The World of Homer
the mythic boar hunt that ended in upper Ettrick; as the boar hunt of
Diarmaid, in Irish; and the hunt of the Welsh Mabinogion, where Keen
Eye and the rest reappear, in the Twrch Trywyth.
The growth of "Saga," or bardic tradition, is the same in all
countries. First we have the _Märchen,_ told in prose, as they still
exist among European peasants and in many "non-Aryan" peoples, from
the Samoyeds of the frozen north to the Red Indians, the Huarochiri
of Southern America, the Samoans, the Bechuanas, the Kanekas of New
Caledonia, the Santhals, and so forth. In the _Märchen_ the characters
are usually anonymous, a boy, a girl, a witch, a king, and the rest;
real characters, as Charlemagne, may appear. The events are not
localised. The situations are efforts of the primal romantic fancy;
like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, they fall
into any number of patterns.
As civilisation advances and a class of professional sennachies
appears, they give names to the characters; the anonymous young
adventurer becomes Jason or Theseus; the cunning man who plays
tricks on Death becomes Sisyphus; the monster, giant or beast, who
sets impossible tasks to the adventurer, becomes Minos or Aietes; his
wife or fair daughter, who baffles him and helps the hero, becomes
Ariadne or Medea. In place of the helpful old woman of fairy tale
comes Hera, whom Jason carries across the ford; or it is Athene, who
gives Bellerophon the golden bit that tames the magical horse; here he
is Pegasus. The rescuer of the girl exposed to a ravening monster is
now _named_ Perseus or Heracles. The brother and sister who flee from
cannibal parents, with the aid of a friendly animal, are named Phrixus
and Helle. In place of throwing behind them combs or stones which
baffle the pursuer by changing into forests or mountains, Medea and
Jason leave the mangled limbs of Medea's brother Absyrtus.
The lad who effects wonders by knowing the language of beasts, is
in Greece named Melampus; the giant, whose life-token is a lock
of his hair, becomes Nisus of Megara; his daughter, who loves the
adventurer, and cuts the giant's lock, purple or golden, so that he
is defeated, becomes Scylla; and Minos, who answers to the giant of
fairy tale in the Theseus Attic legend, in the Megarian fable is
himself the adventurer aided by the giant's daughter.[3] He does not
marry the treacherous daughter, but puts her to death; as Achilles,
in the Lesbian story, does not marry Pisidice, who for love of him
has betrayed her city, but has her slain. The man who, to fulfil
a prophecy, unwittingly weds his mother (a favourite character in
_Märchen_, as Comparetti has shown), becomes Oedipous: he is also the
answerer of riddles, a character of _Märchen_ found everywhere.[4]
Out of these originally anonymous and unlocalised personages and
romantic situations of _Märchen_, the Greek States made the heroes
and events of their legendary history. That history, as of Theseus,
Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Sisyphus, even Odysseus, Pelops, Oenomaus,
Athamas, Laomedon, is but a series of _Märchen_ localised; while, in
place of fairy godmothers, or anonymous benefactors, the old man or old
woman of _Märchen_, the Olympian gods are introduced, with their fairy
gifts, the cap of darkness, the winged shoon, the sword of sharpness
(Perseus), the power of taking all animal disguises. Homer knows the
attack of Heracles on the father and brothers of Nestor. Hesiod knew
the cause of the feud, Neleus refused to purify Heracles who had slain
his host under the hospitable roof. Hesiod knows that Poseidon had
given to Periclymenus, brother of Nestor, the power to appear in any
animal shape, eagle, ant, snake, or bee; and that while Periclymenus
lived, Heracles failed in the fight, and could not take Pylos. But when
Periclymenus, as a bee, settled on the chariot of Heracles, Athene shot
that bee with an arrow (see fragment of the _Eoiai_ 14 (33), with the
scholia).[5] Other examples of the wildest absurdities of _Märchen_,
retained and rejoiced in by the Ionic epic poets, are given later
("Homer and the Ionian Cyclic Poets"). But Homer, in the _Iliad_, takes
his heroes forth from the prison of _Märchen_: whether the fairy tales
had not yet become attached to Bellerophon, Achilles, and Meleager
in his time, or whether his genius ignored such fanciful elements of
tradition, Homer does not speak of the invulnerability of Achilles,
save on his heel; or tell the wooing by his father, Peleus, of Thetis
as she takes a variety of bestial forms. Either these situations had
not yet become attached to the story of Achilles, or Homer chooses to
ignore them. Such things do not come into the natural objective world
of the _Iliad_. In the digression of Bellerophon he recurs to the
human natural side of _Märchen_, the story of the woman who, vainly
attacking a man's virtue, accuses him falsely; the message or letter of
death,[6] his three strange adventures to achieve, that of the Chimaera
and others, and his winning of the king's daughter. This _Märchen_,
localised, is in a digression; but Homer usually keeps his _Märchen_
for the _Odyssey,_ and the incidents occur beyond the bounds of the
world he knows.
Now, even when Homer touches on the tale of Meleager, he says nothing
of that fairy property the "soul-box" or "life-token," the brand
snatched from the burning; or of the visit of the Spaewives, the Fates,
and their prophecy. He actually does not seem to know that incident.
Althaea, mother of Meleager, in Homer (_Iliad_, ix. 565-572), prays to
the Erinnyes and they hear her. She has not her son's "soul-box" or
"life-token" in her hands to burn it, and slay him. In Pausanias (x.
31. 3), Meleager is killed by Apollo, who is fighting for the Curetes
against the Aetolians. Meleager died, like Achilles, by Apollo's hand,
though Paris was an accomplice of the God in the case of Achilles.
Pausanias follows the Hesiodic _Eoiai_, which Kuhnert supposes to have
known the same story as Homer.[7]
As Kuhnert justly observes, the poetry of Homer is _knightly_. "An
der Hofen wurden die homerische Gedichte versungen ... the hero must
find his death at a divine hand in glorious warfare." The Athenian
tragedians are our oldest source for the Moirae and the fatal
life-token: a property very common in _Märchen_; but when the incident
first attached itself to Meleager we cannot know. This avoidance of the
folk-element, the _Märchen_, in the _Iliad_ is one of the things that
distinguishes Homer from the Ionian Cyclic poets, the Hesiodic school,
and the Athenian tragedians.
Homer, again, in another way, stands apart from the genealogising poets
of the eighth to seventh century (such as the school of "Hesiod," and
"Eumelus" of Corinth) by his method of handling tradition or saga.
These genealogising poets aimed at constructing history, and preluded
to the "logographers" in prose of the sixth century. Both they and
the logographers have the same simple method, that of the would-be
historic early mediaeval writers on Scotland and Ireland. Their plan
is to invent for each town or people an eponymous hero, whose name is
simply the name of the city or people (as, in Scotland, Fib for Fife,
Loth for Lothian, Scota for the Scoti). The hero, or heroine, founds
the city, or is first ancestor of the people. Next follow the legends
about heroic characters, as Perseus, Athamas, Pelops, Theseus, Aietes,
Phrixus, which are mere _Märchen_ of world-wide diffusion, localised,
with named persons for the characters.
The region of legend expands with the expansion of geographical
knowledge. Cities hasten, like Athens and Corinth, to attach themselves
to sagas, as that of Argo, in which they had no original part. Hesiod
extends the old saga, and carries descendants of the old characters,
as of Odysseus, to Italy, to Latium and Etruria. "Eumelus" drags
Corinth into the cycle of the Argonautic expedition: Athens, we have
said, brings Medea to Athens, and into her Theseus fable. Later the
logographers, in prose, continue the process and alter the genealogies
to suit their historical theories.
From all these processes Homer stands apart. He has not any historical
theory to prove. He seldom mentions an eponymous founder of a city,
or ancestor of a people. Nausithous founds Phaeacia, his city is not
called Nausithoa. Homer names Mykene (_Odyssey_, ii. 120), but does not
say that she founded Mycenae, as "Eumelus" says that Ephyre founded
the town of Ephyre (Corinth). You would not gather from Homer that the
Achaeans were descendants of Achaeus, or the Danaans of Danaus.
All these things are obvious and undeniable. Homer is a poet: the
genealogising writers in verse are aiming at constructing history
(_some_ history may be present), and at explaining the origins of
peoples and cities.
But, according to some of the modern learned, our Homer contains
borrowings from the Eumelian verses on Corinth. Thus Mr. Murray says
that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ "not only refer to other legends as
already existing and treated by other poets; that every one admits; but
they often in their digressions tell stories in a form which clearly
suggests recapitulation or allusion. They imply the existence elsewhere
of a completer poetical treatment of the same subject," as in the tale
of Bellerophon, told to Diomede by Glaucus in _Iliad_, vi. "Is it not
plain that the poet of _Iliad_, vi., is in the first place referring to
an existing legend, and, secondly, one may almost say, quoting from an
existing poem?"[8]
Certainly Homer is referring to an existing legend, and not improbably
to a lay which in his time existed. But Mr. Murray goes on to suggest
that the existing poem referred to is the _Corinthiaca_ of "Eumelus,"
whom he takes to be a mythical name for the author of Corinthian
traditional poetry; von Christ thinks Eumelus of the seventh century.
Mr. Murray's argument seems to be, Homer knew a legend, probably
knew a poem, about Bellerophon, son of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, who
dwelt in Ephyre (Corinth). "Eumelus" wrote a poem about Corinthian
affairs. Therefore the poet who introduced the tale told by Glaucus
into _Iliad_, vi., took it (textually, it seems to be suggested)
from "Eumelus."[9] In the same way the author of _Iliad_, v. 395-400,
and Panyassis, the uncle of Herodotus, presumably adapt from the same
source. Mr. Leaf, on the other hand, supposes the poet-uncle to give an
"echo" from the passage in the fifth book of the _Iliad._ There may be
an echo, in Homer on Heracles, from an older poem on Heracles, but that
poem is likely to be long anterior to the end of the sixth century.[10]
In any case the "Eumelus" known to us in Greek literary tradition was
a _tendenz_ poet, a poet with a purpose, with a pseudo-historical
theory to prove; he used the method of the genealogisers, who turned
into heroes and heroines men and women who were constructed out of
place-names; and he, in certain places, did not borrow from Homer, nor
Homer from him, for he and Homer flatly contradict each other. If all
this be not post-Homeric, what is?
Pausanias, in discussing Eumelus's peculiar version of the relations of
Medea to Corinth, quotes a "History of Corinth," in prose, by Eumelus,
"if he is really the author of it."[11] "Eumelus is also said to have
been a poet," and Pausanias avers that the only poem recognised as
genuine of Eumelus is a processional ode to Delian Apollo.[12] There
_was_ a prose version of his other work, and Clemens Alexandrinus
regarded Eumelus as a logographer like Acusilaus, who "turned the poems
of Hesiod into prose."[13]
But, genuine or not, an "Eumelian" _poem_ on a forged part of
Corinthian legendary history did at some time exist, for the scholiast
on Pindar (_Ol._ xiii.) cited eight lines of it; and these lines are