Homeric age

“ How vast a deluge of time and of events has swept away the very world in which Homer lived, and the worlds that succeeded his: the place of nativity is changed, the great gulf of time is stretched between, the language is another, the religion new, all the chains of association have been taken to pieces and re-forged, all the old chords of feeling are now mute, and others that give forth a different music are strung in their stead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Homeric materials for exhibiting that relation are different in kind as well as in degree: but as they paint, and paint to the very life, the whole range of our nature, and the entire circle of human action and experience, at an epoch much more nearly analogous to the patriarchal time than to any later age, the poems of Homer may be viewed, in the philosophy of human nature, as the complement of the earliest portion of the Sacred Records. ”

“ The Homeric poems are like a broad lake outstretched in the distance, which provides us with a mirror of one particular age and people, alike full and marvellous, but which is entirely dissociated by an interval of many generations from any other records, except such as are of the most partial and fragmentary kind. In respect of the influence which they have respectively exercised upon mankind, it might appear almost profane to compare them. ”

“ It was probably Christianity which, by the stimulus it applied to the general conscience, first gave mankind the introspective habit on a large scale; and mixed causes may often render the tendency excessive and morbid. But the tendency of the heroic age, standing at its maximum in Homer, was to pour life outward, nay almost to force it into every thing. The fountain from within overflowed; and its surplus went to make inanimate nature breathe. The profuse and easy fertility of Homer in simile surely of itself demonstrates a wonderful observation and appreciation of nature ”

“ 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? ”

“ We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records indeed, the Homeric epic in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity would probably never have come into existence. Whoever therefore ventures to dissect Homer, Arktinus and Leschês, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions. ”

“ If such traditions existed, and if the laws which guide historical inquiry require or lead us to suppose that the forefathers of the Greeks must have lived within their circle, then the burden of proof must lie not so properly with those who assert that the traces of them are to be found in the earliest, that is, the Homeric, form of the Greek mythology, as with those who deny it. ”

“ No finer shading of sentiment, I think, can be found in the language of the most civilized nations, nor any case so remarkable of a high and tender, and at the same time largely developed state of feeling at a time when material progress was so partial, rude, and slight. And of the vital importance of this element of the Greek moral code, we find a proof in the representation of Hesiod, who gives it as a characteristic of his iron, or post-Homeric, age, that αἰδὼς along with νέμεσις had fled from the earth. ”

“ May I say a word to the lovers of poetry who, in reading Homer, feel no more doubt than in reading Milton that, on the whole, they are studying a work of one age, by one author? Do not let them be driven from their natural impression by the statement that Science has decided against them. The certainties of the exact sciences are one thing: the opinions of Homeric commentators are other and very different things. Among all the branches of knowledge which the Homeric critic should have at his command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called "sciences" ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is, the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change. ”

“ The greatest ornament of the poems of Hesiod, the series of the Ages declining from gold to iron, probably expresses the actual state of the facts, as it seems to move on the same line with the narrative of the early Scriptures: and Homer’s lamentation on degeneracy in all likelihood may belong to a real portion of the same descending process.
[479]
SECT. IX.
Woman in the Homeric age.
No view of a peculiar civilization can on its ethical side be satisfactory, unless it include a distinct consideration of the place held in it by woman. ”

“ The Homeric religion, therefore, is largely a social religion of this world, of sunlight and of action.
Yet if Homer’s gods are human, they are still impressive; they have the dignity which comes from unchanging age and superhuman power; they are conceived in the grand way. So true was this that as the Homeric poems became popular literature, studied in school and known to all men, they created a universal religion. They also influenced the types under which the Greek artists represented their great gods. ”

“ What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. ”

“ The Homeric poets, like the painters of the Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms" before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the Iliad and Odyssey. ”

“ It is far more desirable that we should form an approximate opinion as to the date of the Homeric poems, than that we should seek to determine the exact locality in which they originated. Yet the one question is hardly less obscure than the other. Different writers of antiquity assigned eight different epochs to Homer, of which the earliest is separated from the most recent by an interval of four hundred and sixty years,—a period as long as that which separates the Black Prince from the Duke of Wellington, or the age of Perikles from the Christian era. ”

“ On these generations we must look as the real time-keeping organism of his works: and the time with its elastic periods, although indeterminate in its details, is kept by him most accurately and effectually as a whole; so that his generations, which are dispersedly recorded in various parts of the poems, always tally when they meet. This is not the place for the proof of the assertion: I only refer to it, because it may help to dispel the illusion apt to possess the mind with respect to Homer’s decades. ”

“ As respects religion, arts, and manners, the Greeks of the heroic age may be compared with other societies in the infancy of man. But as respects political science in its essential rudiments, and as respects the application of those principles by way of art to the government of mankind, we may say with almost literal truth that they are the fathers of it; and Homer invites those who study him to come and view it in its cradle, where the infant carries every lineament in miniature, that we can reasonably desire to see developed in manhood. ”

“ In Homer, there is a knowledge of Greece, of the neighboring islands, and western Asia Minor. References to other lands are vague. The earth is a sort of flat oval, with the River Oceanus flowing round it. Hesiod is better informed about places: he knows something of the Nile and of the Scythians, and of some places as far west as Syracuse.
RELIGION IN THE HOMERIC AGE.—The Homeric poems give us a full idea of the early religious ideas and practices, (I) The Nature of the Gods.—The gods in Homer are human beings with greatly magnified powers. ”

“ Everything in the two great Homeric poems, both in substance and in language, belongs to an age two or three centuries earlier than Peisistratus. Indeed, even the interpolations (or those passages which, on the best grounds, are pronounced to be such) betray no trace of the sixth century before Christ, and may well have been heard by Archilochus and Kallinus—in some cases even by Arktinus and Hesiod—as genuine Homeric matter. ”

“ Magn. 13. 36, the reading is γερώντων; and Ausonius, following this authority in his Eighteenth Idyll, makes the γενεὴ no less than 96 years. But the sense of γενεὴ is fixed by Homer’s account of Nestor, and otherwise, in such a way as greatly to favour the reading ἡβώντων. The word therefore means the term between birth and the prime of life, which may well be taken at thirty years. Then comes a table as follows.
[445]
The age of the daw = 9 ages of men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A different spirit pervades the Homeric creed and worship, from that which we find in Egyptian, or Median, or Persian systems. One has grovelling animalism, another has metaphysical aspirations, that we do not find in the Greek: but this is not all. If the Homeric scheme is capable of being described, as to its inventive part, by any one epithet, it will be this, that it is intensely human. I do not speak of the [37] later mythology; nor of Hesiod, whose Theogony so marvellously spoils what it systematizes; but of Homer, in whom the ideal Olympus attained its perfection at a stroke. ”

“ In some cases it may be slight, or, at least, easily surmountable; but it is raised nearly to its maximum in the instance of Homer. There are few among us who can say that we learned much of the inward parts of Homer in our boyhood; while perhaps we do not feel that our labours upon him were below the average, such as it may have been, of our general exertions; and though other generations may greatly improve upon us, they cannot, I fear, master the higher properties of their author at that early period of life. ”

“ Now, it appears to me, that in the case of Homer, together with the breadth and elevation of the highest genius, we have before us, and in a yet more remarkable degree, an even more rare fulness and consistency of the various instruments and organs which make up the apparatus of the human being—constituted as he is, in mind and body, and holding, as he does, on the one side of the Deity, and on the other, of the dust. ”

“ The Outer Geography Phœnician.
It is to that people that we must look as the established merchants, hardiest navigators, and furthest explorers, of those days. To them alone as a body, in the whole Homeric world of flesh and blood, does Homer give the distinctive epithet of ναυσικλυτοὶ ἄνδρες [425] . He accords it indeed to the airy Phæacians, but in all probability that element of their character is borrowed from the Phœnicians [426] , and if so, the reason of the derivation can only be, that the Phœnicians were for that age the type of a nautical people. ”

“ He would make an entire reformation of the old mythology; like Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary authority, but only for his own purposes. The lusts and treacheries of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the world below are to be dispelled; the misbehavior of the Homeric heroes is not to be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer which may teach our youth endurance ”

“ Moreover it is one thing to recognize that a literature is essentially oral in its form, characteristic of an age which was one of hearing rather than of reading, and quite another to hold that the same literature was preserved entirely by oral transmission.
The result of these various considerations seems to be that the age which we may call the Homeric—the age which is brought before us in vivid outlines in the Iliad and Odyssey—lies beyond the earliest point to which history enables us to penetrate. ”