Andrew Lang

“ Achilles is, of all the men in Homer, the most passionately affectionate. His love of Patroclus, like that of Jonathan for David, "passeth the love of women"; an affection for his elder, the playmate of his childhood, so pure and so strong that poets of historic Greece could not understand it. But when he is smitten to the heart by the loss of Patroclus his wrath again breaks, as in the ninth Book of the Iliad, through all measure; and he does cruel and evil deeds, his revenge is hateful to Gods and men. ”

“ But to Homer a dead man, be he Achilles or Aias, is merely a dead man. The cairn covers his bones; he has no chapel, no sacrifice; no men covet the possession of his relics; he can neither help nor harm; his spirit is in Hades, with the powerless peoples of the Dead. Trojans would leap and boast on the cairn of Menelaus if he fell at Troy (Iliad, iv. 174-182) . Historic Greeks would have made offerings at the tomb. No such rites were in the belief of the society for which Homer sang. ”

“ Unity in a poem, he said, is not obtained merely by the selection of a single hero (the Cypria is [Pg 202] so far like Vanity Fair that it is a chronicle "without a hero," unless the hero be Paris or Palamedes) . Unity of action is, says Aristotle, essential to an Epic, and Homer observes this unity, grouping all the events round one motif, the Wrath of Achilles, or the Return of Odysseus. The Cypria has no such unity; it simply ends where the Iliad begins.
Unity, concentration, "with beginning, middle, and end," is as necessary, Aristotle holds, to epic as to dramatic poetry. ”

“ We try to prove that, in all such details, the epics are the work of a single moment of culture; and again, that no other work of the Greek genius, and no material relics of other moments of Greek culture, represent the religion, polity, armour, costume, morality, and taste of Homer. Not in these fields of ascertainable facts can the proof that the Epics are by many men in many ages be discovered.
Except in the general conclusion that the Iliad is a mosaic, produced (most of them think) by a long series of Ionian additions to an Achaean "kernel," there is no harmony among critics. ”

“ Homer's world is aristocratic. The poet, none the less, has his eye on the folk; on the honest poor woman who carefully weighs her wool; on the aged female thrall who is busy all night over her task of grain-grinding, and prays that the wooers who have broken her strength may now eat their latest meal. ”

“ The cairn seems to be Homeric, not "Mycenaean."
Historic Greece had no one orthodox belief as to the condition of departed souls. Homer has, on the other hand, an orthodoxy; the ghost of the man who does not receive due burning and burial is an outcast, perhaps a mischievous outcast from the company in the halls of Hades and in the meads of asphodel, while they are but shadows of themselves, unfed, unless some bold adventurer goes to them and sheds the blood of the black ram. That was another thing than pouring libations into the tomb. ”

“ None the less the life depicted so barbarously was no barbaric life. Bad as is the art, you see that the life is Hellenic.
At the same time the Dipylon life is wholly un-Homeric. The manner of burial, the huge vases in place of the cairn and pillar, the metal of the weapons, iron, their want of adornment, the size, shape, and mode of carrying the sword, the tearing out of their own hair by mourners, the size of the shields, and even the dress of the women who, in my opinion, wear skirts, not chitons, are all of a nature unknown to the Epics. ”

“ Had they been worshippers of the dead, the epic poet could not play the heresiarch, and tell them that their faith and hope were void and vain. No poet, no set of poets, who lived by pleasing could afford to horrify their hearers by such impiety. No poets could ignore the existence of normal rites that were familiar in practice to all. The most advanced modern novelist cannot ignore the Christian rites of marriage and burial, however much he may despise and detest them. ”

“ The Achaean mind, like the mind of any savage who recognises an All Father, has brooded over the sacred beings of religion in every mood, the most serious and the most frivolous; every conceivable reflection of every age, early or later, has entered into a conglomerate of yearning desire for the gods, of fear of the gods' wrath, of absurd legends concerning the gods, of broadly humorous glances at them as members of a great whimsical family ”

“ The Cypria, like the Attic traditions used by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Sophists, such as Gorgias, displays a strange hatred of Homer's favourite hero, the taker of the city, Odysseus. He, in most of the plays where he appears, is a peculiarly mean character: in the Iliad he is as noble and resolute as he is sagacious: in the Odyssey he is ruse, because his desperate situation, alone in a throng of foes, requires cunning. ”

“ Homer, in any case, does not despise the Asiatic allies of Troy as "barbarous," does not think them alien wholly, as the poets of the Chansons de Geste regard the Saracens,—worshippers of Mahound and Apollon. The Asians have the same gods and rites as his own people; Glaucus and Sarpedon are as good knights and live in precisely the same sort of polity as Aias or Achilles. Homer does not think of the strife as between Hellenes and Barbarians, that is a far later idea never interpolated into the Epics. All men are children of the Olympians. ”

“ One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever they were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In the Tain Bo Cualgne, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. ”

“ Each of us, it seems to me, has to assume a kind of miracle. I have to think, and do think, that our epics were composed by a poet to amuse the leisure of an Achaean Court, and also that they were miraculously preserved, whether by writing or in memory, through several changeful centuries. I believe that this occurred because the poems are great harmonious structures, such as only a poet could produce; and because the many changes in society, costume, law, belief, and usage which the successive ages evolved, do not appear in the poems. ”

“ Thus, undeniably, archaic and heroic Greece carried on Aegean representations of deities; even the Cretan goddess holding serpents has, in Greek art, an Artemis with snakes to represent her. But, so much earlier and nearer to Aegean times, in Homer, the goddess, as Artemis, shows her later and more truly Hellenic aspects, and is the chaste sister of Apollo. Indeed, the Homeric Olympians are already the beautiful beings which the best art of the Hellenic prime, in the fifth century, delighted to represent ”

“ In the religion of historic Greece, from the Ionian age to the establishment of Christianity, the most active, and, so to say, practical element is, we repeat, that of hero-worship, worship of dead men. The great temples of the gods of Greece in general, especially of the oracular Apollo, and of Athene in Athens, Artemis in Ephesus, Artemis Orthia at Sparta, and so on, were maintained in splendour and enriched with treasures of gold-work, silver, and bronze. ”

“ All mankind are as interesting to Homer as the gallant youths at the bridal dance who wear "daggers of gold in baldrics of silver"; such bronze daggers with gilded blade-centres as were found in the tombs of Mycenae and elsewhere. ”

“ Athene, her divine father's darling, and of Aphrodite; the unnatural hatred of Althaea; the caprice of Anteia; the pathos of the dirges of Briseis for Patroclus, of Helen for Hector; the remorseless jealousy of the mother of Phoenix, when his father loves a mistress among her maids, all supply "the female interest" in the Iliad.
There is not so much "female interest" as in the Volsunga Saga, but women occupy the same position, are regarded with the same deference; they are free, on earth and in Olympus, they give their counsel and even carry their point, as in the Icelandic sagas. ”

“ Christian Europe at various times, in the age of the chivalrous romances, and in comedy generally, fell far below the old northern and Achaean view of the women's part. To chivalry, adultery was a duty, to our European comedy it was a jest: marriage was a bourgeois business. But even to historic Greece the sanctity of the marriage-tie was a serious matter: adulterous intrigues are not the theme of Greek poets and comedians, as they have been ever since our Middle Ages. ”

“ There is no book till the Cypria is made, and the Cypria cannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on the mass of tradition is not borrowing from a book, any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, is another question) . Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. ”

“ In this period male costume was often more of the first or Aegean, than of the second or Homeric Age.
Now, according to the majority of critics of Homer, the life, with all its details, which he describes, is not that of a single age, our second, but is a mosaic of all Four Ages. "The first rhapsodies were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous Mykenaean shield—the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler. The whole view of life and death, of divine and human polity had changed." ”

“ Iliad, xx. 21.
[20] The distinction here made between "religion" and "mythology" is made merely for the sake of convenience. We may readily be told that the belief in a good God is as mythical as the tales about bad gods. But the belief in a just, wise, and loving heavenly Father, the source and sanction of ethics, represents one mood, and leads to one set of results in conduct; while the belief in wicked and buffooning gods represents another aspect of human thought, and leads to very different results, mainly to the bewilderment of late historic Greek thinkers. ”

“ Never were chimes more bewildered, verdicts more various, and contradictions in terms more innocently combined than in the higher criticism of Homer. It is necessary and right that men's opinions should alter, in consequence of reflection, and of the increase of our knowledge of prehistoric Greece, through the revelations of excavators on the ancient sites of a rediscovered world. It is natural that Homeric critics should sometimes contradict themselves and each other. ”

“ It is a splendid work of art, fashioned, in our view, by a great poet, out of masses of tradition, while what we know of the Cypria is a compilation, partly from hints in the Iliad and Odyssey, with popular tales or Märchen thrown in; and is animated by a distinct tendenz, a partisan desire to debase the favourite heroes of Homer, and to exalt a hero, Palamedes, who, to myself, seems intended to represent the Ionian share in the Trojan war, neglected as it is by Homer. ”

“ The representations of men in many works of Aegean art, such as the gold cups of Vaphio, show them wearing clustering love-locks that fall beneath the shoulder. We might as well accuse the Spartans and the Cavaliers as the Achaeans of wearing love-locks because of a vow. That the Achaeans were tabooed from love during the siege is a fact entirely unknown to their poet. "To every man a damsel or two" is his version, and the heroes couch with their fair captives; while Agamemnon takes a solemn oath that he has never done so with Briseis, and Thetis advises Achilles to rejoice in love. ”

“ The fighting men in view are the gentry, stiffening "the host," the λαός of whose equipment we know little, while the archery of light-armed bowmen, such as the Locrians, is not without its effect. But the bows are short, and the arrow is drawn only to the breast, not, as by Egyptian and Assyrian archers, on the monuments, and by the archers of mediaeval England, to the ear. Chariots are not employed, in Homer, as on the Egyptian monuments, in charging squadrons, closely and neatly arranged, but in the flight and the pursuit, and to bear the prince rapidly to distant points of the field. ”

“ Having been terrified by Apollo, and remembering Athene's command to fight no god but Aphrodite, Diomedes is naturally cautious, in view of a splendid unknown antagonist, and asks, "Who of mortals, sir, art thou, for never have I seen thee before? thou alone darest to meet my deadly spear. If thou art an immortal, then I will not fight with the gods of heaven." ”

“ Homer is not a scientific military historian, but a poet. Consequently, in his accounts of pitched battles, he naturally dwells on the prowess of famous individuals in the single combat; the struggle of one hero against a group of assailants; the pursuit and the flight; more than he dwells on the long encounter of marshalled lines before "the break in the battle."
Let us consider the battle in Iliad, xi. The princes begin by giving their chariots to the charioteers, "to hold them in by the fosse, well and orderly," and "themselves as heavy men-at-arms were hastening about." ”

“ Hector's famous phrase, "one omen is best, to fight for our own country," would have shocked most of the Generals of Republican Rome. A phantasm of the dead, as we saw, may appear only in a dream or a "border-land case," to a man in bed, if the dead man has not been cremated. The boding visions of the second-sighted man in the Odyssey, the shroud of mist about the bodies of the doomed Wooers, may indicate a superstitious belief—to those who do not believe in second sight! The fairies of Homer, nymphs of mountain and well, wood and sea, are creatures of poetry, rather than of superstition ”

“ But the later poets of Greece apply it very abundantly: it was rampant in their temple-rites and temple-legends. Homer speaks of no witches, of no incantations save the song for the staunching of the blood of Odysseus, when his thigh had been gored by the boar. The belief in such staunching is still common in Cumberland and in Ireland, as it was when Jeanne d'Arc refused to let the charm be sung over her arrow wound at Orleans.
Magic done for the good of the crops, as in the Eleusinian and other mysteries, does not appear in the Epics. A good king has good luck, under him all things prosper ”

“ The whole view of women is what we may call "northern"; it is the view of the sagas, of the English and the Teutonic epics; and is remote from the spirit of the partly orientalised poets of Ionia. But for the bequest of ancient heroic tradition the poets of Athens could not have created their noble heroines. Attic life, Ionian life, could not produce such women; and Aeschylus and Sophocles fall back on memories of heroines who are not Ionian and are not Attic, in the great majority of cases. ”