W. E. Gladstone

“ If, therefore, he is to be read for his theology, history, ethics, politics, for his skill in the higher and more delicate parts of the poetic calling, for his never-ending lessons upon manners, arts, and society, if we are to study in him the great map of that humanity which he so wonderfully unfolds to our gaze,—he must be read at the universities, and read with reference to his deeper treasures. He is second to none of the poets of Greece as the poet of boys; but he is far advanced before them all, even before Æschylus and Aristophanes, as the poet of men. ”

“ To my conjecture, he seems to personify the one-stringed instrument which might suffice for Pelasgian song: while the Diapason of Homer, embracing with its immeasurable sweep things small and things great, things sublime and things homely, all objects that human experience had suggested, and all thoughts that the soul of man had imagined or received, presents to us that Greek mind, full, varied, energetic, lively, profound, exact, which was destined to give form for so many ages to the genius of the world. ”

“ There is an inner Homeric world, of which his verse is the tabernacle and his poetic genius the exponent, but which offers in itself a spectacle of the most profound interest, quite apart from him who introduces us to it, and from the means by which we are so introduced. This world of religion and ethics, of civil policy, of history and ethnology, of manners and arts, so widely severed from all following experience, that we may properly call them palæozoic, can hardly be examined and understood by those, who are taught to approach Homer as a poet only. ”

“ I do not dispute the merits of the tragedians as masters in their noble art. As long as letters are cultivated among mankind, for so long their honours are secure. I do not question the advantage of studying the Greek language in its most fixed and most exact forms, which they present in perfection; nor their equal, at least, if not greater value than Homer, as practical helps and models in Greek composition. ”

“ It is better to write one word upon the rock, than a thousand on the water or the sand: better to remove a single stray stone out of the path that mounts the hill of true culture, than to hew out miles of devious tracks, which mislead and bewilder us when we travel them, and make us more than content if we are fortunate enough to find, when we emerge out of their windings, that we have simply returned to the point in our age, from which, in sanguine youth, we set out. ”

“ The fact that the Dorian name is all but unknown to Homer, while the Achæan one is at its zenith, not only heroically, as in the Iliad, but in the every day familiar use of Ithaca throughout the Odyssey, is to me one of several strong presumptions, not countervailed by any evidence of equal strength, that Homer could not have lived to see that great revolution, which so completely effaced the ethnical landmarks, and altered the condition, of Southern Greece. ”

“ From among the Helli of the mountains, who nowhere appear among the contingents of the Greek army, must have proceeded the migratory bands who gave to the Thessalian plain the name of Hellas. Their descendants fix themselves as settlers there. Beguiled into civilization, they become Hellenes; they spread, by their inborn elastic energies, towards the south, and carry with them, only a little in their rear, the very title of their Hellenic origin, as well as their own peculiar name. ”

“ This Greek mind, which thus became one of the main factors of the civilized life of Christendom, cannot be fully comprehended without the study of Homer, and is nowhere so vividly or so sincerely exhibited as in his works. He has a world of his own, into which, upon his strong wing, he carries us. There we find ourselves amidst a system of ideas, feelings, and actions, different from what are to be found anywhere else; and forming a new and distinct standard of humanity. ”

“ Especially is this true of the Iliad, which most men suppose to be little more than a gigantic battle-piece. But that poem, battle-piece as it is, where we might expect to find only the glitter and the clash of arms, is rich in every kind of knowledge, perhaps richest of all in the political and historical departments. It is hardly too much to say, in general, that besides his claims as a poet, Homer has, for himself, all the claims that all the other classes of ancient writers can advance for themselves, each in his separate department. ”

“ In some instances it has been so: the body, which has been stronger in the hand, has proved weaker in the intellectual and moral, that is to say, the enduring, elements of power. The undying yet daily influences and sympathies of peace wear down the convulsive vibrations, which the shock of war and conquest have communicated to the social fabric. Victory must end in possession, like toil in sleep. Possession implies the dispersion of the conquerors, and, in such cases as these, their free intermixture with the vanquished. ”

“ He would be indeed a worthless biographer who did not, so far as his materials carried him, pursue the life of a hero back to the nursery or even the cradle: and the same faithful and well-grounded instincts invest with a surpassing interest all real elucidation of the facts and ideas, that make up the image of the Greek nation either in its infancy or even in its embryo. ”

“ The Theogony, by its subject, brought him nearer to Homer, but it is quite destitute of the heroic power and fire: a calm and low-toned beauty, as in the legend of the Ages, is all to which Hesiod ever rises. ”

“ The habitations of the Cyclops, the Læstrygones, the Lotophagi, of Æolus, the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, may have had no ‘whereabout,’ no actual site, outside the fancy of Homer; still they must have been imagined as repositories in which to lodge traditions which had reached him, and which, however fabulously given, purported to be local. Again, with respect to the tradition of Atlas, it is scarcely possible to refuse to it a local character. He knows the depths of every sea, and he holds or keeps the pillars that hold heaven and earth apart. ”

“ We expect to find, and we do find, them worshipped both among the Greeks and among the Trojans as gods, not of this or that nation, but of the great human family. In theory, exclusive regard to the one side or the other comports far better with the idea of such deities as represent unruly passions or propensities of our nature like Mars and Venus, or Mercury; or chief physical forces like Neptune; or such as, like Juno, are the sheer product of human imagination reflected upon the world above, and have no relation to any element or part of a true theology. ”

“ Their keen sense of the beautiful led them to adorn both the body and the mind of man with the attributes of deity, while their imaginative power continually prompted them both to clothe celestial objects in shapes borrowed from the visible world, and to equip the gods with sentiments and passions drawn from the sphere of every day experience. ”

“ As regards the Greeks, it is Homer that furnishes the point of origin from which all distances are to be measured. When the historic period began, Greece was already near its intellectual middle-age. Little can be learned of the relative movements of our moral and our mental nature severally, [8] from matching one portion of that period with another, in comparison with what we may gather from bringing into neighbourhood and contrast the pristine and youthful Greece of Homer on the one hand, and, on the other, the developed and finished Greece of the age of the tragedians or the orators. ”

“ When Homer makes Perseus the son of Jupiter, he certainly implies of this sovereign, as of Minos, that he had no known paternal ancestry, and perhaps that he falsely claimed a maternal one, in the country where he attained to fame. But further, it very decidedly appears from the use of the word Ἀργεῖοι for the subjects of the Perseids, and from the intense attachment of the Homeric Juno to that family, that they were an Hellenic house, following upon the probably Egyptian dynasty of the Danaids. With them appears to begin what Homer esteems to be the really national history. ”

“ Now, this appetite for commemoration does not fix itself upon what is imaginary; it may tolerate fiction by way of accessory and embellishment, but in the main it must, from its nature, rely upon what it takes to be solid food. The actions of great men in all times, but especially in early times, afford it suitable material; and there is nothing irrational in believing that the race which in its infancy produced so marvellous a poet as Homer, should also in its infancy have produced great warriors and great statesmen. ”

“ It is generally admitted that Homer is older by some [74] generations than Hesiod, by many than the authors of the Cyclical Poems; and older by many centuries than the general mass of our authorities on Greek antiquity, beginning with Æschylus and Herodotus, and coming down to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Ælian, Pausanias, Diogenes Laertius. Nor is it by time alone, that his superior proximity and weight are to be measured. Of all the ages that have passed since Homer, it may be truly said that not one has produced a more acute, accurate, and comprehensive observer. ”

“ In the case of Greece, as it is known to us in history, we have the most remarkable disproportion between moral and physical power, and between the green and the full grown product, which is offered to view in the whole range of human experience. A circumscribed country, with a small population, throws forth, without loss of vital power, to the East and to the West, colonies greatly transcending itself, as would appear, in wealth and population; continues for many centuries to exercise a primary influence in the world ”

“ May we not, however, go a good deal further, and say boldly that the faculty of assuming in literary compositions an archaic costume, voice, and manner, does not belong at all either to an age like that of Homer, or to any age of which the literary conditions at all resemble it? ”

“ Finally, though sharing the dissatisfaction of others at the established preference given among us to the Latin names of deities originally Greek, and at some part of our orthography for Greek names, I have thought it best to adhere in general to the common custom, and only to deviate from it where a special object was in view. I fear that diversity, and even confusion, are more likely to arise than any benefit, from efforts at reform, made by individuals, and without the advantage either of authority or of a clear principle, as a groundwork for general consent. ”

“ If the works of Homer are, to letters and to human learning, what the early books of Scripture are to the entire Bible and to the spiritual life of man; if in them lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world, then we must still recollect that that life, to be rightly understood, should be studied in its beginnings. ”

“ He would have done as most other epic poets have done, whose personages we feel that we know, not from themselves, but from what the poet in the character of intelligencer has been kind enough to tell us; whereas we learn Achilles by means of Achilles, Ulysses by means of Ulysses, and so with the rest. Next to their own light, is the light they reflect on one another; but we never see the poet, so to speak, holding the candle. ”

“ For an Egyptian stranger was little likely to attain to power, where Hellenes were already in the field: the more energetic genius would subdue the less vigorous. The expulsion of the Hellenic Bellerophon, and the plot against his life, may really have been connected with the political jealousies of the Danaids towards the formidable new-comers of the Æolid stem: nor do I read the fable of Jupiter with Danae otherwise than as a veil, used to give dignity to the commencement of an Hellic sovereignty, which, in the person of Perseus, partly succeeded, partly supplanted, the Danaid throne. ”

“ Upon our finding, as we find, the Pelasgian name in certain apparent relations with others, such as Leleges and Caucones, it appears more reasonable to presume a relationship between them, than the reverse: for nothing can be more improbable than the simultaneous presence at that early period of a multitude of races, radically distinct from each other, and yet diffused intermixedly over the same country upon equal terms, and if there was a relationship, it would most probably be that of subdivision, under which Leleges and Caucones might be branches of the widely spread Pelasgian family. ”