Homeric poems

“ 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 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. ”

“ After this survey of ancient criticism, he proceeds to point out some of the characteristic features of the Homeric poems. He enquires what is understood by natural poetry, or the poetry of nature; shews that it is perfectly compatible with art—that there is a wide difference between the natural and [ix] the rude—that Homer is distinguished as much for delicacy of perception, accuracy of delineation, and sagacity of judgment, as for fertility of fancy and energy of passion. ”

“ A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. ”

“ His is the oldest extant Greek, his matter is the most various and delightful, and most appeals to the young, who are wearied by scraps of Xenophon, and who cannot be expected to understand the Tragedians. But Homer is a poet for all ages, all races, and all moods. To the Greeks the epics were not only the best of romances, the richest of poetry; not only their oldest documents about their own history,—they were also their Bible, their treasury of religious traditions and moral teaching. With the Bible and Shakespeare, the Homeric poems are the best training for life. ”

“ If we apply all these principles to the Homeric poems, it follows that we gain nothing with our theory of the poetising soul of the people, and that we are always referred back to the poetical individual. We are thus confronted with the task of distinguishing that which can have originated only in a single poetical mind from that which is, so to speak, swept up by the tide of oral tradition, and which is a highly important constituent part of the Homeric poems. ”

“ No poems have ever been more popular, and none have extorted greater admiration from critics. Like Shakspeare, Homer is a kind of Bible to both the learned and unlearned among all peoples and ages, --one of the prodigies of the world. His poems form the basis of Greek literature, and are the best understood and the most widely popular of all Grecian compositions. The unconscious simplicity of the Homeric narrative, its high moral tone, its vivid pictures, its graphic details, and its religious spirit create an enthusiasm such as few works of genius can claim. ”

“ Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing habits of society with regard to poetry--for they admit generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard,--but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts to ensure the preservation of the poems--the unassisted memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To many persons the undisputed fact that the Homeric poems were composed to be recited, not read, has appeared a convincing proof that they could not have originally assumed the form in which they are known to us. For setting aside the difficulty of preserving by the aid only of memory, and the still greater difficulty of composing a long poem without help of the manuscript, to keep secure the part already completed, what motive, it has been said, could induce the poet to undertake so great and so superfluous a labour? ”

“ We should hardly think it sufficient in order to make a good man of a boy to place Homer in his hands. But we do believe that the knowledge of the Homeric poems, introduced at the right time and in the right way, will contribute to such a result. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Homeric poems make much of the religious side of human nature, and the poet chose in order to give to his action and issue a superhuman dignity to set that action in the presence of the gods themselves. ”

“ But it would not, of course, explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each adding such fresh verses as he pleased, and often introducing such modern details of life as he pleased, kept up the harmony of the Homeric picture of life, and character, and law, as far as it confessedly exists.
To take a single instance: the poems never allude to the personal armorial bearings of the heroes. ”

“ The Homeric poems expose to our view two standards not mutually accordant, the objective and the subjective. If we pay attention to the impressions current among men respecting the gods, they are the guardians of some moral and social principles of the highest order. But if we take their own word for it, the mere Olympian deities seem ordinarily to appreciate no quality or conduct, except the practice of offering up numerous and well fed animals in sacrifice, each with the accompanying tribute of the appointed portion ”

“ Since, moreover, the Homeric masterpieces of poetry were older than any masterpiece of art, for Homer had observed nature with the eye of an artist before either Phidias or Apelles, the artists naturally found ready made in his poems many valuable observations, which they had not yet had time to make for themselves. These they eagerly seized upon, in order that, through Homer, they might copy nature. ”

“ But perhaps the easiest solution of all questions in regard to interpolations in the Homeric poems is to pin our uncritical faith to the authenticity of Lucian’s interview with Homer in Elysium: “I went up to Homer the poet, when we were both at leisure, and after making other inquiries ... I asked him further about the rejected verses, whether they were written by him. ”

“ Though the Homeric poems as wholes are not allegories, yet they have allegory playing into them. Indeed the mythus has an inherent tendency to pitch over into allegory through culture. Then there is a reaction, the mythical spirit must assert itself even among civilized peoples, since allegorized Gods are felt to be hollow abstractions, having nothing divine about them. ”

“ The Homeric poems doubtless did this, when they formed well-nigh all the intellectual food of the most sensitive-minded of all people. Others may have done more to enrich thought and to humanize hearts. ”

“ It is to the indefatigable students of Germany that we, the less laborious English, are, along with the rest of the world, indebted for what may be called the systematic treatment of the Homeric poems with respect to the facts they contain. ”

“ In Anglo-Saxon poems—even in those which were not entirely dependent on oral tradition—modernisation prevailed to such an extent that archaic forms disappeared practically everywhere, while substitutions of one word for another were very frequent. The more elaborate character of Greek metre doubtless acted as a check on this tendency to change, but at the same time I cannot help thinking that its importance in the history of Homeric poetry has been greatly underrated. ”

“ The credit for moral results, which has thus been allowed to the probable operation of the Homeric Theo-mythology in the world, must be steadily denied to its influence upon the poems, where it appears before us as in the main a lowering and corrupting agency. ”

“ The end of the Cycle marks also the end of the Heroic Age.
The Homeric Hymns.
The collection of thirty-three Hymns, ascribed to Homer, is the last considerable work of the Epic School, and seems, on the whole, to be later than the Cyclic poems. It cannot be definitely assigned either to the Ionian or Continental schools, for while the romantic element is very strong, there is a distinct genealogical interest; and in matters of diction and style the influences of both Hesiod and Homer are well-marked. The date of the formation of the collection as such is unknown. ”

“ The Bible, that divine lyric monument, contains in germ, as we suggested a moment ago, an epic and a drama—Kings and Job. In the Homeric poems one is conscious of a clinging reminiscence of lyric poetry and of a beginning of dramatic poetry. Ode and drama meet in the epic. There is a touch of all in each ”

“ But it is plain from the poems that the influence, the activity, and the virtual, if not positive presence of Apollo and Minerva pervade the whole Homeric world. This is shown partly by their universal action; in Troas, in Lycia [121] , in Thrace, in Scheria, and all over Greece. It is also demonstrated by the manner in which prayer is addressed to them: and neither the one nor the other is ever represented either as having a palace or residence in any particular spot, or as showing, like Juno, an exclusive partiality to any particular race or city. ”

“ It would not, however, repay the trouble to be entailed by the perusal, were I to draw out in detail a comparison between the diction, taste, figures, and all other incidents of poetic handling, in Tasso, and those of Homer. It is better to direct attention to what more easily admits of being brought into juxtaposition—that is, the general structure and movement of the poems, and the manner in which the greater laws of the poetic art are applied to the respective subjects. ”

“ This contrast, like the greater one relating to Apollo, seems to have its key in the traditional origin of the representation: and there is no one Homeric deity, whose case, when fully considered, can afford a more marked testimony to the hypothesis of a strong element of traditive theology in the religious system of the Poems.
Why has she a position so different from that of any other wife or concubine of Jupiter: such, for example, as Dione or Demeter? ”

“ Man had not, as it were, had time to ask himself, is this a lie? or even, whither does it tend? His soul, in those days of infancy, never questioned, always believed. Logical inconsistency, even moral solecism, did not repel it, nor slacken the ardour of its energies in the work of construction: construction of art, construction of man [18] ners, construction of polity, construction of religion. This is what we see, in glowing heat, throughout the poems of Homer, and it is perhaps the master key to their highest interest. ”

“ Of this common soul the organ in Homer is the Τὶς or ‘Somebody;’ by no means one of the least remarkable, though he has been one of the least regarded, personages of the poems. The Τὶς of Homer is, I apprehend, what in England we now call public opinion. We constantly find occasions, when the Poet wants to tell us what was the prevailing sentiment among the Greeks of the army. ”

“ The poems of Homer, particularly the Iliad, abound in passages relating to prior occurrences. These passages are not in general of a high order of poetical beauty, as compared with the rest of the poem; they often cause the action to hang rather heavily; many of them make up the speeches of old men, whose natural leaning to loquacity it appears that the Poet has, with [349] his usual skill, made to minister to the accomplishment of his own marked historic aims. ”

“ We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual gran [389] deur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. ”

“ Of this we find traces all through the poems, in the course which divine favour usually takes. When Homer speaks of the gods in the sense of Providential governors, it is the just man that they regard, and the unjust that they visit with wrath. But when he carries us into Olympus, and we behold them in the living [357] energy of their individualities, it is sacrifice which they want, and which forms their share in the fruits of earth and of human labour, as we learn from the emphatic words of Jupiter himself ”

“ The arrangement adopted in this edition, by which the complete and fragmentary poems are restored to the order in which they would probably have appeared had the Hesiodic corpus survived intact, is unusual, but should not need apology; the true place for the Catalogues (for example) , fragmentary as they are, is certainly after the Theogony.
In preparing the text of the Homeric Hymns my chief debt — and it is a heavy one — is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vols. xv. sqq.) by T. W. Allen. ”