The World of Homer
was known, a few large finger-rings of iron occur in graves; the metal
being rare and strange. It was an Age of linear writing, on clay
tablets, or in ink with pen or reed. The dead, perhaps occasionally
embalmed, were buried in shaft tombs hewn deep in the rock; or in
"beehive"-shaped sepulchres with chambers, often sunk in the side of a
hill. With the dead were laid their arms of bronze, golden ornaments,
crystal and ivory, and silver, and cups and vases of peculiar fashion,
fabric, and decoration.
Concerning the language or languages of the people of this First
Age, nothing is known with certainty, as their writing has not been
deciphered. We know that they were and had long been in touch with
Egypt, and the highly civilised Egyptian society. Egyptian objects are
found in the ruins of Cretan palaces; Cretan pottery is abundant in the
soil of Egypt; and their envoys, in Egyptian wall-pictures, bear ingots
and golden cups of their fashioning, as presents or as tribute to
Egyptian kings. Their palaces, about 1450-1400 B.C. (?) were sacked and
consumed by fire, but their culture, and even their writing, continued
to exist with dwindling vitality. Of the religion we speak later.
Then comes the Second Age, the period represented in the Homeric poems.
Greek is their language, whether the people of the Cretan culture
on the mainland of Greece had previously spoken Greek, or a cognate
language, or not. Iron had ceased to be a rare metal used only for
rings; it was now employed for tools and implements, occasionally for
arrow-heads, and was an article of commerce; but bronze was the metal
for swords, spears, and body armour; and stone was no longer used for
arrow points; leather no longer, as previously, sufficed for shield
coverings, bronze plating was needed. The dead were not now buried
merely, they were cremated, as often in ancient central and northern
Europe, and as in these regions the bones were placed in urns of gold,
bronze, or pottery, wrapped in linen, and bestowed in a stone-built
chamber, beneath a mound or cairn of earth, on which was set a memorial
pillar.[2]
Treasures do not appear to have been buried with the dead, as a rule.
A new costume, a northern costume, had come in, not sewn and shaped,
as in the previous age, but fastened with pins and _fibulae_, "safety
pins," such as were in use in northern regions, in the basin of the
Danube, Bosnia, and North Italy. This is the costume and these are the
pins and brooches described by Homer.
The Third Age, subsequent to the Homeric, is a dark period; illustrated
by the vases and other objects found at ancient "Tiryns of the mighty
walls"; and by the contents of the cemetery outside of the Dipylon
gate at Athens; in Cretan sites and elsewhere. The nature of the
civilisation (called "the Dipylon") will be described later. It is
the fully developed age of iron for weapons and implements; riding
of horses is superseding the war-chariots, common to both preceding
periods; art is represented by both decadent Minoan work, and rude
vase-paintings of human existence. The dead, with humbler treasures,
are more frequently buried than burned; cairns are not raised over
them; the costume of women appears to have been, occasionally at least,
a survival from or revival of that of the First Age, the separate skirt
and bodice.
The Fourth Age is the archaic or "proto-historic" period of Greece. It
is represented by objects found in the soil of Sparta of the ninth to
seventh centuries; by objects of the eighth to seventh century used
by Ionian settlers in Asia, as at Ephesus; and by "proto-Athenian"
"post-Dipylon" vases and other archaic remains in art; while, later,
come the Black Figure vases of the early sixth century, to which
succeed the more accomplished painters of the Red Figure vases (late
sixth and early fifth centuries). In this period male costume was often
more of the first or Aegean, than of the second or Homeric Age.
Now, according to the majority of critics of Homer, the life, with
all its details, which he describes, is not that of a single age,
our second, but is a mosaic of all Four Ages. "The first rhapsodies
were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous Mykenaean
shield--the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with
breastplate and light round buckler. The whole view of life and death,
of divine and human polity had changed."[3]
If this be true, the Homeric world as depicted in the poems existed
only in fancy; it is a medley of four periods extending over some six
centuries or more, and the Homeric picture must be a mere chaos as
regards costume, manners, rites, armour, tactics, laws, geographical
knowledge, domestic life, and everything. Is it such a chaos? The
critics say that it is, and seek for proof in the poems. They find
anachronisms and inconsistencies as to armour (but not costume), as to
rites, as to marriage laws, as to houses, as to tactics, as to land
tenure; but the inconsistencies and anachronisms at most are petty,
and, we are to argue, at most represent such minute variations from the
norm as occur in all societies, savage or civilised.
For the Homeric period, except in the case of the _fibulae_ marking
the change of costume in the Second Age, we have little evidence
except in the Homeric poems themselves. No Homeric cairns with their
characteristic contents have been discovered by modern scientific
experts, a point to be discussed later. But for our Fourth Age we have
literary evidence, that of the remains and epitomes of the Cyclic
poems, composed in Ionia, about the eighth to seventh centuries, by
the poets of the Ionian settlers in Asia, who were dominated by Attic,
not Achaean traditions. These poems, we are to show (see "The Cyclic
Poems") differ immensely, in descriptions of rites and of religion,
and in the characters of heroes, in their pseudo-historic legends,
and in geographical knowledge, from the pictures given by Homer. The
Ionian armour, too, and round or oval blazoned bucklers worn on the
left arm, as displayed in archaic and early Black Figure vases, are
widely different from Homeric armour, and from the huge Homeric shield,
unblazoned, suspended by a belt or baldric.
The Fourth Age, in fact, is represented by its own epic poetry, and
by its own art; and its representations of armour, religion, rites,
personages, and traditions, are never intruded into our Homeric epics.
The two ages stand apart. The Homeric world is not that of the Fourth
Age. There is no mosaic, except in the epic poetry of the Fourth
Age, which imitated the Homeric poetry, but is full of conspicuous
anachronisms in essential points.
Though the details of life in the Second and Fourth periods,--the
Homeric or Achaean and the Ionian, stand conspicuously apart, modern
criticism, we have said, represents them as inextricably mingled in our
Homer, and naturally thus confused, for what is most ancient in our
Homer is said to have been worked over and recomposed by the poets of
Ionia; in Ionia, we are told, Homer had a second birth, and our Homer
is half-Ionian.
The critical case is well stated thus: "There is, on the whole, a
striking resemblance between the life of Homer's heroes in its material
aspects and the [Aegean] remains" [of our First Age] "which have been
discovered at Tiryns, Mykene, and elsewhere. The two cultures are not
identical, but, beyond doubt, the Homeric resembles in the main the
Mykenaean rather than that of the "Dipylon" (so far as we know it),
or the archaic Greek. _The ancient tradition is on the whole truly
kept in the Epos. Yet in many points we can see traces of apparent
anachronisms,_" whether the departure from the "Mykenaean" be "due to
a later development of that culture itself, _or to an unintentional
introduction of elements from the very different conditions of later
Greece_."[4] In the Epics carried to Asia, says our author, "much
of the old was faithfully preserved, though adapted to new hearers,
much being new added." "We meet with so many inconsistencies so
closely interwoven that the tangle may well seem beyond our powers to
unravel."[5]
When novelties were intentionally added the purpose was to please
listeners later by many centuries than those for whom the original
poets sang; to please the active commercial citizens of Ionia, who
had not the polity, nor the armour, nor the war-chariots, nor the
weapons, nor the costume, nor the beliefs, nor the burial rites, nor
the marriage customs, nor the houses, nor the tactics, nor the domestic
life, and had more than the geographical knowledge of the people who
listened to the original minstrel. Each of the novelties supposed to
have been introduced to gratify new hearers, each novelty in armour,
weapons, tactics, would only produce in the _Iliad_ an unintelligible
and chaotic blend, such as, the critics tell us, actually was
produced--a tangle which we cannot unravel. The fighting scenes, in
particular, thanks to the retention of old armour and tactics, and the
simultaneous introduction of novelties to please practical readers,
must have passed all understanding, and, as we are told, they make
nonsense. No practical hearers in that case could have endured the
confusion, a point to be demonstrated in detail.[6]
Let us remember, too, that the novelties said to have been introduced
were of the pettiest kind. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ retain a
non-Ionian polity: non-Ionian burial rites; non-Ionian marriage customs
(in which a change is detected in one case); non-Ionian houses;
non-Ionian shields, non-Ionian armour, non-Ionian military tactics;
while truly and specially Ionian rites and beliefs and geographical
knowledge are all absent. Why should poets who were innovating have
left the whole Homeric picture standing except in certain minute
details of corslets, greaves, bride-price, and upper storeys and
separate sleeping chambers in houses?
It is our opinion, therefore, that the details of life in the poems
are all old and all congruous; while we find the "much new" abundantly
present, _not_ in Homer, but in the fragments and summaries of the
contents of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, dating from the age (770-650
B.C.) when the novelties are supposed to have been most copiously
foisted into the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--in which, as a matter of fact,
they never appear. Far from altering the old epics, I hope to show that
the Ionians laboured at constructing new epics, the "Cyclics"; partly
for the purpose of connecting their ancestors with ancient heroic
events in which, according to Homeric tradition, their ancestors played
no part; partly to tell the whole tale of Troy.
The task of these Ionian poets was later taken up by the Athenian
tragedians, and a non-Homeric, we may say almost an anti-Homeric
tradition was established, was accepted by Virgil and by the late Greek
compiler, Dictys of Crete; and finally reached and was elaborated by
the romancers of the Christian Middle Ages.
It is not easy to do justice to this theory except in a perpetual
running fight with the believers in the Ionian moulders of the Homeric
poems into their actual form with its contents. Now few things are
more unpleasant than a running fight of controversial argument, the
reader is lost in the jangle and clash of opinions and replies,
often concerned with details at once insignificant and obscure. Into
such minutiae I would not enter, if they were not the main stock of
separatist critics.
On the whole, then, it seems best to describe, first, as far as we
may, the age preceding that of Homer, and then the Homeric world, just
as the poet paints it, without alluding to differences of critical
opinion. These are discussed later, and separately.
[1] _Church Quarterly Review_, vol. xi. p. 414. It is easy to recognise