The World of Homer
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.
Considering the fact that phantasms of the dead are probably as common
in one age as in another, Homer is singularly free from superstition
about them. Even Lucretius did not deny that such apparitions appear;
he tried to explain their appearance as traces left, somehow, on
something, we know not what or how, a theory lately revived. Homer
denies ghosts; and his view, we may say, can never, in his own time,
have been _popular_: it is the view of a class, not of a people.
But, as Mr. Leaf justly observes, there are vestiges in Homer of
other rites than his own. The word ταρχύειν, to preserve, whether by
embalment, or merely by drying or kippering, is used, in a general
sense, for doing all the rites of the dead.[13] The word may survive
from an age when mummification, not cremation, was the rule; honey
may have been employed; and the pots of honey and of oil placed by
Achilles against the bier of Patroclus may represent a faint vestige
of survival.[14] The usage lasted at Athens, the pointed lekythoi were
ranged round the bier. Why Achilles slew two dogs and four horses,
and threw them on the pyre, he did not know himself; he thought that
he slaughtered twelve Trojan prisoners merely in anger.[15] He had no
conscious purpose to send horses, dogs, and thralls into Hades for the
use of his friend; he did not burn the arms of his friend. In _Iliad_,
xxiv. 595, he promises to Patroclus a share of the ransom of Hector's
body; but all these things are spoken of only in connection with the
passion of Achilles. Customs almost forgotten revive or are reinvented
in the mind of the hero, extravagances of grief and anger.
There is a variation in the last book of the _Odyssey_; the souls of
the unburied Wooers arrive among the dead in Hades, though their bodies
are unburned. The passage is usually reckoned late, and these spirits
are under the special guidance of Hermes.
Even in these shadowy matters, Homer presents a view' unusually
consistent; and the view was not held either in Aegean times, or in
"Dipylon" days, or in the eighth century by the Cyclic poets, or in
historic Greece. In this, as in all things, the world of Homer stands
apart. There is possibly one note of change in Homeric burial. The
phrase κτέρεα κτερεΐξαι, as in _Iliad_, xxiv. 38, means the burning of
some of a man's possessions on his funeral pyre. It occurs but once
in the _Iliad_, in the case of the funeral of Hector; but frequently
in the _Odyssey_, about the funeral rites of Odysseus, if he proves to
have died abroad. The only possessions of Patroclus which are burned
are dogs and horses; not his arms, as in the cases of Eetion and
Elpenor. In these cases, perhaps, a slight variation in burial rites
may be detected. It looks as though, in the cases where the arms of
the dead are burned with them, they were expected to be of use to them
in the future life, as to Melissa, wife of Periander, who was cold in
Hades, because her wardrobe had not been burned.
[1] _Beowulf_, 184-188, Mr. Clark Hall's translation.
[2] _Odyssey_, xi. 489-491.
[3] _Beowulf_, 2803-2808.
[4] _Odyssey_, xi. 74-76.
[5] Burrows, _Discoveries in Crete_, p. 101. Evans, _Prehistoric Tombs
of Knossos_, p. 134.
[6] 1 Sam. xxxi. 10-13.
[7] 2 Chron. xvi. 14.
[8] 2 Chron. xxi. 19.
[9] Jer. xxxiv. 5.
[10] Hastings' _Dict. of Bible_, art. "Cremation."
[11] _R. G. E_. pp. 72, 73. Mr. Murray supposes cremation, with
_secret_ burial. If so, the cairn was a later addition made in settled
times, after the Migrations.
[12] Mr. Burrows remarks: "Neither Professor Ridgeway nor Mr. Lang
is able to make the slightest use of the combinations suggested by
the East Cretan graves," in which, for example, bronze weapons and
inhumated bones are found side by side with burned bones, in urns, and
iron weapons (_Discoveries in Crete_, p. 215). The facts are certainly
of no use to any theory of mine: they are quite un-Homeric facts. I
can only state the question thus: Homer uniformly describes a very
well known mode of burial. Did he invent it? Did he receive it from
tradition; and if so, from a tradition of what place and period? Is it
possible that a poet of the age of overlapping of bronze and iron, of
inhumation and cremation, in Greece, persists in reproducing, in great
detail, a method of burial removed from his own experience by all the
time that had passed since the Achaeans left their northern forests? If
they retained the mode in Greece, where are the cairns?
[13] Iliad, vii. 85. The word is also found, Iliad, xvi. 456 = 674.
[14] xxiii. 170, 171.
[15] xxiii. 23.
CHAPTER XII
RELIGION IN GREECE: PRE-HISTORIC, HOMERIC, AND HISTORICAL
In religion, as in all things, the Homeric world at certain points
stands apart from the worlds that preceded and followed it. The Aegeans
probably did not give _divine_ honours to the dead. Over Royal tombs
in the acropolis of Mycenae was "a small round altar with a well-like
opening in the middle, which had doubtless been used for sacrificing
to the dead."[1] This is ghost-feeding, not ghost-divinising. We have
also a Cretan picture of a ghost standing outside his tomb, while an
ox is sacrificed to him, the blood falling into the vessel. But such
traces of hero-worship are rare in Aegean art, and Cretan _art_ shows
no representations of sacrifice of animals to gods. There was, indeed,
an ancient tradition that Minos abolished blood-sacrifices.[2] Certain
sites, however, show bones of animals sacrificed in Minoan times.
On the other hand, worship of high gods is frequently represented on
Aegean engraved rings and in pictures. While there is no representation
of blood-sacrifice to gods, fruit of a sacred tree is often plucked, by
attendants, for goddesses, standing or seated.[3]
In the acropolis of Mycenae (in 1886) was found an apparent
representation of a god, on a table of lime-stone. "In the centre
stands, on a blue ground, a man or an idol, covered with a large shield
in the shape of two circles joined together." This is the usual Aegean
figure-of-eight shield, which is found by itself in little objects of
glass and other materials, called "palladia." "On either side of the
idol stands a woman, apparently in an attitude of prayer. Between the
idol and the woman on the right is an altar-like object, resembling the
bases under the feet of the lions at the Lions' gate."[4]
On a scene of cult, on a large gold ring found at Mycenae, is, in
mid-air "a small apparently descending image of a god," armed and
shielded.[5] He also appears on a ring of Cnossos, and is, in Mr.
Evans's opinion, a sky- or sun-god. If so, the Greeks would identify
him with their own Zeus, a sky-god in his earliest aspect as indicated
by his name (also a god of _everything_, in cult).
This male deity is much less prominent in Mycenaean art than a great
goddess. In the Mycenaean ring already cited she sits under a tree,
probably sacred: a little female figure in a flounce skirt gathers
fruit. The goddess, like Demeter in Theocritus (Idyll vii.), holds
poppy heads in her hand; women bring her flowers. Above her is a
ceremonial double axe, symbol of power, and overhead are sun and
crescent moon.
Mr. Evans thinks that the ceremonial double axe, or rather pair of
double axes, "may be an image of the conjunction of the divine pair, a
solar and lunar deity."[6] The art indicates tree- and pillar-worship
as prevalent, whether the deities were supposed to embody themselves
in trees and pillars or not. A slab of offering, inscribed in Aegean
characters, with three small basins for libations, was found in the
Dictaean cave, and was appropriate to the offerings of honey, wine,
and water to the infant Zeus of the Cretan birth-myth of Zeus, or to
the Homeric three libations to the dead in Hades. There was also a
sacrificial stratum, with bones of oxen, deer, and goats. It must be
borne in mind that though the myth of the birth of Zeus in the Cretan
cave is most famous, Pausanias says that it was hard to count the Greek
cities which claimed to be the places of his nativity.[7] He gives four
or five instances in Messenia and Arcadia.
A goddess between two lions,[8] or on a mountain top guarded by lions,
an armed god standing by (in a gold ring), reminds us of Cybele, or of
Rhea, mother of the Gods of Homer. A goddess holding in each hand a
water fowl or other animal is common in Aegean art; and a god in the
same attitude, is a gold figure of the Aegina treasure (_circ_. 850
B.C.), in the British Museum. In the contemporary and later finds in
the temple of Artemis Orthia, at Sparta, such female figures are very
common, and in the earliest Ionian temple at Ephesus. They persist into
the sixth century B.C., and are representations of Artemis as a goddess
of the wild things, Homer's Artemis Agrotera.[9]
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; while in art much earlier than
Pheidias, but much later than Homer, the gods still appear in their
old Aegean forms. This is the paradox of Homer. The poet lived while
the Hellenes were but a small nation, occupying a narrow region in
Thessaly; but his poems forestall the beauty which blossomed again,
when art and religion were truly Hellenic. And in Homer the beauty
bears none of the barbaric strains that deface the rites of Athens in
her glory. "Homer's portrait of Artemis," says Mr. Farnell, "gives us
not the first but the last point in the development of her character,
and the conception of her in later Greek literature is not more
advanced or more spiritual than his." But "Arcadian and Athenian rites
and legends" (we may compare Boeotian and Spartan art of 800-700 B.C.)
"provide us with testimony much earlier than Homer's."[10]
How are we to explain the facts? Homer is the poet of Achaeans,
regarded as a stronger but less civilised race, invaders of a more
civilised people. Yet this Achaean people, or their poet, is already
on the highest Hellenic level in his conception of the Olympians,
while the practical ritual and legends of Athens in her glorious prime
retain many traces of barbarous and even savage conceptions at which
Homer seldom glances, though even in his mythology there are hints of a
truly barbarous cosmogony, the revolution by which Zeus overthrew more
ancient divinities. Homer knew Hesiod's myth of Cronos,[11] which is
precisely that of the Maoris. How then did his taste, and that of his
audience, arrive at his beautiful portraits of the Olympians?
This is the great problem. The gods of Aegean art are strange if
impressive beings, mixed up with tree- and pillar-worship. Their
altars, in art, are not adapted for sacrifices for animals, but
libations, fruits, and flowers are offered. The gods and goddesses of
archaic Greek art are barbaric and unimpressive, and trees and stones,
as sacred, endured through all Greek history. The Olympians of Homer
are, on the other hand, the Olympians of Pheidias.
Turning from Aegean religion before Homer, which shows infinitely
more of the worship of high gods than of ghosts, we find, in early