Homer and His Age by Andrew Lang (page 5)

CHAPTER XIII

THE “DOLONEIA”

“ILIAD,” BOOK X.

Of all Books in the [blank space] Book X., called the _Doloneia_, is most generally scouted and rejected. The Book, in fact, could be omitted, and only a minutely analytic reader would perceive the lacuna. He would remark that in Iliad, IX. 65- 84, certain military preparations are made which, if we suppress Book X., lead up to nothing, and that in _Iliad_, XIV. 9-11, we find Nestor with the shield of his son, Thrasymedes, while Thrasymedes has his father’s shield, a fact not explained, though the poet certainly meant something by it. The explanation in both cases is found in Book X., which may also be thought to explain why the Achaeans, so disconsolate in Book IX., and why Agamemnon, so demoralised, so gaily assume the offensive in Book XI. Some ancient critics, Scholiast T and Eustathius, attributed the _DOLONEIA_ to Homer, but supposed it to have been a separate composition of his added to the _Iliad_ by Pisistratus. This merely proves that they did not find any necessity for the existence of the _DOLONEIA_. Mr. Allen, who thinks that “it always held its present place,” says, “the _DOLONEIA_ is persistently written down.” [Footnote: _Classical Review_, May 1906, p. 194]

To understand the problem of the _DOLONEIA_, we must make a summary of its contents. In Book IX. 65-84, at the end of the disastrous fighting of Book VIII, the Achaeans, by Nestor’s advice, station an advanced guard of “_the young men_” between the fosse and wall; 700 youths are posted there, under Meriones, the squire of Idomeneus, and Thrasymedes, the son of Nestor. All this is preparation for Book X., as Mr. Leaf remarks, [Footnote: _Companion_, p. 174.] though in any case an advanced guard was needed. Their business is to remain awake, under arms, in case the Trojans, who are encamped on the plain, attempt a night attack. At their station the young men will be under arms till dawn; they light fires and cook their provisions; the Trojans also surround their own watchfires.

The Achaean chiefs then hold council, and Agamemnon sends the embassy to Achilles. The envoys bring back his bitter answer; and all men go to sleep in their huts, deeply discouraged, as even Odysseus avowed.

Here the Tenth Book begins, and it is manifest that the poet is thoroughly well acquainted with the Ninth Book. Without the arrangements made in the Ninth Book, and without the despairing situation of that Book, his lay is impossible. It will be seen that critics suppose him, alternately, to have “quite failed to realise the conditions of life of the heroes of whom he sang” (that is, if certain lines are genuine), and also to be a peculiarly learned archaeologist and a valuable authority on weapons. He is addicted to introducing fanciful “touches of heroic simplicity,” says Mr. Leaf, and is altogether a puzzling personage to the critics.

The Book opens with the picture of Agamemnon, sleepless from anxiety, while the other chiefs, save Menelaus, are sleeping. He “hears the music of the joyous Trojan pipes and flutes” and sees the reflected glow of their camp-fires, we must suppose, for he could not see the fires themselves through the new wall of his own camp, as critics very wisely remark. He tears out his hair before Zeus; no one else does so, in the _Iliad_, but no one else is Agamemnon, alone and in despair.

He rises to consult Nestor, throwing a lion’s skin over his _chiton_, and grasping a spear. Much noise is made about the furs, such as this lion’s pelt, which the heroes, in Book X., throw about their shoulders when suddenly aroused. That sportsmen like the heroes should keep the pelts of animals slain by them for use as coverlets, and should throw on one of the pelts when aroused in a hurry, is a marvellous thing to the critics. They know that fleeces were used for coverlets of beds (IX. 661), and pelts of wild animals, slain by Anchises, cover his bed in the Hymn to Aphrodite.

But the facts do not enlighten critics. Yet no facts could be more natural. A scientific critic, moreover, never reflects that the poet is dealing with an unexampled situation–heroes wakened and called into the cold air in a night of dread, but not called to battle. Thus Reichel says: “The poet knows so little about true heroic costume that he drapes the princes in skins of lions and panthers, like giants…. But about a corslet he never thinks.” [Footnote: Reichel, p.70.]

The simple explanation is that the poet has not hitherto had to tell us about men who are called up, not to fight, on a night that must have been chilly. In war they do not wear skins, though Paris, in archer’s equipment, wears a pard’s skin (III. 17). Naturally, the men throw over themselves their fur coverlets; but Nestor, a chilly veteran, prefers a _chiton_ and a wide, double-folded, fleecy purple cloak. The cloak lay ready to his hand, for such cloaks were used as blankets (XXIV. 646; Odyssey, III. 349, 351; IV. 299; II. 189). We hear more of such bed- coverings in the Odyssey than in the merely because in the _ODYSSEY_ we have more references to beds and to people in bed. That a sportsman may have (as many folk have now) a fur coverlet, and may throw it over him as a kind of dressing-gown or “bed-gown,” is a simple circumstance which bewilders the critical mind and perplexed Reichel.

If the poet knew so little as Reichel supposed his omission of corslets is explained. Living in an age of corslets (seventh century), he, being a literary man, knew nothing about corslets, or, as he is also an acute archaeologist, he knew too much; he knew that they were not worn in the Mycenaean prime, so he did not introduce them. The science of this remarkable ignoramus, in _this_ view, accounts for his being aware that pelts of animals were in vogue as coverlets, just as fur dressing-gowns were worn in the sixteenth century, and he introduces them precisely as he leaves corslets out, because he knows that pelts of fur were in use, and that, in the Mycenaean prime, corslets were not worn.

In speaking to Nestor, Agamemnon awakens sympathy: “Me, of all the Achaeans, Zeus has set in toil and labour ceaselessly.” They are almost the very words of Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland: “Deus, Dist li Reis, si peneuse est ma vie.”_ The author of the _Doloneia_ consistently conforms to the character of Agamemnon as drawn in the rest of the _Iliad_. He is over-anxious; he is demoralising in his fits of gloom, but all the burden of the host hangs on him–sipeneuse _est ma via_.

To turn to higher things. Menelaus, too, was awake, anxious about the Argives, who risked their lives in his cause alone. He got up, put on a pard’s skin and a bronze helmet (here the poet forgets, what he ought to have known, that no bronze helmets have been found in the Mycenaean graves). Menelaus takes a spear, and goes to look for Agamemnon, whom he finds arming himself beside his ship. He discovers that Agamemnon means to get Nestor to go and speak to the advanced guard, as his son is their commander, and they will obey Nestor. Agamemnon’s pride has fallen very low! He tells Menelaus to waken the other chief with all possible formal courtesy, for, brutally rude when in high heart, at present Agamemnon cowers to everybody. He himself finds Nestor in bed, his _shield_, two spears, and helmet beside him, also his glittering _zoster_. His corslet is not named; perhaps the poet knew that the _zoster_, or broad metallic belt, had been evolved, but that the corslet had not been invented; or perhaps he “knows so little about the costume of the heroes” that he is unaware of the existence of corslets. Nestor asks Agamemnon what he wants; and Agamemnon says that his is a toilsome life, that he cannot sleep, that his knees tremble, and that he wants Nestor to come and visit the outposts.

There is really nothing absurd in this. Napoleon often visited his outposts in the night before Waterloo, and Cromwell rode along his lines all through the night before Dunbar, biting his lips till the blood dropped on his linen bands. In all three cases hostile armies were arrayed within striking distance of each other, and the generals were careworn.

Nestor admits that it is an anxious night, and rather blames Menelaus for not rousing the other chiefs; but Agamemnon explains and defends his brother. Nestor then puts on the comfortable cloak already described, and picks up a spear, [blank space] _in HIS QUARTERS_.

As for Odysseus, he merely throws a shield over his shoulders. The company of Diomede are sleeping with their heads on their shields. Thence Reichel (see “The Shield”) infers that the late poet of Book X. gave them small Ionian round bucklers; but it has been shown that no such inference is legitimate. Their spears were erect by their sides, fixed in the ground by the _sauroter_, or butt-spike, used by the men of the late “warrior vase” found at Mycenae. To arrange the spears thus, we have seen, was a point of drill that, in Aristotle’s time, survived among the Illyrians. [Footnote: _Poetics_, XXV.] The practice is also alluded to in _Iliad_, III 135. During a truce “the tall spears are planted by their sides.” The poet, whether ignorant or learned, knew that point of war, later obsolete in Greece, but still extant in Illyria.

Nestor aroused Diomede, whose night apparel was the pelt of a lion; he took his spear, and they came to the outposts, where the men were awake, and kept a keen watch on all movements among the Trojans. Nestor praised them, and the princes, taking Nestor’s son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones with them, went out into the open in view of the Trojan camp, sat down, and held a consultation.

Nestor asked if any one would volunteer to go as a spy among the Trojans and pick up intelligence. His reward will be “a black ewe with her lamb at her foot,” from their chiefs–“nothing like her for value”–and he will be remembered in songs at feasts, _or_ will be admitted to feasts and wine parties of the chiefs. [Footnote: Leaf, Note on X. 215.] The proposal is very odd; what do the princes want with black ewes, while at feasts they always have honoured places? Can Nestor be thinking of sending out any brave swift-footed young member of the outpost party, to whom the reward would be appropriate?

After silence, Diomede volunteers to go, with a comrade, though this kind of work is very seldom undertaken in any army of any age by a chief, and by his remark about admission to wine parties it is clear that Nestor was not thinking of a princely spy. Many others volunteer, but Agamemnon bids Diomede choose his own companion, with a very broad hint not to take Menelaus. _HIS_ death, Agamemnon knows, would mean the disgraceful return of the host to Greece; besides he is, throughout the _ILIAD_, deeply attached to his brother.

The poet of Book X., however late, knows the _ILIAD_ well, for he keeps up the uniform treatment of the character of the Over-Lord. As he knows the _ILIAD_ well, how can he be ignorant of the conditions of life of the heroes? How can he dream of “introducing a note of heroic simplicity” (Mr. Leaf’s phrase), when he must be as well aware as we are of the way in which the heroes lived? We cannot explain the black ewes, if meant as a princely reward, but we do not know everything about Homeric life.

Diomede chooses Odysseus, “whom Pallas Athene loveth”; she was also the patroness of Diomede himself, in Books V., VI.

As they are unarmed–all of the chiefs hastily aroused were unarmed, save for a spear there or a sword here–Thrasymedes gives to Diomede his two-edged sword, _his_ shield, and “a helm of bull’s hide, without horns or crest, that is called a skull-cap (knap-skull), and keeps the heads of strong young men.” All the advanced guard were young men, as we saw in Book IX. 77. Obviously, Thrasymedes must then send back to camp, though we are not told it, for another shield, sword, and helmet, as he is to lie all night under arms. We shall hear of the shield later.

Meriones, who is an archer (XIII. 650), lends to Odysseus his bow and quiver and a sword. He also gives him “a helm made of leather; and with many a thong it was stiffly wrought within, while without the white teeth of a boar of flashing tusks were arrayed, thick set on either side well and cunningly… .” Here Reichel perceives that the ignorant poet is describing a piece of ancient headgear represented in Mycenaean art, while the boars’ teeth were found by Schliemann, to the number of sixty, in Grave IV. at Mycenae. Each of them had “the reverse side cut perfectly flat, and with the borings to attach them to some other object.” They were “in a veritable funereal armoury.” The manner of setting the tusks on the cap is shown on an ivory head of a warrior from Mycenae. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, 196-197.]

Reichel recognises that the poet’s description in Book X. is excellent, “_ebenso klar als eingehend_.” He publishes another ivory head from Spata, with the same helmet set with boars’ tusks. [Footnote: Reichel, pp. 102-104] Mr. Leaf decides that this description by the poet, wholly ignorant of heroic costume, as Reichel thinks him, must be “another instance of the archaic and archaeologising tendency so notable in Book X.” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 629.]

At the same time, according to Reichel and Mr. Leaf, the poet of Book X. introduces the small round Ionian buckler, thus showing his utter ignorance of the great Mycenaean shield. The ignorance was most unusual and quite inexcusable, for any one who reads the rest of the _Iliad_ (which the poet of Book X. knew well) is aware that the Homeric shields were huge, often covering body and legs. This fact the poet of Book X. did not know, in Reichel’s opinion. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 575]

How are we to understand this poet? He is such an erudite archaeologist that, in the seventh century, he knows and carefully describes a helmet of the Mycenaean prime. Did he excavate it? and had the leather interior lasted with the felt cap through seven centuries? Or did he see a sample in an old temple of the Mycenaean prime, or in a museum of his own period? Or had he heard of it in a lost Mycenaean poem? Yet, careful as he was, so pedantic that he must have puzzled his seventh-century audience, who never saw such caps, the poet knew nothing of the shields and costumes of the heroes, though he might have found out all that is known about them in the then existing Iliadic lays with which he was perfectly familiar–see his portrait of Agamemnon. He was well aware that corslets were, in Homeric poetry, anachronisms, for he gave Nestor none; yet he fully believed, in his ignorance, that small Ionian bucklers loveth; (which need the aid of corslets badly) were the only wear among the heroes!

Criticism has, as we often observe, no right to throw the first stone at the inconsistencies of Homer. As we cannot possibly believe that one poet knew so much which his contemporaries did not know (and how, in the seventh century, could he know it?), and that he also knew so little, knew nothing in fact, we take our own view. The poet of Book X. sings of _a_ fresh topic, a confused night of dread; of young men wearing the headgear which, he says, young men _do_ wear; of pelts of fur such as suddenly wakened men, roused, but not roused for battle, would be likely to throw over their bodies against the chill air. He describes things of his own day; things with which he is familiar. He is said to “take quite a peculiar delight in the minute description of dress and weapons.” [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 423.] We do not observe that he does describe weapons or shields minutely; but Homer always loves to describe weapons and costume–scores of examples prove it–and here he happens to be describing such costume as he nowhere else has occasion to mention. By an accident of archaeological discovery, we find that there were such caps set with boars’ tusks as he introduces. They had survived, for young men on night duty, into the poet’s age. We really cannot believe that a poet of the seventh century had made excavations in Mycenaean graves. If he did and put the results into his lay, his audience–not wearing boars’ tusks–would have asked, “What nonsense is the man talking?”

Erhardt, remarking on the furs which the heroes throw over their shoulders when aroused, says that this kind of wrap is very late. It was Peisander who, in the second half of the seventh century, clothed Herakles in a lion’s skin. Peisander brought this costume into poetry, and the author of the _Doloneia_ knew no better than to follow Peisander. [Footnote: _Die Enstehung der Homerischen Gedichte_, pp. 163-164.] The poet of the _Doloneia_ was thus much better acquainted with Peisander than with the Homeric lays, which could have taught him that a hero would never wear a fur coverlet when aroused–not to fight– from slumber. Yet he knew about leathern caps set with boars’ tusks. He must have been an erudite excavator, but, in literature, a reader only of recent minor poetry.

Having procured arms, without corslets (_with_ corslets, according to Carl Robert)–whether, if they had none, because the poet knew that corslets were anachronisms, or because spies usually go as lightly burdened as possible–Odysseus and Diomede approach the Trojan camp. The hour is the darkest hour before dawn. They hear, but do not see, a heron sent by Athene as an omen, and pray to the goddess, with promise of sacrifice.

In the Trojan camp Hector has called a council, and asked for a volunteer spy to seek intelligence among the Achaeans. He offers no black ewes as a reward, but the best horses of the enemy. This allures Dolon, son of a rich Trojan, “an only son among five sisters,” a poltroon, a weak lad, ugly, but swift of foot, and an enthusiastic lover of horses. He asks for the steeds of Achilles, which Hector swears to give him; and to be lightly clad he takes merely spear and bow and a cap of ferret skin, with the pelt of a wolf for covering. Odysseus sees him approach; he and Diomede lie down among the dead till Dolon passes, then they chase him towards the Achaean camp and catch him. He offers ransom, which before these last days of the war was often accepted. Odysseus replies evasively, and asks for information. Dolon, thinking that the bitterness of death is past, explains that only the Trojans have watch-fires; the allies, more careless, have none. At the extreme flank of the host sleep the newly arrived Thracians, under their king, Rhesus, who has golden armour, and “the fairest horses that ever I beheld” (the ruling passion for horses is strong in Dolon), “and the greatest, whiter than snow, and for speed like the winds.”

Having learned all that he needs to know, Diomede ruthlessly slays Dolon. Odysseus thanks Athene, and hides the poor spoils of the dead, marking the place. They then creep into the dark camp of the sleeping Thracians, and as Diomede slays them Odysseus drags each body aside, to leave a clear path for the horses, that they may not plunge and tremble when they are led forth, “for they were not yet used to dead men.” No line in Homer shows more intimate knowledge and realisation of horses and of war. Odysseus drives the horses of Rhesus out of the camp with the bow of Meriones; he has forgotten to take the whip from the chariot. Diomede, having slain King Rhesus asleep, thinks whether he shall lift out the chariot (war chariots were very light) or drag it by the pole; but Athene warns him to be going. He “springs upon the steeds,” and they make for their camp. It is not clearly indicated whether they ride or drive (X., 5 I 3, 527-528, 541); but, suppose that they ride, are we to conclude that the fact proves “lateness”? The heroes always drive in Homer, but it is inconceivable that they could not ride in cases of necessity, as here, if Diomede has thought it wiser not to bring out the chariot and harness the horses. Riding is mentioned in _Iliad_, XV. 679, in a simile; again, in a simile, _Odyssey_, V. 37 I. It is not the custom for heroes to ride; the chariot is used in war and in travelling, but, when there are horses and no chariot, men could not be so imbecile as not to mount the horses, nor could the poet be so pedantic as not to make them do so.

The shields would cause no difficulty; they would be slung sideways, like the shields of knights in the early Middle Ages. The pair, picking up Dolon’s spoils as they pass, hurry back to the chiefs, where Nestor welcomes them. The others laugh and are encouraged (to encourage them and his audience is the aim of the poet); while the pair go to Diomede’s quarters, wash off the blood and sweat from their limbs in the sea, and then “enter the polished baths,” common in the _Odyssey_, unnamed in the Iliad. But on no other occasion in the Iliad are we admitted to view this part of heroic toilette. Nowhere else, in fact, do we accompany a hero to his quarters and his tub after the day’s work is over. Achilles, however, refuses to wash, after fighting, in his grief for Patroclus, though plenty of water was being heated for the purpose, and it is to be presumed that a bath was ready for the water (_Iliad_, XXIII. 40). See, too, for Hector’s bath, XXII. 444.

The two heroes then refresh themselves; breakfast, in fact, and drink, as is natural. By this time the dawn must have been in the sky, and in Book XI. men are stirring with the dawn. Such is the story of Book X. The reader may decide as to whether it is “_Very_ late; barely Homeric,” or a late and deliberate piece of burlesque, [Footnote: Henry, _Classical Review_. March 1906.] or whether it is very Homeric, though the whole set of situations–a night of terror, an anxious chief, a nocturnal adventure–are unexampled in the poem.

The poet’s audience of warriors must have been familiar with such situations, and must have appreciated the humorous, ruthless treatment of Dolon, the spoiled only brother of five sisters. Mr. Monro admitted that Dolon is Shakespearian, but added, “too Shakespearian for Homer.” One may as well say that Agincourt, in Henry V., is “too Homeric for Shakespeare.”

Mr. Monro argued that “the Tenth Book comes in awkwardly after the Ninth.” Nitzsche thinks just the reverse. The patriotic warrior audience would delight in the _Doloneia_ after the anguish of Book IX.; would laugh with Odysseus at the close of his adventure, and rejoice with the other Achaeans (X. 505).

“The introductory part of the Book is cumbrous,” says Mr. Monro. To us it is, if we wish to get straight to the adventure, just as the customary delays in Book XIX., before Achilles is allowed to fight, are tedious to us. But the poet’s audience did not necessarily share our tastes, and might take pleasure (as I do) in the curious details of the opening of Book X. The poet was thinking of his audience, not of modern professors.

“We hear no more of Rhesus and his Thracians.” Of Rhesus there was no more to hear, and his people probably went home, like Glenbuckie’s Stewarts after the mysterious death of their chief in Amprior’s house of Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. “The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad … It is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind.” But it was time for “comic relief.” If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle under the sunlight. Is the poet not to be allowed to be various, and is the scene of the Porter in _Macbeth_, “in style and tone,” like the rest of the drama? (_Macbeth_, Act ii. sc. 3). Here, of course, Shakespeare indulges infinitely more in “comedy of a rough practical kind” than does the author of the _Doloneia_.

The humour and the cruelty do not exceed what is exhibited in many of the _gabes_, or insulting boasts of heroes over dead foes in other parts of the _Iliad_; such as the taunting comparison of a warrior falling from his chariot to a diver after oysters, or as “one of the Argives hath caught the spear in his flesh, and leaning thereon for a staff, methinks that he will go down within the house of Hades” (XIV. 455-457). The _Iliad_, like the sagas, is rich in this extremely practical humour.

Mr. Leaf says that the Book “must have been composed before the _Iliad_ had reached its present form, for it cannot have been meant to follow on Book IX. It is rather another case of a parallel rival to that Book, coupled with it only in the final literary redaction,” which Mr. Leaf dates in the middle of the sixth century. “The Book must have been composed before the _Iliad_ had reached its present form,” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] It is not easy to understand this decision; for, as Mr. Leaf had previously written, about Book IX. 60-68, “the posting of the watch is at least not necessary to the story, and it has a suspicious air of being merely a preparation for the next Book, which is much later, and which turns entirely upon a visit to the sentinels.” [Footnote: _Companion,_ p.174.]

Now a military audience would not have pardoned the poet of Book IX. if, in the circumstances of defeat, with a confident enemy encamped within striking distance, he had not made the Achaeans throw forth their outposts. The thing was inevitable and is not suspicious; but the poet purposely makes the advanced guard consist of young men under Nestor’s son and Meriones. He needs them for Book X. Therefore the poet of Book IX. is the poet of Book X. preparing his effect in advance; or the poet of Book X. is a man who cleverly takes advantage of Book IX., or he composed his poem of “a night of terror and adventure,” “in the air,” and the editor of 540 B.C., having heard it recited and copied it out, went back to Book IX. and inserted the advanced guard, under Thrasymedes and Meriones, to lead up to Book X.

On Mr. Leafs present theory, [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p.424.] Book X., we presume, was meant, not to follow Book IX., but to follow the end of Book VII, being an alternative to Book VIII. (composed, he says, to lead up to Book IX.) and Book IX. But Book VII. closes with the Achaean refusal of the compromise offered by Paris–the restoration of the property but not of the wife of Menelaus. The Trojans and Achaeans feast all night; the Trojans feast in the city. There is therefore no place here for Book X. after Book VII, and the Achaeans cannot roam about all night, as they are feasting; nor can Agamemnon be in the state of anxiety exhibited by him in Book X.

Book X. could not exist without Book IX., and _must_ have been “meant to follow on it.” Mr. Leaf sees that, in his preface to Book IX., [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 371.] “The placing of sentinels” (in Book IX. 80, 84) “is needed as an introduction to Book X. but has nothing to do with this Book” (IX.). But, we have said, it was inevitable, given the new situation in Book IX. (an Achaean repulse, and the enemy camped in front), that an advanced guard must be placed, even if there proved to be no need of their services. We presume that Mr. Leaf’s literary editor, finding that Book X. existed and that the advanced guard was a necessity of its action, went back to Book IX. and introduced an advanced guard of young men, with its captains, Thrasymedes and Meriones. Even after this the editor had much to do, if Book IX. originally exhibited Agamemnon as not in terror and despair, as it now does.

We need not throw the burden of all this work on the editor. As Mr. Leaf elsewhere writes, in a different mind, the Tenth Book “is obviously adapted to its present place in the _Iliad_, for it assumes a moment when Achilles is absent from the field, and when the Greeks are in deep dejection from a recent defeat. These conditions are exactly fulfilled by the situation at the end of Book IX.” [Footnote: _Companion_, p. 190.]

This is certainly the case. The Tenth Book could not exist without the Ninth; yet Mr. Leaf’s new opinion is that it “cannot have been meant to follow on Book IX.” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 424.] He was better inspired when he held the precisely opposite opinion.

Dr. Adolf Kiene [Footnote: Die _Epen des Homer, Zweiter Theil,_ pp. 90-94. Hanover, 1884.] accepts Book XI. as originally composed to fill its present place in the _Iliad._ He points out the despondency of the chiefs after receiving the reply of Achilles, and supposes that even Diomede (IX. 708) only urges Agamemnon to “array before the ships thy folk and horsemen,” for defensive battle. But, encouraged by the success of the night adventure, Agamemnon next day assumes the offensive. To consider thus is perhaps to consider too curiously. But it is clear that the Achaeans have been much encouraged by the events of Book X., especially Agamemnon, whose character, as Kiene observes, is very subtly and consistently treated, and “lies near the poet’s heart.” This is the point which we keep urging. Agamemnon’s care for Menelaus is strictly preserved in Book X.

Nitzsche (I 897) writes, “Between Book IX. and Book XI there is a gap; that gap the _Doloneia_ fills: it must have been composed to be part of the _ILIAD_.” But he thinks that the _Doloneia_ has taken the place of an earlier lay which filled the gap. [Footnote: Die _Echtheit der Doloneia,_ p. 32. Programme des K. K. Staats Gymnasium zu Marburg, 1877.] That the Book is never referred to later in the _Iliad_, even if it be true, is no great argument against its authenticity. For when later references are made to Book IX., they are dismissed as clever late interpolations. If the horses of Rhesus took part, as they do not, in the sports at the funeral of Patroclus, the passage would be called a clever interpolation: in fact, Diomede had better horses, divine horses to run. However, it is certainly remarkable that the interpolation was not made by one of the interpolators of critical theory.

Meanwhile there is, we think, a reference to Book X. in Book XIV. [Footnote: This was pointed out to me by Mr. Shewan, to whose great knowledge of Homer I am here much indebted.]

In _Iliad_, XIV. 9-11, we read that Nestor, in his quarters with the wounded Machaon, on the day following the night of Dolon’s death, hears the cry of battle and goes out to see what is happening. “He took the well-wrought shield of his son, horse- taming Thrasymedes, which was lying in the hut, all glistening with bronze, but _the son had the shield of his father_.”

Why had Thrasymedes the shield of his father? At about 3 A.M. before dawn the shield of Nestor was lying beside him in his own bedroom (Book X. 76), and at the same moment his son Thrasymedes _was_ on outpost duty, and had his own shield with him (Book IX. 81).

When, then, did father and son exchange shields, and why? Mr. Leaf says, “It is useless to inquire why father and son had thus changed shields, as the scholiasts of course do.”

The scholiasts merely babble. Homer, of course, meant _something_ by this exchange of shields, which occurred late in the night of Book IX. or very early in the following day, that of Books XI-XVI.

Let us follow again the sequence of events. On the night before the day when Nestor had Thrasymedes’ shield and Thrasymedes had Nestor’s, Thrasymedes was sent out, with shield and all, in command of one of the seven companies of an advanced guard, posted between fosse and wall, in case of a camisade by the Trojans, who were encamped on the plain (IX. 81). With him in command were Meriones and five other young men less notable. They had supplies with them and whatever was needed: they cooked supper in bivouac.

In the _Doloneia_ the wakeful princes, after inspecting the advanced guard, go forward within view of the Trojan ranks and consult. With them they take Nestor’s son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones (X. 196). The two young men, being on active service, are armed; the princes are not. Diomede, having been suddenly roused out of sleep, with no intention to fight, merely threw on his dressing-gown, a lion’s skin. Nestor wore a thick, double, purple dressing-gown. Odysseus had cast his shield about his shoulders. It was decided that Odysseus and Diomede should enter the Trojan camp and “prove a jeopardy.” Diomede had no weapon but his spear; so Thrasymedes, who is armed as we saw, lends him his bull’s-hide cap, “that keeps the heads of stalwart youths,” his sword (for that of Diomede “was left at the ships”), and his shield.

Diomede and Odysseus successfully achieve their adventure and return to the chiefs, where they talk with Nestor; and then they go to Diomede’s hut and drink. The outposts remain, of course, at their stations.

Meanwhile, Thrasymedes, having lent his shield to Diomede, has none of his own. Naturally, as he was to pass the night under arms, he would send to his father’s quarters for the old man’s shield, a sword, and a helmet. He would remain at his post (his men had provisions) till the general _reveillez_ at dawn, and would then breakfast at his post and go into the fray. Nestor, therefore, missing his shield, would send round to Diomede’s quarters for the shield of Thrasymedes, which had been lent overnight to Diomede, would take it into the fight, and would bring it back to his own hut when he carried the wounded Machaon thither out of the battle. When he arms to go out and seek for information, he picks up the shield of Thrasymedes.

Nothing can be more obvious; the poet, being a man of imagination, not a professor, sees it all, and casually mentions that the son had the father’s and the father had the son’s shield. His audience, men of the sword, see the case as clearly as the poet does: only we moderns and the scholiasts, almost as modern as ourselves, are puzzled.

It may also be argued, though we lay no stress on it, that in Book XI. 312, when Agamemnon has been wounded, we find Odysseus and Diomede alone together, without their contingents, because they have not separated since they breakfasted together, after returning from the adventure of Book X., and thus they have come rather late to the field. They find the Achaeans demoralised by the wounding of Agamemnon, and they make a stand. “What ails us,” asks Odysseus, “that we forget our impetuous valour?” The passage appears to take up the companionship of Odysseus and Diomede, who were left breakfasting together at the end of Book X. and are not mentioned till we meet them again in this scene of Book XI., as if they had just come on the field.

As to the linguistic tests of lateness “there are exceptionally numerous traces of later formation,” says Mr. Monro; while Fick, tout _contraire,_ writes, “clumsy Ionisms are not common, and, as a rule, occur in these parts which on older grounds show themselves to be late interpolations.” “The cases of agreement” (between Fick and Mr. Monro), “are few, and the passages thus condemned are not more numerous in the _Doloneia_ than in any average book.” [Footnote: Jevons, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vii. p. 302.] The six examples of “a post-Homeric use of the article” do not seem so very post-Homeric to an ordinary intelligence–parallels occur in Book I.–and “Perfects in [Greek: ka] from derivative verbs” do not destroy the impression of antiquity and unity which is left by the treatment of character; by the celebrated cap with boars’ tusks, which no human being could archaeologically reconstruct in the seventh century; and by the Homeric vigour in such touches as the horses unused to dead men. As the _Iliad_ certainly passed through centuries in which its language could not but be affected by linguistic changes, as it could not escape from _remaniements_, consciously or unconsciously introduced by reciters and copyists, the linguistic objections are not strongly felt by us. An unphilological reader of Homer notes that Duntzer thinks the _Doloneia_ “older than the oldest portion of the Odyssey,” while Gemoll thinks that the author of the _Doloneia_. was familiar with the _Odyssey_. [Footnote: Duntzer, _Homer. Abhanglungen_, p. 324. Gemoll, _Hermes_, xv. 557 ff.]

Meanwhile, one thing seems plain to us: when the author of Book IX. posted the guards under Thrasymedes, he was deliberately leading up to Book X.; while the casual remark in Book XIV. about the exchange of shields between father and son, Nestor and Thrasymedes, glances back at Book X. and possibly refers to some lost and more explicit statement.

It is not always remembered that, if things could drop into the interpolations, things could also drop out of the _ILIAD,_ causing _lacunae_, during the dark backward of its early existence.

If the _Doloneia_ be “barely Homeric,” as Father Browne holds, this opinion was not shared by the listeners or readers of the sixth century. The vase painters often illustrate the _Doloneia;_ but it does not follow that “the story was fresh” because it was “popular,” as Mr. Leaf suggests, and “was treated as public property in a different way” (namely, in a comic way) “from the consecrated early legends” (_Iliad,_ II 424, 425). The sixth century vase painters illustrated many passages in Homer, not the _Doloneia_ alone. The “comic way” was the ruthless humour of two strong warriors capturing one weak coward. Much later, wild caricature was applied in vase painting to the most romantic scenes in the Odyssey, which were “consecrated” enough.

CHAPTER XIV

THE INTERPOLATIONS OF NESTOR

That several of the passages in which Nestor speaks are very late interpolations, meant to glorify Pisistratus, himself of Nestor’s line, is a critical opinion to which we have more than once alluded. The first example is in _Iliad,_ II. 530-568. This passage “is meant at once to present Nestor as the leading counsellor of the Greek army, and to introduce the coming _Catalogue_.” [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad,_ vol. i. p. 70.] Now the _Catalogue_ “originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle.” [Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 87.] But, to repeat an earlier observation, surely the whole Cycle was much later than the period of Pisistratus and his sons; that is, the compilation of the Homeric and Cyclic poems into one body of verse, named “The Cycle,” is believed to have been much later.

It is objected that Nestor’s advice in this passage, “Separate thy warriors by tribes and clans” ([Greek: phyla, phraetras]), “is out of place in the last year of the war”; but this suggestion for military reorganisation may be admitted as a mere piece of poetical perspective, like Helen’s description of the Achaean chiefs in Book III, or Nestor may wish to return to an obsolete system of clan regiments. The Athenians had “tribes” and “clans,” political institutions, and Nestor’s advice is noted as a touch of late Attic influence; but about the nature and origin of these social divisions we know so little that it is vain to argue about them. The advice of Nestor is an appeal to the clan spirit–a very serviceable military spirit, as the Highlanders have often proved –but we have no information as to whether it existed in Achaean times. Nestor speaks as the aged Lochiel spoke to Claverhouse before Killiecrankie. Did the Athenian army of the sixth century fight in clan regiments? The device seems to belong to an earlier civilisation, whether it survived in sixth century Athens or not. It is, of course, notorious that tribes and clans are most flourishing among the most backward people, though they were welded into the constitution of Athens. The passage, therefore, cannot with any certainty be dismissed as very late, for the words for “tribe” and “clan” could not be novel Athenian inventions, the institutions designated being of prehistoric origin.

Nestor shows his tactics again in IV. 303-309, offers his “inopportune tactical lucubrations, doubtless under Athenian (Pisistratean) influence.” The poet is here denied a sense of humour. That a veteran military Polonius should talk as inopportunely about tactics as Dugald Dalgetty does about the sconce of Drumsnab is an essential part of the humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor’s critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, “that should be.” Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor’s speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He arrays his Pylians with chariots in front, footmen in the rear. In the [blank space] the princely heroes dismounted to fight, the chariots following close behind them. [Footnote: _Iliad_, XI. 48-56.] In the same way during the Hundred Years’ War the English knights dismounted and defeated the French chivalry till, under Jeanne d’Arc and La Hire, the French learned the lesson, and imitated the English practice. On the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way. Nestor’s advice in Book IV. is _not_ to dismount or break the line of chariots; these, he says, were the old tactics: “Even so is the far better way; thus, moreover, did men of old time lay low cities and walls.” There was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. Nestor’s were not the tactics of the heroes–they usually dismount and do single valiances; but Nestor, commanding his local contingent, recommends the methods of the old school, [Greek: hoi pretoroi]. What can be more natural and characteristic?

The poet’s meaning seems quite clear. He is not flattering Pisistratus, but, with quiet humour, offers the portrait of a vain, worthy veteran. It is difficult to see how this point can be missed; it never was missed before Nestor’s speeches seemed serviceable to the Pisistratean theory of the composition of the _ILIAD_. In his first edition Mr. Leaf regarded the interpolations as intended “to glorify Nestor” without reference to Pisistratus, whom Mr. Leaf did not then recognise as the master of a sycophantic editor. The passages are really meant to display the old man’s habit of glorifying himself and past times. Pisistratus could not feel flattered by passages intended to exhibit his ancestor as a conceited and inopportune old babbler. I ventured in 1896 to suggest that the interpolator was trying to please Pisistratus, but this was said in a spirit of mockery.

Of all the characters in Homer that of Nestor is most familiar to the unlearned world, merely because Nestor’s is a “character part,” very broadly drawn.

The third interpolation of flattery to Pisistratus in the person of Nestor is found in VII. 125-160. The Achaean chiefs are loath to accept the challenge of Hector to single combat. Only Menelaus rises and arms himself, moved by the strong sense of honour which distinguishes a warrior notoriously deficient in bodily strength. Agamemnon refuses to let him fight; the other peers make no movement, and Nestor rebukes them. It is entirely in nature that he should fall back on his memory of a similar situation in his youth; when the Arcadian champion, Ereuthalion, challenged any prince of the Pylians, and when “no man plucked up heart” to meet him except Nestor himself. Had there never been any Pisistratus, any poet who created the part of a worthy and wordy veteran must have made Nestor speak just as he does speak. Ereuthalion “was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!” and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade _patu_. An objection is now taken to Nestor’s geography: he is said not to know the towns and burns of his own country. He speaks of the swift stream Keladon, the streams of Iardanus, and the walls of Pheia. Pheia “is no doubt the same as Pheai” [Footnote: Monro, Note on Odyssey, XV. 297.] (Odyssey, XV. 297), “but that was a maritime town not near Arkadia. There is nothing known of a Keladon or Iardanus anywhere near it.” Now Didymus (Schol. A) “is said to have read [Greek: Phaeraes] for [Greek: Pheias],” following Pherekydes. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. 308.] M. Victor Berard, who has made an elaborate study of Elian topography, says that “Pheia is a cape, not a town,” and adopts the reading “Phera,” the [Greek: Pherae] of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey. He thinks that the [Greek: Pherae] of Nestor is the Aliphera of Polybius, and believes that the topography of Nestor and of the journey of Telemachus is correct. The Keladon is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha. Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, “the rough and brawling stream.” Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic–“_Yarden_, from yarad to flow”; but the Semites did not give the _Yar_ to the _Yarrow_ nor to the Australian _Yarra Yarra_.

The country, says M. Berard, is a network of rivers, burns, and rivulets; and we cannot have any certainty, we may add, as the same river and burn names recur in many parts of the same country; [Footnote: Berard, _Les Pheniciens et L’Odyssee,_ 108-113, 1902] many of them, in England, are plainly prae-Celtic.

While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer’s claim to Nestor’s speech. As to Nestor’s tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are’ithous, “the Maceman,” so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron _casse-tete,_ as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears “as Prince Areithous, the Maceman,” father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather’s name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector’s victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector’s victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator’s possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor’s speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his _casse- tete_ from the mere word “maceman” in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination.

Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really “inapplicable to the context.” Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an “applicable” and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or _gabe,_ about “he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew,” is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, “he is the nicest emperor I ever met.” The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus.

The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI. 604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a “hot-trod,” so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a _creagh_ of cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of “Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead,” in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott’s showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. [Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.]

The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. “No doubt he was an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus.” [Footnote: _Iliad_. Note to XI. 756, and to the _Catalogue_, II. 615-617.] It is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!

Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the _Catalogue_. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf’s opinions as to the date and historical merits of the _Catalogue_ have widely varied, while M. Berard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the _Catalogue_ Mr. Allen writes, “As a table, according to regions, of Agamemnon’s forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity,” showing “a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing.” He makes a vigorous defence of the _Catalogue,_ as regards the dominion of Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. [Footnote: _Classical Review,_ May 1906, pp. x94-201.] Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of Nestor.

CHAPTER XV

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EARLY EPICS

Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and _SAGA,_ decided that “in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method.” [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 135.] Part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr. Saintsbury’s Short History of _FRENCH LITERATURE_ (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by “M. Paul”; for Iceland he only quoted _THE Encyclopedia BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany, Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish _Kalewala,_ the _ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a _PRIMER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE_ by Mr. Stopford Brooke.

These sources appear less than adequate, and Celtic heroic romance is entirely omitted. A much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that the study cannot aid our critical examination of the Homeric problem. Many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to that of Achaean society as described in the _Iliad_ and Odyssey. Every society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs. The similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of societies separated in time and space but practically identical in culture. It is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic so rich and interesting has been, at least in England, almost entirely neglected by Homeric scholars.

Meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as Sir Richard observes, that “we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems,” for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great poet–the greatest of all poets– except in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. But, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey,_ we possess the heroic Achaean legends handled by one great poet. They find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the poems are ascribed to a late _litterateur_. Now to that supposed state of things we do find several “true parallels,” in Germany, in Finland, in Ireland. But the results of work by these many hands in many ages are anything but “a true parallel” to the results which lie before us in the _Iliad_ and _ODYSSEY_. Where the processes of composite authorship throughout many _AGES_ certainly occur, as in Germany and Ireland, there we find no true parallel to the Homeric poems. It follows that, in all probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the _Iliad_ and Odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they failed egregiously to produce the results.

Sir Richard’s argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not, and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the Court minstrels, all– except the great poet. In all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and _Marchen_, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an English, German, or Irish _ILIAD_ or _ODYSSEY_, or even of a true artistic equivalent in France.

We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the _ILIAD_ and _ODYSSEY_. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends.

It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all.

One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of “a certain phase of early civilisation,” and that picture is “a naturally harmonious whole,” with “unity of impression,” says Sir Richard Jebb. [Footnote: Homer, p. 37.] Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this “harmonious picture” in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of _Beowulf_; but we know that _Beowulf_, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms–a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no “painful anxiety,” like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.

If we take the _Nibelungenlied_, [Footnote: See chapter on the _Nibelungenlied_ in Homer _AND the Epic_, pp. 382- 404.] we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the _Nibelungenlied_ is of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian prose author of the _Volsunga_ been a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the _Iliad_. But, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel to the Greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. In the German _Nibelungenlied_ all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and _Marchen_ older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. The mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed Ionian continuators are sometimes said to have done, any more than did the French and late Welsh handlers of the ancient Celtic Arthurian materials. The late German _bearbeiter_ of the _Nibelungenlied_ has no idea of unity of plot–_enfin_, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to _ILIAD_ and Odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics.

“If any inference could properly be drawn from the Edda” (the Icelandic collection of heroic lays), says Sir Richard Jebb, “it would be that short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection _without_ coalescing into such an artistic whole as the Iliad or the Odyssey.” [Footnote: Homer, p. 33.]

It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. “Short separate poems on cognate subjects” can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a very inharmonious whole, as in the _Nibelungenlied_, but a controlling poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that feat.

Where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence, as Dr. Lonnrot (1835-1849) did in the case of the peasant, not courtly, lays of Finland, he “fails to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes,” says Sir Richard Jebb. [Footnote: Homer, p. 134- 135.]

This is perfectly true; much as Lonnrot botched and vamped the Finnish lays he made no epic out of them. But, as it is true, how did the late Athenian drudge of Pisistratus succeed where Lonnrot failed? “In the dovetailing of the _ODYSSEY_ we see the work of one mind,” says Sir Richard. [Footnote: Homer, p. 129.] This mind cannot have been the property of any one but a great poet, obviously, as the _Odyssey_ is confessedly “an artistic whole.” Consequently the disintegrators of the Odyssey, when they are logical, are reduced to averring that the poem is an exceedingly inartistic whole, a whole not artistic at all. While Mr. Leaf calls it “a model of skilful construction,” Wilamowitz Mollendorff denounces it as the work of “a slenderly-gifted botcher,” of about 650 B.C., a century previous to Mr. Leaf’s Athenian editor.

Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. The Odyssey is an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse. Blass, Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare that the composition is excellent. A crowd of German critics and Father Browne, S.J., hold that the composition is feeble. The criterion is the literary taste of each party to the dispute. Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Mollendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the _Odyssey_ is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. Yet Sir Richard Jebb, while recognising the _Odyssey_ as “an artistic whole” and an harmonious picture, and recognising Lonnrot’s failure “to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes,” thinks that Kirchhoff has made the essence of his theory of late combination of distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods, in the _Odyssey_, “in the highest degree probable.” [Footnote: Homer, p. 131.]

It is, of course, possible that Mr. Leaf, who has not edited the _Odyssey,_ may now, in deference to his belief in the Pisistratean editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. If the _Odyssey,_ like the _Iliad_, was, till about 540 B.C., a chaos of lays of all ages, variously known in various _repertoires_ of the rhapsodists, and patched up by the Pisistratean editor, then of two things one–either Mr. Leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the excellency of the composition, or he does not. If he does still believe that the composition of the _Odyssey_ is a masterpiece, then the Pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. If he now, on the other hand, agrees with Wilamowitz Mollendorff that the _Odyssey_ is cobbler’s work, then his literary opinions are unstable.

CHAPTER XVI

HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS

Sir Richard Jebb remarks, with truth, that “before any definite solution of the Homeric problem could derive scientific support from such analogies” (with epics of other peoples), “it would be necessary to show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appear in early Greece had been reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere.” [Footnote: Homer, pp. 131, 132.] Now we can show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems confessedly arose were “reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere,” except that no really great poet was elsewhere present.

This occurred among the Germanic aristocracy, “the Franks of France,” in the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries of our era. The closeness of the whole parallel, allowing for the admitted absence in France of a very great and truly artistic poet, is astonishing.

We have first, in France, answering to the Achaean aristocracy, the Frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful fealty to an Over-Lord, the King, passing their days in the chace, in private war, or in revolt against the Over-Lord, and, for all literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by _jongleurs_, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors of the poems which they recite.

“This national poetry,” says M. Gaston Paris, “was born and mainly developed among the warlike class, princes, lords, and their courts…. At first, no doubt, some of these men of the sword themselves composed and chanted lays” (like Achilles), “but soon there arose a special class of poets … They went from court to court, from castle … Later, when the townsfolk began to be interested in their chants, they sank a degree, and took their stand in public open places …” [Footnote: _Literature Francaise au Moyen Age_, pp. 36, 37. 1898.]

In the _Iliad_ we hear of no minstrels in camp: in the _Odyssey_ a prince has a minstrel among his retainers– Demodocus, at the court of Phaeacia; Phemius, in the house of Odysseus. In Ionia, when princes had passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs. The parallel with France is so far complete.

The French national epics, like those of the Achaeans, deal mainly with legends of a long past legendary age. To the French authors the greatness and the fortunes of the Emperor Charles and other heroic heads of great Houses provide a theme. The topics of song are his wars, and the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the Emperor and among themselves. These are seen magnified through a mist of legend; Saracens are substituted for Gascon foes, and the great Charles, so nobly venerable a figure in the oldest French epic (the _Chanson de Roland, circ._ 1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in the later epics, than Agamemnon himself. The “machinery” of the gods in Homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery of dreams is in vogue, as in the Iliad and _Odyssey_. The sources are traditional and legendary.

We know that brief early lays of Charles and other heroes had existed, and they may have been familiar to the French epic poets, but they were not merely patched into the epics. The form of verse is not ballad-like, but a series of _laisses_ of decasyllabic lines, each _laisse_ presenting one assonance, not rhyme. As time went on, rhyme and Alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded, altered, condensed, _remanies_, with progressive changes in taste, metre, language, manners, and ways of life.

Finally, an age of Cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the Cyclic poet who sang of the son of Odysseus by Circe. All these conditions are undeniably “true parallels” to “the conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared.” The only obvious point of difference vanishes if we admit, with Sir Richard Jebb and M. Salomon Reinach, the possibility of the existence of written texts in the Greece of the early iron age.

We do not mean texts prepared for a _reading_ public. In France such a public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of the epic. The oldest French texts of their epics are small volumes, each page containing some thirty lines in one column. Such volumes were carried about by the _jongleurs_, who chanted their own or other men’s verses. They were not in the hands of readers. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.]

An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker of the first version of the _Bataille Loquifer_, twelfth century) is instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that “he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died.” Similar statements are made in _Renaus de Montauban_ (the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises, Leon Gautier_, vol. i. p. 215, Note I.]

These early _jongleurs_ were men of position and distinction; their theme was the _gestes_ of princes; they were not under the ban with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek rhapsodists. Pindar’s story that Homer wrote the _Cypria_ [Footnote: _Pindari Opera_, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.] and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie. Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public.

Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a “school” of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation.

Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a “school” of _jongleurs_ at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn _cantilenae_, new lays. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.] But by that time the epic was decadent and dying?

The audiences of the _jongleurs_, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small _jongleurs’_ copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. [Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in _La Chancun de Willame_., London, 1903.]

The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of the _jongleur_ who was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early Greece. He thinks that there was “no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public” before the end of the fifth century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. “Wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody except himself” (the author) “or those to whom he privately bequeathed them” (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), “but his end would have been gained.” [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 113.]

Recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non- Phoenician writing in Crete of course increase the probability of this opinion, which is corroborated by the story of the _Cypria_, given as a dowry with the author’s daughter. Thus “the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared” “been reproduced with sufficient closeness” in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the France of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the _monomanie cyclique_. In the Greece of Homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Leon Gautier in mediaeval France. We have:–

(1) An uncritical age confusing history by legend.

(2) We have a national _milieu_ with religious uniformity.

(3) We have poems dealing with–

“Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago.”

(4) We have representative heroes, the Over-Lord, and his peers or paladins. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 6-9]

It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old _Marchen_, as in the Odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of Charles.

In the French, as in the Greek epics, we have such early traits of poetry as the textual repetition of speeches, and the recurring epithets, “swift-footed Achilles,” “Charles of the white beard,” “blameless heroes” (however blamable). Ladies, however old, are always “of the clear face.” Thus the technical manners of the French and Greek epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of Homer, to which no approach is made by the French poets.

The French authors of epic, even more than Homer, abound in episodes much more distracting than those of the _Iliad_. Of blood and wounds, of course, both the French and the Greek are profuse: they were writing for men of the sword, not for modern critics. Indeed, the battle pieces of France almost translate those of Homer. The Achaean “does on his goodly corslet”; the French knight “_sur ses espalles son halberc li colad_.” The Achaean, with his great sword, shears off an arm at the shoulder. The French knight–

“_Trenchad le braz,
Parmi leschine sun grant espee li passe_.”

The huge shield of Aias becomes _cele grant targe duble_ in France, and the warriors boast over their slain in France, as in the _Iliad_. In France, as in Greece, a favourite epic theme was “The Wrath” of a hero, of Achilles, of Roland, of Ganelon, of Odysseus and Achilles wrangling at a feast to the joy of Agamemnon, “glad that the bravest of his peers were at strife.” [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 75-7s [sic].]

Of all the many parallels between the Greek and French epics, the most extraordinary is the coincidence between Charles with his peers and Agamemnon with his princes. The same historical conditions occurred, at an interval of more than two thousand years. Agamemnon is the Bretwalda, the Over-Lord, as Mr. Freeman used to say, of the Achaeans: he is the suzerain. Charles in the French epics holds the same position, but the French poets regard him in different lights. In the earliest epic, the _Chanson_ de Roland, a divinity doth hedge the famous Emperor, whom Jeanne d’Arc styled “St. Charlemagne.” He was, in fact, a man of thirty- seven at the date of the disaster of Roncesvaux, where Roland fell (778 A.D.). But in the tradition that has reached the poet of the _chanson_ he is a white-bearded warrior, as vigorous as he is venerable. As he rules by advice of his council, he bids them deliberate on the proposals of the Paynim King, Marsile–to accept or refuse them. Roland, the counterpart of Achilles in all respects (Oliver is his Patroclus), is for refusing: Ganelon appears to have the rest with him when he speaks in favour of peace and return to France out of Spain. So, in the _Iliad_ (II.), the Achaeans lend a ready ear to Agamemnon when he proposes the abandonment of the siege of Troy. Each host, French and Achaean, is heartily homesick.

Ganelon’s advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the Saracen court. It is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent and been murdered. The Peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the aged Naismes, the Nestor of the Franks. His offer is not accepted, nor are those of Oliver, Roland, and Turpin. Roland then proposes that Ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the Wrath of Ganelon, which was the ruin of Roland and the peers who stood by him. The warriors attack each other in speeches of Homeric fury. Charles preserves his dignity, and Ganelon departs on his mission. He deliberately sells himself, and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the rearguard under Roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of Charles make up the rest of the poem. Not even in victory is Charles allowed repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. He is of those whom Heaven has called to endless combat–

“Their whole lives long to be winding Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of them perish,”

in the words of Diomede.

Such is the picture of the imperial Charles in one of the oldest of the French epics. The heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and truly imperial, figure of St. Charlemagne–wise, just, and brave, a true “shepherd of the people,” regarded as the conqueror of all the known kingdoms of the world. He is, among his fierce paladins, like “the conscience of a knight among his warring members.” “The greatness of Charlemagne has entered even into his name;” but as time went on and the feudal princes began the long struggle against the French king, the poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the Emperor. They created a second type of Charles, and it is the second type that on the whole most resembles the Agamemnon of the _Iliad._

We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character?

The answer is that just as the second type of Charles is the result of feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of Agamemnon reflects the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of Greece. The masterly portrait of Agamemnon could only have been designed to win the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an Over-Lord whom they cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence, but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and character some of them can barely tolerate.

[blank space] _an historical unity._ The poem deals with what may be called a feudal society, and the attitudes of the Achaean Bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the _Iliad_ and in every Book of it, those of the peers and king in the later _Chansons de Geste_.

Returning to the decadent Charles of the French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, “whence sprang Roland.” The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the Nestor of the French epics, cries: “It is for you that we have left our lands and fiefs, our fair wives and our children … But, by the Apostle to whom they pray in Rome, were it not that we should be guilty before God we would go back to sweet France, and thin would be your host.” [Footnote: _Chevalerie Ogier_, 1510-1529. _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. iii. pp. 156-157.] In the lines quoted we seem to hear the voice of the angered Achilles: “We came not hither in our own quarrel, thou shameless one, but to please thee! But now go I back to Phthia with my ships–the better part.” [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 158-169.]

Agamemnon answers that Zeus is on his side, just as even the angry Naismes admits that duty to God demands obedience to Charles. There cannot be parallels more close and true than these, between poems born at a distance from each other of more than two thousand years, but born in similar historical conditions.

In Guide _Bourgogne,_ a poem of the twelfth century, Ogier cries, “They say that Charlemagne is the conqueror of kingdoms: they lie, it is Roland who conquers them with Oliver, Naismes of the long beard, and myself. As to Charles, he eats.” Compare Achilles to Agamemnon, “Thou, heavy with wine, with dog’s eyes and heart of deer, never hast thou dared to arm thee for war with the host …” [Footnote: _Iliad_, I. 227, 228. _Gui de Bourgogne_, pp. 37-41.] It is Achilles or Roland who stakes his life in war and captures cities; it is Agamemnon or Charles who camps by the wine. Charles, in the _Chanson de Saisnes_, abases himself before Herapois, even more abjectly than Agamemnon in his offer of atonement to Achilles. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. iii. p. 158.] Charles is as arrogant as Agamemnon: he strikes Roland with his glove, for an uncommanded victory, and then he loses heart and weeps as copiously as the penitent Agamemnon often does when he rues his arrogance. [Footnote: _Entree en Espagne_.]

The poet of the _Iliad_ is a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over- Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.

The treatment of Agamemnon’s character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in “the original poem” Agamemnon were revered like St. Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_, and in the “later” parts of the _Iliad_ were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent _Chanson de Geste_. In the _Iliad_ Agamemnon’s character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe. The Ionians –“democratic to the core,” says Mr. Leaf–would either have taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest _Chansons_. Or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait.

The conditions under which the _Chansons_ arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: _cared vate sacro_. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.

It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our _Iliad_ is only a very late _remaniement_, like the fourteenth century _Chansons de Geste_, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age of _remaniement_, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. Ladies “in a coming on humour” abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in _gauloiseries_ of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the _Iliad_ is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the _Iliad_.

CHAPTER XVII

CONCLUSION

The conclusion at which we arrive is that the _Iliad_, as a whole, is the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and _lacunae_ and _remaniements_ perhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. But that the mass of the Epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the _Iliad_ presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved.

If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zunis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns–the care of a priesthood–are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember, which they alter at pleasure.

We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the French Chansons _de Geste_. Unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. All seems to depend on each individual’s sense of what is “likely.” In that case science has nothing to make in the matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of Homer. Mr. Monro thought it “probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes.” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xxxv.] Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole “Minoan” libraries– manuscripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. [Footnote: _L’Anthropologie_, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.] Mr. Leaf, while admitting that “writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development,” holds that “it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of it…. At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular …” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. xvi., xvii.] Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the Epic “from the sixth century onwards.” [Footnote: _Handbook of Homeric Study_, p. 134.] He also says that “it is difficult to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing” (the Cretan linear), “should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting.” He then mentions the Knossian cup “with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink … The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared.” [Footnote: _Ibid_., pp. 258, 259.]

Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing. Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used “ordinary writing,” and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that “the Finnish epic” existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. [Footnote: _Grundfragen der Homerkritik_, p. 94.] But there is not, and never was, any “Finnish epic.” There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zunis–songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. Lonnrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a mass of _Volkslieder._ Cauer’s other argument, that the German popular tales, Grimm’s tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of _Marchen._

As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the _Iliad_ a patchwork of metrical _Marchen_ or is it an epic nobly constructed? If it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation.

It is impossible to argue against a critic’s subjective sense of what is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic’s imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf’s opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown.

Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.

That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs. [Footnote: Cretan _Pictographs_ and _Prae-Phoenician_ Script. London, 1905. Annual of British _School_ of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of _Hellenic Studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.]

M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: “As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, … and that for this reason the Greeks call letters ‘Phoenician,’ some reply that the Phoenicians did not [blank space] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled ‘Phoenician.'” [Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v. 74. _L’Anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. [Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp. 634-645]

Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man’s sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert.

My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the “Phoenician letters,” which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; “at the beginning of the ninth century,” says Professor Bury. [Footnote: _History of Greece_, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.] This may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. When such a humble class of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate classes.

If Mr. Gardner is right in dating a number of incised inscriptions on early pottery at Naucratis before the middle of the seventh century, we reach the same conclusion. In fact, if these inscriptions be of a century earlier than the Abu Simbel inscriptions, of date 590 B.C., we reach 690 B.C. Wherefore, as writing does not become common in a moment, it must have existed in the eighth century B.C. We are not dealing here with a special learned class, but with ordinary persons who could write. [Footnote: _The Early Ionic Alphabet: Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. vii. pp. 220-239. Roberts, _Introduction to Greek Epigraphy_, pp. 31, 151, 159, 164, 165-167]

Interesting for our purpose is the verse incised on a Dipylon vase, found at Athens in 1880. It is of an ordinary cream-jug shape, with a neck, a handle, a spout, and a round belly. On the neck, within a zigzag “geometrical” pattern, is a doe, feeding, and a tall water-fowl. On the shoulder is scratched with a point, in very antique Attic characters running from right to left, [Greek: os nun orchaeston panton hatalotata pais ei, tou tode]. “This is the jug of him who is the most delicately sportive of all dancers of our time.” The jug is attributed to the eighth century. [Footnote: Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p, 243; Kretschmer, _Griechischen Vasen inschriften_, p. 110, 1894, of the seventh century. H. von Rohden, _Denkmaler_, iii. pp. 1945, 1946: “Probably dating from the seventh century.” Roberts, op. cit., vol. i. p. 74, “at least as far back as the seventh century,” p. 75.]

Taking the vase, with Mr. Walters, as of the eighth century, I do not suppose that the amateur who gave it to a dancer and scratched the hexameter was of a later generation than the jug itself. The vase may have cost him sixpence: he would give his friend a _new_ vase; it is improbable that old jugs were sold at curiosity shops in these days, and given by amateurs to artists. The inscription proves that, in the eighth to seventh centuries, at a time of very archaic characters (the Alpha is lying down on its side, the aspirate is an oblong with closed ends and a stroke across the middle, and the Iota is curved at each end), people could write with ease, and would put verse into writing. The general accomplishment of reading is taken for granted.

Reading is also taken for granted by the Gortyn (Cretan) inscription of twelve columns long, _boustro-phedon_ (running alternately from left to right, and from right to left). In this inscribed code of laws, incised on stone, money is not mentioned in the more ancient part, but fines and prices are calculated in “chalders” and “bolls” ([Greek: lebaetes] and [Greek: tripodes]), as in Scotland when coin was scarce indeed. Whether the law contemplated the value of the vessels themselves, or, as in Scotland, of their contents in grain, I know not. The later inscriptions deal with coined money. If coin came in about 650 B.C., the older parts of the inscription may easily be of 700 B.C.

The Gortyn inscription implies the power of writing out a long code of laws, and it implies that persons about to go to law could read the public inscription, as we can read a proclamation posted up on a wall, or could have it read to them. [Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. pp. 52-55.]

The alphabets inscribed on vases of the seventh century (Abecedaria), with “the archaic Greek forms of every one of the twenty-two Phoenician letters arranged precisely in the received Semitic order,” were, one supposes, gifts for boys and girls who were learning to read, just like our English alphabets on gingerbread. [Footnote: For Abecedaria, cf. Roberts, vol. i. pp. 16-21.]

Among inscriptions on tombstones of the end of the seventh century, there is the epitaph of a daughter of a potter. [Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. p. 76.] These writings testify to the general knowledge of reading, just as much as our epitaphs testify to the same state of education. The Athenian potter’s daughter of the seventh century B.C. had her epitaph, but the grave-stones of highlanders, chiefs or commoners, were usually uninscribed till about the end of the eighteenth century, in deference to custom, itself arising from the illiteracy of the highlanders in times past. [Footnote: Ramsay, _Scotland and Scotsmen_, ii. p. 426. 1888.] I find no difficulty, therefore, in supposing that there were some Greek readers and writers in the eighth century, and that primary education was common in the seventh. In these circumstances my sense of the probable is not revolted by the idea of a written epic, in [blank space] characters, even in the eighth century, but the notion that there was no such thing till the middle of the sixth century seems highly improbable. All the conditions were present which make for the composition and preservation of literary works in written texts. That there were many early written copies of Homer in the eighth century I am not inclined to believe. The Greeks were early a people who could read, but were not a reading people. Setting newspapers aside, there is no such thing as a reading _people_.

The Greeks preferred to listen to recitations, but my hypothesis is that the rhapsodists who recited had texts, like the _jongleurs_’ books of their epics in France, and that they occasionally, for definite purposes, interpolated matter into their texts. There were also texts, known in later times as “city texts” ([Greek: ai kata poleis]), which Aristarchus knew, but he did not adopt the various readings. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p, 435.]

Athens had a text in Solon’s time, if he entered the decree that the whole Epic should be recited in due order, every five years, at the Panathenaic festival. [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii. p. 395.] “This implies the possession of a complete text.” [Footnote: _Ibid_., vol. ii. p. 403.]

Cauer remarks that the possibility of “interpolation” “began only after the fixing of the text by Pisistratus.” [Footnote: _Grundfragen_, p. 205.] But surely if every poet and reciter could thrust any new lines which he chose to make into any old lays which he happened to know, that was interpolation, whether he had a book of the words or had none. Such interpolations would fill the orally recited lays which the supposed Pisistratean editor must have written down from recitation before he began his colossal task of making the _Iliad_ out of them. If, on the other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at pleasure into _them_, and such books may have been among the materials used in the construction of a text for the Athenian book market. But if our theory be right, there must always have been a few copies of better texts than those of the late reciters’ books, and the effort of the editors for the book market would be to keep the parts in which most manuscripts were agreed.

But how did Athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? One can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts–copied out in successive generations–in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our _Iliad_ as the late French Cyclic poets knew the earlier _Chansons de Geste_. They certainly knew it, for they avoided interference with it; they worked at epics which led up to it, as in the _Cypria;_ they borrowed _motifs_ from hints and references in the _Iliad_, [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 350, 351.] and they carried on the story from the death of Hector, in the _AEthiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus. This epic ended with the death of Achilles, when _The Little Iliad_ produced the tale to the bringing in of the wooden horse. Arctinus goes on with his _Sack_ of _Ilios_, others wrote of _The Return_ of _the Heroes,_ and the _Telegonia_ is a sequel to the Odyssey. The authors of these poems knew the _Iliad_, then, as a whole, and how could they have known it thus if it only existed in the casual _repertoire_ of strolling reciters? The Cyclic poets more probably had texts of Homer, and themselves wrote their own poems–how it paid, whether they recited them and collected rewards or not, is, of course, unknown.

The Cyclic poems, to quote Sir Richard Jebb, “help to fix the lowest limit for the age of the Homeric poems. [Footnote: _Homer_, pp. 151, 154.] The earliest Cyclic poems, dating from about 776 B.C., presuppose the _Iliad_, being planned to introduce or continue it…. It would appear, then, that the _Iliad_ must have existed in something like its present compass as early as 800 B.C.; indeed a considerably earlier date will seem probable, if due time is allowed for the poem to have grown into such fame as would incite the effort to continue it and to prelude to it”

Sir Richard then takes the point on which we have already insisted, namely, that the Cyclic poets of the eighth century B.C. live in an age of ideas, religions, ritual, and so forth which are absent from the _Iliad_ [Footnote: Homer, pp. 154, 155.]

Thus the _Iliad_ existed with its characteristics that are prior to 800 B.C., and in its present compass, and was renowned before 800 B.C. As it could not possibly have thus existed in the _repertoire_ of irresponsible strolling minstrels and reciters, and as there is no evidence for a college, school, or guild which preserved the Epic by a system of mnemonic teaching, while no one can deny at least the possibility of written texts, we are driven to the hypothesis that written texts there were, whence descended, for example, the text of Athens.

We can scarcely suppose, however, that such texts were perfect in all respects, for we know how, several centuries later, in a reading age, papyrus fragments of the _Iliad_ display unwarrantable interpolation. [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426.] But Plato’s frequent quotations, of course made at an earlier date, show that “whatever interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which Plato quoted was not one of them.” [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 429] Plato had something much better.

When a reading public for Homer arose–and, from the evidences of the widespread early knowledge of reading, such a small public may have come into existence sooner than is commonly supposed–Athens was the centre of the book trade. To Athens must be due the prae- Alexandrian Vulgate, or prevalent text, practically the same as our own. Some person or persons must have made that text–not by taking down from recitation all the lays which they could collect, as Herd, Scott, Mrs. Brown, and others collected much of the _Border Minstrelsy_, and not by then tacking the lays into a newly-composed whole. They must have done their best with such texts as were accessible to them, and among these were probably the copies used by reciters and rhapsodists, answering to the MS. books of the mediaeval _jongleurs._

Mr. Jevons has justly and acutely remarked that “we do not know, and there is no external evidence of any description which leads us to suppose, that the _Iliad_ was ever expanded” (_J. H. S_, vii. 291-308).

That it was expanded is a mere hypothesis based on the idea that “if there was an _Iliad_ at all in the ninth century, its length must have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral delivery,”–“a poem or poems short enough to be recited at a single sitting.”

But we have proved, with Mr. Jevons and Blass, and by the analogy of the Chansons that, given a court audience (and a court audience is granted), there were no such narrow limits imposed on the length of a poem orally recited from night to night.

The length of the _Iliad_ yields, therefore, no argument for expansions throughout several centuries. That theory, suggested by the notion that the original poem _MUST_ have been short, is next supposed to be warranted by the inconsistencies and discrepancies. But we argue that these are only visible, as a rule, to “the analytical reader,” for whom the poet certainly was not composing; that they occur in all long works of fictitious narrative; that the discrepancies often are not discrepancies; and, finally, that they are not nearly so glaring as the inconsistencies in the theories of each separatist critic. A theory, in such matter as this, is itself an explanatory myth, or the plot of a story which the critic invents to account for the facts in the case. These critical plots, we have shown, do not account for the facts of the case, for the critics do not excel in constructing plots. They wander into unperceived self- contradictions which they would not pardon in the poet. These contradictions are visible to “the analytical reader,” who concludes that a very early poet may have been, though Homer seldom is, as inconsistent as a modern critic.

Meanwhile, though we have no external evidence that the _Iliad_ was ever expanded–that it was expanded is an explanatory myth of the critics–“we do know, on good evidence,” says Mr. Jevons, “that the _Iliad_ was rhapsodised.” The rhapsodists were men, as a rule, of one day recitations, though at a prolonged festival at Athens there was time for the whole _Iliad_ to be recited. “They chose for recitation such incidents as could be readily detached, were interesting in themselves, and did not take too long to recite.” Mr. Jevons suggests that the many brief poems collected in the Homeric hymns are invocations which the rhapsodists preluded to their recitals. The practice seems to have been for the rhapsodist first to pay his reverence to the god, “to begin from the god,” at whose festival the recitation was being given (the short proems collected in the Hymns pay this reverence), “and then proceed with his rhapsody”–with his selected passage from the _Iliad_, “Beginning with thee” (the god of the festival), “I will go on to another lay,” that is, to his selection from the Epic. Another conclusion of the proem often is, “I will be mindful both of thee and of another lay,” meaning, says Mr. Jevons, that “the local deity will figure in the recitation from Homer which the rhapsodist is about to deliver.”

These explanations, at all events, yield good sense. The invocation of Athene (Hymns, XI., XXVIII.) would serve as the proem of invocation to the recital of _Iliad_, V., VI. 1-311, the day of valour of Diomede, spurred on by the wanton rebuke of Agamemnon, and aided by Athene. The invocation of Hephaestus (Hymn XX.), would prelude to a recital of the _Making of the Awns of Achilles_, and so on.

But the rhapsodist may be reciting at a festival of Dionysus, about whom there is practically nothing said in the _Iliad_; for it is a proof of the antiquity of the _Iliad_ that, when it was composed, Dionysus had not been raised to the Olympian peerage, being still a folk-god only. The rhapsodist, at a feast of Dionysus in later times, has to introduce the god into his recitation. The god is not in his text, but he adds him. [Footnote:_Ibid_., VI. 130-141]

Why should any mortal have made this interpolation? Mr. Jevons’s theory supplies the answer. The rhapsodist added the passages to suit the Dionysus feast, at which he was reciting.

The same explanation is offered for the long story of the _Birth_ of [blank space] which Agamemnon tells in his speech of apology and reconciliation. [Footnote:_Ibid_., XIX. 136.] There is an invocation to Heracles (Hymns, XV.), and the author may have added this speech to his rhapsody of the Reconciliation, recited at a feast of Heracles. Perhaps the remark of Mr. Leaf offers the real explanation of the presence of this long story in the speech of Agamemnon: “Many speakers with a bad case take refuge in telling stories.” Agamemnon shows, says Mr. Leaf, “the peevish nervousness of a man who feels that he has been in the wrong,” and who follows a frank speaker like Achilles, only eager for Agamemnon to give the word to form and charge. So Agamemnon takes refuge in a long story, throwing the blame of his conduct on Destiny.

We do not need, then, the theory of a rhapsodist’s interpolation,