The World of Homer
Cyclic poems (750-600 B.C.) tried to prove that they and neighbouring
and friendly peoples had their share in the Trojan war; and, next, the
tragedians of Athens carried on this pseudo-tradition in regard to
Thebes as well as to Troy. Their versions led the world captive for
2000 years. The oldest indications of the Ionian attempts to connect
heroes of Athens and of her neighbours and friends with the Trojan
affair are to be read in the fragments and summaries of the Cyclic
poems.
Next, we find this cause taken up by the Athenian tragedians; and,
lastly, we find in later sources the fables which the tragedians
handled with poetic freedom; while, in the pseudo-Dictys of Crete, we
have legends derived from the Cyclic poets, from other sources, and
from the author's own fancy. The Roman poets, like Virgil, also reflect
the Ionian and Athenian traditions, and their hostility to Agamemnon,
Menelaus, Odysseus, and Diomede, with their partiality for Aias,
claimed as a neighbour of Athens, and for the ill-used Philoctetes, and
the martyr sage, Palamedes of Nauplia. Homer mentions neither him nor
his city.[17]
[1] xi. 321-325.
[2] Leaf, Note to _Iliad_, iii. 144.
[3] Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 370.
[4] Roscher's _Lexikon_, under "Minos."
[5] See Miss Harrison's _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_,
London, 1890.
[6] _Ibid_., p. 56, note. For human sacrifice see "The Cyclic Poems,"
later.
[7] _Ibid_. p. lxxxvi.
[8] _Ibid_. p. lxxxvii.
[9] Pausanias, from the _Thebais_, ii. 20. 4, ix. 9. 1.
[10] Hdt. ix. 27.
[11] _Suppliants_, Isoc., _Oral. Panegyr_. p. 196. Auger.
[12] Pausanias, i. 28. 7.
[13] Hdt. v. 65.
[14] _Iliad_, xxiii. 679; _Odyssey_, xi. 271-280.
[15] Scholiast. _Iliad_, xxiii. 679.
[16] Thucydides, i. 2.
[17] See "The Story of Palamedes."
CHAPTER XVI
HOMER AND "THE SAGA"
Every reader of the _Iliad_ perceives that the poet knows an immense
mass of legend and tradition. Thus, like Shakespeare, and our great
masters of fiction, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, he rarely
introduces a minor character without marking the individuality in some
memorable way. Often he does this by some line or two on the ancestry
of the personage, and we are for a moment brought into touch with "old
unhappy far-off things," or meet some notable trait of character. Thus
Theano, daughter of Kisseus of Thrace, priestess of Athene in Troy, and
wife of Antenor, is only introduced to utter the prayer of the women to
the relentless goddess (_Iliad_, vi. 302-310). Yet we know her when we
meet her, for (_Iliad_, v. 69-71) we have already heard of her goodness
of heart. She reared Meges, a bastard of Antenor, "kindly, like her own
children, to please her lord." Here we have probably no more than a
touch of Homer's genial and discriminating art; it is not probable that
the poet took this trait from any traditional "saga."
On the other hand, when in a digression he makes Nestor speak of
old heroes, Epeians and Lapithae; or when Glaucus tells the tale of
Bellerophon and the wife of Proetus; or Phoenix touches on the tragedy
of fair-haired Meleager of Aetolia; or Agamemnon speaks of the birth
of Heracles, or, in several other references to Theban wars, to the
Amazons, and so forth, Homer is clearly drawing from the great
legendary store of Achaeans or Pelasgians (to use that term for the
earlier people).
All this matter is called "the saga" by the critics. As Homer comes at
the crowning period of epic poetry, as his instrument, the hexameter,
is delicately tempered by long processes, it seems probable that his
mind was full of ancient lays on legendary themes as well, probably,
as of _Märchen_ and traditions told orally in prose. These things are
to him what ballads and oral traditions were to Scott. Though he only
once, in a suspected passage, touches on the Choice of Paris (_Iliad_,
xxiv, 25-30), he must have known some tale which accounted for the
enmity of Hera to Ilios, and the hatred of Athene to the Asian city
of which she was patroness. Zeus himself (_Iliad_, iv. 31-33) seems
puzzled by the fury of Hera against Troy. _Quo numine laeso_? The cause
of wrath is, in fact, _spretae injuria formae_, the spite of neglected
beauty. No other reason (setting aside the favour of Ganymede, to whom
Homer only refers in the most casual way) has ever been given.
As to the Trojan affairs, Homer knows many things on which he only
touches briefly. It is clear that he knew a great saga about Trojan
legendary history; for example, about the wall built by the Trojans
and Pallas Athene to shelter Heracles when he fought a monster that
ravaged the land (_Iliad_, xx. 146). He also knows that Apollo was made
thrall to Laomedon, and built the city wall of Troy, but was defrauded
of his reward (xxi. 441-455). That Apollo and Poseidon therefore sent
the monster to which Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, was exposed, Homer
does not say; he commonly ignores the _märchenhaft_, the fairy-tale
points in a legend, but he knows that Heracles was also defrauded, and
avenged himself by sacking Ilios (v. 638641). Manifestly there was a
rich growth of _Märchen_ and legends clustered round Troy, and known to
the Achaeans; Homer merely alludes to it, and to events posterior to
the death of Hector.
He knows how Achilles fell in the Scaean gate, slain by Paris and
Apollo; he knows the Sack of Troy, the wooden horse; the Returns,
prosperous, troubled, or fatal, of the heroes; he knows Memnon's part
in the war, and the end of Aias; he knows that Philoctetes is to be
needed, and that Eurypylus fought and fell, and so forth. Concerning
some of these things he may have heard lays; others he may have learned
merely through oral tradition in prose.
Now it is at this point, namely, Homer's peculiar treatment of the
legendary material which reached him, whether in verse or in prose
_Märchen_, that his art stands especially apart from the art of poets
who followed him, whether the authors of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics,
or the Athenian tragedians, or the dim genealogisers in verse of the
eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Homer deliberately _selects_ from
the "saga," or folk-tale, or bardic tradition, what is noble, heroic,
possible, and human. He also, in the _Iliad_, deliberately rejects
what is _märchenhaft_; the situations which belong to the datelessly
old popular _Märchen_, or "fairy tale." Later poets put these things
prominently forward; Homer ignores them. This is to be proved later in
detail: meanwhile here is another mark of the aloofness of Homer, of
his high aristocratic genius.
It seems certain that the Trojan legend, with the legends of the Theban
wars and tragedies, of the voyage of Argo, and of the hunt of the
Calydonian boar, existed in some consecutive form, and was supposed to
be record of historical facts before our Homeric poems were composed.
Actual history it was not, any more than the _Chansons de Geste_, the
poem of _Beowulf_, the two Irish cycles of Cuchullin and of Fian, or
the _Volsunga Saga_, or the romances of Arthur, are records of actual
history.
In some of these cycles of western Europe we know that historical
personages are involved,--about Charlemagne, of course, there is no
doubt; and there really were wars of the Cymri of Strathclyde against
the English invaders; and the romances appear to contain fanciful
accounts of actual battles of Arthur fought in Cumberland, Lothian,
Ettrick Forest, and the Lennox. But when King Loth of Lothian, whose
house plays so great a part in the romances, appears, we see that he
is only an "eponymous hero," his name being derived by legend from the
name of his realm, Lothian. About any real characters whose fame may
echo in the ancient Irish bardic traditions nothing can be known.
Homer's heroes are in the same case. There may have been a very early
Achaean attempt against the northern Asiatic shore of the Aegean.
There may have been wars of several States against Thebes. The voyage
of the Argo, on the other hand, is nothing but a tissue of diverse
_Märchen_, adroitly fitted into each other, as most formulae can glide
into any other _Märchen_ formula and be prolonged almost infinitely.
The Argo saga, as currently told, begins apparently with the tale
of the man who weds a fairy bride or a swan nymph, and later loses
her, like the Eskimo Bird Bride, the Sanskrit Urvasi and Pururavas.
In the saga the man is Athamas, king of the Minyae of Orchomenos,
or of Halos in Thessalian Phthiotis, or of Phthia. The bride is
Nephele the Cloud-maiden. The pair have two children, Phrixus and
Helle. The king takes another wife, and has another child by her. We
now have the stepmother formula. Ino ill-treats Phrixus and Helle.
Nephele returns to the house disguised as an old nurse (_East Lynne_
formula). She deceives Ino into slaying her own children in place of
her step-children (_Hop o' my thumb_ formula; but this is not the most
current version). Ino roasts the seed corn; there is no harvest, she
sends messengers to the Delphic oracle to bring back the false answer
that Phrixus must be sacrificed. When Athamas is about to sacrifice
him, or both him and Helle, Nephele produces as substitute the golden
(or white, or purple) ram, a gift of Hermes. On his back Phrixus, or
both Helle and Phrixus, escape.
This is merely the formula of the two children flying from cannibal
parents by the aid of a friendly animal, often a sheep; in Samoyed a
beaver which can speak.[1] In many variants of _Cinderella_ the helpful
sheep is the dead mother in that form. In _Asterinos and Pulja_, a tale
from Epirus,[2] a dog is the helpful animal; but the boy is turned into
a sheep, is slain by the girl's jealous mother-in-law, and from his
bones grows a wonderful apple-tree. The girl is thrown into the deep
water, but revives. In the Greek saga, Helle falls into the Hellespont
off the ram's back: her name is eponymous, derived from the Hellespont.
In some variants she does not escape on the ram. The later fortunes of
Athamas and Ino are variously told.
But the Argo saga is continued by making the heroes of all Hellas join
in "the classical Quest of the Grail," the search for the fleece of
the Golden Ram. Where it was, Homer, we shall see, clearly did not
know: the place was still in fairyland, unlocalised. Jason, as in a
very common _Märchen_ formula, collects companions with marvellous
gifts, Keen Eye (Lynceus), the Strong Man (Heracles), the prophet
(Orpheus), the winged men, sons of the North Wind, and so on. There
is nothing historic here; even thus, in Celtic saga, the miraculously
gifted heroes hunted the Twrch Trywyth, the boar. Even thus the
miraculously gifted Finnish heroes seek for the mystic Sampo in the
Kalewala. The Achaean heroes find the fleece in the hands of King
Aietes, who represents the giant of fairy tale, and has a fair daughter
(Medea) that aids the young adventurer, and enables him to plough the
perilous field with the untamable bulls, like Ilmarinen in the Finnish
_Kalewala_ (Rune 19), like the hero of Kilwch and Olwen in the Welsh
_Mabinogion_. She flees, as usual, with her lover from her father. Here
this formula ends; the return voyage and the later adventures of the
pair were fantastically told as geographical knowledge increased, after
the home of Medea had been located at Aia in Colchis, at the east of
the Euxine. Other formulae of _Märchen_ were introduced, the venomed
robe that burned up Glauce, the magic cauldron of youth that, in the
wrong hands, is deadly. Medea is taken here and there, to Corinth, to
Athens, mixed with the Theseus set of _Märchen_, made the eponymous
heroine of the Medes.
The Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, again, is of the same character as