Homer, A Mirror for Humanity and Nation

“ Very old and still very new is the problem of the Odyssey; with a little care we can see that the Homeric Greek had to solve in his way what every one of us still has to solve, namely, the problem of life. Only yesterday one might have heard the popular preacher of a great city, a kind of successor to Homer, blazoning the following text as his theme: God is not to blame. Thus the great poem has an eternal subject, though its outer garb be much changed by time. The soul of Homer is ethical, and that is what makes him immortal. ”

“ Equally are the thought, poetry, rhetoric of by-gone times kept in significance by the perceiving, the imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,—what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. ”

“ Nothing is harder than for us to laugh at ourselves; we prefer to dwell upon the seriousness, the impressiveness of lasting fame, as proof of the unity of the human race. When the world of twenty-five centuries after Homer can thrill at the twang of the bow of Odysseus, and smile at the laughter of Nausikaa and her maidens, we are kinsmen of the distant Greeks. Time and race are annihilated before the mighty genius which touches the deeps of the heart. Institutions and nations may decay, but the song of Homer calls us brothers. ”

“ Though we speak of national and race literatures, like the Greek or Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good literature knows no nationality, nor any bounds save those of humanity. It is occupied chiefly with elementary passions and emotions,--love and hate, joy and sorrow, fear and faith,--which are an essential part of our human nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it awaken a response in men of every race. ”

“ Atrides, and ye other chiefs of Greece,
Since many a long-hair’d Greek hath fall’n in fight,
Whose blood, beside Scamander’s flowing stream,
Fierce Mars has shed, while to the viewless shades
Their spirits are gone, behoves thee with the morn
The warfare of the Greeks to intermit:
Then we, with oxen and with mules, the dead
From all the plain will draw; and, from the ships
A little space remov’d, will burn with fire:
That we, returning to our native land,
May to their children bear our comrades’ bones.
Then will we go, and on the plain erect
Around the pyre one common mound for all ”

“ It was wholly fit that men should see in the epic heroes the founders of their own nation and of their own civilisation; but in point of fact it was through Homer that the Greek nation first acquired consciousness of itself, of its individuality and of the common blood in its veins. Not in the time of the heroes alone, but in that of the poets of the Epos, the Greeks had no national unity and less than no national feeling, and the same holds good of their civilisation. ”

“ But now, where the spirit of the Western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means—by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountainhead of humanity. ”

“ The desire to pose before the world as the descendants of the nation which produced Homer and Æschylus and Pericles and Plato and Demosthenes has led them to sacrifice in some measure the real interests of the nation to the glamour of a remote and glorious past. Just as they have been ashamed of some mediæval monuments which reminded them of humiliating epochs in their history, so they have tried to get rid of words and forms which bore the stamp of foreign ascendency. But such affectation cannot alter facts, and is bad for the morale of a nation. ”

“ It is, perhaps, the kernel of this Greek tragedy: that real people are sacrificing real people on the altar of the abstract. It is a battle of tastes, a clash of preferences, an Armageddon of opinions, judgements, and lessons. Armies are still moved by ancient events, by symbols, by fiery speeches, by abstract, diffuse notions. It is a land devoid of its present, where the past and future reign supreme. No syllogism, no logic, no theory can referee that which cannot be decided but by the compelling thrust of the sword. ”

“ So, in the case of illustrious men, nations dispute the honor of giving them birth; there are six or seven towns in Asia Minor that claim to be the birth-place of Homer. National vanities justly desire to possess the largest amount of genius; hence, no sooner does anything useful make its appearance in the world, than half a dozen nations or individuals start up to claim it as their offspring. ”