dipylon period, say 900-750 B.C. It is not any later period; one or two late barrow burials do not answer to the Homeric descriptions. The "late" parts of the poems, therefore, dealing with burials, in Books VI., VII., XIX., XXIII., XXIV., and the Odyssey, are of an age not in "the Mycenaean prime," not in the Dipylon period, not in any later period, say the seventh or sixth centuries B.C., and, necessarily, not of any subsequent period. Yet nobody dreams of saying that the poets describe a purely fanciful form of interment. They speak of what they know in daily life. If it be argued that the late poets preserve, by sheer force of epic tradition, a form of burial unknown in their own age, we ask, "Why did epic tradition not preserve the burial methods of the Mycenaean prime, the shaft grave, or the tholos, without cremation?"
Mr. Leaf's own conclusion is that the people of Mycenae were "spirit worshippers, practising inhumation, and partial mummification;" the second fact is dubious. "In the post-Mycenaean 'Dipylon' period, we find cremation and sepulture practised side by side. In the interval, therefore, two beliefs have come into conflict. {Footnote: All conceivable beliefs, we have said, about the dead are apt to coexist. For every conceivable and some rather inconceivable contemporary Australian modes of dealing with the dead, see Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia; Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia.} It seems that the Homeric poems mark this intermediate point...." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. 622.} In that case the Homeric poems are of one age, or, at least, all of them save "the original kernel" are of one age, namely, a period subsequent to the Mycenaean prime, but considerably prior to the Dipylon period, which exhibits a mixture of custom; cremation and inhumation coexisting, without barrows or howes.
We welcome this conclusion, and note that (whatever may be the case with the oldest parts of the poems which say nothing about funerals) the latest expansions must be of about 1100-1000 B.C. (?). The poem is so early that it is prior to hero worship and ancestor worship; or it might be more judicious to say that the poem is of an age that did not, officially, practise ancestor worship, whatever may have occurred in folk-custom. The Homeric age is one which had outgrown ancestor and hero worship, and had not, like the age of the Cyclics, relapsed into it. Enfin, unless we agree with Helbig as to essential variations of custom, the poems are the work of one age, and that a brief age, and an age of peculiar customs, cremation and barrow burial; and of a religion that stood, without spirit worship, between the Mycenzean period and the ninth century. That seems as certain as anything in prehistoric times can be, unless we are to say, that after the age of shaft graves and spirit worship came an age of cremation and of no spirit worship; and that late poets consciously and conscientiously preserved the tradition of this period into their own ages of hero worship and inhumation, though they did not preserve the tradition of the shaft-grave period. We cannot accept this theory of adherence to stereotyped poetical descriptions, nor can any one consistently adopt it in this case.
The reason is obvious. Mr. Leaf, with many other critics, distinguishes several successive periods of "expansion." In the first stratum we have the remains of "the original kernel." Among these remains is The Slaying of Hector (XXII. 1-404), "with but slight additions." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. xi.} In the Slaying of Hector that hero indicates cremation as the mode of burial. "Give them my body back again, that the Trojans and Trojans' wives grant me my due of fire after my death." Perhaps this allusion to cremation, in the "original kernel" in the Slaying of Hector, may be dismissed as a late borrowing from Book VII. 79, 80, where Hector makes conditions that the fallen hero shall be restored to his friends when he challenges the Achaeans to a duel. But whoever knows the curious economy by way of repetition that marks early national epics has a right to regard the allusion to cremation (XXII, 342,343) as an example of this practice. Compare La Chancun de Williame, lines 1041-1058 with lines 1140-1134. In both the dinner of a knight who has been long deprived of food is described in passages containing many identical lines. The poet, having found his formula, uses it whenever occasion serves. There are several other examples in the same epic. {Footnote: Romania, xxxiv. PP. 245, 246.} Repetitions in Homer need not indicate late additions; the artifice is part of the epic as it is of the ballad manner. If we are right, cremation is the mode of burial even in "the original kernel." Hector, moreover, in the kernel (XXII. 256-259) makes, before his final fight with Achilles, the same proposal as he makes in his challenge to a duel (VII. 85 et seqq.). The victor shall give back the body of the vanquished to his friends, but how the friends are to bury it Hector does not say—in this place. When dying, he does say (XXII. 342, 343).
In the kernel and all periods of expansion, funeral rites are described, and in all the method is cremation, with a howe or a barrow. Thus the method of cremation had come in as early as the "kernel," The Slaying of Hector, and as early as the first expansions, and it lasted till the period of the latest expansions, such as Books XXIII., XXIV.
But what is the approximate date of the various expansions of the original poem? On that point Mr. Leaf gives his opinion. The Making of the Arms of Achilles (Books XVIII., XIX. 1-39) is, with the Funeral of Patroclus (XXIII. 1-256), in the second set of expansions, and is thus two removes later than the original "kernel." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. xii.} Now this is the period—the Making of the Shield for Achilles is, at least, in touch with the period—of "the eminently free and naturalistic treatment which we find in the best Mycenaean work, in the dagger blades, in the siege fragment, and notably in the Vaphio cups," (which show long-haired men, not men close-cropped, as in the daggers and siege fragment). {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p, 606.} The poet of the age of the second expansions, then,' is at least in touch with the work of the shaft grave and ages. He need not be contemporary with that epoch, but "may well have had in his mind the work of artists older than himself." It is vaguely possible that he may have seen an ancient shield of the Mycenaean prime, and may be inspired by that. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 606, 607.}
Moreover, and still more remarkable, the ordinary Homeric form of cremation and howe-burial is even older than the period which, if not contemporary with, is clearly reminiscent of, the art of the shaft graves. For, in the period of the first expansions (VII. 1-3 I 2), the form of burial is cremation, with a barrow or tumulus. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. xi. and pp. 606, 607.} Thus Mr. Leaf's opinion might lead us to the conclusion that the usual Homeric form of burial occurs in a period PRIOR to an age in which the poet is apparently reminiscent of the work of two early epochs—the epoch of shaft graves and that of THOLOS graves. If this be so, cremation and urn burial in cairns may be nearly as old as the Mycenaean shaft graves, or as old as the THOLOS graves, and they endure into the age of the latest expansions.
We must not press, however, opinions founded on the apparent technical resemblance of the free style and coloured metal work on the shield of Achilles, to the coloured metal work and free design on the daggers of the Mycenaean shaft graves. It is enough for us to note that the passages concerning burial, from the "kernel" itself, and also from the earliest to the latest expansions, are all perfectly harmonious, and of a single age—unless we are convinced by Helbig's objections. That age must have been brief, indeed, for, before it arrives, the period of tholos graves, as at Vaphio, must expire, on one hand, while the blending of cremation with inhumation, in the Dipylon age, must have been evolved after the cremation age passed, on the other. That brief intervening age, however, was the age of the ILIAD and Odyssey. This conclusion can only be avoided by alleging that late poets, however recent and revolutionary, carefully copied the oldest epic model of burial, while they innovated in almost every other point, so we are told. We can go no further till we find an unrifled cairn burial answering to Homeric descriptions. We have, indeed, in Thessaly, "a large tumulus which contained a silver urn with burned remains." But the accompanying pottery dated it in the second century B.C. {Footnote: Ridgeway, Early Age Of Greece, vol. i. p. 491; Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. pp. 20-25.} It is possible enough that all tumuli of the Homeric period have been robbed by grave plunderers in the course of the ages, as the Vikings are said to have robbed the cairns of Sutherlandshire, in which they were not likely to find a rich reward for their labours. A conspicuous howe invites robbery—the heroes of the Saga, like Grettir, occasionally rob a howe—and the fact is unlucky for the Homeric archaeologist.
We have now tried to show that, as regards (1) to the absence from Homer of new religious and ritual ideas, or of very old ideas revived in Ionia, (2) as concerns the clear conception of a loose form of feudalism, with an Over-Lord, and (3) in the matter of burial, the Iliad and Odyssey are self-consistent, and bear the impress of a single and peculiar moment of culture.
The fact, if accepted, is incompatible with the theory that the poets both introduced the peculiar conditions of their own later ages and also, on other occasions, consciously and consistently "archaised." Not only is such archaising inconsistent with the art of an uncritical age, but a careful archaiser, with all the resources of Alexandrian criticism at his command, could not archaise successfully. We refer to Quintus Smyrnaeus, author of the Post Homerica, in fourteen books. Quintus does his best; but we never observe in him that naïf delight in describing weapons and works of art, and details of law and custom which are so conspicuous in Homer and in other early poets. He does give us Penthesilea's great sword, with a hilt of ivory and silver; but of what metal was the blade? We are not told, and the reader of Quintus will observe that, though he knows {Greek: chalkos}, bronze, as a synonym for weapons, he scarcely ever, if ever, says that a sword or spear or arrow-head was of bronze—a point on which Homer constantly insists. When he names the military metal Quintus usually speaks of iron. He has no interest in the constitutional and legal sides of heroic life, so attractive to Homer.
Yet Quintus consciously archaises, in a critical age, with Homer as his model. Any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the ILIAD must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the Border ballads. If he succeeds in producing nothing that will at once mark his work as modern, he will be more successful than any poet who has made the experiment, and more successful than the most ingenious modern forgers of gems, jewels, and terra-cottas. They seldom deceive experts, and, when they do, other experts detect the deceit.