The World of Homer
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THE WORLD OF HOMER
by
ANDREW LANG
With Illustrations
Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1910
PREFACE
In 1895 I published _Homer and the Epic_ (pp. 424), containing a
criticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which is
the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book,
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, observing on the modern ideas of
interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages
which, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" and
inconsistency.
I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the
early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies,
more or less imperfect, with Homer.
On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor
Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish
_Kalewala_. He says:
"The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so
often and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics,
proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and
from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and
groundless."
The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century,
separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the _Æneid_ and
the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, from those which belong to the period of
spontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned many epic
lays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the
right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made themselves,"
as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not "epic lays," but ballads like
"Jock o' the Side," and "Archie o' Cafield," and "Johnie Cock," despite
its name the most romantic of all.)
"These epic lays were called 'national' or 'popular,' not only by
virtue of their contents, sentiment, and audience, but mainly because
the poetry which takes this form is natural, collective, popular, and
hence 'national' in its origin and development." (By "collective"
I understand the author to mean, not that a whole country-side
automatically and collectively bellows out a new ballad, but that the
original author uses traditional formulae in verse wherever he can,
and that his ballad is altered in the course of recitation by others,
so that any version which has been obtained from recitation is, in
fact, one of many variants which have arisen in course of time and
recitation.)
"The baseless application of this principle is to regard the national
poems not as creations of a single poet, but as put together out of
shorter pre-existing lays (either by a single person at one time, or
by several in succession), until the final fashioning of the poem. And
this process is conceived of as a mere stringing together, without any
sort of fusion, so that a critical philologist, thanks to his special
sharpness and by aid of certain criteria, would be in a position to
recognise the joinings, and to recover the lays out of which the poem
has been made up.
"With this preconceived idea people have gone on anatomising the Epics;
from Lachmann to the present day they have not desisted, although so
far no positive satisfactory and harmonious results have been won. This
restless business of analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of
its own fruitlessness, yet unconvinced of it, builds up and pulls down,
and builds again, while its shifting foundations, its insufficient and
falsely applied criteria, condemn it to remain fruitless, tedious, and
repulsive. The observer marks with amazement the degree of intellectual
shortsightedness produced by excessive and exclusive analysis. The
investigator becomes a sort of man-microscope, who can see atoms but
not bodies; motes, and these magnified, but not beams."
Comparetti proceeds: "No doubt before the epic there existed the
shorter lays; but what is the relation of the lays to the epic? Is the
epic a mere material synthesis of lays, or does it stand to them as
a thing higher in the scale of poetic organisms,--does it move on a
loftier plane, attaining higher, broader conceptions, and a new style
appropriate to these?" Notoriously the epic infinitely transcends in
scale, breadth of conception, and grandeur of style any brief popular
lays of which we have knowledge. It never was made by stringing _them_
together.
So much for the little lay theory. "But there remains the nucleus
theory" (the theory of "the kernel"), "for example of an original
Achilleis" (the _Menis_) expanded by self-denying poets into an
_Iliad_. Comparetti does not believe that a poet would fashion lays "to
be inserted in a greater work already constructed by others, nor that
he would have done this with so much regard for other men's work, and
with such strict limitation of his own, that the modern erudite can
recognise the joinings, and distinguish the original kernel and each of
the later additions."
Here Wolf anticipated Comparetti, he did not believe that the additions
could be detected.
But Comparetti does not reckon with his host. The astute critics tell
us that the later poets did _not_ compose "with so much respect for
other men's work"; far from that, the poet of _Iliad_ ix. calmly turned
the work of the poet of _Iliad_ xvi. into nonsense, we are told (see
_infra_, "The Great Discrepancies"). Again, the critics will say that a
later poet did not "fashion lays to be inserted in another man's work."
He merely fashioned lays. Much later other men, the Pisistratean, or
Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension, took his lays and
foisted them into the middle of another man's work, making every kind
of blunder and discrepancy in the process of making everything smooth
and neat.
Comparetti goes on: "The difficulty is increased when we have to do
with epics which seem in all their parts to be composed on a definite
plan, which exists in the final poem, not in the supposed kernel. The
organic unity, the harmony, the relation of all the portions, which
are arranged so as to lead up to the final catastrophe, are such as to
imply the agreement and homogeneity of the poetic creation in a common
idea, and, moreover, resting on that idea--a limitation of the creative
processes."
Comparetti, I fear, forgets that his "man-microscopes" see none of
these things; "they see the mote, not the beam." Finally, granting
the pre-existence of a mass of poetic material, "He who could extract
from this mass the epics which we possess, and not a kind of Greek
_Mahabharata_, would have produced, at all events, such a work of
genius that in fairness he must be called not merely the redactor, but
the author and poet."
How true is all that Comparetti says of "this restless business of
analysis, which has lasted so long, impatient of its own fruitlessness,
yet unconvinced of it! It builds up, and pulls down, and builds again,
while its insufficient and falsely applied criteria condemn it to
remain fruitless, tedious, and repulsive."
"Our little systems have their day." "They have their day, and cease
to be." The little system which explained the _Iliad_ as a mass, or
rather a concatenation of short lays, "has had its day." The system
of a primal "kernel" (Books i., xi., xvi., and so forth)--a kernel
more archaic in language than Books ix., x., xxiii., xxiv.--is also
perishing, "stricken through with doubt." The linguistic analysis
of Miss Stawell (_Homer and the Iliad_, 1909) and, in America, of
Professor Scott, has fatally damaged the linguistic tests of books for
earliness and lateness.
The most advanced German critics find that Book i. of the _Iliad_ is
no longer that genuine kernel which, with certain other passages,
represents the primal _Menis_, or "wrath of Achilles," as opposed to
the later accretions of three or four centuries. _Das ist ausgespielt!_
The "kernel" hypothesis is doomed. Its cornerstone--Book i. of the
_Iliad_, is, by the builders of new theories, rejected; it is now
one of the latest additions to the _Iliad_.[1] Only to one point is
criticism steadfast. The _Iliad must_ be a thing of rags and tatters;
and it is torn up by the process of misstating its statements and
finding "discrepancies" in the statements misstated.
Again, as even Comparetti's "man-microscopes" could not well help
seeing that the epics, though not good enough as compositions for them,
still _are_ compositions; have, in a way, organic unity, harmony,
adjusted relations of all the portions, some critics tried to account
for the facts as the result of the labours of the Pisistratean, or
Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension at Athens, in the sixth
century B.C. But so many critics of all shades of opinion have rejected
this hypothesis, even with scorn, as "a worthless fable," "an absurd
legend," part of Homeric mythology (Blass, Meyer, Mr. T. W. Alien, D.
B. Monro, Nutzhorn, Grote, and many others), that it can scarcely be
restored even by the learned ingenuity of Mr. Verrall.[2]
In defect of the late Recension, which is wholly destitute of historic
evidence, a poet, a _Dichter_, has to be sought somewhere, and at some
period of the supposed "evolution" of the _Iliad_. He may lawfully
be sought, it seems, at any period of the history of the poem, except
at the point where, in fact, the poet is always found, namely at the
beginning. The search for the poet will never find him anywhere else.
He cannot be made to fit into the eighth or seventh or sixth century;
it is useless to look for him at the Court of Croesus! A poem purely
Achaean had an Achaean author.
None of the many critical keys fits the lock. The linguistic key breaks
itself, it cannot break the wards.
Archaeology is used as a test of passages very early and very late;
and the archaeology is also wrong, demonstrably fallacious. The
archaeologists themselves, Mr. Arthur Evans and Mr. Ridgeway, will
have none of Reichel's key. Whatever archaeology may prove, it does
not prove what Reichel and his followers believed it to demonstrate.
If I succeed in convincing any separatist critics that the costume and
armour in the _Iliad_ are much less like the costume and armour of
Ionia in the seventh century B.C. than like those of Athens at the end
of the sixth and beginning of the fifth centuries, these critics will
probably be grateful. Here, they may perhaps say, is proof of our late
Athenian recension, by which the actual Athenian dress and armour of
540-480 were written into the ancient poems.
I would agree with them if the members of the Committee of Recension
had excised the huge Homeric shields, introduced cavalry in place of
chariotry, iron instead of bronze weapons; excised the bride-price
in marriage law, introduced the rite of purification of homicides by
pigs' blood, and generally, in a score of other ways, for example by
introducing hero-worship, had brought the _Iliad_ "up to date." But as
I cannot easily conceive that _only_ armour and costume were brought
up to date, I suppose that the whirligig of time and fashion had
reverted in Athens to hauberks of scales in place of the uniform use
of back-plate and breast-plate, and had also deserted the Ionian and
early Hellenic _cypassis,_ the Aegean loin-cloth or bathing-drawers for
the longer and loose Homeric chiton.
If each critic would publish his own polychrome _Iliad_, with
"primitive" passages printed in gold, "secondary" in red, "tertiary" in